The Hour of Lead
Authors: Bruce Holbert
Copyright © 2014 by Bruce Holbert
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The hour of lead : a novel / Bruce Holbert.
p. cm
ISBN 978-1-61902-380-2
1. RanchersâWashington (State)âHistoryâFiction.
2. FamiliesâWashington (State)âHistoryâFiction. I. Title.
PS3608.O48287H69 2014
813'.6âdc23
2014014411
Jacket design by Michael Kellner
Interior design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates
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Contents
For Holly, Natalie, Luke, and Jackson
Caliban's nights are full of teeth
âJOHN WHALEN
Caliban
This is the hour of Leadâ
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the snowâ
FirstâChillâthen Stuporâthen the letting goâ
â
EMILY DICKINSON
,
from poem 372
NOVEMBER 1918
I
N
1918, S
PANISH
I
NFLUENZA KILLED
seventy-five million people worldwide, though not the Romanovs, who were instead murdered in their palace basement by Bolsheviks. The same year, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, World War I closed with the Treaty of Versailles. No one was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.
In that year, for the only time in the century, America's population shrank. One hundred one people perished in Tennessee's Great Train Wreck. May 20 in Codell, Kansas, tornadoes leveled every building, just as they had on May 20, 1917 and May 20, 1916. In Boston, Babe Ruth pitched a shut-out for the Red Sox in the World Series, though he hit no home runs.
The Wobblies and AFL crippled the city of Seattle, Washington with a general strike adding fuel to fears of a Bolshevik insurgence. The state initiated prohibition with the Bone Dry Act, and the
Wenatchee World
published the first public mention of a concrete dam on the Columbia River at Grand Coulee.
Yet, east, past the mountains, in the Big Bend and the Basin, on the reservations and the Palouse and the fissured basalt paralleling the Columbia River's deep trough, among channeled scablands and the wheat country and orchards and cattle ranches and dairy farms, horses still powered crude machines not much improved from a hundred years before. Towns of no more than a hundred, many just a grain silo and half-dozen houses that served the railroad lines, scattered over the state's eastern and central portion. Most people resided far even from these skeletal communities, settling in draws with good water or meadows livestock might graze or beneath eyebrows so as not to waste arable acres or at the mouth of canyons that kept the herds.
Far from cities' competing glare and industrial haze the year appeared to pass this country like another cloud in another sky of another day. Its half-dozen papers delivered month-old world and national reports along with fair winners and local obituaries, though people received most of their news through tales added to and subtracted from a hundred times before reaching their ears. Most were good for nothing sensible, just wonder and doubt and the uncertainties attached to them. Nevertheless, alone, behind a plow or aboard an animal or pulling a saw handle or over a chicken boiling in a pot, the denizens chewed and swallowed and digested them until the stories turned as tangible as bone and muscle and tendon.
L
INDA
J
EFFERSON WAS A CLICHÃ
and she knew it. Twenty-four, both schoolteacher and widow, she tugged a sweater over her blouse then her husband's sheepskin-lined riding coat. His death the year previous had deposited her in a sad, inevitable season. She weathered it as a dumb animal scratches for summer's remnants beneath the snow, not understanding winter or seeking to, only enduring it. The absence was endless and reasonless; it seemed less a wound, which mourning would have mitigated and eventually closed, than a flaw in herself, requiring constant stitching to keep from bleeding through.
In this country, loneliness was unassailable law. A man weighed his heart by the number of sleepers under his roof when the lights went out and a woman by the number of eggs in the skillet mornings. The distance between souls, however, remained incalculable. Blood made them kin, yet a heart does not beat solace or joy. One must hunt that in others, and others remained few and far apart. Days she entertained a room full of children but a job was no remedy for an empty house.
In the schoolroom furnace, quartered pine ebbed to coal and ash and wind clattered the flue. The weather battered the cottonwood in the yard and clouds clotted and thinned the light. The storm was a relief. A hard wind could perform beautiful things to country, sweep it clean like a new room. Once it let up and the sky emptied to blue, the snow seemed a new start.
As she approached the twins, pressed into desks for which they had grown too large, they hitched themselves a little taller. Clad in a cotton shirt and grey trousers, Luke flipped his book closed with his forefinger. Clothes passed between the brothers and were never a reliable way to tell them apart; still, three minutes in a room, you knew Luke from his twin, Matt, who was bent across his spelling, crimped hand steering his pencil.
She tapped a finger on Matt's paper to identify two words that remained misspelled. He nodded and opened his primer to correct the work. Matt was better suited for practical pursuits. Fall, the boys demonstrated a bent to arrive early and she'd assigned Matt the stove. Each morning, he retrieved the axe from the long covered porch and quartered a couple of aged tamarack rounds stacked at the porch's far end. After, he knocked loose some kindling and propped it across a handful of dried pine needles and a balled page of last week's news. He struck a matchâone was all he'd allowâagainst the paper two or three places and coax the damper draft till the wood burned blue and smokeless. Not a wisp entered the room. All the while, she shot Luke new and difficult words to spell. She felt odd enjoying boys this age. Eighth grade, they recognized a woman differed from them and that they were meant to do something about it. She thought of her husband once more, his broad, callused hands on her shoulder and waist while they danced at the Fort Saturdays, not pulling her, just steady and there. His nails, yellowed by cigarettes, the hair dark and wiry between his knuckles, the same hand that dangled from the sheet as the logging crew
carted him from the forest. As his crew recalled, the tree turned on its stump and thrust a wooden blade through Vernon's throat and out one ear. The mortician could do nothing without removing the head entirely, so he appeared like an awestruck child in the casket, marveling at something overhead and slightly to the left.