by Molly Gloss
Finally she looked off, away from me, off toward her old house. “I appreciate you coming so far.” I couldn’t hear grief in it, just that same flat tone, like she was worn out, worn down.
I thought about it. “Jim would’ve done the same for me,” I said.
She raised her head without looking around. “Yes, I guess that’s so,” she said. “Jim always set his friends high.” She said it like she faulted him for it, and there was a look in her face, somewhat of bitterness. After a silence she said, “Were you with him?”
I had to think a minute what she was getting at, and then when it came clear I began to knead my leg again, working my knuckles at the knee. “Yes. I was there.”
She nodded in that way she had, as if it meant something serious. Then finally she looked at me again, a straight look. “I want to hear about it.”
I had thought I might get away with just telling her he had been kicked by a horse. But she stood there waiting for the rest, so I told her more or less what had happened, though I hadn’t got myself ready to tell it.
I told her we had got drunk after the rodeo in Sprague and Jim had started in teasing me about that blue roan I loved so much. Actually, I never did tell her it was the roan. I just said it was a mare Jim had, which I had taken a liking to. She had lately come into heat and every stallion who stood within half a mile of her was probably rubbing himself against a post that night. Jim was kidding me about it, asking if I was man enough to service her myself, and so on. But after a while things took a turn and he started talking in a serious way, as if we weren’t both drunk, sitting on our butts under the dark bleachers in the rain.
“Female needs offspring,” he said solemnly. “She won’t be happy until she throws a colt. I ought to put her in with that good-looking red stud belongs to Chip Lister. She’ll get herself a little red roan baby to keep her happy.”
“The hell,” I believe I said and kept drinking my beer.
In a while he made a thoughtful sound and stood up. He walked off, dragging his boot heels in the mud in a lazy, strutting way. It was a while before I got up to follow him. I was pretty drunk. By the time I caught up to him, he had the mare in with Chip’s stallion and was leaning on the rail watching them.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey. What the hell are you doing?”
“If you weren’t so blind-drunk you’d see what I’m doing.”
I took off my hat and waved it. I don’t know what good I thought that would do. “Jim, damn you, this ain’t funny.”
Jim clapped me on the shoulder. He was grinning. “The hell it ain’t,” he said.
The stud was driving the mare just ahead of him around the edge of the corral. In the rain and darkness the mare looked black, the stallion dark red, the color of old blood. I flapped my hat again. “Get away from her, you big bastard.”
Jim laughed. “That old boy’s going to make her a baby.”
I stood holding my hat. Then I said, “The hell he is,” and I went over the fence. Chip’s horse had her pushed up against the rails by then and he was trying to work around behind her. I went up and just hit him in the muzzle with my fist. I was drunk. I should have got a stick of wood or something but I didn’t. I just pushed in between them and starting hitting.
I don’t know what happened. I guess I got bumped. I was sitting in the mud, all at once, and they were stepping on me. I heard Jim yelling, I still don’t know if it was at me or at those horses, but a big drunk yell, and then he came wading in, beating at the stallion like I’d done, with his knuckles.The horse got up on his hind legs, squealing, I saw his big chest and his mane swinging loose, and then I heard the sound the iron shoe made against the solid bone of Jim’s head. That was all there was, just that sound, because Jim never made any, just fell back straight as a tree and heavy.
I got up from under him and got hold of a two-by-four and beat the hell out of that stallion. I felt bad about it afterward, it wasn’t the damn horse’s fault. But I beat him off the mare and ran the mare outside, and then I went back and sat down next to Jim, with the rain falling on us in the dark. One of the horses had broken my shinbone and my boot was filled up with blood, but there was no pain there, just the sticky wetness, and I didn’t know I was hurt until somebody told me afterward.
