The Hour of Lead (6 page)

The dog hooked himself under Matt's feet. It recognized Matt's mother's disapproval, though she never spoke to it and selected places to lie where it could watch her and exit the room if she appeared to anger.

5

O
NE MORNING NOT LONG AFTER
, Matt rose to the dog whining in distress. Half dressed, he stormed from his bedroom to find the animal cowered into a corner, his mother over him crying and swinging a mop handle.

“Mother!” Matt shouted. She turned to him. The dog used the pause to bolt into the bedroom and under the bed.

“The animal has no manners,” his mother said. “It stares at me.”

She wiped her face with the back of her hand and replaced the mop in the mudroom. In the kitchen, she hacked at the chicken on the cutting board.

“I'm not myself,” she said. “You should not have brought that animal into this house when I'm not myself. It was unkind.” She spoke with her back to him. “You are hurting me,” she said. “Do you know that? Marching that poor girl here and there on this folly. Have you once considered my feelings?”

“I don't know what you mean,” Matt said.

She wiped her hands on a towel and turned to him. “I loved your father, too,” she told him. “I want to see him at peace.”

“Like Luke is at peace?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then why don't we feel better?” Matt asked.

She returned to the chicken and her knife.

Matt hunted the dog who growled and whimpered and would not leave its sanctuary until he began to dress, when the dog scrambled past him into the living room turning mad circles until Matt's mother opened the door and the dog bee-lined into the yard, past the corral for the brush behind the barn.

Matt watched from behind. His mother turned.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm not myself.”

“Me, too,” Matt said, though knew which not half of the statement he was agreeing to.

The following days, the dog looped wide to keep clear. He studied Matt's work from under a tree or in high grass, but refused lunch. Once, he managed to kill a rabbit and chose to remain in the yard with his prize rather than follow Matt inside at the day's end for the nightly dinner scraps. When Matt opened the door later to offer him a roof, the dog remained in the darkness. Matt returned with a lantern and turned in a slow arc to reach the shadows, but saw no sign of the dog.

The next day, the dog returned in the daylight, hulking in the hill brows, apparently grown hungry enough to resume house living. Matt finally resorted to scraping the dinner dregs into a tin pie plate and depositing it next to a water trough. Soon, the dog disappeared for days. The animal lost weight and his coat turned ragged. He tore part of an ear off in some sort of altercation.

Matt considered him nights when the coyotes pitched their voices at the moon and owls hooted in reply. He didn't sleep, though
neither the owls nor the coyotes nor the dog was the reason. Work occupied his day, body and mind, and negotiating his mother's illnesses or moods amply squandered the evenings, but after she retired and he had read as much of a book as he could and blown back the last lantern, his thoughts awoke and flew at him in the silence.

The dog continued with Matt and Wendy on their Sunday outings though he had no interest in the wagon. They encountered the prophet Alfred several times and once he halted on the hill above Matt's home to lead his congregation in a memorial prayer. The dog yipped with the rest of the canine choir. Another instance they discovered him at Miles Junction along with Harlan Miller and a transmission in a wagon driven by two haggard mules.

“You're acquainted with each other,” Wendy said.

“This man broke my nose in grammar school,” Miller replied. “We've been friends ever since.”

Alfred said, “Faith or not. We beat on each other in our youths and didn't hold a grudge. That's a blood bond.”

Alfred's dog following had increased by half. Matt recognized his own at the boundary of the pack, sniffing and being sniffed. His hackles tautened and so did a few others, but the animals arrived at some agreement that didn't require submission or dominance and soon his dog sorted the group as if a member.

The subject of the revival rose. Alfred seemed unimpressed.

“It seems you would be pleased to see the country go toward Christ,” Wendy said.

“This man has no credibility,” Alfred said.

“Because he doesn't preach to dogs?” Matt asked.

“You've got to start simple. Dogs, they don't have human sense, but they have dog sense and loyalty and they can be brave or cowardly, depending upon how they're treated. They are simple but mighty.”

Miller nodded. “A man that starts with people is in too big a hurry.”

“Dogs don't have money,” Alfred said. “Or heathens and atheists or pagans or machines to make gods.”

“Good,” Miller said. “Because I'll be damned if a god who let the automobile into the world gets my patronage.”

“That's excusable,” Alfred said.

“I don't need excused.”

“I didn't mean it like that.”

“Doesn't matter how you meant it. I'll think what I want.”

“It is America,” Wendy said.

“Damned right, girly,” Miller replied.

A terrier bit a collie mix and a tussle ensued until the collie found his adversary's throat and pressed him to his back. The terrier rolled and the collie eyed him hard, but relented, and the melee went quiet.

“Well you got the soldiers to give him what for,” Wendy said.

Matt rustled the reins and the horses tugged the wagon forward. After a mile he wrestled in his pocket for a pipe and tobacco pouch. It had been his father's. He had never smoked it, but enjoyed its fragrance and the weight and smoothness of the ebony bowl. Now, though, he hooked his finger into the pouch and tamped tobacco into the pipe, found a match in his possibles bag and struck it. Burning tobacco popped in the wind. Matt looked onto the land that was his father's and his grandfather's and before that no one's. He gazed at the mottled grass in the few spots the thaw had uncovered, and at the sky so deep and blue he felt lost in it.

He once again wondered at the hours that took his father and his brother and delivered Matt to an adult woman before his time—it loomed over him like the constant arctic night, though he could put words to none of it. Luke had always been calmer over the turning of the world. Even when Matt bowed his head and cried real tears
over a scolding, Luke could let things be. The knowledge served him as well as it had his father. They had given into the cold and let it take them, while Matt had stayed too long alive, when dying made the most sense.

“Where's the dog?” Wendy asked.

