Rest and Be Thankful (37 page)

He smiled then. He paused, and then, as neither of the women spoke, he said awkwardly, “That’s as far as I’ve got it thought out. The last bit of the poem will be the journey back to earth, I guess. And you’re getting mixed up with men again, and you can’t plan for them any more, and everything is less clear, and the truths become colourless, like the way the clouds are turning as you look up at them now. And you look back at the mountains, too, and all you can say is that it’s mighty pretty up there.”

Chuck’s shout broke through the evening silence. “Hey, Robb! Come and get it!”

Robb grinned. He touched his hat. They watched him walk away, his lean body slouching a little, moving deliberately, with the leather chaps round the thin, blue-jeaned legs still encumbering his stiff stride.

Chuck was yelling, unaware of his audience, “It’s pork chops tonight, split and blast you—not a pot of stew that don’t mind waiting!” He talked for two more sentences about Robb, without failing in his descriptive vocabulary.

Mrs. Peel, who could never stop flinching when she heard a swear word—the only remaining relic of her Calvinist upbringing, she thought—now listened in calm wonder. It was strange how they could use an oath so that it was really only the normal way to address a friend. It was, in its rhythm and imagination, a kind of poetry too. But how had she imagined that she heard the word baroque?

“I was wrong to suggest that he should go east this winter,” Sally said as they walked towards the house. “New York or Chicago would be no good for Robb. Not at the moment. Not until he gets that poem all out of his heart, just as it is, without other influences spoiling its simplicity.”

“He’s got to live on something. He’s got to earn money somehow. If he stays in the West he’ll probably go with Ned to Arizona to work on a dude ranch there for the winter.”

“Yes. If only he could stay here! He’d get plenty of time to work here in the winter.”

“The ranch is half closed. Old Chuck and Bert have priority on jobs here over him.”

“What about Rest and be Thankful?” Sally asked thoughtfully.

“He earns his own way,” Mrs. Peel told her. “Sally, I’d spend every last penny I had on keeping the house open this winter, but do you see him living here as our guest?”

Sally shook her head.

“If we could give him a job, not a faked one, a real one...” Mrs. Peel hesitated, trying to think of such a job. “We’ve got to try and arrange that, Sally. Somehow. He should stay here, within sight and touch of these mountains.”

“Arrange it without arranging it. Take an interest without seeming to take interest. Margaret, you’re facing a riddle more elaborate than Cocteau’s Sphinx.”

Mrs. Peel’s delicate eyebrows were set in a determined frown.

“It was the highest compliment ever paid us,” Sally said, “when he talked to us like that.”

Mrs. Peel nodded, still frowning, but she said nothing.

“And to think I once thought
I
could write poetry,” Sally went on. “All I worried about was the lisp of a consonant or the echo of vowel sounds, or how free in metre or rhyme I could be. Like the young bard of Japan, whose verses never would scan...”

Mrs. Peel smiled at that. She even finished the limerick. “Because I try to get as many words into the last line as I possibly can.”

They were laughing as they entered the house. And then Mrs. Peel, remembering Karl and Earl, became serious. “I’m going to look for some Band-aid,” she announced.

Earl Grubbock and Karl Koffing had thought that, after one of Mrs. Gunn’s biggest and best dinners, they might slip away from the living-room with a nonchalant air and set a straight course for their beds. But it was pleasant to be given the two most comfortable armchairs in front of a roaring fire, and have all the others—even Prender Atherton Jones—gather round with questions. Mimi had threatened to come downstairs if she was going to miss all the fun, and had only stopped climbing out of bed when she had been promised that Earl and Karl would pay her a visit before they went back to the cottage.

“If we can get up these stairs,” Grubbock admitted frankly. He had already been put through that test when he borrowed one of the bathrooms in the house. (Koffing had reached the bath in the cabin first.) “You never know how many muscles you’ve been born with until you start climbing stairs.”

