The Jump-Off Creek (18 page)

For himself, Jack missed having Danny there, and he went back and forth on how he felt about being so outright workless. He had had a few laid-off winters where he'd put up in town and lived on the cheap until spring, but the summer was a cowboy's working season and he'd never had one off entirely. He and Danny and the kid had spent the last one riding from Montana to Oregon, asking after jobs at every spread between, but this was the first summer he'd done nothing—just fooled away time. Sometimes dust would blow up against the sky and make him think of some cattle drive he'd been on, or a smell like burnt grass would call up a branding crew from ten years past. Then
he'd be touchy for a while, restless, Harley's habits would aggravate him, he'd wish he had gone with Danny looking for work.

But other times he was happy enough with the way things were. He liked to walk the horses out in the mornings, away from the spent grass around the shack. He'd drive them slowly down off the bench to some other clearing and then sit down for a while in their long-legged shadows without any need to get back or to get anything else done. He had been a young kid when his family had come out in a wagon from Indiana. The clearest thing he remembered from it was walking out on the prairie in the evenings, through the dry, red-stemmed grass, driving the horse and the cow and the oxen slowly ahead of him and then sitting with his chin on his knees watching them feed. His family had been beaten down afterward, by bad luck and bad judgment, and when his mother died young they were all scattered, broken apart. But he didn't think of that when he was with the horses. Walking behind them down the hill under the cool trees, he thought of that kid he'd been, walking out on the prairie with the big dumb beasts.

As much as anything, what kept him and Harley at peace was the card playing. The kid was a good player, going at it thoughtfully, frowning whether he had a good hand or bad, and playing a card with slow care. He appreciated having somebody serious to play against, and Jack liked having the time to play cards whenever he felt like it. The cards they had were worn out, soft and greasy and the corners bent dog-eared, so Jack knew a lot of them by the marks and creases. But he figured the kid knew the marks too, so they were on an equal footing in that respect. They played euchre and five-card, betting with matches. Generally Jack could win two out of three at euchre—he had taught it to the kid without teaching him any of its secrets—but Harley kept even on the poker. They traded matches back and forth and neither of them ever went bust. They played outside, sitting on the grass under a tree when it was hot. When it rained they played inside on a blanket spread out on the dirt floor. It was what they mainly did. It was how Jack remembered it afterward—that summer he spent with Harley Osgood, playing for matches and waiting for neither of them knew what.

The days became long, regulated, uniform.

In the morning, the milk that had been taken the night before and let cool, must be jarred and set down in the cold cairn she had made in the piled-up rocks of the Jump-Off Creek. Then, crouching in the shadowless chill before the sun had cleared the high east ridge, she let down the goats and hung the new milk in a clean flour sack to clabber in the long day's heat, before she ate a never-varied meal of corn mush and buttermilk. She forced upon herself the habit of doing up the house immediately after breakfast as otherwise it was liable not to be done at all. Then she took the axe and the bucksaw and the black mule fitted out with a trace, and went up the Jump-Off Creek past the end of the clearing and back into the trees along the narrowing gully between the ridges. There was another, smaller creek that came down the hill and joined the Jump-Off there, and she was logging the trees slowly out from the confluence. The ground for the most part was level at that place, and the trees tended to grow straight and all of a size. Also, she had in mind to build a house in the fork of the two creeks in some coming year.

She had not much experience at cutting down trees, and not a man's arm strength, so it was slow and effortful work. With the
axe she made a bird's-mouth on the down side of a tree and then sawed through slowly from the high side, stopping often to let her arms hang down tiredly, or to put an edge on the saw, or to drive in a wedge when the weight of the tree pinched the saw and hung it up. The pines grew in close. She had to carefully think out the undercut, the lean, the weight of the lopsided branching, and still she had poor luck getting a tree to fall exactly where it must, the aisles between them too narrow. When one was caught up on another, then she must go at the one holding up the first, and as often as not that one would fall wrong and she had a dangerous tangle of half-fallen timber. Then it was a slow job calculating how to get it all to come down, and a quick route to run and jump clear herself, when the critical blow was struck.

