Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  Does the soldier on the battlefield learn these things? Does the student of Noh learn selflessness, tolerance, unconditional bravery?

  Why must we take lives to become human? We sat for a long time in silence. My thoughts were tangled. If I hadn’t liked what I was before, how did I know what to become, and by which vehicle? How does one learn how to live?

  30

  Long after the funeral the sky turned black with rain, then the heat came. Bobby found a rattlesnake curled up in the sun at the kitchen door. He didn’t try to kill it. Instead he picked up a broom and hit it and told it to go away, and it did.

  McKay rode more than he needed to that spring.

  When he went to mend fence, he led two packhorses loaded with wire, posts, fence stretchers, a hammer, pliers, and a shovel. It took a week to ride to every fence. He crisscrossed the ranch. In one place, Alkali Creek went underground as if it had been shot in the hip and drowned in its own waters. The sinking feeling he had been experiencing for two years happened when he was with Mariko, as well as when he was alone. Her waters were a kind of liqueur that weighted him, submerged him in a sweet, asphyxiating trance.

  He heard the sandhill cranes before he saw them. At first he scanned the horizon down by the lake. The sound they made was like a consonant rolling back and forth in water, a wavering “rrruuu, rrruuu,” a cry of longing. He looked straight up. Two eagles rolled in opposite directions across high thermals, and a pair of cranes, mated for life, flew one above the other, their long stretched bodies gold and white. McKay knew there was no hope of their nesting on the ranch. Not enough water. “Not here,” McKay thought. “Death, that’s all we’ve got going on down here.”

  He and Bobby arose as usual at 4:30 A.M. Bobby made breakfast—oatmeal, bacon, and coffee. When he took the deck of cards down for their usual winter morning game of gin, McKay said, “Not now. I’m going to the Camp to ask Mariko to live with us.”

  Bobby looked at McKay.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “You fill every room up with women? Madeleine coming soon to live here during calving.… Did you forget that? Did you forget her so fast?” he asked, dashing his hands together. “What Mariko do on this ranch? You make her into cowboy? You marry her? Abe-san must come too, then. Can’t leave him all alone.…”

  McKay sat back against the breakfast table as if he’d been pushed.

  “Damnit, Bobby.”

  “Sooo … damn Bobby … you blame me, but you don’t think. You only think with this!” he said, clasping his hands to his groin.

  McKay looked away, pained.

  “She very beautiful, very great painter … I know that. But what she do here? This—” he said, indicating the ranch, “worse than Camp. Worse prison for her. She would be like caged bird here,” Bobby said, then retied the sash of his kimono. He stared at McKay until McKay turned to him.

  “Sooo … you love her, desu-ka?” he asked gently.

  Madeleine burst through the door.

  “Did you hear those cranes? They just flew over. Here’s the mail,” she said brightly, tossing it on the table. “Are you going to check those heifers or am I?” she asked McKay.

  McKay pulled on his boots. “I’ve got to go to town. Could you do it this morning, Mad?”

  “Yep, but you owe me …,” she said, smiling.

  “That’s just what Bobby’s been saying.”

  The guard at the sentry gate—not Harry, he had been fired—let McKay through after he signed the visitor book. He walked to Mariko’s block. It was breakfast time and he could hear the clamor of the mess halls as he passed them, one by one. The roads in the Camp were deeply rutted from spring rains. Soon they would be dust, a kind of veil that isolated the prisoners from the green irrigated farms on the outside.

  He saw Mariko walking down the lane, arm in arm with Kai. They stopped once and pointed at some children who were playing naked in the mud while their parents ate breakfast, and she and Kai were laughing. McKay did not know what she did at Camp when he was not with her or whom she saw. He had never asked. She looked so domestic at that moment and happy in an ordinary way. The sight shocked him. They didn’t cook or eat together, or pull calves, or go to the grocery store, or pay bills, or clean house, or go to the movies; he hadn’t thought there was anything casual about her. Yet her laugh was different from any he had heard before.

  He walked to the far end of the barrack. He could hear them talking and laughing as they approached their rooms. He stopped and filled his lower lip with snoose. The wind kicked up black from the coal dump at the end of the building and he wiped the tobacco and dust from his chapped lips.

  He knocked on Abe-san’s door. No answer. Then he heard the old man’s bright peel of laughter outside. McKay went around back and there was Abe-san, straddling a blue bicycle with wide handlebars and a wicker basket. He stepped on one pedal, standing for a moment above the hard seat, then sat and pedaled strenuously out away from the building onto the rutted lane.

  “Haaaa …,” Abe-san cried out. His brown kimono dangled above the bicycle chain.

  At the end of the lane, he put one foot down, paused, then mounted the bike again and rode toward McKay. The handlebars shook from side to side as the front wheel hit ruts. He stopped and let the bike fall to one side.

  “Here, you ride now,” he said to McKay.

  “Hell no, I’d get flat bucked off.…”

  “Ahhhh …,” Abe-san growled and tapped McKay briskly on the chest. “Be cheerful!”

  McKay picked up the bike. He rolled it out onto the dirt track, then hopped on, the way he hopped onto a calf-roping horse, and let it roll.

