The Jump-Off Creek (4 page)

“How do you do,” she said, without getting down from the mule.

The boy looked at her. He was sixteen or seventeen. There was a thin, pale mustache trying to grow across his upper lip. His hair stuck up in a cowlick along the front where his fingers hadn't gotten it to lie flat.

“Ma'am,” he said finally, looking past her and then back to her in something like confusion. Another boy came and stood next to him, just out of the doorway. He was not much older, maybe
twenty. He had put on his hat, or had never taken it off. Under the shadow of the brim she could see his mustache had had time to grow in full and brown, drooping long at the corners of his mouth. They both stood and looked at her.

“Do you know, is this the Claud Angell place?” she said. She knew it was. The trees that had been cleared out for acres around it had surely gone to make ties for the railroad.

The younger one pulled up his shoulders in a sort of shrug. “We heard it was. Hasn't been anybody living here in a while, though.” He lifted one hand, swinging it vaguely. “We're just camped,” he said, and looked sideways at his friend.

“Wasn't anybody living here,” the older one said, in a low, self-conscious mutter.

She became unexpectedly, unreasonably embarrassed. She looked away from them.
I have a clear deed
, she had said to Tim Whiteaker, but could not get those words out now. “I have taken up Mr. Angell's claim, if this is his,” she said finally, gently.

They stood looking at her. After a while the younger one shifted his feet. “We were just camping,” he said. “We're headed over for Pendleton, we heard there was an outfit over there that was hiring.” He looked at the other boy.

There was a silence. Then the older one, in his low voice, said, “We was about to eat. We'd share it, if you want. It ain't much, though.” He put both his hands in his pockets and looked past her. In the fine rain, under the darkening sky, his face looked smooth and pale, childlike.

“Thank you. I have been all day without eating at all.”

She stood down from the saddle and shook her skirt out while they watched her. She looked at the goats, the mules, and then left them standing, leads trailing among the squatty stumps, and went through the door between the two silent boys who stood framing it. There was a single room, floorless and dark and bare. In it was a little monkey stove, rusted through along its bottom edge, a one-legged bunk balanced in a corner, a three-legged
table, a wooden box nailed to the wall beside the stove. The floor was muddy, puddled where the roof leaked. There were sawn-open tin cans and drifts of spent coffee grounds in the front corner near the stove, saddles and chaps and kit bags piled up along a wall. The whole place had a dank and fetid smell—mouse droppings and decayed garbage and rotted wood.

The two of them came in behind her. The younger one fussed around with the stove, feeding in broken limbs and poking at the flames without looking toward her. The older one lit a candle, set it in a dribble of wax on the wobbly table. He spooned succotash from a pot to a plate and set it down carefully on the table.

“We've got no chair,” he said. “You could sit on the edge of the bunk.”

She came around and sat on the rough log edge of the bunk. The succotash was thin, maybe watered down out of a can, but there was bread to mop it up, a salty hard loaf probably one of them had made. There was coffee, black and bitter. They ate in silence, the two of them standing holding plates in their hands while she sat. The only sound was the scrape of spoons against tin and the breath and snap of the fire in the stovebox. The boys didn't look at each other, only sometimes in a glancing way at her. They chewed carefully. She saw the Adam's apple in the younger boy's neck sliding up and down slowly when he swallowed. Watching him, she began to fill up with vague melancholy.

“I guess those goats must need to be let down,” the older one said, low.

She looked toward him. “Yes.”

“Well it's been a while but I used to do it. I guess I could help out.”

Both of them followed her out into the fine dark rain. They pushed the door back so the candlelight fell outside. In that dim light, silently, Lydia pinned the brown doe, Louise, between her legs and leaned over the goat's back to let down the milk on the ground. It was hard to get her started; a goat was inclined to be
cross with any change of her situation. The two boys watched her.

“You don't want to catch that milk?” the older one said finally.

She kept from looking toward them, or toward the two mules browsing the high wet weeds. “I believe the pail and pans are carried at the bottom of the packs,” she said. “I don't know if they can easily be got out.”

