The Hour of Lead (16 page)

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON
, W
ENDY RECOGNIZED
smoke on the wind. She spotted a grey swell north and wondered if the federals had jumped the chute and started burning houses for the coming dam. She watched the plume double. The smoke blackened, not grain, but seasoned wood burning. Grain made good fuel. With a little wind, fire covered country faster than a horse and rider. You stayed keen for it like a miner watching his canary. She harnessed the team at the barn. Mrs. Lawson emerged from the doorway and perched herself on the bench seat until Wendy finished and pressed the team forward.

They made two miles before the road dropped around a basalt outcropping skirted with shale. Below lay Linda Jefferson's place aflame. After the teacher had grown heavy with child without a proper sire and was two-checked by the city fathers, her students continued to visit. She had been a favorite of the children, more than most realized, and sixteen years past the boys still tied lambs and calves to her porchposts or delivered game salted and cured
into her root cellar. Wendy stopped more often than most, as her residence at the Lawson place left them neighbors. They traded novels and, when she noticed a need, Wendy delivered materials from the hardware to patch a roof or caulk a failing window frame. Linda Jefferson asked nothing from anyone and no one doubted she would have soldiered on without such kindnesses.

The house was nearly to the ground by the time Wendy and Mrs. Lawson made the drive to her road. Linda stood near the pump arm, sooty and sweat-stained. She held an emptied bucket. The sixteen-year-old boy next to her looked flushed. The fire had left the house just joists and the door in its brick frame. Linda pushed the pump handle and filled the pail and drank, letting what was left spill and soak her blouse.

From the house came a spitting. Timber jumped and the grass danced.

“Bullets I made,” Linda said.

Mrs. Lawson looked at her.

“I learned from a book. There's hundreds down there.”

The boy unbuttoned his pants and urinated into a bush.

“My,” Mrs. Lawson said. “His pecker is enormous.”

“Lucky,” Linda said. “Cover yourself.”

An explosion tossed three bricks across the yard. One struck the grey in the ribs and he neighed and crowhopped until Mrs. Lawson settled him.

“Do people still live in caves?” Linda asked.

“Not for a long time,” Mrs. Lawson said.

The boy lumbered up the hill and sat down in Mrs. Lawson's wagon. His hair was as long as a girl's and his clothes split at the shin and shoulder where he'd grown past them. “Would it be so bad?” Linda asked him, but the boy refused to move.

“Suit yourself,” Linda said. “You made this nest, not me.”

“What nest?” Mrs. Lawson asked.

“He knows,” Linda replied. She mounted the wagon, sat next to the boy and took his hand. He allowed it. Mrs. Lawson drove, breaking the grey into a trot and out of the canyon. When the fire found the bulk of the gunpowder, splintered timber, singed shingles, bricks, and the door whole rose up, then fluttered back to the ground. Ashes rained over them, and heat arrived again in gusts, like strange weather.

•

M
RS
. L
AWSON FOUND THE JUG
and uncorked it. She poured two cups and put four kettles on the range for bathing and filled a roasting pan with vegetables and a ham and let them bake. Mrs. Lawson cajoled Linda into the outside tub, a grain trough Wendy had sealed and glued one winter. In the water, Linda's limbs winnowed to muscle and bone; her shoulders and back and ribs secured her to herself, except for her breasts, which were weighty and awkward. Her privates were a tangle, cloaking the cavity under, making it more like something omitted than a mystery. She'd washed her face and her hair and they shone in the sun's setting.

Linda slumped in the tub until her ears were stopped and only her nose was clear of the water. Mrs. Lawson listened to her breaths, then kicked the tub hard enough to make a wave. Linda came up coughing. Mrs. Lawson was already on her way to the house for a fresh jug.

When she returned, Linda was staring at her. “I believe we'll find another to place to stay. If you'll hand me that towel.”

“Someplace less contrary?” Mrs. Lawson asked.

Linda nodded.

Mrs. Lawson held the towel in her lap and patted it with both hands. “Most everyone in the county if they find us worth considering at all agree on our peculiarities.”

“It's been a good while since I've considered other people's considerings,” Linda said.

Mrs. Lawson said, “It's high time to.”

“What makes you think so?”

“You're not living in a cave,” Mrs. Lawson told her. “The government is damming downriver. There's going to be nothing but water over this country.”

She offered Linda the towel, who took it and dried herself. She led Linda to the house and helped her into some of her own clothes. After, she poured some shine into a glass. Linda sipped at it.

“Wendy will be disappointed,” Mrs. Lawson said.

“Why?” Linda asked.

Mrs. Lawson tapped her cup with her finger. “I've corrupted you.”

•

T
HE BOY FOLLOWED
W
ENDY TO
the barn. Wendy occasionally encountered Lucky and his mother when her duties left her on the north end of the ranch, returning from a hunt. Once, in a travois Linda had constructed they dragged two deer hindquarters, a tattered badger, and coyote pelts, from which Linda made blankets rough as cobs. The boy was toting birds of all kinds, half-plucked, and a dog they'd found hit by a car. Wendy had offered to retrieve the wagon. They declined.

Finished putting up the horses, Wendy filled two dinner plates and returned to the barn. The boy ate delicately as a coon, though he was obviously famished. When he finished, Wendy fed him what was left of her meal and refilled his plate. The weather was cool enough for frost, but afterwards he made his way into the bathtub, still filled with water, and undressed. He was short and stout as a tree stump and bowlegged, each buttock square as the rest of him, and above his back muscles creased his skin as he let himself into the lukewarm water.

Wendy entered the house and rummaged the drawers until she found trousers, a plaid shirt, and a T-shirt. Matt's old underwear were in a box, unused, the only thing of his she would not wear. She set the outfit on a fence railing near the bathtub, along with a fresh towel.

