McKay had looked at his father and asked, “What happened tonight?”
RJ had stared straight ahead. “I still love her. We just fit together.…”
“Here,” McKay had said and shoved another full shot glass between his father’s crumpled hands.
Afterward, McKay had understood his mother’s fierce resolve and her loneliness better. Once, she might have become hardened or else crushed, but she succumbed to neither. Each time RJ had a distant look in his eye, she softened with accommodation. She might have done the same if she had had the chance to roam as he did. And she loved her boys.
His parents’ death felt as if a black wave had sprouted legs and walked out of the sea and rolled over them, taken them in the night. The freedom he had thought he might feel did not come. Quite the opposite: he sensed his parents’ watchful eyes more strongly now than when they were alive, and he could not shake them.
The kitchen door swung open and Pinkey roared, “McKay, you lazy sonofabitch, ain’t you up yet?”
McKay heard Bobby’s soft footsteps and Pinkey’s hobbling, then the sound of the cook stove fire being laid. He went to the kitchen.
“Me and Bob went on a tear last night—did you miss us?”
McKay looked at the two old men. “Well I’ll be-go-to-hell.”
“Bobby only had one, but he got drunker than a waltzing billy goat,” Pinkey said and plunked himself down on the kitchen stool. “I thought we was shipping today.”
“You’re not with that thing on your leg.”
“Well let’s saw her off then.”
“No. Because I ain’t taking you back to that hospital …,” McKay said, then looked at Bobby. “You’re not saying much this morning.”
Bobby shoved another piece of pine into the firebox. “Did bad thing yesterday,” he said.
“Like what?” McKay said, laughing softly.
“Don’t bullshit him,” Pinkey said.
McKay winked at Pinkey as he pulled the kitchen table out from the wall and added two middle leaves to make it big enough for the roundup crew. Then he sat back against the wall with his coffee. His spurs jangled as he hung his feet on the rungs of the chair. Bobby looked at the table. The surface was badly scarred from years of use. Some of the hired hands had carved their brands into the wood.
“They’re not there,” Bobby said to McKay.
“Who isn’t where?”
“Yep …,” Pinkey crooned apropos of nothing.
“Sister … uncle … not living in that Camp.”
“You went to the Camp?” McKay said in amazement.
Bobby nodded, then continued. “Asked. No one heard of them.”
“Well that’s that, then,” McKay said finally.
“Then those army pricks wouldn’t let Bobby out.…”
“Ah hell …,” McKay growled.
“So I went and straightened the bastards out,” Pinkey said proudly.
McKay tipped the chair forward and set his coffee down. “I bet you did.…”
“Ohh … many many faces … all kinds … young and old … some rich ones, wear cashmere coat and hat … some like me … they’ve got everything in there, all penned up like pigs … not good …,” Bobby said.
“What else?” McKay asked.
“Worst thing happen.”
“What’s that?”
“Couldn’t talk … can’t remember Japanese.”
“The hell … you’re always running off at me in Japanese.…”
“I mean really talk.…”
“But those are Americans in the Camp … they speak English,” McKay said.
“Not the old ones like me, not very good English.”
McKay looked Bobby in the eye and, smiling, nodded his head.
McKay stepped out the kitchen door to spit out his snoose. It had begun snowing lightly and the sky was pale gray. He saw someone hunched over, sitting on the stairs to the main part of the house. He walked toward the figure.
“Madeleine?” he called out, alarmed. She was his closest neighbor and friend.
She did not raise her head. Since the war began she and McKay had run their cattle together because her husband, Henry, went off to war with McKay’s brothers and there was too much work for both of them to do alone.
“Madeleine,” McKay repeated and knelt by her. She was shivering. Snow filled the brim of her hat. She held out a telegram, which McKay read.
WE ARE SORRY TO INFORM YOU THAT HENRY HEANEY HAS BEEN REPORTED MISSING IN ACTION SINCE JULY 1942.
McKay led Madeleine inside.
McKay told Bobby and Pinkey: “Henry’s missing in action.”
Pinkey pulled a chair out from the table for her. “You sit down now and we’ll fix you up … sonofabitch,” he grumbled and hobbled to the stove for coffee.
Bobby pulled down a pint of brandy he kept to resuscitate birds who flew into the windows and added some to Madeleine’s coffee. She wiped tears from her cheeks as she drank while McKay leaned toward her and held her other hand.
“It could mean all kinds of things … not that he’s dead.…”
“I know,” she squeaked out.
She had long blond hair pulled back in a braid and ruddy, freckled skin. She was sturdily built though not big.
“Did you put your horse up?” McKay asked.
She nodded yes.
“Hell, you must have been riding in the dark to get here this early.”
“That damned horse of hers has headlights,” Pinkey said.
Madeleine smiled then.
“You better stay here for few days,” Bobby offered. “I fix room upstairs.”
She glanced at McKay, who looked shyly down.
The snow worsened. When the kitchen door opened again, Jesse, Orval, Frank, and his daughter filed in. They stomped their feet to get the snow off and piled their overcoats and hats on the floor.
Pinkey surveyed the crew. “Well ain’t this a ragtag-lookin’ outfit.…”
Madeleine did not look up.
