Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (34 page)

Harold’s mind took hold again, and he thought, No
damn line-up, like a church. No going around it, staring in. There’s
no knowing what she’d think of to do. If we put the lid on now, she
can’t.

He leaned over and picked up the two branches of sage
and pushed them down into the cofiin beside the legs. Then he went
around the coffin and Joe Sam and picked up the padded lid in both
hands and came back with it. But then he had to stand there and hold
it, because Joe Sam was kneeling beside the coffin, leaning over it
so the hair of his loose braid hung inside. He was reaching in by the
head with one hand. When he took the hand away, Harold saw that he’d
left a little, buckskin pouch between the bulges made by the chin and
the crossed hands. There was a pattern of black and white porcupine
quills around the pouch, a line of little wedges, like birds dying in
a row.

His medicine pouch, Harold thought. He looked at the
shape of what was in the pouch, and thought, One of the black
panthers Arthur made him.

Joe Sam took something out of his coat pocket and
reached into the coflin again. He did this three times. Then there
was a red tobacco tin lying on one side of the head, and on the other
side there were five arrowheads in a line, like the flying quills on
the pouch. One of the arrowheads was white quartz and one was a dull,
hard red, like dried blood. The other three were shiny black
obsidian. There. was a thin band of yellow buckskin stretched across
the forehead of the shrouded figure too. It had a quill pattern on
it, like the one on the pouch, and a row of small, iridescent, green
and black feathers sewed along one edge of it. Two little rawhide
tie-thongs, with beads on them, hung down from each end of the band.

I wonder how he makes a warrior out of Arthur? Harold
thought, and then, But maybe the feathers can mean something else
too. And then, looking at the feathers, he knew where they came from.
They were from the neck and shoulders of the bantam cock.

Joe Sam was standing up, waiting for him to put the
top on.

"That’s line, Joe Sam. He’ll like that,"
Harold said.

The old man looked at him, showing nothing in his
face, only waiting, and he felt how bad his words had been. Get it
over with, he thought. Anything anybody could say would be bad, and
laid the lid down carefully, and set it so the nail points were in
the holes they’d started. Only then, when he stood up and looked
down, and there was only the black, flat-sided shape of the coffin,
did he feel how final the act was. The loss and the love came
together strongly in him, making a real prayer, although he didn’t
bother with any words, only Arthur’s name repeating itself in his
mind. He looked up, and Joe Sam was holding out the hammer to him. He
took it. Then he thought of Grace and the father still sleeping, and
said, "Close the door, will you, Joe Sam?"

The old man went over and closed the door softly, and
stayed there against it. Even then the pounding seemed to make a
terrible din in the small, white room. Harold screwed up his face
against the sound, and struck the first nails awkwardly, needing
extra blows. After that he did better, driving each nail in with just
two blows, but even so, when he had driven in the last nail, and
stood up again, he felt the hammering still going on in his head.
There was a fine sweat on his forehead, and his hands were shaking a
little. He laid the hammer carefully on the table, not making a sound
with it, and then, more to steady himself than for any other reason,
straightened the bed, moulding it with his hands to take the long
shape of the body out of it, folded the white blanket and draped it
over the footboard, and opened the north window a crack. The cold,
clear air sucked in, breaking the powdery top layer off the snow that
had piled up on the sill and blowing it over the table. Then he
turned back. Joe Sam opened the door, and he went out into the
kitchen. Joe Sam followed him, and pulled the door closed.

Grace was standing by the stove, sipping at a mug of
coffee. She had on a blue flannel dressing gown, pulled close around
her throat, as if she were cold, and her hair was hanging loose down
her back and in front of her shoulders. Gray hairs showed in it that
were hidden when it was done up. Her face was very white, with great
dark hollows under the eyes. She let the cup down, and Harold saw
that her hand was shaking.

"That hammering," she said, and her mouth
trembled too.

"I’m sorry," Harold said.

"It isn’t just now," Grace said. "She
was hammering in there all night. She’d hammer, and you could hear
it echoing all over, as if there wasn’t anything in the house."

"Everything’s ready," Gwen said, setting
the first two plates on the table. "You’d better eat something
too, Grace."

"No, I couldn’t," Grace said. "Is it
going to be today?" she asked Harold.

Gwen put two more plates onto the table, and began to
pour coffee into the mugs.

"I guess so," Harold said. "If this
snow’ll let up.”

Grace sat down at the table and went on sipping her
coffee, not looking at anybody, but only into the center of the
table, where the light from the window made a faint shining.

Joe Sam sat down in his place without anybody
speaking to him. He watched Gwen and Harold sit down, and glance at
each other, and then quickly down at their plates. He kept on
watching them from under the brim of the black sombrero, and again
his presence grew until they could not speak or move easily before
him. He seemed to till the room, and to be the only real thing in it.

19

All morning, while the falling snow thinned out and
the air grew colder and brighter around
them,
Harold and Joe Sam shoveled paths and did the chores, forking hay out
of the shed for the horses and off the stacks for the cattle, and
feeding the hogs and the chickens. Joe Sam worked slowly and
dreamily, and often Harold, looking back in the trench they were
cutting through the drifts, would see him just standing there,
leaning on his shovel and staring out over the piled snow at the
mountain or across the valley. He’d have to speak to him two or
three times to wake him. Only while they were clearing the chicken
run, and the space behind the bunk-house to feed the birds on, did he
work steadily. He scattered the grain on both clearings too, but even
the ritual of feeding the chickens wasn’t quite the same as usual.
His face remained expressionless and his vision turned inward even at
the very end, while he held the grain down in his hands for the
bantams to pick at. Harold stopped work for a few minutes to watch
him, though, and was cheered a little because the vain bantam cock
was still there with his hen.

