The Jump-Off Creek (11 page)

Evelyn Walker's face became pink. She lifted her own hamper, piled up with the unhung wet clothes. “We had a fresh cow ourselves, once,” she said, as if she had been asked about it. “Mike bought it off a family going East on the La Grande Road. We were getting better prices for the cattle then and we had the money. But she has since died and we haven't had the extra to buy another one.” She lowered her head suddenly and then raised it. “When Mike comes in I know he will want to get the milk. He'll know what we can trade for it.”

Lydia nodded, standing where she was holding the heavy hamper. She found she had not ever lost her narrow, rigid smile. She wanted to say something about the narrowness of her circumstances, but nothing came.

Mrs. Walker got the door of the house open and held it with her hip for Lydia carrying the milk in. There was just one long room inside, with a curtain that could be pulled across to screen
one bed from the other, but the logs on the inside of the house had been planed so they lay flat as boards and then two walls papered and the last two painted clean with whitewash. The windows had been hung with bleached-out sacking embroidered finely along the hem, and there was a little table overspread with a red silk scarf, and on it two painted figurines and a blue figured bowl. Out from one of the papered walls stood a good small stove with a damper on the smokepipe, and an oven box. In the small clean house Lydia felt a vague melancholy, not like tears at all but like the emptied out tiredness afterward. She widened her smile against it.

“Where have the children gone, Mrs. Walker?”

Mrs. Walker set the laundry down, waved both hands vaguely, smiling. “Oh, they're hiding under the bed. They don't see anybody but us, usually, so they have got a fear of strange faces. Junior! Charlie! You boys come out from under there now. Come out.” But when they didn't come, she let them stay where they were.

There was a kettle still sitting on the stove from the washing just done. Mrs. Walker lifted it off and set it on the floor and then got out a coffeepot and a grinder. “Oh sit in this chair, Mrs. Sanderson, it's got a better seat. Do you like toast and jam? I have a thimbleberry jam, you know the berries are very dull just to eat but they cook into a good jam.”

“I'm sure I would like it.”

“Please don't notice the bread. I've never got this little stove to bake bread without burning it.”

Lydia kept smiling purposefully. “I hope you won't mind if I do notice the bread, or the smell of it anyway, as I do like that already.” She had a proneness to sound stilted, mannered, with other women, she knew it herself. Sometimes in other women's faces she could see that she was taken for pompous and she glanced toward Mrs. Walker for sign of it. Mrs. Walker's face was pink, both her hands were at her chest.

“My mother used to say she liked a sharp-set guest, they will
eat whatever you put out and praise it though it's poor.” She kept the palms of her hands pressed against her bosom, not looking at Lydia and then looking at her with that flushed face. “I'm very glad you've come,” she said, quick and low.

She dropped her hands, wiped them on the front of her apron. “Here, we won't wait for the coffee, we'll have toast right this minute, don't you think, we can have the coffee after.”

She set the toast out on good white plates, brought a small pot of blackish jam and sat opposite Lydia in the chair with the broken cane seat. She used the tips of two fingers to push the jam pot slightly toward Lydia. “Please do eat as much as you like.”

They each spread jam on the toasted bread and ate a few bites in polite silence.

“Mr. Whiteaker told Mike you were homesteading all alone.” Mrs. Walker lifted her flushed face. “I'm afraid I'm just full of questions about that. You must stop me if I begin to ask too much, or sound like an old Paul Pry.”

Lydia shook her head, looking down at her hands. She felt a little heat come up in her own face. “The truth is, there is not much interesting about it. You'll be soon bored.”

Mrs. Walker's face became intent. “Until I was sixteen and married, I lived in my father's house in Alicel, down in the Grande Ronde, and since Mr. Walker and I have been married I've lived in this little house and I believe I've never once gone anywhere alone but berry picking or fishing and that within a loud yell of a man, so I daresay I wouldn't be bored with hearing how your life has been different from that.”

Lydia could not help a small laugh, or the way it sounded, sharp and sour.

“The fact is, I have never lived anyplace before this but my father's house. My husband just brought his things and moved into my room when we were married.”

