The Jump-Off Creek (7 page)

It was black and cold inside the shack. She made a fire in the stove, coaxing it slow and smoking from the wet wood. She fried a patty of corn meal and bolted it down, standing over the stove.
She drank hot water, having no patience, this late, to get at the coffee among her piled-up stores. Afterward she took the dead rats out of the traps and set the springs on them again and heated salt and soda water in a pail. In the high jumping shadow of candlelight, she pushed a stiff boar's hair brush steadily back and forth along the peeling, mildewed walls, the bedframe, the teetery three-legged table, and then made up her bed for the second night, on the clean bare logs of the bunk. She shook the bedding out and went along the quilts cautiously, holding up a candle, looking for vermin.

Sitting on the edge of the bed in the poor light, she wrote tiredly, crosswise over the printed vertical columns of the accounting ledger she had taken over for a journal.

 

9 April
Cut brush all day to make a Fence. I have not worked this hard in a while so I am tired but now I have a place for the beasts to stand out of mud anyway. If I'm to wear clean stockings in the morning must do up a little wash yet tonight. O I would trade all for a hot bath but too tired to lift the water myself. Believe I was up 3 times or 4 in the night to take dead Rats from traps and reset. Have killed 16 Rats so far. The rain has quit but it is still cold & the sky low.

 

She sat on the edge of the bunk a while with the book closed in one hand, her eyes closed too. Then she undid her boots, lay down stiffly in stiff dirty stockings. The quilt had gone dank, clammy, all day in the leaky house, but there was still a little clean mothball smell in it. She pulled the edge up to her eyes.

Harley Osgood hated the leg-hold traps. He left them jangling on his saddle most of the day, until it was plain he wouldn't have any luck with finding game. Then, to keep from Danny's righteous yelling, he got down off his horse and set a couple of the damned things. He chained one to a tree, pried open the jaws and balanced a piece of meat gingerly on the trigger, then kicked a little duff over thejaws and the chain. He didn't worry about his smell being on the iron because they wouldn't catch any wolves in the things anyway; he knew better than that. And the truth was, he was afraid to touch a trap that was set. He had a stupid fear of the things, from breaking two fingers in a squirrel trap when he was a little kid, and a healthy fear, from seeing what a wolf's leg looked like, caught in the sprung jaws.

It started to rain as he was setting the last one. It was half dark by then, so after thinking about it, he rode down the Jump-Off Creek to that old shack. He was quite a bit closer to it than to the place on the high bench, and the last time he had gone by the Jump-Off shack there had been a couple of cowboys living there, they had been young as him. He figured he would get in under the roof with them and get dry, wait out the wet and the dark. Maybe they'd play cards. He had lately learned how to play euchre, he was anxious to play it whenever he could. It wasn't like he had anything waiting for him up on the bench. Jack would have played cards with him, but he never could win when he played euchre with Jack.

He stuck his cold left hand inside his coat, between the snaps
in the front, but that didn't help the right hand holding the reins or his ears hanging out cold below the hat. Every little while rain ran off the front of his hat brim, dribbling on his wrists and the sleeve of his coat where he reached out holding the horse to a straight path. “Shit,” he said, in a flat way, every time it happened. He had a habit of swearing when he was alone, for the little bit of cold comfort in it.

It wasn't all the way dark yet when he came out of the trees into the long clearing. All the light left in the day seemed to lay in that open place. He could see from where he was, a woman walking down from the trees behind the house. She must have seen him too. She stood and looked a minute and then went on quicker and stood waiting in front, beside the door, with her arms folded up on the front of a big old coat.

He hadn't thought about those cowboys maybe moving on, and somebody else squatting in the house. Shit! He sat his horse under the skimpy cover at the edge of the trees and looked across at the woman, the rain falling straight down in the open clearing between them. But then he went ahead. He was hungry, and teeth-chattering cold, and hell, they were just squatters.

