Piles of poles were sanctuaries for small living things.
Under there gophers were safe from badgers who wished to eat them whole. There cottontails were safe from coyotes who worried the poles with their paws and teeth. Living there until men came to use the poles to build the fences around the stacks, the small living things knew every recess and cranny and brazenly insulted the big animals in their little voices. They shared their bastion with animals even smaller than themselves, with moles and mice, and helped make war with the smallest animals against snakes who threaded their way in, the skin whispering against the wood as they slithered in, hoping to eat another’s young. A cottontail rabbit with its long hind toenails can rip a snake wide open.
It was a sport of ranch boys to rout out the gophers, the cottontails, the mice — to exhaust themselves lifting pole after pole to expose the hiding place of some terrified creature grown too confident. How moving it was to see it cowering, the eyes mad with fear, limbs trembling, hoping by stillness it might yet again escape. Often the boys let it scurry to another hiding place, and the boys imagined the slowly subsiding fear, the return of confidence. But then again the boys set to and moved the sheltering poles, worked with stolid patience until once again the little creature was exposed to unspeakable dangers. Some boys, tired at last, desisted. Some were perhaps diverted by a bird call, a killdeer pretending a broken wing, fluttering just out of reach to draw away from eggs or young. A few boys felt the first stirrings of conscience. Some boys — bored, disappointed in what they had hoped to be a more exciting sport — tortured or clubbed the creatures, and even that was sometimes strangely unsatisfying. Just so one learns how hollow is the pursuit of pleasure.
It was often said of Phil that he never lost a certain boyish air; you saw it in his eyes, in the step of his high-arched foot. He was forty, yet his face was innocent of lines except those around the eyes that hint of one who looks often and long into the distance. Only his hands had aged, and they only because of the baffling pride he took in going gloveless. Yes, he still took delight in boyish games. Idle for a moment in the shade of a willow, he might take out his pocketknife, open the big blade and the small blade, and holding it between thumb and index finger he would toss it to turn over once, twice or three times before it pricked the earth at an angle of exactly forty-five degrees. Thus he kept expert at an old game called mumblety-peg. If you lost, you were bound to root out from the earth with teeth a peg pounded level with the earth. You ate dirt. Many’s the game Phil had played with George, and many’s the peg George had rooted out of the ground.
Phil had astounded the young son of a cattle-buyer who represented himself to Phil as an expert at marbles, had indeed brought out a chamois bag of chinks, agates and flints and those lesser stones of baked, glazed earth. A fat little boy, Phil had thought, a greedy child, passing his precious bag of marbles from hand to hand so they rattled richly deep inside the pouch. George and the cattle-buyer, some new fellow, sat jawing on the running board of the buyer’s fancy car. Phil had squatted on his haunches looking into the distance when the fat kid sauntered over and spoke up.
‘Want to see my marbles?’ he asked Phil, bold as brass.
‘Why sure,’ Phil said, smiling pleasantly.
How like a miser that kid looked, how he looked this way and that way before he drew the bag open, knelt, and then he poured out the precious marbles. ‘There’s two hundred of them,’ the kid said softly.
‘Well, how about that!’ Phil said, listening at the same time to George’s palavering with the buyer.
The kid scooped up the marbles and let them fall on each other. ‘Did you ever play marbles when you were a little boy?’ the kid asked.
‘Oh, just a little bit.’
‘Do you know what?’ the kid asked.
‘No, what?’
‘I was champeen marble player this year at my school.’ The kid’s eyes challenged Phil.
‘Well, how about that!’ Phil said.
The voices of George and the buyer droned on. They weren’t getting down to cases yet, Phil knew, and he could safely turn his attention to other things. The sun beat down mercilessly in the middle of the field where the steers they had brought the buyer to see — curious as steers are — stood at a distance, heads lowered, sizing up the fancy car.
‘I was champeen two years in a row.’ The kid was fat, so fat he felt the heat; needed some good exercise to get that fat off. He was a town kid, Phil knew, but he dressed up in boots and stetson like his old man. Funny rig, Phil thought, for the marble champion to sport.
‘I expect you’re mighty proud,’ Phil said dryly.
Yes, the sun was hot. Looked as if George and the buyer were going to yammer for some time. The buyer had got out a pad of paper and was figuring. ‘Want to try a game of marbles, mister?’
What cheek, Phil thought. ‘Why, son, I haven’t got any marbles.’
