The Double Hook (2 page)

At last he threw the bones into the stove. The heat from the stove, the heat crept in from the day outside, anointed his face. Blest, he sat down again in the rocker, and the boards creaked and groaned as he fiddled.

The old lady did not come back to disturb his peace. But somewhere below the house a coyote barked, and the hounds raised their heads, gathered their limbs and sprang into the brush. The terrier sat in Felix’s shadow, its ear turned to the voice of Felix’s fiddle.

But the hounds heard Coyote’s song fretting the gap between the red boulders:

The hounds came back, yellow forms in the yellow sunlight. Creeping round the barn. Flattening themselves to rest.

Felix put down his fiddle and slept.

The Widow’s boy saw the old lady.

The old lady from above is fishing down in our pool, he said, coming into the Widow’s kitchen. I’m going down to scare her out.

The Widow’s eyes closed.

Dear God, she said, what does she want? So old, so wicked, fishing the fish of others. Slipping her line under our fence before my boy can get the fish on his hook.

The Widow’s daughter Lenchen sat behind the table. Her yellow hair pulled straight above her eyes like a ragged cap. Her hands in the pockets of her denim jeans. Her heavy heeled boots beating impatience into the boards of the floor.

At the far end of the table the Widow was straining milk into shallow pans. The boy sat down and rested his elbows on the other end of the table.

Where’s she fishing? the girl asked.

Down at the grass pool, the boy said.

It’s enough to turn a person mad, the girl said, to have an old woman sneaking up and down the creek day in and day out. I can’t stand it any longer. It’s just what I was telling Ma. I’ve got to get away, right away from here. It’s time I learned something else, anyway. I’ve learned all there is to learn here. I know everything there is to know. I know even as much as you and James Potter.

How do you know what James Potter knows? the boy asked.

The Widow went on with her work.

All you’d learn in town, she said, is men. And you’d be lucky if they didn’t learn you first. The things they know
would be the death of me for you to know. They’d teach you things it isn’t easy to forget.

She put the milk-pail down on the floor beside her, but she kept her eyelids folded over her eyes.

It’s easier to remember than to forget, she said.

There are things too real for a person to forget, the boy thought. There are things so real that a person has to see them. A person can’t keep her eyes glazed over like a dead bird’s forever. What will Ma do, the boy thought.

You’ve got to take me, the girl said to the boy.

Why don’t you just go? he said.

You’ve been out with the men on the beef drive, she said. You know what it’s like down there. I’ve had enough of round this place, but I don’t know where to go.

Place is the word, said the boy. I only know a place where men drink beer, he said. A bunch of men and an old parrot.

He got up and went to the window.

I’m going down to put a fence right across the creek, he said, so James Potter’s mother can’t go up and down here any more.

He went out of the kitchen into the sun. Outside the world floated like a mote in a straight shaft of glory. A horse coming round the corner of the barn shone copper against the hewn logs, Kip riding black on its reflected brightness.

The boy raised his hand.

Kip rode his horse forward to a stop. He rested his hands on the pommel of his saddle and shook his feet free of the wooden stirrups to ease his legs.

There’s nothing doing round here, said the boy, unless you’ve come to trade that bag of bones you’re riding for another.

Some day, Kip said. Some day.

Where are you going? the boy asked.

On the road, Kip said. Riding. Just riding. Just coming and going. Where’s the girl?

I don’t know, said the boy.

I got a message for her, Kip said.

She’s in the house, the boy said. Give her the message yourself. I’m not having anything to do with that sort of thing, one way or another.

He went over to the barn and picked up a roll of wire. Then he put it down and looked at Kip.

Kip’s face was turned towards the house.

What in hell are you doing? said the boy.

Looking, said Kip.

Get out of here, the boy said. Wherever you are there’s trouble. If a man is breaking a horse when you come round it hangs itself on the halter, or throws itself, or gets out and back on the range. Take your message back where it came from.

A’right, said Kip. A’right.

He shoved his feet into his stirrups and gathered up his lines.

