The Hour of Lead (36 page)

The bullet had exited his back. He heard something sounding like coins rattle. He untucked his shirt. Two bullets fell against the hard ground, one fresh metal, the other black and tired from forty years inside him.

He walked home. At the door, he yelled his name so the boy would put the gun away. Inside, they had all dressed. It seemed as strange as seeing them naked a few hours previous, and he recognized the strangeness came from being alive. Wendy was at the phone. He put his hand over the cradle and she gazed up at him.

“What happened?” she asked him finally.

He shrugged. “I got shot,” he said.

Wendy tore the shirt open and saw the wound. She blinked and touched her fingers to his belly where she had marked him. He dropped his hand to hers and inside placed the bullets, first the one that meant to end him, then the other.

Wendy pressed the bullets into her fist and opened her fingers and gazed at them. Angel found the gauze and alcohol in the medicine cabinet and cleaned the wounds. Matt sat with his shirt off, letting them doctor him. Angel cooked dinner later and they moved to the porch to eat, and remained a long while after in lawn chairs, enjoying the cool of the evening.

Soon, the children drifted off. Wendy went inside and returned with blankets to cover them. She stood over him for a long time with another. He took her hand when she offered it.

“I have to tell you something,” she whispered.

“Shhh,” he told her.

“No,” she said.

“It doesn't matter,” he told her.

She felt guilty at first, like she guessed a woman might who has taken a new lover, and then realized, that her new lover was her old lover and the good fortune in that discovery. She lay her head upon his chest listening to the sounds he made and following them to her own heart beating, alive, as it had been all along.

40

L
UCKY REACHED
C
OLFAX IN THE
dead of night. He left his car in a supermarket parking lot and hitched with a truck driver four miles up the highway toward Lacrosse, then walked a gravel road toward Garrett's country.

Garrett owned so much land no one had reason to travel the roads bisecting it aside from himself.

The sky was still grey with dawn and Garrett's pickup trundled slowly toward him, the way farmers ride their own country, gawking and enjoying what owning land means. Lucky stepped into the headlight's glow. Garrett braked his rig and stepped out.

“You look worse for the wear,” Garrett said.

“I am that.” Lucky took the gun from his pants. He had no idea why he had left it there rather than his holster.

“You use that on him?”

Lucky nodded.

“He's dead then?”

“Creased good. I didn't stay for the funeral.”

“I'm not paying until I am certain.”

“I guess you'll know soon,” Lucky told him. He raised the gun. Garrett lifted his hand, but the bullet folded him in half. Lucky kicked him into the ditch weeds, then dropped to one knee to look at him clearly.

“Get me to the doctor, damn you. I'm bleeding bad.”

Lucky walked to the truck and parked it on the roadside. He cut the lights. Alive still, Garrett attempted to drag himself through the cheat grass. Lucky walked with him until he collapsed. He listened to him fight for breaths.

“I'm dying,” Garrett said.

“You sound surprised,” Lucky told him.

The sun was on the rise. It blanketed the hills gold, the wheat was ripening, and a breeze moved it in ripples. He'd spent hours trapping rabbit or stalking pheasant through mornings like this, but he'd never thought of enjoying the light.

Garrett said no more. Lucky remained beside him until he'd quit breathing and his pulse had faded. He lugged the body back to the truck and put it in the passenger seat. Lucky drove the truck to an abandoned shed. He checked that it was empty and pulled the truck inside, latched the door. The harvest road was dry and overgrown. He kicked the loose dirt that held the tire marks, then walked himself toward town, ducking into the ditches whenever he heard a car's approach.

That evening, Lucky drove to the Rockford Rest Home. In the lobby, his mother was bunched into a wheelchair. The other patients babbled or cried or sat with stone faces aimed at the black-and-white television. She alone looked like she understood where she was.

Lucky pulled a stool to her and sat. He drew his badge from his pocket and placed it in her hand, where she examined it. He felt his debt but had no idea how to pay it. The bill was, he realized,
an owing you needed to accept to be a man in this world, one you had to leave outstanding. He took his mother's hand. She spoke his name, and he returned, “Mother.”

“There was a storm,” she said.

“Yes,” he replied.

“There was a storm,” she said again. “A terrible storm.”

Lucky bent to her. Her fingers touched his face and wound his coarse hair. She looked up, and in her face was all he knew of family, all he'd ever know, and, though it wasn't near enough, he would deny her no longer.

EPILOGUE

Because I could not stop for Death—

—
EMILY DICKINSON

from poem 712

F
OR TWELVE YEARS, CLOCKS AND
calendar pages turned without consequence. It wasn't a long span in history, Matt knew, but it was more than he'd permitted himself to hope for. He gave Angel away to a farmer boy after a stint at a junior college, and watched Luke acquit himself well in both his studies and summer work. The boy graduated from Washington State University four years later and took a structural engineering position at the dam. Matt served as best man when he wed, and they took lunches in the riggers' loft when Luke's schedule allowed.

Angel delivered their first grandchild, a girl. She bore a remarkable resemblance to Wendy and this set Matt and Wendy to chuckling so that Angel gave them odd looks. Not long following, Luke's wife, Ann, bore him twin boys. He named them Matthew and Lucas, and this concerned Matt, tempting the fates.

Matt retired in mid-June of his sixty-seventh year. He recalled standing in front of the shop, looking over the Bureau of Reclamation complex. Someone named Slats passed on a forklift and another called Otto, who fished all summer and turned back everything he caught, was whistling while he waited for the new powerhouse shuttle where he operated a boom crane. It was no different than any day that had passed; he simply didn't need the routine any longer.

