The letters about Christmas began the following September. He’d had no word from him since the night of the tryst. The letters outlined the turkey, the feast he would bring, the midnight expedition to get the tree on snowshoes to haul it back on a toboggan. They gave vague clues about presents. He wrote about gathering around the woodstove in the old man’s house and singing old carols and listening to the cold snap the roof timbers. Each letter held something more and the kid felt himself grow excited despite himself.
The old man and he never gave much energy to Christmas. There was always a gift or two, but they leaned toward the practical: a hunting knife, snare wire, a new halter for the horse, a saddle blanket and such. He splurged on a turkey though and store-bought pies and a jar of sweets. For the kid, Christmas was all about the quiet, and the biggest part of it was the long hike the old man and he always took while the turkey roasted. They’d head off in a different direction or angle every year. They snowshoed in for two hours, built a fire, and drank strong tea, and in that cold and barren-feeling world, the kid came to know Christmas as a time when the land and its emptiness were perfect. Now and again the old man would tell him a story. But it was the thrill of the silence they walked through he loved the most. The land sleeping. The hushed atmosphere where even sound was absorbed and realized in the great white sanctity of winter. That was Christmas to his mind.
“Don’t be gettin’ all crazy in the head about this,” the old man said.
“Right,” the kid said but he couldn’t hold back the excitement that built up in him with each of the letters. The promises were lavish. He would come on the bus and they would celebrate. The kid let himself stoke the fire in him and when they went to meet the bus in town two days before Christmas, his father wasn’t on it. They waited for the next one. He could taste the salt of tears in his throat and he cursed himself for weakness. But not until that next bus turned the corner at the edge of the parking lot and he and the old man stood there watching it leave did he let it out of him.
“Son of a bitch!” he said and kicked at a chunk of ice.
The old man stood and watched him. The kid stomped around in a circle and hammered his fists into his thighs and he could feel the rage. He felt his jaw quivering with the need to cry, to wail, to scream. He raised his fists in the air and fell to his knees in the snow.
“Frank,” the old man said. “Frank. Shoulda never let him near ya.”
“Ain’t pissed at him,” the kid said. “Pissed at
me
.“
“Ya done what anyone’d done,” the old man said.
The kid sat back, still on his knees in the snow. “After what I seen?”
“Can’t hold it against yourself for bein’ a kid.”
“I fuckin’ know better and I ain’t a kid.”
“Ya got a heart is all. No shame in that.”
“Feels busted up and sore right now.”
“But ya got to move through it.”
“Why?”
“Ain’t no choice,” The old man raised the kid’s chin with
one hand. They knelt there in the snow and muck, the wet seeping into their pants. “Y’all right?” he asked.
The kid wiped at his nose with a sleeve. “I will be,” he said.
“Yeah. Ya will. I know that.”
By the time they got back to the farm he was beyond it, ready for the return to his predictable life, the feel of the woodstove heat on his face comforting and real.
HE WOKE IN THE EERIE HALF-LIGHT OF PRE-DAWN
. There was mist rising off the creek and when he roused he startled a deer come to drink at the far shore. The sky was a dim grey cut with a pale blue. The day would be warm. The stones he’d fallen asleep on had stiffened his back and it took long minutes of stretching to work the kinks out. He walked to the stream and knelt on the gravel and dipped his hands in to splash on his face and neck. Then he drank. He held the last mouthful in his cheeks and rinsed his mouth and spat on the stones and rose and walked back to where he’d left his father. He was sleeping. It didn’t seem that he had moved all night and when he put a hand to his brow he found it hot. He covered him with his own blanket from the pack. Becka had put a small sack of supplies in there without his knowing and he was surprised to open it and find bacon, bannock, and beans. He cut the top off the beans with his knife and laid the bacon on the flopped over lid and set it by the edge of the fire once
it got going. Then he sat on a rock and rolled a smoke. His father stirred at the smell of the food.
“God,” he said. “Smells mighty good.”
“Figure you could eat now?” the kid asked.
“Some. Got some water?”