The girl don’t need no telling, he said.

He bent down over the saddle. His face hung close to the boy’s.

When a stallion’s broke down your fence, he said, there’s nothing you can do except put the fence back up again.

He swung his horse around away from the boy, but he kept his face turned over his shoulder.

Wipe off that look, the boy said.

Then he called after Kip: James Potter’s mother is fishing in our creek. It’s her I’m going to fence out.

As Kip moved off, the boy noticed the light again. Caught in the hide of the beast which picked its way along, its eyes on the dust of the road.

He stood thinking of the light he’d known. Of pitch fires lit on the hills. Of leaning out of the black wind into the light of a small flame. Stood thinking how a horse can stand in sunlight and know nothing but the saddle and the sting of sweat on hide and the salt line forming under the saddle’s edge. Stood thinking of sweat and heat and the pain of living, the pain of fire in the middle of a haystack. Stood thinking of light burning free on the hills and flashing like the glory against the hides of things.

All along the fence the road had been cut by the wheels of William Potter’s truck. Cut to plague the feet of beasts. To plague the very wheels which cut it. The whole road cut when a day’s wait would have let the mud bake flat. Cut anyway, William said, by the feet of the beasts themselves, moving singly or in herds, by the old moose, his face above man-level, and the herds moving, moving.

The boy wrestled with the roll of wire, which curled in on itself seeking the bend into which it had been twisted. The sun beat down on him as it beat down on Kip’s horse.

I’m afraid, thought the boy, and even the light won’t tell me what to do.

He thought of the posts he would have to drive. He wondered: Is it Lenchen I’m afraid of. Or Ma. Or Kip. Is it
the old lady fishing in the creek. Or is it seeing light the way I’ve never noticed before.

He gathered up the wire and went down to the creek. He looked through the stems of the cottonwood trees, but the old lady had gone. The water caught the light and drew it into itself. Dragonflies floated over the surface as if the water had not been stirred since the beginning of time. But the grass by the pool was bent.

I knew it was the old lady, the boy said. Shadows don’t bend grass. I know a shadow from an old woman.

From the kitchen window the Widow looked out to the hills.

Dear God, she said, the country. Nothing but dust. Nothing but old women fishing. What can a person do? Wagner and me were cousins. I came, and what I could I brought. I’ve things for starting a girl. Things belonging in my family for years. Things laid by. The spoons. The sheets. The bedcover I crocheted with my own hands. The shame. A fat pig of a girl, Almighty Father. Who would want such a girl?

I could tell you, the girl said.

You can tell me nothing, the Widow said. Go. Go. I hear nothing. I see nothing. Men don’t ask for what they’ve already taken.

She went to the bottom of the stairs.

You want to go, she said. Go. Don’t keep asking. Go.

Lenchen watched her mother walk away. She kept pulling the tongue of her belt until the belt bit into her flesh.

James had not come as he promised. She had not seen him for days. Except from the crest of the hill. She had seen him below at work in the arms of the hills near his own house. Going from house to barn. Sometimes alone. Sometimes with Greta. She could not imagine the life he lived when the door closed behind him.

She remembered him on his knees in the corral. Holding a heifer down. The sweat beading the hairs of his chest where his shirt divided. She smelt smoke, and flesh seared with the branding-iron. She saw him on his knees with a bull calf under him, the gelding knife bright in his hand.

She heard his voice again: This is no place for her. And Heinrich’s voice: She’s been at it from a kid, like me. You’ve just not noticed before. She’s been round here always, like the rest of us.

She remembered James’s face above his plaid shirt, and how she’d slipped down from the fence where she’d been sitting with Kip and had begun roping one of their own calves so that James could see what he’d noticed for the first time.

If Lenchen had been looking down from the hill just then, she would have seen James saddling his horse. He was alone.

Greta was in the kitchen talking to Angel Prosper. William had stopped his truck at Theophil’s that morning and asked Angel to go up the creek to give Greta a hand.

