Collected Stories, page 57
Young Schulz took the shovel and Ray stood out of the trench, blowing. The violent work seemed to have made him more cheerful. He said to Schulz, when the boy stopped and reached a gloved hand up the hole, “She comes out of there in a hurry she’ll run right up your sleeve.”
Schulz grunted and resumed his digging. The untroubled sun went over, hanging almost overhead, and an untroubled wind stirred the old grass. Over where the last terrace of the floodplain rolled up to the prairie the first gopher of the season sat up and looked them over. A dog moved, and he disappeared with a flirt of his tail. Ray was rolling up his sleeves, whistling loosely between his teeth. His forearms were white, his hands blackened and cracked as the charred ends of sticks. His eyes touched her—speculatively, she thought. She smiled, making a forgiving, kissing motion of her mouth, but all he did in reply was work his eyebrows, and she could not tell what he was thinking.
Young Schulz was poking up the hole with the shovel handle. Crouching in the trench in his muskrat cap, he looked like some digging animal; she half expected him to put his nose into the hole and sniff and then start throwing dirt out between his hind legs.
Then in a single convulsion of movement Schulz rolled sideward. A naked-gummed thing of teeth and gray fur shot into sight, scrambled at the edge, and disappeared in a pinwheel of dogs. Molly leaped to the heads of the horses, rearing and wall-eyed and yanking the light buck-board sideways, and with a hand in each bridle steadied them down. Schulz, she saw, was circling the dogs with the shotgun, but the dogs had already done it for him. The roaring and snapping tailed off. Schulz kicked the dogs away and with one quick flash and circle and rip tore the scalp and ears off the coyote. It lay there wet, mauled, bloody, with its pink skull bare—a little dog brutally murdered. One of the hounds came up, sniffed with its neck stretched out, sank its teeth in the coyote’s shoulder, dragged it a foot or two.
“Ray …” Molly said.
He did not hear her; he was blocking the burrow with the shovel blade while Schulz went over to his horse. The boy came back with a red willow stick seven or eight feet long, forked like a small slingshot at the end. Ray pulled away the shovel and Schulz twisted in the hole with the forked end of the stick. A hard grunt came out of him, and he backed up, pulling the stick from the hole. At the last moment he yanked hard, and a squirm of gray broke free and rolled and was pounced on by the hounds.
This time Ray kicked them aside. He picked up the pup by the tail, and it hung down and kicked its hind legs a little. Schulz was down again, probing the burrow, twisting, probing again, twisting hard.
Again he backed up, working the entangled pup out carefully until it was in the open, and then landing it over his head like a sucker from the river. The pup landed within three feet of the buckboard wheel, and floundered, stunned. In an instant Molly dropped down and smothered it in clothes, hands, arms. There was snarling in her very ear, she was bumped hard, she heard Ray yelling, and then he had her on her feet. From his face, she thought he was going to hit her. Against her middle, held by the scruff and grappled with the other arm, the pup snapped and slavered with needle teeth. She felt the sting of bites on her hands and wrists. The dogs ringed her, ready to jump, kept off by Ray’s kicking boot.
“God A’mighty,” Ray said, “you want to get yourself killed?”
“I didn’t want the dogs to get him.”
“No. What are you doing to do with him? We’ll just have to knock him in the head.”
“I’m going to keep him.”
“In Malta?”
“Why not?”
He let go his clutch on her arm. “He’ll be a cute pup for a month and then he’ll be a chicken thief and then somebody’ll shoot him.”
“At least he’ll have a little bit of a life. Get away, you dirty, murdering … !” She cradled the thudding little body along one arm under her mackinaw, keeping her hold in the scruff with her right hand, and turned herself away from the crowding hounds. “I’m going to tame him,” she said. “I don’t care what you say.”
“Scalp’s worth three dollars,” Schulz said from the edge of the ditch.
Ray kicked the dogs back. His eyes, ordinarily so cool and gray, looked hot. The digging and the excitement did not seem to have taken the edge off whatever was eating him. He said, “Look, maybe you have to go back home to your folks, but you don’t have to take a menagerie along. What are you going to do with him on the train?”