Even when a tree fell cleanly to the ground, she was only fairly started—she must go along its reach, getting the limbs sawn off one after the other, and when it was trimmed, hitch it to the mule and skid it back down the gully along the banks of the Jump-Off to the house. She did everything deliberately, carefully, there being no one else to get the work finished if she was unable—and nothing about tree falling that she had found to be out of harm's way.

Sometimes after a log was dragged in and laid up to dry, she would eat a curd of soft white cheese out of her hand, standing in the yard looking at the rack of logs. If she sat to eat a better meal in the midday, the flies would torment her, and the yellow jackets. The weather continued hot and dry. On the trail she wore by skidding the logs, dust lifted up like a scarf whenever the wind blew, and it got in her teeth and behind her eyes.

On a good day, she cut four trees.

She quit logging as soon as the sun dropped behind the high west ridge. Then she turned the mule out on the dry grass in the clearing and brought water up in pails from the creek, standing long-shadowed over the hills of potatoes while the water sank
slowly into the hard reddish soil. Then the milk which she'd taken in the morning, if it was clabbered enough and drained of whey, must be pressed and the curds cut and wrapped in a clean cloth and set down in the cairn. In the cold dusk afterward, she walked out for the goats and drove them in to milk again, and set the milk out in flat pans to cool overnight.

Afterward, finally, by a candle, she ate a meal of fried corn cakes, fish or meat if she had it, or a small thin-skinned potato dug up from the edges of the garden plot. She heated water while she ate, and after eating washed out her stockings. Often, she bathed her feet and her sore hands, her itching face, in the spent and tepid water afterward. She wrote daily in the bound ledger, but gradually it became a report of unvarying weather and numbers of trees cut; she forced a small hand so the pages might not fill up before fall.

On Sundays she left off the logging. She cut and split stove wood on that day, and did up a week's clean washing, made butter, did a thorough cleaning of the house, hoed along the garden rows slowly, cutting the heads off the weeds with short, brisk strokes. On Sundays, also, in the evenings or in the cool mornings after the milk was done, she fished the Jump-Off Creek or the North Fork of the Meacham, or took the shotgun out and looked for meat. She shot hares and porcupines and rock rabbits, a few. The fishing grew poor as the summer proceeded; sometimes she propped up the pole and picked chokecherries into a tin can while watching the line. She bathed on Sunday, carrying up and heating clean water that had not, this time, seen some other use before hers.

Late in July she put down the gray mule, Bill. He had failed slowly, relentlessly, without the energy for complaint. When he gave up eating altogether, she led him a good distance from the house and put his own blanket over his head and killed him deliberately with the shotgun, only setting her mouth tight and walking off quickly afterward without looking back.

She did not see Evelyn Walker at all after the Fourth of July. A day must be taken from the logging if she went there, so it was put aside by force of circumstance—she had pledged to see the goat shed done before rounding up her steers in the fall. She wrote letters from time to time and kept them ready in case Evelyn's husband might come and take the notes back with him, as he did once in July, twice in August.

The only one she saw in a regular way was Mr. Whiteaker. On the Sunday after the Fourth of July, he came riding out of the trees at the high end of the clearing and after a moment lifted his hand stiffly. She was burying garbage in the yard. She kept on digging, only waving at him briefly, and resolutely smiling.

“Mrs. Sanderson,” he said when he had come up near the hole she was digging. He stayed on his gray horse and looked down at her.

“Hello, Mr. Whiteaker.”

“I'm cooking for a crew over behind Meacham,” he said, in a way that was unlike him, quick and direct. “I've got a cash allowance for groceries and I would like to buy milk off you if you have it to sell.”

She looked up from shoveling the garbage into its shallow hole.

He ducked his chin in that characteristic way, but he kept on quickly, as if he had thought over what he meant to say. “I've been coming home on Saturday night and going back there about this time on Sunday. I would come by for it every week. I guess I would buy a gallon at a time. I would get more but I don't have any good way to haul it.”

