by Gary D. Svee
“More than fair. If your Ma’s peach cobbler is as good as her bread, I’ll be getting the better part of the deal.”
Arch shook his head in disgust. “That’s the way it is with management, always trying to cheat the worker.”
“Arch, who told you all this about labor-management?”
“Klaus.”
Standish nodded. “So what do you want for your day’s work?”
“Hortenzia.”
Standish’s back stiffened. “You want Hortenzia for one day’s work?”
“Not forever. Just for a day. Seems fair to me. One day of work from me. One day of work from Hortenzia.”
“What do you need her for?”
Arch finished the last bite of his sandwich. He licked his fingers before replying. “I could plow the garden. We still got some seeds left over from.…” Arch’s attention dropped to the ground. “We still got seeds.”
“You ever plowed, Arch?”
The boy shook his head.
“How about I plow?”
Arch’s face hardened. “Don’t want you around our place.”
Standish reached up and scratched the back of his head. “Why’s that, Arch?”
“None of your business.”
“Maybe it is.”
Arch jumped to his feet, both arms akimbo. “No it ain’t. Ain’t nobody’s business.”
Standish held up his hands, palms toward the boy. “Now wait a minute, Arch. No sense getting mad about this.…”
“How do you know that?” Arch’s voice was as close to a growl as his eight-year-old throat could make it. “How do you know what’s worth getting mad about? What do you know, you, you.…”
“I don’t know anything. Nothing about what riles you anyway. All I know is that you want your garden plowed, and I’m trying to figure how to get that done.”
Arch’s head dropped. His breath escaped in a sigh, and he seemed to shrink. “Sorry, it’s just.…”
Standish shook his head. “Forget it. What do you say about having a can of peaches, and then get back to work. While we’re doing that, maybe you can figure out how I can plow your garden. How’s that sound?”
“Peaches?”
“Yeah.”
“How we going to divide a can of peaches?”
Standish ran the palm of his hand across his forehead. “How about you eat the peaches, and we’ll get back to work.”
“Well, if that’s what you want,” Arch said.
The root cellar came together that afternoon. Standish and Arch nailed the framework for the walls. Once they were certain that the framework was square, they added the siding, cutting the boards on the bias for additional strength. Each of the walls was built on three four-by-four-inch timbers. Standish eased each wall into the holes, making sure that they were level before adding another wall. Four-by-Fours provided the strength for the ceiling, but before he finished it he and Arch stepped inside the structure admiring their work.
“Pretty nice,” Standish said.
“Best root cellar I ever saw,” Arch intoned.
“You have a root cellar?”
“Kind of.”
“So this is the only real root cellar you’ve seen?”
“Yup.”
Standish grinned. “You might say this is the Taj Mahal of root cellars.”
“Eighth wonder of the world,” Arch opined.
Standish chuckled. “Not much to do now. Put some shelves in here. Put the roof on, cover it with tarpaper and pack those rocks and dirt around it.”
Arch cocked his head. “So we took ’em out so we could put ’em back?”
“One way of looking at it.”
Arch nodded, one eyebrow arching into a question mark. “This will take another day.”
“Maybe two.”
“S’pose we could take tomorrow off?”
“Why?”
“So we could get the garden plowed.”
“S’pose.”
“S’pose you could come over about first light?”
“S’pose I could if I knew where you lived.”
Arch dropped his head. “You sneaked up on me this morning without me hearing you. I figure you can find your way to my place.”
“S’pose I could.”
“Don’t come in the dark,” Arch said. “Don’t want to shoot you.”
“That’s good, Arch. I don’t want you to shoot me.”
“You stay away from my Ma!”
“No trouble.”
Arch nodded. The rules had been set.
“I can get beans at home,” Arch had said, and he walked away without bothering to say goodbye.
Funny little kid, Standish thought, an 80-year-old man hiding in an eight-year-old body.