‘I could sort of lend you some of mine.’
‘Now, how could you “sort of lend” anything? I’ll tell you. Suppose I buy a couple off you?’
The fat kid got a hooded look; you could see that fatty mind grinding and figuring. Just so the father wrote on the pad, mind grinding away. There were those marbles made of baked earth: he could sell them, win them back, and make a clear profit of whatever he could cheat out of Phil.
Sure enough, the kid pawed apart a few clay marbles.
‘How much you want for them, son?’
His old man had taught him well. ‘They’re worth a quarter.’
They weren’t worth a dime, Phil knew. ‘All right, son.’ And Phil took out the little purse he carried with him with its bits of silver and some double eagles in the depths.
‘You go ahead and shoot first, mister,’ the kid urged.
‘My,’ Phil said. ‘I couldn’t let a guest shoot second. You go ahead, son.’
The kid was pretty good. He got four of the marbles Phil had bought before it was Phil’s turn. Phil picked up a little stick and ran it around the circle the boy had traced in the earth. ‘Now it’s my turn, huh?’
‘Your turn, mister,’ the kid said, and licked the sweat off his upper lip.
‘Is this how to hold the marble when I shoot?’ Phil asked.
‘More like this,’ the kid said.
‘Oh,’ Phil said. And then Phil got down on one knee, like he used to, and my, if it didn’t bring back being a boy again, the feel of the old sun, Old Sol, on your back, the grit of the earth on your knuckles, the breath you heaved before you whammed the marble into the ring. ‘Here goes!’ and he whammed out ten of the cheap marbles. ‘Want to trade these ten for one of your flints and play flintsies?’
Round-eyed, stunned, the kid nodded.
Well, sir, Phil took every marble the kid had, and when he got them all before him, he scooped them up and put them back in the kid’s bag. ‘Now you take your marbles back,’ he said. ‘Your old man maybe showed you a few tricks about bein’ sharp, but he didn’t tell you the works by a long shot.’ Now when the kid held the bag he didn’t pass it back and forth, but just held onto it for dear life. Phil liked to teach people a lesson. He got to his feet and walked to the car where George and the buyer were still jawing. ‘I figure you don’t want these cattle,’ Phil drawled, and put his eyes on the buyer. ‘I figure you’re just taking up me and my brother’s time.’
Phil could still construct a kite, and fly it. Until lately he and George played a little catch out back, Sunday; used to be a crackerjack first baseman. He could spin a top. He was ageless, and never lost his boyish air. Others wondered what had happened, whence the rheumatism, the aching bones, the burgeoning paunch; and where was the lovely old flavor of the world they’d lost?
In a boyish mood Phil now drew Peter’s attention to a cottontail that had skedaddled under the poles there where they worked, fencing haystacks. It was an old pile, unused for several years. The hired men had hauled new sharp-smelling pine poles in the wagon and piled them there; they hadn’t yet hauled the old ones to the house for firewood. The rabbit had maybe had the poles to himself for some years, from his unconcern. He hopped around, mind you, as if he owned the place and Phil had first glimpsed him when he and Peter paused for lunch. The sun was bright, and so hot they had moved into the shade of the stack, backs against the stack, legs stretched out. Phil selected a cured blade of timothy from beside him and sucked and nursed the end of it, thinking how curious that Peter’s face and arms seemed to glow. He coughed and removed the blade of hay from his mouth. ‘You’ve got quite a tan there,’ he said, and fell silent. Then, ‘What it was about Bronco Henry, is he never did any roping, never any riding till he was anyway your age. Hey, look at that rabbit.’
It might have been tame so bold it was. Phil smiled, removed his hat, took aim, and shied it at the rabbit; like a hawk, the hat rose, its shadow a hawk’s shadow, and it descended. The rabbit cowered at the shadow, then leaped for the poles. Phil unfolded himself and sauntered into the sunlight and retrieved his hat, knocked the dust off. Then, frowning, he stooped and shook the top pole of the pile, and the sound of it rattling, the heat of the sun and the smell of the afternoon made him smile and moved him to long, long thoughts. ‘Hey, Pete,’ he called. ‘Let’s see how long it takes before Peter Cottontail makes a run for the open.’ That’s what boys used to do, bet on how many poles they’d have to move before the animals ran for it.