But now it was out. He did blame her. “You think I’m running out on you,” she said.
“I just said you can’t take a menagerie back to town.”
“You said maybe I had to go home. Where else would I go? You’re going to be on roundup till July. The ranch is going to be sold. Where on earth would I go but home?”
“You don’t have to stay. You don’t have to make me go back to ridin’ for some outfit for twenty a month and found.”
His dark, battered, scarred face told her to be quiet. Dipping far down in the tight pocket of his Levi’s he brought up his snap purse and took from it three silver dollars. Young Schulz, who had been probing the den to see if anything else was there, climbed out of the ditch and took the money in his dirty chapped hand. He gave Molly one cool look with his dirty-ice eyes, scalped the dead pup, picked up shotgun and twisting-stick and shovel, tied them behind the saddle, mounted, whistled at the dogs, and with barely a nod rode off toward the northeastern flank of the Hills. The hounds fanned out ahead of him, running loose and easy. In the silence their departure left behind, a clod broke and rolled into the ditch. A gopher piped somewhere. The wind moved quiet as breathing in the grass.
Molly drew a breath that caught a little—a sigh for their quarreling, for whatever bothered him so deeply that he gloomed and grumped and asked something impossible of her—but when she spoke she spoke around it. “No thanks for your digging.”
“He don’t know much about living with people.”
“He’s like everything else in this country, wild and dirty and thankless.”
In a minute she would really start feeling sorry for herself. But why not? Did it ever occur to him that since November, when they came across the prairie on their honeymoon in this same buckboard, she had seen exactly one woman, for one day and a night? Did he have any idea how she had felt, a bride of three weeks, when he went out with the boys on late fall roundup and was gone two weeks, through three different blizzards, while she stayed home and didn’t know whether he was dead or alive?
“If you mean me,” Ray said, “I may be wild and I’m probably dirty, but I ain’t thankless, honey.” Shamed, she opened her mouth to reply, but he was already turning away to rummage up a strap and a piece of whang leather to make a collar and leash for her pup.
“Are you hungry?” she said to his shoulders.
“Any time.”
“I put up some sandwiches.”
“O.K.”
“Oh, Ray,” she said, “let’s not crab at each other! Sure I’m glad we’re getting out. Is that so awful? I hate to see you killing yourself bucking this hopeless country. But does that mean we have to fight? I thought maybe we could have a picnic like we had coming in, back on that slough where the ducks kept coming in and landing on the ice and skidding end over end. I don’t know, it don’t hardly seem we’ve laughed since.”
“Well,” he said, “it ain’t been much of a laughing winter, for a fact.” He had cut down a cheekstrap and tied a rawhide thong to it. Carefully she brought out the pup and he buckled the collar around its neck, but when she set it on the ground it backed up to the end of the thong, cringing and showing its naked gums, so that she picked it up again and let it dig along her arm, hunting darkness under her mackinaw.
“Shall we eat here?” Ray said. “Kind of a lot of chewed-up coyote around.”
“Let’s go up on the bench.”
“Want to tie the pup in the buckboard?”
“I’ll take him. I want to get him used to me.”
“O.K.,” he said. “You go on. I’ll tie a nosebag on these nags and bring the robe and the lunchbox.”
She walked slowly, not to scare the pup, until she was up the little bench and onto the prairie. From up there she could see not only the Cypress Hills across the west, but the valley of the Whitemud breaking out of them, and a big slough, spread by floodwater, and watercourses going both ways out of it, marked by thin willows. Just where the Whitemud emerged from the hills were three white dots—the Mountie post, probably, or the Lazy-S, or both. The sun was surprisingly warm, until she counted up and found that it was May 8. It ought to be warm.
