Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  When Dot married, she and Arlen took up a house in Chelan where the county employed Arlen to engineer and construct a small dam above the falls. Strawl and Dot wrote only occasional letters to one another, until he was put ass over teakettle by a misbehaving sorrel. The doctor set and cast both his legs and took the horse as payment. Arlen and Dot and the girls returned to tend the animals and plant the fall crop. Arlen left equipment magazines on the kitchen table Sundays when Dot fixed a weekly family dinner large enough for him to cobble the rest into a week of suppers. The literature announced new fertilizers, experiments in weed control, and rod weeders with rotating tines. Arlen had talked Strawl into a fresno to level the uneven knobs Strawl left fallow and spoke longingly of a gas-powered combine that would harvest the place in a few days. He underlined the most compelling points in pen. Strawl had no argument against them except money, which was the only one he required.

  Dot’s family stayed on, and two years after, Ida—Strawl’s second wife and Elijah’s mother—drowned alone fishing the river during runoff, as was her wont. Her body never surfaced and it was likely a hundred miles away, twisting in the current toward the ocean. Her passing, of course, stunned the children, and Strawl tried to close the wound by splitting the ranch between them.

  He had expected to work Elijah into accountability with his piece and to anchor Dot and Arlen with the other. Neither turned out as he had predicted.

  Arlen was smarter than Strawl, but he had little faith in himself. Like a poker player short-stacked, he took outrageous gambles on poor odds and failed to play even money. He had tried to outsmart dirt and moody weather with the wheat hybrid seed fostered in the Palouse, but that country received a half inch of rain Junes and had dirt black enough to grow any seed. The rocky coulee was less generous and by the time Arlen had discovered so, he’d augured his half into a hole so deep, Strawl took it back until he could return it to profit.

  After six months of lukewarm effort, Elijah peddled his portion of the ranch to Hemmer, a disagreeable neighbor, which was half of Strawl’s worth. The boy lacked the will to finish, and not just his chores. Checkers, he saw moves others missed, but often grew bored and lost or just stopped playing entirely. Strawl had seen him build rolls in a poker game just to drop them betting hands he had no business playing. The boy was not even his blood, but Strawl, too, in his youth, had been hoppy as bacon on the griddle and possessed the attention of a horsefly. He had spoiled the boy. When he and his mother had agreed to live with him, Dot was starting at the high school in town, so, after his chores, the boy was permitted to fish and hunt and wander on his own.

  He wondered if Dot knew Elijah’s whereabouts. It was unlike her not to share an opinion, but she felt he was her brother, and confidences between siblings were the hardest to pierce. They felt an owing past even husband and wife, whom the joining of loins could undo as easily as it intertwined them. Even parents surrendered their children out of guilt over raising criminals. Childhood was a lonely business, however, and navigating that solitude together seemed to fix siblings fast. Though Dot had been miffed that Elijah received an equal share, when Elijah sold his portion she had been satisfied at Strawl’s comeuppance. For her, it was a wash between the two in a strange way. If Dot had apprehended Elijah’s whereabouts, she hadn’t surrendered them, and likely would not now that he had dealt away his inheritance, and turning her would require Strawl to stoke a wrath in her he doubted he could smother when the issue concluded.

  “I was just wanting a little rest,” Strawl said.

  Dot looked down at her coffee. “I guess he did, too.”

  “Maybe I should have beat him,” Strawl said.

  “What he did with his inheritance is your folly and his. You never asked my advice.”

  “You still mad?” he asked her.

  “You were fair.” She paused and blinked her eyes. “I was only mad a little and I haven’t been for a long while. We’ve got my wages yet and our half of the ranch. We’ll look after you.”

  “I don’t intend to spend my dotage on your porch, useless as a stick, thank you.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if you planned it to come to this.”

  “Wish I was that smart,” Strawl said.

  Dot sighed and began to collect the children. “A piece of ground is no substitute for love, Father,” she said.

  “It was never meant to be.” Strawl shook his head. “It’s got a deed and a price and you can measure it. It’s all I had to give. Land.”

  “I’d swap for more of you and less of it,” Dot said.

  “No, you would swap for more of someone else standing in my shoes and less of me in them,” Strawl told her.

