The Jump-Off Creek (16 page)

He nodded. “Well, a dog's got to have the temper for it, and then the schooling.” He did not ask at all about Lars.

She said, after a short silence, “I have thought of getting a dog myself. There, I am finished with you, Mr. Odell. And I don't see that I have got you bleeding again anywhere.”

He pulled up his shoulders gingerly and sat up straight. “Thank
you, ma'am.” He stood and put his shirt on before he turned around toward her. “Herman Rooney has a place over on the Five Points. He raises good dogs. Both our dogs came from him.” He began to smile slowly. “We had one we'd bought over on the plateau, all he knew about was sheep.”

She smiled also, looking down. “If I make up my mind that way, I will get the directions from you, and see Mr. Rooney.”

“All right.” He looked past her vaguely. “Sit down, ma'am. I'll make up some coffee.”

“No. Thank you, Mr. Odell. I believe I'd better go on.” She gestured toward the hamper he had set down on the floor beside the platform rocker. “I have brought just a little milk for you, as I had it to spare.”

He nodded. “We've been appreciating your milk, ma'am. Tim makes a pretty good bread pudding when he's got the milk for it.”

She did not look up from putting away the scissors and the tweezers in her handbag. “Yes.”

“I'm putting bread in here for you,” he said, crouching over the hamper getting the milk out. “Tim got it made before he left home this morning.”

She thought of saying something against it. But finally she said, “That's very kind, Mr. Odell.”

He walked out with her, carrying the hamper. She coiled up the string handles of her purse, and looked down deliberately at that.

“Mr. Whiteaker is offended with me, I imagine,” she said suddenly. She gave him a short, flushed look.

He turned his face toward her in slow confusion. “I don't know, ma'am.”

Then she was miserably embarrassed. She looked toward the sidehill, making a little involuntary sound like a chucking. Mr. Odell continued to walk beside her silently. She could not tell if he watched her. She climbed up on the mule while he stood
holding the hamper. When he handed it up to her, she became aware that her mouth was drawn up rigidly. She let it go out flat again.

“Well, Mr. Odell, I'm glad you are mending well.” She looked straight at him, smiling slightly. There was still a great deal of heat in her face.

“Thanks to you, ma'am.”

She shook her head without otherwise answering. “Well, good-by, Mr. Odell.”

“So long, ma'am.”

She started the mule back up the slope. She kept from looking back until she stood letting down the rails. He had walked out in the yard to watch her go. She lifted her hand, and he raised his also.

Coming back to the Jump-Off Creek, the trail folded on itself and back again, going over the ridge between Chimney Creek and the North Fork. The way had been a misery in other weather, the trail deep cut with runnels, slick with mud, but it was dry now, hardened in the contour it had taken from the last rain. The mule found steady footing at one edge or the other of the dried-out rills. From the top there was a splendid view east and south to the horizon, the ranks of mountains dark and hunch-shouldered, the steep shadowed gorges parting them. She counted ridges, guessing out where the Jump-Off Creek cut its gully. But from here there were no marks of human society, the trees owned the world.

When she had been fifteen, sixteen, before the hope had worn away, she had used to imagine proposals of marriage, had composed elaborate replies, yes or no, depending on the imagined asker. She couldn't remember, now, any of those unspoken conversations. It had been a long time ago, or had happened to someone else.

When Tim showed up, Blue stayed where he was in the shed, sitting on a sawhorse, whittling at the piece of alderwood he was shaping to a rifle stock. He worked at it slowly, peeling off long thin curls of yellow wood with his pocketknife.

“You're working in the dark,” Tim said, coming up to stand at the front of the three-walled shed. Probably there was an hour of daylight left if you were up on the ridges or over on the flat land west of the Blues. But the sun had gone behind the rise of the hills, so it was dusky and cool in the bottoms. Under the cover of the shed it was shadowy.

“I can see,” Blue said. He kept whittling. Tim stood just under the eave, watching him. He hadn't unsaddled his horse yet. He stood holding it slackly by the reins.

“Are you cooking, then?” Blue asked him.

Tim nodded. “Their second cook bucked off a horse and broke his hip. They been without one since the middle of the week.” He watched Blue a little more. “They shut down on Sundays. I guess I can come up here on Saturday night and then go back down on Sunday night.”

