The Jump-Off Creek (24 page)

Afterward, when the kid had gone on down into the trees, he stood up unsteadily and palmed some of the mud off his coat and his knees. He and Blue didn't look at each other, didn't speak. Tim was still shaking a little. He kept brushing at the front of his coat. When blood splashed on his hand, he touched his face in surprise. His mouth was cut, his chin sticky and smeared with blood. He wiped his mouth on his coat sleeve gingerly.

Blue began to make a new cigarette, watching how he did it, his hat shadowing his face. “Shit,” he said, low, without lifting his head. Tim looked over at him, across the arm he was holding up to his mouth. Then he looked away. After a while Blue said, “What now?” He was smoking his cigarette, looking down toward the edge of the trees where the two wolfers had gone.

Tim looked there too. “I don't know,” he said glumly. Then he said, “Maybe it's over with.” Blue looked at him.

They walked down warily off the bench, carrying their rifles. They scouted the edge of the woods. The trees dripped quietly. The prints were a smeared mess, but they found a couple of boot marks going downhill and a long skid in the duff where maybe a horse going down too fast had slipped and then caught itself.

“They went on down, both of them,” Tim said.

Blue had hidden the horses out of the way in a little gully below the edge of the trees, holding them there on a peg and a rope. The saddles were wet. They hadn't brought anything to wipe them off with, so they sat on the wet and rode downhill silently in a chilly dusk, holding the rifles in their laps and watching out for the kid and the Montana man without talking about it. After the first couple of hundred feet, Tim never saw any boot marks. He wondered if the Montana man had stopped finally for Osgood and they were both up on the buckskin, or if the kid had gone off the trail, running scared into the brush, or hiding there. Sometimes, Blue hipped around in the saddle and looked back up the trail behind them as if he was thinking about the kid too, but he didn't say anything about it.

Below the mountain, along the little north-running creek, they let the horses have some water. Tim's own mouth was dry, it tasted of blood, but he didn't want to get down off the gray. He felt stiff and achy.

“Danny wasn't with them,” Blue said.

Tim looked at him. “No. I guess he wasn't.” He didn't know why that made him feel better. Then he knew: he was glad it hadn't been Danny he'd taken that shot at.
Jesus Christ.

“Maybe he's not wolfing anymore,” he said. “They might have split up.”

A gun went off, reporting flatly under the wet trees, and both the horses started, throwing up their heads. Blue said, “Oh,” in a surprised way, and went down over the shoulder of the dun.
Somebody shot again, splashing up a jet of water, and in the dusk along the hillside Tim saw the little yellow spittle of the gun. He shot at it twice, with the gray jumping under him, before he lost a stirrup and went off clumsily, holding the Miller up high and hitting hard on his hip and his shoulder in the frigid water. He lay there stupidly a moment, out of air, and then grabbed hold of Blue by a pants leg and dragged him out of the water, up under the brush along the edge of the creek.

He squirmed around, getting the rifle up where he could shoot it. He looked at Blue once and then looked at the dark trees and held his breath in, trying to steady his hands. The creek made a small, padded, inoffensive noise running downhill in front of where he lay. That was all he could hear, except his heartbeat booming in his ears. He waited, watching the trees. His chest burned. After a while, after quite a while, Blue made a small sound, a release of air. Tim looked at him. “Blue,” he said, starting to cry. Then he looked away. He looked at the horses, trailing their muddy reins, standing high-headed and fidgety a little way down the trail.

When it was dark enough, he crawled out of the brush. He left Blue there and crawled down along the creek in the dark. He sat with his back to a tree and waited, watching the woods and the brushy place where Blue was. He had to keep his teeth clamped down hard on the shivering. A small moon came up but nothing moved in its light except the two horses and the narrow white creek.

When it was daylight he stood up stiffly and waited, standing there, and then he went up the hill. He found Osgood lying on his side in the leaves with his hat squashed up under his head and his hands outspread in front of him holding onto the gun, with the long knobby wrists showing below the cuffs of his too-short jacket. Tim had killed him, shooting wild and scared off the back of the damned horse.