Lucky rose from the tub, the beginning of a chest over his ribs and a ropey stomach and his conspicuous organ between his thighs. The boy dried himself and dressed slowly, admiring the feel of each fresh garment.

“By God,” he said.

He held out his arm and admired the T-shirt covering his shoulder. Dressed, he preened across the yard, his hair dripping. He wrung it with his hands.

“You need that cut,” Wendy said.

He stood in the yard, motionless. His head turned toward the house.

“Your mother would mind?”

The boy shrugged. “She never said,” he replied hopefully.

“Well, then she must not,” Wendy told him.

She found the shears in the barn as well as a lantern, a handful of wagon grease, and a currycomb. In the corner was a fresh pan she used for feeding the cats. She set the lantern on the post and gave the boy the pan and told him to watch. She took his hair off like trimming a horse's mane and it fell in fistfuls around a tall bucket he'd picked for a seat. With each rasp of the sheers he grinned, until he was giggling.

His hair was coarse and pleasant feeling, and when she cut it close enough, she combed it with her hands to see if the length was uniform. She put a little grease in it to train a cowlick, and when she finished he looked like any other boy might.

In an hour, the lights in the house went out, and an hour after that, the lantern burned down. Wendy loaded it with fresh oil and
relit it and walked the boy into the house where the women had built him a pallet in the front room. With the boy content, she turned in, but she slept hot, and later rose for some air. On the porch, the boy was once again staring at himself with the frying pan lid, the lantern burning the last of its oil, his pants undone, and his free hand tending his erect self like a wound.

18

T
HE FIRST WEEK IN
D
ECEMBER
, a month into Matt's second year at the ranch, the sky turned a dark hunk of ice that weighed upon the whole country. Mornings, it was thirty below, the land white and still. Before dawn, Matt constructed fires under the metal troughs—halved barrels—and filled them with snow. He'd busted the creek open with an axe the first three days, but the third, instead of water, all he found was bottom. The cows bellowed from thirst but weren't interested in making even the short trip to their trough. They locked their legs against the cold when he hauled the doors open, and he finally saddled a hardy gelding and dragged the cattle one by one to their water. Each kicked snow over the fires while it was drinking, and he'd have to coax the coals back and add wood.

The chore consumed two hours. Matt's hands, even in lined gloves, couldn't feel the rope by the end of it. He had stirred the last of the cows and watched the steam rise from their backs and wished he could cut one open and dip himself into its warm blood. Milking the heifers should've been out of the question, but he'd
discovered the second morning an udder heavy with ice. He examined the others; all were near frostbit from lactating. On the barn stove, he set a pot to heat and dipped his hands into it for as long as he could tolerate, then massaged each tit until he'd drawn it dry. He drove the animals into a manger and forked straw until it covered their udders. After, he covered their backs with wool riding blankets he'd warmed on the stove. Their eyes watered as their tear ducts unthawed and they complained, but they owned enough wits to remain still.

Once he'd tended the animals, he stoked his own fire and watched it blaze. Matt loaded the wood crib and busted kindling for the house while smoke climbed in columns from the chimney into the cold, cold sky.

When the wood grew scarce, Roland directed Matt to a rotted poplar and Matt felled it while Roland watched. The work was the kind Matt favored, muscle and bone, and if you did it properly, you shook thinking altogether and considered only the next blow. When the tree creaked and finally dropped, showering the yard with bark and limbs, he limbed it and cut the trunk into rounds then put diesel to branches and boughs and perched on a fence rail to watch the wood catch and light. The tree burned into the twilight, and Roland sat next to him, content, too, to watch it. Matt was cold and part of him hankered for another chore, but a bigger part was satisfied to sit and gaze at the coals that had started to glisten.

Roland said, “I'll stir a meal up.”

Matt nodded and returned to the dying embers, seeing in them faces and objects of all kinds. He looked up occasionally to the white smoke that climbed the bruised sky. It occupied him until Roland brought plates of warmed pork and gravy. They each sat on the ground and took their meals. After, Roland offered him a cigarette and they smoked. What the man was thinking Matt had no inkling. Perhaps he was happy because he wasn't thinking, just
seeing. He seemed, like his son, to be a man comfortable. Smiling didn't come so natural to most.

“Nothing like a fire,” Roland said.

Matt nodded.

“Not everyone enjoys such simplicities.”

“Not everyone's been cold,” Matt said.

Roland set out three wool blankets and Matt was grateful for them once he returned to the barn, whose walls were constructed to keep predators out and stock and fodder in; weather wasn't a consideration. Matt stocked the stove with enough wood he worried he'd throttled the flue and was still required to curl himself around the furnace mouth with the dog in the crook between. Even the skittish cats risked cover for light and warmth. The cold required him to rotate position every few minutes like a cook might turn a hog on a spit.

“You awake?” Jarms offered Matt a bottle. Matt's eyes were open, so the question didn't require an answer. Matt shoved the bottle with his hand, but it remained and he finally opened it and drank. It was ice cold and full of fresh grape juice.

“The old man buys this from the grocer and keeps it under some rocks up in Rebel Flat Creek.” Jarms rubbed his hands together and put them toward the stove.

“You still live out there in the weather?”

“I've not been in a house to live since I don't remember,” Matt told him. “I doubt I'd take to it.”

“It's a big place.”

“It don't belong to me,” Matt said.

Jarms lit a cigarette and smoked a minute.

“All you're going to do is sleep in a room for Christ's sake. You don't need a deed for that.”

“Deed isn't the point.”

Jarms inhaled and Matt drank more of the juice. The dog burrowed under his arm for warmth.

“You are a stubborn bastard,” Jarms said.