Lime Creek (7 page)

And Whitney and I would have to help before going to school. Spencer would get us up in the dark and half-asleep we’d dress against the cold and then meet him in
the barn where he and Red, our foreman, would already be graining the horses. And then one of us would go with one of them. One day I’d be with Spencer and Whitney with Red, and the next day we’d switch off, day after day after day.

But this was the morning after New Year’s and Red and Aggie, his wife, had stayed at their daughter’s near Rawlins for the holidays and Spencer had told him to take an extra day or two. The snow was blowing sideways and the temperature against the outside of the barn read minus twenty-eight and of course it was still dark. We took one team, working just the one sled, for Spencer would feed off the other one after we came back and Whitney and I had to leave. And even though Spencer would be by himself, at least he’d have the dawn by then.

The horses strain in their traces until the runners under the loaded sled break free with a sharp crack from where they’ve set overnight and frozen to the earthen floor, and then we move out into the blizzard and away from the shelter of the outbuildings. The horses know the way by sight or not, and once they enter the meadow Spencer ties the reins around one of the forward posts on the sled and then kneels down where Whitney and I are huddled amongst the bales. When we start out it’s still night although the relentless flat wall of snow that
races by us begins to gain some subtle gradation of what could only be perceived as notdarkness. The horses continue to prow ahead with their terrific slow inexorability until the bawling cattle begin to materialize as from behind an almost solid-seeming grey curtain. And so we can hear the animals approaching for a time before we can actually see them.

Spencer cuts and pulls and then wraps the twine that holds each bale as Whitney and I begin to cast the hay down off the sled, dividing each long rectangular block roughly into thirds that we let drop on the snow as cattle follow closely behind us and then fall back. Whitney soon begins to fling his flakes of hay almost in a rage of cold and I know how he feels because there are times when it all seems like it’s more than a man should be asked to endure. When it’s so cold that it seems like you’re losing more than you could ever hope to gain, and the harder you try the more you just seem to fall behind.

We continue to crawl along ahead of the interminable crush of cattle, the near faces of hungry animals parting and beginning to eat as other animals move in to take their places, endlessly. Whitney throws his arm again as I bend to another bale and I think I hear him cry out in the shrieking wind but I can’t be sure, even though he’s only just an arm’s length away. And then for
some reason he suddenly kneels down with his gloved hand against his chest and he screams something into the wind again that I still can’t hear as I turn and toss the hay in a continuous repetition that I seemingly cannot stop. And then after another moment Whitney rises back up and begins again.

The horses draw the sled with that same plodding nonprogress even after the load of hay has all been distributed. Spencer sits with us with our backs against the front cross-member of the frame, facing away from the great round rumps of the two Belgians and huddled into the collars of our coats with our gloved hands thrust into our pockets. Dawn is on the snow at last but with hardly any light at all as if the two drafthorses pull us into a colorless windtunnel where the knifing blizzard continues without alteration except in terms of visibility. Although there is nothing to see except the snow horizonless and with no point of reference to mark where the earth ends or the sky begins.

And then as we finally approach the entrance to the meadow again, the opening in the fenceline, Spencer gets back up and unties the reins and guides the animals who know exactly where they are going whether he stands with them or not. Far off and higher up the barn’s lights sail behind the streaming storm illuminating next
to nothing and obviously making no impression whatsoever on that iron-grey shroud of opaque darkness that must be the new day. Stillborn.

Whitney and I sit against each other’s arms as Spencer stands above us with one leg alongside my shoulder. We hump our backs against the cold but there is no escape, for the cold will have its way. The hollow sun wherever it is has no warmth left to give and even if it dared to show itself it seems as if it probably must have used up all of its fiery essence a long time ago. And so only the wind is left to cleave the world as it will, paring away the fragile warmblooded creatures as with a surgeon’s scalpel until the flesh feels as if it’s been laid bare. The wind as both tormentor and redeemer too when you finally surrender to it, when you finally cross over from the near agony of sentience to a state almost of unconcern, for when the cold goes so deep as to defeat itself it just doesn’t make any difference anymore. Almost like death. For only death can defeat death.

