“Wasn’t no chicken shit,” Eldon said quietly. “You think leavin’ was easy and then stayin’ gone?”
“What would you call it then?” The kid looked up at him and glared. “You run off with yer tail between yer legs like a whipped pup.”
His father picked up the whisky again and held it to his lips. He closed his eyes. He sighed and set the mug down on the floor again without drinking. “Hurt is all,” he said. “Big bad hurt.”
“You coulda made a choice too.”
“Them were tough years, Frank. Losin’ my father. Workin’ my ass off tryin’ to take his place. Didn’t never get to be no kid. Not proper, least ways.”
“I never got to be no kid neither.”
“At least you was taken care of.”
The kid laughed. It was bitter and hollow and his legs were bouncing up and down. He rose and marched to the fire and stirred it around with a poker, causing embers and ash to fly around in clouds. He arranged the logs and then arranged them again. Then he set the poker against the hearth and
stared into the burst of orange flames he’d created. When he spoke again he stayed looking into the fire. “You think that’s all there is to it. Bein’ taken care of? Goin’ to school and bein’ picked on because you don’t know who the fuck you are, bein’ called Injun, wagon-burner, squaw-hopper, Tonto?”
“Just like me,” Eldon said.
“I ain’t nothin’ like you,” the kid said.
“Some parts, maybe.”
“No parts. I never been no chicken shit.”
The kid walked back and sat on the chair and slumped down into it, facing the fire. He put his elbows on his knees and jammed his fists up under his chin, closing his eyes. “I get it,” he said finally.
“Do you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I get that you were scared to go to jail. But you never done it. Jimmy did. Jimmy did what you shoulda done. So I get it. Maybe you didn’t wanna face your shame about that.”
“I’da had to give up Jimmy to the law if I stayed.”
“He wasn’t family.”
“He was all I had.”
The kid looked at his father. He felt tears coming. “You had her,” he said, his voice breaking. “You had a mother.”
His father met his look and they stared at each other. The kid shook his head to clear his eyes and his father looked away. There was only the crackle of the flames.
“Besides, Jenks’ friends woulda half killed me if I’d stuck around,” his father said finally.
The kid turned away. His face was set hard and grim in the flicker of the flames. “Gettin’ half killed once’s gotta be better’n bein’ half alive forever.”
When he didn’t say anything further his father stared at him wide-eyed. Then he leaned down and took up the mug, his hands shaking crazily, and he drank all of it off in one huge gulp.
“Yeah,” the kid said, nodding. “Yeah.”
The kid lay under a thin blanket close to the fire and heard rain dripping from the eaves over top of his father’s ragged snores. The dampness deepened the chill and he shivered some and hitched himself closer to the hearth and laid another couple logs onto the embers and then laid back down and drew the blanket tight around him. Eldon lay on the floor a few feet off. The kid watched him for a moment or two and saw him shiver and shake. He got up and put his blanket over him. The fresh logs flared and there was a wild sear of heat and he had to back off a few inches. Becka came and set a kettle close to the flames and sat down beside him. They watched the fire without speaking. They heard Eldon moan and shift about behind them.
“He’s worse,” the kid said. “Just in the last day or so.”
“What he done was brave. You know that, huh?”
“Done what?”
“Tellin’ you. That took some grit.”
“I don’t think it’d take much grit to tell what ya already know.”
“Maybe. But it sat in his gut a long time. Most’ll just give stuff like that over to time. Figure enough of it passes things’ll change. Try to forget it. Like forgettin’s a cure unto itself. It ain’t. You never forget stuff that cuts that deep.”
“A story like that woulda been good to hear before now, knowin’ nothin’ about where I come from an’ all.”
“You didn’t grow up with him.”
“No.”
“Them that raised you then, they never said nothin’ about your mother?”
“I asked once. But I was told it was a father’s job to do, tellin’ me about her.”
“He never come out with it?”
“Whenever I seen him he was mostly always drunk or drinkin’ an’ he never did make much sense. I got raised good. Never wanted for nothin’ an’ I got no gripe with any of that.”
“Except that they never said nothin’ about your mother.”
