Bearstone

by Will Hobbs

  Half the posts remained when the saw began to kill as soon as it bit into the wood. Then it wouldn’t fire at all. Cloyd checked the gas, which hissed as he loosened the cap. Boiling hot, most of it escaped. Maybe the saw did need oil mixed in with the gas, but who cared?

  The saw was too hot; it wasn’t going to start. Probably he’d ruined it by leaving out the oil. He felt like he was going to faint. He had to get out of the sun. He threw the saw down and walked off, waded the irrigation ditch at the edge of the field. Even though the water ran cool and clear, he didn’t think to drink any. He started up the mountainside toward the sandstone outcrop where he’d found the blue stone.

  On his way up, Cloyd saw the trucks and horsetrailers leave, and then he saw the old man walk down to the peach orchard. He turned and fled higher. When he reached the top of the cliffs and looked out, he was not soothed, as he had expected to be. The sight of the distant peaks did nothing to lift him out of the despair drowning him inside. Usually after he did something he knew was going to bring trouble, he felt better in a way—revenged. But with the old man it was different. He’d never felt this awful in his life; he’d never liked anybody this much, as much as he’d liked Walter. Suddenly he felt more alone than ever before, even more than in the first days in Durango after the tribe had sent him to Eaglewing.

  This wasn’t the same as getting into trouble with the teachers or the principal, or with his housemother. Those people were making him do things he didn’t want to do. It was different with the old man. Once, he had really wanted to work for Walter, and it was good then. Now everything was spoiled. He had spoiled it.

  His thirst grew so bad he couldn’t swallow. But he was good at enduring pain. No one could ever take that away from him. Maybe he would run away. But first he would stand up to the old man for punishment the way he did with the principal, then go home and hide in the canyons. Walter would take him back to Eaglewing, but he wouldn’t stay for long. No one could find him in the canyons.

  It was dark, and Cloyd was off the mountain. As he reached for the latch on the front door, the old man stepped out of the shadows, trembling with rage. He caught the boy by the shoulders with unnatural strength and shook him back and forth against the door. “What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway?” he roared.

  Cloyd said nothing and let himself be shaken. He’d spent his own anger and had none left to counter the enormity of the old man’s wrath.

  Walter put his livid face against Cloyd’s where the boy’s eyes couldn’t avoid his. “Who the hell are you to come in here and ruin our peaches? You knew damn well what those trees meant to me. Well? Speak to me!”

  Cloyd turned his head aside and looked at the ground.

  “Give me that little blue rock you keep in your pocket,” Walter commanded.

  Cloyd’s mouth turned sharply down at the corners. “What rock?” he grunted.

  Walter extended his hand, palm up, “Give it to me, Cloyd. I wasn’t born yesterday. I’ve seen you more’n once sneakin’ it in and out of your hand. C’mon, give it!”

  There was nothing else to be done. He could see he owed it to the old man. He heaved a sigh and fetched it out of his pocket.

  Walter took the stone and closed his fist on it. “You care about this little rock, eh? You won’t say? I think you do. C’mon, I want to teach you something.”

  Walter stalked over to his machine shop with the boy in tow, flicked on the bare bulb suspended from the rafters, and set the blue stone on his anvil. Then he reached for the sledgehammer.

  “A dose of your own medicine,” the old man raged, holding the sledgehammer high over his head.

  Cloyd’s heart turned to lead. He waited passively for his punishment.

  As Walter focused on his target, he paused with the hammer in midair and craned his neck in the bad light. “What the hell is that thing?” he demanded.

  “A bear,” the boy answered quietly.

  “A bear?” The old man took it in his hand and examined it up close. Cloyd edged forward.

  “You care about this thing quite a bit, don’t you?”

  Cloyd wouldn’t say. He backed off and looked at the ground.

  “Oh, to hell with it,” Walter stormed. “Here, keep it.”

  When Cloyd didn’t respond, Walter reached over and shoved it into his pocket. “Go get your stuff. I just want to get the hell rid of you.”

