Bucking the Sun, page 30
Hugh was watching his brother with something like vexed admiration. Darius had always been the kind who’d send one present to cover three boys and could get away with it; the same way that steam engine toy sailed in from the Clydeside, here courtesy of Darius Devilment Duff was the latest plaything from the Blue Eagle, tossed in the family face. Owen, there with your instruction-manual look on you: it runs on peroxide, doesn’t it, this one. Quite the device, really. What’s that wife joke—”You screw it on the bed and it makes mince of you,” eh, Darius? Of course it may depend on how easy you are to mince.
For once Darius was hoping Hugh could see under the surface of him. As of today, Hugh, the old question is over. We are quits, in the matter of Meg. I cede and concede. When I uttered “I take thee, Susannah,” we each gained a wife. Man, will you not credit that?
“Least we can do is give her a chance,” Bruce said after they were home.
“She looks like she knows what to do with a chance when she gets one,” Kate said.
“Huh!” was all Neil said, afterward.
“I guess!” said Rosellen.
“That look on your mother! I thought she was going to give up the ghost, right there!” Charlene said the instant they were home. She yawned and added: “I don’t know, I kind of got a kick out of Mrs. Darius Duff.”
Owen, busy mulling everything, said nothing.
February’s glacier of cold air slid down from the north until it covered Montana from corner to corner, then stood there for two solid weeks.
Her fingers waiting at attention on the keys, Rosellen read that over. Owen had given her a funny look when she poked her head into his cubbyhole and asked how a glacier behaved. But he reeled off enough of an answer that she could give the next part a whirl:
Temperature readings were its cutting edges, red stubs of mercury in the bottoms of thermometers across six hundred miles, saying—
Pushing with her toes, she scooted to the window in her typing chair, its rollers raucous in the noonhour-empty office, peeked out at the king-size Ad Building thermometer, then trundled speedily back.
—repetitiously 35 degrees below zero at noon, 38 degrees below zero at dusk, 45 degrees below zero in the night.
With a slight frown she looked that over, yanked open her desk drawer and thumbed through the used edition of SAY IT WITH SYNONYMS that Neil had given her for Christmas. Fingers at the ready again, concentrated on the keys, then kersplickety, taking out repetitiously with an overstitch of xxxxxxxxxxxxx and tapping above it the substitute monotonously.
People tottered with the cold when they had to be out in it.
Herself, to name one. Merely to come to work, a person had to load on so many clothes she felt like she was traveling in a closet.
Fort Peck’s around-the-clock moviehouse gained new patrons, workmen bundled with everything they could get on, clumping in to stand behind the back row until they thawed out enough to trudge off on their errands again.
Neil. Shivering in, for each day’s hypnotic five or ten minutes of gray-and-white newsreel. (What’s this Hitler? How does a place like Spain get by with everybody fighting everybody?)
A diesel boredom—
She backspaced and put the x key back to work.
A diesel monotony broke the silence of the frigid spell and simultaneously made Fort Peck go even more groggy—the engines of the bulldozers were never shut down in weather this cold, merely throttled onto idling all night long.
Kate swore that the most effective lullaby on both Bruce and the baby was a Caterpillar D-8.
Mealtimes at the cookhouse, the air went stale with cigarette smoke and the accumulated pack of not recently bathed bodies—
Meg swore she was going to don Bruce’s diving suit for her job, if winter and odor didn’t let up soon.
—but then the instant you stepped outside, the air’s keenness would all but take the lungs out of you.
As if reminded, Rosellen stilled the machine-gun chatter of her typing, threw her shoulders back and took a seismic breath. Here it was, keys and brainstorms going together at last. If Owen sat in there sopping up everything about the dam and glaciers and whatever else came his way, if Proxy was an obvious whiz at the, hnn, tricks of her trade, if Darius knew how the Queen Mary was put together, if Neil recognized every rattle in the truck, she was just as much on top of her vocation today. Drunk on writing, she couldn’t believe the clock telling her that lunch hour was nearly over and she was about to have to go back to manufacturing paychecks. She hit the carriage return with ecstatic force, there were enough minutes left if she kept slamming away at the words on the paper.
