The Hour of Lead (9 page)

Poplar trees on her property had grown twelve feet in her lifetime, and, in a field behind her house, the wind had flung pollen and seeds, and the bees hovered over them summers, and the deer and an occasional elk browsed the grasses and dropped pellets, and rain
turned their leavings grit, and the grit fed the seeds, and the sun shone, and the clouds rained, until she had seen a patch become a meadow, and, finally, strained by the years and thinned with daily, mundane duties, her tragedies, too, seemed to turn natural.

She drew no comfort with seraphim and a heavenly patron. People who believed in such absurdity in her opinion lacked education and the fortitude to face a future of their own making. However, she fancied herself too possessed by the muses to heed Darwin, whom she found dull and brutal, as she did most science: an appropriate discipline for destructive little boys and men who took pleasure from spreading animals asunder to see how they functioned. The finest knowledge could not be gutted and cleaned like mule deer or river trout. Instead, she thought the world possessed its own order, without explanation, cruel or kind.

Watching the twinless survivor flounder through simple long division and sentence parsing children four years his junior had mastered, she worried his rescue from the storm did him no favor. He made his marks only through graceless effort, an inadequate boy in so many ways. She was concerned the children would tease him—despite his size, he was not intimidating—but few ventured a word one way or another. They admired his resolve and they were frightened by it.

She had joined him at that portal through which men must pass to be born and pass again to be men. The boy had cut the loop too abruptly, she realized, returning to nature so swiftly after leaving it, he'd not forgotten enough of the first to uncloud the second and her living body lay between them as if reason itself.

Over the years, she found herself assigning her classes whole books to read or an impossibly long series of problems from the primers then setting a teakettle on the stove. From her desk, she sipped her porcelain cup and made each child a study, shifting from one to the next wordlessly. If they met her eyes or shied and fidgeted,
she would loosen her gaze a moment then return when the child had forgotten her. Often, as the children walked or rode horseback along the paths and roads leading them to their families, she found herself weeping, and those nights she'd lie on the schoolroom's hard floor and stare into the beams until her eyes blurred and she could conjure and scrub clean the faces of the children, and search for any crumb of herself that might allow her a share in them.

Linda had thought it silly, any adult putting so much stock in something impermanent as a child. Such vanity begged the stars to differ. Occasionally, she believed she had not considered the twins and the storm in years, but realized, each time, in doing so, as with things truly tragic, she had recalled the event every day. She was no seer, but, in the images she found filling her thoughts, Linda recognized her own face rising. Like taming her reflection in a pond, the harder she looked, the stiller she became, until she felt steadied and almost right, then something she couldn't say roughed the picture, like a wind or duck landing, the stirrings distorting her likeness until it went monstrous, and she marked that twisting as in herself, and understood, finally, the wanting of another past just company, if only to offer a face to stare into that belongs to you but is not your own. She bore this strangeness through the winter and spring following and, when school let out for summer, she visited the empty building anyhow, smelling for the children and leafing the primers for their grubby fingerprints and scratchy letters.

Mid-June, she was called upon at home by the new superintendent of county schools. The man dismounted and trudged the porch steps. His prominent stomach unfolded beneath his chest, and his shoulders stooped from decades of bearing the girth. He knocked a pipe against his pantleg, loaded it, and struck a match. His face, slack as a bulldog's, pinked as he puffed and exhaled.

The man's name was Superintendent Harrison, and he insisted on being addressed as such. She filled a bucket and watered his
animal while politely allowing him to prattle his opinions on the keeping of schools. He inquired, finally, if she would be requesting textbooks or desks. The school board had replaced those lost in the storm a few months after. She told him they were holding up well.

“You are a relief,” he said to her. “Most of the others are clamoring for them.”

“I am in need of your assistance,” she said.

She stood and began unbuttoning her blouse. His eyes flew to her face where she met them. Deflated of smoke and color, they sagged farther, and trembled with his breaths. She shrugged her undone shirt down her back.

“I would like a child,” she told him.