  “Faster …,” Abe-san yelled delightedly.

  McKay pedaled hard and the front of the bike lifted a little. He rode to an intersection, turned, and pumped until he was in front of Abe-san again.

  “Whoa, Blue.” He skidded to a stop.

  “That’s good,” Abe-san purred.

  “Where do you want this bronc?” McKay asked.

  “‘Bronc.’ What’s that?”

  “A horse that’s hard to ride.”

  Abe-san laughed.

  “Where do you want it?” McKay asked.

  “Inside, here—” he said, pointing to the wall inside the screen door, then stood and admired his “steed.”

  McKay heard Mariko’s voice in the next room—Kai’s room.

  Abe-san watched him.

  “I came to see Mariko,” McKay said.

  “I know,” Abe-san said. “She is right there.” He pointed to the wall.

  McKay listened, nodded, then walked through the door all the way to the sentry gate and went home.

  31

  Madeleine would remember 1944 as the year when more people died than animals. The flu had taken nineteen lives so far, Vincent had died, twelve “boys” had arrived home in coffins from Italy, and she’d had a miscarriage. She had more time to contemplate these events than she wanted. She and Pinkey were feeding that week, and Pinkey, still stunned by grief, hardly talked. It amazed Madeleine that so much could change on a ranch, where sameness would seem to prevail—the same seasonal routines year after year for a hundred years. But what happened between and to people changed everything.

  Madeleine climbed on the wagon and Pinkey slapped the lines across the horses’ backs. Where the thaw had come out of the ground, the wagon wheels made sharp ruts that froze into a mass of crystals until the sun hit them and the ridges softened into mud. The oldest calves were six weeks, which is old in a calf’s life. They jumped and bucked together, then ran to their mothers’ sides as the wagon approached.

  Madeleine drove while Pinkey pitched loose hay to the cattle. The line of green behind the wagon was like the wake of a boat. Madeleine drove the length of the field, then turned the team and came back the other way until the wagon was empty. After, they drank coffee from a thermos and watched the calves play. Madeleine took off her jacket and gloves and let the sun pound down on her shoulders. Pink
ey asked whether she had heard from Henry, and she said yes, but his letters were always months late. “I’m so afraid he’ll be dead while I’m reading his latest letter, thinking he’s …” She stopped and looked at Pinkey. “I’m sorry,” she said. Pinkey grinned. “Yep. It’s tough, ain’t it.”

  “What I was waiting for in 1942 is different from what I’m waiting for now. How stupid to have thought otherwise. But how was I to know?” she said.

  “Yep,” Pinkey mumbled again, though he didn’t know what she was talking about and didn’t care.

  When she finished her coffee she jumped down and walked through the calves to check for scours. One calf butted his head against her leg, and when she reached down to touch his ears he twisted away and jumped backward. Descriptions of the Death March turned through her mind. She had collected all the clippings and articles she could find from the Billings Gazette, the Casper Star Tribune, the Kansas City Star, and Life magazine. Thirst, delirium, dysentery, malaria, and hunger; bayonets, live burials, executions—she had found Henry’s last letter unbearable because he had mentioned none of these things, yet he had been on the March, and his cheerfulness and concern struck her as patronizing.

  At the end of the long line of mother cows, she found a calf who had not suckled all day. He was too weak to stand, and his mother’s teats were hard with milk. She held the calf in a standing position between her legs, pried his mouth open with her thumb, and pushed a bolus to the back of his throat, massaging his neck as it went down. Then she held him at his mother’s side as he sucked.

  Her boredom—the boredom of waiting for Henry—embarrassed her now. Had her night with McKay happened because of the cheerlessness of her life? Yet, his weight on her had seemed to push her through the floor, to some unspoken tenderness that both frightened and pleased her.

  Now, waiting was like straining against gravity. “How high can I jump to reach him?” she wondered. She envied the women who passed the time doing their nails, planting their victory gardens, and playing cards. Surely, she thought, they must wake in the night fearful and crying as I do. In ’42, even ’43, she marked her calendar. Absence could be counted in days then. Now she didn’t bother.

  After the calf had his fill, she walked back to the wagon. Pinkey watched her as he sipped whiskey from a flask. He could no longer be counted on for cheerful words, or even for help on the ranch. When she climbed on the wagon, he stood and spit over the side. The younger of the two horses backed nervously, then lunged forward as Pinkey picked up the lines.

  “Blackie, Bud, come up.”

  McKay had been waiting for Mariko since morning because that is when the note, scribbled on a piece of cardboard, said she would come—April 1, 1944. She had lied to the Camp Director, saying she was interviewing for a job.

  Twice McKay went outside. Had she walked? Would she drive? He heard Pinkey and Madeleine unharness the team and turn the horses out. The ducks that had returned to the ranch the day before wheeled over the house.

