The Hour of Lead (3 page)

“The matches are in the top drawer,” Mrs. Jefferson told him.

Matt watched her roll Luke onto the blanket and use it to drag his brother toward the stove.

The wood crib was empty.

The shape of her face in the light trembled. “Books,” she said. “Tear the pages out.”

He found math books stacked behind the desk. “You sure?”

“Yes.”

He ripped the multiplication chapters from their binding and stacked them inside the stove. His hands wouldn't pinch onto the match. He closed his fist, jammed the stick between two knuckles, and struck the sulfur head against the stove's iron lid. The match flared. He set it to the pages. They lit and curled above the cold ash. He doubled the pile and watched while letters, numbers, whole equations unraveled. The hatchet was in the closet and he hacked the desks, separating the legs and the seat ribbing to kindle the blaze. The flames snuffled the varnished wood, then took. He added a top and seat back and left the door open to give them light.

Luke lay naked on the blanket. “Undress,” Mrs. Jefferson said. She unbuttoned her own jacket and wrenched off her gloves. More blankets lay next to Luke's clothes. Matt's underwear stuck to his skin and hissed when he shucked it from his legs. He covered himself with his hands.

“Get on the blanket,” Mrs. Jefferson said. He watched her lift her blouse. Her hair hooked to the collar, then fell to her shoulders. Through the burning, he could smell her clothes. She bent at the waist and her skirt dropped, then her pants and pantaloons. Her eyes shut. She reached behind herself with both hands and undid her camisole, then curled her knickers past her ankles. She put herself between the two to warm them both.

Luke awoke to her next to him. She extended her arm across him for another blanket and her thick nipple brushed his chest. Her hair curved, a half crescent to the bottom of her neck. It shone like polished metal, and with her over him, the paper ash fluttering in the apricot light like warm snow, he felt vaguely content.

Linda saw the boy's breathing stop. She tapped at his sternum
and set her cheek beneath his nose. The fire's watery heat washed over her spine and ribs and muscles and skin. Matt watched as she opened her mouth and placed it on top of Luke's. He envied his brother the kiss. Air passed from her into Luke. His throat fluttered then quit. She blew into him twice more and then drew back and waited. Luke's tongue lolled in his mouth.

With her thumb and forefinger she closed Luke's eyes. The flesh felt cool and damp, like her own. She was afraid suddenly that she couldn't separate the living from the dead. The wool blanket raked the skin of her shoulders when she turned toward the living boy, who lay on his side, facing the opposite wall. He tensed his legs and buttocks against her cool skin, but as the warmth built between them, his muscles relaxed. He twisted his hips into the space she had left for them. Her breasts parted. He rose to peer past her shoulder, but she halted him with her hand against his chest.

“Let him sleep,” she said. She shifted to slide one arm beneath Matt's spindly ribs, then drew the other around to meet it. The boy's breath warmed and dampened her wrists. She could smell his musty hair. She turned one palm and traced his chest. The muscle of his heart opened and closed. His diaphragm dragged in the warm air. His whole body worked. She rubbed his stomach for the friction that would warm him and in doing so, touched his adolescent pubic hair, recognizing the stirring in the flesh it covered below. She felt his heart beat again, when, by some sort of natural knowing, he turned and guided himself into her.

•

D
AWN SPLINTERED THE NEXT MORNING
. It brightened the west wall of the schoolhouse blue and pink and orange. Matt awoke and gazed at the pure light. His legs ached and semen clung to the thin hair on his thighs. The stove fire had taken all the math and reading
books. All that was left were a few encyclopedia volumes scattered in front of their low shelves. He had chopped six more desks during the night. Mrs. Jefferson lay with her arms and legs extended to where he'd slept like a cat. He could smell her, them. Luke didn't move. Matt bent to affirm what he already knew. Luke's skin was cold and tight as animal hide.

