Lime Creek

by Joe Henry

  Toebowman would be singing softly at first so that we hadn’t really been paying that much attention until one by one the grownups would join in as their kids seemed to gravitate back up against them with their young wild voices catching a word here and there and making up others as their folks sang along. And one or two of the ranchers droning with one fixed tone that probably sounded to them as if they were warbling away with everyone else. A joining of voices in that delicate light that somehow seemed to generate a warmth, a suspiration of living breath and a real warmth that was undeniable. As if each of the creatures that lay or stood or sat in that drafty close place made enough of a contribution to the engendered atmosphere to actually produce a living heat from out of the barren cold that pressed against the outside walls.

  Then Spencer would take out his spectacles and set them low on his nose and sit in front of the tree so that its light fell onto the children’s book that he held with both hands and always read from about the Baby and the animals, and how the animals were all given human speech on this one night. And as I listened I remembered that I planned to get up later so I could get dressed and get my boots on and come back down to the barn to hear what each of the horses and dogs and cats and the cattle and sheep would sound like when they spoke actual words. Wondering what they would say to each other, but especially what they would say to me when I spoke to them. And Whitney looks at me from the corner of his eye so I know he’s thinking the same thing.

  But we wake up much later than we should have, and Whitney’s already dressing himself as I rush to catch up to him. And he whispers fiercely, Pa said they do it at midnight. And as I’m trying to get my flannel nightshirt tucked into my jeans I say, Maybe they’re still doing it because it’s still dark outside. And then we bump and shush each other down the stairs as we hold on to the railing.

  The cold freezes the inside of my nose, it’s so cold, and I breathe into the collar of my jacket. The stars are like little white holes all across the black sky and Sirius, all aglimmer with red and blue and white light too, hangs just above the roof of the barn as we slide the door open just enough to squeeze through and then close it behind us. But we’re too late. Lemon comes up to me in the dark and noses into my fingers but he doesn’t say anything even when I rub his head against my chest and say, Hi Lemon. Hi Lemon. And I know how his mouth smiles when I scratch his ears but he still doesn’t speak. At least not with words anyway.

  I turn the light on in the tackroom and leave the door open so the light spreads out across the dark runway. And then I hear Whitney over by Blue’s stall, standing on a haybale and speaking softly to him with Blue’s head lifted and his legs folded under him and his gentle eyes blinking against our intrusion. Hi Blue, Whitney says. Hi Blue. And I climb up behind him and watch the horse’s face as he continues to blink into wakefulness with his lovely pale eyelashes.

  We can hear other animals in their stalls restive in the darkness and groaning with sleep, and one of them drinking while another one whinnies softly as if to itself, instantly reminding me then in memory as well as now how I’ve loved the voice of horses for my entire life. It’s too late, I whisper to Whitney shaking my head. We got here too late. And Whitney whispers back, I know but next year we have to remember. And I whisper back at him, Yes we have to remember. Next year.

  Toebowman always plays Silent Night last, maybe three or four times in a row, and everybody knows the words and sings it with him. And the seeming perfection of those simple sounds, with all the people huddled together warm out of the vast cold and safe somehow out of the vast dark, makes me feel as if the beauty that I didn’t then know the word for was nearly too big to hold all at once. And so for a moment I have to stop singing so I can swallow two or three times before I can make the song begin again.

  I’m leaning against Elizabeth’s legs as she sets against Spencer sitting on a couple of haybales with Whitney leaning against his legs and against me, and Lonny on Spencer’s other side with Spencer’s arm around him and his other hand resting on Whitney’s shoulder, and Elizabeth’s arm around Spencer’s back and her other hand resting over my chest. And by the time we come to the Sleep-in-heavenly-peace line, her hand lifts off me and rises up and then settles back so that I can see her face again in my mind and even know the water in her eyes slipping over her cheeks like quicksilver in the candlelight without having to turn and look up at her. And her hand goes off me again and then comes back, and I don’t have to look at it either because I know how it looks in my mind too just as I know her face.

  And besides I can’t take my eyes off the candles, how wondrous a vision they are to me with their fragile light that for some reason makes me think of how aspen leaves tremble when the wind blows into them. And so perhaps if those leaves were to magically be transformed into something else, they’d become candlelight too because aspen leaves and candlelight both seem to tremble and quiver in just exactly the same way.

  Sleep I think for all the massed days and clicking years of my tiny flickering life. Sleep I think of Spencer whose soul parties with the antelope smelling of sage and horselather and covered by the insubstantial globe of a great tumbleweed. Sleep I think of Elizabeth who glides over the sea with her long yellow hair trailing above the dim dark monument of the endless turning tide. Sleep I think of Lonny who bears his gentleness like a food to be offered to anyone who approaches him hungry for it or not.

  And sleep I think to myself for all of us for all of us beating fiercely against the wind or lying placidly beneath its cool touch with broken hands and wondrous wings and blinded eyes that see even beyond seeing the same wordless dream built of the same heartcrushing sorrow and the same unspeakable loveliness all at the same time how beautiful and sad it is all at the same time.