Mrs. Walker's look became pinker. “Oh I'm sorry,” she said, in a flustered way.

Lydia could think of no response. It was not clear to her what Mrs. Walker felt sorry about. She thought she wouldn't say anything else, but then a little more came out into the silence. “When he died, I sold my husband's clothes and his dog and horse and everything that belonged to him, to have the money to come West.” She heard the tone of her own voice, without any grief, heatless and stiff, and was surprised, herself, to feel a sudden itchy need for sympathy, or for forgiveness. “I suppose his mother is rolling over in her grave,” she said, in the same flat way. She picked up a slice of toast, bit it, chewed dryly.

“Oh I'm sure not,” Mrs. Walker said finally, on a low let-out breath.

They looked at one another. “I only think there must be a deal of courage in you,” Mrs. Walker said slowly. “If Mike were to die I don't know what I'd do except to go and try to find myself a new husband to take care of me and my children. I couldn't ever stay here by myself, it'd be too lonely and too hard. How do you sleep without anybody against your back? The nights up here are so black and full of the sound of varmints you can't see. And how will you ever get the man's work done on that place? You are quite as thin as six o'clock.”

Lydia smiled dimly. “I don't like the nights,” she said. “But I'm not afraid of the work. I kept up the man's work on my dad's farm for fourteen years. He was sick from the time I was twelve, in bed most of the time and always calling my mother to tend after him so it fell to me to do his work. I was the only child of theirs that lived, there wasn't anyone else to do it and keep us from starvation.”

Mrs. Walker shook her head vaguely, seriously. Then she smiled. “Oh Mrs. Sanderson, you see I'm not bored yet!”

She stood and got the coffee off the stove, holding the handle of the pot with a bunched-up corner of her apron. She poured it into china cups. Lydia brought a little milk out of the hamper and sweetened the coffee with it.

“I don't know what Mike will say about the milk,” Mrs. Walker said in a whispered way.

Lydia looked into her coffee, stirring it. “I'm sure whatever he decides, I will think it's fair,” she said, with slow, unavoidable embarrassment.

They sat at the little table and drank coffee slowly in a tender silence. Eventually the boys scraped their heels restlessly against the floor under the bed, and one of them hunched out from below the edge of the Wedding Ring quilt. He sat up close to the bed, with his thin small body drawn up in a bundle and his face half hidden behind his arms. Lydia looked at him gently, slowly. After a while the other boy came out and crouched next to his brother.

“Junior is three,” Mrs. Walker said, looking toward them without moving her head. “Charlie is two or will be in a month.”

“They are pretty boys, both of them.”

She flushed. “I think they are,” she said, pleased. She brought her chin down so that, like Junior, her face was half hidden behind her raised arms holding the coffee cup. “I had another one, a girl, born first,” she said in a lowered voice.

Lydia looked away. After a while she said, without knowing she would say it, “I have carried two, but could not keep either of them past the third month.”

Mrs. Walker gave a little clucking sound, soft and distressed. After a while she said, still low, flushing brighter pink, “I'm carrying another one right now.”

They passed between them a brief, private look.

Into the long silence afterward, Lydia said, “Your clean clothes will be dank and cold, laying there in that pile. I'll help you hang them, we would be done in a minute.”

They went out together, standing next to one another in the cold spring wind, pinning things by the shoulders, the waist, to the long sagging line.

“I guess there are little blessings,” Mrs. Walker said. “There is only your own things to wash when you're living alone.”

“I don't believe Mr. Angell had a place to hang his laundry at all. He cut down every tree around that house, there is no place to tie a line. I've been just laying things out on the twigs of bushes.”

Evelyn Walker nodded. “When I came here, Mike didn't have a line. I planted these trees, they're wild things from the woods, and put a line up the first week I was here.” Then she said, looking sideward at Lydia, “That place of Mr. Angell's is in a sorry way, I guess. I haven't seen it, but that's what Mike says.”