Outside the window glass, the sky had blued and cleared and turned so deep he could see the peaks of the Okanogans and Kettles farther, the rock slides where snow couldn't hold and the blue-green sprinkling of pine blown clean by the wind. Steam rose from the river in long columns that danced above the water, and the earth in front of him was all one thing, simple, colorless, and impossible to know.

2

F
ROM ABOVE, THE
C
OLUMBIA
R
IVER'S
Lincoln County shoreline appears as if a giant child has dragged a hoe through the land. The steep banks collapse from the U-shaped bluffs, narrow and less vertical where the bays and streambeds, fed with spring rains, carve the rock to gravel each year. The river itself, a half-mile wide, hurried faster than a horse galloped: the boys had thrown in sticks and raced them with their ponies for proof. They knew no one who had navigated to the other side without ending up in Keller or drowned. It was not unusual to row a boat to the current's fringes and anchor it with two or three large stones, but even the goofiest of the homesteaders had little inclination to cross.

The river bottom constantly changed with the season's rainfall and drought. Spring runoff, a thousand uprooted trees might pass in a week, their starry roots bobbing on the current; some trees, halved by winds and rot, slowly drowned, needles and all, creating pools too acidic for fish or fowl. Others spun in the current or sunk
separately and made homes for trout that harbored in the river's slow spots. Still more hung up in the cataracts where they idled for years, unraveling under the constant beating of water and rock like obscure sagas absent a necessary listener, occasionally providing deadheads, hazards for the four ferries that shuttled soldiers and Indians and farmers from one bank to its opposite. Each spring, snowmelt lifted the waterline. The fortified current pressed the winter's silt from the graveled bottom, readying it for the Coho, Sockeye, Steelhead, and Chinook spawn, when the river shallows would teem and boil with red salmon, days from expiring. Their tails and dorsal fins puckered the water's surface in the river's bays and inlets. Like the old Greek said, you could never step in the same river twice, but anyone in this country recognized the long view, that the river's change was its constancy, like the turning Earth itself.

Above, the basalt gorge appeared to have stood since the primordial epochs, sharp bluffs and talus slides exposed and last disturbed by ice age floods. Though sagebrush and ponderosa pine and birch and larch pocketed the river banks and descending grades, in the rich loess beyond the cliffs stretched wheat and barley by the square mile, not native to this country but graceful enough, whether whiskering the plowrows spring or early summer or rocking in the midsummer winds, cresting and falling like the river's surface, and even when threshed and gleaned to stubbled loops, it smelled like wet dough in the evening dew.

Summers, the sky, held in place by the high barometric pressure, looked an azure sheet for weeks at a time, deeper than any lake or sea, muddied only by the occasional plow's dust plume or a wildfire's ashy billow. Falls began gently with cirrus clouds and corduroy skies that filtered the sunlight to cool and colorless. Later blustery; nimbus and cumulus clouds blossomed in the thinned light and
delivered rain then winter full on, which alternated between clear and cold freezes where a man could hear a footstep five miles off, and blizzards that stacked snow upon the river country until the spring, which delivered more blue and less grey, and the occasional mile high thunderheads, shattering the quiet with thunder and the sky with brutal electric streaks that split trees to the trunk and occasionally exploded houses and outbuildings and twice farmers who were late finding cover.

Here, Eugene Lawson, Ed's father and Matt's grandfather, took over an abandoned half section, then bought another five good crops later, then turned to beeves, accumulated a thousand acres of scrub grass to graze them, and here Ed Lawson was reared and never entertained residing elsewhere. Indeed it was here he had finished his earthly turn, though his son remained not inclined to accept it. The hours that took his father and his brother and delivered Matt to an adult woman before his time—and, it appeared to his conscience, the former a punishment for the latter, and his brother and father and mother casual innocents of a wrathful god's broad blow—loomed over him like a six-month arctic night. Yet Matt found no fault in the country from which his tragedies sprung.

