The Hour of Lead (10 page)

“You are not the kind of man who beats an animal.”

Matt glanced about. The dog had barked and bit the horse's bouncing hooves when Matt began their struggle, but had retreated outside the corral fence where he paced staring, eyes flashing in the glow from the lantern his mother held.

“Will that horse mind better hurt like it is?”

Matt did not reply.

“If I beat you would you be right?”

“I am not right,” Matt said.

“Nor me,” she said. She glanced toward the dog. “But he had nothing to do with it and he never did a thing to me. I was wrong. So are you.”

Matt nodded.

“Now come in and eat a meal with me and let that horse be.”

He followed and she fed him and spoke to him, and he managed to attend to her words but they meant less than her voice itself, going on in a way he recalled and did not, maybe the same as you recall breathing without the need to remind your mouth and lungs and diaphragm to do their duty.

Late that evening, he walked to the barn and loaded the trough with oats. He opened the corral's gate and barn's swinging door. The horse stirred and skittered at the sound.

He hooked the lantern then hid in the shadows. The gelding crossed the barn and ate. Matt watched his throat tremble. Welts mottled his ribs, and the bleeding wounds were matted with straw and hair. He found ointment and eased himself to the gelding's side. The horse bolted and Matt let him, returning to doctoring
only when the gelding bent his neck again to eat. Before Matt could clean the first wound, the animal retreated once more. The horse's sweat and his own made an odor gamey as venison in the skillet. Matt found an apple and salved every cut, then added sugar cubes to his bribe and applied liniment to each swollen place.

•

W
ENDY WATCHED THE EARLY THAW
stretch into a long springtime. Morning glory and dandelion weeds pocked the untilled garden plot and the lawn's grass was yellowing toward green. Overhead, geese and ducks sliced through the warming sky, headed for the river or potholes in the basin.

Nearly every day a gift arrived. Tiny things much of the time: a scarf, fruit preserves, or jujubes. One morning, she rose to breakfast enough for the entire family, sliced bacon, large boiled eggs, and sweet bread; another she lifted the blanket from a basket containing a tabby kitten with a full milk jug and two fresh trout.

Once Wendy woke to her sisters' squealing. They'd discovered a pair of muddy boot tracks. A few more were in the yard, but they vanished in the rutted street.

“He's ugly,” Amy said.

Wendy sighed, impatiently.

“If he wasn't ugly, he'd let you see him.”

“You are both insufferable,” Wendy said. She led the girls to the house and handed one a straw broom and the other the dusting rag. “This will keep your imaginations occupied,” she told them. They complained and she ignored them, preparing herself for the walk to the store, where she had assumed the clerking duties at her mother's insistence. Her mother was at first pleased a young romantic had imagination enough to woo her daughter in such a courtly manner. She had become exasperated by the mystery, lately, though, and
pressed Wendy to examine anyone coming into the store for evidence. Each day, she surveyed grocery lists and hunted for indications of it in the gifts she received. But she was left without clues. She'd considered Matt Lawson, speculating that perhaps their history kept with him. He'd stopped into the grocery once, but seeing her had turned him around so swiftly he nearly caught himself in the door's shutting. She'd met his eyes for a moment and recognized only fear. It saddened her until the next morning when a pair of narrow store-bought slippers lay on the porch, red ribbon binding them, and she ceased entirely to think of him.

•

M
ATT TROTTED THE HORSE RIDERLESS
around the corral for a full two weeks, only a blanket on its back. He spoke to it of the girl: what he remembered of her smell, her kindness with the graves, her voice he'd been so long without hearing. The horse grew to cooperate, more or less. There was still the crow-hopping, but Matt, reversing his methods, closed the line slack, allowing the gelding no room, save carrying him into the air. It took more attention, but he'd recognized the chore required it. Afterwards, he fed the gelding well and allowed it to frolic loose in the pasture each evening when he rode to the butte. He ordered a fresh leather saddle from the town livery and paid a middle-aged lady near Lincoln who had some standing in the county in leather crafts to cut Wendy's name in it along with painted roses.

The gelding tolerated the saddle in a few weeks, but threw him six days straight until he snubbed its neck to the sturdy fence post and its hindquarters to another, giving him no choice but to bear him. He repeated this five times a day for a week, though it put him behind in the spring work. To his surprise, the gelding allowed him to ride the eighth day without incident.

Matt saddled and worked the gelding daily, easing his gait and acquainting the horse with the bit and bridle. When he'd tired sufficiently, Matt allowed the gelding to make its own trail back, giving him his head to chew at spring grass or new tree leaves. Fenceposts and low limbs, the horse tried to rub him from the saddle, but any animal with good sense will test a rider; it was more an act of character than revolt.

He mounted the gelding every trip to Peach now and hobbled it close by, where it could watch the house. He'd direct it to Wendy and speak her name like a charm. Late, he'd offer whatever the next gift was for the horse to study. Then, one warm night, he delivered the gelding himself to the porch and tied him to the sturdiest rail.

•

T
HE GELDING NIBBLED THE GRASS
beneath the porch. He lifted his head when Wendy clucked. She patted his warm silky neck. He eyed her, but she was fresh to it. She stroked the reins and the horse chattered the bridle.

“There,” she said to it.

The leather of the saddle was whirled into roses, painted red and yellow and pink, her name above them. She patted it gently, then hoisted one leg into the stirrups and swung the other over the pommel. At the street, she coaxed the gelding to full gallop. She felt her eyes crying and the tears dry in her lashes and on her cheek. She reined for a road north that would meet the river. In her nightclothes, she raced and trotted and raced again the beautiful animal the miles toward Seven Bays. There she permitted the horse to drink its fill and, later, deliver her home. She settled on Amherst for his name. It was Emily Dickinson's home.