The first day of November was as bright and warm as June but overnight the weather soured and in the morning the sky was black, the ground frozen hard, the wind fierce out of the northwest. Rain began to fall in the afternoon, sleety white, rattling against the frozen ground. The goats and the mule stood under the low roof of the shed, bunched in a close, taciturn flock. On the goats' long dirty fleece, ice hung in peas, hard and filthy. Lydia let them have a few of the yellow squashes she'd put by for these occasions, jealously doling them out by turns. In the lurid twilight she pinched Louise between her knees and let down the milk which froze as it touched the pail, forming a thin bluish crust on the cold tin.

She brought the frozen milk up to the house and thawed it on the stove, Lars's big coat thawing out too while she stood there in it shivering and drinking the milk down hot. The wind hissed through the holes in the house where the cement chinking had cracked and fallen out. It was too cold to do any handwork, or even to write. She heated stones on the stove and took them to bed and pulled the quilts up to cover her head. The frozen rain ticked against the shingles of the roof and gusted up against the walls with a sound like gravel. The black wind racketed in the trees. She pulled the rag rug up off the floor and covered the quilts with it.

When daylight showed between the cracks of the house she unwillingly gave up the bed to get a fire made in the cold stove. There was a heavy rime of ice on the rug and on the stove, frozen puddles on the floor. She laid her clothes on the stove and came
back to bed to lie shivering watching them thaw. Afterward, she broke up the ice on the floor, swept it up in a hillock and thawed it in a kettle for the animals. The door was iced shut. She had to kick and pry at it stubbornly until the seal broke and the door swung to let her out.

The freezing rain still fell on the wind. From the eaves of the house and the shed and the privy, ice hung in long white braids. The trees, the stumps were glazed and satiny. The little Jump-Off Creek trickled bare and blackish-looking, caged in ice.

Between the house and the shed the ground was beaten down smooth and the ice overlaid it in a slick, opaque sheet. Her boot soles were worn smooth as the ice. She took a couple of slipping steps and went down sideways, holding the kettle up sloppily level so the water wouldn't be much spilled. Her wrist was cut on the sharp ice, between the edge of her glove and the sleeve of her coat, and she stood again slowly, sucking on it, and then bracing the sore hand on the wall of the house, setting the heels of her boots down watchfully, deliberately, and holding the big kettle low. She went a long way around to the shed, staying close to the brush fence where the uneven ground gave a little better footing. The rain fell slanting and gray, ticking on the brim of her hat, blowing up under it hard and stinging as sand.

She came all the way around slowly to the east end, the open end of the shed, before she saw the caved-in corner of it where the wind had dropped a tree across the back edge of the roof. The logs had slipped down there and the roof had given way, slumping in like old thatch. One of the does, it was Louise, lay dead in the frozen straw at the back of the shed. Rose and her kid and the good steady mule had bolted out, were gone.

She stood holding onto the brittle, icy twigs of the brush fence, staring at this defeat. Then grimly she tipped out the water and carried the empty pail back to the house. She wrapped up her boots in strips of rag, pushed a piece of rope and the mule's bridle down in a pocket of Lars's coat, and went out again.

She went up the clearing along the rough track of the log-drag because they would have gone with the wind behind them. Under the trees, the way was a tangle of downed limbs and windfalls, the brush splayed out with the weight of the ice. She made a deliberate trail through it, tramping on the brittle white branches. She went past the bare tree-cut up the gorge of the Jump-Off. The gully stayed narrow, pinched between the ridges, only widening a little wherever a seasonal creek had cut a trough crosswise to the Jump-Off. She went painstakingly up each of those dead ends, breaking a track through the icy brush and listening for the goat's bell, or whistling for the mule when she could get a sound out of her cold stiff chin, numbed lips.

She had been up this far, fishing the creek, but it was another place now in the white glaze and wreckage of the ice. Limbs broke and fell in a shower whenever the wind gusted, scattering needles and knives of ice. There were countless downed trees as well, and trees still falling intermittently, so that when the wind came up hard she stood in one place and waited, with her shoulders hunched up in a reflex, as if they would take the weight of what might hit her. The rain kept up, blowing along her back. Where her hair straggled out below the hat, it froze to the collar of the gray coat; when she turned her head or bent it down, she heard her hair breaking, as brittle as twigs. There was no track of the mule or the goat under the ice. But she kept the wind behind her and went on doggedly.

