The Hour of Lead (8 page)

The Indian and Harlan Miller galloped their horses for the melee. Wendy laughed and Matt snapped the reins and steered the horses and wagon onto a game trail with an angle shallow enough to keep them upright. The horses shuffled the slush for footing and the wagon flung Matt and Wendy hither and yon. The prophet Alfred
hurtled through the assembly's aisle toward the minister, Miller right behind. The Indian cut a pork shank slice with his hunting knife. He ate and laughed. Alfred's horse drove through the risers and collapsed the podium stand and herded the preacher, Jenkins, through the back tent flaps up the hill behind and into the darkness. Meanwhile, the stunned congregation stared at its meal, half scorched against the coals, the other half torn to ribs and vertebrae by the dog pack, which had organized enough to drag the carcasses from the fire.

A few men tore tent poles from their moorings and swung them at the dogs, which proved too lithe to be dissuaded by such tactics. Others laughed, and soon most of the gathering had joined them. The whole group appeared to be enjoying the scene until they parted and the returned preacher burst between, shotgun in hand. His first blast tore beef from bone and sent half a dozen dogs backward stunned with buckshot. He reloaded and raised the gun for a second go, this time directing it at the hog and, Matt realized, his own dog. He leapt from the wagon and barreled between the dog and the pig and the gun. The dog ended up underneath the pig shank, eyes oddly untroubled. Matt lay atop them both. The buck-shot's sting peppered his shoulder and drove a howl from him. He rose. The preacher reloaded the breach, but Matt delivered him a blow to the head that separated gun and man and man and jaw and kicked three ribs into his lungs. The man gasped and hacked blood that blacked his teeth. He tried to spit and Matt dragged him by the ankles through the fire. His skin spat on the coals, not unlike the cooking pig and cow before. He screamed and attempted to twist free, but Matt whacked his kneecap with a quartered round and lifted him into the trough. When the preacher rose gasping, Matt held his head under with both hands until he felt a blow against his wounded shoulder. Wendy was hammering him with an axe handle. She shouted his name over and over.

“Stop,” she said. “You're torturing him.”

Matt shrugged.

“The dog is fine,” Wendy told him.

Matt glanced at the dog, who stared back, then licked the hog shank.

“Okay,” he said. He retrieved the preacher from the water. The man sucked at the air and moaned. The other combatants gazed at Matt. After a long while, some turned and made for their wagons and automobiles; soon the rest followed. The dogs began again on the meat. Matt's dog joined the feast, tussling for all he could gather.

Matt drove the wagon on the main road following the tire-worn grooves, as the evening temperature had not yet reached freezing. Miller and the Indian nodded, but Alfred refused to look his way. Wendy mopped Matt's cheek with a handkerchief. When she drew it away the thin material was peppered with blood. She began on his jacket sleeve, but it smeared like oil and justed clotted the wool.

Matt shivered in his damp shirt. Wendy withdrew and huddled in a blanket at her end of the wagon seat. He wanted to say he had not heard; it wasn't that he wouldn't listen to her. He was not certain that was true; however, he only knew he had not enjoyed beating the preacher, unlike some who fought for pleasure or to win. The event had humiliated him worse than losing could have. He said none of this, of course, and drove the horses in silence until, finally, Wendy spoke, suggesting he hunt the open country for his father's body, the same place his mother urged, but he only shook his head and clucked the horses.

“Don't you want to put an end to it?” she asked.

“Sounds as though you do,” Matt replied.

He didn't speak to her the rest of the trip, and she knew, bringing it up, she'd betrayed him, though she didn't know to what extent.
He dropped her at her door, and after she collected her things, she leaned toward him and set her cheek next to his own. Matt felt her tears warm his cold face but did not respond.

The next day, the dog reappeared and followed Matt from the house to the wagon. In his mouth was a human hand. The dog dropped his prize between his forefeet and ran northeast. Matt unharnessed the plow horse and followed the general direction to the east property line. He discovered his father two miles away minus skin and a hand and eyes and nose, yeasty in the thaw, decomposed beyond stink. Matt roped the corpse and dragged it to the house. He wheeled the body in a hay cart to the knoll where the grass stubble had already begun to grow over his brother. There, he started the second grave of spring. The ground split for his spade and he managed six feet deep and long in forty-five minutes.