The kid stared at his father’s sleeping form. Becka rose and poured water from the kettle into a teapot and the kid smelled mint. She poured each of them a cup and the kid set his between his feet. “I’d look at women in town sometimes or at gatherin’s we’d go to wonderin’ if she was one of them or if maybe she’d been walkin’ by me ev’ry day an’ I never knew.”
He stopped and picked up the cup and stared at it wrapped in his hands. “I get that some things take some workin’ up to. But he could die tonight fer all I know.”
“He won’t.”
His father moaned and the kid regarded him. “He don’t seem much of a warrior to me.” He sipped at the tea.
“Who’s to say how much of anythin’ we are?” Becka said. “Seems to me the truth of us is where it can’t be seen. Comes to dyin’, I guess we all got a right to what we believe.”
“I can’t know what he believes. He talks a lot, but I still got no sense of him. So far it’s all been stories.”
She only nodded. “It’s all we are in the end. Our stories.” She stood and put a hand on his shoulder and gave it a pat. Then she poured some more of the tea in his cup and padded
off to the cot, where he heard her rustle about some and then everything was silent.
In the morning she warmed up porridge with water from a tin she kept in the rain barrel and cut up berries to sweeten it. The kid ate but all his father could do was finger the rim of his bowl. He picked a berry or two out and sat there moving them around in his mouth. When he was finished the kid gathered their few supplies and carried them out to the shed where he watered the horse, brushed and saddled her. Becka walked his father out. He could tell by the look of him in the daylight that he was weaker. He had a deeper yellow cast and he shook with the effort of walking. It took both of them to help him up onto the horse, and the heat from his skin was powerful. The kid took rope from his pack and cut it into three lengths. Together he and Becka tied his father’s feet to the stirrups and his hands to the pommel. Then they walked off a few yards and Becka put a hand on the kid’s shoulder.
“Give him some of this when he needs it,” Becka said. She handed him a rough hide tied up into a bundle.
“What is it?” the kid asked.
“Ain’t no medicine I know can help him perfect. But I made this up for my own father when he was near the end. It’ll soothe him when it counts.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me yet. When he gets too weak to even take in booze he’s gonna be sicker. Booze sick. Hard and ugly. He’s a lifer. Been drinkin’ all his life and stoppin’ sudden ain’t no good idea. It ain’t gonna be no pretty picture. You won’t be up to thankin’ me much when that happens.”
“What can I do when that comes about?”
“Can’t know. The bad news is he’s gonna be a terrible handful. The good news is, on toppa what he’s got goin’ now, it ain’t gonna last long. But give him some of this when the worst of it is on him.”
The kid kicked at the dirt. “I guess I better get to it then. But I do mean to thank ya.”
“Ain’t done nothin’ no one else would do no different,” she said. “I was glad of the company.”
“Me too.”
“You could stop by when you’re on your way home.”
The kid could only nod solemnly.
He tied the sack of medicine and their supplies behind the saddle and led the mare out of the shed. It was cool and damp and he could feel the chill of winter on the breeze. He hauled a deep breath into him and stood looking at the trees along the ridge to the west, undulating and serpentine, and found himself wishing suddenly for home. When he looked down Becka had disappeared back into the shack. The bulk of his father slumped in the saddle and the cloud of the horse’s breath was all that framed the day in front of him and he walked the horse across the rough yard and into the trees.
THE WALKING WAS DELIBERATE
. The horse seemed to sense the dire situation and he let go of the reins and she was
content to plod along behind him. After the rain the land was a gumbo of smells. Pitch and bog, the tang of spruce, and the dank, rancid smell of wet bear tracing the weave of the creek to his left. He drew it all into him, closed his eyes a few paces and held it, let it fill him. The night and his father’s story had drained him and he needed the feel of the land at his feet and the sounds of it to quell the clamour in his head. His father. He thought about what Becka had said and worked at finding some pattern to the shards and pieces of history he’d been allowed to carry now. They jangled and knocked around inside him. It felt like jamming the wrong piece into a picture puzzle. Like frustration alone could make it fit the pattern. He cast a look back over his shoulder at his father, who seemed to be asleep, but he’d mumble when the horse’s step over a rock or a root made him lurch in the saddle. When the kid looked back at the thin trail they followed he felt worn and makeshift as the trail itself. He had no idea what was about to happen. He didn’t know if he could carry out what they’d set about to get done. He looked back over his shoulder at his father again. The sky was clearing and the sun splattered light against the green-black boughs of the trees and the birds came alive with it and he lost himself in the feel of the land shrugging itself into wakefulness.
