The Jump-Off Creek (17 page)

“You know Mike Walker, and Tim,” Blue said. Neither of those two stepped up to shake her hand, they stood back and nodded. She had not seen Mr. Whiteaker since his proposal was made. She glanced toward him in stiff embarrassment. His own look was stiff too, his arm was stiff as he touched his hat.

“Do you know Otto Eckert?” That was Mike Walker's hired man. He was a bachelor, with a blond beard and pale eyes set deeply so that he seemed to peer out of the brush. He was excruciatingly shy, or he had taken a dislike of her, she could not tell which it was. She was always determinedly polite. “Hello, Mr. Eckert.” He took a step backward and folded his arms up on his chest. Maybe he bobbed his head.

“Shall I bring this in the house now, ma'am?” Blue Odell lifted the hamper slightly.

“Yes. Thank you, Mr. Odell.”

She followed him in, striding forthrightly while the men watched her from behind. The house was stifling hot inside. Evelyn Walker's face was scarlet and glossy.

“Oh, Mrs. Sanderson! There you are.” Evelyn took hold of both her hands tightly. Her smile made a sweet bow in her wide face.

Lydia smiled, herself. “I am here,” she said, sighing.

The McAnallys came last, in the late morning, sitting up on a high wagon behind a pair of brown hinny mules. They lived almost to the Umatilla-Union county line. They had left there at six-forty by Avery McAnally's watch, and come the long way without stopping except as the mules required water.

Doris McAnally was fifty, her hair coarse and black, almost without gray, her face dark and creased as muslin. Three of her children were grown and married. Two were dead. Two were half-grown: a thin, shy girl, twelve; and a boy fourteen who rode Avery's horse ahead of the wagon. Doris, when she came in the hot little house, shook Lydia's hand strongly, as if she were a man, and then kissed her once firmly on a cheek. “There,” she said. “That is for getting Avery to drive us here. I haven't seen
Evelyn in a year, and we wouldn't have come now, except he must get his look at the woman homesteader.”

Lydia smiled briefly, sourly. “I am famous, then.”

“Well, until they have all seen you once or twice, and made up their minds that you are bound to fail!” Doris McAnally's smile was sour also. She squeezed Lydia's hand in fierce, abrupt friendship.

There was no shade at all near the house. The men carried the sawhorses and the planks down under the pine trees a hundred yards away, and the food was all brought down there by slow, hot procession. Evelyn's shy boys were carried down on Mike Walker's shoulders, but they afterward hid under the sawhorse table and would not be coaxed out.

Lydia sat down too soon: the stationman, Jim Stallings, came and took up the bench next to her, where she had hoped Doris McAnally or Evelyn Walker might sit.

Mr. Stallings was talky company. Shortly she knew he was a widower twice, with eleven children farmed out to sisters-in-law in three different states. “I've lately been considering taking off the time and going round to see them all, see if they are growing up right,” he said, smiling in a slow, contrite way. “I wouldn't mind marrying again,” he told her, and smiled ruefully, so it was a joke, or anyway only half serious. “But you know I'd have to take all those offspring back again if I did that, so I figure I had best stay a bachelor until they are grown. There's no hope, anyway, of finding a woman who would marry a man with eleven offspring.” He looked at her sidelong, with his brows pinched up in his reddish forehead.

She smiled slowly, stiffly. “Oh I'm afraid not, Mr. Stallings, no hope at all.”

He nodded. “Well I thought so,” he said. “Here, Mrs. Sanderson, let's get the coffee down to our end here. I do like having the little cream to sweeten it, eh? Owing to you. I said to myself I'd got used to coffee without cream but now that I've had it
again I see I was lying to myself all along.” He flashed a cheerful grin.

She smiled faintly also. “I could not live long without milk,” she agreed. “But I'm afraid it's sugar I miss. It is too dear for me. I have gone without for months.”

“Well, sugar has gotten high right now, that's a fact. But I've heard they're going to grow it down on the Grande Ronde, and I wonder if the price of it won't come down on that account. Of course, not soon enough!”

“I don't suppose we could grow sugar beets up here.”