Ray brought the buffalo robe and spread it, and she sat down. One-handed because she had the thong of the leash wrapped around her palm, she doled out sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs. Ray popped a whole egg in his mouth and chewing, pointed. “There goes the South Fork of the Swift Current, out of the slough. The one this side, that little scraggle of willows you can see, empties into the Whitemud. That slough sits right on the divide and runs both ways. You don’t see that very often.”
She appraised his tone. He was feeling better. For that matter, so was she. It had turned out a beautiful day, with big fair-weather clouds coasting over. She saw the flooded river bottoms below them, on the left, darken to winter and then sweep bright back to spring again while she could have counted no more than ten. As she moved, the coyote pup clawed and scrambled against her side, and she said, wrinkling her nose in her freckleface smile, “If he started eating me, I wonder if I could keep from yelling? Did you ever read that story about the boy that hid the fox under his clothes and the fox started eating a hole in him and the boy never batted an eye, just let himself be chewed?”
“No, I never heard that one,” Ray said. “Don’t seem very likely, does it?” He lay back and turned his face, shut-eyed, into the sun. Now and then his hand rose to feed bites of sandwich into his mouth.
“The pup’s quieter,” Molly said. “I bet he’ll tame. I wonder if he’d eat a piece of sandwich?”
“Leave him be for a while, I would.”
“I guess.”
His hand reached over blindly and she put another sandwich into its pincer claws. Chewing, he came up on an elbow; his eyes opened, he stared a long time down into the flooded bottoms and then across toward the slough and the hills. “Soon as the sun comes out, she don’t look like the same country, does she?”
Molly said nothing. She watched his nostrils fan in and out as he sniffed. “No smell up here, do you think?” he said. But she heard the direction he was groping in, the regret that could lead, if they did not watch out, to some renewed and futile hope, and she said tartly, “I can smell it, all right.”
He sighed. He lay back and closed his eyes. After about three minutes he said, “Boy, what a day, though. I won’t get through on the patrol trail goin’ back. The ice’ll be breakin’ up before tonight, at this rate. Did you hear it crackin’ and poppin’ a minute ago?”
“I didn’t hear it.”
“Listen.”
They were still. She heard the soft wind move in the prairie wool, and beyond it, filling the background, the hushed and hollow noise of the floodwater, sigh of drowned willows, suck of whirlpools, splash and guggle as cutbanks caved, and the steady push and swash and ripple of moving water. Into the soft rush of sound came a muffled report like a tree cracking, or a shot a long way off. “Is that it?” she said. “Is that the ice letting loose?”
“Stick around till tomorrow and you’ll see that whole channel full of ice.”
Another shadow from one of the big flat-bottomed clouds chilled across them and passed. Ray said into the air, “Harry Willis said this railroad survey will go right through to Medicine Hat. Open up this whole country.”
Now she sat very still, stroking the soft bulge of the pup through the cloth.
“Probably mean a town at Whitemud.”
“You told me.”
“With a store that close we couldn’t get quite so snowed in as we did this winter.”
Molly said nothing, because she dared not. They were a couple that, like the slough spread out northwest of them, flowed two ways, he to this wild range, she back to town and friends and family. And yet in the thaw of one bright day, their last together up here north of the Line, she teetered. She feared the softening that could start her draining toward his side.
“Molly,” Ray said, and made her look at him. She saw him as the country and the winter had left him, weathered and scarred. His eyes were gray and steady, marksman’s eyes.
She made a wordless sound that sounded in her own ears almost a groan. “You want awful bad to stay,” she said.
His tong fingers plucked a strand of grass, he bit it between his teeth, his head went slowly up and down.
“But how?” she said. “Do you want to strike the Z-X for a job, or the Lazy-S, or somebody? Do you want to open a store in Whitemud for when the railroad comes through, or what?”
“Haven’t you figured that out yet?” he said. “Kept waitin’ for you to see it. I want to buy the T-Down.”
“You what?”
“I want us to buy the T-Down and make her go.”
She felt that she went all to pieces. She laughed. She threw her hands around so that the pup scrambled and clawed at her side. “Ray Henry,” she said, “you’re crazy as a bedbug. Even if it made any sense, which it doesn’t, where’d we get the money?”