The kid rose and handed him a cup and he drank slowly. His lips looked dry and cracked and he rubbed some of the water along them. The kid handed him the last of the smoke. “How you feel?” he asked.
His father bent his back and grimaced and put a hand to the right side of his belly. “Not good,” he said. “How much more of that stuff we got?”
“It’ll hold long as you don’t gulp it. Ya gotta drink it slow. Measure it out. Save it. It ain’t hooch.”
“Speakin’ of hooch. Did ya dump it?”
“You said.”
“Damn.”
“I never chucked all of it,” the kid said.
His father stared at him blandly. Then he scratched at his whiskers and lay on his back looking up at the sky. The kid went to the fire and turned the can with a forked stick. The bacon sizzled and spat grease. When it was ready he used a pair of sticks to move the can onto the grass and sat and waited while it cooled. He hung the bacon off one of the sticks and carried it to where his father lay. He held it out to him and he took a strip and stuck it in his mouth. He worked the bacon around in his mouth and then spat it out. “Can’t do it,” he said.
“Try the beans.”
“A little, I guess.”
The kid knelt and put some of the beans on the tip of the knife and held it out. His father licked them off. He leaned
back against the tree and closed his eyes. The kid shook him and fed him more of the beans. He was hotter now. The kid could feel the heat thrown off him like a wave so he walked to the creek and soaked his extra shirt and used it as a compress on his father’s head. He ate some of the beans himself. When he was finished he broke camp, saddled the horse, and kicked dirt and sand onto the fire and danced on it to make sure it was out.
“You take a lot of care, don’tcha?” his father asked. His voice was a croak.
The kid nodded. “Got to. When you’re out here alone there’s no one on your back trail.”
“I left a lot of back trail in my time,” his father said.
The kid kept stomping down on the remains of the fire. “Musta been lonely.”
His father took the wet shirt off his forehead and touched it to each cheek. He sipped some water from the canteen and when he spoke his voice was clearer. “I can’t reckon lonesome. Seems to me a man makes a choice somewhere along the line that he don’t need no wingers or others walkin’ with him. I know I did.”
“Seems a good choice to me,” the kid said. “Reason I come to know things out here so good is on accounta feelin’ better alone.”
“Figure we’re a pair of oddballs?”
The kid stopped stamping the fire and stepped out onto the grass. He kicked the residue of ash from his boots and took his time rolling a smoke. He handed the smoke down to his father and lit it for him. He busied himself rolling another for himself. He felt his father watching him but didn’t raise his eye from his hands.
“I held words better in my head than speakin’ ’em mosta my life,” his father said. “They never come out arranged the way I wanted. But I could listen good. Always was partial to a good story. Places I went there was always someone with a whopper or a tall tale and I liked hearin’ them. Went lotsa places, met lotsa men, but never had no chit chat, no banter, could never lay ’em out all loud and hilarious like other men I come to know. Guess I kinda envied them that.”
The kid smoked and stared at the play of sunlight on the waffled surface of the creek. “The old man always said people waste a lot air talkin’ about nothin’. I grew partial to that notion.”
“Still’n all, I wish I’da come out with more,” his father said. “More of what I seen, where I gone. Gettin’ to this point a fella sees the lack, I guess.”
“Call it a lack, not talkin’?”
“Feels like it. Ain’t gonna be no one to speak for me when this is all said and done.”
His father smoked and crushed the butt against the trunk of a tree. He looked up at the kid, who watched him, and he tucked the dead butt into his pocket. He exhaled long and slow and raised his head to the sky. Shadows fell on his face and the branches pushed by the breeze made it appear to move, to shift, to alter, and the kid felt hollow watching life dance across his dying father’s face.
“Stories get told one word at a time,” he said quietly. “Somethin’ your grandmother said. Stories get told one word at a time. Maybe she was talkin’ about life. I didn’t have the ears to hear it though.”
The kid waited for more. His father let his head drop, his chin nearly resting on his collarbone. His eyes blinked and he
closed them finally and lay there, breathing deeply, and the kid thought he had passed out but he opened his eyes and turned to him. They regarded each other without speaking.
