The Hour of Lead Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Bruce Holbert

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The hour of lead : a novel / Bruce Holbert.

  p. cm

  ISBN 978-1-61902-380-2

  1. Ranchers—Washington (State)—History—Fiction.

  2. Families—Washington (State)—History—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.O48287H69 2014

  813’.6—dc23

  2014014411

  Jacket design by Michael Kellner

  Interior design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates

  COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  Contents

  PART ONE

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For Holly, Natalie, Luke, and Jackson

  Caliban’s nights are full of teeth

  —JOHN WHALEN

  Caliban

  PART ONE

  This is the hour of Lead—

  Remembered, if outlived,

  As Freezing persons, recollect the snow—

  First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

  —EMILY DICKINSON,

  from poem 372

  PREFACE

  NOVEMBER 1918

  IN 1918, SPANISH INFLUENZA KILLED seventy-five million people worldwide, though not the Romanovs, who were instead murdered in their palace basement by Bolsheviks. The same year, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, World War I closed with the Treaty of Versailles. No one was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

  In that year, for the only time in the century, America’s population shrank. One hundred one people perished in Tennessee’s Great Train Wreck. May 20 in Codell, Kansas, tornadoes leveled every building, just as they had on May 20, 1917 and May 20, 1916. In Boston, Babe Ruth pitched a shut-out for the Red Sox in the World Series, though he hit no home runs.

  The Wobblies and AFL crippled the city of Seattle, Washington with a general strike adding fuel to fears of a Bolshevik insurgence. The state initiated prohibition with the Bone Dry Act, and the Wenatchee World published the first public mention of a concrete dam on the Columbia River at Grand Coulee.

  Yet, east, past the mountains, in the Big Bend and the Basin, on the reservations and the Palouse and the fissured basalt paralleling the Columbia River’s deep trough, among channeled scablands and the wheat country and orchards and cattle ranches and dairy farms, horses still powered crude machines not much improved from a hundred years before. Towns of no more than a hundred, many just a grain silo and half-dozen houses that served the railroad lines, scattered over the state’s eastern and central portion. Most people resided far even from these skeletal communities, settling in draws with good water or meadows livestock might graze or beneath eyebrows so as not to waste arable acres or at the mouth of canyons that kept the herds.

  Far from cities’ competing glare and industrial haze the year appeared to pass this country like another cloud in another sky of another day. Its half-dozen papers delivered month-old world and national reports along with fair winners and local obituaries, though people received most of their news through tales added to and subtracted from a hundred times before reaching their ears. Most were good for nothing sensible, just wonder and doubt and the uncertainties attached to them. Nevertheless, alone, behind a plow or aboard an animal or pulling a saw handle or over a chicken boiling in a pot, the denizens chewed and swallowed and digested them until the stories turned as tangible as bone and muscle and tendon.

  1

  LINDA JEFFERSON WAS A CLICHÉ and she knew it. Twenty-four, both schoolteacher and widow, she tugged a sweater over her blouse then her husband’s sheepskin-lined riding coat. His death the year previous had deposited her in a sad, inevitable season. She weathered it as a dumb animal scratches for summer’s remnants beneath the snow, not understanding winter or seeking to, only enduring it. The absence was endless and reasonless; it seemed less a wound, which mourning would have mitigated and eventually closed, than a flaw in herself, requiring constant stitching to keep from bleeding through.

  In this country, loneliness was unassailable law. A man weighed his heart by the number of sleepers under his roof when the lights went out and a woman by the number of eggs in the skillet mornings. The distance between souls, however, remained incalculable. Blood made them kin, yet a heart does not beat solace or joy. One must hunt that in others, and others remained few and far apart. Days she entertained a room full of children but a job was no remedy for an empty house.

  In the schoolroom furnace, quartered pine ebbed to coal and ash and wind clattered the flue. The weather battered the cottonwood in the yard and clouds clotted and thinned the light. The storm was a relief. A hard wind could perform beautiful things to country, sweep it clean like a new room. Once it let up and the sky emptied to blue, the snow seemed a new start.

  As she approached the twins, pressed into desks for which they had grown too large, they hitched themselves a little taller. Clad in a cotton shirt and grey trousers, Luke flipped his book closed with his forefinger. Clothes passed between the brothers and were never a reliable way to tell them apart; still, three minutes in a room, you knew Luke from his twin, Matt, who was bent across his spelling, crimped hand steering his pencil.