Peter on one end of the pile, Phil on the other, they removed first this one and then that, and set it aside; at the end of the tenth pole the rabbit still cowered underneath somewhere, waited. Phil thought he saw it once; he probably had, for his eyes seldom failed. You can bet your sweet life on that.
‘Gutty little bugger, ain’t he,’ Phil breathed. It was like pulling teeth to get Peter to talk. You had to toss the kid direct questions. When Peter spoke, he felt curiously rewarded.
‘I guess he has to be gutty,’ Peter said.
‘I thought he’d’ve made a break for it by now,’ Phil said.
They removed two more poles; the second disturbed the precarious balance of others that collapsed like huge jackstraws to a new pattern; then underneath there was a wild scurrying that was drowned out by a clap of thunder.
And what’s this? The rabbit emerged with a broken leg; flopping, thrusting at the earth with the one good leg, it had a hard time of it. Phil watched while Peter picked the thing up, holding it in the crook of his arm. ‘The poles fell on it,’ Phil remarked.
‘It seems they did,’ Peter said.
‘Well, put the thing out of its misery,’ Phil ordered. ‘I guess the quickest way, knock its head in. Funny, ain’t it? If it hadn’t been so damned gutty, it wouldn’t have got itself hurt.’
‘It seems to show the way things work,’ said Peter.
So the kid was some kind of philosopher, was he? Phil smiled. ‘It seems to show that you never can tell,’ said Phil.
He watched Peter smooth his hand over the rabbit’s head, calming it, and the next minute he was wringing its neck, and so deftly that Phil couldn’t help but admire — he’d never seen anything quite like it. Now the rabbit’s hind legs, free at the severing of the spinal cord from the tensions in the brain, relaxed and hung still in the boy’s hand, the eyes glazing over in death. There was no blood at all! It was Phil himself who was bloody, hooked himself on some sharp thing.
Peter looked at the oozing blood. ‘That’s deep,’ he remarked.
‘But what the hell,’ Phil said easily, and took out his blue bandanna and swabbed off the wound. The thunder boomed and echoed over the vast valley; black clouds hid the sun. Phil wet his index finger and held it up. His spit made it feel the slightest breeze. ‘Won’t get this storm,’ he announced. ‘Wind’s south.’ But he felt thwarted and grumpy. The rabbit thing hadn’t worked out. He’d failed to capture the nostalgia his heart required; when they went around to the far side of the stack again to finish lunch, he spoke again of Bronco Henry. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Bronco Henry came to these parts ignorant of every damned thing about riding and roping. Knew less than you, Pete old dear. Why, you’re sitting up there these days on a horse good! But by God, he learned. Oh, he taught me things. He taught me that if you’ve got guts, you can do any damned thing, guts and patience. Impatience is a costly commodity, Pete. Taught me to use my eyes, too. Look yonder, there. What do you see?’ Phil shrugged. ‘You see the side of the hill. But Bronc, when he looked there, what do you suppose he saw?’
‘A dog,’ Peter said. ‘A running dog.’
Phil stared, and ran his tongue over his lips. ‘The hell,’ he said, ‘you see it just now?’
‘When I first came here,’ Peter said.
‘Well, to get back. I think what a man needs is odds against him.’
Peter’s knees were drawn up with his arm around them. ‘My father said, obstacles. And you had to remove them.’
‘Maybe another way to put it. Well, Pete, you’ve got obstacles, and for a fact, Peter-me-bye.’ He sometimes lapsed into a brogue, for the Irish amused him, their pluck, their roguishness.
‘Obstacles?’ Peter’s eyes were mild.
‘Take your maw.’
‘My mother?’
‘How she’s on the sauce.’ Phil held his breath. Had he said too much? Too soon? Had he maybe alienated the boy before the entirety of his plan had unfolded? Continuing to smile in a pleasant and understanding way, he wondered why he had spoken as he did. Had he perhaps spoken from some motive he himself didn’t wholly understand? Son of a bitch!
‘On the sauce?’ Peter asked, pretending, Phil thought, to look puzzled, as if he didn’t savvy that old expression.
‘Drinking, Pete. Boozing it up.’ The boy winced at the word booze. A little too strong for him that word? But damn it, it was precisely that little old wince he needed to see. Maybe to gauge the wince, to judge it, and when he saw it, he knew he had not said too much, that it was impossible now to say too much. ‘I guess you know she’s been half-shot all summer.’
‘Yes. Yes I know she has. She didn’t use to drink.’
