Outcast (21 page)

“Lunch?”

The word startled Standish and he lunged at the hopper. Another miss. Another dingly miss. He turned, a little perturbed, to see Iona grinning down on him.

“So you would rather have grasshoppers for lunch than chicken.”

Standish climbed to his feet. “There was a time when I would have eaten grasshoppers if I could have found any, but today I'll settle for chicken.”

“That's magnanimous of you.”

Standish grinned. “That's the way it is for those of us born of locoed mothers.”

Iona laughed.

Standish held up four tobacco bags full of kicking hoppers. “Do you suppose we have enough?”

“Arch does tend to the extreme.”

Standish grinned. “That, ma'am, is an understatement.”

“That, sir, is the truth.”

Standish searched the meadow until he spotted Arch pouncing on another hopper. “Arch. Your mother is here with the food.”

Arch nodded, slipping the hopper into one of the tobacco sacks and drawing the string tight. He walked to his mother and Standish. “Figure we should catch some more?”

“Figure we have more hoppers than fish in that pond.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Just a guess.”

“Guesses ain't worth much.”

“I
know
you catch more fish in the morning than at noon.”

“You guessing about that, too?”

Standish shook his head. “Nope.”

Arch turned to his mother. “What do you figure the odds are on a locoed man knowing when to fish?”

“He told you how to catch that big one, didn't he?”

“Kind of.”

“So maybe it's worth listening to him.”

“Maybe.”

“So maybe we should go fishing.”

“Guess so.”

Iona had spread a blanket in the shade of a pine overlooking the beaver ponds. From there, she watched Arch and Standish. The day was glorious, sunny and cool still. The soft light painted the pond and the surrounding trees in impressionist colors. Iona wondered if God was giving artists a lesson in beauty.

Iona's life had been painted in harsh blacks and whites, as confining, she imagined, as a prison cell. She had locked herself in her cabin after that night. Sometimes, if they had warning enough, she and Arch would slip into the darkness of the trees, hoping that the drunks wouldn't find them or torch their home in frustration. Sometimes they would walk to Klaus's cabin, and huddle in the darkness there. Neither she nor Klaus recovered from that night. Klaus's episodes became more frequent. She had urged him to seek medical help, but he had resisted. Death, he had said, was a reality of life, and he would embrace it as he embraced life.

A squirrel scolded her from a nearby tree, and she smiled. The squirrel was right. She shouldn't be thinking dark thoughts on a day like this. She should open her soul to God and the beauty of His creation. She should be thankful that she felt safe this day, and that she had laughed for the first time in months. Standish was a good man. His patience with Arch was remarkable, she wondered if Standish's patience was rooted in his own need for understanding.

Whoop, whoop, whoop!

The sound pulled Iona's attention to the beaver pond. Arch had hooked a fish, a big fish if the bend in his rod was any gauge. Arch was whooping, and Standish was standing beside him, yelling encouragement. Iona smiled. This was a day that the Lord had made, and she was rejoicing and glad in it.

Arch and Standish were hunkered. Arch was nodding as though he had proved his view to his satisfaction. “Both drumsticks for me.”

Standish cocked his head. “And.…”

“Both thighs.”

“And.…”

“One side of the breast. I figure that since Ma fried the chicken, she should get one side of the breast.”

“I get the wings?”

Arch shook his head. “Seems to me you could have one wing, if I get to pick which one.”

“What difference does it make?”

“Lucia had a brush with a skunk.…”

“Lucia the chicken?”

Arch shook his head, and sarcasm dripped from his mouth. “No, Lucia the skunk.” He stared at Standish for a moment, and then continued. “Anyhow, the one wing was kind of.…”

“Shrunken?”

Arch stared into the sky for a moment. “Yeah, I'd say that's about right.”

“So I get.…”

“The neck, the shrunken wing and the pope's nose.”

“Seems fair to me.”

Iona burst into laughter. “Doesn't seem fair to me, Mr. Standish.”

“Miles.”

“Miles gets the first pick.”

“Ah, Ma.”

