The Hour of Lead (7 page)

When Matt and Wendy skylined at Reservation Ridge, they saw the fort grounds boiled with believers, would-be and genuine, gawkers, and anyone a long time between beef in a meal. The chatter turned din with talk and hymns and shouts of hosannas or hallelujahs.

Fennimore Jenkins, like his namesake, lived in a narrative dream. In the county's two taverns he drank nightly, whiskey not beer, and after imbibing mounted hundred-foot trees and lit them afire from the top, then watched the flame follow the sap to the taproot. Once, at a Keller inn, his meal had angered him so that he axed the beams, and the place's porch slid into the river along with diners and drinkers and chicken dinners. He cited scripture against fornication and railed of a modern Sodom but also surrendered his honor to women who sought comfort for loss or shortcomings or their own sinful nature.

But he preached like a house on fire, and being a sinner just seemed to add to his credibility. His shock of wild black hair left him looking like he was constantly surrounded by his own stormy weather. With his oblong, cleft chin, he reminded onlookers of a better-crafted Lincoln. His lips and nose didn't protrude so dramatically, his brow didn't hood his forehead with brooding. His appearance wasn't as contemplative as the Great Emancipator; he looked instead heroic, and his voice boomed, yet rarely lacked clarity, and, when before a crowd, it dropped and rose with emotion like a church organ.

Matt and Wendy had met him on the road a month before, when the snow had yet to clear the lee side of the draws. He was limited to two wagons then—he'd added two as his reputation gathered—and they seemed a humble group as they lumbered toward their Gifford Ferry appointment between heathens and the Lord.

A quarter mile away, two riders broke the horizon. One stopped and lit his cigarette—the orange flash painted his face, then the cherried ash. The man offered it to his companion and struck another for himself. He wore a bowler and the other was hatless, the last of the sun blackening his unkempt wiry hair. They surveyed the scene below several minutes before directing their horses to Matt and Wendy's wagon. As they closed, Matt recognized Harlan Miller, the mechanic, and an Indian who was a ferry hand.

On the ridges above the gathering it remained quiet enough to hear the thaw trickle from the high ground and lee hillsides as gravity tugged the groundwater toward the big river through the draws and cuts and seasonal streambeds. The soft, vernal months the ground plowed like warm butter, and automobiles' rubber tires and wagons' iron-rimmed wheels cut the roads axle-deep until the county or frustrated farmers filled them with highway department sand. It was weather that, July, the country rarely received, though March and April, they saw little else.

Matt studied the preparations: the fires smoked, voices hollered commands, others laughed; some hummed gospel songs; a few told stories between swings of a sledge or the rhythm of pulling on the ropes, like slaves in Egypt lifting obelisks before Moses cut them loose. The believers labored like insects constructing a hive. Some cut and trimmed timber, another group split long pine rounds into seats. Others hammered stakes to anchor the canvas tent and more propped poles to support the folded oval from which the fire's exhaust could escape while its warmth comforted the faithful. Outside, a whole beef turned on another fire, this one straddled by a
crudely welded spit; on the other side of the flat a pig was in the same predicament. Wagons and chugging cars arrived regularly, and nervous horses danced at the occasional backfire from a worn exhaust. A brother believer waved a lantern in one hand and circled the other this way and that to direct each to parking areas. Others anchored horses to a long rope snubbed to two trees; another still manned three water troughs to support failed radiators. It was a synchronized, unnatural order: lurching starts and halts. Matt had witnessed deer in a field harassed by barnstormers: they employed no method, but were not without order, in fact the opposite. They behaved as a single body, each animal responding to those with him not like soldiers marching but like organs pumping blood and oxygen and the rest of it to and from the necessary muscles. They turned as one, leapt as one, doubled back as one, and even scattered into the rocks as an organism that comes apart, in order to return to its whole when peril passes.

“Quite a circus,” Miller said.

Matt nodded.

“That beef down there has nearly drove me to worship, though.”

The Indian ferry hand nodded.

Wendy offered them the last of her sandwiches. Miller offered his thanks, as did the Indian. The men ate in silence. Wendy and Matt swapped a canteen, having lunched late enough in the day to sate their hunger.

