The Big Sky (53 page)

Boone said, "I gave up on my job a little spell ago. Sun's like hell let loose."

"You been doin' too much anyway, cleanin' out stumps and rocks and makin' things smack smooth. Work like a crazy man, you do." Dan picked at the ground with a stick. "Like I said, wisht you'd take a notion to go in with me. Plenty of work here for two, and land enough."

"Don't reckon I care to." The women inside had quit talking to listen.

"It don't get you anything, roamin' don't. You had your taste of it, Boone."

Ma said, loud enough for them to hear, "Humans wasn't meant to traipse around all their lives."

"What you got out of it, after all?" Dan asked. "Don't see gold hangin' to you or rich clothes or anything."

"Wasn't lookin' for gold."

"Ever see any, Boone? Ever look for it? Must be some, in all that passel of country."

"We had beaver."

"You mean you never looked back, even, to see did you kick up any gold."

"We had beaver."

Dan looked at Boone like he might look at a crazy man. Boone just let him look. There weren't any words to make Dan know how it was. After a while Dan nodded and said, "Beaver, eh?" as if letting go of something he couldn't make out. "There'll be a pile of folks in the west before you know it, Boone. It'll be just like here, only more work to get started."

"You don't know a damn thing about it, Dan."

"I know I can't hardly handle this place myself." He gave Boone a slow smile. The knot in his throat pushed up along the skin of his neck and then went back again.

"Farmin's too much like work," Boone said.

"Might be we could buy us a nigger. What you think about slaves, Boone? Some fuss over the rights of it."

"I do' know."

"A body would think you never used your head at all. You got some idea, for certain."

"Bein' free means fight, to anything."

"So niggers ain't desarvin'?"

"Fight enough, and freedom comes."

"Could be you're right, but gettin' back to farmin' and to work, what's trappin' if it ain't work? And goin' hungry and cold and your feet wet half the time and your backside stiff from a horse and fear of redskins in you steady? What's that?"

Blue snapped at a fly and then laid his muzzle back between his paws.

Boone didn't answer right away. When he did it was to say, "We never counted it work."

"Can't see fun in it myself."

Cora spoke from inside the kitchen. "Have to be kin to Injuns for such to pleasure you." She stepped past Boone, walking as if she was all business, and carrying a bucket of ashes that she dumped in the hopper outside. The hopper was full to the top. One day now she would dump water on the ashes and so make herself some soap.

Nancy said, "Maybe I'm kin, then. I feel like I'd like it."

Boone tried to picture her in a tepee, tried to picture the straw-colored hair and the pale face and the high head and the slender nostrils that had a way of widening now and then. She was like a young mare, that's what -a nervous mare watching and trying the breeze.

Dan laughed. "Reckon I'll go, Nancy, if'n you'll go along."

Boone heard Ma's voice. "Don't take no notice, Nancy. He don't mean anything. One thing about the Caudills, they's all one-woman men. Pap hisself was, till the phthisic carried him off."

Cora let her eye fix on Boone as she passed inside. It was a hard brown eye, set in a tight-held face, that seemed always on the watch for something to blame a body for. She was so set against sin, Boone thought she must have a time with it herself. Back at the table she gave a loud sniff. "What you sayin', Nancy! The west ain't a place for decent people."

"You know a hell's sight of things that ain't so," Boone said to her.

Cora went on talking to Nancy. "Can't get that Boone inside a door, hardly. Won't sleep in a bed. Has to be outside like a wild critter."

A house smothered a man, sure enough, once he had got the smell and look and feeling of the mountains in him. A house was close and shut in and full of little stinks, and a man with a roof over him and walls around couldn't see the sky or feel the wind or even know the time of night by looking overhead. "Don't like butter, neither, nor bread," Cora went on. "Likes marrow more'n butter. Put salt on a thing and you sp'ile it for him. Just straight meat and branch water, that's what he wants."

Dan winked at Boone. Under his breath he said, "Don't mind her, Boone. What the preacher says is righteousness is set so deep in her she's got to dig at somebody."

"Don't you ever hush her?"

Dan's face went solemn and tired for a little, and then the slow smile came. "It don't fret me much, not any more. Seems I can put up with things better'n you, like with Pap. Half of livin' is just holdin' in."