  He went inside and sat down to pay bills. Long before, Bobby had stopped going to the general store or the grocery store, but called in his orders, which were charged to the ranch, and McKay picked them up when they were ready. He used the same big checkbook his mother had used, four checks to a page, and wrote out the amounts hastily and signed his name. April first. Maybe she’s playing a joke on me, he thought. He looked up from the table. No one. Then he felt the errant bomb move into the room, felt its weight against the back of his neck, and when the wind outside shifted against the kitchen, a metallic smell filled the house. He put down his pen. He thought he heard a sound—the noise of an engine. But still she didn’t come and he went to the window over the sink, and no one was outside.

  The bomb mocked him with her absence. It had come to stand not for loneliness in general, but for the specific hardship of separation, from which almost everyone in the world was suffering now, he thought. He closed the checkbook and walked to the corrals. Then the bomb shrank to the size of a football and jostled the air by the side of his head and he wanted to swing around and smash it with his fist.

  He turned the colt into the round corral. It was the blue roan gelding he was breaking for Champ. He was easy to catch and saddle, though sometimes he still struck out with his front foot when McKay was getting on. Pinkey told him to hobble the horse with a gunny sack, and get on and off for a few hours, but McKay preferred to let the colt figure it out on his own, come to trust his passenger in his own way.

  “It’ll take longer,” Pinkey had warned. What else did they have in 1944, but time?

  McKay stepped on smoothly. In the saddle he wasn’t lame and the colt moved out gracefully from the round corral into the roping arena. As he trotted toward the chutes at the other end, McKay looked down the lane to see whether Mariko was coming and still there was no car; he could see Pinkey walking to the house with Madeleine and Heart Mountain going purple and gray with a spoke of sunlight piercing the clouds.

  McKay touched the colt’s ribs with his left heel and the colt turned. What time was it now, he wondered? Nine? Ten? Halfway down the rail he touched the colt’s ribs with his other heel and the colt turned into the middle of the arena and McKay let him stop. The colt was a natural athlete but it had been difficult to teach him to stand still while he got on. This he had to learn because Champ would need extra time to get his bad leg over the saddle.

  McKay nudged the colt with his right heel again and pulled back on the bridle rein until the colt backed, then he touched his right spur to the colt’s ribs and the horse spun. He did the same going to the left. He asked the colt to back ten steps, then McKay kicked the horse into a lope. He felt the muscles in the colt’s hindquarters bunch up and when the horse bucked, McKay jerked the colt’s head around sharply, let it go, and the colt bolted in another direction.

  “What the hell’s got into you, anyway?” McKay yelled at the horse, pulling him around quickly the other way. The colt fell on his side. McKay fell too, but pulled his foot out from under the horse before the full weight landed on him, then stood, and with the long mecate, pulled the frightened horse to him. McKay rubbed the horse’s head. “April Fool’s, huh?” he said, then got on again.

  When McKay was a little boy Pinkey had told him how smart a horse is. “Hell, he knows you’re coming out to catch him before you get out of bed in the morning,” he always said. “So you better have your head on straight by the time you’ve finished breakfast.”

  Pinkey had learned the hard way. Horses had broken almost every bone in his body by the time he was thirty-five. The year he rode the rough string on a big outfit in Montana and came on a colt nobody could get near, much less ride, he devoted the entire winter to understanding that horse’s mind. “He’s an unridable horse, not even fit for glue,” the foreman had warned him, but Pinkey said, “I know we can get along,” even after the colt struck out at him and shattered his thigh.

  “I never did conquer that horse,” he’d told McKay, “but I got him to trust me …,” he said, grinning.

  “How?” McKay had asked.

  “I went out there one morning and front-footed that waspy little shit and down he went. He was sure surprised … but not half as surprised as he was later.… I got a real soft rope and while he was down I tied him up … wound it around his legs and back and under his tail and around his chest.… He looked like he’d got caught in a big cobweb. Then I lay on him and petted him all over, and talked to him kind of softly. I did that all day long. It was worse than shacking up with a dame … I mean more tiring.”

  When McKay asked what happened next, Pinkey told him.

  “I did the same thing the next day and the next. That went on for just about a week. Then one morning I went out and that ol’ colt looked at me and I looked at him and we both knew the game was over. I could see it in his eyes and the way he acted. So I got my saddle out and I put it on him real quietly … I didn’t tie him up or anything. He knew he could get away if he wanted to … b
ut he just stood. Then I stepped on. I tell you what … I took a deep seat at first, but he didn’t do much—just moved around enough so I knew I had a horse under me. From that day on he wasn’t scared of me and I wasn’t scared of him and he only gave me enough trouble to keep me awake … to kind of check up on me so I didn’t get lazy.…”

  Remembering this story, McKay smiled as he loped the colt in figure eights, stopping each time they came to the middle; backed the colt; turned him one way and the other; then loped out in the opposite direction, giving him so much to do and think about he wouldn’t have time to buck. McKay worked him until the horse was covered with lather, but not so much that it would sour him. “See, I wasn’t mad at you, ya dummy,” McKay chirped affectionately. He could feel the colt relax as soon as he relaxed, and then he didn’t have to think about what the horse was doing because the movement took on its own internal rhythm, and the horse’s legs and McKay’s legs were the same legs, and his hands holding the bridle reins telegraphed the horse’s mind.