Blue glanced toward him, surprised. “It's a long ride.”

Tim shrugged. “I can leave there as soon as the last dinner shift is fed. I don't have to do the cleaning up. They've got a couple of monkeys.”

Blue looked at him. Then he looked down at the rifle stock. He turned the wood and felt along it with his fingertips in the poor light. When Tim made a movement to lead the horse off,
he said, “The woman from the Jump-Off Creek came over here and picked the thread out of my back.”

Tim turned and looked back at him. In the dimness, standing at the edge of the shed, his face was featureless, black. “I guess you were on the Jump-Off Creek the other day,” Blue said.

Tim kept standing where he was. He didn't say anything. After a long silence, he said, as if he were answering something, “I cut her a few pine poles.”

Blue kept waiting, but Tim didn't say anything else. Whatever had gone on between him and Mrs. Sanderson, he didn't mean to tell anybody about it. The bay horse shifted its weight, backing up a step, impatient, and Tim took a step back too, getting away from Blue maybe, and the sound burst out loud, the hard metal echoes wowing off the trees. For a long-seeming moment they didn't move, any of them, as if they had to wait out a sudden little suspension, then the horse's head flung up, startled, eyes rolling white, and Blue came jerkily off the sawhorse, skidding his chin in the wood chips getting flat down on the ground at the back of the shed. He heard Tim flopping down behind the woodpile, knocking loose a little slide of stove wood. Neither of them said anything. They listened to the sound the bay horse made, thrashing his head weakly against the dirt.

In a while Blue said, low, “You got the Miller with you?” One or the other of them sometimes took a gun when they were out working, in case they had a chance to shoot something for meat. Lately, Tim had been carrying his about every day.

“The horse is laying on top of it,” Tim said.

So they waited. There were ropy streams of blood squirting out from the nostrils of the bay horse. He made only a low noise, wet, strangling. There wasn't any other sound, except the livestock grunting and shifting nervously. The dogs stood in the yard, wide-legged, poised, looking for something to go after. Blue watched them from where he lay flat at the rear of the shed, waiting. His back began to be sore, from the dive off the sawhorse.
The air got slowly cold and brittle, all the day's heat seeming to go straight up into the clear, colorless sky. Blue had on a thin shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He had sweated in it all day. Finally, warily, he got up on his forearms and rolled the sleeves down over gooseflesh, staring out against the failing light.

“He's gone,” Tim said after a while. “That was all he meant to do, kill the goddamned horse.” He said it roughly, in a sullen voice. Then he stood up.

Blue started to say something but Tim was already standing by then, looking big and bare in front of the shed. Nobody shot him.

“Shit,” Tim said, standing there.

Blue stood slowly. His back hurt. He found his pocketknife where he'd dropped it. He folded it up and put it in his pants pocket. He put the alderwood stock piece leaning up against the wall with the hand tools. Tim was pulling his gun out from under the dead horse. When he had it, he walked across the field to the edge of the trees. Blue didn't go. He walked out with a rope and got the dun mare and brought her back to where the bay had fallen dead in front of the shed.

She didn't like the blood smell. He had to go in the house and get some castor oil and smear it up her nose and then she stood still while he rigged a breast collar and a trace and tied up to the bay to drag the carcass away from the yard. The dun was small, stocky. She strained, pulling the big bay. Blue coaxed her. In the cold darkness the blood on the grass looked black, smoking. Behind the shed he let the fence down, got the dun to drag the horse through. Tim came and stood behind him, watching.

“He was long gone,” Tim said.

Blue picked at the knots. The carcass would probably still stink up the house from here, but it was out of sight, outside the fence. He took everything off the dun and lifted his arms once, twice, shying her back inside the big fenced field. Then he stood looking
after her, letting the rope hang down from his hand. He didn't say anything to Tim.

“It's between him and me,” Tim said, in a sorry, stubborn way, low-voiced.

Blue looked at him. “Which one of them?”

In a while Tim said, “That kid, Osgood.”

Blue figured he knew some of it. “I guess it was him bumped into your eye when you were out chasing nickels.”