The chili was good. He had soaked the beans overnight, and set them on the stove along with a concoction of diced onions, canned tomatoes, jalapeno and chili peppers, salt and Tabasco sauce. He’d put the rest of it in a cooler. He had chili enough to last a week; unless Arch.…
Standish shook his head. Truth was Standish was a little disappointed the boy hadn’t joined him. Company was a rarity in Standish’s life, and Arch, even with his barbarian ways, was company. A grin crossed Standish’s face. Maybe Arch was good company in the same way that the way that the root cellar was the best Arch had ever seen.
Standish stood and scraped off his dishes, putting them into a basin of water heating on the stove. He poured in a little soap and scrubbed them, rinsing the dishes in another basin before drying them and putting them away. He needed to put the chili into the cooler, but he didn’t want to put it away hot. It could spoil some of the other food already there. He took the pot off the stove and covered it, making sure the cover was tight. One damn fly could ruin a whole pot of chili as far as he was concerned.
That done, Standish set about to take a bath. He tugged the bathtub to the stove and placed a chair beside it. Standish fiddled with the soap and a towel and a wash cloth and a razor and shaving soap and a mirror until they were just right. He carried buckets of water from the stove, pouring them carefully into the tub so he wouldn’t waste a drop. Standish stepped then to the spigot, adding cold water to the tub, stirring each addition to be sure the water was perfect.
Standish shrugged off his clothes, thinking he should burn them, break out some of the new clothing he had bought. Standish knew the thoughts were only whimsy. He would wash the clothing, pound the dirt out of it and hang it outside until it dried. He might have to leave this place with nothing more than the clothes on his back, best to take care of what he had.
Standish sighed and put one leg in the tub. The water was hot, and he waited for a moment before pulling the other leg in. As his skin adjusted to the heat, Standish grasped the sides of the tub and, holding his breath, lowered himself into the water. He leaned against the high back of the tub, closing his eyes and trying to remember when he had felt so much at ease. His hands came out of the water, feebly rubbing water over his face and neck. He abandoned the pretense and sank deeper, his knees poking up like two islands rising from the sea. His head disappeared under the water, arising later as he knees had, magma poking from the core of the earth into the air. He lay against the back of the tub, and years ran down his face and drained into the tub.
Standish might have gone to sleep then, to awaken later, sputtering as he slipped into the water. But he wasn’t going to waste this hot water any more than he wasted anything else. He reached to the chair, taking the soap and the washcloth. He scrubbed off the months he had spent in the mountains hiding from his pursuers.
Next came the shaving soap and brush. He held the shaving brush in the water until it was saturated and then put it to the soap bar in the bottom of the shaving mug. The lather came out thick and creamy. He rubbed it into his beard, enjoying the scent. What was it? Not floral, something more.… It didn’t matter. He set the shaving mug and brush on the chair and picked up his razor and mirror.
Bit by bit the dark beard
peeled off. Bit by bit the pale lower half of Standish’s face was exposed. Incredulity spread across that face. Staring back at him from the mirror was a young man with a sunburned brow and pale chin.
The face in the mirror was a stranger, a face abandoned in Standish’s flight into the mountains. This face didn’t look like a hunted man. This face had a certain naiveté that emphasized its youth. How old was he now? It had been years since anyone, including Standish, had celebrated his birthday. The eyebrows crawled down Standish’s forehead—27 years. How could he be only 27 when he felt so old? He didn’t have to ask that question. He knew the answer. The past years had been hard, carving him as Montana winds carve cliffs into patches of light and shadow.
Standish rinsed his face again and stood, the coolness of the cabin rushing to replace the heat on his skin. He would have to get a haircut, but.… Years had passed since Standish allowed anyone with a razor to be close to his face and neck. Maybe Arch had a pair of scissors. Maybe he could borrow them from the boy, and cut his own hair.