His mother again brought out her bible and this time read from a line or two from Luke. Which of you fathers if your son asks for bread would give him a stone? How much more will your heavenly father offer those children who ask?

Wendy arrived the Sunday next, dressed in a long calico skirt and a sweater against the still chilly morning. Matt wore his work clothes, split at the knees and elbows, where he had grown most; a bandage patched his shoulder. She stood on the first porch step and he in the doorway. His eyes blinked at the rosy early morning.

“My father's dead,” he told her.

“I reckoned that when you didn't come to the house,” she said.

“He was right where you said, goddammit.”

“I didn't put him there,” she told him.

“I didn't either,” Matt said. “But there he was.”

She looked at her shoes.

“So I guess you're shed of me,” Matt said.

She looked up.

“No need to look for someone planted in the backyard.”

The dog stood next to her and she patted its head.

“It's what you wanted wasn't it?” Matt asked. “To put an end to it. Well, it's done, isn't it?”

He stepped past her toward the barn and the dog followed. He sharpened the cultivator tongs and patched a hackamore until he was certain she had gone.

7

C
HURCH GIRLS GENERALLY LOOKED AFTER
the widows, so, later that spring, Wendy assisted Mrs. Lawson in opening the house. Matt made himself scarce. She visited into summer, as well, but cultivating occupied Matt from dawn to nightfall and he saw her only on their dirt road, arriving or departing. His mother, though, sorted closets for fabric enough to construct a quilt for her. She insisted Matt line it and he succeeded in trapping enough coyotes to make a thick padding. His mother presented it to Wendy in a dress box. She unfolded the tissue as carefully as inspecting a wound, and sat, wordless for a long time, stroking the tanned hides. When she turned it over to examine the stitching, she could see it was constructed from Matt's brother's shirts and trouser legs, along with a few things of his father's.

Wendy didn't remain long that day, just enough to thank Mrs. Lawson for the gift before she mounted the grocery wagon for the ride back to Peach. Two weeks after, Matt, leveling a frost slide above the barn, drew rein on the plower. He'd almost convinced
himself it was only a funny wind that stopped him, until he looked toward the graves. Planted where he imagined the heads would be were two rose bushes in bloom, fertilized with steer leavings. Roses didn't take easy in this country, and over the season he would glimpse Wendy pruning them off and on, or nursing them with water buckets until midsummer, when they were a thicket of color. Both were red, the color of blood, he knew, but the color of love, too, Mrs. Jefferson had declared in her poetry talks.

•

H
E SAW IN PASSING
A
LFRED
, too, who recognized the new grave and paused with his animals to offer prayers. Miller, he met briefly on the town road, navigating a clanking Ford toward his shop, the Indian in the passenger seat beside. Each waved in the ocher dust the machine raised. Two weeks later, he encountered the men again, this time on horseback, and he assumed better humored. Matt had thought talk of him might have halted after word traveled that his mission was finished and a failure; however, the citizens in Peach and Plum and other nearby towns had not forgotten him. According to Miller, he remained news, though the balded preacher, who spoke only when necessary in light of his waylaid jaw, was now the subject of the tale. The preacher had tried to press the law for an arrest, but his public saw the charges as pathetic, seeing he had brandished the gun, and the authorities could discover no one impartial to witness, though they had not spent much time on the inquiry, Miller reported.

Autumn, girls at school were old enough to fill their dresses past skin and stuffing. Some girls flirted with him, mostly the ugly ones, with bad teeth or fathers poor enough to hope to draw easy land. Wendy he no longer spoke to, and soon he stopped attending altogether. At the farm, he cleared a brushy quarter, fresnoed the
bowled edges and rodweeded and harrowed the ground for spring and seed.