She had not got over her surprise yet. She held her hand up over her eyes, shading them from the late sun, and looked at him.

He nodded as if she had said something he agreed with. Then he said, “I brought a saddlebags, and some newspaper to set the jars in.”

Then finally she nodded too, and stuck the spade down in the
garbage hole. She wiped her hands on her apron and left the spade standing up there and went down to the cairn. Mr. Whiteaker brought his stiff leather sacks and followed her across the yard, letting his horse loose to crop the thin grass. He stood behind her while she lifted out four quarts.

“I guess you wouldn't want to sell any of that cheese, or the butter,” he said, watching her.

Without looking around at him, she said, “I would.” She set out some of it on the grass behind her.

He squatted down with his sack and packed everything in carefully. “I'll bring the empty jars back with me next time,” he said. “Does that leave you short of them?”

She said, “No,” though probably it would.

He nodded again and stood up and carried the sacks to his horse. When he had lifted and settled the sacks across the back of his saddle, he stood beside the horse and took a handful of coins out of his pocket and looked at her.

“Forty-five cents,” she said. Without the time to figure her price carefully, she didn't know if it was too little, or too much.

He reached the money out to her, dropping it into her open hand. He mounted and started to turn the horse and then didn't.

“Meacham has got a store,” he said, looking down at her. And then, unexpectedly, “If you wanted anything from there, I could bring it back for you.”

She considered. Then she said, “If they have got a post office, I would be grateful if you would take down a few letters of mine to be posted.”

He nodded.

She went to the house and got the several letters she had written to her mother and to her aunt. She wrapped them in a piece of newspaper tied with a string, came out again and gave him the little packet, smiling slightly. “Thank you, Mr. Whiteaker. I had thought I wouldn't have this occasion until the fall, when I must go out myself.”

He sat holding her letters gingerly in one hand. The little finger
was crooked, not quite lying flat along the edge of the packet of letters. Probably the bone had been broken and poorly set once. Looking at it, she felt a sudden, small, inexplicable pang.

“Well, we never get letters ourselves,” he said in an indifferent fashion. It wasn't clear why he had said it. She could not think what might be expected, by way of a reply.

She said, after the little silence, “If you have time, Mr. Whiteaker, please come in for coffee.”

He shook his head. “I'll be late getting there as it is.” There was an irritable quality about it, and he touched the brim of his hat and turned the horse and rode away without saying anything else.

After that, he came every Sunday regularly to buy milk from her and to take her letters to the post office. After the first occasion he became more nearly like himself, slow to speak and diffident, but he never would come inside the house and take coffee with her. She was not sorry for that, but bothered by a dim guilt.

She sent a note with him, to have her own mail forwarded to the Meacham Station from the post office in La Grande, and finally on the second Sunday of August he brought back the letters and parcels that had been waiting.

Lydia had at one time resolved to open her mail slowly when she got it—one or two each day from earliest to last, as if she had not got them all in a bundle. But that intent was lost as soon as she saw them held out in Mr. Whiteaker's hand.

She began to smile foolishly. “Oh, Mr. Whiteaker, I am so grateful to you. How many letters are there, it looks like a lot? Please come in, I wish you would. I'll make coffee and we'll see what is in those packages. Are there two of them? You know I haven't been able to post a letter myself, from April to July, I rather worried I'd be forgotten.”

He did follow her in, watching her with a slight, soft smile. “I'll get the coffee made, ma'am, if you are wanting to open those parcels.”

“I do, Mr. Whiteaker. Thank you. I believe I know what is in
this one from my Aunt Jessie, but not the one from my mother.”

She was not able to be slow or careful, she tore the paper off the books all at once and turned them over and over in her hands.

“What are they, ma'am?”

She looked up. “It's an almanac, Mr. Whiteaker, and a blank book for writing in, and Marah Ellis Ryan's book,
Told In The Hills
, which is a favorite of mine.”