The girl's carrying voice came through the door. "It don't seem to have worked him harm." Boone had an idea that her glance had slid over to him, sizing up his built and heft. He squirmed a little under his shirt, feeling not quite comfortable.

Dan winked again. "One on your side anyhow, Boone," he said, low-voiced.

"If 'tweren't for you, I'd hush Cora's mouth good."

"Don't do it, Boone. It don't matter to me, and you ain't here but a while."

Boone listened to Nancy's "I best be going," and saw her coming for the door. As she went by, she turned her face full on him and her mouth made a quick smile, showing small white teeth. She was gone then, stepping up the path like a high-blooded young mare. Boone watched her going and knew that Dan watched, too. Even Blue raised his old head. It was a soft look she had had for him. Maybe he could call it inviting. The world and all had been like make-believe lately, with nothing of real feeling in it, and now there was this sharp, beginning stirring.
 

"Tell us about Injun fightin', Uncle Boone," Punk said.

"I'd ruther hear about b'ars," Andy put in. "Tell about a b'ar fight."

"No! Injuns! Injuns!"

"Bet I could kill a b'ar some time."

"You couldn't, neither," said Punk. "Shoo, maybe I couldn't my own self, and I got two years on you."

"It wouldn't harm ye to tell 'em a little bit of something," Dan said to Boone. There was a gentle scolding in his voice and in his face. "You ain't hardly opened your mouth to 'em about the west."

"Don't shine at storytellin'." Boone tried to get comfortable in his chair. It was a straight-back chair made of hickory poles and woven bark. Ma sat in one like it, except it had rockers, and Dan was hunched up on a three-legged stool that Boone remembered from Pap's time. The two boys were on the floor. Cora went out the open door with a pan of slop water. When she came back in, she said, "Nigh to bedtime, you boys."

"No, Ma! Uncle Boone's fixin' to tell a story."

"We ain't sleepy."

"Got the wide-eye, ain't ye?" Dan asked, smiling down at the pair of them.

Cora sniffed and went to wiping off the table.

"Cat's got your Uncle Boone's tongue," Ma said, her hands busy with her knitting needles. "Won't hardly pass the time of day with a pretty thing like that Nancy. Don't keer how his pap went."

Outside, the day was paling off toward night, though dark wouldn't come for an hour yet. Through the door Boone could see the old barn and a mocking bird fluttering up from the roof of it and settling and fluttering again and all the time singing fit to tear the throat out.

The boys' faces were turned up to him, waiting for him to begin. With his first finger Punk worried his rusty forelock.

"Won't hurt the boys not to get abed so soon," Dan said to Cora. "Seems like Boone might come out of his balk."

Cora put her washrag away and perched stiff on a chair as if just waiting for the foolishness to be done. It was her sitting that way that made up Boone's mind.

"Reckon you never seen a white bear," he said to the boys. Punk held his knees in his arms and rocked back and forth on his butt, listening.

Andy said, "Never seed ary kind of b'ar."

"A ten-footer, this one was, and heavy as a ox."

"How long would his teeth be?"

"Long as this here finger, almost."

"An' sharp? Sharp as granny's knittin' needle?"

"Sharper."

Punk said, "Leave him go on, Andy."

"Eatin' berries, he was, when Tom Quinn run into him, onexpected, high on the Little Bighorn. Good country there, Dan. You never seen the like of it, 'round here."

"What about the Far?" Punk asked.

"Bear riz on his hind legs sudden and made a swipe at Tom and like to tore his arm out. Muscle was all pulled from it, for a fact, and the bone showin'. Tom yelled out, and I looked up from downstream a piece and seen what was up."

Speaking of them made the time and place come back, and Tom Quinn's scream shrill in the ear and the bear standing tall and the sun white on the tips of his fur.

"Go on, Uncle Boone!" Andy said. "Don't keep stoppin'."

"I up with my old Hawken and fired quick, and that there bear let down and the bushes shook like a herd of bulls was in 'em as he made for me. And me without time to load my rifle again and only an old pistol on me."

"Did you kill him?" Punk wanted to know.

"Man has to keep his head. Has to keep steady. Has to hold his fire," Boone was holding himself steady again while the bear came on. He was seeing him charging big and black against the graveled bank and rearing at the last with the red drip of berries on his mouth and the clawed hand ready for the slap that would tear a man's face off. He heard the grunted breath of him and heard Tom shouting.