He never saw the bear until the horse snorted and reared. They’d come around a long bend in the trail that followed the creek and he hadn’t paid attention to the change in the direction of the wind. He cursed himself for his carelessness. The bear appeared suddenly. It was a boar grizzly and it stood on its hind legs on the rocks by the creek that ran about twenty yards away. The bear itself hadn’t heard them over the rush of the creek.
The horse clattered on the rocks of the trail and the kid scrambled back and flailed about for the reins that had come loose in his hurry. The mare was sunk back on her hind quarters as the bear roared and his father swayed dangerously, unable to centre his weight. The kid found the reins and braced against the yank and pull of the mare. He walked toward her and she shied and shimmied. He could hear the bear huffing behind them.
“What the fuck?” his father said and pulled at the ropes that bound his hands to the pommel.
“Be quiet,” the kid said. “We got a bear here.”
“Jesus.”
Eldon settled in the saddle as much as he could and the stable weight made the mare easier to manage and the kid was able to grab hold of the halter and she calmed some but twitched nervously. When he could handle her he walked her off to a copse of birch and tied her and loosed the ropes that bound his father and helped him off the horse. He laid him in moss beneath the birches. He could hear the bear prowling slowly along the creek, cuffing at stones and growling low in the throat.
“Whattaya think yer doin’?” his father croaked.
“Can’t run,” the kid said. He slung the pack from his back and dropped it on the ground beside the tree. “Gotta face him.”
“Are you nuts?”
“Gonna have to be.”
“He’ll kill ya.”
“If I’m scared shit he could.”
“You ain’t?”
“Yeah. But he don’t gotta know that.”
He hobbled the horse with the rope from his father’s foot and secured the halter tie to the birch. Then he walked out toward the bear. It stood swinging its head back and forth ten yards up the trail. He hadn’t wanted to turn them away from it. He knew that retreat with their backs toward the bear was to show fear. Now the only way was forward. He held his hands out wide and tried to make himself appear as large as he could. He stood up on his toes and opened his eyes and mouth wide and growled. The bear lowered its head and stared at him through the top of its eyes. It swayed its head and shoulders. There was a rumble from its throat. He could see that it was a juvenile, maybe in its first year away from its mother. The boar hadn’t grown the grizzly hump at the shoulders and it had yet to fill out its massive size. Still, it was dangerous. It seemed to want to hold the trail and the bend in the creek. The kid took a slow step forward and spread his arms out wide again and growled with the stride. The bear lurched to its hind feet. It stood there all seven feet of it and bellowed. He could hear the horse shy and buck some in the trees. He took another slow, measured pace forward. The bear roared again. It echoed back to him through the trees and he heard the horse’s ragged whinny.
He moved again. The bear shook its head and there was a spray of spittle. There were only eight paces between them now. The bear dropped to the ground and cuffed at the trail with both fore paws. There was a sudden trench in the dirt. The kid slid forward another step and held the outstretched posture. He could smell the high, bitter scent of the bear. He growled and drew in as big a breath as he could until he thought his ribs would crack. The bear shifted left and right. He took another step. He could see right into the boar’s eyes
and the bear held the look and raised its snout to sniff. The kid’s heart seemed to clang in his chest but he moved forward in another sliding step and the bear kept up the lateral shifting, and when the kid let the breath out and began striding forward and raising his arms outward again the bear broke. It turned and trotted off a few yards, then it raised its snout and sniffed again. The kid held his pose. The bear growled its discontent. Then it turned and walked off slowly, looking back over its shoulder every few paces and the kid didn’t move an inch. When it reached another bend in the trail the boar broke into a trot and then a full gallop when it reached the trees, and the kid could hear the snap and break of branches as it took off up a ridge until the clatter of stones was all that remained of its presence.