Then we’re finally back in the barn and Spencer’s on the other side of the team at their harness and I’m carrying a sack of grain over to the bin which has been fed down low. Several lightbulbs try to lessen the darkness but it’s so cold that their light seems frozen about them, little pools of brightness that hover like halos beneath
their reflectors but doing little to change that perpetual dusk as we go about our chores, the cold slogging blood that won’t warm and fingers too numb to feel what they need to touch.

I begin to turn with my load when Whitney suddenly flings a grain-bucket at an empty stall. The near drafthorse flicks the skin along its jaw as if responding to imaginary insects but still stands stolidly beside the other animal that doesn’t move at all and with Spencer still at its cheekstrap. I hear Spencer say, Huh? as Whitney yells, It’s too fucking cold to live here. And then he kicks at the pail that’s bounded back at him so it glances off the stall partition and ricochets off the little window with a spiderweb now cracked in its surface. This time the horses do flinch taking a half-step to the side as the animal that Spencer holds in harness moves its great head away from the clatter of the bucket.

One moment Spencer’s on the other side of the team and the next without seeming to have even moved, his gloved fist is under Whitney’s chin driving him up against the wall and holding him off his feet by the front of his coat so that Spencer’s face is nearly touching Whitney’s, with Whitney’s eyes showing all their white like a horse’s does when it’s frightened and Spencer’s face a hard white rage that we had never seen before, as
if all the blood had left it to give even more strength to his arm and hand that hold Whitney pinned against the wall as if he were made of straw beneath his heavy winter coat instead of a young man of probably at that time a hundred and thirty or forty pounds.

Cold? Spencer says in that low seething rage. Did I hear you say something about the cold? And Whitney with the fear in his eyes but with his youthful defiance still intact cries, It’s fucking ridiculous living like this almost freezing to death and the cattle almost freezing. That number 76 cow. My hand cracked against her head and her goddamn ear broke off. Her ear broke off! he screams. With the ear-tag still in it. And he can do nothing to stop the tears springing down his face with Spencer’s eyes only inches away and burning through him like an incandescent white flame.

That’s lucky that’s all she lost, Spencer says. You think this is cold? I’ll tell you what cold is. Because this is a fucking walk in the park. You hear me? This is a fucking walk in the park. I’ll tell you what cold is. Cold is seventeen years ago to the day yesterday morning. Cold is what we call Cemetery Ridge on New Year’s morning and I don’t know what the Germans called it but I’ve got seven men left out of fifty and half of them deaf or bleeding from their ears from the artillery that’s been
pounding us for three days and when dawn comes so it’s still dark on the snow we can hear the Germans before we can see them and I run up to my point-men who’re hunkered over their machine-guns where they’ve been sleeping and I bang them awake because the Germans are pouring over that ridge pouring hard and coming down and I Bang on Tullio on one point and I Bang on Gallagher my second point. And each time he says “bang” he drives Whitney even harder up against the wooden planking. And Gallagher mumbles something that I don’t hear because I’m already banging on Dickinson who is barely eighteen years old who has been here for three months who has a girlfriend whose picture he showed me who is still in high school in Spring-fucking-Hill Maine who put his hand out and shook mine six hours ago at the stroke of midnight and who I said to along with the others Let’s pray to God that we don’t have to spend another New Year’s in this hellhole. And it’s Dickinson who starts singing
Silent Night
so all of us are singing it with him whether we ever been to a church or not. And Dickinson who has red hair and still has freckles Dickinson won’t wake up and I scream Come on Howie and I can hear the Germans and I can hear someone beside me saying They’re coming they’re coming and Dickinson is frozen like a goddamn statue. His eyes are frozen open and he’s frozen against his Browning .30-fucking-caliber
air-cooled machine-gun and I need his weapon. My men need his weapon and so I start hacking away at his hands. I’ve got tears in my eyes and I’m screaming at myself and I’m screaming that this man is dead and I’m hacking his hands off. I’ve got my bayonet into his hands and I’ve cut and I’ve cut and I’ve cut and I can’t get through the bone and so I’m stomping on his arms with my boot to break his hands free so I can get somebody on his weapon. I’m stomping on his arms until they finally break away but his hands are still frozen in the handles of that Browning and so I’m prying at his fingers with the tip of my bayonet. His mittens are all slashed away and the fingers the frozen tendons like white knots are frozen in the handles and I’m prying them away. I’m digging under his fingers that don’t want to let go. That just won’t let go.