Tim looked away.

“Now we got another damn dead horse,” Blue said.

Tim stared off past the dead horse into the trees. He shifted his weight. “It's between him and me,” he said, sounding only stubborn this time.

It was cold and dark. Blue coiled up the rope slowly in his hand. “Okay,” he said, and he walked off toward the house. Tim followed him in after a while and stood behind, watching, while he fiddled with the cold stove, getting a fire going.

After a lengthy silence, Tim said, “I never thought he'd shoot the horse.” Blue didn't answer him. It wasn't his horse. He didn't know why he was filled with bitter resentment. Tim looked down at his boots. In a while, unexpectedly, he said, “I was twenty years old, or twenty-one, when you and me worked for Joe Longanecker on the Rocker S.” Like he was picking up the end of something.

Blue looked at him. Then he looked away. “That was a long time ago,” he said, sighing.

Tim waited again. Finally he said, in a low voice, “Did you ever think about marrying?”

Blue kept from looking around at him this time. “No,” he said. “I never did.” He heard the way it sounded, the stung surprise in it, and was embarrassed.

Tim ducked his head. He didn't say anything else.

Blue shut the door on the firebox. Then he walked out of the house, across the dark yard to the shed. The sky was brilliantly clear, spangled with stars. He fumbled around getting an armload of stove wood. His back was tender. He was careful how he bent over. When one of the dogs came to see what he was doing, he said irritably, “Get out of the way.”

Behind the wall of the shed, something bolted off through the brush noisily. The sound of his voice had started it. In a while it would come out again, or something else would, getting at the bay horse.

After the bear was killed, while he had lain painfully in the darkness, in the rain, waiting on Tim, he had shot off his rifle once, into the black trees. He didn't know why he had done that. Before very long he had heard them again, tearing at that big bear and his dead horse, Jay. They hadn't been very close to him. He hadn't been scared. He didn't know why he had done it.

On the Fourth of July Lydia went down to Evelyn and Mike Walker's. The weather was hot and windless. She wrapped the jars of milk round with wet rags before setting them down in the hamper packed with saw chips, and wet the saw chips as well, with the clear, cold water from the Jump-Off Creek.

She had been months encountering people singly or by twos: her heart turned over when she saw there were already six men or seven standing about in the yard as she rode the mule slowly up the narrow track off the Oberfield Road. Gradually she saw among them Tim Whiteaker, Blue Odell, Mike Walker and his hired man. The others she did not know.

It was Mr. Odell who came out to meet her. He held the mule
and put a hand up for the hamper. “How are you, Mrs. Sanderson.”

“Hello, Mr. Odell. This is heavy.”

“I've got it.”

She climbed off the mule and stiffly pulled down the skirt of her good blue dress without looking toward the several men watching her.

“I don't know if you've met all of us,” Mr. Odell said gently. He was watching her as if he might be appraising her in some way.

She looked toward the others, stiffening her mouth in a deliberate smile. “No.”

He pinched her elbow lightly in his hand and walked her over there. “Mrs. Sanderson,” he said, gesturing vaguely. “We have a few for you to meet. This is Carroll Oberfield. He raises cattle down at the end of this road.” She put her hand out and Mr. Oberfield shook it politely. He was a short man but thick-set, his hands thick from front to back and his head shaped quite round and placed solidly on the broad neck. She had it from Evelyn Walker that he was well-to-do, and that his wife lived in Maryland. They had met and married suddenly while Mr. Oberfield was on a tour East, calling on relatives. But she had been in delicate health, or of delicate constitution. She had lived with him briefly, in 1883 or '84, and not since. He spoke his wife's name occasionally. So far as anyone knew, they had never divorced.

The man who stood next to Carroll Oberfield put out his own hand abruptly. “I'm Jim Stallings, ma'am. I live over at the Goodman Station.” He had a big rough face, reddish-skinned, large-featured, a smile that showed big teeth.

Beside him was an old thin bachelor, Herman Rooney. She remembered that he was the man who raised dogs. When Mr. Odell said his name, he nodded his head and took her hand lightly without shaking it. He was scrupulously clean, smelling of bath salts and shaving lotion, his mustache neatly waxed.