“She had news about Henry,” McKay said, interpreting her silence.
Jesse stepped forward.
“Tell me what it was,” he said.
“He’s missing in action,” Madeleine said.
“I’m real sorry, Madeleine. You just let me know what I can do, day or night.…”
“Thanks, Jesse, I will.”
“Sorry to hear it, ma’am,” Orval mumbled, then sat at the table, as did the others.
There was a silence, then Bobby served a fine breakfast of calf’s liver, bacon, biscuits, gravy, and fried eggs. They ate quietly.
“Can I see it?” the other girl said. “I’ve never seen a telegram before.”
Everyone looked up at Madeleine. “Sure you can,” she said and handed the girl the telegram.
Pinkey hobbled over to the table with the coffee pot and filled the cups.
“How’s that leg, Pinkey?” Madeleine asked.
“Short, just like the other one.”
Bobby pulled a gooseberry cobbler from the oven.
“Oh boy … doesn’t that smell good,” Frank said.
“I can’t believe it,” McKay mumbled, meaning Henry.
Madeleine did not eat, but went to the living room.
McKay went to find her. “What are you doing?”
“Watching it snow.”
He sat beside her on the window seat that faced Heart Mountain. The snow came down in tiny grains.
They were silent. McKay thought about how his life had opened up when Henry came on the scene. The years working alongside Champ had been years of dogged competition and Henry’s good-naturedness diluted Champ’s hostility. McKay thought of the day Henry’s horse had fallen on him when they were doctoring calves for pinkeye. The fall had broken Henry’s pelvis and while others went for help, McKay lay on the ground beside him, holding him, telling him jokes to keep him from going into shock. When the ambulance came, the driver had found the two young men on the ground, laughing.
“I’ll go jingle those horses,” McKay announced. Jesse nodded appreciatively. His hair was slicked down flat and dented where a hatband had ridden his head for forty years. Of all those present, except for Pinkey, he was the only one to have ridden roundup with McKay’s father.
McKay used a flashlight to get to the corrals. It was so cold his nostrils froze and he could smell the moisture in the air as it sailed down the escarpments onto the plain. Wind whistled through woven wire. It pushed against McKay and he pushed back, tilting his body into it until his hat brim bent down to his nose. Snow flew sideways in a cross fire and the wind, roaring now, swept the old snow up, held it whirling in the air, until the ground beneath was bare. McKay stopped to get his bearings. A piece of roofing flew by. He thought he could make out the stackyard fence where the hay was kept but he couldn’t be sure. The wind heaved and broke him at the waist and took his hat and pushed him forward. He yelled, not because he thought anyone could hear, just to throw his voice at the storm, but the wind took the sound from his mouth and carried it away.
McKay walked. It didn’t matter whether his eyes were opened or closed. He couldn’t tell if time was passing, or was passing him so fast—at the speed of the wind—that he would be dead when the storm stopped. He heard a terrible noise, then he saw that part of the stackyard fence had snapped and blown into the hay and stuck there like cracked ribs. He circled around the stack to the shed where he fed his saddle horses. The horses were bunched together in the far corner. Snow had drifted through unchinked logs and buried them to the shoulder. They could not move. McKay talked quietly. The snow rose up their necks like a tide. He cupped his hands and dug quickly, like a dog eager to unearth a bone. Steam rose from the horses’ backs and their flanks quivered, and the hair around their muzzles and eyes and under their chins was frosted white. McKay exposed the shoulder of the horse closest to him, then the belly. He was breathing hard and the mucus froze and hung down from his nose in an icicle. The first horse stepped out of the collapsed drift. He dug more and the second horse came free, then the third and fourth. He waved them through the corral gate and closed it, tying it shut with a piece of barbed wire.
He turned toward the house. Now the wind was in his face and he had to loosen his scarf and wear it around his nose and mouth in order to breathe. He had heard the stories of men’s lungs freezing, but that was when the air was much colder, thirty-five and forty below. He tried to sense his bearings and remember the dips and rises of the ground. He began counting his steps. How many steps would it take to get from the corrals to the house, he wondered, then laughed at himself. He counted to six hundred.
A tiny light shone in his face. It was Madeleine.
“Here, hold on.”
They linked arms.
“It’s a little breezy …,” McKay said.
Madeleine led him to the kitchen door.
The roundup crew waited out the storm in the house. It lasted twenty-two hours. Bobby busied himself sweeping up snow as it sifted beneath the north-facing doors. When night came, the men bunked up, two to a bed; Frank’s daughter slept in the living room; and Madeleine slept upstairs in the room Bobby had made up for her.
Before dawn the wind stopped and the clouds broke apart. Above where the light came, the sky was indigo, almost black, like the mind at the point of unconsciousness. McKay padded through the house waking his guests. Their tall boots, lined up by the fire to dry, had tipped to one side and the other, anchored by spurs, and their hats were crown-down beside them.
He walked to the horse pasture. Drifts of snow skidded back and forth. It looked as if everything were floating, everything except himself. He was pinned by the movement of his feet sinking through new snow to the ground.
