Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (8 page)

It really is like a face carved out of wood, she
thought. It can’t change. It’s like Arthur had made it with his
whittling Harold’s always talking about; deep wrinkles, like Mrs.
Bridges, only all broken up with little ones too, like dried-out
earth or old leather, on his forehead and cheeks and chin, and by the
puckering at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth.

She wanted to look at the face for a long time, but
she couldn’t because of the eyes. It wasn’t that he looked at
her, but rather that he didn’t look at her, although his eyes were
turned at her face, and that only his right eye seemed to be watching
whatever it was he saw behind her. His right eye was surprisingly
young and liquid and alive in the old, dry face, but the left eye was
turned a very little out and up from it, so they didn’t appear to
be looking together. The lid drooped over it more too, as if from an
old injury that had made him unable to lift it.

Harold said, "It’s all right, Joe Sam. Go on
in," and the mother turned from the stove with Gwen’s plate in
her hand and saw the old Indian standing there. Even the father
stopped watching Gwen and, turning his glass on the table between his
thumb and fingers, looked around too.

"Go ahead, Joe Sam, go ahead," he said
impatiently.

The mother brought Gwen’s plate to the table and
set it down in front of her as if there were no one sitting there
yet.

"Get over by the stove and warm yourself,"
she said.

"It’s a wonder you don’t take your death of
cold, wandering around in your shirt sleeves."

Joe Sam didn’t answer, or even show in his face
that he’d heard her. Appearing to start only by his own wish, he
walked slowly, very upright and very softly in his buckskin
moccasins, dark and shiny with use, over to the wood box in the
shadow by the stove. He turned around in front of the wood box and
crossed his ankles and let himself down slowly and without a sound
and then sat there, as upright as he’d walked, his hands lying limp
and palms up in his lap. His face almost disappeared in the shadow,
only tiny points of reflected light showing where his eyes were.

Harold followed him across, his boots clumping.
Standing in front of him, he blew out the lantern and reached across
him and set it on the shelf behind the stove. Then he went back to
the pegs by the door and stuffed his cap into the pocket of his
mackinaw and took the mackinaw off and hung it up in the row of
coats. He turned, trying to comb his hair back with his big hand, and
came to the table and sat down in Arthur’s chair, across from Gwen.
He leaned on the table, and locked his big hands in front of him and
looked at Gwen, smiling a little, and when she smiled back at him,
looked down at his hands.

The father spoke loudly and importantly. "What
was all that Curt was talking about? Joe Sam been up to something
with the horses?"

"Oh, nothi.ng," Harold said. "He was
already out there when Curt got there, and the horses were kind of
spooky, so Curt blamed him. He wasn’t doing anything."

"Was he in the corral?"

"Yes, he was, but he was just standing there by
the fence. He wasn’t doing anything. It was the snow spooked the
horses."

"The old fool’s going to get himself killed
some time," the father said, "warndering around without the
slightest notion where he is."

"I wouldn’t worry about it," the mother
said. "He’ll look out for himself. Another cup of coffee,
Harold?"

"Please."

The mother filled a mug and brought it over and set
it down in front of him.

"Curt might be able to hunt at that," he
told her. "It’s just about stopped snowing."

"It wouldn’t make no difference anyway,"
she said. "Curt would hunt anything, once he got started, if he
had to make the tracks himself."

"And he’d get it too," the father
declared. "Curt’s about the best hunter I’ve ever known,"
he told Gwen. "He has a gift for it. He knows right away,
without giving it a thought, what other men can’t even figure out.
He knows what a cat will do; he knows what a deer will do, better
than they know it themselves. He’ll outguess them every time. He
doesn’t need tracks. Just a start, and he knows what they’ll do.
He’s a remarkable shot, too, remarkable, one in a thousand, one in
ten thousand. Why, I remember once . . ."

"I dor1’t guess Gwendolyn cares about Curt’s
fancy shooting enough to listen to all that," the mother said.

The father stared at her, the whisky slowness showing
in his eyes already.

Before he could speak, Gwen smiled at him, and said
"Harold told me about it. He must really be a wonderful shot,"
and looked back at her plate.

After a moment the father said, "He’s all of
that, and I then some. I’ll tell you about a couple of the things
I’ve seen him do, some time when it’s possible to have a little
conversation without these constant interruptions?

Gwen smiled at him again, and nodded. He was
encouraged.

“
G0 ahead and eat, my dear,” he said expansively.
"We should have waited for you, but sometimes it seems to me
we’ve lost even the most ordinary consideration in this wilderness,
all sense of the amenities of civilization. You have no idea the
pleasure it is, if only for that reason, to have you under this roof.
It may remind us of ourselves a little, and heaven knows we need to
be reminded."

He leaned toward her and smiled at her and raised his
glass. "A most left-handed compliment, I fear, but not intended
as such. The true pleasure, of course, is your presence."

Gwen hushed and made the quick, little smile again,
and looked back at her plate.

"Thank you," she said.

"N0, no; thank you," the father said, and
flourished the glass at her, and drank from it, and sat back with it
in his move or look at her.

Gwen picked up her fork, but then, to loosen the
close hold of his attention, looked away and
watched
the mother set a plate of potato and bacon on the floor in front of
Joe Sam, and a mug of coffee beside it. The old Indian, so upright,
and with his eyes gleaming, appeared unnaturally alert, as if he saw
and heard something none of the rest of them could, and had become
their sentry against what was waiting outside the door he stared at.

This black panther they all joke about, she thought.
He isn’t really seeing anything, though, she thought uneasily. Mrs.
Bridges is right in front of him now, but he’s staring at her the
same way he was at the door. He doesn’t even know she’s there.