“You children can keep close,” Miller said, “Never know when a man can use a hand. And I meant children only in terms of years. I've grown to like you two. Don't ever purchase an automobile, though.” Miller nodded at the opposite bluff a quarter mile off. “That's a wild card I'd like to see played.”

Across the wide maw that opened to the river, Alfred of Coffee Pot Lake stared into the melee, aboard a horse, which contradicted a sworn oath to the dogs never to employ an animal for labor.
Another rider paralleled him fifty feet away and between were at least thirty dogs, Alfred's entire congregation. Matt could see Alfred had constructed collars for each and tethered them to a rope. He imagined the cats were serving reconnaissance. The air had cooled and stringy clouds rose from the dogs' mouths, together gathering into a fog that made them look like demons in a moor. Some barked and others howled; still more nipped one another in their anxiety. The cooking meat stirred their stomachs and they leaped to break the ridgeline, stout horses and good hemp rope knotted on a pair of saddle horns all that held them.

Some below glanced at the animals but dismissed them. Animals were drawn to a meal that didn't require the effort of killing. They would all be scavengers if circumstances permitted. People differed little, Matt realized: most would eat a beef steak or chicken leg, skinned and plucked and cut and papered and piled into their freezers or root cellars rather than kill and butcher for themselves. For a man civility seemed the ladder out of the melee; otherwise, like his animal brethren, a man only survives. Straight up killers seemed more moral, though. They turned lives into food knowing the flesh their teeth ground and their tongues savored and their gullets swallowed breathed an hour or a day or a minute before. They recognized their own existence was constructed upon slaughter, and the debt they owed their victims could never be repaid, simply owed. It seemed to Matt, though the meals arrived on porcelain and cooked, the scene below was no less savage.

Those below seemed somehow humiliated, as if their hallelujahs and amens and heartfelt confessions and impromptu baptisms evoked ancient fears and uncertainties akin to the Neanderthals, who spent centuries drawing the stars into something other than scattered light though more constant than winds and rain and the shuffle of tectonic plates.

They could not address their fears with a plow or a strap or loyalty or deceit, and the knowledge bent their knees, rattled them into prayer. The dogs pawed the earth. Their minister, Alfred, and his companion continued to restrain them. Animals knew no guilt, no death, only avoided it to dodge the pain each might predict with the few wits they could direct past here and now. They didn't ponder the impractical like what happens to smoke when it quits being smoke.

Below, a whistle sounded and the crowd, spread like water on a flat rock before, headed for the canvas tent. A few women remained to tend the spits and coals and stirred pots of baked beans and boiled potatoes and onions. On the stones wrapped in towels were baked rolls and loaves that required only to be warmed. The women labored with a resolve Matt envied. Such certainty rarely had visited him. Service, Matt had heard repeatedly from the pulpit, was a human being's highest calling, though it seemed to Matt one ought to at least consider for whom he worked. And this Jenkins appeared to be an unusual kind of master. He paced outside the tent, his hands holding a black bible behind his back, clothed in a black shirt, black pants, a black long duster, and a grey newsboy cap, nervous in a way his reputation did not portend, yet his steps were measured and equal. Matt imagined the rhythm like a clock ticking.

The choir, robed and collected from those that followed the revival along with any newcomers who thought they could hold a note, assembled on makeshift risers constructed from 2 x 8s and cedar rounds staggered in height. A woman leading them tooted a pitch pipe, and each voice arced or dipped to match, while a boy tinkled scales on a pneumatic accordion.

In tune, they began, “Be Thou my Vision,” a lyric Matt enjoyed, as it encouraged listeners to act some way after hearing it. The next hymn, which he did not recognize, seemed the opposite,
inert, contemplative. The choir leader's arms dropped. The audience beneath them lived under good roofs and between stout walls along with husbands, wives, and children. They owned ranches and cattle or worked permanent jobs, yet they remained lonesome. Matt hunted the crowd for his mother. She was a dutiful churchgoer, but he did not see her. Perhaps she waited in the kitchen for him to return and wagon her to salvation.