  It was late at night. As the pickup wound slowly through the foothills on its way to Durango, each of them kept silent, preoccupied with his own regrets. Just after they passed through the little town of Bayfield, the headlights illuminated a rabbit darting across the highway. Walter and Cloyd both winced at the thump under the wheels. In their broodings, that thump resounded like a judgment, and each was plunged deeper in remorse.

  Fifteen more slow and silent miles, and they reached Durango. Walter stopped at a red light and stared down Main at the blinking yellows. At this hour Durango was a ghost town, and it seemed there were only the two of them in the world. “I couldn’t miss him,” Walter said with a sigh.

  “Miss who?” Cloyd asked quickly. Somehow he was eager to talk with the old man.

  “Oh, that darned rabbit back there. He seemed bound and determined.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I suppose not,” Walter said slowly. “Just one of them things. Well, show me the way to your … Eaglewing.”

  Cloyd gave directions, and then the old man geared the truck down, and it crept toward the group home. They both knew they had only a few minutes left. “I wonder if you’d mind if I looked over that turquoise piece of yours once more,” Walter said.

  The old man turned it over in his fingers, eyed it, and rubbed it thoughtfully, but he said nothing as he drove down the empty streets.

  “Turn here,” Cloyd said.

  Walter sighed. “It’s a sure-enough bear,” he said. “Could even be a grizzly, from the shape of it. I went to the Bear Dance once down at the reservation….” he began, then stopped talking. A revelation was forging itself in his mind. At last he said, “You cut those peaches right after those fellows came in from their bear hunt. Isn’t that right?”

  Cloyd grimaced.

  Walter scratched and scratched behind his ear, and then he handed the stone back. “Well, that helps some, it sure does.”

  “Here it is,” Cloyd said, and pointed to the house with his lips.

  Walter slowed to a stop and eyed the group home. It wasn’t what he expected; you couldn’t tell it apart from all the other tract homes in the neighborhood. He drove on another block before he stopped. For a long time he said nothing. He took off his cap and raked his bald head with his fingers. Then he said, shaking his head a little, “Pigs might fly, but they’re unlikely birds.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Just an old saying.” he replied with a faint smile. “I never did know exactly, but I always liked the sound of it. Cloyd, Susan told me once you’d rather more’n anything just go home. Is that right?”

  Cloyd shrugged guardedly.

  “Well?”

  “They won’t let me.”

  “I suppose not,” Walter agreed, as he slipped the truck into gear and drove off.

  “What’re you doing?” Cloyd mumbled.

  “Takin’ you home.”

  “How come?”

  “You ain’t gonna do any good here at this ‘Eaglewing,’ are you?”

  “They won’t let you.”

  “I don’t see nobody,” Walter said gruffly.

  “They’ll come and get me.”

  “I’ll wait a week before I tell Susan. You’ll have some time at home, whatever happens.”

  They left Durango behind and headed west up a steep grade. Cloyd barely thought about going home, he was so astonished and puzzled. He didn’t know what to make of this old man. He’d liked him, and then he’d hated him, and now he didn’t know what to think. Walter was taking him home. After a few more miles had passed and t
hey were on their way down the western side of the mountains, he asked again, “How come you’re doing this?”

  “Maybe it’ll help you get the bee out of your bonnet,” the old man said coldly.

  Cloyd didn’t want to have to ask him what that meant. The old man was in a strange mood—better to keep quiet. He thought about the horse. He wished there’d been a chance to see Blueboy before he left.

  The sun was rising over the high desert as they neared White Mesa. In the clear, thin air Cloyd took in the landmarks he’d grown up with. He almost wished he could share them with Walter, but they hadn’t really made a peace. To the north, Blue Mountain, the sacred one, still wearing a patch of snow. To the east, the massive form of the Sleeping Ute lying on his back with arms folded across his chest, not yet ready to awake and vanquish his enemies. To the south, the glowing white cliffs of the San Juan as it flowed through Bluff, and beyond them the bare red-lands of the Navajos with the towers of Monument Valley beginning to appear in the early light. To the west, the wooded slope of Cedar Mesa falling from the Bear’s Ears to the river, gouged by the bottomless red-walled canyons. In those remote canyons was where he would hide, he decided. There, in the slick-rock country, he could live wild and free.