  Dot said nothing.

  “I don’t blame you,” Strawl said. “I’d likely trade myself if I thought I’d get a taker. Might be we could swap me for an old brood mare.”

  Dot chuckled. “Maybe if it only had three legs.”

  “We’d still be a leg ahead, wouldn’t we?” Strawl replied. He walked across the room and examined a worn bookcase Elijah had commandeered as his own many years before.

  “I see he got rid of the donkey skull, at least.” Elijah had ridden thirty miles to pay a horse doctor for it.

  “Except the jaw. He bronzed it with the teeth.”

  Strawl shook his head.

  “Samson,” Dot said. “That’s how he fought the Philistines.”

  “Guns are too simple for a true believer, I guess.”

  “Apparently,” Dot said.

  “What did he think he needed the money for? Whenever he asked didn’t we come up with it?”

  “Maybe he needed something he couldn’t ask for.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Heaven on Earth. The second coming. Who knows?”

  Strawl stood and walked them to the door. Across the pasture and beyond the barn, Arlen had constructed their house. He’d put it at the bottom of Squaw Creek, despite Strawl cautioning him against it, because that’s where the elms Dot favored for shade grew. The bottom flooded every thaw, as Strawl had foreseen, and the house might’ve been ruined if Arlen hadn’t carted in river gravel and laid it under the foundation and then run metal culverts both ways. Springs, the floor trembled with the water passing, and the front yard was often a swamp navigable only by a row of two-by-eights he’d cut for the purpose, but not a plank of the house got damp.

  “I see Stick is at the ready,” Dot observed. The horse was reined to the porch post.

  “He’s not as hardy as The Governor,” Strawl said. “But he’ll suffice.”

  “You could take the truck,” she told him.

  “Horses don’t break down and they don’t need gas.”

  “He’s crazy, I hear, your killer,” Dot said. “He might want to cut you to pieces and serve you on a bun at the café.”

  “If the man wanted me, I’d be shepherd’s pie or on the coat rack at the livery,” Strawl said.

  “You agree he’s insane.”

  “It’s crazy people that make the most sense.”

  Dot put her hands on her hips and stared at him.

  “Cutting others hither and yon. That’s reasonable?”

  “Man’s got an ordered mind. It’s just a sideways order.”

  “If you’re trying to comfort me, you’re making a mighty wide circle,” Dot said.

  Strawl grinned at her. “You don’t need comforting. I’m just crossing the river, like I have a hundred times before.”

  She hugged him anyway, and the rigid awkwardness of their arms and chests turned obvious to both of them.

  “Manage to stay miserable, will you?” Dot said. “A person gets your age doesn’t want to enjoy anything much. You’re old, and pleasure makes the time go too fast.”

  “True enough,” Strawl said. He watched Dot and her family cross the hard dirt path to the barn, then bend through the corral railings.

  “You tell your husband he buys that combine he’s eyeing, he better just keep going
down the road. I won’t have it on my place.”

  Dot turned. “It’s not your place, it’s mine. Legal as the courthouse.”

  Strawl pawed a hand her direction. “Doesn’t matter. Long as I’m living, it’s Strawl Canyon and Strawl Road, and even after. It’s my place.”

  five

  Stick remained in passable shape herding the fifty head of cattle pastured behind the house, but the horse’s temperament was the primary reason Strawl favored him. Bullheaded enough to bust a rider’s head with a low branch if bored, Stick had some personality, which made him decent company. Moreover, any animal keen enough to catch his rider napping was, in fresh country, all ears, nose, and eyes. As far as covering ground, Stick was not built for eight furlongs but for twenty miles. He could pick his way through a trail like a burglar crossing a squeaky roof, and lope uphill or down from morning till black night if you didn’t draw rein.

  Strawl scabbarded his .06 and scattergun and holstered a pistol onto his belt. Venison jerky and a tin box of flour, a sackful of coffee and the pot, plus his worn mess kit filled one saddlebag, along with an oilskin satchel full of stick matches, string, a thread and needle, and a burlap sack holding a load of apples to keep Stick through any grassless stretch. Shells for the weapons rattled in the other, and he had a wallet full of expense money the three counties had delivered him in separate envelopes.