Like anything in nature, a child's notion of the ordinary depends upon the ground in which he was sown. Born in dirt crannies, trees split basalt cliffs and the heartwood and cambium and protective bark reach for sun and rain in all sorts of unnatural geometry, knowing nothing of vertical and horizontal.

Ed inherited the place entirely. His twin brother, Willy, offered no argument. Willy possessed less interest in raising crops than he did space flight, and Ed lived for it—not because he worshipped the work and not because he loved sacrifice. From a distance a farm appeared rote, a season to plant, another to cultivate, a third for harvest and the last for prayer. But inside that ordered hoop each
day differed so that every minute inside required attention, and it was this that made him a farmer.

•

C
ARDS ARRIVED AS WORD OF
their tragedy swelled throughout the county. Mrs. Lawson had contracted pneumonia in her grief. Entire days she inclined over a steaming water kettle. Matt boiled her clothes each night and warmed canned vegetables and applesauce for their meals. Days, he battled the weather to keep the cows and pigs in fodder.

Between Sundays, the church's women's group delivered groceries the congregation donated. The women never talked of Matt's brother—stowed in the barn as the ground was too frozen to shovel—or his father, still not recovered, and Matt's mother did not press them for news from the Lord on their fates.

When her fever broke, she asked Matt to harness the team and deliver her to church. The preacher perched them in the front pew. They were his accomplishment: a family whom in their grief he'd returned to the Lord. Yet, Matt's mother dismissed the words, not standing or sitting or singing with the congregation. The choir's voices swam to her like song snips from her school days, tuneful, but meaning nothing save the stir of memory, which was as reasonless as weather passing.

Matt's mother closed her eyes the entire service and Matt squashed his shut, too. His head thought nothing; he stared into blackness and listened to words that had torn loose from meaning and become only sounds a man made, no different from the barks or grunts from animals.

On the way out of the sanctuary, though, he would allow the light through the stained glass to warm him. He pinched his eyelids shut and stopped in the aisle, and, for a moment, the other
parishioners would look at him strangely, as if he might be taking the whole exercise more seriously than he ought.

Matt prayed every night. His mother followed and, when he shut his door, tarried outside and listened. The boy pushed prayer further than a person should, wrestling with God for his soul.

She missed Luke terribly. Secretly she feared parting with Matt might've left her less grieved. Matt was like a good skillet, dull and duty-bound. But it was Luke who stirred a person up. Having both had spoiled her. The church had offered up prayers for her perseverance and Ed and Luke's eternal salvation. But, she realized, no one had prayed for the living boy. The deaths made such a crater in their lives. She'd be filling it the rest of her years. He would, too, but he had a longer life coming.

Later, she entered his room. He slept soundly. Wind sawed at the window's frame, and he'd made a fist of himself under the blankets. Like a balled animal, he sought his own warmth. His pillow held only the top of his hair and one hand, which shuddered then stilled under her touch as if his skin recalled her mothering. She stroked his fingers and remembered it herself. She hadn't mothered the boy in a long while, she knew, longer than before the storm. That it was still in her to do it gave her some courage. She wanted to love him as much as the other, and she asked God for the power to do so. It was as generous a prayer as she could summon.

•

B
ETWEEN STORMS THOSE BITTER WEEKS
the neighbors did their best to find Ed Lawson, but with only frostbite to show for their labors, they returned to their own homes and chores. Matt, however, continued. His mother suggested he hunt the draws and canyons between the ranch and the school. Instead, Matt hitched the team to the sled and headed to Peach, the nearest town. Hope
without cause is the last great mystery; it is beyond nature's acceptance of what is and man's reason to predict what will be and memory of what was. In the religious it is simply faith the absence of explanation and the proof of God, and a great comfort. In those uninclined to churches and good books, however, such hopes still occur, certainties born from fear, desperate, stubborn, full-pitched battles against truth and time. In Matt's mind, too, such a force resided. His will battled horror with the one truth he still had some use for: his father had not been found and he believed, though he could not speak it to another or explain it to himself, that if he could pull that stitch his other troubles would unravel as well.