‘Didn’t she now?’ A bit of the Irish accent again, to keep things on a light plane. But were they?
‘No, she never did.’
‘But your paw, Pete?’
‘My father?’
‘Father. Paw. I guess he hit the bottle pretty hard? The booze, Pete?’ Phil’s heart was racing a little. Said too much? Didn’t the boy grow a little rigid? Phil tasted his upper lip.
‘Until right at the end,’ Peter said. ‘Then he hanged himself.’
Phil started to touch the boy, but drew back his hand, and dropped his voice. ‘You poor kid,’ he said, and Peter made a faint smile. ‘Things will work out for you yet.’
‘Thanks, Phil,’ Peter murmured.
The thunderheads rolled away as Phil said they would. Riding home through a little patch of sagebrush at one corner of the field they came on the abandoned nest of a sage hen, nothing left in it but a few shells. You hardly ever run across a sage hen’s nest. You’ve got to keep your eyes peeled. Phil always did.
So good God, he noticed the hides were gone from the butcher pen long before they rode past there. Phil’s mind was photographic; each detail that passed before his eye was etched deep in that dark recess where, for the rest of us, float and drift those pointless hairlike shapes, where lights flash off and on, and some amorphous shape slides across.
Phil saw the hides were gone, and Phil saw red. He rose in his stirrups. ‘Well, I’ll be damned!!’ he said, and spurred his sorrel who began a long strong pace into the barnyard.
‘Phil — Phil what’s wrong?’ Peter asked. ‘Phil is something wrong?’
‘Wrong? Wrong for Christ’s sake?’ Phil said. ‘Every God damned hide is gone. She’s really put her foot into it this time.’
‘You think she did it, Phil — sold them?’
‘You’re bloody tootin’,’ Phil said. ‘Or maybe gave them away.’
‘Why would she do that, Phil. Why? She knew we needed the hides.’
‘Because she was drunk. Pie-eyed. She was stewed. Why sonny, I’d think you’d know from them books that your paw left you that your maw’s got a whatyoumacallit alcoholic personality. In them books of yours, it would come right under the letter A.’
‘Phil — you’re not going to say anything to her?’
‘Say anything?’ Phil barked. ‘I won’t say nothing. It’s no skin off my ass, but sure as one good hell brother George will. High time that bozo got next to a few whatyoumacallit facts.’
They entered the long, dark barn that smelled of dust and manure and hay. Yes, and of years. Pale light knifed down from the crazy high windows.
‘Phil?’
Phil’s tongue had now swollen with anger. ‘Mmmm?’
And then the boy touched his arm — touched it. ‘Phil — I’ve got rawhide to finish the rope.’
‘You’ve got it? What you doing with rawhide?’
And the boy’s hand remained right where it was. ‘I cut some up, Phil. I wanted to learn — to braid like you. Please take what I’ve got?’ They were facing each other, and the boy’s hand remained right where it was. ‘You’ve been good to me, Phil.’
Take what I’ve got. You’ve been good. Phil, at that moment in that place that smelled of years felt in his throat what he’d felt once before and dear God knows never expected nor wanted to feel again, for the loss of it breaks your heart.
Oh, sure. Could have been the boy’s offer was but a cheap means of getting his pretty little mother out of the soup. But wanting to braid like him! What reason for the boy to have rawhide but wanting to braid like him! To emulate him! Why else would he have cut up strips of rawhide? The boy wanted to become him, to merge with him as Phil had only once before wanted to become one with someone, and that one was gone, trampled to death while Phil, twenty years old, watched from the top rail of the bronc corral. Ah, God, but Phil had almost forgot what the touch of a hand will do, and his heart counted the seconds that Peter’s was on him and rejoiced at the quality of the pressure. It told him what his heart required to know.
Please, was it not Fate (because a man must believe in something), was it not Fate that the boy had looked on him in his nakedness in that hidden place known only to George and to himself — and to Bronco Henry? Just so, he had looked on the boy’s nakedness in that eternity when the boy had walked proud and unprotected past the open tents, jeered at, scorned — a pariah. But Phil knew, God knows he knew, what it was to be a pariah, and he had loathed the world, should it loath him first.
His voice was husky, ‘That’s damned kind of you, Pete,’ and he slid his long arm about the boy’s shoulders. Once before that day, he’d been tempted, and desisted, because he’d always sworn out of that old loyalty never again to make that move. ‘I’ll tell you one thing. Everything’s going to be clear sailing for you from now on in. And do you know, I’m going to work and finish up that rope tonight. And Pete, will you watch me do it?’ So that night the boy watched while Phil finished it off, scorning his fresh-wounded hand.