They stood a moment. Then the older one went over and began to pick at the damp pack knots. The other one helped him. They wrestled with the packs and the saddle, rubbed down the mules, wordlessly carried her goods inside the little house. The older boy straddled Rose and held her neck and shoulders between his knees. He looked a little clumsy, and it was a while before he got her to let down into the pail. The younger one stood watching, pushing his forearms down straight into his pockets. He had a look in his face, like a child watching other children playing a game he didn't know.

“My mother used to keep goats,” the older boy said. He had lost some of his mutter. In the darkness, in the rain, his voice had a low man's sound, soft-spoken. “She was Quaker. She kept pigs too.”

“Where are you from?” she asked him.

“New York.”

She looked across the goat's back at him. “I lived near Williamsport, in Pennsylvania. We had neighbors who were Quaker.”

He smiled slightly. “Hey,” he said. “Have you heard of Six Corners?”

“No.”

“Well it's pretty small. But that's where I'm from. It can't be a hundred miles from Williamsport.”

She stood and stretched and briefly pressed her hands against the small of her back. “I have a tin of cherries,” she said. “They are good with a little fresh milk.”

They looked at her. Finally the younger one said, “My mother used to can up cherries.”

In the dim, ugly house, the three of them ate cherries and syrup with the hot milk poured over, spooning it up slowly, quietly, off the tin plates. Afterward, she poured a little hot water over flakes of yellow soap in their small chipped basin. They looked at one another but did not deny her. While she did the dishes they made vague motions around the room, until it became clear they were gathering their gear. There was only a little pile of it, once they had put on their coats and chaps—worn plaid blankets stitched together to make a couple of bedrolls, a greasy canvas cook's kit, and another little duffel that held razors, soap, stubs of candle. She gave over the cleaned plates, the wiped-out tin basin, and they stowed them in the dirty cook's sack.

She had seen the place where the horses stood, deep in black mud, puddled brown. It was from guilt that she said, finally, “You might sleep under the shed roof, and go when it is light.”

The older boy looked at his feet. Then he looked at her. He was back to muttering again. “We had to ride after dark a lot of times, on outfits we been with. It's nothing. We got oilskins if it keeps raining.”

The younger one said, “It's okay, ma'am.” His face was serious.

They went out, hauling their saddles with the straps trailing. The air was wet and cold and black. She stood behind them silently while they saddled and tied on their gear. Their boots sucked gently in the mud under the shed roof.

Astride their big horses, in bulky coats and wide-brimmed hats, they seemed less boyish. They looked down at her shyly.

“Good luck to you, ma'am,” the younger one said.

“And you.”

They turned out across the clearing and went along the little creek into the darkness.

From the ridge, the baited-up meat looked like a spill of red paint. Maybe it was wolves had come up to it: there were a couple of dead animals on the grass there. In the poor light, from a distance, they looked black, bigger than coyote.

Harley rode down slowly off the ridge. He let the horse pick its own way through the scrubby myrtle and tamarack, not hurrying. If it was wolf, it wasn't going anywhere. And he had trained himself away from too much expectation. When he got down where it was stinking, he left the horse standing, reins trailing, while he went to squat beside the kill. They were wolves, both of them. They were already stiff, their coarse coats wet through the guard hairs to the undercoat.

One was male, almost black, and the other a gray female. Mates, he thought, and the female still nursing their litter. He had no good way to find the pups, and who knows how many ears would molder in that unknown den when they starved—the bounty was the same for a pup as a grown wolf and a big litter would've been a nice prize. But he was glad enough for the two he had; he had gone eight or nine days this time without taking a hide at all.

He skinned them with spare and practiced movements, rolled the wet pelts together and tied them from the saddle, stuffed the ears in a little leather bag behind the can tie. The bait was sour, just horns and gnawed carcass making a red place on the grass. He would need to drop a fresh one somewhere, away from this stink. If the den was anywhere close he might still get lucky. The pups ought to be a couple of months old if the season ran to par,
and they might yet come out of the ground if they were hungry, might smell a fresh kill and come to it.