Jim’s wife never said a word while I told her how Jim had got killed. When I was done she just stood there, looking out at the sky edge. Finally she said, “Well, I’ll think about the work you offered,” and she looked down at her feet and then walked back up the hill to the house. She had a deliberate way of walking, even across the soft field. I’d noticed it before. She walked like somebody who has a long way ahead and has set herself a pace to get there.
• • •
By the time I had got the harrowing done, the sun was low. I gave the mare what feed I had from the back of the truck and I was doling out the woman’s hay to her cow when the boy walked out to me.
“I’m supposed to do that,” he said, mumbling, pointing the words somewhere to the left of where I was.
“Okay,” I said, and stood off and watched him do it.
“You’re supposed to come in for supper,” he said when he had finished with the cow. “We’re both supposed to.”
I followed him up to the faucet and we took turns again.
“Did you get bucked off?” he asked me, sideways, eyeing the dirty cast.
“Got stepped on,” was all I said.
He nodded like his mother, in a solemn way. “Oh.”
The woman had brought out a bit of a cold supper and we ate as before, silently, in the high-ceilinged kitchen. The daylight began to fail fast while we were sitting there, and when she stood to do up the dishes she pointed with her chin and the boy pulled the chain on the ceiling light without being told. I didn’t wait for her to point her chin at the door. I went on outside.
I’d been hoarding the few cigarettes I had left, but I was needing one pretty bad tonight and, hell, that’s what they were for, so I got one out. I went partway down the hill and sat down on the grass in the darkness with my cast stuck straight out in front of me while I smoked. I watched the mare grazing on the poor grass in that fenced field. I could hear her ripping the tough stalks with her teeth.
After a while I heard the screen door crack. I kept on sitting there, sucking up the last of my smoke, staring off at the mare like I didn’t know, but I could feel the woman’s eyes on me—I knew she was standing back there, watching me. I was about to get onto my feet again when she came down from the house and sat a couple of yards away, with her knees pulled up in front of her and her arms clasped around them.
In a bit she said, “Jim never could stay put. I guess you know that, you’d be like that yourself. So the boy and me, we’ve been alone half his life, and sometimes we get pretty hungry for a man’s voice. Both of us do, I won’t deny it; we get pretty lonesome.” There was a silence. Then she said, “If I was looking for somebody to wear the edge off my lonesomeness, I guess you’d do; you have a kind face, as far as that goes.”
I felt a heat start up from my neck. I took a long stem of grass and began to split it down the middle with my thumbnail. I guess I had known all along she might take my offer that way. Afterward, when I thought about it, I wondered if I might even have meant her to take it that way. I don’t know. I sat there on the grass in the dark, looking at my hands.
“The truth is, I could use the help,” she said. “There’s more work than I can do, and no money to pay anybody.” She waited again. “But the boy sees you with that good-looking horse, looking like you do, dressing like you do, just smelling of places a long way from here. And I can see his eyes going away from me.” I didn’t know what she meant, not then, but I figured it out later. She said, “Jim’s eyes used to do that,” and there was tenderness in it, or pain, the first I’d heard since telling her Jim was dead.
She didn’t say anything else for a while. I wondered if she had started to cry. Then she said, “I guess I’m stupid,
turning you away when you offer your help. I could use it, that’s for sure. But it wasn’t your fault, what happened; you don’t owe Jim anything. And my saying no doesn’t have anything much to do with you.” She lifted her chin a little and gave me a straight look and then I saw her eyes were tearless. “It’s just a lonesome woman isn’t any mare in heat,” she said in a level voice. I looked away. I looked down at my hands. “I’m just trying to hold on to my son,” she said after a wait. Her voice dropped lower. “I appreciate you harrowing the field. And coming down here with the news. If you don’t mind sleeping in the shed, I’ll see you get a good breakfast in the morning before you leave.”
She stood up without waiting for me to say anything else and walked back up the short hill to the house. I kept sitting where I was for a while. I watched the blue roan, the shadow of her, in that field.