Koffing was still not admitting anything. In any case, there was more reason for him to be silent: his arm hurt badly, in spite of the neat bandages which Ned had wrapped round the swollen wrist and forearm. Ned, when he had come over here after supper to look at Karl’s arm, had said he didn’t like the look of it too much and that Karl might be wise to see Dr. Clark in Sweetwater tomorrow. Sally suggested that it might be even wiser to drive into Sweetwater with Jackson tonight. Karl refused this idea so definitely that Mrs. Peel then remembered the quantity of iodine, zinc ointment, sticking-plaster, talcum powder,
and
Band-aid which Grubbock had collected from her in a very offhand way. She wondered how she could suggest that Ned ought to be invited back to do a little more extensive bandaging. After all, there was such a thing as blood-poisoning. And when Earl Grubbock made a joke about barbed wire being the one thing he couldn’t argue with, and pulled up his sleeve to show an iodined gash in his forearm, so that Esther Park would stop suggesting that Karl was half-way to tetanus, Mrs. Peel rose unobtrusively and went into the hall.

Miss Snodgrass at the Sweetwater telephone exchange said why of course she’d find out if Dr. Clark was too busy tonight; glad to—no trouble at all.

And after a conversation with Mrs. Clark, mostly about the two Clark children who were going to be on one of the 4-H floats on Saturday, Miss Snodgrass could report back that Dr. Clark was attending a meeting of the Sweetwater Improvement Committee this evening at the Purple Rim Bar. Did Mrs. Peel want to be put through to him there?

“Just a minute, Miss Snodgrass. Let me think this out,” Mrs. Peel said, discovering she hated to disturb Dr. Clark enjoying one free evening.

“Sure,” Miss Snodgrass said helpfully. “I’ll wait. Choose your words.” Mrs. Peel stared thoughtfully at the receiver in her hand for a full minute while she listened to the clack of Miss Snodgrass’s knitting-needles.

“I’ve decided just to ask his advice,” she said at last. And after a three-minute wait Dr. Clark’s calm voice was produced out of a background of cheerful noise.

“It’s nothing serious,” Mrs. Peel began, “but they won’t listen to anything except professional advice, I know.” She began to explain. “You see, it isn’t very much. But what does worry me is the fact that he’s a writer. If something is wrong with a bone or ligament, then he may not be able to write or type for weeks.
That’s
what is serious. I should insist that he comes and sees you tomorrow, shouldn’t I?”

Even with the door of the Purple Rim’s telephone booth firmly shut, it was difficult to hear Dr. Clark’s voice. He was, she found after two wrong guesses, interested in open wounds.

“Just small ones,” she said reassuringly. “And Ned got all the gravel out of them, I’m positive. The arm is swollen, but that’s because it is badly bruised. And the other writer has a two-inch tear, barbed wire, but not very deep. What’s that? Sorry. Tetanus shots? Well, one of them was in the Army, and I’m sure he must be
full
of shots... I don’t know at all about the other one... No, he wasn’t in the Army or anything... Then I’ll send them both in to see you tomorrow. Even if I have to drug their breakfast coffee and bring them stretched out in the ranch truck. No, there’s no need for you to come over tonight—absolutely not. No. See you tomorrow. I just needed your authority, that was all. Good night and thank you.”

And that, Mrs. Peel thought, was exactly what I wanted to know. Sweetwater tomorrow, and no protests from any heroic young men.

She returned as quietly to the living-room as she had left it. They were discussing cowboy clothes. Earl Grubbock was saying they were certainly practical. Karl Koffing agreed.

“There’s nothing comic about cowboy dress once you’ve found that out,” Grubbock insisted, watching the smile on Atherton Jones’s face. “There’s a meaning for everything. Take these chaps they wear buckled round their legs, for instance. Wish I had been wearing chaps when we went through that brush: thorns as long as your little finger. My legs began to feel like pincushions. Or take these high heels we’ve all been laughing about.” He looked pointedly at Atherton Jones’s flat-heeled riding-boots. “If you’re hanging on to a steer’s head while he’s pushing you along you’ve got to be able to brake his force with your heels stuck out in front of you.”

“I can’t imagine the circumstances arising,” Atherton Jones said, “when I should ever be hanging on to a steer’s head—or a cow’s tail.”

Everyone except Earl and Karl thought this was funny.

“I am prepared for the most florid effects at the rodeo on Saturday,” Prender Atherton Jones went on. “Oscar Wilde would no doubt have approved of the colourful clothes we’ll see there. He thought the Californian miners were the best-dressed men he had seen in America: they combined the practical with the ornamental in the right proportions.”

“I’ll give you one word of advice,” Grubbock said. “I wouldn’t tell the cowboys about Oscar Wilde’s possible approval. I’ve got a feeling that that wouldn’t appeal to them somehow.”