Peter was moved, too. In some astonishing way far beyond his pagan petitions, his poor mother had taken his own plan right out of his hands, and as he stood feeling the hand that gripped his shoulder, he seemed to hear a voice whispering that he was as special as he believed himself to be.
It was a matter of pride with Phil to be first at the breakfast table.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ he’d say with mock formality as they ambled in the back door. ‘We got through another night. Good morning to yez!’
Or he might say ‘Gut’ Morgen’ in memory of a Dutchman who once worked on the place. He delighted in dialect. He liked a good big breakfast, and had no patience with people who had but reluctant stomachs. ‘Have another coupla eggs,’ he’d urge a sick young fellow who could scarcely hold down coffee. ‘Come on, now.’ And he’d wink at the other men. Oatmeal and cream, pancakes, fried eggs, rose-hued slabs of ham, coffee with thick cream. The meal never varied, and never would. No young fellow ever disobeyed Phil, and the men seemed to get a kick out of the show. Phil did like to josh people, and he liked to jolly people, too, and during breakfast he jollied them, including George.
George, a heavy sleeper, had not even in the old days appeared until the others were seated and fixed on their food, and his silence was as contagious as Phil’s morning bounciness. Sometimes Phil found himself irritated with George, and he needled him.
‘Have a bad night, George?’ he’d ask, winking at the others. ‘Get tangled up in the arms of Morpheus?’
George, since his marriage, might be five minutes late for breakfast, and the faster eaters had already cleaned up their plates and pushed back their chairs and begun rolling smokes.
Recently, when George was more than five minutes late, Phil had remarked, wide-eyed and innocent, ‘’Strouble, George? Your old lady roll over on your nightshirt?’
Phil could laugh at the memory of the shocked silence, for to these men, these drifters, these homeless wanderers, there were but two kinds of women, good women and bad women. Bad women had no more right to respect than animals, and as animals they were used and discussed.
Ah, but good women! Good women were pure, sexless and as holy as God. Good women were Sister, Mother, and the childhood sweetheart whose glance melted the heart. The pictures and photographs of these good women the men kept in their suitcases, their icons and altar stones.
The little slip of a woman they saw occasionally in the yard, or recently tugging at pieces of trash almost as big as herself, a funny little hand around her head to keep the hair out of her eyes — she was a good woman, hardly to be considered in terms of beds and nightshirts.
George blushed in that silence that contained the mousy sounds of forks and knives and the plink of china. The men held their eyes on their plates, and the moment passed while Phil reached long across the table for the hotcakes — his boardinghouse reach, he called it, that caused the sleeve of his blue chambray shirt to slip far up on his wrist revealing skin that was shockingly white, such skin as might be found under a stone. How red and chapped his hands were, his worldly, scratched and damaged hands.
One comes to count on the usual and the expected, the appearance of the sun, the chilling voice of wild geese wedging south, the breakup of the ice, the shy green grass on the south slopes, the heady breezes that disturb the purple camas. Sun, geese, ice, grass and waving camas all point to the knowable future, and the world was well.
But now Phil was late. No cheery greeting for the cook, no ‘Good morning to yez,’ no good morning in any of the dialects that amused him.
Mrs Lewis brought in the first round of pancakes, slow and heavy on her unsatisfactory feet.
Neither George nor Peter had yet appeared. There was a curious animation among the men, a nervousness they hoped to conceal by continuing to belabor a joke that had sprung up a few moments before in the bunkhouse — some one of the men had got hold of a water snake, surely one of the last of the season, for the frost was now everywhere. The man — just who nobody yet knew — had put the snake into the bedding of a sleeping man. The man had waked, felt something, touched it, and knew a snake was coiled comfortably and torpid close against the hollow of his throat. He alone was now sullen and angry, taking it as the sort of joke you play on a child. Since his only achievement, so far, was that he had grown up, he was jealous of his dignity. When he found out who had done the thing, he had some plans of his own, and don’t you forget it.
‘I’ll bet that old snake was sure sleeping there,’ a man said, giggling a little. ‘But it’d sure take a snake to do it. I sure wouldn’t want to be the one sleeping with you.’
