The Hour of Lead (5 page)

At the Cloud mill, the saws screamed over planks of raw timber until the operator switched off the planer and overhead blade. The man promised to inquire about Matt's father.

“Others tell about you,” the man said.

It was a compliment, Wendy explained as they left him and climbed the grade from the river. The wagon passed small tin hovels and others constructed with unfinished logs, a few not much beyond lean-tos, one an army tent converted into a tipi that belched grey tamarack smoke. Cattle and a few sheep and goats dotted the bald hills and scoured the bare places for fodder.

At the ridgetop, they circled a butte and came upon a small shack, smoke climbing out its tin chimney. A gangly German Shepherd pup staked to a chain circled a dirt yard. The dog cried and woofed and dug in a trench that marked his limits until a man who appeared not much older than Matt emerged through a curtained opening and began whipping it with an axe handle. At first the dog bared his teeth and growled, but following the first blows all it could manage was to cower and roll in submission and whine. Wendy cried. Three hours later, as the sun descended toward the coulee's eastern breaks, their return route passed once more the dog at his stake. Matt halted the horses and jumped from the wagon. From
under his seat, he retrieved his rifle then set out toward the dog, who eyed him until Matt took the opposite arc of his circular path, and eased to the stake where he unlooped the chain from the rod keeping it.

Matt returned to the wagon. The dog studied him without reaction. Matt clucked and the horses made for the ferry. They heard the jangling chain before they saw the dog loping the road behind them. It halted before the wagon gate. Wendy threw a bread piece into the bed. The dog sniffed the air but didn't move. She tossed another over the endgate and the dog devoured it. The dog whined in confusion. Matt lobbed some jerky and the dog could not help himself. He leaped into the wagon and ate all they could feed him. By the time he'd finished their scraps, the wagon rode the ferry, mid-river. The dog looked at the water on both sides, and recognized jumping made no sense and simply lay against the wagon floor watching Matt and Wendy.

When the ferry landed, the dog leaped onto the firm earth and jogged from sight. He appeared several miles later, halfway to Lincoln. The dog loped next to them and Matt halted the wagon. When he descended the dog growled and cowered, though he allowed Wendy to unlatch his chain so that if he bolted once more, he could at least avoid snagging himself on the sagebrush and rocks that pocked the hills.

After the dog took the last bite of the jerky, it jumped from the wagon, though it paced with them into Peach, where Matt stopped at the Worden house to return Wendy. The dog looked at her and whined. “Go on,” Matt told him, but the dog instead labored into the wagon. It tipped its head and met Matt's eyes a moment, and Matt saw the animal's bewilderment, a sort of permanent vigilance, a vast fear prodding the sentry in his head to maintain its watch, but also a glimpse of doglike faith, too, a trust that comfort exists despite knowing the contrary. Wendy turned and disappeared into
the lemony light of her parents' house. Matt stirred the horses, and they moved toward home. After a time, the dog joined him on the bench seat, curled into a ball, his head opposite Matt's thigh for a quick escape if it came to that. Matt covered him with the wool blanket.

4

M
ATT'S DAYS DIFFERED FROM WHAT
they once were. Two months of a man's ranch duties had added twenty pounds of ropy muscle to his frame. He'd shot up four inches. He felt no anger for his burden, and once the dog joined him, he rarely was lonely.

That first night, Matt watched the dog make water then permitted him into the house and fed him scraps from the dinner his mother had prepared. At first, the animal cowered in a corner. Finally, Matt carried the dish into his bedroom and coaxed the dog inside. The dog curled at his bed end but avoided the plate, though morning, the food was gone and a careful circle of feces reeked at the edge of a throw rug. The dog watched Matt from the bed as he scraped the scat into the empty pan, then scrubbed the woven carpet to erase the stain. Finished, he looked at the dog, “Come on, then. Chores.”

The dog uncoiled itself and tracked Matt all day as he foddered the animals and harrowed what earth had thawed enough to break. Like most ranchers, the Lawsons maintained a barnload of cats to
kill rats, and when Matt slid the door loose the cats flew into the light, saw the dog and scattered. The dog stood taller and his ears tipped forward, but he remained still.