He roped out seven horses: four bays, a light sorrel, a red roan, and a blue roan. The blue roan was his “long circle” horse. He had a big roman nose, feet round as pancakes, and a deep heart girth. When McKay looked over the withers of his horse he saw Madeleine walk into the corral.
“Morning,” she said.
“Good morning, sunshine.”
The others followed.
“Don’t you have no lights out here, for God’s sake?” one of the men asked.
McKay grinned. “I like saddling my horse by moonlight.”
“Well ain’t you a romantic sonofabitch … I wish’d I was a girl.”
“I don’t,” McKay retorted.
The blue roan flinched as McKay swung the saddle on.
“Watch out for that bronc.”
“Yea, I’m awful scared.”
Madeleine pulled her cinch up, then recoiled her rope and fastened it to her saddle. McKay watched her affectionately. They had been childhood friends, then lovers. By the time she surrendered her virginity to him and he to her, wrapped in a canvas dam that smelled of mildew in a dry irrigation ditch, they had already punched cattle, roped, and ridden colts together and continued to do so. They had been born on the same day in the same hospital, McKay in the delivery room and Madeleine in the labor room—there being only one of each in the small country hospital—and years later when she came home with Henry on her arm, McKay felt as welcoming as he did betrayed.
When the horses were saddled, the riders trotted out into the white pasture eight abreast, like cavalry. Madeleine edged in between McKay and Jesse. It was cold enough to make their eyes tear. The horses snorted rhythmically, blowing air on every second step, and McKay felt the front legs of his horse pounding up through him like pistons.
After two hours of trotting, the riders puffed hard, too, their breath spraying in white bursts, and the smell of sage, bruised by horses’ feet, lifted to them. When they came to water they let the horses drink. They startled two coyote pups at the spring. The pups backed up a few feet, then sat and watched curiously. Light crept down the tops of the hills and as the riders started off again, they could see the cattle.
It was a mixed bunch—calves, yearlings, two-year-old steers, and bulls. McKay sent pairs of riders to the top of the draw. From there they sent cattle running downhill for half a mile on either side of the creek. McKay and Madeleine stayed low and caught the gather. They moved steers out in a long line. The riders took positions on either side of the herd—two on flank, three on drag. Madeleine and McKay rode point, steering the lead cows down the draw, then across the high bench toward town.
They stopped for lunch at a pond and took turns holding the herd. McKay unrolled his slicker on a rock. The sandwiches, cookies, and fruit tumbled out from it. From their perch they could see a corner of the Heart Mountain Camp. Madeleine gazed down on it silently. There was a guard tower and some men were marking out a baseball diamond in the snow. McKay pulled the cork from his flask and offered her a drink. She took a big swallow, inhaled sharply, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Maybe Henry is playing baseball in Japan,” she said caustically.
“I was just thinking of him, too.”
“Maybe he’s dead, or worse.…”
“Don’t, Madeleine.”
“I can’t help it.”
“It doesn’t do any good.”
“Yea. Nothing does.”
“I know,” McKay said.
“I just feel so damned useless. Going through the motions … of what, I don’t know. Hoping, I guess. But what’s hope anyway? It’s just a joke that doesn’t really mean anything. But if I don’t hope, then what am I?”
McKay drank from the flask again.
“We’re just used to being able to do things, Madeleine. That’s how we were raised.”
“Then how do I learn to do nothing?”
McKay rolled the uneaten sandwiches in his slicker and tied it to the back of his horse. Now he and Madeleine could make out the whole baseball diamond at the Camp and the three men on hands and knees mounding up snow where the pitcher would stand.
&
nbsp; “I can’t wait to see them start hitting snowballs,” McKay said and climbed onto his horse.
Madeleine led her horse behind a clump of sage and squatted down to pee. After, she gathered the reins and put a foot in the stirrup. A sage hen flew up. The horse crow-hopped sidways away from the bird, into Madeleine, then jumped again with Madeleine’s foot hanging from the stirrup, and started trotting downhill. Madeleine’s head banged against the ground and one shoulder dug a trench in the snow. Then her foot came free. She sat on the ground and rubbed her ankle. McKay quickly retrieved her horse, loped back to where she had fallen, stepping off before his horse drew to a stop beside her.
“Babe, are you okay?” He held her.
She started laughing, then struggled free. “Yes.”
She walked slowly to the horse, touched his shoulder, rubbed her hand up his neck, then pulled his head all the way around with the one rein and kneed him hard in the belly.
“Goddamn you. Stand still now,” she said and with the horse’s head still checked, stepped on.
After they held herd while the others ate, McKay and Madeleine moved the cattle out. When she rode ahead once to keep a young steer from turning back, McKay noticed her jacket was torn at the shoulder and a line of blood stretched across her back where she had lost some skin. When she turned back, he saw her tears.
“Are you hurt, Madeleine?”
“No. I’m okay.”
“You don’t look too damned okay.”
“I’m scared.”
“From the fall?”
“No …”
“Do I have to work your jaw to make you talk?”
She looked wide-eyed at McKay. “I’m scared about Henry.”
She kicked her horse into a lope and McKay caught up with her.
Heart Mountain Page 6