The creek divided. She stood at the fork, not able to choose, and then saw the thing lying dead, half in the water, at a distance up the left branch. She stayed where she was, looking at it, blinking her eyelashes against the freezing rain. Then she went up slowly. It wasn't the mule. She had to come right up to it to be sure. It was a thin old cow, black and white, under a skin of ice. The cow's knees were bent under a little, as if she had knelt there first and then tipped over along her side. The carcass was whole, not eaten or cut into. There was no telling what had killed the cow,
but no bait had been made of it anyway. Under the scabby ice, the brand had the plain shape of the Half Moon.

Lydia stood in the sleeting wind and stared at the cow. She had kept away from Tim Whiteaker's since Mr. Odell was buried. She had felt a dim fear of calling on him—something not to do with the cruel shootings, but with Mr. Whiteaker's bare and burning look. She didn't know why the old dead cow with his brand on it drove her now suddenly to tears on his account. The tears were cold, few, and straightaway they froze. She had to take a glove off and pick open her icy eyelashes. She peered unhappily along the icebound gully where the cow lay. The wind blew hard, showering ice in a loud, jagged spattering. She pulled up her shoulders until it was done and then determinedly went up the fork of the creek.

She had come away from the house without eating anything, had not even drunk coffee. Hunger was not much of a difficulty, she shut her mind to it. But the narrowing branch of the creek was sealed in ice and she suffered from the want of water. She knew enough not to suck on ice: it deepened the thirst. Twice, she beat through the crust of the creek with a stick and a rock and got a hand down to the water underneath, bringing it up in palmfuls, insufficient, and teeth-aching cold.

Eventually she found the mule. A tree had toppled in some other wind, the weight of it pulling over the root mass intact so the big wheel of dirt and root, in a white glaze of ice, stood high and flat upwind and Rollin was in the dark lee of it with his head down, abject and solitary.

Mules and horses were social, she had never known one who liked to be alone. Rollin, after the other mule was dead, had got to like the company of the goats. Often he trailed Rose in at night, following the bell. Lydia had kept out a little hope they would be found together. So she came up to the mule dourly, as if finding him was the discouragement. She got the bridle out of a coat pocket and put it stiffly on him. Ice had balled in his feet
and she hadn't brought a pick, might not have been able to chip his shoes clean anyway. So she didn't get up on his back. She took him by the bridle and led him back downstream—he had come up this way without the goat, or Rose would have been found there with him.

He wasn't happy, facing into the sleet. He pulled his head around stubbornly and stopped, hunching up his hindquarters. She dragged at him and hit him with a stick and finally he came around. She found she had to walk in front of his muzzle, breaking the wind, or every little while he would stop again and try to put his rump to the stinging rain.

The backs of both her hands ached dully. She had been frostbitten along the backs of her hands once and ever since had been prone to freeze there when the weather was bitter. The gloves she had were sheep's suede with the fleece turned in, they were good gloves but too big for her hands—they had been Lars's. She regularly changed about which hand held the mule's lead, and kept the other one always shoved down in the pocket of Lars's coat. She pulled up the collar of the coat and sank her chin in it and stumped thick-footed through the icy brush. She went by the dead cow without turning her head.

At the fork she turned out of the wind and went up the other branch. Shortly, the way became rocky, narrow, steep. She left the mule with his lead made fast to a tree and kept on a while, climbing up cautiously, holding on to the brush. The rocks were slick, glazed with ice. Finally she stood up straight, gasping air, and looking ahead along the rough steep gorge.

Damn
. She could not articulate it. Her mouth was dry, her tongue thick and cold.

She peered into the wind, back down the way she had come. The mule stood sullenly with his whiskery muzzle trailing ice in a long white beard.

She climbed down slowly to the mule and stood a moment with her forehead against his cold neck and then she led him bleakly
down the gully of the Jump-Off Creek. It was hard, going down against the wind. She kept her chin down, taking the sharp rain on the crown of her hat and stumbling shortsighted with her stare fixed on her boots. Her eyes teared helplessly and the tears froze so that she had to take a glove off every little while to pick the ice from her lashes. Wherever the ground was smooth, the mule was apt to slip on his icy shoes. She undid the rags from her own feet and put them numbly on his. But she was never done with persuading him. She hauled him down the long way home slowly, by fits and starts.