When he came up in the yard, something started a sudden scared racket behind the house. He heard the brush fence cracking and when the woman heard it she made a desperate face and went around there quickly, flapping her muddy big skirt. But the goats had got out by then, two of them scooting off through the stumps, up the long clearing, bleating a silly alarm. The woman made a tired, helpless gesture, lifting one hand, as she stood there watching them run away. Harley sat up straighter, without smiling. He had got to like it a little, the way people and livestock pulled up short and their eyes rolled white when they smelled the wolf on him.

He stopped his horse and waited. She was tall as a man, lean, and as old as Danny Turnbow. There were muddy fingerprints on the brim of her old man's hat, as if she had taken it off or set
it on with dirty hands. She stood stiffly along the hole the goats had made in the dead-hedge and looked back at him. He dropped his own look down to his cold hand clasping the reins.

“Ma'am,” he said, without looking at her. He didn't say anything about the goats. “The squatters' rights been already taken up here,” he said in a low voice. “Me and two others have been living here all winter.” He had thought out how much of a lie to tell, and he delivered it as briefly as might be. “I don't mind sharing the roof with your family tonight, though, since it's raining.”

The woman's face set slowly, not quite as if he had provoked her, but as if she was getting hold of a stubbornness. She pushed her hands down in the pockets of her big coat. “I have bought the deed outright from Mr. Angell,” she said in a level voice, cold as clay. He could tell it was the truth just by the way she stood there, and a little heat began to come up in his neck. He felt stupid, all at once.

Without his deciding to do it, he sat up higher in the saddle and looked at the woman recklessly. “You don't say,” he said, letting the words out short so he knew they sounded disbelieving. He didn't know what he expected out of that. It had come out without thinking, on his sudden, unexpected temper.

She lifted her big chin slightly and drew her mouth up in small pleats. The look she gave him was pink, straight, bristly. “I'm sorry for it, but I must turn you away, as there isn't room under the roof,” she said, without sounding sorry at all, only sharp and very well decided.

He felt his own face going red and he tried to stop it from doing that. But for a while he could only sit there feeling that bright thing like embarrassment, and himself holding straight in the saddle. He wished wildly that he had come to her in the first place with his hat in his hand, she would maybe then have let him sleep on a shakedown bed next to the stove. But there was no going back to that now.

She said, with her mouth still drawn up and stiff, “If you are hungry I can spare milk for you.” She was watching him. The rain felt cold as snow. Her look made him suddenly sorry for himself, and piteous.

He pulled up his shoulders gloomily and looked down at his cold hands. “No,” he said, in a low, miserable way. “I'm not on the grub line yet.” Without any warning, his eyes sprang with tears. In desperate embarrassment he jerked his horse around and kicked it, kept kicking it until they had run into the dark under the trees. He was crying by then, stupidly, helplessly.
Shit
, he thought.
Shit!
He wiped his face on the sleeve of his cold, muddy coat.

“Horsefaced old bitch,” he said running the words together loud and wet. “Stupid old woman.” It was a long-standing comfort. He had used to go out in the corn or down along the rock road below the house when he was twelve years old, fourteen, and swear out loud at his mother.
Old bitch cunt slut.
Swearing until he had quit crying. The last occasion for it, he had backed one of his sisters up against the barn wall in the shadows under the hay rick and squeezed the small buds of her breasts in both his hands. He remembered suddenly, the look that had come into her face. Her eyes had gone so wide-open that the whites had showed all the way around. He was too old to be whipped by that time, but his mother's husband had whipped him for it anyway, and afterward he had gone down the road, swearing out loud, and never had gone back. Thinking of that old humbling, now, a heat began to crawl in his face, making the pimply skin itch. “You damn whore!” he shouted out, and got a cold solace from the echo of it in the black trees.

A south wind came up from the Grande Ronde overnight and pushed the clouds up billowy and white. The sky broke clean and pale blue behind them. In the sunlight, the air was watery, dazzling. Lydia did a quick washing and laid the clothes, the milk rags, the towels out on the brush fence where they steamed faintly and shivered against the hedge whenever the wind gusted. The water after the washing was fawn-colored, tepid, but she wrung a clean rag in it and did a meager washup herself, standing on the little braid-rug barefoot in her shift. The washrag felt cold, sandy. She took long fast swipes, only delaying at her feet, poking scrupulously at the black filth between her toes.

