The Hour of Lead (22 page)

“Horace is crazier than a billy goat and refuses taking care of himself or his money. You know he's down in the big poker game to men who don't have that sort of money. But they have guns and nothing to lose.” Garrett said. “But the man has never bullshitted me. Do you know how valuable that is? Someone who will tell you the truth no matter how ugly or how much it costs him.”

Matt said nothing.

“You can't imagine being boss? Is that it?” Garrett asked. “Someone has to be in charge. It might as well be a person that knows how to do the job.” Garrett grinned. “The world's a strange place.”

Matt toed the dirt with his boot.

“You see I'm attempting to help Horace,” Garrett said.

“I never doubted it,” Matt said.

They were quiet a while.

“Who owns what is only ink on paper.” Garrett said. “Bad and good, right and wrong, more ink, more paper. Whiskey was illegal, remember that? Now they can't sell enough. I follow the bible closer than any priest ever thought to and, God, he looks out for me for it. You could give me some of that about how tough it is for the rich to get to heaven, but I been to New York and I saw St. Patrick's. That place is the holiest thing in these United States and it's a palace. Tell me why they didn't feed a million poor Irish with that money? Because they'd be hungry again tomorrow. But that church will stand longer than any of those paupers will live even if you fed them ten meals a day. God is, above all things, practical.”

Garrett stayed quiet a while. His face was green in the moonlight, and his skin looked suddenly like it could slip from his face like a mask and pool in the gravel under them, leaving just the bone and muscle underneath.

“Horace has read more than me and he knows more ideas than me. He can tell you the difference between Aristotle and Socrates and whoever else had ideas about other ideas and he can talk them like a goddamm lawyer.” Garrett laughed finally. “You know what the difference is? Horace, he knows a lot of philosophies, but he doesn't have one.”

Matt did not reply.

“You and me can look after Horace,” Garrett said. “Roland passes and the house can be yours. Horace will just live in it. It's all
he does now. Then in months or years he'll turn up dead or drink himself so far rummy, he can't get back from it. It'll happen before me, don't even argue it—you'll have a home.”

Matt stayed quiet awhile.

“You think you're siding with him?” Garrett asked.

“Maybe I'm just not siding with you.”

“That's a selfish reason. Not liking me is no cause not to do business when it serves everybody involved.”

It was simple logic, even if Garrett bent it to his hearing. Roland would listen to it.

“Like I said.” Garrett grinned. “The world's a strange place.”

“Not that strange,” Matt said.

Garrett smoked his cigarette to a stub. “You ain't doing him a good turn,” he said. “Fact is, you're killing him dead as a heifer to the slaughter.” He clapped Matt on the shoulder with a grip firmer than congenial. “You disappoint me, big man. I was hoping for more from you.”

23

T
HROUGH EARLY SUMMER
, J
ARMS MADE
circles between town and the ranch. He'd traveled that orbit for years, but now he turned the ideas of ranch and town over in his mind like a coin he continually flipped, hunting a pattern from the results. Some mornings, Matt woke and Jarms joined him in the chores before the sun rose and remained throughout the day. Others, he rose early, worked until lunch and after drove the Ford in the general direction of town. Some days, Matt did not see him at all.

The Ford occasionally failed him. Jarms woke to flat tires often enough that he finally purchased a pump; a week after he rose to the tires cut with a long knife. He bought fresh inner tubes, but soon the pistons would not fire. The spark plug wires were snipped. Jarms repaired them and arranged a chain and padlock to secure the hood and engine, though a few days past the Ford died for good, sugar in the gasoline tank pasting the piston to the cylinder walls. Jarms saddled his horse, Ahab, named for the Melville character rather
than he of the bible, and made for town. Upon his return he tethered the animal beneath Matt's window open even on the coldest nights.

Matt thought the culprit might be Roland, and Jarms wondered over Matt's complicity. Whoever it might be, however, did not appear willing to sabotage an animal.

The girl hadn't returned for eight weeks, Jarms stopped to talk to her father and verify her condition. She felt weak at the stomach mornings. Jarms inquired about her bleeding, but the man would say no more. Jarms did not speak to the girl. He was certain, though, and after he delivered her meal each evening, he paused at Matt's door every night to report her progress.

One evening on the porch, Matt smoked a cigarette and rolled another. Roland had lost weight and color. Evenings, he listened to the radio serials. Together, Matt and Jarms watched Roland drift into sleep until he snored.

“Wish it was me with the bad heart,” Jarms said. “No work would be a cure I could take to.”

Matt nodded. “Maybe it's why you're in good health.”

Jarms lay back on the rocker and closed his eyes. He was long enough silent that Matt thought he, too, had dozed off.

“You even in your game?”

“Somewhat.”

“That like being somewhat pregnant?”

Jarms laughed.

“You didn't say how the poker was working out,” Matt said.

“I'm more certain about the girl than the cards.”

Roland shifted in his sleep and sucked a hard breath then struggled until his leg freed. Jarms worked his cigarette.

“They're gonna be building dams on the Columbia. Jobs better paying than this're coming.”

“And a line to get them,” Matt said.

“You and I know there ain't no line you'd wait in long.”

“You putting the run on me?”

“Why'd I want to go and do that?”

Matt shrugged. “Maybe inside straights and low pairs.”

Jarms shook his head. “You worry too damned much.”

“Equals out, you not worrying at all.”