“Oh no, ma'am, not a chance. They need those long hot summers, hot nights too. We've got but three seasons up in these mountains and that's Winter, Thaw, and August.” He grinned again, enjoying what he had said. “But I guess you'd know about winters all right. It gets cold in the state of Pennsylvania, I hear.”

“Yes, it's cold. But they have gotten hot long since, I imagine, and likely to stay so until October.”

He smiled wider, as if he took a perverse pride in harsh weather. “Well, there's no telling here. We've had a hard frost in June and again by the end of August. Snowed once in June, I remember. There's just no telling. Soil is thin too. I don't believe it'll grow much besides tamaracks and pines and rocks.”

She shook her head but she kept smiling too. She was not sure how serious he was, though the peas had not come up at all, the turnips were still small as marbles. “Oh, Mr. Stallings, I hope you're wrong. I've put so much work onto the garden.”

He grinned and shook his head. “Well I shouldn't have said it. The truth is, I've never tried to grow anything myself, except once I planted a squash and the seed rotted in the ground, but I haven't got the hand for it, I know that, and you shouldn't take me for a standard. Did you put in spuds? I believe they'll grow in rocky ground well as anything only their shapes will come out crooked. They'll stand some cold too.”

“They are coming up for me.”

“Well good. So you see I spoke too quick. You'll be roasting spuds on the stove next winter and I'll be eating rocks, and the needles off them tamaracks.”

She laughed and sipped the sweet hot coffee. As a husband, or as a father, she would surely have found him wanting, but she discovered she did not mind his company on the Fourth of July. He had an easy sociability—maybe it was the result of two wives and eleven children.

Beneath the table, one of Evelyn's boys sat on the toes of her boots, staring up under the edge of the cloth. She had not quite looked down at him. But in a while she lowered a spoon of yellow rice pudding, and when he had thought it over, he took the spoon in his own hand and licked it clean.

“Are you Junior or Charlie?” she asked him, whispering gravely.

He whispered, “Junior.”

She fed him slowly, by spoonfuls, reaching below the table.

Afterward the three women walked back across the dry grass to the house, carrying up the platters and plates, and standing together in the stifling room doing up the dishes. Doris McAnally's daughter Catherine stayed in the shade under the pine trees, watching over the two Walker children, silently tempting them to play in the grass and the brush away from the benches.

Doris said in a low voice, looking out the window across the still, bright field to the trees, “Poor Catherine has got her friend already, she's not thirteen yet. I don't wonder she has turned as shy as those two little boys.”

Lydia considered. Then she said, “I was twelve myself,” with something like Mr. Stallings's perverse pride in bad weather.

Doris McAnally shook her head, made an unhappy clucking sound. “Well, I am over it myself, anyway, and not sorry to see it behind me.”

Evelyn, in a low way, looking down at her hands wiping out bowls, told them, “I have heard if you get it early, you won't carry a baby well, but I don't know if that's true.” Her eyes jumped to Lydia.

Doris shook her head again, thoughtfully. “My first girl, Muriel, was almost as early, she was thirteen, and she has two children already and never had any trouble carrying them.” She looked at Lydia in her steady, unreserved manner. “Did you have that trouble, then, carrying babies?”

She liked Doris's plain straightforwardness. It made her feel steady, herself. She said, “Yes,” and smiled firmly.

Doris nodded. “Do you miss having them?”

That surprised her. She looked away. “No!” Then she said slowly, stubbornly, “I am not inclined to loneliness.”

“I guess I have been lonely, with five or six of my children in the same room with me,” Doris said ruefully. In the moment afterward, Lydia saw the look that went between Doris and Evelyn, an understanding of something, from which she was unavoidably shut out.

Then Evelyn said suddenly, in a girlish way, impassioned, “I admire you so much, Lydia! You are brave as anyone!”

Lydia made a surprised, disbelieving sound that was not quite a laugh. But she felt better afterward. She knew there was a small, keen truth in it.

In the afternoon they lounged on the benches and on the grass in the stippled shade and listened drowsily while the men spoke of cattle prices and the progress of the depression, and the usefulness of putting up hay. Carroll Oberfield was the only one of them who had been doing it for long. He had no spring roundup to speak of. His cattle stayed all winter near the stackyards where the hay was doled out to them on the snow. Then it was a simple matter to watch over the calving, and afterward to separate out the calves for branding. Mike Walker had bought a mower and sweep himself. The hired man, Otto, was not a range hand but
a skilled hayer. The two of them had just begun to cut the wild grass hay on the big field the house sat in.

