The Hour of Lead (12 page)

It was perhaps the scattering of people that made them behave so. In the cities people flocked up like ducks in a pen and squawked at one other accordingly. It seemed all tumult, but noise can be as static as quiet and the opposite as disruptive. City boys, west for work, beat at the silence with talk until the locals threatened to hit
them with a skillet. And it was clear: the tumult they spat out with talk others just swallowed, and there was peace in neither.

The paradox appeared to multiply in the case of Matt Lawson. He recognized he had passed the frontiers of ordinary when the .22 bullet creased his gut thirteen years before. The fall from the grocer's roof broke Matt's arm, though the bullet failed to damage anything necessary and burrowed into some muscled place within him. He ran like an injured animal, bent, favoring the wound in his side and a broken forearm. Mounting his horse was not as difficult as he anticipated as the wounds were both to his left side. Once aboard, though, he was unsure where to direct the animal. A broken-up fugitive was no way to return to his widowed mother, and Wendy had delivered her opinion. The horse trotted toward the river out of instinct. No one offered chase. He bled from the bullet wound and it lightened his head; his arm buzzed with pain. At Miles Junction he directed the horse north, away from Peach and the family ranch, and nodded into a doze that lasted off and on a day and a night. The horse possessed a shy nature and chose game trails bisecting the highways rather than encounter another rider.

Once he'd ridden far enough into the mountains, he propped the wounded limb in a locust crook and walked his shoulder away until the bones separated. With his good hand, he squared his elbow to his wrist and then, just as slowly, let the bone rejoin.

To lift the arm from the tree required all his strength. When he finally freed it, his wrist was pocked with sap and bark. The break beat pain, though he could feel only numb below it and feared he'd cramped the nerves. He made a fist with the fingers. They answered only when he forced them, which left them useless for even holding a rein. He collapsed against a tall pine. He'd sweat through his shirt. His haunches were too feeble to hold him and he slipped farther until his legs spread before him like clock hands.

He drove a finger from his good hand into the bullet hole, which was raw and burning. The bullet hadn't cleared him. A man often died from less. He'd wandered himself high into the Kettle Mountains; not even Indians traipsed this way until huckleberry season. The Indians believed stories had rules. Once begun, no tale could be uttered twice a season. No less than two could be present aside from the teller, as once a story is loose, though the teller tends it as best he can, like an animal, it owns itself and is not bound by intellect or ritual's restraints and must be tracked to its finish, and the trail required a witness's veracity or the teller could claim it led anywhere he chose. They contained truths past deeds, past civility, past the god preached in churches; they were truths so inarguable they required no faith at all.

He wondered if they happened onto him August—a strange, dead white man, an arm broken and a rib shot—what story they would make of it. Would their tales leave him a god or a wounded devil? Or would he just be a dead man, not fit for story at all? He quit thinking about it. Motion seemed to him an early morning dream. He feared forgetting it altogether. Nothing moved save his eyes. They blinked, and he watched a new world arrive and an old one recede with each flickering, until there were hundreds, all frozen, all the same: a feathered tamarack branch, moss yellowing the limb's underside, a few gnats hovering, and above, blue sky thatched with strings of white clouds. Once a crow crossed.

A day later, he dragged himself to a creek. There, he lay on the gravel bank and lowered his arm into the cold water until, again, the break was without feeling. He was glad for the spring sun. He let it warm his back and shoulders. The horse followed in his own good time, reins dragging in the grass, and the dog, which had followed a few miles behind, gazed, mouth open in a doglike grin.

Sleep came, bright and of no circumstance, but it fascinated him all the same, and he studied himself inside it like a child measuring
a rattle the first time he shook sound from it. When he dreamed, he thought it was himself he was watching, then recognized it was not. Luke swam next to him, a baby again, and Matt studied his stubby arms and the rope of blood and veins feeding him. The only sound was fluid when it passed after he moved. It was a fitful doze and he dreamed and woke and dreamed and woke, until the shades between the two were no more than what you'd see between one stalk of wheat and the one next to it.