Historically, men courted with flowers or jewelry, but weekly Superintendent Harrison trekked the dusty road to her home carrying a new desk or box of colored chalk or lined manila tablets for handwriting exercises. By midsummer, the inventory of his largesse included a microscope she couldn't operate and twenty-three plaster-of-Paris likenesses of the presidents.

Upon spying his poor horse clearing the bend, she would undress and wait. He'd deposit the most recent offering on the steps, and, inside, disrobe as well, folding his trousers and jacket to elude scandal. She placed herself on all fours before him, facing a side window from which she could see the yellow rose bush she favored. He would couple to her like a train car, and spit and wheeze like its great locomotive firing. From the little she'd discerned of such matters, he was unusual in size, and, occasionally, his girth would drive a cry from her. Mostly those minutes, though, she would gaze at her flowers past the glass pane. The petals, closed in fisted buds through spring, had unbound. In them, she could make out handsome profiles and she would imagine them inside her heart, blooming finally.

By late summer, she was six weeks without menstruating. The last time Superintendent Harrison arrived, she greeted him on the
porch, dressed. He remained aboard his horse. Her clothed body was unusual to him, and somehow more arousing than her nakedness. She recognized this and let his gaze float over her to remind him that what he had had wasn't her at all, but only some unclothed cavity that feels for him no more than a breeding heifer does the neighbor's bull.

•

W
HAT REMAINED OF THE SUMMER
, gardening consumed her. The perennials bordering the house required only an occasional trimming but the vegetable rows she nursed daily, shooing aphids and tomato worms from the new leaves and piling the stalks with a pungent mulch she'd prepared with spring grass clippings or steer manure wheel-barrowed from the neighboring pasture. Her aging dog followed her through the day, sulking like a jilted beau.

September, she bartered ten droppable acres for a pair of dairy cows and swapped a dated encyclopedia to a well-off rancher who filled her barn with fresh alfalfa. She downed three dead birches and split wood enough for two winters and, after felled a third living tree to season. Evenings, she canned the garden and filled the cellar shelves with mason jars and lined them on the floor beneath.

October, she locked the dog inside and set out a salt lick in the garden. Until midnight she kept motionless on the porch. Lanterns hung in the trees, but she heard the two mule-eared does that had robbed her garden all summer long before she saw them. They warily descended from the rocks into the stubble behind her house. One bent her neck and Linda heard its rough tongue on the salt. The other joined it. Linda lifted the Winchester and pressed it to her shoulder. The deer glowed like light itself in the sights. The first shot stopped the nearer of the two. She levered the bolt, ejected a shell, and refilled the chamber. The second doe hopped twice, then
checked herself. Linda eased down the trigger. There was no sound, save her own ears ringing.

In the garden, amongst the autumn husks, she butchered both deer by lantern light. Her bloody clothes clung to her until she pulled them off. She puffed out the lanterns and started a fire. Morning, when the coals burned low enough, she lay green birch atop them, then strips of venison rolled in rock salt. At the pump, she filled a bucket and washed. Her scattered clothes lay about like a skin she'd shed. She set them in the fire. She was frightened at her happiness and tried to swallow it, to save it like good luck come too soon.

•

N
EAR
C
HRISTMAS
, S
UPERINTENDENT
H
ARRISON RETRACED
his path down her lane. Grey snow and a grey sky kept the light ghostly. The muddy road had spattered his horse's legs and worn suit clothes. She realized it was the only apparel she'd seen him in, and perhaps all he owned of fine wear.

“The school board has asked me to give you your notice,” he said.

She took the envelope he offered.

Superintendent Harrison shook his head. “Should I tell them the truth?” he asked finally.

“I would deny every breath of it,” she told him.

9

T
HE FIRST PRESENT WASN'T WRAPPED
and no ribbon garnished it. The leather-bound cover had the writer's name impressed upon the spine and her own in the right corner, both embossed gold. Wendy closed her eyes and rubbed the cool skin, tracing her finger on the letters of her name until she would have recognized it if she were without eyes.