  As they drove south out of Blanding onto the windy mesa, Cloyd searched for something to say to thank the old man. There was something welling up inside him that he’d never felt before and that had to be expressed. Too soon he was pointing out the nondescript government house that was his grandmother’s, the one with the summer ramada of cottonwood branches on one side and the scraggly peach trees on the other. And then he was standing by the truck with his duffel bag in his hand, and the old man was saying, “Good luck, Cloyd. Let’s don’t say good-bye with no hard feelin’s….”

  Cloyd nodded, but it was all happening too fast, his feelings were too deep to be reached. He found no words at all, only waved slightly as the old man turned the truck around and drove away.

  The pickup was small in the distance by the time he realized he’d lost something of priceless value. He waved forlornly, then furiously, as the truck vanished. With the suddenness of a cloudburst in the desert, tears ran down his face.

  He stumbled around behind the house to the little shed and corral, to check in on the goats. They were all gone. There was no fresh dung there, either.

  After smoke started to come from the chimney pipe, he went in. His grandmother looked up from the frybread dough she was kneading and gave a sharp cry.

  A Ute woman in the old style, she was dark, earthy, and large, the mainstay of her diet being frybread. In her green velveteen blouse and voluminous red skirt, and in the way she knotted her long hair and wrapped it in bright yarn, she reflected the influence of the nearby Navajos. Not one to ask a flurry of questions, she made a joke about his ribs showing through his T-shirt and opened up a can of fruit cocktail. It was something for him to start on while she cooked the frybread in the oil she had boiling on the cookstove. She fed the people in her life, lavished affection on them, rarely asked anything, and never tried to control whether they came or went.

  They squeezed honey on their frybread. Cloyd wanted to talk. He’d spoken no Ute in the last year, as the boys from the Colorado reservation no longer knew the language. Right away he found himself telling her about Walter, how they’d worked together, how there was a river flowing right through his farm.

  “Good,” she said. “I knew you would like it in Colorado.”

  He told her about the high mountains, how someday he’d like to go there and climb the highest peak he could find.

  “Wouldn’t that be something,” she said, her eyes reflecting the vision. “This man you work for, he lives in a good way?”

  “He’s the best man I ever knew,” Cloyd heard himself saying. “He’s old—older than you. His wife died. He’s all alone.”

  Suddenly he knew he had no desire to hide out in the canyons. But what was he to do?

  They talked about his sister who was at the boarding school in Salt Lake City. She had visited, his grandmother said, and had reported that everything was fine.

  “I’ll go to Blanding on Saturday and get lots of groceries so we can put some fat on your ribs.”

  Though sometimes someone she knew stopped and picked her up, often enough she walked all the way. Cloyd saw how he could save her the ten miles into Blanding, ten miles back. He realized he’d made a decision. “Oh, I can’t stay long,” he said. “I have to leave tomorrow.”

  His grandmother’s eyebrows rose. “Oh?”

  “Walter needs me. We have a lot of work to do.”

  “Well, that’s good. I’m glad you came to see me. How are you traveling?”

  Cloyd gave the hitchhiking sign with his thumb.

  “I have to go now,” she said. “I have a job. There is a day-care center here now. I cook for them. I had to sell the goats when there was nobody to take care of them. Maybe someday we’ll get them back.” She paused at the door. “Live in a good way,” she said in parting, as she always did.

  Cloyd decided to leave right away. His grandmother would understand. But would the old man take him back?

  When Walter got home from Utah, he went directly to his bed and collapsed in his dirty overalls. He was exhausted. Unshaven, no sleep, nothing to eat, at his age driving to Utah and back: he’d been letting himself go to the dogs. And he didn’t care. Right now he should be irrigating the field. The grass would burn up in the heat before long if he didn’t. But he didn’t care. He let himself sink into sleep like a heavy stone plunging into a well.