“Good,” Matt said. He treated the dog to half his sandwich.

From that day forward, the dog repeated Matt's steps and maintained a polite vigilance. Nights, he didn't appear to sleep past a doze. He rested, silent, eyes aglow, reflecting the moonlight that trickled through the window glass. Even when Matt rose in the wee hours for the peehouse the dog was to the bedroom door before Matt's feet hit the floor.

The ranch duties Matt favored most required strength and little forethought. Throughout December and January, he leveled a birch copse for wood and another half acre to plant. When each tree creaked or rocked, he dealt it one more blow and hurried clear. The fallen birch showered him with bark and limbs. He sawed the trunk and central leader into rounds and after sheered and split and quartered them and the biggest of the branches into arm-length posts. Their sawdust oranged the brisk sunlight.

Matt tolerated the farm's half-dozen cows only on his mother's bent for cream and butter. They didn't care to be milked and employed blunt and common tricks on his sleep-dulled mind. He'd look at the milk trickling across the straw and flex his toes stunned with pain and wonder at the thick mind that gives way to such blockheaded creatures.

The first of the year, a heifer so angered him, he hacked her hamstring into mop-shreds with a blow from the maul. The animal bawled all day and night, and the next morning he shot and butchered it, though he had only a vague notion how to cut steaks from roasts so ground most into hamburger. Covered in blood, he offered the scraps to the dog. The dog accepted them nervously and hauled the bones into a dark portion under the loft, then to the brush beyond a hill knob.

Matt's brother's form darkened the barn rafters above the hayloft, and each instance he gathered tools and fed the stock, his brother's blanketed shape hung over him, though his labors and weekly searches had seemed to lessen the heft of his brother's and father's absence. Of course that was not so. The loss appeared smaller, but so does a freight train in the distance, though up close its wheels will slice an automobile in half like a blade cuts warm butter.

Matt attended school only in spotty fashion. On one of the days he arrived late, he walked into the room during a recess as Mrs. Jefferson sat at her desk alone next to her stacked papers. She glanced up at him and began to cry and so did he, and Mrs. Jefferson lifted her forefinger and touched his face where it was damp with tears for a moment, then retrieved her hand and put her wet fingers to her own cheek. Otherwise, she seemed to neither note nor miss him; his being at all stumped her.

As for the children, once a schoolmate mocked him until Wendy gloved her hand and rubbed a fresh horse turd into his face, after, the others circled wide and let him alone. They seemed to be following some code to adulthood that he himself only had rumor of. Though he recognized the rituals required to participate and responded as fittingly as he could he did so with a wooden self-consciousness that kept him in fear of being found out. The one thing he possessed that equaled their knowledge was muscles stout as cottonwood root and a capacity for work that appeared bottomless.

One evening, the dog curled himself into a comma at Matt's feet. Matt scratched its ears and it sighed in a manner unfamiliar and melted into the wood floor, asleep, finally willing to trust the world a few hours. Matt wondered if he, himself, ever slept with such certainty. He envied the dog and patted his head half hoping to wake him, but instead the dog's chin sunk between his paws farther and he breathed deep, regular breaths that seemed to Matt how a creature ought to breathe if things were right with it. It did
not shift its weight with Matt's mother's footfalls when she retired or his own as he made his way to his bedroom, but Matt left the door ajar and some time after passing into sleep himself, the dog climbed next to him and traced his shape, and, when Matt woke, it stirred only a little and stared into Matt's face, its tongue lolling over its jagged teeth.

The first week in February, his mother decided she could bear Luke's body in the rafters no longer. Matt stoked the barn furnace to white hot, then forged two spade faces into a single horse-faced blade. An inch under its skin, the earth turned bone, but Matt's newly thick arms separated it like time itself.