  And sleep i think for all of us sleep i think at last

  oh sleep in heavenly peace

  sleep

  HANDS

  We’d been feeding the cattle off horse-drawn sleds, which is how it’d always been done in our country, Luke says. Big wooden platforms on runners with a two-by-four frame front and back to pile the haybales against, and each sled pulled by one of our two teams of Belgian drafthorses. Massive two-thousand-pound animals with thick winter coats and huge shaggy feet and a manner as gentle as their bodies were strong.

  And Whitney and I would have to help before going to school. Spencer would get us up in the dark and half-asleep we’d dress against the cold and then meet him in the barn where he and Red, our foreman, would already be graining the horses. And then one of us would go with one of them. One day I’d be with Spencer and Whitney with Red, and the next day we’d switch off, day after day after day.

  But this was the morning after New Year’s and Red and Aggie, his wife, had stayed at their daughter’s near Rawlins for the holidays and Spencer had told him to take an extra day or two. The snow was blowing sideways and the temperature against the outside of the barn read minus twenty-eight and of course it was still dark. We took one team, working just the one sled, for Spencer would feed off the other one after we came back and Whitney and I had to leave. And even though Spencer would be by himself, at least he’d have the dawn by then.

  The horses strain in their traces until the runners under the loaded sled break free with a sharp crack from where they’ve set overnight and frozen to the earthen floor, and then we move out into the blizzard and away from the shelter of the outbuildings. The horses know the way by sight or not, and once they enter the meadow Spencer ties the reins around one of the forward posts on the sled and then kneels down where Whitney and I are huddled amongst the bales. When we start out it’s still night although the relentless flat wall of snow that races by us begins to gain some subtle gradation of what could only be perceived as notdarkness. The horses continue to prow ahead with their terrific slow inexorability until the bawling cattle begin to materialize as from behind an almost solid-seeming grey curtain. And so we can hear the animals approaching for a time before we can actually
see them.

  Spencer cuts and pulls and then wraps the twine that holds each bale as Whitney and I begin to cast the hay down off the sled, dividing each long rectangular block roughly into thirds that we let drop on the snow as cattle follow closely behind us and then fall back. Whitney soon begins to fling his flakes of hay almost in a rage of cold and I know how he feels because there are times when it all seems like it’s more than a man should be asked to endure. When it’s so cold that it seems like you’re losing more than you could ever hope to gain, and the harder you try the more you just seem to fall behind.

  We continue to crawl along ahead of the interminable crush of cattle, the near faces of hungry animals parting and beginning to eat as other animals move in to take their places, endlessly. Whitney throws his arm again as I bend to another bale and I think I hear him cry out in the shrieking wind but I can’t be sure, even though he’s only just an arm’s length away. And then for some reason he suddenly kneels down with his gloved hand against his chest and he screams something into the wind again that I still can’t hear as I turn and toss the hay in a continuous repetition that I seemingly cannot stop. And then after another moment Whitney rises back up and begins again.

  The horses draw the sled with that same plodding nonprogress even after the load of hay has all been distributed. Spencer sits with us with our backs against the front cross-member of the frame, facing away from the great round rumps of the two Belgians and huddled into the collars of our coats with our gloved hands thrust into our pockets. Dawn is on the snow at last but with hardly any light at all as if the two drafthorses pull us into a colorless windtunnel where the knifing blizzard continues without alteration except in terms of visibility. Although there is nothing to see except the snow horizonless and with no point of reference to mark where the earth ends or the sky begins.

  And then as we finally approach the entrance to the meadow again, the opening in the fenceline, Spencer gets back up and unties the reins and guides the animals who know exactly where they are going whether he stands with them or not. Far off and higher up the barn’s lights sail behind the streaming storm illuminating next to nothing and obviously making no impression whatsoever on that iron-grey shroud of opaque darkness that must be the new day. Stillborn.

  Whitney and I sit against each other’s arms as Spencer stands above us with one leg alongside my shoulder. We hump our backs against the cold but there is no escape, for the cold will have its way. The hollow sun wherever it is has no warmth left to give and even if it dared to show itself it seems as if it probably must have used up all of its fiery essence a long time ago. And so only the wind is left to cleave the world as it will, paring away the fragile warmblooded creatures as with a surgeon’s scalpel until the flesh feels as if it’s been laid bare. The wind as both tormentor and redeemer too when you finally surrender to it, when you finally cross over from the near agony of sentience to a state almost of unconcern, for when the cold goes so deep as to defeat itself it just doesn’t make any difference anymore. Almost like death. For only death can defeat death.

  Then we’re finally back in the barn and Spencer’s on the other side of the team at their harness and I’m carrying a sack of grain over to the bin which has been fed down low. Several lightbulbs try to lessen the darkness but it’s so cold that their light seems frozen about them, little pools of brightness that hover like halos beneath their reflectors but doing little to change that perpetual dusk as we go about our chores, the cold slogging blood that won’t warm and fingers too numb to feel what they need to touch.