“He is our guest.”

“How can he be our guest? We're on his place.”

“Then we are the guests, and the host gets the first pick.”

Arch glowered. “So he gets the first pick, no matter what?”

Iona nodded.

Arch glared at Standish. “So what do you want?”

“How about the neck and the pope's nose?”

Arch nodded. Seemed fair to him, but he couldn't understand why his mother was laughing.

Standish rolled over on his back. “Best chicken I ever had.”

“Best ever,” Arch agreed.

“Fit for the greatest castles of Europe,” Iona opined.

“Without question. Makes me feel like a king.”

“Remember your place, varlet.”

Standish chuckled. Arch stood. “We'd best get fishing.”

Standish rolled up on one elbow. “You go ahead. I'll be down in a minute.”

Arch and Iona stiffened. When Iona spoke, her voice was strained. “Go ahead, Arch.”

Arch glared at Standish. “Don't you hurt my Ma.”

Standish's voice was low, soft. “Wouldn't ever do that, Arch.”

“Didn't think my Pa would, but.…”

“Arch!”

“Sorry Ma, but.…”

“Mr. Standish will be down in a minute.”

Arch turned toward Standish. The boy looked vulnerable, easy to hurt. “I'll give a holler if I get into a big fish.”

Standish nodded. They watched Arch trudge to the pond, each step a major effort.

“He's grown fond of you.”

“That's the way it is with us locoed varlets. We grow on people.”

Iona laughed, and to Standish it seemed that he was in the midst of a fine orchestra.

“Ma'am.”

“Iona.”

“Iona.…”

Standish dropped his eyes to the grass beside the blanket. He pulled one shaft from the grass, biting off the soft white center of the stem.

“Say it, Miles,” Iona said, her voice filled with dread.

Standish scratched the palm of his hand. Then he turned to Iona and spoke. “There's this friend of mine.…”

“Male or female?”

“Male.” Standish rubbed his chin, wishing he had done a better job shaving that morning. “Anyhow, this friend of mine came to Montana to mine for gold.”

“Did he find any?”

Standish nodded. “Actually, quite a lot. It was a placer find up in the mountains.”

“Placer?”

“That's where the gold is in the gravel of a creek. You dig the gravel out of the creek bottom and run it down a sluice. Because gold is heavier than the rest of the gravel, it settles into the sluice's ribs.”

“What is a sluice, Mr. Standish?”

“It's like a long box that's open at both ends. You shovel gravel into the upstream side, and water washes the gravel over ribs in the sluice. The gold collects in the upstream side of the ribs.”

“You seem to know a lot about mining, Mr. Standish.”

“Miles, ma'am.”

“Iona.”

Standish stared across the blanket at Iona. “Do you suppose we'll ever get that right?”

Iona grinned. “Don't know.” Her face grew serious. “You were telling me about this miner friend of yours.”

Standish nodded. “Well, this find was way up in the Beartooths, way above the timberline. They call that alpine tundra.”

“Who are they?”

Standish grinned. “I can see now that Arch is your son.”

Iona persisted. “So what is alpine tundra?”

Standish leaned back on both his elbows. “It is a rash of tiny plants clinging to the earth for nutrition and warmth, like a rug of greens and reds and yellows unlike any other you've seen. It snows up there about every two weeks, even in August, and the nights are cold. Some mornings you wake up, and there's ice in the water bucket.”

“So you've been in this alpine tundra.”

“Just for a few days…to visit my friend.” He leaned toward Iona. “It is a brutal place, a brutally beautiful place.” His face wrinkled as he tried to wrench the words from his mind. “It is like sitting on the edge of the world. You see mountain peak after mountain peak—and then nothing.”

Standish shook his head. “I know that sounds crazy, and maybe it is, but to sit on the edge of a ridge is to see rivers turned into trickles below. In the immensity of those mountains, you realize that you are nothing more than a speck of dust dancing soft breezes. The mountains shrink everything.”

Standish rubbed his eyebrows with his fingertips. “The land is covered with tiny flowers, each hugging the ground for safety, each reaching through that thin air toward the sun.”