Matt climbed the ladder into the barn rafter and found the ends of the wires holding the blankets over his brother. He unwound each and lifted his brother. Years before when their parents left them alone, his mother ordered Luke to tend Matt and Matt to mind him. Matt was sixteen minutes older, but Luke read first in school and wrote in neat, tiny letters Mrs. Jefferson admired. When they fought, Luke wrestled him in new, unexpected ways, and Matt would have to give uncle. He had worried he'd misplaced something vital when they were babies and Luke had found it and learned whatever there was to learn before him. Now, Matt understood he'd lost a fine rival, and, over time, he determined that that was worse than losing a good friend. His chest rippled and his biceps and forearms bore Luke's weight easily and Matt couldn't help but believe half his size undeserved.

He set Luke into the simple coffin his mother had asked the mill to cut. The box was too large. He thought a moment, then stood him on a hay bale inside it. The team was already harnessed. They gazed at his labors lazily. In the shed, Matt cut a rope in equal lengths and wound them around each end of the coffin and tied them off. He made a loop of the opposite rope ends around the horse's neck and dragged Luke and the casket to the open pit. Two planks lay
crosswise over the grave. He slid the casket across them. The planks whined and bent with the weight. He could smell nothing leave the dusty straw. He opened the lid. His brother's face startled him.

When the horses shifted and the boards under the casket creaked, Matt knew he'd tarried too long. He threw himself over the casket and gripped its edges. The board holding Luke's feet popped. The rope jerked, held, then gave, as the surprised horses were yanked backward. The coffin's foot slammed the graveside and clattered to the bottom. The end keeping Luke's head slid from its plank to the top edge, putting the coffin upright. Above, the horses whinnied. Matt cursed himself. He looked at his brother. He could imagine his laughter. His memory rang with it, until Matt wondered if maybe dying was just another way for Luke to pull one over on him.

He climbed the graveside and tried to scrape the mud from his pants. The horses were out of whack. He coaxed the team until both ropes were tight and the casket level against the hole's edge and backed them toward the grave.

When his brother was again lying flat, Matt dropped himself to him. Above, the stars had commenced their shining, and though he couldn't hunt up any of the constellations his father had taught them, he tipped Luke's head so his eyes could get a look. The weight of Luke was, he knew, the weight of a child and the thought left Matt happy for his brother. His own new sinew and raw bone had all but swallowed him. He kissed Luke's open mouth. His lips felt like cold wood rubbed smooth. They tasted of nothing, though the smell reminded Matt of butchered beef. He pushed himself backward and blew a cloud of breath into his brother's face and watched it break up, then closed the casket and nailed it shut.

He went inside and warmed himself. His mother sat crying silently, sorting through her bible for a passage she thought suitable. She could find none and rose with Matt when he opened the door, bracing herself against the cold with a shawl and a heavy
sweater and Ed's duster. She stood at the opened grave, the dirt mounds rich and black and fertile; a gas lantern dangled from one hand and rocked with the breeze and the trembling of her arm and cast shadows and yellow glare across the scene.

“Ashes to ashes,” she read and Matt missed the rest, studying instead the casket's construction and regretting the hickeys he'd left in one corner with an errant blow.

•

T
HE DOG SOUGHT HIS APPROVAL
, and for a kind word and a pat between the ears he would herd the dairy cows into stalls and nip their hind quarters if they stirred while Matt relieved them of their milk. The dog attempted to organize the cats, as well, though they paid little attention, and upon discovering his benign nature, rubbed their backs under his belly and chest and purred, and when he bent his head, they met his nose as equals.

The dog rode the wagon and learned to speak when Wendy coaxed him with a cookie. Occasionally, he leapt from the bed to pursue a badger or rabbit but always returned a few minutes later to perch on the seat between them.

His mother ignored the animal, as she did Matt. Her day's chores kept her inside and his labors out of doors. He rose before her and breakfasted on bread and butter and filled a lunch can with meat and more bread, then, outside, levered the pump until his water jug filled. Evenings in the house, each arranged their paths to avoid one another. They occupied opposite ends of the dinner table and in the parlor ignited separate reading lamps and hung them from hoops situated to leave them in separate, buttery universes.