10

L
INDA
J
EFFERSON WAS NOT TAKEN
aback when, after the shock of her dismissal ebbed, the children visited her home. Fall, she had arrived at the school to more fruit and wildflowers on her desk than any year before, and, as each left for the Thanksgiving holiday—some of the last days she would share with them—she caught herself kissing their cheeks. Even the older boys inclined their straight backs to offer themselves. They still cared for her, as children will for anyone who treats them generously, but her awkward condition hushed them. The boys feared it; the child was a bulk impossible for them to make. It frightened them to know she could conjure more than they could.

The girls were much less naive. They only hoped to determine who had left the seed. Girls were never as romantic as boys. That is where people were wrong. It was boys who pined for love, and girls who understood it, and therefore pursued not love, but boys.

The day she was dismissed from her school duties, Linda Jefferson opened an abandoned copy of
Anna Karenina
. It lay on her
nightstand, her place marked with a rawhide strip. She read a few pages each night, preoccupied with Anna's eventual end. Finished, she read it once more with the desperation one devours tragedy. She dog-eared the pages where Anna committed each transgression, as if Linda herself might be able to avoid them. But so many pages were marked finally that the book cover slanted nearly forty-five degrees, and Linda realized she'd marked each page Anna appeared and some where she hadn't and couldn't anticipate the calamity folding over her.

Her breasts were not yet milk-heavy, nevertheless their weight reassured her. She stroked her stomach and spoke to it not with her voice but with the tips of her fingers, where she rubbed her stretching hair follicles and the wrinkled skin line that her elastic undergarment cut and hunted the right place, until the baby, like a fish ascending from deep water, rose to her touch.

When the year turned, Linda harnessed her one good horse and trotted her flatbed up the Peach road. She stopped at the cafe. It was the men's place mornings—farmers drinking coffee by the potful and protesting the weather or the state of their machinery and a few merchants making themselves social like they would at Sunday church. The banker took breakfast every morning at the window table, studying the previous day's market tape, joined by a high-hatted farmer or two.

Seeing her in the doorway halted their banter and gossip, a hush Linda thought nearly visible, all those words collapsing midair, then piling on the floor, quiet as snow. She shrunk until the baby cramped inside her. Small was not a choice afforded her. She nodded at the bank manager, a mustached fellow, whiskers dark where the coffee wet them.

“I'd like to see my money,” Linda said.

The man sighed and rose.

“I'm in no hurry,” she told him.

“I am,” he said.

“Your breakfast will cool.”

He looked at his eggs, bleeding yellow eyes where he'd dipped his biscuit. “I'll order more.”

“I'll not be a partner to waste,” Linda said.

Her baby-heavy belly pressed her distended skin. The banker gazed at it, then back to his plate. The men eyed him. She was in no way his fault, but it was his business that had brought her in the door.

He shoveled his food and chased it with more coffee. Linda surveyed the room, quietly delighted that she'd hoisted her discomfort upon them. The child shifted. She decided after this one, she'd have another.

Finished, she followed the banker across the street. He rotated the doorbolt, spun it the opposite direction, and stepped into the safe. She scribbled out a slip for her balance. It was over seven hundred dollars. He snapped the bills twice and shoved them across the transom toward her.

She recounted them. “I'm sorry,” she said when she was satisfied. “Checking others' work is a habit.”

She walked the clapboard sidewalks, drawing a few stares. She welcomed them. In the gristmill, she ordered three barrels of treated wheat flour and paid, shucking bills from her stack. She found lead and powder and, on the hardware's shelves, a pamphlet concerning loading. At the mercantile, she bought a pedaled sewing machine and flannel, gingham, and cotton bolts. She purchased several thread spools and an array of needles and a pin cushion shaped like a tomato, before adding yarn and knitting needles, sheets, and fresh wool blankets. The little she knew of clothes-making passed when her mother did, but she had a book and she would learn.

The dime store window displayed a crib. She purchased it and some playthings she could tie above for the child right away, and others, including a kaleidoscope, wouldn't be much use until the child could sit up and take notice of the world.

She ended at the doctor's, a stringy, middle-aged man, fit more for animals than people. His hands were cold and he had horrible gas, for which he never felt compelled to restrain or the courtesy to apologize.

He put the stethoscope ends into her ears. She heard the baby's heartbeat and offered him five dollars for the instrument, but he had none to spare. He pronounced her and the baby healthy.

“Are you friendly with your neighbors?” the doctor asked.

She didn't answer. He wrote a note on his calendar. “When it's your time, I'll send someone around to check.”

“That won't be required.”

He looked at her for a moment. His glasses shifted. They left sores on his nose and he rubbed them. “Birth is a very violent process, ma'am.”

“So is living,” she told him.

11

“I
T'S NOTHING
I
'M ACCUSTOMED TO
, what's going on,” her mother told her. Wendy unlatched the cabinet and unfolded a drying towel, then took her place at the dish rack. “It's not normal.” Her mother huffed. Her agitated hands stirred the sink to a froth. Wendy passed her the meat platter and watched as she scraped the scraps into a soup kettle for stock.

“It's not love, it's worship.”

“Do you think I'm shallow, mother?” Wendy wiped clean a fork. “If I was, I'd keep a regular beau and the only worry you'd have was his pulling at my underthings before we got to the altar.”

Her mother's hands quit scouring. “Don't you think they'd want to touch you honey? Don't you want to touch them?” She peeked into the parlor to be certain her husband and the girls were occupied. Her mother emptied the sink and scooped clear the drain, rinsed and filled it once more. She insisted on the hottest of water for fear of botulism, which she contracted once as a child. Her
hands went red under it. She sighed and bit her lip and stretched her fingers until they became accustomed.