Standish shook his head. He wasn’t sensitive about the way he looked. Let people make of him what they chose. He ran the towel across this back and down his legs, and then rubbed down his front. He felt cleaner than he had in years; the tub seemed to have scrubbed off those bad years—almost, but not quite.
He reached for a bucket to begin emptying the tub but stopped, bending instead to pick up his clothes and toss them into the tub. He would let them soak overnight. Couldn’t hurt. He stepped to a box beside his bed, pulling out a pair of new long johns. They rasped against his skin, stiff yet from their time on the shelf at the Last Chance Emporium. They clung to his skin as he lit the lantern and climbed into his bed.
He would read more of this Klaus Bele.
Klaus had fled the East, feeling the Earth open to him as the train moved into the nation’s belly. He wrote that he was on his second voyage to find America, riding the windblown grass of the prairie as he had ridden the waves of the Atlantic.
The Rockies poked from the high plains of Montana as a rock from a pond. Homesteaders washed into that pond from the East, crashing against the mountains and falling back. They came to share free land where a family could raise wheat belly-high to a tall horse, a place where work could be traded for wealth.
Hard work was nothing new to these settlers. They had worked hard all their lives, but they had little more to show for it than the clothing on their backs. Homesteading was the American Dream writ bold in the pamphlets published by Jim Hill’s Great Northern Railroad. These stretches of grass were the real America, not the slums they had left in the East.
Standish sighed. His journey west had brought him little more than anguish. He was a hated man, fair game for the first person who recognized him. His future held bitter portents, being shot or hanged. The epitaph on a crude wooden marker would read, “The son of a bitch got what he deserved.”
Bele’s fine handwriting pulled him back to the page, away from the darkness of his thoughts. Bele had found Last Chance fascinating, a mélange of ethnicity. To walk down the street was to hear the languages of half a dozen European countries. The town had sprung as foreign and vulnerable as an orchid from the prairie.
The city of Bele’s birth was built of stone and brick and history. To walk those streets was to feel centuries of human endeavor. Churches dating back to the dark ages loomed over the streets, their spires pointing the way to heaven.
People knew their neighbors. They had spoken the same language for as long as it existed, albeit seasoned and tempered by this conqueror or that religion. People knew their place. Bele had fled that. He had a fine mind, and a fine education, but he could never be more than a servant to the royal family, no matter how inept they might be.
Last Chance was Bele’s chance to transcend his past; the dry air of Montana was his last chance to beat the tuberculosis that ravaged his body.
Standish shook his head. He must be too tired to read. Bele’s words ambled across the page as though they weren’t words at all.
Wind whispers scent
of needles bitter to the tongue
Meat eater’s foot to stone
flickering sounds of death
run
Branches slash and tug
Until…
Nothing,
No shadows.
Scents of rose and mint
Of sun on grass
and cool water
Life pinned against bright light.
Synapses crackle, blood surges
Hooves thump
Through light to shadows
To shadows and safety
Standish propped the book open on his chest. Bele was writing about a prey animal running for its life. Standish knew what it was to be hunted, to immerse himself in his surroundings, each sense tingling as a piano key does ringing high C. Danger might be as subtle as the scent of cigarette smoke, or a glint where there shouldn’t be one. Standish knew what it was to become one with the land. But what was Bele talking about?
Standish scratched the outside of his lower lip with his teeth. A cigarette would taste good now, if he had a cigarette, and if he still smoked. Smoking is a dangerous habit for a man on the run. Trackers might find a crushed butt on the trail, or smell cigarette smoke when they were stalking their prey. Standish shook his head. He didn’t really want a cigarette. He raised the journal from his chest, squinting a little in the soft light to read the fine print.
I sat on a rock and watched the doe move through the trees, her ears flicking this way and that. She was aware of something I wasn’t. That piqued my curiosity, so I followed her into the woods. She walked softly, tentatively, and then burst into flight. Only then did it occur to me that I might want to run, that something in that thick wood might endanger me, too.