  I begin to turn with my load when Whitney suddenly flings a grain-bucket at an empty stall. The near drafthorse flicks the skin along its jaw as if responding to imaginary insects but still stands stolidly beside the other animal that doesn’t move at all and with Spencer still at its cheekstrap. I hear Spencer say, Huh? as Whitney yells, It’s too fucking cold to live here. And then he kicks at the pail that’s bounded back at him so it glances off the stall partition and ricochets off the little window with a spiderweb now cracked in its surface. This time the horses do flinch taking a half-step to the side as the animal that Spencer holds in harness moves its great head away from the clatter of the bucket.

  One moment Spencer’s on the other side of the team and the next without seeming to have even moved, his gloved fist is under Whitney’s chin driving him up against the wall and holding him off his feet by the front of his coat so that Spencer’s face is nearly touching Whitney’s, with Whitney’s eyes showing all their white like a horse’s does when it’s frightened and Spencer’s face a hard white rage that we had never seen before, as if all the blood had left it to give even more strength to his arm and hand that hold Whitney pinned against the wall as if he were made of straw beneath his heavy winter coat instead of a young man of probably at that time a hundred and thirty or forty pounds.

  Cold? Spencer says in that low seething rage. Did I hear you say something about the cold? And Whitney with the fear in his eyes but with his youthful defiance still intact cries, It’s fucking ridiculous living like this almost freezing to death and the cattle almost freezing. That number 76 cow. My hand cracked against her head and her goddamn ear broke off. Her ear broke off! he screams. With the ear-tag still in it. And he can do nothing to stop the tears springing down his face with Spencer’s eyes only inches away and burning through him like an incandescent white flame.

  That’s lucky that’s all she lost, Spencer says. You think this is cold? I’ll tell you what cold is. Because this is a fucking walk in the park. You hear me? This is a fucking walk in the park. I’ll tell you what cold is. Cold is seventeen years ago to the day yesterday morning. Cold is what we call Cemetery Ridge on New Year’s morning and I don’t know what the Germans called it but I’ve got seven men left out of fifty and half of them deaf or bleeding from their ears from the artillery that’s been pounding us for three days and when dawn comes so it’s still dark on the snow we can hear the Germans before we can see them and I run up to my point-men who’re hunkered over their machine-guns where they’ve been sleeping and I bang them awake because the Germans are pouring over that ridge pouring hard and coming down and I Bang on Tullio on one point and I Bang on Gallagher my second point. And each time he says “bang” he drives Whitney even harder up against the wooden planking. And Gallagher mumbles something that I don’t hear because I’m already banging on Dickinson who is barely eighteen years old who has been here for three months who has a girlfriend whose picture he showed me who is still in high school in Spring-fucking-Hill Maine who put his hand out and shook mine six hours ago at the stroke of midnight and who I said to along with the others Let’s pray to God that we don’t have to spend another New Year’s in this hellhole. And it’s Dickinson who starts singing Silent Night so all of us are singing it with him whether we ever been to a church or not. And Dickinson who has red hair and still has freckles Dickinson won’t wake up and I scream Come on Howie and I can hear the Germans and I can hear someone beside me saying They’re coming they’re coming and Dickinson is frozen like a goddamn statue. His eyes are frozen open and he’s frozen against his Browning .30-fucking-caliber air-cooled machine-gun and I need his weapon. My men need his weapon and so I start hacking away at his hands. I’ve got tears in my eyes and I’m screaming at myself and I’m screaming that this man is dead and I’m hacking his hands off. I’ve got my bayonet into his hands and I’ve cut and I’ve cut and I’ve cut and I can’t get through the bone and so I’m stomping on his arms with my boot to break his hands free so I can get somebody on his weapon. I’m stomping on his arms until they finally break away but his hands are still frozen in the handles of that Browning and so I’m prying at his fingers with the tip of my bayonet. His mittens are all slashed away and the fingers the frozen tendons like white knots are frozen in the handles and I’m prying them away. I’m digging under his fingers that don’t want to let go. That just won’t let go.

  So cold, he says almost in a whisper and
with a weariness that makes it sound as if it were not him anymore but his very soul that was talking. We’re all cold, he says, with Whitney back on the ground by then so he stands as if at attention. We’re all cold, Spencer says. And we all still have both of our two hands too. And so if you’re cold you can go on up to the house. Now. But I don’t want to hear about it. Do you understand?

  And then that night lying in the dark in our beds and whispering back and forth because Whitney and I had never heard our father use a real cussword before, the “damns” and the “shits” maybe but nothing that’d get you thrown out of a class for it. But then when we thought about it we understood that there was nothing that could be said, there was no word or string of words that a body could come up with that could in any way free someone of the memories that Spencer had had to live with. And that we in turn would now share with him for the rest of our own time unforgotten along with our own yet-to-be-discovered trials and misfortunes that are part and parcel of each and every one of us who tries to get through this life on just two legs. As if that awful and enduring gut-ache of human sorrow was just the going market-price for having the pride and presumption to think that with all the other creatures who needed all four legs to make it through on, that you could get’er done on just the two.