“Probably never heard of Oscar Wilde, to begin with,” Atherton Jones said. “And if there is one thing I dislike it is adding footnotes to a joke.” He looked at Grubbock reprovingly. A word of advice, indeed...

“I hope your arm is better by Saturday, Karl,” Mrs. Peel said, trying to change the conversation and bring it round to Dr. Clark’s advice. She only half succeeded.

“How did it happen, anyway?” Robert O’Farlan asked, pointing to Karl’s arm.

“Did you fall off your horse?” Esther Park asked. “That
must
have been funny.”

“It wasn’t so funny,” Earl said, frowning at Esther Park, then breaking into a grin to belie his words. “At least, no one thought it was funny except me. And I didn’t think it was funny until Karl had got up on his feet again. Say, Bert was quick at catching your horse, wasn’t he?”

Karl, feeling the pain in his hand and arm, didn’t share Earl’s amusement. He had the impulse to say he was going to bed, and leave them all to laugh over his accident. That’s what they wanted to do, anyway.

Mrs. Peel was watching his face closely. She said, “Karl, why don’t you go to bed and rest your arm? Tomorrow we can—”

“Go ahead and tell them,” Karl said to Earl Grubbock, and he settled back firmly in his chair. “It’s nothing,” he said, equally firmly, to Mrs. Peel.

Grubbock hesitated for a moment. “Well,” he said, “last night we were coming back to camp. When I say ‘camp’ I mean we had found a place as sheltered as possible, which wasn’t much, near some water. And when you come riding into camp after a day’s work you’ve got to make it. You attend to your horse, unpack your roll, gather wood, build a fire, and cook your food. Then, after you’ve eaten, you’ve to get all the damned litter buried and burned and the greasy pans washed in ice-cold water. And after all that—if there isn’t something else to be done—you can sit down and relax by the fire, and you have half an hour to get warm before you hit the sack, because you’re up at the crack of dawn to start everything all over again in reverse. It’s strange, you know—”

“Cut out all the sidetracking,” Karl Koffing said. “Go ahead and tell them. What’s wrong, Earl? Sparing my feelings?” He smiled mockingly. Earl hadn’t spared them much during these last five days: would Karl stop talking so much and doing so goddamned little, he had even asked. And now Earl was the one who was talking about discomforts. He hadn’t stopped talking all evening.

But O’Farlan, who had been a soldier too, recognised the symptoms. Every post-mortem on any mission successfully completed carried its own privileges of grousing. “Must have reminded you of the Army in some ways,” he said to Grubbock. “Except that you weren’t being shot over.”

Karl Koffing rose. “I’m hitting the sack,” he said. “Good night.” He walked out of the room.

“What’s wrong now?” O’Farlan asked irritably.

“His arm is more painful than we think,” Mrs. Peel said.

“Well,” Sally said, “he’s learned a new phrase, at least.” But she looked after Karl worriedly too.

“How did he fall?” Prender Atherton Jones wanted to know. “Was he bucked off?”

Earl Grubbock didn’t answer. He knew what was wrong with Koffing. It wasn’t the arm, though that probably hurt like hell and Karl wouldn’t admit it. It was O’Farlan’s way of talking about the War. Karl had some kind of guilt about that, and what it was you couldn’t find out. But frankly it was getting a bit tiresome. Especially for five days on end, when Karl was so damned intent on proving he was braver, quicker, tougher than any of the rest of them. No one questioned the fact that Koffing had guts. Except himself seemingly.

“Was anyone to blame?” Mrs. Peel asked. That had been worrying her.

Grubbock shook his head. “No,” he said, “it was all his own darned fault. Yesterday evening Karl and Bert and I were riding back together. We had been out looking for strays. We’d found none. We were taking a short cut to camp, following a fairly narrow trail that would lead us through a small canyon. At the moment we were on the open hillside, with Karl riding some distance ahead of us. On our right there was a sheer wall of rock rising straight up from the edge of the trail. On our left the ground dropped away in a steep slope of grass, sprinkled with boulders and young pine-trees. Karl was just reaching the entrance to the canyon. We could see it, narrow and deep, with giant teeth of rock lining its sides, and blue spruce- and pine-trees trying to climb up between its crags. Then, suddenly, Karl’s horse stopped dead in its tracks.”

“And Karl fell off,” Esther Park said quickly.

Grubbock looked at her. Everyone silenced her nervous laugh with a combined glare. Even Atherton Jones, caught up in the picture of three men on this mountain trail, stared at her angrily.