It was the magpie's flapping that finally stirred him. It marched across his chest, its face and neck feathers tinged scarlet. Its black eye blinked until it drove its beak into the bullet wound and rose with flesh. Matt watched its head turn upward and the neck muscles swallow, then in a single arc his good hand caught the bird, and in another wrung its neck.

Matt propped himself on his elbow and studied the wound, a small, ragged hollow. In a month it would heal, and in two, scar until the Indians crowded him out. He killed a deer and ate roots and kept days on a fir tree, carving a slash for each one. July, he had reckoned for only thirty, so he departed one day shy of plumb.

For the next thirteen years he followed work throughout the state's eastern half, aside from a stretch in Idaho. He insisted upon one rider concerning employment: he must be allowed to work every day. Once hired, he took to any assignment like work was a woman he'd loved and lost and found again. He recognized how best to order a chore, no matter the complexity, and turned iron in the application. Before the lunch whistle, any foremen with sense saw him a bargain.

He'd set grade and paved highways and liked it; he'd driven truck, both long haul and deliveries, and liked it, and he'd braked for the railroads and liked it; he'd skidded logs and set choke chain in forests and liked it, and pulled green chain in the mills and liked that, too. Occasionally, a check crossed his palm, and that was how
he kept the months. Days, though, were like trees in timber, one next to the other, and no different unless he studied them closely, and he saw no purpose to. Too soon, though, someone would join his shift who needed talk as much as Matt needed quiet, and he'd take his check and his leave.

He'd grown so large people looking his way saw nothing except him. But it left him bare, too, like a snake shed of its skin, waiting on a new one. He'd heard people say it took a lot to get a big man's goat, but what enraged Matt was everything, all a little and nothing more or less, his belly constantly filling. An outright insult didn't weigh upon it any heavier than the slightest voice. The result was one day he'd take what a man shouldn't and, an hour past, not endure ordinary people behaving in ordinary ways. For thirteen years he tore down whoever crossed him, even those who weren't aware they had done so. He never lost a scrap. When the fisticuffs were finished, another man was likely wheezing or bleeding hard and, for a second or two, his living or dying was up to Matt. He'd seen it in their eyes. Some looked pleading, some looked trustful, and others, they just waited for him to make up his mind. And in that moment Matt just kept getting bigger, though growing was the last thing a big man required. In fact, Matt's size loomed over him so large, that sometimes it shrank his insides to nothing. Matt never knew himself if he would halt, and a roomful of men was sometimes all that kept him from manslaughter. He didn't count himself a brave or noble man and when his jaw tightened and his hands doubled into fists and he closed the distance between himself and his antagonist, it was in disregard of sense and honor rather than a defense of it.

Campfires, Matt listened to stories about whores, some one-legged or hairless, others pretty as porcelain, and one who could twist herself into a wagon wheel and spin on a man's rod like it was an axle. Other tellers recalled devastating wildfires, tornadoes that
hurled pitchforks through four-inch beams, dry spells that turned lakes to dusty hollows and creeks damp lines at their channel's bottom. Still more were of men with a blacksmith pyre full of fury, enough gall or ill humor to defy civility and law and good manners. Matt himself had become the subject of many.

He considered his mother or Wendy or his father and brother these thirteen years no more than breathing, which is to say never and always. On occasion they would enter his conscious thoughts. Recalling his mother left him with guilt and Wendy an ache he associated with confusion; only his brother and father delivered him anything approaching nostalgia.

Occasionally he traveled to town to purchase the necessary trappings. Folks would wait on him and take his money and he'd move through them like he was nothing peculiar. He listened to scraps of conversation about dress colors or what riffraff the immigrants were. Soon, though, someone would recognize his eavesdropping and avoid him and others would do likewise, reminding him he was an alien to such human country.