He must have been saving up the feathers for a long
time, he thought. There were fifteen or twenty of them on that
bonnet, anyway.

When the chores were done, they dug a path up the
hill behind the house to the woodpile, and then on up to the open
grave under the pines. The wind was beginning to move on the mountain
by then, and they were showered repeatedly by long, glittering veils
falling away from the boughs above them. When Harold stopped to rest,
and looked out over the house at the valley, he could see faint
shadows racing across the open under the surface-scud, and even the
solid, white shapes of the hills on the other side beginning to show
here and there. By the time Gwen came out to the corner of the house
and called up to them that lunch was ready, a great, formless
shifting of half-light and faint shadow was going on everywhere
beyond her. Harold was almost ashamed, when he thought of what they
were doing now, and of Curt out there somewhere in the white sea of
mountains, to feel how life and meaning came back into everything
when he heard her voice calling his name, and looked, and saw her
down there. The sound of that life was in his voice answering her,
too, but before it was quiet, even, she had disappeared behind the
house again, without replying. The world darkened and emptied again,
and he set his jaw, thinking, Am I to blame for my whole damn family
too? But he cou1dn’t keep up the temper while he was swinging the
shovel, and after it came the familiar despair, and he thought, Well,
aren’t I, as far as she’s concerned? He and Joe Sam finished
clearing the grave, and a path around it, and stood their snow
shovels up in the mound on the north side of the grave, with the
shovels that had dug the earth, and went down to the house.

Gwen was still quiet and apart, and Joe Sam didn’t
eat, or even drink his coffee this time, but only sat there, straight
and motionless, with his hat and coat and the blue bandana on. There
were only the three of them in the kitchen, and nobody spoke. Harold
and Gwen tried to eat, but mostly  they poked at their food or
just sat studying their plates. It was only when Harold stood up that
Gwen finally broke the silence.

"Your mother said to tell you it wouldn’t be
till later, not till about sundown."

"Changed her mind again?”

"I don’t know. She just told me to tell you.”

"She’s still hoping Curt will get back,"
Harold said finally.

"Maybe. She didn’t say."

Harold felt the little anger against her rise in him
once more. He waited until it sank back, and said, "I’ll take
the drag down on the meadows, then. The stock’s coming in from
everywhere now. Can’t get anything through the snow. If you need me
for something, just come down by the stacks and wave. I’ll keep an
eye out for you."

Even before he finished speaking, he was ashamed that
he was saying so much, making it a kind of begging for her attention.

"We’re getting along all right," Gwen
said.

"Well, when she’s ready, if I’m not back by
then."

"I’m not helpless," Gwen said. "I’ll
come for you if you’re wanted."

Harold stared at her, thinking, To hell with you too,
then, but she wouldn’t look at him, after the angry glance thatwent
with what she said.

Harold waited until the red dancing was out of his
own eyes, and he could speak to Joe Sam quietly. Then he held the
door and went out after the old Indian, and closed the door again,
without once looking back.

All afternoon, though, while he walked beside the
drag, or stood on its shallow deck astride the stones that were piled
there, he kept looking back at the house. Joe Sam rode in the back of
the drag, sitting down, with his arms spread along the tail-board,
like a man riding in a rowboat, and every time Harold looked, he
looked too, but there was nothing to see that wasn’t there all the
time. The wind grew steadily colder and stronger, until Harold had to
make Joe Sam get out and walk behind, on the bent grass of the wake,
and beat his arms across his chest to warm himself. The snow mist
broke open over them, and islands of light began to glide across the
meadows to the southeast, and then the islands of light became
islands of shadow that lied over the white expanse and diagonally up
the eastern hills, to vanish in the blue, and still nothing moved up
by the stacks except the cattle that were feeding there. The drag
moved on steadily through the light snow, and the wind whipped the
curling snow away from the prow like spray. A long line of cattle,
far behind and moving slowly, followed in the wake, heads down to the
discovered grass. In the north there were more of them coming in,
singly and by twos and threes, only black dots on the dazzle of the
drifted range. At last the drag was so far out that the stacks and
the sheds and the house were only tiny toys, already in shadow at the
foot of the home mountain. The whole length of the lower range showed
from there, stippled black with timber the wind had cleaned, and the
main range loomed above itlike a white wall, with the last dark
clouds rising thinly out of it here and there.

It was Joe Sam who saw Gwen when she did come out.
The wind had died down again, by then, and the white breath of the
men and the big horses, laboring with arched necks, floated in slow
white plumes in the frosty air.

"Woman say come," Joe Sam announced from
the back of the drag, and Harold peered far across into the shadow
over the ranch, and could just make out the tiny figure standing at
the end of the shed. He raised his arm and waved it, to show that he
saw her, and turned the drag back in a wide curve. She stood there
for a long time, watching while they moved in until the big range
sank slowly out of sight behind the timbered one, and then until they
had come into the reaching shadow themselves. Harold began to hope
that there would be a difference now, but then, when the drag was
moving upslope through the feeding herd, he saw her turn and go back
without a sign or a sound. He hardened himself inside again, and his
face was as expressionless as Joe Sam’s while they were putting the
drag away, and letting the team back into the corral, and forking out
the hay for them.

When they came into the house, the mother was sitting
in the big chair, reading in a pocket Testament with a black leather
cover. She was holding it close to her face, with her big fingers far
up the back of it. The black shawl was folded the long way and draped
over the chair behind her. Gwen was sitting sideways in one of the
chairs by the table, with her hands in her lap, just waiting. She had
on the dark skirt still, but a new blouse, a white one with puffy
shoulders and a lace front and a narrow, black ribbon at the throat.
Her hair was done up in the heavy braid again. The room was full of
just waiting, and yet of not wanting the
waiting
to be done, either.