The Jump-Off Creek (15 page)

“Mr. Odell is on the mend I hope.”

“He's getting along all right,” he said.

“I believe he ought to have the stitches out by now. Yours ought to be picked out as well.” She stood and got her embroidery scissors and wordlessly pulled the thread out of his cheek while he sat there on the edge of the bunk, holding the coffee cup on one knee, balanced. He looked carefully past her until she was done. Then he looked down at his coffee.

When she sat again, she said suddenly, as if she were taking up old needlework and not dropping a stitch, “It was a poor place. We had some apple trees and a field we usually put to barley and a kitchen garden that was about an acre.” After a silence she said a second time, “It was a poor place,” and then, “The ground was rocky. We kept goats and sold the milk.” She looked at him straight, but not as if she was answering any question he had raised. “I did all the farm work there for more than fourteen years. I am not afraid of work and I'm used to getting by on little. I believe I can make a living up here all right.” She said it in a dry way, plainspoken, so that he believed her, and didn't feel a need to say that he did.

She stood and poured him more coffee, then sweet yellow cream, taking only the cream herself, without coffee. He didn't know much about her means, just the little she had said and what he could see for himself, but he figured she would be up against it this first year, eating poor as Job's turkey by way of making sure her money and her provisions held out to the next spring. He had seen enough of that kind of living, had lived that way
himself more than once. She might be glad of an offer out, or it might be her heels were dug in, she was set and single-minded. He figured he knew which it was. He sat looking into his coffee.

“I expect you wouldn't want to try marrying again,” he said in a slow way, and feeling the heat come up slowly in his face.

She looked at him. He kept his eyes on the cup of coffee held carefully level on one knee.

“I don't know if we could get along,” he said. He looked at her quickly and then away. For a moment the only clear thing he felt and recognized in himself was dread.

“I don't suppose we could,” she said after a silence.

He nodded. He rubbed his forehead with the heel of one hand and frowned past her, out the open door across the flat to the wooded ridge. “Well,” he said, “I just wondered about it.”

She made one of her peculiar brief smiles. But she said nothing else, only sat still holding her own cup tenderly with both hands. Her whole face was bright.

He drank the coffee down in steady long swallows and stood. “I guess I'd better get back,” he said.

She stood also, so that in the small room, for the first time, he became aware that she was tall as he was—taller.

“Thank you for the work done, Mr. Whiteaker. Will you take home some milk and cheese.” She sounded staunchly polite.

He hunched his shoulders. “No. Thanks. I had the time,” he said. “I didn't mind doing it.” He went past her, out of the dim, hot little room into the clear bright heat outside. The bay horse sidled away from him, he caught at it impatiently, tightened the saddle, rose onto it. He remembered the axe left leaning against the wall of her house but he didn't get down for it because the woman had come out into the yard by that time and stood with the sun behind her, looking up at him.

“Good-by, Mr. Whiteaker.”

He touched his hat. “So long, Mrs. Sanderson.”

“You'll tell Mr. Odell that I will come in a day or so to get out his stitches.”

“All right.”

Her face was pulled up in that frowning squeeze, there was bright pink along the shells of her ears and the thick straightness of her jaw.

He turned the horse out. Nothing was holding still inside his head. He didn't feel anything he could name, except that restlessness.

He was most of the way across the clearing when she called his name. He looked back to see her walking quickly up behind him holding his heavy axe by the head. He thought about waiting where he was but then he started the horse back toward her.

“You left this, Mr. Whiteaker,” she said, as if he might have some question about it.

He took the axe from her. She seemed to wait for him to say something but he couldn't get any words to come out. In a moment she smiled in a very stiff way, turned and started back, holding her good blue dress up out of the dirt with both hands. She looked brittle, he could see the wings of her shoulder blades pushing up rigidly under the dress.