So cold, he says almost in a whisper and with a weariness that makes it sound as if it were not him anymore but his very soul that was talking. We’re all cold, he says, with Whitney back on the ground by then so he stands as if at attention. We’re all cold, Spencer says. And we all still have both of our two hands too. And so if you’re cold you can go on up to the house. Now. But I don’t want to hear about it. Do you understand?

And then that night lying in the dark in our beds and whispering back and forth because Whitney and I
had never heard our father use a real cussword before, the “damns” and the “shits” maybe but nothing that’d get you thrown out of a class for it. But then when we thought about it we understood that there was nothing that could be said, there was no word or string of words that a body could come up with that could in any way free someone of the memories that Spencer had had to live with. And that we in turn would now share with him for the rest of our own time unforgotten along with our own yet-to-be-discovered trials and misfortunes that are part and parcel of each and every one of us who tries to get through this life on just two legs. As if that awful and enduring gut-ache of human sorrow was just the going market-price for having the pride and presumption to think that with all the other creatures who needed all four legs to make it through on, that you could get’er done on just the two.

And seeming to see clearly for one moment before it all clouded up again and slipped back into that vast obscurity of question and doubt, I suddenly saw how each life’s joy and pain were made just exactly right for that life so that they fit that life perfectly like its own skin. And so no other body could possibly get in and try it on for itself because every other body had its own perfect skin too.

And the more you could stand the more you’d be given, so you were always filled right up to your own personal limit where one more drop, which you could count on, would push it over the edge. And so you would somehow have to find the way to contain it too, that one drop too many, and maybe just to see how much you could actually bear. And whether your capacity be a thimbleful or the whole damn ocean, the well of your precious collected humor be it tears today or your life’s blood tomorrow will surely drown the fragile flame of your existence given the addition of that inevitable next drop. Unless you grow. Unless you become big enough to still hold it all.

And so like it or not, you would learn what you were given the breath of life to learn. You would learn what you unknowingly came here to learn. And your sorrow and grief and your joys and pleasures too would teach you your lessons in a curriculum devised just precisely for you. The man who spends his life chasing golden rings for his naked and grasping fingers, and the man who mourns his fingers with rings of gold in careless abundance but no hands to put them on.

When my mare died, Luke says, the day we put my mare down. I hadn’t been able to ride her for over a year because her back had gotten so bad. And Spencer had told me that she would have to be put down someday because eventually the pain would just be too much for her. You could run your hand along her backbone and feel the muscle wince up as you passed over these arthritic edges that had grown there. Until finally she could hardly lie down nor stand back up again. I’d go into her stall and she’d move back and forth from off one foot onto the other trying to find one position of relative neutrality
that maybe would hurt her a little less. And so I finally had to admit to myself that leaving her like that was more cruel than the alternative.

Spencer was away on business and I’d gone down to the barn to grain her early one Saturday morning, humping my shoulders up at how cold it was right at the beginning of October. And I remember cutting more corn into her feed for the heat we’d been taught was generated digestively or something, and so I emptied the bucket of it into her trough and then took some of it in my hand as she began to move over to that side of the stall. I put my arm across her withers speaking to her as she nuzzled the grain off my open palm and she nickered deep down in her throat. And I remember watching her great gentle eyes as I spoke to her until it suddenly hit me as if she’d spun around and nailed me, it suddenly hit me as I talked to her eyes just how much pain she was in. And all the while she kept mincing from one foot to the other as she continued to sidle her way over to the grain trough.