‘Who the hell ever asked you to,’ the man growled.
George walked in and said good morning.
Peter came in silently, and sat. He took a pancake. The fast eater at the table had now already finished, and had pushed back his chair and was commencing to pick his teeth.
The tooth-picker, perhaps a little proud that he had again finished first, was tempted to josh Phil at being late, and opened his mouth to speak, but closed it at once at what he saw in Phil’s face. Phil had apparently not dried his face well on the roller towel in the back lavatory — or was it sweat? — and he had only inexpertly raked his fingers through his hair. He pulled out his chair and sat.
And simply sat. Mrs Lewis lumbered in with a steaming cup of coffee and set it before him. He reached out a hand, picked up the cup, and put it down again, and continued to look at his hand. He looked around the table with a curious, mild expression, pushed back his chair, rose, and left the room. He was not seen again until half an hour later when he sat in the doorway of the blacksmith shop. The sun, just risen above the sagebrush hill, was full in his face. The new frost on the ground began its retreat.
Next, Phil was seen walking with the slow, paced dignity of an old man back to the house. He went into his bedroom and closed the door. He made no sounds in there, nor did he answer when George knocked. George took a breath and did the unheard-of thing — he opened his brother’s door without an invitation. ‘I’ll run you into Herndon,’ George said.
‘All right,’ said Phil.
He had got himself arranged into his ill-fitting town suit; he had got into his shoes from the Army & Navy store. It had been long since he had sat in Whitey Potter’s chair, and his thick hair had so increased that his hat sat high and comical, like a clown’s. He seemed all angles as he walked through the living room and out the front door. Rose, at his approach, left the living room for the kitchen where she poured herself a cup of coffee with a shaking hand to give herself a more reasonable reason for having fled the room. She could not understand the yawning silence in the house, nor what was going on in it. The last she saw of Phil, he was walking across to the garage where the old Reo shot rings of exhaust smoke into the cold morning; Phil stood aside while George backed out the car. Over against the hill, all was shadow. She sipped her coffee; she had so frightened herself two days before in collapsing drunk on the bed that she had drunk nothing since, determined to be sober when George spoke to her, as he surely would. Why hadn’t he spoken yet? Why? She was crushed by the irrational notion that whatever was going on that morning was her fault. Thus does guilt smother and sicken.
The Old Lady and the Old Gent both agreed there was nothing for it but to take the next train to Herndon where George had telegraphed he would meet them.
‘No, she’s good about it,’ the Old Lady said. ‘If the tip is big enough, they’re good about it.’ She spoke of the chambermaid who was good about coming in to water the geraniums that made their hotel rooms homelike. ‘What time is it?’
The Old Gent in his vaguely Prince Albert topcoat reached into his vest pocket for his watch. ‘Exactly five thirty-seven,’ he said.
‘I hate these tiny watches,’ she said, frowning at the wee face of the jeweled one on her wrist. ‘I always have. You can’t see them and they don’t keep time. We can get something to eat on the train.’ Suddenly the Old Lady covered her face with her hands, and the Old Gent walked at once to her as if he had expected the gesture.
‘Now-now,’ he whispered.
‘I’m sorry, I’m all right now,’ she insisted. In a few minutes they left the room, closed the door behind them, and the Old Gent tried it once. They had already sent their bags down ahead into the lobby where, beyond in the dining room, a few transients, unacquainted with the rhythm of the great hotel, ate early dinners under the chandeliers.
‘No, I’m perfectly all right,’ she told the Old Gent as they followed the driver to the revolving door. ‘I’ve been braced for some such thing.’
Phil was fortunate to have his town suit with him, for it was on a Sunday night he needed his suit, although of course Mr Green of Greens would gladly have opened up, under the circumstances. The weather was fine, Indian summer, really — lazy. And lazy out in the country, the air languid and perfumed by the incense of distant forest fires. The winter chore of feeding cattle had not yet begun so people were free that Monday. There was a representative from every store where the Burbanks traded, and even from the stores where the Burbanks did not trade — they having an eye to the future. There was a group from the bank, of course. The ranchers themselves came with their wives and children, the wives — some of them — in the furs of animals their husbands had trapped and had made up as Christmas surprises at a furrier’s in the capital city — local animals, beaver, stone marten, red fox and so forth. Because the funeral was at two (the usual time in that country) they planned so they could have a nice lunch either at the Sugar Bowl or in the hotel and a nice little visit afterwards, for many never saw each other except on such pointed occasions.