• • •
She and the boy made a space for me under the eaves of the lean-to, amid the stack-up tools, and it was snug there; I’d slept in worse places. But after a while I just gave it up. There was a pretty good wind shaking the tree, and my leg was aching, and I blamed it on those things. In the dark I had to watch out not to kick over a rake or something, feeling careful with my boot and my cast until I was out in the open, where the moon gave some light to see what I was doing. I sat down and wrote on a scrap of paper the name of the mortuary where’s Jim’s body was in Sprague, and below that I wrote, His horse and gear were sold, this is the sum of what it came to. The truck was his too. Jim had had a little money and I put it with my own money, all I had, in a stack on the piece of paper, and I folded it so it was a flat packet. Then I went up and set it under a rock on the porch, where she would find it. I lugged the saddle out of the truck and put it on the mare. I had a hell of a time getting her saddled and a worse time getting myself up on her with that damn cast. I had to lead her up next to the house so I could stand on the porch and clamber up. I was afraid maybe the woman would hear me bumping around, but if she heard, she didn’t come out to see what it was.
I left her the truck sitting there with the keys in it. It was a better one than she had, and the trailer was damn near new. Half of the rig was Jim’s anyway, and I didn’t have the money to buy him out, after giving her the money for the horse. Driving up here, I had thought I would give her the blue roan too, but I could see now, she wouldn’t have wanted it there, around the boy. So that was the only thing of Jim’s I held on to.
The Everlasting Humming of the Earth
WHEN JOYCE WAS TEN YEARS old she woke in the night and went to the foot of the stairs and called up to her mother’s bedroom that the earth was shaking. This was not the first time, nor even the hundredth. “Write it down in your journal,” her mother said, in a voice rough with sleep. Her daughter’s insomnia and nighttime anxieties had worried her at one time, but by now she was impatient with them. Writing her thoughts and worries in a journal had been the solution of a pediatric therapist they had seen when Joyce was eight.
Joyce pleaded. “I did, I wrote it down, but it didn’t help. I can still feel it. Can’t you feel it?”
“For Pete’s sake, Joyce, no, I don’t feel it. Nobody feels it. The earth is not shaking! Go back to bed and let me sleep. Please, please, I have to be up at six o’clock, I need my sleep, don’t keep doing this. I mean it. Don’t come to my door again.”
This was not the first time, nor even the hundredth, Joyce was made to understand: No one, not her mother, her brother, none of her friends, no one else she had ever met, no one, only she could feel, could hear the low ceaseless droning of the earth under their feet. She alone could feel the juddering, tightening vibration that was the earth grinding its teeth in sleep. She alone in all the world could feel the great grinding of stone on stone, the sudden rumbling reverberation that was the earth rolling over, rearranging itself under the covers.
• • •
When she was seventeen she started a blog. She posted to it when she felt the earth making ready to shift its weight, and a day or three later she posted a link to the National Earthquake Information Center bulletin about the M 7+ quake that always followed. She didn’t expect anyone to find the blog or read it, but shortly she had a few dozen followers. Some of them were disaster junkies, or had their own improbable theories of earthquake prediction. Someone from the NEIC wrote to ask that she delete her posts. “Fraudulent predictions of earthquakes,” they said, was “fearmongering of the worst kind.” Most of the comments that came in were salacious, or pornographic—an algorithm had picked up the sexual meaning of “I feel the earth move.” She stopped blogging after a few months.
• • •
When she was twenty-five and married, Joyce woke in the night, went to her computer, and posted on a website called The Big One. It was a serious forum frequented by seismologists and geoscientists, focused on research and hypotheses aimed at predicting major quakes, the ones that ten or twelve or twenty times a year rang through Joyce’s body like a struck bell. She wrote, “What if I have a way to know when, but not where? Would that be any help at all? I know there will be a quake tomorrow. Or the next day. I’m sorry but I don’t know where. I don’t know who I should tell or whether it would do any good at all. It probably wouldn’t. I just feel like I have to tell someone.” This was half past two in the morning, Arizona time, but someone, perhaps on the other side of the globe, commented immediately, “Are you nuts? What kind of a stupid-ass question is that? Prediction is when/where, that’s what prediction f***ing MEANS!” There had been profane argument and flame wars on the site, around the question of whether accurate prediction would ever be possible.