  Strawl climbed aboard and screwed his black felt Anthony Eden, a piece of haberdashery he’d purchased on pure whim, onto his head. The horse soon broke into a trot and Strawl’s eyes teared in the wind. He pulled his hat lower and felt guilty, experiencing such satisfaction leaving his family and heading toward as black a man as he’d encountered.

  He boarded the ferry once more, Young Bill puzzled by the horse. On the other side, the sun on the prairie warmed him. A line of mallards sliced the sky, and Strawl watched a red hawk atop a fencepost study a mouse in the grass below. The wind eased as he traveled the road paralleling the river, and he unbuttoned his canvas jacket.

  He turned Stick north and east following a game path that paralleled the river opposite Thacker’s Ferry, then headed west past the Hopkins Ferry Road, then the mouth of Hopkins Canyon, then the ferry that served it. He passed Clara’s gristmill once more, where he had sharpened his saws. The building and machinery had been moved lock, stock, and barrel on a flatboat from the Okanogan country; it was the talk of the county ten years ago.

  The road joined the main highway toward town. Cars passed, their horns pressing Stick into the shoulder ditch. Strawl worried he’d spook, but the horse’s mind was on his work. In Nespelem, he stopped at the grocery and bought a handful of day-old radishes and fed them to the horse for his troubles.

  Strawl took Wack-Wack Road east until he met Joe Bird Creek, which he followed atop the Nespelem Divide until it dwindled to its source. On the other side, he crossed into Ferry County and the San Poil country. He picked through another trail at Peter Dan Creek and meandered with it until the channel and path veered north into a thicket he wasn’t inclined to navigate. Instead, he directed Stick to circle through a meadow, where he let the horse eat his fill of bunchgrass and wild oats. Midday, they met Manila Creek. The tribe or county had graded the highway and laid new gravel. Under Johnson Ridge, Strawl rested Stick for half an hour in the shade, then steered north. There was no track, but the country was open. Desert scrub and sagebrush, it was an oven in August, but the dirt was soft and good for horseback travel.

  He found a thin path and veered with it west for a flat a smaller stream drained. The morning had become hot and close, like it was preparing for a summer squall. Wildflowers smelled thick and almost sickening in their sweetness. Strawl wove through a thicket of fir and tamarack, then halted at the edge of a rectangular clearing framed by higher, basalt-strewn ground thick with pine and fir and birch that thinned the light and enough low brush to make approach a noisy proposition.

  The center was a depression still lush with groundwater. The grassy meadow feathered in the wind, somewhere between green and the yellow it would remain through late summer and autumn. Grasshoppers clicked and floated in the air, good bait for fishing the nearby streams.

  Strawl kept in the trees and circled the clearing. On the other side was a well-constructed tongue-and-groove log structure with a tin chimney, and a cord of seasoned wood was stacked against the north wall for insulation. A hundred feet to the south was a wind-driven pump over a well. Beyond that was the peak of the outhouse, built in another hollow to keep the sewage from draining toward the well.

  The primary resident was the last living San Poil medicine man. His Salish name meant Raven Flying, but the closest English translation was Marvin.

  Strawl avoided the plastic window and banged on the door with his pistol butt.

  The door cracked and a watery eye took him in. “No bad men here,” the voice said.

  “Marvin, I’m not put off that easy.”

  No one answered.

  “I just want to ask you about something.”

  “Marvin does not know,” Marvin said.

  “What colored feather is on a starling?”

  “Marvin does not know.”

  “Now you’re lying, Marvin. Lying to the law is a serious matter.”

  “What is a starling?”

  “It’s a bird, Marvin. That explains the feathers.”

  “Brown.”

  “Brown?”

  “Brown feathers.”

  “Jesus.” Strawl sighed.

  Marvin was quiet behind the door.

  “What about these killings?” Strawl asked.

  “I do not know of any killings.”

  “You don’t have any idea what I’m speaking of?”

  “I do not know about none. No killings. No whiskey for Marvin.”