His last job, though, he held for three years. A widow who desired a hand for her cattle took him on. The pay was half of what he cashed elsewhere, but she allowed him a bunk in the barn loft caretaker apartment and left him alone. He warmed to her two boys and trained them in the roping and riding. They threw mumblety-peg between chores and dinner. Christmas, they brought him chocolate candies and he savored them, dispensing one piece an evening so they lasted through spring. He returned the kindness with a stone Indian pipe he'd acquired, and though they thanked him politely, he worried they didn't derive the enjoyment from it that he had from the sweets. He kept on the glean for a gift they might cotton to, but never came upon something fitting. He had departed them the week before, only because the Depression turned even his small wage a burden and the boys had grown
proficient enough to mind the place themselves. His last pay was tucked in his pants pocket.

He studied the little family—minus a father—and the pleasure they took in one another and the absence they bore with grace and their efforts to include him and felt his mind rising to him like a fish from the depths after thirteen years of winter. He recognized, though he traveled many miles, he had spun like a calf with circling disease but had collected none of the wisdom required to lift a life past simple existence and little of the charity necessary to turn time into something other than just years. He determined to return home, but with nothing to offer in regards to heart or thought for his absence, he decided he could at least deliver a wallet full of money.

Whitman County remained the only country still flush for that kind of pay, and Colfax was the county seat. The town was situated in a deep cleft the Palouse River tore through the basalt troughs and hills of what was once idle bunchgrass and soft loam. The Indians let it alone and stayed poor, but migrant Germans, Russians, and Norse cut the brush, tilled, then planted and cultivated and prospered. Miles of sprouting wheat sown in late fall greened the softened horizons.

Matt's approach was from the west and above. The farmhouse lights dotted the hills' western portions, where they could catch most light. The larger ranches were in flats between, each with an enormous barn harboring cattle and swine and fodder, and another their implements, and usually a grain elevator, as well. Roads tracked the water flow or property lines: Cherry Creek, Rebel Flat Run, The Big Hole, Green Hollow, Dry Creek, Little Almota Creek, Spring Flat Creek, Palouse River South Fork, Thorn Creek, Duncan Springs or Parvin (Mick and Peter), Banner, Danaher, Hergert, Behrens, Bushnell, Hubble, Biddle, Henning, Wells, Smidt, Smit, Schmidt (the families got along so poorly two sides changed their
spelling) and Kleveno, Kleaweno (cousins, who held no grudges). The country's lines were as gentle as his own was stern, arcs and rounded buttes, an ocean of earth. Even the canyon cut by the Palouse River was topped by farm country and the lights of Colfax below followed the water in a shape as lazy and pleasant as the horizon's hills.

The town's major boast was a gristmill. A few hardware stores and two closed banks shadowed its narrow main street, but Matt had come looking for a poker game. Cards and good fortune were too mercurial for him to trust, especially when the best you could hope for was just more of the same the next hand. However, rumor was the big farmers in the Palouse country, those who had work and need for a good hand, swapped cards and discretionary income Wednesday nights in a backroom of a Chinese opium warren.

November remained a week away, but the temperature won the race with the season. The winter's first snow cloaked the fields and floated about Matt and his coyote pup trotting behind. He'd lost the dog six years before and acquired the pup when someone killed its mother raiding the camp garbage.

Five deer browsed a ranch house garden's dregs. Above, sky had cleared and the temperature he estimated had dropped close to zero. His hands ached inside his heavy gloves. A chain of headlights snaked up the canyon. Most of the country had swapped horsepower for internal combustion in the twenties and many of the farmers managed to keep them running despite the Crash and the Dustbowl. Now midwest clunkers, piled with children and belongings and kept whole with rope and wire and prayer littered the highways, aimed at federal construction projects throughout the center of the state.

Matt permitted the horse its own head descending the basalt. Below he heard jabbering, and at the canyon well where a creek
trickled past a cottonwood copse a group of men lit by homemade torches seemed to be arguing with one another.

“Chinese shouldn't be telling an American what to pay in America, Jarms,” one wearing a heavy red mackinaw said.