Jimmy never wanted Joyce to make public predictions—he knew about all the fake psychics, the charlatans, he knew there’d been a lot of name-calling when she was a kid. He didn’t want anybody thinking his wife was a nutjob or a quack. It was his job to remind her, over and over: If she couldn’t say where it would happen, how would telling anybody do any good? How would it keep people from dying?
She only told Jimmy about the posting afterward—after the quake in Nepal that killed 9,000 people, and after her post drew a firestorm of argument and comment on The Big One. “I just felt like I needed to tell someone,” she said to Jimmy. And she told him she had been banned from the website. “Good,” he said, “that’s good. You’re well rid of it, Joyce, you know you are. When you need to tell somebody, you tell me.”
• • •
When Joyce met Jimmy they were both living in Arizona, and they went on living there for the first years after they were married. But then Jimmy’s job moved them over to the Bay Area, to San José, which was Joyce’s idea of hell. She surrendered to it while Jimmy was still alive—he had been promoted, the move was good for him—but the summer after he died she sold the house and moved north to get away from all the tremors. She went up to Oregon, which was not exactly out of the earthquake zone but would be some relief, at least, from the 8,000, 9,000 minor quakes every year in San José, the shivers she could feel rising up from the bottoms of her feet into her bones.
Honestly, she would have preferred to move East—not Kansas or Oklahoma, where all the fracking and fracturing had been making the news for decades, but farther north, Wisconsin maybe, or Minnesota, where they hadn’t had an earthquake in 10,000 years—but her son and his wife still lived in the Bay Area. She didn’t want to be clear across the country from them when the worst happened, but she thought a few hundred miles might be a good thing. She and Michael weren’t estranged; she still called him every couple of weeks, he called her at least every couple of months. But his mother was “an odd duck,” he had said to Brenda when the two of them were first together. He had said it in Joyce’s hearing and Jimmy had jumped on him for it. None of them had quite managed to forget it. She didn’t know why it had been so easy for Jimmy to accept strangeness in his wife and so hard for Michael to accept it in his mother.
When they had first moved to San José, Jimmy had given Joyce a
pillow embroidered with a famous quote of Richter’s, “I don’t know why people in California or anywhere worry so much about quakes. They are such a smaller hazard compared to things like traffic.” Joyce had never been afraid of dying in a quake—she and Richter were of like minds—but she knew more than most people about earthquakes, enough to be cautious and to make plans. She couldn’t live in Portland—there were crustal faults running up the West Hills and right under the downtown. So she bought a small one-story stick-built house in Cornelius, a little farm town thirty miles west of the Portland fault line, and a hundred miles east of the Subduction zone off the coast. There were no buildings taller than the two-story Wilco Farm Store in Cornelius. In a big quake, bridges would go down, roads would buckle, the town might end up isolated for a few weeks, but she thought most people—at least people who planned ahead and stocked up their pantry—would be all right. Plus, there were a lot of Spanish-speaking farm workers in town and she was trying to learn Spanish in order to read Borges in his own language. This had been on Jimmy’s list for his retirement, if he had lived long enough to retire. They used to read aloud to each other in the evenings, and she had the idea that if she could read Borges aloud it would be like Jimmy was still there.
Bienestar Dispensario Médico was a nonprofit alt-health storefront mostly serving the indigent, addicts and migrants. Joyce was not indigent, not a migrant, not an addict. She was fifty-five years old, she had her husband’s pension to live on, she could pay for acupuncture, she told the woman on the phone. “I’ve just moved here. I’m not poor, but yours is the only acupuncture clinic in town. I can pay. Do you accept paying patients?”