She’s getting played out doing for Ma, he said. She thinks nobody cares. When you go, tell her I stopped and asked.

And on Theophil’s doorstep before the work was done he’d paid Angel her day’s wages.

Greta was polishing a lamp globe.

I’ve seen Ma standing with the lamp by the fence, she said. Holding it up in broad daylight. I’ve seen her standing looking for something even the birds couldn’t see. Something hid from every living thing. I’ve seen her defying. I’ve seen her take her hat off in the sun at noon, baring her head and asking for the sun to strike her. Holding the lamp and looking where there’s nothing to be found. Nothing but dust. No person’s got a right to keep looking. To keep looking and blackening lamp globes for others to clean.

Angel sat back on her heels. She had been moving, half squatting, to scrub the floor. The water from her brush made a pool on the boards.

You mean you’re not going to let her do it any more, Angel said. One person’s got as much right as another. Maybe she don’t ask you to clean those globes. There’s things people want to see. There’s things too, she said as she leant on the brush in the wall shadow below the window light, there’s things get lost.

For nothing I’d smash it, Greta said. A person could
stand so much. A person could stand to see her fish if they had to depend on her doing it to eat. But I can tell you we’ve not eaten fish of hers in this house. Ask anybody what she did with her fish. Ask them. Not me. I don’t know anything.

Why didn’t you take your own lamp and go looking for something? Angel said. You’ve never all your life burned anything but a little oil to finish doing in the house.

What are you saying? Greta asked. You don’t even know. You don’t know a thing. You don’t know what a person knows. You don’t know what a person feels. You’ve burned and spilled enough oil to light up the whole country, she said. It’s easy enough to see if you make a bonfire and walk around in the light of it.

Angel scrubbed the last boards, and threw the water into the roots of the honeysuckle which grew over the porch.

They need all the water they can get, Angel said.

Then she saw Ara passing by in the road. She saw her loosening the bootlace and taking off her hat to shove back her damp hair. She thought: William Potter got an ugly one. Then she shook the last drop out of the pan and went back into the house.

Do you want me to clean up the stairs? she asked Greta.

No, Greta said. I don’t like people looking round. I won’t have people walking up and down in my house.

Ara hadn’t intended to come to her mother-in-law’s. She had wanted to get away from the house. From the sound of the cow’s breath in the dry grass. From the smell of empty buckets
and dust heavy with sage. She had thought of going up the hill into the clump of jack pines to smell the smell of pine needles. She had walked up the hill, stopping now and then to knock off a prickly pear which clung to her sneakers. But when she reached the shoulder, instead of turning away from the valley, she had cut down through the sand and dust and patches of scorched grass to the road which led to her mother-in-law’s.

If she had gone up to the old lookout she might have seen something to think about as William saw things when he was coming and going with the post. She might have seen a porcupine rattling over the rock on business which had nothing to do with her; or a grouse rising and knotting itself to a branch, settling fork-angled so that the tree seemed to put out a branch before her eyes.

Roads went from this to that. But the hill led up to the pines and on to the rock rise which flattened out and fell off to nowhere on the other side.

Yet she had cut down from the hill because she had to talk. She had to talk to some living person. She had to tell someone what she felt about the old lady and the water.

It couldn’t rise, William would say. Not in summer. Why, the wonder is there’s any water at all. I’ve known the creeks fall so low, he’d say, that the fish were gasping in the shallowness. The day will come, he’d say, when the land will swallow the last drop. The creek’ll be dry as a parched mouth. The earth, he’d say, won’t have enough spit left to smack its lips.

It couldn’t rise, William would say; but she’d felt it rise.

There was no use telling Greta. Greta wouldn’t listen. She could hear Greta’s voice rattling like the rattle of dry cowhide: All these years we’ve never had a wipe-up linoleum. But I like boards better. You know when the floor’s splintering away. You know when the rats have gnawed it. I don’t like a
linoleum. It’s smooth like ice, but you can’t tell when it’s been eat away beneath.