He worked if there was light and sometimes beyond by lantern in the barn, when the equipment required attention. The dog remained his shadow out of doors, but in the barn or the house, he mirrored Matt's restlessness. The dog would not eat indoors, rather preferring even to spoil a piece of meat and its gravy in the rain. He refused Matt's bed and instead made a nest near the stove from the old blankets Matt's mother deposited for him. In the barn, when a nut would frustrate Matt and he belted it with the wrench handle, the dog would race to the door to be put out or belly into the hay and remain there until Matt departed.

Winter, once he had sharpened the blades and replaced failing parts and organized his tools, little was left to occupy Matt's time. His mother had improved mightily after interring his father and at meals attempted conversation, but when he tried to listen, his mind would leave his head and the room, though where it went, he was unsure.

He read some of his father's books and the few magazines his mother had saved in a box and taught the dog to fetch sticks, though he learned so quickly Matt figured it had been in him all along. He had less luck with teaching him shake or roll over, and as the dog rarely made any sound, he didn't attempt to make him speak as Wendy had. They walked hours each day despite the lengthening freezes, and his thoughts traveled in wide loops that encircled all he'd witnessed or forgotten or remembered or dreamt and bent them into smoky spirals without order and so thinned they broke apart before him. He did not attempt to make sense of them with thoughts or words; they were not of that nature, though if they were, and if he could add them like numbers in a book, he knew the sum would be different each time until the idea of addition and numbers turned ash.

On one of these excursions, he encountered Alfred again. His congregation was down to two spaniels, and neither he nor the dogs looked like they had eaten in a good while.

Alfred gazed at him. “Coyote names the thickets in creek bottoms Woods of Her Private Hairs because water is desirable, but to retrieve it without tearing yourself on the brambles, well, it is beyond Coyote.”

Matt nodded as if he understood, though he did not, and he wondered if Alfred, too, was perplexed by his own words, as if the tongue of this strange god had entered his mouth without the sense in his head to stand between. The long nights that followed, Matt considered his own mind, which seemed, opposed to Alfred's, all thoughts and no words, though they did eventually move him, as he lumbered through December and January, idle as seed beneath the snow.

At the north edge of Peach a towering knoll rose out of an otherwise level alfalfa pasture belonging to the grocer. Wendy and her sisters swathed the field summers to fodder the delivery nags the grocer drove twice weekly to service the invalids and bachelors who'd quit on town for one reason or another. Straw and dirt had accumulated under the rocky promontory until it looked a part of the country, but Mrs. Jefferson had told the class a volcano near the ocean had spewed it across the state. February, when the Chinooks began to loosen winter, Matt ended a horse ride at the place. He tethered his mare to the spindly locust behind and hiked to the crest. There, he tucked himself behind the sharp-edged rock.

He let his mind unspool once more that evening, waiting for truths he suddenly felt he required. Swimming below him was the town, all light and motion. Horse hooves splashed the damp streets and children darted in and out of the house glows like birds in the dawn. Full dark, he heard a mother call and then another. An hour past, the lights slipped out. A couple spooning on a porch split the
quiet with a laugh, but the night stitched it over like something he'd dreamt.

From his knoll, he saw the pendulum Wendy's arm made when she swept a broom or the rock of one of her legs crossing the other while she read. He became almost giddy with her and, when the light of her window turned the lawn lemony and warm-looking after all the other lights had been blown dark, he crept to the edge of her window's glow on the lawn and put one hand inside it, then one leg, and studied himself lit. Finally, he dared to get his whole body aglow and felt weightless and bold, like he might just walk to the door and knock, until he heard a chair shift inside and dove into the well of a raspberry thicket.

8

F
OR YEARS
, L
INDA
J
EFFERSON HAD
watched parents hunt themselves in their little ones. Pawing mothers and distant fathers both hunting some track that would lead them back to themselves. They would say to their children “You've become a little man,” or “the boys will be calling soon.” These were one-sided conversations. Children did not answer such silliness. Of course they would turn men; of course boys would call for the girls. It was inevitable as the next daybreak. The children recognized their awkward arms and high water pant legs and new hairy places were nothing except natural. Their parents, though, seemed shocked at such developments. Soon the children realized that when adults spoke about their growth in such a manner, it was in the same bewildered tone they saved for death, which, also, they did not understand.