“Borrow it.”
“Go in debt to stay up here?”
“Molly,” he said, and she heard the slow gather of determination in his voice, “when else could we pick up cattle for twenty dollars a head with sucking calves thrown in? When else could we get a whole ranch layout for a few hundred bucks? That Goodnight herd we were running was the best herd in Canada, maybe anywhere. This spring roundup we could take our pick of what’s left, including bulls, and put our brand on ’em and turn ’em into summer range and drive everything else to Malta. We wouldn’t want more than three-four hundred head. We can swing that much, and we can cut enough hay to bring that many through even a winter like this last one.”
She watched him; her eyes groped and slipped. He said, “We’re never goin’ to have another chance like this as long as we live. This country’s goin’ to change; there’ll be homesteaders in here soon as the railroad comes. Towns, stores, what you’ve been missin’. Women folks. And we can sit out here on the Whitemud with good hay land and good range and just make this God darned country holler uncle.”
“How long?” she said. “How long have you been thinking this way?”
“Since we got John’s letter.”
“You never said anything.”
“I kept waitin’ for you to get the idea yourself. But you were hell bent to get out.”
She escaped his eyes, looked down, shifted carefully to accommodate the wild thing snuggled in darkness at her waist, and as she moved, her foot scuffed up the scalloped felt edge of the buffalo robe. By her toe was a half-crushed crocus, palely lavender, a thing so tender and unbelievable in the waste of brown grass under the great pour of sky that she cried out, “Why, good land, look at that!”—taking advantage of it both as discovery and as diversion.
“Crocus?” Ray said, bending. “Don’t take long, once the snow goes.”
It lay in her palm, a thing lucky as a four-leaf clover, and as if it had had some effect in clearing her sight, Molly looked down the south-facing slope and saw it tinged with faintest green. She put the crocus to her nose, but smelled only a mild freshness, an odor no more showy than that of grass. But maybe enough to cover the scent of carrion.
Her eyes came up and found Ray’s watching her steadily. “You think we could do it,” she said.
“I know we could.”
“It’s a funny time to start talking that way, when I’m on my way out.”
“You don’t have to stay out.”
Sniffing the crocus, she put her right hand under the mackinaw until her fingers touched fur. The pup stiffened but did not turn or snap. She moved her fingers softly along his back, willing him tame. For some reason she felt as if she might burst out crying.
“Haven’t you got any ambition to be the first white woman in five hundred miles?” Ray said.
Past and below him, three or four miles off, she saw the great slough darken under a driving cloud shadow and then brighten to a blue that danced with little wind-whipped waves. She wondered what happened to the ice in a slough like that, whether it went on down the little flooded creeks to add to the jams in the Whitemud and Swift Current, or whether it just rose to the surface and gradually melted there. She didn’t suppose it would be spectacular like the break-up in the river.
“Mumma and Dad would think we’d lost our minds,” she said. “How much would we have to borrow?”
“Maybe six or eight thousand.”
“Oh, Lord!” She contemplated the sum, a burden of debt heavy enough to pin them down for life. She remembered the winter, six months of unremitting slavery and imprisonment. She lifted the crocus and laid it against Ray’s dark scarred cheek.
“You should never wear lavender,” she said, and giggled at the very idea, and let her eyes come up to his and stared at him, sick and scared. “All right,” she said. “If it’s what you want.”
He who Spits at the Sky
I had some pictures to take of the opening of a neighborhood house down by Exposition Park, and it was nearly ten before I got back to Hollywood. I had never been to Mazur’s house. The address Carol had given me was on a cross street just off Franklin. As I parked and walked in, away from the snarl and slash of traffic, the quiet of a dark pocketed neighborhood closed around me. The air was damp and soft, as if it should smell of flowers, but I had such a thick head cold I could hardly breathe, much less smell the scented evening air of the city of the angels. If you want to know how I was feeling, press your face down into a tub of modeling clay and inhale.