Fall of the following year he and Wendy culled the husks and stray leaves from a spot Wendy intended for more roses. Wind gusted from the north and geese sliced ahead of it through the sky. He had decided to retrieve his jacket, when Wendy stumbled to one knee. Before he reached her, she collapsed. Her mouth hung open and gasped for breath. He said her name. Her eyes went wide.

He ran for the car, carrying her and through her sweatshirt felt the leap of her heart wrestling loose from her. Driving to the hospital, he spoke her name, recalling reading that the dying lost their ears last.

The funeral was three days later. The casket was draped with roses. Angel and Luke and their families maintained a vigil next to him throughout the service. Matt had bought a suit for the occasion. Angel had put Wendy in a summer dress, as that was her favorite season. The family followed him home for a potluck the neighbors prepared, but he shooed kith and kin away once all had eaten.

But the next morning, some of the cars returned. The glass door slid and his grandchildren raced over the yellowing grass toward the house. They knew little of grief and he held out his arms and smiled, hoping to hold that education off a while longer. It was Sunday; he heard a church bell peel. Inside, Angel found the pans and scrambled eggs and bacon while Luke's wife turned flapjacks. They waved, but Matt was rolling on the grass with the grandbabies. It was bright and cool, the same as it was on the Sunday next,
when they returned and again shared breakfast, as they did the Sunday after that and the one after that, as well.

•

E
IGHTEEN MONTHS LATER, THE LOCAL
doctor sent him to Brewster for x-rays and the pictures returned with a smear on his left lung that indicated cancer. The surgeons removed two lobes and stitched him up then took more pictures and returned to their scalpels and tore into the second lung. Finally the old general practitioner visited.

“I'm carved as Christmas goose,” Matt said and lifted his shirt to reveal the sutures. “I'm out of lungs, doc, but not out of cancer. That's what you're here to tell me.”

The doctor nodded.

“Well, if there's nothing more, I guess I'll head home.”

“You had two of the worse surgeries there are one on top of the other,” the doctor told him.

“There's infections, bones mending.”

“I'm going to be back here sooner than I'd like and the next visit will be the last of it. I aim to put as much time between this one and that one as possible.” Matt eased his legs onto the floor and used his arms to prop himself until he stood. “If I don't make it they can put me back. If I do, I'll sleep in my own bed.”

He called his children on the telephone and asked them to visit without children or spouses so he could deliver the news. Neither tried to talk him into returning to the hospital. Both cried. He told them not to and then to go ahead. He said he wasn't worried and found that strangely true, and when they left he slept a deep sleep with bountiful dreams of childhood and his wife and vast country.

He asked the children one favor. In November while the weather remained mild, Luke and Angel took him into the Palouse country.
The old house was still occupied. A new shop held a red International combine and a pair of diesel trucks. The man who answered looked in some ways like his father. His name was Ellis Garrett.

“Do you know that lone oak by the creek?” Matt pointed north where he remembered it being.

“That the one with the carvings in it?”

“Do you think it would be all right to go out there?” Matt asked.

The man nodded. “It's a half-mile farther then west on a harvest road. Mind the chuckholes.”

Luke opened a barbed wire gate and Angel drove through it to the tree. It was larger, though parts of it had shriveled and died and it needed to be pruned. Matt saw no sign of disease, however, and the fallen leaves still gathered against the trunk appeared healthy enough.

Matt circled it and stroked the cold bark. The names were still there, though barely legible—just white scars. Angel discovered her own and gazed at it. Matt unsheathed his buck knife. He found each name and hacked the letters deep into the old bark. After he'd finished retracing what was there, he cut Wendy's name and Luke's and the grandbabies'. His arm ached from the labor and his chest burned, but he continued until the whole of his family and Jarms's was there to be read.

•

M
ATT'S FUNERAL WAS FIVE MONTHS
later. Angel recalled him lying in the hospital bed, smelling like fruit gone bad. He asked to visit the grandchildren alone. He whispered to each, but when Angel and Luke inquired later, the children allowed only it was a secret. He'd grown weak with cancer and needed to be tipped to sip water, but he latched on to Angel and Luke like he had when he lifted them whole in his hands as children. They stayed with
him until he'd drifted off, then quietly both kissed him and left the room. He died that night alone. It grieved Luke horribly, but Angel recognized it as his intent.

The chapel service was short. Angel and Luke watched the pall-bearers unload the casket and listened as the winch motored it into the grave. Angel kissed Luke's hand in her own. After, she gathered her children to her, and bent her head back into her husband's warm stomach. She closed her eyes and listened to the minister recite his lines. The mourners stirred and rose to leave, but she remained a little longer then finally stood and joined her family in the procession to the parking lot.

A man in a black suit, heavy and stooped with age, passed her the other direction. She recognized him, a demon from a bad dream long ago. The man dropped something gold and flat and metal onto the casket and then began to wail.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M
ANY THANKS TO
J
ANET
R
OSEN
, Sheree Bykofsky, Julia Drake, Judy Klein, and Dan Smetanka for their generosity and care for my work. Thanks to friends and family for their patience and wisdom, especially Holly Holbert, Jackson Holbert, Luke Holbert, Natalie Holbert, Jody Mills, Max Phillips, Elizabeth McCracken, John Whalen, Charlie McIntyre, Chris Offutt, Bob Ganahl, Jim and Lisa Van Nostrand, Rick and Kim Simon, Dave Koehler and Desi Koehler—whose grandmother midwifed my father into the world and it seems like we've been joined at the hip since—Pat Holbert, Barbara Holbert, Bonnie Hogue, Margaret Moore, and especially Vince Moore, a one-time resident of Peach with a wealth of knowledge about the country now under the reservoir. Also, thanks to Mt. Spokane High School for its generous flexibility and support, especially Jim Preston, Darren Nelson, and John Hook. Finally, thanks to
The Iowa Review
, which published the first chapter of this novel as a short story many years ago.