He remembered suddenly the time he had quit the Rocking Horse Ranch. He hadn't thought about that in a while. The boss had had a fine wife, she was a big strong Swede with masses of faded blond hair plaited down her back like a girl, and a laugh that was low like a man's but quicker and easier. She and the boss had five or six children. Tim had been maybe twenty years old then, and he had thought she was on her way toward getting old. She might have been thirty, or thirty-five. Both years he was there, she had the hands up to the house for a Christmas supper. He had never worked any place before that where the hands ever ate sitting down with the boss and his family. Afterward, in the parlor, they had all stood around with cups of hot applejack and she had brought out for each of them some thing she'd made and wrapped up in tissue paper—it was peanut brittle candy one year, and the other time a little round hazelnut cake soaked in brandy. She liked to talk, and she managed to talk with each one of them about some personal thing so they would know they hadn't escaped her notice. She asked Tim about the stubborn, bigheaded dun horse he was riding at that time. And about a bone he had broken in his little finger. Whenever she would laugh, he would catch the boss looking at her tenderly over his cup of applejack. The third year as it came around to Christmas, Tim had quit the outfit. There weren't any damned jobs to be found at that time of year and he had come near starving to death before spring. He hadn't known why he'd quit, when he was twenty. But after a few years, he began to know.

Once when he had been pretty drunk he had asked a whore to marry him. And when he had been about thirty, he had ridden a couple of times over to Choteau, Montana, to see a seventeen-year-old girl who soon after had married a logger and moved down somewhere near Missoula. He was forty-one now. He thought,
Suit yourself
, as he sat looking after Lydia Sanderson's narrow back. But there wasn't any great bitterness in it, just a vinegary, helpless discontent.

9
June (Sunday)
Rode the long way to see Evelyn Walker today, we had a poor short visit, her husband's hired man sick in the barn and she must go back and forth to care for him, and help her husband with the work, the man being too Sick for it. Weather has been hot, if I were Home I would long since have taken the stove down, setting it outside under tarp roof so to cook w/o heating the house red hot. But we are so High up here, nights and mornings are still frosty Cold and I do enjoy the stove then & quilts besides. I am sure Mrs Walker is right about the corn, it would sit & sulk, as indeed the pumpkins are doing which I put in in spite of her good advise. The gray Mule which I named Bill has never put on wt as I hoped, instead got thinner & now has a cough & eats little. I have tried every Remedy and fear the worst. I keep him from Rollin as much as can be. I could not stand long against the Loss of both. Mr Whiteaker has come and cut a score of poles from straight young Pinewood and tho I dislike his Purpose I am glad enough to have them. I have promised myself & the patient Goats I will have a shed & good stout fence before the Weather turns. I know I will be at that work the whole Summer as I am a poor logger and must go a ways to find good trees since A has cut all the ones along the near flat and the ridges are too steep to log. I believe I may use Mr Whiteaker's poles before that, in walling up the Little House, the hole being well dug now & the Seat I have cut out and been planing & sanding in the evenings as the Daylight has stayed longer. I have had Mr Whiteaker's offer of Marriage. I believe the only clear thing I felt on the occasion was Fear, as I have been long getting my Independence and am much afraid of losing it through some Need or Circumstance. If, as I feel, the proposal was forced by Loneliness, I am very sorry on that account. Only I shall not submit to the Tyrant myself, having by long denial learned the value of Self Rule.

There were a few old cows and three horses standing in long shadows on the grass, and a few brown birds on the brown water of the pond. From the fence line above the house she could see neither Mr. Whiteaker nor the Indian, Mr. Odell.

She liked the way their house sat at the foot of the long sloping park, with the little lake in front of it and the steep wooded ridge standing high behind. The house was dark, unkempt, but she admired the cold-cellar and the site and the post and rail fence going around most of the big meadow, and the steep-roofed shed where stove wood was stacked up in long ricks, and tools and saddles had a place to hang out of the weather. There was not a prosperous aspect about any of it, but it looked well established and was soundly built. She set a high value on those things.