“Together, we break even, then,” Jarms said.

“Maybe,” Matt replied. He yawned.

“Keeping you from your rest?”

“You're about to.”

“Well, you're awake, now,” Jarms said. “Might as well go for a ride.”

“Car is still broke,” Matt said.

“Trap wagon runs, though.”

“Where?”

“Cemetery.”

They traveled in the truck to Roland's tree and the graves of Jarms's siblings. Matt sat and listened to the little stream collect itself and move for the river. Sometimes Jarms went alone, Matt knew. Matt wondered at the headstones for children's graves and if they were not unlike the rose thicket marking his brother and father's bones and if either made a difference one could measure and call comfort.

Jarms offered him a bottle and he took it.

“How long does it take for a baby?” Matt asked.

“Nine months,” Jarms told him. “She ought to make it that far. The doctor says she's healthy.”

Matt poked a stick in the damp gravel.

“She's got wide hips,” Jarms said.

“Is that good?” Matt asked.

“Is in cows,” Jarms told him.

They sat and watched the moon rise. He could feel the cold coming. It calmed him. The stars above were so indecipherable that he figured nobody knew for certain anything and the realization comforted him.

They shared a cigarette that left Matt's mouth sticky and sweet with the bourbon.

“That girl pretty?” he asked.

“You seen her before.”

“Never up close.”

“You were pretty close the one time.”

“It was dark.”

Jarms nodded. “You particular?”

“Just inquiring.”

Jarms lay his head back into the tree bark. Matt heard him chuckle.

“You ain't one to inquire,” he said. “Something's on your mind.”

Matt watched the cigarette in his hand burn down. He dragged from it one more time then set it in the dirt.

“I was thinking about the baby,” he said.

“What about it?”

“I was wondering what it might look like.”

Jarms laughed. “Like itself, I expect.”

“You don't think it'll favor the mother?”

“If it's lucky.”

Matt said nothing. His cigarette was finished. The butt left a black spot in the dirt.

•

H
ER HAIR WAS THE COLOR
of hay, but he'd forgotten most of the rest of her. The profile of her nose he could gather if he pondered
enough, but the rest remained a pebble in his shoe that left him raw and doubting. The child weighed upon him, as well. He considered it every night. It would have him in it, and he worried which part the child would draw.

“You think it will know me?”

“You think a calf ponders the bull that made him? It doesn't know anything but its mother.”

“You're one to talk,” Matt said. “You don't know your mother.”

Jarms stared at Matt.

“I guess that came out mean,” Matt said.

“I guess it did,” Jarms agreed. He sighed. “Old Roland mothered me about as well as any damned woman could.”

“Seems so.”

Matt vowed to quit thinking of it. To imagine children until they had come was as impossible as to forget them after they had gone. Matt wondered if Roland would make it into another year.

“That baby might perk him up,” Matt said.

“He'll know it soon enough,” Jarms said. He rose and jingled his car key. “Come on if you're going to,” he said.

In the grain truck, Jarms drove the ridge's trail and parked within view of the old place where the girl's family resided. He withdrew binoculars from the glove box.

“That top window's hers.”

Jarms handed him the binoculars and Matt gazed into the girl's room. Inside was a chest of drawers, painted white. A brush and comb lay on its top next to a ceramic-faced doll with rose painted cheeks, its hair nearly gone. A tiny mirror had been tacked to the wall above it. Blankets on a cot made up her bed.

They had to wait a while before the girl turned in. She sat in the room in the lantern light and brushed her hair. It was long and thin and he could see the color of the plain wall through it. Her
chin was pointed and her jaw a pleasing crescent. Her nose was as he recalled it, and her eyes were small—he couldn't make out their color. He waited for her to do something extraordinary, but she blew out the lantern and was gone.

24

R
OLAND REMAINED HOBBLED AND
J
ARMS
returned to bring in the harvest. Matt set him to driving the combine while Matt sewed sacks. It was the most skilled labor there was. A man had to fill a fifty-pound sack with grain and hem it shut before the next fifty pounds of wheat filled the grain bin. The labor was numbing. It'd taken him a whole harvest to make himself passable at it. One day, they stopped for water, and Jarms sauntered to the back and stared at the sacks and twine.

“I'm tired of eating dust,” he said. “Let's swap.”

Matt said, “You can't keep up.”

Jarms grinned. “I might surprise you.”

They cut all day into the night without stopping. Jarms not only kept pace, he got far enough ahead to start a cigarette every dozen bags or so. His hands and the twine were a blur.

They quit with the end of twilight. Matt nodded at what they'd finished.

“That's a lick of work.”

Jarms agreed.

“More than we'd get if I was bagging,”

“Yep,” Jarms said.

“You cut just fast enough to carry me, didn't you?” Matt had run the combine near double Jarms's pace just to try and test him.

“Didn't make much sense to cut faster than you could sew.”

Jarms stared at him. It was quiet and damp from the coming evening. The night smelled like bread, and a fog of dust turned the moon huge and orange.

“You let me think you were useless,” Matt said.

Jarms was counting the bags and writing the numbers into his notebook. Each night Roland ledgered the totals. He was awake late, figuring. His color was better and his lungs had cleared.

“Old Indian trick,” Jarms said. He clasped Matt's shoulder and pointed him to the house. They could see the light shining from it.

He said. “I sewed bags before I was twelve. Neighbors hired me from all around. I was a good boy once. I got it in me.”