"You kilt him, I bet," Andy said. The click of Ma's knitting needles drowned Tom out.

"A white bear on a charge allus rises at the last, to hit you a side blow with his paw. That's the slick time to shoot, when his face's struck out straight at you and a ball won't glance off his head."

Dan asked, "You wait that long, sure enough?"

"I took aim between the eyes and let go."

"What else, Uncle Boone?"

"No else to it. He went over, dead as a bone, and I stuck my knife in him."

Cora came farther to the front of her chair. "Bedtime. Hear, Punk? Andy?"

Dan said, "Y'eat b'ar, I reckon?"

"Barrin' somethin' better."

"I don't guess a man ever lacks for victuals in the mountains, what with all that game around."

"Even wolf meat suits the taste fair enough. 'Member onc't runnin' into some British over in Oregon, and we was all froze for powder, but one of them British had some almighty big fishhooks -cod hooks, he called 'em- and we tied three together and hung 'em from a tree, baited with a rabbit we snared. Mister Wolf would jump for the rabbit and get hisself hooked and so hang there till we come along, with maybe his hind legs just touchin' the ground. Mostly, they was dead, time we showed up."

"It's ag'in Scripture," Cora said.

"What's ag'in it?"

"Eatin' meat strangled in its own blood. The Book tells you to keep away from meat offered to idols and from blood and from critters strangled."

"An empty belly don't go by a book."

Cora said, "Better if it did. Git to bed, you boys."

"Ever go hungry for a long stretch?" Dan asked.

Before he thought, Boone spoke the thing that had sneaked into his head. "Rock goats saved us once."

"What's a rock goat?" Punk asked, hunching closer.

"Nothin'. I was talkin' to your Pa."

Andy's mouth was pouty. "Ain't you goin' to tell us, Uncle Boone?"

"It ain't anything."

Cora got out of her chair. "I said bedtime."

"Go on, please! We can listen, can't we, Pa?"

"No, I told you," Boone said.

Dan's voice was soft. "Looks like your Uncle Boone has done talked hisself out." As Punk got off the floor, big Dan reached out and scuffed his head with his knuckles.

"Take yourself along now, Punkin Top. And you, too, Andy."

"Where'd he get that rusty hair? His mammy's side?"

It was Cora that answered Boone. "Never no redheads in our family."

Ma looked up from her knitting. "Your grandpa, now, was a little bit pinky, him that died of the milksick before ever you was born, Boone. Or was it after? I swear, I can't keep things straight in my head. Anyhow, it was the milksick, but your Pap died of the phthisic."

The slow smile was on Dan's face. "This'n just stoled into the fambly, I reckon."

"You was sayin' about them rock goats," said Punk.

Boone got up. "This here chair makes me ham-shot," he said and walked out the door.
 

She met him by the fence that cornered halfway up the hill, as she had said she would.

Sliding away from the house, keeping to the shadows so's Dan or Cora or the boys wouldn't sight him, Boone saw her standing and the light lying on her from the moon that had just got untangled from the timbered hills and was setting out to shine. She was watching the moon, watching with her hands down and her chin up, and the lines of her soft and shadowy against the slope. He stopped to look while his heart beat strong in him and the stirring grew to a purpose that made all else seem small and distant. While he halted, he heard the mockingbird singing, singing blind or to the moon or the night or to the nest it had somewhere, singing loud and steady as if it had to sing. Climbing the rise, he kept his eyes on the girl but still went so quiet that it was old Blue, snuffing along a varmint's trail, that gave her a start.

"You scare a body dead," she said after she had made him out. "You don't make sight or sound, and then, of a sudden, you're standing close."

"Didn't aim to scare you."

"I don't guess you can he'p it. It's fightin' Injuns, ain't it, that makes you go so soft?"

"That, and huntin'."

"Huntin's tame around here, so Mose Napier said. You know the Napiers?"

"Used to."

"You would, they lived so close. They was still here when Pa came to take over their place. Mose looked funny, for his face was whopperjawed."

Boone hunted for a spot to sit and cleared it of a dead limb that had blown from a wild cherry tree. "Best sit
down."