  When he woke up he was hungry. Intent on drowning himself in sentiment, he went downstairs to the basement to fetch a jar of peaches. He sat on a crate a long time as the sunken window admitted less and less light. He brooded on the two dozen or so jars of peaches left on the shelf, her special Missouri peaches from those seedlings she’d brought along to Colorado. He’d told her that peaches wouldn’t make it here, but she insisted. And there’d never been a time he’d gone downstairs for peaches that he hadn’t remembered how it all happened.

  Walter studied the crack that had appeared the length of the concrete basement wall just after his wife died. He got up and looked at it from across the room and then from the corner, where he eyeballed the length of the wall. He saw, or feared he saw, the foundation bulging in more than ever. As he had many times before, he outlined the work that had to be done to plumb the wall. Digging, pouring, timbering … He had the materials, the tools, the know-how—everything but the desire.

  He didn’t care anymore. About much of anything. He had for a while, when the boy was with him and they were working together to put the farm back in order. To what purpose? he wondered. He’d tried to make it like it was before, when his wife was alive, when the two of them and the farm were all one. On the surface, he and Cloyd had succeeded. But a farm isn’t land and fenceposts and hay in the barn. As his wife always said, “A farm is a home.” He’d failed the boy. When he’d had the chance to give him a home, he’d given him only work. But work for work’s sake can’t keep a soul going, Walter told himself. That’s like pounding rocks in a prison yard. It’s not the work that’s awful, it’s the lack of purpose.

  She was gone. He could quit working the farm now. He himself had never been a farmer. He was a miner. He’d taken up farming for her, and gladly. They’d had all those good years making their living on the farm. Now he could quit, and lie down to rest….

  The next morning, Walter got up late and wandered outside to check on the horses. They had plenty of pasture and were able to drink from the river, but there was no telling when one might turn a leg in a varmint hole or get itself torn up in barbed wire. He felt bad when he saw the blue roan. He was never going to look at that horse again without thinking of the boy.

  On the way back, he walked the irrigation ditch to see if a beaver hadn’t moved in and started to dam it up. He sat down on the ditchbank with all the hayfields sloping away in fro
nt of him and tried to think of how to get his fields taken care of properly. Only one choice remained, really; he’d just been putting it off. He’d pick the best man he could and lease the second cutting to him. There were always industrious fellows around trying to raise more cows than they had the land to support. They had families to feed and mortgages to pay off. He’d turned down plenty of requests as they’d seen him getting older.

  He didn’t really have to work anymore. The farm had been paid for years ago, and he didn’t need much income to live the way he did. They’d always put some savings by, and he got a steady, if small, income from the mining claim his wife had finally convinced him to sell, the one near Monarch Pass. She’d wanted him to sell the Pride of the West, too, but he was so adamant about keeping it, she finally gave up. She even quit badgering him about his packhorses and mining equipment, and his occasional announcements that in a year or two he might reopen his mine. So many years had gone by, she knew he was just hanging on to a dream he’d had when he was young, and there wasn’t any harm to it.

  It was pleasant to sit on the ditchbank in the morning sun and imagine he was up at the mine, sitting on the ore dump with Snowslide Creek rushing by and the peaks all around, the grass green and the wildflowers all in bloom. And inside the mine, not far at all from where he’d left off tunneling, waited the heart of the mountain, a secret place, a marvelous fluke made millions of years before in the bowels of the earth: a room having no doors, its furniture and draperies the fantastic shapes of glistening, crystalline gold.

  Walter looked up to see a figure stumbling toward him out of the dying peach trees and through the sawed-off fenceposts lying at sixes and sevens down at the low end of the farm. The figure was struggling with an awkward burden. The old man squinted for a better look. In a few moments, to his everlasting amazement, he made out the white T-shirt and jeans, the duffel bag, the shaggy black hair and the brown face of the boy. He stood up meekly, lifted his cap, and ran his trembling hand over and over his skull. “He’s come back, Maude,” he said quietly. “He’s come back.” Then he walked down to meet the boy.