While they talked about cutting and raking and shocking hay, Tim Whiteaker sat on the grass glumly and stripped the stems of weeds with his fingers. “I guess we lost as many cows to wolfers, last winter, as to starving,” he said finally, but there was little quarrel in it; it had a slow, thoughtful sound.

Carroll Oberfield scrubbed the top of his round, cropped head. “Tim,” he said gently, “I suppose if most of your cows were kept down on your stackyards where you could keep an eye on them, there wouldn't be too many wolfers who would bother them.” He looked faintly sorrowful. “The cattle business is bound to change, Tim. There's no stopping it, you know.”

Mr. Whiteaker put his chin down. Then Blue Odell began to smile slowly without looking at Tim. “He knows it, Carroll. He just doesn't like it yet.”

Mr. Whiteaker shifted his place on the grass and gave Blue a ducking look and finally he smiled a little, or grimaced—it was a deepening of the long creases that framed his mouth. “You know what they say about old dogs,” he said unhappily.

The McAnallys left early in the afternoon. Doris gave Evelyn and then Lydia a short, strong hug and a sorry smile and when her husband drove her off in the wagon she looked back without smiling or waving. Herman Rooney left too, and after that the spirit was gone out of the party. The men broke down the tables and benches and carried the planks up to Mike Walker's barn. Evelyn and Lydia waded in the creek with the two little boys, who were turning over rocks and undertaking to catch crawdads in a tin can. Blue Odell was the only one of the men who walked back down under the trees where they were.

“If you want company, Mrs. Sanderson, I can wait and ride you home.”

“No. Thank you, Mr. Odell.”

“Well all right then. We'll go on. Tim has got to be back up to the log camp tonight.” He had been squatting down along the
muddy bank next to their shoes. He stood up and touched his hat. “Thanks, Mrs. Walker.”

“You're welcome.” Evelyn stood with the edge of her skirt floating out on the water, and the palms of her hands flat on her hips, smiling in a slightly shy way.

They watched him walk away. Then Lydia began again, turning over stones in the slow, cold creek.

“You know, Mr. Odell is Indian,” Evelyn said softly.

In the evening, when the air cleared and became cool, Lydia walked out for Rollin and saddled him and led him back to the house. She was the last to leave. Mike Walker carried out the hamper and stood aside awkwardly while Evelyn came for a quick, rigid embrace. When Lydia had climbed up on the saddle, he set the box in front of her. He was a big man, he reminded her in that way of Lars. But his face was strong and bony. He had a habit of looking at his wife, following her with his eyes. When he stood back from Lydia, he looked at Evelyn and seemed to wait.

Deliberately, Lydia said, “Thank you, Mr. Walker. I always enjoy our visits.”

His big brows rose up into his forehead. “I do also, ma'am.” He patted the shoulder of the mule.

“Good-by, Mrs. Sanderson,” Evelyn said in a stout way, smiling. She had her arms folded on her bosom. Her wide face looked girlish in the sunset light.

When Rollin had taken her a short way down the road, she turned and lifted a hand to Evelyn. Evelyn held one of the little boys up in her arms. She shifted his weight onto her hip and waved slowly. She was still holding her brave smile. There had been a flag hung down from the eave of their house, in front of the south-facing window. Mike Walker was taking it down, reaching up to get it off the nails.

Jack had let Danny do pretty much all the worrying before, but now that Danny was gone he found he was doing some of it himself. He kept both himself and Harley away from Whiteaker and the Indian. They rode up the canyons north almost to the Umatilla River, looking out for rib-splayed, rheumy-eyed old cows, tick-infested calves, old rogue steers. He made sure they skinned a cow and buried the damning hide before they hauled the naked, thin-looking carcass back up to the shack. And all summer they kept to themselves, dodging whomever they happened to see without ever getting close enough for hellos.

If the kid was lonely for other company he didn't say so. He was close-mouthed anyway, probably he didn't mind their solitariness. Jack didn't think he'd discovered the knack of conversation as yet, or it might have been he didn't give a damn about it.