He was all afternoon scouting the sidehills, looking for something. There were five or six winter-thin cows and their spindly calves grazing along the bottom of one of the gullies, and for a while he sat looking at them. He went on, finally, but when it started to rain he rode back to where he had seen the cows.

They had gone up the side of the hill under the trees. He sat at the bottom with the knotted reins looped around the horn, pulled his old Wakefield from under the fender of the saddle and touched and counted the load with his fingertips while his eyes stayed in the trees studying the cattle. Then his hands touching the gun went still, and he sat frozen on the horse with the sweet surprise holding him quiet and patient. High against the slope, browsing soundless with the cows, the doe turned haunches to him and grazed slowly uphill.

Harley let himself down carefully from the horse. In the dove-colored rain he moved quietly beneath the trees, setting his feet ball first. All at once he could smell the oily gun and the wet mold of the ground and the bouquet of the dogwood trees, their big cream stars, and it gave him a good, tingling feeling of alertness. The stock of the rifle felt warm and smooth under one hand, the barrel cold and hard and smooth in the other.

The deer turned and came toward him, making no sound. When she saw him, her head lifted with a wisp of grass dangling from the jaw like a beard. He brought the stock of the rifle against his cheek, and then he could smell the strychnine on the skin of his hands. She moved gently, turning, looking at him now with her head canted over one shoulder. Harley squeezed his hand, and as the deer leaped, the butt of the rifle came back hard against his shoulder and the sound popped loud through the silence. The deer, bounding high on springy legs, turned once to touch him with her wide eyes and then was gone into the timber, through the scattering, grunting cattle.

Damn. Damn. Damn. In a moment it had all turned sour again. “Damn!” he said, loud, so it rang in the trees.

The cows were going off down the gully. Irritably, he pointed and shot a calf as it was running bawling after its mother. The cow kept on, her bag swinging heavy between her legs. Squatting on his heels in the rain, he cut the calf up the belly and reached through the hole to knead in the poison, working it in the gut and the muscle with the tips of his fingers. A little rain ran off the brim of his hat and steamed in the puddle of blood around his boots.

By the time he was done, some of the edge had been worn away. He was cold and wet, and the best part of the day had been used up anyway. He wiped his hands on the grass and let the pinto horse take him toward home. There was little enough comfort there. The house crouched dumb and blind on the high bench in the rain. Jack's horse stood droop-necked and dismal inside the strand of rope fence, but there wasn't any smoke coming from the damned stove.

He put his horse in with Jack's and went through the wet weeds to the house. There was a patchy steer hide hung up in the door opening, that was all they had as a door. He pushed it and carried his saddle in. The place was cold. It stank of rot and wet and wolf and maleness. Jack wasn't there. The only light was the daylight that came in gray bars where the chinking had crumbled away between the logs.

Irritably, Harley brought a little wood in and laid a smoky fire in the stove, and while he was fussing with it Jack came up from wherever he had been. He had his rifle in one hand. He used the butt of it to push back the door hide, coming in.

“Where's Danny?” Jack said, as if he thought the two of them ought to be together, though he would have seen there was only Harley's horse standing with his. Harley didn't see a reason to answer him at all. He sat on his blanket on the floor and took out his cards and started to play solitaire.

Jack had a big mustache that maybe hid a harelip, or anyway
a scar on his mouth, and sometimes there would be spittle caught in the whiskers. He must have known it. He had a habit of rubbing his sleeve across his mouth every little while, or rubbing down across the mustache with the edge of his hand. He did it now, using his left hand, though there wasn't any spit on his brush that Harley could see. “Where is he?” Jack said peevishly.

Jack had already set Harley off a little, leaving the stove for him to do, and Harley had a reflex, a quick bitterness, he knew that about himself. He looked at Jack over the cards and felt his face redden all at once. He said, “I'm not his mother, I guess,” so it was a gibe. Generally he spoke as little as he could get by with, and looking down at his boots as if he was still a damned kid—he couldn't keep from it. But if he was provoked, or felt on the least wobbly ground that way, he found he could get his look up straight and the words that would come out then would be straight too, and quick. He hadn't ever considered whether it got him anything he wanted.