The two boys had come slowly out from the house. They squatted next to the door, watching Lydia from behind their pulled-up knees. She looked back at them. Then she looked at Evelyn, and at the big man's shirt she was snapping out in her hands. She felt a slow, surprising intention.

She said, looking at the shirt, “My dad never said a good word to me all the time I was doing his work. I believe he was ashamed of what I was doing. He got Lars Sanderson to marry me, I heard that afterward from more than one person, and when I asked my dad, he wouldn't deny it. He wanted a man to be working the farm, and Mr. Sanderson wanted a farm made over to him. I guess he didn't mind me as a wife, as he knew I always had worked hard and without thanks for it.”

She heard the shake coming into her voice, but she kept on with what she had decided to say, only beginning to smile a little, helplessly, feeling it stiff and askew on her face. “When he dropped dead, I sold about everything he had brought to our marriage, even the ring he had married me with, and I came out here to Oregon. I don't know who's taking care of my dad's place now, and I don't give a damn either, except for my mother's sake.”

Her hands too were shaking by this time. She took a child's shift out of the wet pile and snapped it twice. “The truth is,” she said,"I'd rather have my own house, sorry as it is, than the wedding ring of a dead man who couldn't be roused from sleeping when his own child was slipping out of me unborn.”

She hung the little shift silently, pinching the pins down hard with the fingers of both hands. Her face felt red and stiff. She had not ever told that much of it to anyone.

After a while Evelyn Walker, from where she stood beside her at the clothesline, reached for her hand clumsily and squeezed it. When Lydia looked toward her in embarrassment, she saw that Evelyn's eyes had filled with tears. “Oh, Mrs. Sanderson, I believe we will be wonderful friends. I've just been beside myself with loneliness, and here you are, lonely as me!” The girl made a wordless sound and took Lydia in a short, fierce embrace.

It had been a while since Lydia had cried over anything. She was surprised when a few dry tears squeezed around the edges of her eyes. But it was the lost babies, she thought, and could not be loneliness, that made her feel this quick, keen need of Evelyn Walker's friendship.

6 May
Have got the soil dug up a little and on the dark Moon will put down on Mrs. Walker's advise potato eyes, onions, beets, parsnips, turnips. Had hoped to grow corn at least and shell beans but her luck w them has been poor, the Summer too short to bring them on, so I will not try them or not this yr. It was slow tilling, the ground woven thru everywhere with roots of the trees A. had sawn down. Could not get the plow down in it much. Some other Spring I must burn out the stumps but for now make a crazy Quilt of small odd plots knowing the poor potatoes will take odd shapes as well. I am desperate in need of some green thing, beet tops or the young onion pulls, as I have had little besides corn mush and the goats cheese since coming to this place. O I have shot a Rabbit today and on the day before caught a Trout in the Jump-Off Creek with a worm in a mud ball! Planted a squash vine at the corner of the house which if it grows I will train up the roof edge, as I have no flower seeds & the squash will look pretty there and do double work. My Health is good, and my thumb which was sprained at Mr Whiteaker's in the branding is healing at last, the swelling gone out of it so I can hold a hair brush now and get my hair done up decently as I have not for a week. I find I have the company every little while of a man or a boy who is Riding The Grub Line. (I have this from Mrs Walker.) I am so far off the road it is always a surprise to see them come into the yard but they know of the houses that are vacant, the word goes around among them. When they see this house is not empty any longer they generally stand hat in hand and ask a meal for a wood-chopping or “whatever needs done". If they will settle for milk and cheese of which I have plenty I do not turn them away Hungry, only one boy for a rude manner and a man who said he could not abide milk, it gave him red bumps. For the most part they are quiet company & soon gone, for which I am glad enough, and in any event glad to have wood cut by hands more idle than mine. I believe the white goat Rose will kid in the Summer tho the man who sold her swore she was just Fresh & not bred. O well she will be Fresh again by Winter and I suppose I cannot starve as Louise gives more than can use, every day without complaint.

Tim sat up in the darkness and reached for his pants.

“What the hell.”

“I don't know. Something after the horses maybe. I heard one of them, right before the dogs started in.”