The dogs, when they saw her, came trotting out stiff-legged. They never barked. She stayed up on the mule and rode down silently past them, around the edge of the water into the yard. Mr. Odell was under the eave of the shed, hammering nails into a shoe of a brown horse. She hallooed but he never heard her over the tapping of the hammer. Then finally he saw her. He started a little and straightened up and came out a couple of steps into the yard to wait while she rode in.

“Hello, Mr. Odell. I called out but you didn't hear it.”

“How are you, Mrs. Sanderson.” He took off his gloves, dusting them lightly against his pants leg. His face was wide, all mouth and thick eyebrows, and a heavy forelock of dark brown hair. He had a sweet, rare smile he let out long and slowly: she had liked him as soon as seeing it. He stood unsmiling behind the brown horse, holding on to the gloves with both hands.

“I told Mr. Whiteaker I would get the stitches out for you,” she said, not smiling herself.

She saw by his face, he was surprised. “Tim could probably pick them out all right.”

“Well,” she said. “I am here now.”

She had been in an agony of dread, watching the house obliquely for Mr. Whiteaker, but as Mr. Odell reached to take the hamper she handed down, he said, “Tim, you know, is over at Meacham.”

She shook her head.

“There is a logging camp has set up over there. We heard they
were short a cook. He went over to see about it.” He made a vague gesture with the hand not holding the hamper. “I guess we could use the cash. If he gets on there, he can quit in a couple of months when we get busy again.”

She said, “Yes,” unnecessarily, as she followed him across the yard.

The house inside was hot and dim, smelling faintly of yeast. The top of the table was wiped clean, the board floor had lately been swept.

“Will you just sit on the bench, Mr. Odell?”

He sat on the low bench obediently. She took out the fine scissors, and the tweezers. “Do you want this shirt off, ma'am?” He was watching the scissors with evident anxiety.

“Yes please, Mr. Odell.”

He turned his back to her modestly and pulled the shirt over his head and sat hunched on the bench with his elbows resting on his knees. She began slowly to pick the stitches out of the yellow-painted flesh. She felt him holding still, breathing carefully through his mouth.

“You look a great deal better today than when I saw you last, Mr. Odell.” She had in mind, in an indefinite way, keeping his attention from the scissors.

“I'm getting along,” he said after a while. “I can get up on the saddle, so I don't complain. I guess it wouldn't do me any good.” If he was letting out his wide slow smile, she could not see it from standing at his back.

In a moment she said pointlessly, “You have got all the calves branded by now.”

“Yes, ma'am. That's done, unless we've missed a few. Rounding up cows in this country is like working a Chinese puzzle. You're never finished with it.”

She began to smile, without happiness. “I will have to get used to that. Where I lived, we would walk out to the field and chide them in with a stick.”

He nodded in a stiff way, holding still. “I guess I've done some
of that. When I was a kid, I worked a couple of years in Clatsop County, it's nothing but dairies over there and flat as a plate.”

She had given up, on account of Mr. Odell, several large fancies having to do with the Wild Indians of the West. Now several smaller ones came undone all at once. She had seen, through the window glass of the train in the towns she had come through, a few Indian men and women standing in queues, solitary Indian men sitting on curbstones or walking up a street. Mr. Odell was her only great experience of them.

“Oh, Mr. Odell, I'm afraid I am hard put to imagine you pailing cows.”

He may have smiled. He made a low wordless sound of amusement. “It was a long time ago, ma'am.” Then he said, as if it bore on the matter, “I never saw a cow dog before I was twenty-five, I guess.”

Through the door he had left standing open, she looked for the two dogs. They had gone to lie in the shade of the shed, disregarding her, now that they had watched over her approach of the house. She said, “I have never heard you or Mr. Whiteaker call the dogs by name.”

He lifted his head in surprise. “Is that right?” He twisted his head around stiffly, looking for the dogs. “The yellow one is Tag. The ugly brindle is named Hangdog.” He seemed to think about it and then he said, “I had horses I named and ones I didn't, but dogs always need a name, I guess.”

She said, “Yes. I believe that's true.” Then, slowly, “My husband had a hound he kept for hunting but that dog was only a nuisance around livestock.”