Lonesome Animals (15 page)

“I want to tell a story,” he said. Slowly those around him quieted.
“Seems we were living in the old place on Desautel. A bad wind blew the shingles off the roof, so I sent those two boys up with tar paper to keep the rain out. The roof was steep and they were worried to fall. So they got two lengths from my good hemp rope and tied one end to their belt loops and the opposite to the truck bumper. Then I went to town for shingles.”

Someone scuffed his feet in the hard dirt. Two others looked down at their boots.

“They didn't hear the motor go, so the first they knew, they were sliding over the top and down the other side. One fell into an old elm and the other onto the roses.

“When I went back, both were only about half there. One, I don't remember which, cried, ‘Don't wake me, I'm dreaming I am a bird.'”

Cloud turned his hat in his knobby hands. He lit a cigarette. “Seemed funny to me,” he said finally.

The crowd said nothing until Elijah, who could not purposely abide anyone's embarrassment, shouted, “Well, we were just waiting to hear if the house was one story or two.”

The gathering rollicked with laughter, and one of the boys' sisters rose and hugged her father, and his story was rescued as simply as that.

An hour later, Elijah delivered Strawl a plate filled with venison and potatoes and turnips and wild onions, a piece of fried bread atop it all, along with a pitcher of cold tea.

“Thank them,” Strawl said.

“I have,” he said.

“For me,” Strawl said.

“All right,” Elijah told him.

He returned to the family, and Strawl ate in the hayloft. Through the open hay door, he watched them pick over their plates stoically, like ants culling their mound. Inside the house, the tables
were loaded with casseroles and plates of meat and vegetables. The children ate on the wide windowsills or short parlor tables and the mothers on the floor next to them, while the men bent over porch rails or sat three abreast on the steps. A door shut and, in the backyard, Strawl saw the boys' parents exiting the house. They were silhouetted in the ebbing light, pointed toward the big river and setting sun. They didn't touch, but to Strawl they appeared more attached than if they were stitched together. She bent and lifted a flat board and he turned to face her. She clouted him on the shoulder with the board awkwardly. He bent his legs to maintain his balance. She struck him once more, on the other side, then alternated again. His silhouette shuddered then stilled after each blow, the only sound her labored breath and the board upon his flesh. She went on until she was too tired to lift the wood. He took it from her and placed it next to the back steps, where, Strawl recalled, she had found it. Their behavior had the emotionless trappings of habit and the conviction of a ritual not predicated by the deaths of their sons, but confirming the event nonetheless.

Strawl finished his meal and walked to a mound in the pasture to watch the sun set. He saw Marvin and Inez among the mourners by their voices, as the twilight blanketed the house and its visitors in ashy shadows. Marvin sang a song and the rest put their drinks down until he had finished. Strawl watched a trio of shadows separate from the main group and hurry toward the barn. He lost them in a copse of aspen lining a creek between him and the house. One was Elijah.

Strawl heard two women singing in much the same way Marvin had.

Strawl heard Elijah's voice, still in the trees, as the song faded.

“This is our blood, shed for thee,” he said. Two female voices repeated the words, then he heard them pause—to drink whiskey, Strawl decided after hearing the women cough.

Elijah announced, “This is our body, broken for thee.” Strawl found them on the creek bank. Each pulled at a piece of bread and ate. Their heads bowed as if in prayer. Elijah rose before the women. He stood over them and appeared to bless each with a cross-like gesture. They gazed up at him like animals waiting to be fed. Elijah tugged off his shirt and unbuckled his belt and the women helped each other with their dresses. The sun set on the coulee's lip. A brilliant yellow light lay upon the rock, and the figures were for a moment as precise as drawings. One lay in the cool grass below the trees and Elijah joined her. The woman whined and yipped like a coyote until, finally, Elijah roared as if he were his own peculiar breed of animal; then they stopped and after ten minutes of lying quietly in the grass, the women traded places and Elijah and the other repeated the act and the sounds. After, they rested once more, until the women stirred and dressed Elijah and then themselves. Elijah let them lead him back to the funeral party, as quietly as they had come.

In the stock corral, Strawl rinsed his plate and pitcher under the pump. The dusk had deepened, when he returned to his pallet. He lay and tried to think of nothing. Evenings when they were first married, Dot's mother used to read to him from her Shakespeare
volume.
Lear
was his favorite. He enjoyed Edmund, so thoroughly convinced by a philosophy that he behaved as thought itself, hurtling into other people as if they, too, were simply notions and murder just a rhetorical flourish. She favored
Hamlet
. The play disturbed Strawl. Revenge could not have been a motive for such a man. It was simple-minded and bloody and useless against the citadel of time. The man had climbed past the primitive drum of anger but danced to the tune it called anyway.

Strawl regretted the barn roof and beams over him. He'd barter cold against a roof anytime after the snow backed off. Under an open sky, sleep could take a person without his knowing it, but a roof put you straight up against the notion. As a child he'd dreaded his father's last breath upon the lantern. Strawl had woken each morning crying until he was nearly seven, and, though his parents had figured him just a crabby riser, his sobs had been more relief at navigating the night alone. Though his wailing had ended long ago, closing his eyes and abandoning himself to himself still demanded more effort than he was comfortable with.

Elijah woke him past midnight.

“Bless me father for I have sinned.”

Strawl blinked his eyes.

“I seen you watching,” Elijah said.

The boy handed Strawl a bottle of grape soda. Strawl drank from it. “ Isn't much of a transgression,” he said.