I continued after her, taking care to step carefully so as to not make a sound. I realized then that I was hunting her, hunting her secrets, trying to find what frightened her. We came then to a meadow, and she burst into flight, but I was struck with how beautiful is the area she fled. The meadow is large, covered with grass and sprinkled with flowers.
I knelt to look at a day lily, wondering why something so fragile should seek to draw the eye and foot and hand. One would think this bit of beauty would find ways to conceal itself from predators like me. I didn’t pick the flower, of course. To do so would be foolishness, as though one were capable of possessing a lily’s beauty.
I sat on a rock left for that purpose and surveyed this wonder. The scent of pine and grass and mint and rose wafted past, competing for my attention. I almost fell asleep, the sun so gentle on my face, but speculation drew me to my feet. This seemed the Garden of Eden, without the tempting apple.
But of course, I couldn’t live here. To sully that meadow would be heresy. Still, I found that with not too great an effort, I could create a living space near the meadow. I walked back through the trees to Hortenzia, and the wagon I had purchased in Last Chance. I must find a neighbor to determine if this land is owned by another, or if it might be still be open for homesteading.
I stepped into the shadows with sun-washed eyes, bumping into branches and stumbling until I broke free of the trees. I knew that any neighbors must be to the south, so I set Hortenzia in that direction, seeking roads, seeking a new life.
Standish slipped a a scrap of paper into the journal and laid it on the box that served as a night stand. He opened the lamp, blowing out the flame, watching a thin vapor of smoke curl up from the wick.
Bele painted his edges too soft for Montana. Still, he had created this home, a home distinctly suitable for Standish. How could that be? Standish had no soft edges. They had been swept away by a cold that tugged at his bones, by a wind so fierce it blew his soul away. Standish had become one with the doe Bele described. He was hiding now in the shadows of these trees, afraid that something would drive him into the bright light of discovery.
Standish sighed and rolled over. Arch would
expect him there at daylight. That was a shred of life that Standish must cling to.
CHAPTER 5
Standish snortled, the sound rousing him from his sleep. Still dark. That was good. He had promised to…to plow the garden for Arch and his mother. One of Standish’s eyes squinted to see more clearly what this day held for him: plowing and maybe meeting Arch’s mother.
Arch was fiercely protective of his mother. Why? Maybe he could solve that mystery without being shot.
Standish’s stomach growled for attention. He needed something in his belly, maybe some bread and huckleberry jam. Coffee, of course. Nobody should step into a day without coffee.
Standish twisted against the mattress. Damn long johns were as scratchy as his whiskers. Might as well run a steel brush down his back. He threw the covers off and swung his legs to the floor. The floor was cold, and bristly as his long johns. Bele had used rough lumber for the floor, and it hadn’t yet worn smooth. Standish reached for a pair of pants on the chair beside the bed. He slipped into the shirt.
Clean body. Clean clothes. Clean start on a new day.
His hands roved over his clothes. Matches. Where had he left the matches? On the night stand. Last night, he had emptied his pockets on the box that served as a nightstand. There they were, in a small silver case.
Standish scratched the tip of a match against a thumbnail, found the lever to open the lantern with the match’s light and set the flame to the wick. The scent of burning kerosene bumped into his nose.
His boots? Where were his boots? There, under the bed. That wasn’t good. Wouldn’t do to be scrambling for boots if Bodmer found him. Standish sighed. Boots wouldn’t matter much if Bodmer put a noose around his neck. Standish had seen a lynching once. The man had kicked and writhed, his face turning purple as he struggled to get air past the rope, and then he died and his mouth opened and his tongue popped out black as ash.
Standish shook his head. Bodmer and his lynch mob had occupied his thoughts for more than three years. He had other things to think about today.
The stove fell into the circle of light. Standish chose kindling, building a teepee of splinters and surrounding it with slightly larger sticks. The splinters flared into life, burning long enough to set the sticks above them on fire. Not long before the cabin would be warming.