So, in the shacks of Wheeler, the shanties of Park Grove and McCone City and New Deal, the sod huts of Free Deal, the tidy but not overly warm houses of the Corps townsite—
Charlene, the poor abused thing, claimed you could get frostbite from the nailheads in their walls.
—the houseboats along the wintered-over river—
Darius scraping a peekhole in the iced window of the houseboat so that he could look out at more ice.
—the parlors of the Happy Hollow brothels and the saloon precincts of taxi dancers—
Proxy. Woohoohoo. Talk about a family addition.
—in beaverboard kitchens and drafty living rooms, Fort Peck’s people fed fires and hunkered in to wait out the record winter of 1936, the year they had all been looking for.
He rattled when he coughed, and he was coughing a lot.
Never one to let a little thing like a bad cold get him down, Hugh rode out the spasm, cleared his throat and blew his nose, sucked in as much breath as he could, and, glad that the weekend was nearly here, put his mittened hands to the wheelbarrow’s handles again.
Here at the mouth of the tunnel the river would one day siphon into, along with the three other huge boreholes through the base of the dam, outcroppings of crumbly weathered shale still were being shaved down with rocksaws. The men who had been assigned onto the barrow crew for the winter merely had to trundle the sawcuttings to the conveyor, which—
To his surprise, all at once his wheelbarrow was on its side, and he was on his, too. His head, light as a balloon, seemed to be somewhere above his fallen body, watching, taking note of the confusion, the scream of the rocksaw suddenly shut down and the rest of the crew shouting for help. He went in and out of consciousness, and in the moments of light-headed clarity he felt quite offended. Technically speaking, he was not even in the tunnel, where pneumonia bred.
• • •
Over the weekend, Hugh Duff grew old.
Owen saw it immediately in the white whiskers salted among his father’s stubble, when he and Charlene stopped by the hospital again before work on Monday morning; his father had always been an immaculate shaver. Recuperation, this was supposed to be, the oxygen tent having done its part, Hugh’s lungs clearing and his breathing better, but the grizzled figure in the hospital sheets had a long way to go yet to reconstitute into anything like Hugh Duff.
“How the hell are you?” Owen let out before realizing it was not the best sickroom hello.
“Pretty well done in, if you want the truth.”
“Yeah, well, it’ll take a little time for you to mend,” Owen said uneasily. He cut a quick glance to Charlene, wishing she would pitch in; women were better at this convalescent kind of talk, weren’t they? When she simply kept on the automatic smile you send someone you don’t like but have to have sympathy for, Owen had to do the next part, too: “How long are they going to keep you here?”
“Don’t know yet.” Hugh went into a coughing fit that was hard to watch. Then his chest heaved a few times, and he was having to breathe with his mouth. “Until I can whistle opera, I suppose.”
“We ought to at least get you a shave,” Owen said in a bothered tone.
“Your mother says she’ll tend to that,” Hugh coughed out, then shifted in the hospital bed, twirling his finger to indicate he wanted it cranked up some. When Owen brought him up to a semi-sitting position, the heaving lessened and he managed to finish: “It’s her best chance to scrape me and see any real result.” He brought a hand up to his face and paused it there, as if surprised at the seriousness of the bristles. He scratched his whiskery neck while he considered his visitors again. “How’s the Charlene?”
“I’m getting by, Hugh,” Charlene produced. Dressed for business, hair done in exemplary fashion for her day’s customers, she looked slick as a racehorse. “Where is Meg anyway? We figured sure she’d be—”
“She went off to the cookhouse to smuggle me a real breakfast. The food in here is a threat to one’s health.”