“It was the boys' wives,” Elijah said.

“That is a dicier proposition.”

“They wanted me to bring their men back. It was all I knew of to do.”

Strawl lay back. He was unwilling to press the boy further. He saw no profit in it.

“I think men have done worse for poorer reasons,” Strawl told him.

Elijah lay down in the hay across from Strawl. Soon his breathing turned regular and slow and he was asleep. Strawl sipped the last of the soda and wished he could rise and piss all the venom he possessed into the glass bottle, then replace the cap and bury it someplace he might forget in a day or a month or a year.

Strawl rose and washed his face at the pump. The musty hay filled his nose, and the dew burning off the spring wheat added a doughy dampness. He smelled fresh coffee and could not keep himself from wandering toward the aroma. Cloud sat on the steps smoking from a corncob pipe. He nodded, then invited Strawl to join him. Strawl drew his tobacco from his pocket and started a cigarette. The Cloud woman brought her husband coffee, and upon seeing Strawl, returned with a second cup. Strawl thanked her. He sipped the coffee. It was better than he had hoped, with chicory and a thimble of whiskey enhancing it.

“I thank you for allowing me to bunk in the barn.”

Cloud nodded. He sipped at his coffee. His shirt was unbuttoned, and a bruise yellowed his chest.

“I'd like to find who did this to your sons,” Strawl told him.

“I thought you would arrest my sons.”

“They hadn't done anything,” Strawl said.

The old man put a finger over the pipe bowl and drew hard until the ash in it smoked.

“Anyhow, I'm not in the arresting business, anymore. The government is just paying me to find the one doing this killing.”

“Killing has not been unusual here,” Cloud said. “It is not unlike before, so much.”

“It's how the killings occur,” Strawl said. “That's what scares them. More than Indians, even.”

Cloud smoked. “We scare no one.”

Strawl filled his cigarette papers with tobacco, then licked one edge, then rolled it over the other. Cloud struck a match, and Strawl bent toward him and lit his cigarette. He decided to forego technique.

“Your boys know the others that have been killed?”

Cloud said, “The young ones all know each other.”

“You have seen those others?” Strawl asked.

“They visited. They slept in the barn, like you.”

“All of them?”

“Were there four?”

Strawl nodded.

“They all have been here. The first one baled the last of the fall hay. Another cut wood for meals. He stayed a month. The last two, they were wild. Nowhere was home for them.”

“How are they the same? Like your boys?” Strawl asked him.

“They are dead,” Cloud said.

Strawl sipped his coffee and smoked. Cloud did the same. A few early risers joined them on the porch. They stretched and yawned and watched the sun pour over the Okanogans.

“Those other boys. They Nez Perce?” Strawl put his finger to his nose.

“I think yes,” Cloud said. “Though not from Joseph's band. Maybe Whitebird's.”

Strawl thanked the man. They finished their smoke in silence, and when the Cloud woman took his empty cup and returned with it freshened a moment later, he was happy to accept the coffee and remain where he was.

“You will make him stop?” Cloud asked Strawl.

Some argued the Indians' austere intellect, as elemental as hide and skeleton, was what kept this country country, and others declared it a dearth of intelligence at all. If the tribes had managed to equip themselves with concrete and trawlers, perhaps they too
would dam a river and fish it into extinction. Strawl only knew that they had not. He had heard it said that when we declaw all nature's monsters, we'll be looking across the table at the genuine article. Whether the speaker meant God or each other, he didn't recall, but now he was chasing the genuine article—and he had come through this ranch and slept in the same barn he himself had a few hours before.

Strawl dumped his coffee dregs on the lawn.

“Yes,” he said, finally. “I will make him stop.”

T
hroughout his adolescence, Elijah's reputation swelled, though the locals on both sides of the river were more inclined to describe him as an eccentric than a seer. His makeshift family indulged his whim for wandering as they, themselves, were planets orbiting separate stars, Dot, her husband and first child; Ida, the house duties and her own silent universe; and Strawl, the ennui of ranching.

Elijah soon graduated to predicting car accidents and hospital visits and the occasional arrest, though he still employed time as loosely as a listener would permit. Some would whistle when they discovered yet another prophecy bearing fruit, and others would shake their heads and laugh a little, and some hurrahed him as the Indian soothsayer, though none saw his life's work as anything yet
beyond a curiosity. Elijah himself pondered the possibility that he was just observing his surroundings with more vigor than others and that what he saw approaching amounted to a kind of calculation that anyone might exercise given the inclination. He determined to put his shoulder to the wheel. Twice, neighbors reported him for housebreaking, but when they could find nothing missing, Dice refused to press charges. Elijah had admitted to entering the houses; as for stealing, he had no interest. He claimed to simply want to see what living in other houses felt like. Strawl could think of no appropriate punishment, though Dot hid his Bible until he could recite “The Three Bears” to her satisfaction.

Soon locals barely noticed his visits and often felt something close to blessed by his presence rather than victims of a prowling. Like the prophets of yore, however, he suffered from his own darkness. He had gathered enough sense to free himself of witnesses when black moods leaped upon him. He would walk into the woods and fish a creek neck too much trouble for others to frequent and permit his festering mind to race and rid himself of torment, half of himself speaking and the other listening. He'd often shout for hours at nothing but pine needles, sagebrush, or rock, his voice coursing like runoff under a cloudburst. Then the words would trickle to a tolerable quiet.