  “Marvin, I’m not accusing you.” Strawl waited for a minute. He heard whispering. Marvin had a wife, but Strawl couldn’t make out if it was her voice or another’s. He had seen Marvin’s buckskin tied behind the house but no other, and there was no way for a car to get in or out, though that didn’t rule out walking.

  “That Inez, Marvin?”

  “Inez is not here,” Marvin answered.

  “Then who in hell is it?”

  “Marvin.”

  “That’s another lie, Marvin. You lie about Inez, I can put her in the jail.”

  “ Inez is not here,” Marvin repeated.

  “I’m trying to be civil, Marvin. I know you haven’t done nothing wrong; quit behaving like you have. I come here to chew the fat a little is all.”

  “You are not the law now. They told me.”

  “Who’s they? Those there behind the door with you?”

  “Indians. Indians told me.”

  “Indians behind the door.”

  “Me behind the door.”

  Strawl leaned against the wall. He heard stirring inside and looked up at the blue sky. Nostalgia had pressed Strawl to begin here. Back when concerns over an uprising still existed, Strawl had arrested Marvin several times for practicing his medicine. Each time the man was respectful and compliant, but as soon as the judge set him free, he would be back to his powders and singing. Once Strawl hauled him in naked to embarrass him into obedience, but the man simply served his sentence, then left the jail in his prison clothes. Strawl blackened both his eyes and broke his nose before Marvin left the shadow of the jailhouse and then broke two of his ribs, but Marvin did nothing but cover up, then, after the beating, hobble to his home and sing a prayer. Strawl refused to pursue him afterward.

  Now Marvin was harmless and too remote to hear anything beyond gossip. At best, Strawl might have been able to rule out the San Poil country, no more. He wanted to see how the years had treated the man, truth be told.

  “I can’t let you put me off, Marvin. Word would get out I turned soft. Open the door so I can say we talked, then I’ll let you alone.”

  Marvin said nothing. Strawl gave him two minutes by the watch, then drove
his shoulder into the worn wood. The chain gave and Strawl pushed into the house. Two doe-eyed grandchildren gazed up at him, then bolted under the table.

  “Now, I haven’t done a thing to you to imply I’d hurt babies,” Strawl said.

  Marvin remained quiet. His long hair was tied behind his neck with a scrap of rein and his face was wrinkled but not bloated and gone to seed like so many in town. Inez, his tiny, grey-haired wife, huddled behind him.

  “What do you know about these killings?”

  Marvin looked down at his shoes. In his early police days, Strawl had equated such gestures with guilt, but he had come to realize that eyeing another man was an insult to the Salish tribes.

  “They’re bad,” he said.

  “They are that. An Indian doing them?”

  Marvin said nothing.

  “I’m not asking for fact. What’s your opinion on the matter?” Strawl paused, hunting a word. “Gamble. Would you gamble the killer’s Indian?”

  “A crazy Indian, maybe.”

  “A white man. Could he do this? A crazy white man?”

  Marvin shook his head.

  “Why not, Marvin?”

  “No money for him.”

  Strawl nodded.

  “Thank you, Marvin,” he said. He looked at the children under the table, all eyes and shaggy black hair, then Inez, cowering behind Marvin. “I apologize for interrupting your day.”

  Outside was a wooden cable wheel from the dam that locals had scrounged for picnic tables. Strawl untied Stick’s saddlebags and left half a sack of flour for Inez upon the wheel and his deck of cards for the grandchildren, along with a handful of sugar cubes meant to treat Stick.

  It took him through the heat of the afternoon to retrace his path to the Nespelem road, then ride the six miles to the Indian Agency. Tenement flats that once barracked soldiers lined a grassy field on which they had drilled. Half the place had filled with orphans or widowed or abandoned mothers with their litters. Attached at the far end was a medical center, where a nurse distributed tablets of all sorts to those she could convince to swallow them.

  The police department was next to the pole plant, an effort to turn the tribe into capitalists. The best they had managed was to hire white lumbermen to deliver raw logs and employ an Indian crew to pluck them from the rigs with the loader and another to operate the saws. It wasn’t that the Indians were lazy so much as they were mystified by the project. The young men would work for a day or a week, then wander off, not seeing how their lives differed at the end of the day from the start.