“Jaarala’s grub is bound to help, yeah,” Owen laughed. “Anything else we can bring you? Name it.”
“Years off my life, Ownie, would be all. I swear to Christ, this time last Friday I was your age.” Hugh’s voice was reedy, but reporting to its pulpit. “I don’t know whether it’s me or—” he grimaced at the hospital window to indicate outside, all of Fort Peck. “But I went through winters on the place that would frost the tallywhacker off a brass monkey—sorry about the language, Charlene—and never came down with anything like this.”
“Dad”—Owen was exasperated without quite knowing why—“this is the worst sonofabitch of a winter any of us have ever seen. If it’s any consolation, that’s what it took to get you down.”
“One more record, eh, Ownie?”
“I have to run.” Charlene’s words were meant for Hugh, but she was looking toward Owen. “It’s almost opening time. Don’t do anything in here I wouldn’t do, Hugh.”
Charlene had barely gone when Owen checked his watch. “I’m going to have to clear out of here pretty quick, too.”
Weak though he was, Hugh jumped all over that. Owen didn’t like being around sick people, did he. Well, Hugh didn’t either, particularly when he was one of them. “Christ in his nighty, Owen, stay until your mother gets back, can’t you at least?”
“Sure.” Owen watched him in some alarm until Hugh’s breathing calmed down, then went over to the window. He was surprised at how hard it was to discern the dam from here. In fresh snow camouflage, the plateau of fill nearly blended with the bluffs of the valley, chalkings of outline against the greater gray of sky. Blots of gravel showed through on the dam in a few places, and the frozen crater lake that was the core pool could be picked out if you knew where it was, but the prairie’s flat winter light didn’t give much of a sense of scale. Owen turned away, moved restlessly around the hospital room. “You having plenty of company?”
“Everybody, yes. Except your uncle and esteemed aunt. No, that’s not quite the case. They must have been here while I was asleep. Darius left me some high-toned reading.”
Braced for Marx, Engels, Sorel, or THE LITTLE RED SONGBOOK, Owen picked up the slim olive volume from the bedside stand. William Blake. POEMS AND ILLUMINATIONS.
“ ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright,’ ” Hugh rasped, “isn’t he the one?”
“Yeah, other stuff too,” Owen answered slowly, holding open the pages marked by a slip of paper. “This, ah, your place marked here?”
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem,
in England’s green & pleasant Land.
“No, Darius must’ve left that in.” Hugh seemed to go deep into thought. “Darius has never given me so much as a whit before. I must really be a goner.”
“You’re not any kind of a goner, damn it,” Owen slapped the book shut, “you’re going to be up and around and ornerier than ever in no time now. Then you’re supposed to take it easy for a while, is all. Make you a deal, along that line. How’d you like a new job come spring? I’ll get you on as a watchman. Give you a chance to build yourself back up and—”
“No.”
That first word was more than audible, but Owen thought he heard wrong on the rest of Hugh’s answer. It had sounded as if his father wheezed out:
“I quite like poking traps.”
• • •
Hugh, do you know there are times when this is the way I most love you? Absent.