Afterward, she took the bucksaw and the mattock and froe and went up the Jump-Off Creek, under the trees, where she was about done bucking and making shingles off a windfallen cedar.

She changed off, sawing through a butt and then splitting it, piling the shingles on a tarp and dragging the hillock behind her back to the house before she bucked the next one. The sawing was tedious, trying. There was a tooth out near the draw end of the saw and when she pulled it back too far, it hung up. But she drove the froe neatly enough, with the blunt end of the mattock, a few blows down through the butt of the log, the shingles peeling off in clean reddish slabs, arm-long, thick as her wrist. It was cold in the shade. She kept the coat buttoned up. Her breath shot out white in a noisy burst whenever the saw hung up.

The roof was low but she could not clamber up on it ladderless, hauling the long shakes and the nails, the hammer. When she
had brought the splitting to an end, she sawed down a thin yellow pine tree and trimmed it and made out of it a homely ladder with four rungs. It was heavy, wide-legged. She horsed it up against the eave of the house and climbed up on it with the shakes pinched under an arm two or three at a time. She piled the shakes up slowly in long, neat ranks below the crown, going down the ladder and up repeatedly. She had to pull her big skirt around out of the way, gather some of it up in the belt, as it kept hanging on the broken shakes and on the nubbin ends of the ladder.

The nails went up with her last, in the pockets of Lars's coat, and she laid the shakes from the eave edges, nailing them down on the old rotten roof. The roof was grown over with club moss, the nails went in softly, without getting a hold. She would need to cut long poles afterward and tie them down at either end, across the shakes.

When she had about finished one pitch up to the crown, she heard a calf bawl faintly and saw Mr. Whiteaker and his dog coming across the long clearing from the North Fork of the Meacham. There was a skinny piebald calf straddled wet across the neck of his horse, on the front of his saddle. It was crying thinly and steadily as he came.

She climbed down from the roof, with the front of the coat swinging heavily, full of nails. She pulled the dress loose from the belt and smoothed it, standing in front of the house waiting as he came up in the yard.

“The mother was a CrossTie,” he said, without quite looking at her. “So this here is yours.”

She stepped up to him and reached to take the slimy calf, staggering a moment beneath the weight and then stiffening to tote it inside the house. She laid it down on the mud and got a clean rag and began to towel off the sticky wet membranes. The man came and stood in the doorway behind her.

“Is the cow dead then?” she said, looking around at him.

“Yes, ma'am. I figured if you had a sugar tit you could maybe
nurse him along. We do that if we've got the time. Or I didn't know but what one of your goats might let him suckle.”

She nodded without saying anything. Then she said, looking at him again, “Do you know what it was that killed the cow, Mr. Whiteaker?” She had in mind the carcass of that poor cow, baited with poison, but he said, “I guess maybe the calf was born crosswise. It was already born when I came on it. The cow was down and she died on me before I could get her up.” He was standing in the doorway, turning his hat in both hands, not leaning against the jamb. His head and shoulders looked hunched under the low ceiling. With the light behind him she couldn't see his face, it was a featureless shadow.

She nodded again. She looked away from him, around to the calf, but she felt the man standing in the door, not making a move to go.

“You've got a lot done,” he said after a while. He might have meant the stiff new fence, the roof, the cleared brush. But he was standing inside the door of the house, where there was little enough done, most all of her goods still not put away, standing in one pile under the damp tarp. The quilts had been pulled up smooth on the bare frame of the bed, but there were the traps set out under the bed and behind the stove, and a big rat dead in one, along the wall next to the door. So she made a little indifferent sound, without looking toward him. She kept at the calf, wiping the mucus out of its eyes, ears, lifting it by the tail to stand knob-kneed and unsteady. Behind her the man's shadow moved, she felt the light come in across her back. She stood, gathering up her damp, splintery skirts, and went out after him. She put her hand up flat above her eyes to shade against the thin, bright sunlight.