The accordion wheezed and went silent. No introduction ensued. The minister hiked slowly up the steps and to the pulpit in the same rhythm he awaited his cue.

Neither Matt nor Wendy nor the two joining them on the bluff heard words, but they recognized the audience quiet their hands and their papers and the bibles they held and curtail their whispers and scold those who did not. Finally, the quiet baritone voice become audible beyond the tent.

The minister read, then paused.

“I don't recall that verse,” Matt said.

“It's a poem,” Wendy told him. “Emily Dickinson. Mrs. Jefferson taught it.”

“Must have missed that class, hey little brother?” The Indian said.

“I missed a lot of school.”

“Sometimes even when he was in attendance,” Wendy added.

The minister stated that a poem, a beautiful poem such as this, was true as scripture. Such poems have a nebulous and ever-smoldering center, weighty enough to bend time and space and compel planets to mind their proper ellipses; a poem steers every line, every word, every syllable into circles held by the gravity of an idea beyond the speakable as is God. People circle the Lord's presence; his power is in the circle we turn. Our lives are evidence by the sense in them, the repetition in them, birth, death, seed and earth and sprout, then harvest and tilling and the undoing of the stalks and their return to feed in the season that follows.

He paused. “Aside from a sidewise glance or a reflection in a window, you can't look at the sun. It will burn your eyes out. So you look at shadows and blue sky and faces, and that's the evidence it is day and the sun you can't look at exists. And when night falls and you can't see these things without a lantern or electric light that, too, is evidence of the sun. Its absence proves its presence.”

“The man has a silver tongue,” Miller said.

“White isn't black,” The Indian replied. “That's not Jesus talking. Sounds more like Coyote.”

“Maybe they're kin,” Miller said.

The preacher broke for a silent prayer, and each head within the tent bent while the woman outside continued spinning an animal at the spit or stirring salads or toasting muffins upon the rocks encircling the cooking fires. One dipped a paintbrush extended with rake handles into honey-filled buckets and striped the baking pig with it. The choir commenced “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which started as dirge, built to a march and finally turned a cry for war that left the accordion player's white shirt clinging to his sweaty skin, a kind of pink mottle as they finished.

It was a startling reversal from the pensive to the fervent, and when Matt turned to Wendy, she appeared shaken to witness it. He took her hand without thought, and she his. She stared at them, joined that way, as did he, and it was as if they had joined every other way, as well. Past sex and ardor and lust, all of which they were vaguely conscious, past anything they could imagine and only equal to the simplicity and innocence adults could recall in their most wistful moments of awkward, sincere feeling.

Matt gazed at those beneath, tucked in the tent, hushed, awaiting their marching orders or outside daubing the braised meat with condiment. Like drunks entering a tavern or soldiers going to war, they had enlisted individuals but turned gears in a larger contraption and now could not be separated unless to undo the whole
machine. They smoked cigarettes and nodded their head, songs and philosophy fixing one to the other a sloppy, messy paste, but adhere they did to the sway of the hymns and the minister's voice as, refreshed by water and a biscuit, he lifted his god's standard and continued.

Wendy squeezed Matt's hand. He wondered if she was seeing what he was and thinking his thoughts. He had never been alone; even the womb he had shared with a brother; they bobbed and breathed the same fluid and tapped the placenta's feed tube in unison, hollered their first cries together, shat their first diapers. Their fights often seemed to him to emanate from a particular kind of vehemence, one rooted to separation. In anger, they returned to a single furious entity at least until the blows commenced, when each felt his own pain separately.

Wendy squeezed his hand again, and he looked up at her face. She was smiling with a devilment that eventually interested him. She nodded to the opposite ridge, now nearly a blank against the sky. The dogs' racket had increased. One or the other rider had loosed the rope, and the dogs instead of a line turned a crescent, then a half moon, then a broken charge as one rope end was freed. The animals hurtled toward the spits like a prairie fire with a tailwind and leaped upon the beef and hog, ignoring the women batting at their haunches and shoulders. The cooks' screams along with the spits collapsing into the fires distracted the congregation from its preacher. The dogs darted to and from the flames and yipped and howled and scrapped for their treasures, their paws and undersides singed.