Meg attacked the chores the instant she got home from the hospital each evening, woodbox–coal scuttle–waterbucket, windowshades drawn down even though they waved discouragingly in the drafts around the window casings, a rag rug flung against the bottom of the breezy door for all the good that would do, too. Hugh’s regular hand at the shack, she did miss. But not your main habit. The drift that starts in you, so that you begin to be not yourself even before you’re off onto one of your jags and then dragging yourself home looking like death warmed over. Absent entirely is preferable to that, Hugh, and although I hate to speak ill of the ill, I am relieved when this skimmed version of you in the hospital is out of my sight, too. The water in the kitchen stove reservoir was warm enough, barely, to wash herself up a bit before going to bed. I remember, in one of our fights about leaving the homestead, or perhaps it was English Creek or even Inverley, you told me I could dampen spirits at a funeral. Maybe I am not much good at mending the world. My father did think he was a tailor of souls—what can a reverend think if not that?—but in the end he could not even fashion mine, a stroppy young kissing fool named Hugh Duff did that for me. She undressed there in the kitchen by the stove and shimmied her flannel nightgown on as fast as she could, then raced for the bed. But Hugh, what I mean about love for you in absentia is that the hard parts of us do not rub together then. In memory or for that matter anticipation we cushion each other to ourselves, or at least I do you. Of course, under these covers—when there’s not such a mountain of them, anyway—we manage it, too. You tell me I am sweet to the bone, here, and I in all honesty can say the same for you. But elsewhere—otherwhere—the veers you make . . . What is there about the Duff squad of manhood? You with a will to drink the world dry, while Darius falls for a dyed mopsy at the drop of an eyelash. “Don’t be so high and mighty, Meggie,” he said to me on their shivaree night. That was uncalled-for. I do wish now, though, that I had not told him back, “Better that than the other—low and insipid.” You see, Hugh, there have been times when Darius seems to fasten in where you curve away from me, when Darius and I . . . That avenue was gone now. Or was it. A man’s term with that Proxy was normally a matter of minutes, not a lifetime of marriage. So, Hugh, I hate your habit of risk. But I perhaps grasp it better than you think . . . Meg, curled in the middle of the bed, sank into the chilly sleep of the alone.
• • •
When the weather moderated—it had no other way to go—and the temperature at last was up around zero, the dam crews picked up at their usual schedules, except in special cases.
“We do what?” Bruce asked incredulously at the winter harbor. “What the hell for?”
“You’re putting us at what?” Darius asked at the same moment in the boatyard. “Whose bright notion is this?”
“What the dickens can I tell you?” the foreman answered, so swaddled it could have been either Taine or Medwick, and gave a not-my-doing shrug. “You guys have been detailed off to this, until spring gets here. You’re icemen now.”
• • •
“Take a seat, Duff.” First names did not come naturally to Major Santee.
Owen sat and watched the major frown at his memorandum. He wouldn’t know a good idea if it came along and bit him in the butt. This was the Friday before ice became the new career of Darius and Bruce, and Owen’s idea had not yet made its way through the channels of the Corps. God only knew, he thought, how furrowed up the major would be if the memo called this ice plan what it actually was, the Murgatroyd process.
It had come to Owen while he was passing the first morning of March by staring alternately at the white river and the mostly white calendar leaf, equally unyielding. Now a mere six weeks until dredging was supposed to start, and there lay the river under a lid of ice thicker than a railroad bed. In Owen’s most pessimistic moments he figured this big winter’s armor of ice would be off by about Labor Day, and in his optimistic ones he thought it might only take until the Fourth of July. In any case, an April 15th startup of dredging gave every indication of being a long way out of the picture. So, okay, if the Archangel Murgatroyd right this minute came along and asked what you most wanted done, it would have to be to melt that sonofabitching ice off the dredging areas, wouldn’t it. Murg, my friend, that would do nicely, get the damn stuff out of my way by the fifteenth day of Ap—
Owen sat up then. Huh uh. No. Christ no, melt didn’t really matter. Just get the SOBing ice off, so the dredging material would have time to soften up and the dredges would have a clear channel to move in. The right kind of crew, of ice cutters and haulers, could do that.
“You’ve already been to the colonel, I suppose?” Major Santee said now, wafting the one-page memo up and down a little as if trying to guess its weight.
“Unofficially,” Owen said carefully about having gone over the major’s head, and with even more care: “He’s made it known the dredging schedule counts for quite a lot with him.”
Santee passed his frown over Owen and on out to the Missouri. “There’s a world of ice on that river. How do you expect to cut enough of it to make any difference?”
Owen did not smile, didn’t even grin, but nonetheless his expression was that of someone fortified by all the aces in the deck.