The poems were untitled, kept apart only by numbers plain as those attached to the county prisoners. The poems startled her; cropped as a manx tail, many seemed scarcely thought at all. Like birds flitting from tree to tree, their purpose would alight in her mind and she'd know it, then she would not. Some were so dismembered by hyphens and misplaced capitals they appeared butchered as spring lambs. They compelled her as one's own wounds demand exploring and finally led Wendy to realize that, without using the word, they were about love and the holes it thrust in you.

The next day, she woke to her sister Amy's shouts. She approached the door. On the walk was her name again, spelled in polished river agates.

Wendy collected the stones. One was turquoise. The dawn had warmed it. She rubbed the smooth edges across her forehead and the bridge of her nose.

“Who was it?” asked Amy, who was thirteen and boy-crazy, but Wendy had no desire to discuss it. She only knew it was her name printed with the rocks and her name cut into the book's leather. Someone was taking some trouble over her, and she was pleased.

•

A
MONTH LATER, MID
-M
ARCH
, M
ATT
allowed himself to dally past the sun's rise and watch Wendy discover an embroidered hair band he'd laid upon the porch rail. She lifted the heavy cast hex nut he'd cleaned to anchor it, then rushed to her room and twisted her hair until it met her liking. He remained while her family ate, listening to silver clack the porcelain and later studied her and her shadow and reflection gliding through the rooms in a routine he'd committed to memory. When she left the house, she battled the mud-thick roads to the grocery, her skirt-bottoms bunched into her fists, but the goop still spattered them, and at the store she was forced to find a flat rock to scrape the bottoms of her laced boots. For a moment, she stared in frustration at her sullied clothes and hands.

That afternoon, Matt rode to the Fort and bartered an old single-shot 30.30 to an Indian for a two-year-old gelding. The Indian guaranteed the animal saddle broken, but simply leading the horse turned contentious, and Matt worried he'd been bested in the bargain. Home, he took two hours washing and currying the animal's tangled mane and dirty coat. The gelding darkened under the water
and soap, but came up red. Matt stopped and admired the color like rich earth with the sun on the wane.

The next morning, he bridled the horse and trooped him around the corral. The gelding reared after one pass and Matt fought him down. The horse snorted and made a step for his toes. Matt hopped clear. He jerked the lead rope and the horse settled. Two rounds later, they repeated the contest. Five hours every morning, it remained their routine. The gelding kicked slats from the fence and blew snot at him. He crow-hopped so viciously, Matt had to cut a longer lead to keep it from jerking his shoulder from its socket.

At the end of that second week, the gelding kicked him. The lead was long enough and Matt had let himself drift behind it. He dusted himself and tested his leg to see if it was broken. When he found it wasn't, he snubbed the lead rope to a post. In the barn, he found a shovel. He carried it to the corral and there, beat the horse senseless. Each swing the horse screamed and Matt leaped clear of its flashing hooves, crying out, too.

He left the horse panting and shivering in the livery. It had long ceased being a shadow in the corral, but he could hear it step and paw the roughed ground. The night was cold and steam rose from its wounds. He had nothing for his ride this night. It would be a mean trick to leave off Wendy now, but a meaner one to stick her with himself, even if she was inclined to accept him.

His mother stood behind him. It was her breaths he heard now, burdened with another winter of pneumonia. He remembered nights she would sit and read him and Luke to sleep with the King James. Luke could quote scripture when he was five. Matt just liked the sound of its poetry. Like the river and the creek, it would still him. His mother had tried to read to him alone afterward, but without Luke holding down the words, he felt compelled to double-duty. He found little sense in most of the stories, and in yielding to reason's call, lost the poetry, too. Finally, after a month, he sat below her
chair to listen, and she set the book aside and stroked his forehead and the tiny lines the storm had left. Her hands were rough from kitchen work and worry, but through the calluses, as she brushed his scalp, he felt her hunting that old wordless hum he loved, trying to offer it back to him.