After a while, the kid helped him onto the horse and he could feel the bones in his back and ribs. He tied his feet and hands and his father hung his head and stared at the ground. The horse shimmied and he swayed in the saddle. The kid shouldered the pack and whistled and the horse started to walk.
They followed the creek another two miles and then cut to the north up a swayback ridge. The kid could see bear and deer scat and the tracks of skunks and weasels. The bush was thin, mostly big ponderosa pines and spruce and fir. There were large, open stretches strewn with rocks and they walked through splatters of holly strung along the edge of the trail. His father was unconscious. The horse seemed to sense the fragile nature of her load and walked lightly and they made slow time going up the ridge and when they crested it, the day had swung to noon.
He found a glade. There was deep moss in the shadow and he stopped the horse and untied his father and helped him down. He was soaked. It felt as though he were burning from the inside out, and the kid laid him on the moss with the pack under his head and roused him and got him to drink some of the medicine. It dribbled at the corner of his mouth. He slumped back with his head on the pack. The kid walked off and paced among the trees. His father lay with his eyes closed.
“You sleepin’?” the kid asked.
“Can’t,” his father said. “She’s a harder fight now.” His voice was frail and shaky. “How far we got to go?”
“I looked out off the edge of the ridge. We put in some good time we can make it by evenin’ if yer up to it.”
“No choice.”
“All right.”
When they’d rested he got his father back on the horse and led her down the far side of the ridge into the cut of a narrow valley. He remembered it. It was one of his favourite places to trap. There were small streams that wound their way down the sides of the mountains on either side and there were small meadows and bogs where fur-bearers came to drink. He told his father about his forays here. Now and then his father grunted and he took it for encouragement.
“Come here when it got too noisy in my head,” he said. “When the old man got too old for the ride he let me make the trip alone and I got to prefer that. Never was afraid. Never seemed to be a place for fear. When ya come to know a thing ya come to know its feel. I know this place by feel nowadays.”
“You’re a good man,” his father croaked suddenly. “The old man done good turnin’ ya loose out here. He know how good ya are out here?”
“He knows.”
His father slumped back down in the saddle and the kid led the horse along in silence. When they rounded the turn at the foot of the mountain the kid could see the ridge his father sought. They walked steadily. By early evening they were at the foot of it and the kid tightened the ropes at his father’s feet for the climb. His breath was ragged and weak and the kid could feel the heat of him. Still, he shivered. He could only manage to wet his lips from the canteen the kid held up. The trail looped up and around the base of the ridge and it was easy walking and the horse stepped lazily along, the
sway of her gentle as if she understood the depth of her mission. He led her along and the evening was bright and crisp and there was birdsong everywhere. The backside of the ridge was thick with fir, and as they climbed higher and more easterly the slope relinquished itself to pine and saplings of aspen and birch and patches of wild rose and sudden juts of mountain ash and juniper.
His father groaned now and then and the kid stopped the horse to check on him but he made no other sound. They walked through the early part of the evening and when they crested the ridge the kid walked the horse to the rim and looked out over the valley. A river plowed through the belly of it. It was turquoise from the melt of the glacier higher up that was the source of the flow and there was a wide flood plain that was heavily stoned at its edge, giving way to scrub pine and thickets of cedar and then the slender thrust of maples, red willows, and clumps and pokes of mountain grass and autumn wildflowers. He watched a doe deer and fawn step gingerly out of the reeds at the river’s edge. A black bear waddled out of the bush a mile or so farther downriver. From where they stood the mountains arranged themselves along the far side of the valley in a long green line, pocked with granite cliffs and bordered with snow on the higher peaks. The valley twisted off to the west and disappeared around the hem of the western range behind them.
His father stirred and the kid took the horse to a grove of ponderosa pines thirty feet from the precipice. He untied him and helped him down. His father slumped against him and the kid carried him a few yards before he could get his feet under him to stand shakily with one hand on the kid’s shoulder. He set him on a log and went back to see to the horse.
He carried the saddle over, spread the blanket on the ground, and eased his father down onto it, propping his head against the saddle facing the edge of the ridge.