To George, of course, had fallen the dismal task of choosing a coffin from among those out back in the Baker Funeral Home. But little light fell through the windows that faced the back alley; they had been purposely left dirty that loiterers might not easily look in upon the accouterments of the dead, the boxes of indifferent wood enhanced with fake silver. Here, too, was an expensive coffin of mahogany, bought perhaps with the Burbanks and two or three other such families in mind. ‘No, don’t turn on the light,’ George murmured. ‘I can see well enough.’
‘Buck up, George,’ Baker said.
‘It’s all right,’ George said. ‘I’ll take the one here.’
‘A fine piece of merchandise, George,’ Baker said. ‘Fit tribute to a fine man. I knew you’d want to do the right thing.’
The church smelled of coal smoke and old brown wood. Those who were not Episcopalians — Episcopalopians, as Phil used to call them — whispered that it was a shame that there was no eulogy. There was so much, they said, to say about Phil — so much about his intelligence, his friendliness, how common he was as an old shoe, his lack of side; and my, they did remember his banjo playing, his bright whistle, his boyishness, the works of his strong, scarred, chapped hands — the little carved chairs, the wrought iron pieces. Mrs Lewis, back at the ranch, shed a tear over a darning ball Phil had once surprised her with.
The Old Folks went directly from the grave to the railroad depot; otherwise they would have had to spend the night in Herndon. There was nothing to say to anybody, and they knew it.
‘Don’t look like that,’ the Old Lady commanded the Old Gent. ‘You had nothing, precisely nothing, to do with it. One is what one is, does what one must do, and ends as fate requires.’
‘May I remind you of the same?’ the Old Gent said softly.
‘Oh, so many flowers,’ the Old Lady remarked. Sufficient flowers to later perk up each room in the Herndon Hospital, even blooms for the charity wards.
‘I was watching,’ the Old Gent said, ‘when you kissed Rose.’
‘So now we call her Rose. You were watching? Well, of course. I hope for so much.’
‘You can, of course. That’s when I noticed you didn’t have your rings.’
‘My rings? Oh, yes.’
‘I’ve always liked your hands. You know, you never needed rings.’
‘And she least of all, I think. But sometimes they please. A symbol? But thank you, thank you kindly. I was watching how she got down from the machine, how she gave her hand to George, and suddenly looked at him. So good, both of them. So then I went to her, and I said, “Here …”’
As their accommodation was the single large drawing room on the fast olive-green train back to Salt Lake City, the Old Lady could weep a bit in private. When at last she stopped, the Old Gent rose, steadied himself as the train leaned into a swooping curve, and went and opened one of the bags and got out two monogrammed decks of playing cards and pushed the button for the porter who came and smiled and brought a table and set it up. There beside the window the Burbanks sat and played Russian Bank, and no matter how fast the car sped, the full moon floated easily beside them, a yellow balloon on a string.
‘I suppose,’ the Old Lady said, ‘that I always knew something strange would happen.’
‘… mystified. But you said you were braced. And remember you were always patient, you were always kind.’
She leaned suddenly forward in the seat, and began kneading her bare hands to stop their trembling. ‘Kindness!’ Her voice broke. ‘What else in God’s name is there?’
‘Nothing, really.’
She smiled a little, and spoke softly. ‘Do you know? We’re to spend Christmas with them. At her specific request. I used to feel so old.’
‘I swear you never looked it.’
‘Indeed? But then, I always had you. Always had you, just as she has him. She’s only thirty-seven.’
‘Sometimes you’re hard to follow.’
‘Am I — really?’ She lifted her chin and looked straight into his eyes.
Phil’s doctor, too, was mystified. On Phil’s admission to the hospital, he had taken blood samples and cultured them. The culture the samples produced — a little pale jelly in a test tube — he had already sent off to the State Hospital where they knew about such things. Phil’s final convulsion, although mercifully brief, had been truly frightful. Well, he’d know in a day or two what had gone wrong. He thought the whole business, as he remarked to a nurse, the whole business of sending the culture off was rather like locking the barn door after the horse was stolen.
The culture in the test tube would tell him what one person already knew.