“
There’s your breakfast, Joe Sam," the
mother said, raising her voice as if the old Indian were deaf. After
a moment she said, "Joe Sam," still more loudly. Joe Sam
didn’t move or look at her.

The father stirred uneasily in his chair and set his
glass down. "The old fool," he said, laughing a little.
"He’s seeing things again. The first snow always upsets him,"
he explained to Gwen. "Sometimes it puts him into a regular
trance. He can’t sleep, and he forgets to eat unless we make him.
But there’s no reason to be alarmed," he added quickly. "He’s
perfectly harmless. When he’s himself," he went on, "he’s
not at all bad help, either, as Indians go. We just have to put up
with these little spells now and again. But he’s all right, really.
Gentle as a lamb. There isn’t a mean streak in the old codger."

Gwen made the diilicult smile again, but clenched her
left hand in her lap, and thought passionately, Oh, stop it, stop it.
Stop talking about the poor old man as if he wasn’t even here.

The mother was prodding Joe Sam’s knee with her
foot. At last he looked up at her slowly and asked, "What do?"

"He’s as old as the hills, to hear him tell
it," the father said, laughing. "He can’t remember
exactly how old, though. Too old to remember, even, I guess."

Gwen looked at Harold for help, but he was staring at
his hands folded together on the table, and seemed to be thinking of
something else.

"Eat," the mother told Joe Sam. "Drink
your coffee. It’ll warm you."

"Not cold," he said.

His voice was deep, surprisingly deep out of such a
small, fat, old man, and with a heavy, male resonance in it that was
stirring. Yet he spoke small too, reluctant to make a sound, as if,
being compelled to speak, he was robbed of a power he stored for
greater uses, as if he were violated by the presence of another.

"Go on, drink it," the mother said. "You’re
shaking like a leaf still."

"Coffee good," he said politely, although
he hadn’t yet touched the mug.

The mother waited, looking down at him, bearing her
presence down heavily upon him. Finally Joe Sam took up the mug in
both hands and sipped at the coffee, holding the mug against his
mouth between sips. He appeared to test the coffee in his mouth like
an unfamiliar wine, and to be thinking about the way its warmth
spread out in him. He didn’t look at the mother again, or speak to
her.

"And eat something too, do you hear me?"
the mother said. She turned, drawing the bathrobe closer about her,
and came back to her place at the table and sat down.

"Him and his black painters," she said, to
no one in particular. "Every winter we have to go through all
this nonsense all over again."

Having said that, she put herself apart from the
others. The separation could be felt as much as if she’d gone into
another room. She closed her eyes and set one thumb against the edge
of the Bible, and opened the Bible where her thumbnail went between
the pages. She moved a finger down the page and stopped it, and
opened her eyes, and began to read where her finger pointed. She
moved her finger along under the words, and shaped each word slowly
and distinctly with her lips.

"Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in
the days when God watched over me; when His lamp shined upon my head,
and by His light I walked through darkness." She pointed out the
words for herself with her left hand, and with her right hand she
held the dressing gown closed tightly at her throat, as if she were
threatened, or as if it were cold in the room.

"It’s really quite all right, my dear,"
the father’s voice was saying. "It happens to him every year,
although, to be sure, he seems to be taken harder with it this time
than most." He chuckled.

"This black painter Curt was teasing you about
invariably arrives with the first snow, arrives in Joe Sam’s mind,
that is, and apparently it requires strong medicine to get rid of it.
That’s all he’s doing now, making his spells against the black
painter. Actually a mountain lion, we gather. He took Mrs. Bridges’
word for it, calls it a painter. Mrs. Bridges’ family is Southern,
you know. For a good many years now, Arthur has whittled him a little
model of a lion each fall, so he could have it when the snow came. No
idea what it really means to him, of course, but apparently it’s a
comfort. He carries it around with him, in a little sack under his
shirt, as a sort of charm against the real lion, I suppose. Only this
year, with this unexpectedly early snow, Arthur doesn’t have his
charm finished, which aggravates his condition, I suppose. Sometimes
he recovers in an hour or so, but it looks as if we might be in for a
long spell this time. He’s gone as much as two or three days,
sometimes. But there’s nothing whatever to worry about. Only have
to keep an eye on him to see he doesn’t wander off or sit down
somewhere outside and freeze to death. He’s never violent; never
known him to lift a hand against anyone."

Gwen looked across at Harold again, and this time he
was watching her and understood.

"It’s all right," he said. "Joe Sam
doesn’t hear a word we’re saying when he’s like this. I don’t
think he ever listens to us much anyway. He
doesn’t know enough English to guess what we’re talking about
usually, so he doesn’t pay any attention."

"You never told me very much about him,"
Gwen said, keeping her voice low.

"Well, now," said the father, "when a
young man has to ride all that way to get in a little courting, you’d
hardly expect him to spend many of his words on the hired help, would
you, my dear? Especially when he has as few as Harold has. Or want
him to, eh?"

"There’s not much to tell about him,"
Harold said slowly, and looking at his hands again. "We don’t
any of us know much about him, except maybe Arthur."

"Arthur," the father said, and snorted.
"I’d hesitate to put my faith in anything Arthur thinks he
knows."

"Arthur knows quite a bit about him, I guess,"
Harold said to Gwen. "But he doesn’t talk much about it.
That’s why Joe Sam trusts him, I guess. He talks to Arthur a lot."

After a moment, when Harold didn’t go on, Gwen
said,

"He must be terribly old."

"Well, now, as to that," the father said,
smiling at her, and then worked his lower lip up over his moustache
and down again, smiling at the same time. "I wouldn’t believe
all I see, my dear, if I were you. He’s no child, to be sure, but
he’s nowhere near as old as he thinks he is, either. They have no
real means of keeping track of their age, you know, and they grow old
much faster than white men."