Standish shook his head. “I could cover half a dozen of those flowers with my thumbnail.”

Standish threw the grass stem as though it were a spear, watching it come to Earth. “We…I mean the miner friend of mine, tore at the earth, spewing gravel and sand and mud. We crushed those fierce little bits of beauty beneath our feet. We were a plague of ugly, tearing at God's broad canvas for bits of paint to serve our greed.”

Standish sat cross-legged on the blanket, his face torn into bits and pieces. “I think God must have decided to rid the world of us, such terrible creatures we were. I think he sent that early blizzard as a shroud.

“We were above the tree line. We had no logs to build cabins, so we lived in tents. The wind and the snow tore down most of those tents, left us exposed to the wind and the cold, that terrible fierce cold.”

Standish stared at Iona. “We were like insects under an overturned rock. We scuttled around, trying to keep that terrible wind from carrying us away.”

Standish coughed, clearing his throat. “Getting caught in that blizzard was our own fault. We had all planned to leave the claims earlier, but none of us would go until we all left.”

Standish's need to explain plowed furrows across his forehead. “I suppose that people thought we starved to death, and we did, but it was greed that killed us. We couldn't leave the mountains because we were afraid someone would steal our gold. It wasn't our gold, you know. It was God's, just as everything is, but.… Anyway, we ran out of food and we ran out of wood. We had only our bodies' heat. We huddled in one tent, hoping to keep each other warm. Every now and then, someone would step outside. Most of the time he wouldn't come back.

“Hunger was almost a relief. It dulled the senses, We didn't talk much. We just sat there. Every now and then someone would say, “Charlie's gone, or Fred or Jacob, and we would take their clothes and haul them outside. And then.…”

Standish's body shook. He looked as though he wanted to cry but all the tears had been wrung from him. “And then Paul died, and somebody said, ‘Maybe we should eat him.' There was a roar, as much of a roar as we could raise anyhow. People were shaking their heads. Nobody liked the thought of that, and then somebody, ‘Christ gave us his body and blood to eat.'”

Standish fidgeted on the blanket. “I told them not to talk like that. I told them I would go for help. I asked them to give me three days, before they.…”

Standish stood, pacing back and forth in front of the blanket. “I wrapped my legs in dead men's coats and started down that mountain. I don't know if I was going for help, or if I was running from what they were going to do.”

Standish stared into Iona's eyes. “I don't think I could have…done anything so terrible as that, but I don't know. I don't know what I would have done if I had to choose between doing that and death. Maybe I was running because I thought I was too weak to resist.”

Iona leaned toward him, pulling him down to the blanket. She put her hand on his. “You do know. You made your choice.”

Hope washed across Standish's face. “Maybe.”

“Certainly.”

Standish sighed. “I took my gold with me because I needed it to buy supplies…or maybe I took it because I didn't want them to have it. Wouldn't that be something, if I carried my gold away so I wouldn't have to share it with dead men?”

Standish scratched his head and then his arms. The scratching grew frantic as though he might find the answer to that question just below his skin.

“The snow was deep and soft, and it carried me, keeping me on my feet. I felt sometimes as though I were swimming through a cloud. I looked at my compass every five or ten minutes, but then I couldn't remember which way I was supposed to be going. I couldn't even remember what the needle on the compass meant, or whether it was day or night.”

Standish rubbed his arm. Thin rivulets of blood showed where he had scratched himself. His face wrinkled into a question as though he didn't remember what had happened. Then he turned back to Iona, his face in shards.

“I smelled smoke, and I thought; ‘Isn't this remarkable. Snow burns.' I thought about trying to walk back up the mountain to tell them that snow burns. I laughed about that. That fierce cold, and all we had to do was to burn some snow. I walked toward the fire, and then…and then I…don't remember.”

Standish shook his head. “I remember the pain.” He cocked his head. “Have you ever frostbitten your feet or your hands?”

Tears were running down Iona's cheeks, and when she shook her head, they spun off into the sunlight.