Peter, waiting patiently at the ranch during the funeral, had an interesting day. One of the dogs, a half-breed collie, followed him around from the barn and played a game with itself, snapping at its reflection in one of the basement windows there at ground level. It was the first of the dogs to adore him. His first friend. When he went inside, it whined for him beyond the front door. Then he spent some time soberly thumbing through George’s pile of Saturday Evening Posts. Among them he found evidence of one of George’s little dreams, a somewhat ragged brochure for Pierce-Arrow motorcars. His face came very close to a grin for he felt a sudden warm kinship with George. Who could help but admire those magnificent machines, the insolent sweep of the fenders and the headlights set into them? Those were the vehicles of the high and mighty, and he knew that only the Locomobile (fancied by old General Pershing, among others) rivaled the Pierce.
The sun had slipped around behind, and the shadow of the house lay black across the road and crept up the face of the hill. Peter browsed among the books in the case in the living room, looking close (for the light was failing), noting the range of their contents. Here the Memoirs of the Russian Court composed by a Grand Duchess, was smack against a copy of Grasses of the Western United States, and then a modern edition of Hoyle’s Card Games, books for dreams, books for facts. And here was the Book of Common Prayer. He supposed it would be used that day in Herndon, and drew it out; it fell open to Psalms, Day 6. But this was the fourth of September, and he turned back, and since the shadow was already creeping up the face of the hill out front, he read the Psalms of Evening Prayer. The twentieth verse was weirdly appropriate, and moved him to turn to and read through The Order for the Burial of the Dead, equally appropriate, and a much shorter service than he’d imagined, hardly longer than the Form of Solemnization of Matrimony he had first read not nine months before. Not many words, he thought, to celebrate oblivion. Reading it slowly as the pale priest might, he found it took but fifteen minutes by the big clock to finish — counting appropriate pauses at the commas and periods; however, the coffin would have to be carried in and carried out, and it would be bulky. Thus, the entire service might take a good half hour.
From the windows of the neat, quiet room where he lived in Herndon he had watched a half dozen processions to the cemetery on the hill a mile away, had seen the sun fix and flash on bottles and mason jars that held the rotting stems of flowers; the hearse moved so slowly that it always took a good half hour, but in the wintertime they hurried it up a little. But this day was warm. Then there were the words ‘appointed to be read at the grave’ — about fifteen minutes’ worth (reading as the old priest might) and then the trip back with the empty hearse, a blue Buick hearse, new that year. He’d read about it in the Herndon Recorder. Baker, the undertaker, and his family had driven the old hearse out to Chicago and taken delivery of the new one and had driven it back, picnicking along the way with many little adventures that the editor wrote up with a gentle humor.
Then there would be coffee and sandwiches somewhere, and greetings and good-byes, so it would be past five before the whole thing was over, and dark.
But what enchanting words those were in the Prayer Book, what majesty, what a roll they had. How his father would have loved them, had they been said over him, but they had not been, because his father had played God and removed himself. But oh, what words they would have been to read — to sing over his father!
It was long past suppertime when his mother and George got back. The girl came in from the kitchen and had spoken to Peter with respect. ‘Do you want me to leave their places on?’
‘Please,’ he said. Then he went upstairs and washed his hands carefully, and wetted and combed his hair. Before long the dogs began their predicted barking and he combed his hair carefully and got up and opened the window and looked out. At first they were hidden in the shadow of the hill; he heard his mother’s soft voice. Then they moved slowly out into the moonlight. How lovely she looked in the moonlight, how fine that George stood still, took her, kissed her! What but for this, this playing of a scene in the moonlight that marked the true beginning of his mother’s life, what but for this had his father removed himself — sacrificed himself to lie under that other hill, in Beech, under a handful of paper flowers, faithful to his own book of dreams?
The dogs kept to the shadows, whimpered softly, then were strangely still. Peter was moved to whisper the line from Psalms that had so moved him, hours before.
Deliver my soul from the sword,
My darling from the power of the dog.
He wondered if that Prayer Book were often used, if he might not snip out that bit and paste it into place in the scrapbook, a far better final entry than the rose leaves that, still red, had lost their odor. For she was delivered now — thanks to his father’s sacrifice, and to the sacrifice he himself had found it possible to make from a knowledge got from his father’s big black books. The dog was dead.
In those black books, one August afternoon, he had found that anthrax — blackleg they called it out there — was a disease of animals communicable to man, and that it finds its sure way into the human bloodstream through cuts or breaks in the skin from a man’s handling the hide of a diseased animal — as when perhaps a man with damaged hands will use a diseased hide in braiding a rope.