“He must have stayed,” Matt said.

“We can retrieve him,” Wendy said. “Just turn the wagon back.”

Matt shook his head. She took the reins and clucked to reverse the horses.

Matt batted her hands and the rein. “No, goddammit.”

Tears shined on his face in the twilight followed by deep sobs that frightened Wendy, as she was unsure he could manage a breath between them. His chest heaved and he could not speak. Wendy replaced her hands over his, perhaps because she had once seen or felt her mother do such a thing, perhaps for no reason other than the beauty of instinct, which even the fiercest animals will offer one another, or perhaps because a thing in him moved a similar thing in herself. She took his head between her hands and held it, then moved toward him until her face was all he could see.

“I am tired of looking.”

“Your father, he's not returning,” Wendy said.

“I know it,” Matt said.

“I'm sorry if that's cruel.”

“Just the truth.”

He watched her eyes blink and an emotion quiet the muscles in her face. “Sometimes the truth is just plain mean.” She put her forehead to his and released her hands from his chin.

“We can return for the dog,” she said.

Matt shook his head. “He's got his reasons.”

She blinked her eyes and feigned a pout for him. He stirred the horses forward toward the buildings and clustered light of Peach, but she demanded the reins and steered them another direction,
eventually to his ranch. Matt was surprised at how well she maneuvered him through the rocky draws of his own land. From a bluff that overlooked the big river bend, he could see Hawk Creek, and the Columbia and where they met. Below was the house and barn and, above, Fort Spokane north and east, and farther, the reservation village, and south, Peach. Past that, the Okanogans, stripped of their snow, stood like a fence waiting on paint.

Wendy spread a blanket in the well of a bull pine cleared of snow by the tree's canopy and prevailing wind. He watched her draw a long knife from her basket and divide a hoagie sandwich. Crickets rattled in the closing day and the sun skimmed the couleed horizon and purpled the rolling snowy fields beyond it. She patted for him to sit and he did and she bent to one knee with him and it was like wind shifting. Her shoes were within his reach. He wanted to clean them with his handkerchief. He turned his face to hers. She said nothing for more time than he thought a person other than himself could keep still.

“You always brought me something to eat,” Matt said. “You always bring something to eat.”

The night was mild, but he collected brush in a pile and ignited it with a matchstick from a box he was never without. Together they watched the fire crack and burn. She bent and kissed him and erased the sky. He kept himself as still as he could, not wanting the moment to pass him. Her skin was orange in the firelight. She closed her eyes and her face turned blank as a piece of paper waiting for his writing. He outlined her jaw and chin with his rough palms and felt the wispiness of her hair.

She lolled in his fingers, and he held her there, pleased with the weight.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

He did, and their lips met awkwardly. He let off to stoke the fire. He coaxed it to a blaze. The heat made her face shine. The darkness
past looked like a piece of overworked metal with dings and nicks of light. He wondered when it would wear out, when day would tear clear through. They kissed again. Her tongue dabbed his lips.

“You're better at this than me,” he told her.

“I read a lot,” she said.

She kissed him again and after let her face rest on his shoulder. He gazed down at the clear part in her hair and the white skin and her forehead and nose underneath. He'd never looked at anyone so close. She turned her head up to his. This time he set his lips to hers carefully. Matt leaned back to where he could see her better.

“You learned this from books?” he asked.

She rubbed his arm and watched the hair stand on end. Her eyes blinked hard and her face twitched. He looked at his belly. He half expected it to be bleeding. “I'm disappointing, I'm sure,” he said.

“No,” she said. She took one of his hands and laced both hers over it. He clamped her wrists and pulled her toward him until she was stretched enough to kiss. When her eyes opened, they stirred him like fever, chilling his flesh and burning his floating mind. A bead of sweat collected, and fell onto her lip. She touched her finger to it as if hushing him or tasting something and reckoning its contents. He felt her breath dampen his arm next to her and knew he'd come to the end of himself. He waited to die, to be broke from her and this earth like a tree limb on a too-strong wind, and he understood that he had stopped hunting his father a long time ago, that each Sunday he made the trek to Peach and waited in the wagon for Wendy to notice him through the window and gather her heavy coat and a blanket and appear in the doorway and climb the step to sit herself next to him for the bulk of the day for an entirely different reason.

6

W
HEN THE EVANGELIST
F
ENNIMORE
J
ENKINS
and his indigent family, along with the devotees whose fervor survived the morning's Jesus hangover, prepared to leave for old Fort Spokane at the confluence of the Spokane and Columbia Rivers, they sought a jackpot of sorts. The army had seized the tribes' children and delivered them to the fort where priests and nuns instructed them in civilized behavior with the rod and the whip, and in response the Indians converted to Catholicism almost whole hog, fearing more efforts to enlighten them. The surrounding ranchers were Christian as there was little else to be. Together, they made a receptive audience—the natives primed by guilt and despair and the stoic ranchers by their devout wives and their own superstitions, mostly regarding weather. The good Lord could turn handy in a dry spell.

Sunday, after services, Wendy joined Matt in the wagon once more. They traveled the country the evangelist recently cleared: Hunters, Fruitland, Cedonia, Emerson Road, and the Naborlee Camp. By evening the bluffs and hills above the Spokane's rocky
crease glowed with lanterns and firelight, even ten miles off. As they neared, the crowd's rumble left quail skittering through the wild grass and the doves flitting brush to brush. Starlings abandoned their mud-bank nests and flung themselves into clouds of gnats and early mosquitoes, and hawks and one eagle coasted in the winds that sprung from the Columbia evenings, too uneasy to perch their nests. Anything larger lay in thickets and hollows bending for the rivers or in burrows and warrens under that same earth.