  She tapped a finger on Matt’s paper to identify two words that remained misspelled. He nodded and opened his primer to correct the work. Matt was better suited for practical pursuits. Fall, the boys demonstrated a bent to arrive early and she’d assigned Matt the stove. Each morning, he retrieved the axe from the long covered porch and quartered a couple of aged tamarack rounds stacked at the porch’s far end. After, he knocked loose some kindling and propped it across a handful of dried pine needles and a balled page of last week’s news. He struck a match—one was all he’d allow—against the paper two or three places and coax the damper draft till the wood burned blue and smokeless. Not a wisp entered the room. All the while, she shot
Luke new and difficult words to spell. She felt odd enjoying boys this age. Eighth grade, they recognized a woman differed from them and that they were meant to do something about it. She thought of her husband once more, his broad, callused hands on her shoulder and waist while they danced at the Fort Saturdays, not pulling her, just steady and there. His nails, yellowed by cigarettes, the hair dark and wiry between his knuckles, the same hand that dangled from the sheet as the logging crew carted him from the forest. As his crew recalled, the tree turned on its stump and thrust a wooden blade through Vernon’s throat and out one ear. The mortician could do nothing without removing the head entirely, so he appeared like an awestruck child in the casket, marveling at something overhead and slightly to the left.

  Wind creaked the building trusses, but it was the winter’s first storm and early, likely packing only a skiff of snow and freeze enough to finish the pumpkins and squash. Still the boys ought not to risk a chill.

  “You two better get on,” Linda Jefferson said.

  She watched the boys button their jackets and tug their stocking caps past their ears. Outside, they patted their horse and each took a stirrup and mounted. It left them one-footed until they had purchase enough to reach the saddle horn. Neither asked nor offered the other assistance. Their mulishness struck her as comic and she laughed.

  •

  ED LAWSON NARROWED HIS EYELIDS and peered toward the horizon as the first strong gusts batted the shutterless window. Flakes no bigger than birdshot and nearly as hard followed. They whirled and rapped the crosshatched pane. He held no rancor against the season coming hard. After, he’d walk his property to scout coyotes or the few cougars left in the cliffs that might harass the livestock.

  His wife, though, had been fussing at the window since the cattle had congregated at the feedbin despite half a day till the next feeding. They huddled at the barn door and lowed for Ed to admit them. Eventually he relented and, past them, she watched the horizon swell purple and pulse like blood through an opened vein that spilled across the sky. Winters in this place turned afternoon brief as a heartbeat, and night unraveled over day so thick sleepers dreamed themselves swimming through it to breathe. Day, when it arrived, was little relief. Breaths turned hurried, drawing in more cold than air and expelling a body’s warmth until a person was left light-headed and pneumatic. The sun, shimmering behind the cumulous haze, looked as warm as it might to a fish at the bottom of a lake.

  A half empty coffeepot perked in the center of the table. Ed Lawson rocked his cup below his mouth and enjoyed the vapors from the moonshine inside it.

  “Probably stopped somewhere to throw a ball.”

  The front of her head disappeared in the glass reflection as she turned to him. “You know it’s too cold for baseball.”

  Ed inhaled over the cup then drank. The window was nearly blank with frost. He fortified his coffee again and joined his wife looking out. Her head swung when she caught the liquor scent. He winked at her. Her face had slackened and too much sun had guttered her eyes. He recalled her profile from their first days, a crescent and white as the moon, and the thinness above her hips that tapered her. He felt no different about the woman now and considered that his greatest good fortune.

  An oak crate tumbled past and splintered into the house wall. “Goddamner,” Ed said. “This one’s got a bad humor.”

  His wife nodded, still at the window.

  “Not supposed to blow like this till January,” she said.

  Lawson joined her and stared out the glass. “Maybe January in Alaska,” he said. His wife turned and watched Ed lift his long duster from the chair back and tug his gloves from the pockets and test his fingers inside them.

  “Boil some water. They’re liable to be frosty when I find them,” he said.

  He screwed a hunting cap onto his head and opened the door; cold blasted through, a lamp shook, and light wavered in the kitchen. He waved to her and stepped toward the corral. The light in the doorway became a shadow then nothing, enveloped by the sideways storm.

  •

  WHEN HE AND MATT WERE left alone, Luke poured moonshine into fruit jars and let Matt dare him into sipping it. That woolly burning felt like Mrs. Jefferson next to him. Luke had tracked his teacher through autumn, hunting her insides under the breathy voice and slow windmill circles her hands spun as she recited poetry, like words were birds she could coax from nests. The best reader and speller in the class, Luke could not fathom where his teacher disappeared when she spoke those words. Each time he recognized her fragrance, he wished to know more.

  The horse halted, a three-year-old Appaloosa mare, Mule, named for such moments. The sun, only a smear of white without warmth in the short days, turned memory aside from the shallow, long light lining the horizon. The wind pitched itself into the riders and the horse. Luke stood in the stirrup, dismounted, and twisted the reins, the rawhide frosted white to the bridle where it thawed with the mare’s breaths. An ice layer clung to her neck and under her belly, and tongues of snow spiraled around them, sometimes moving up instead of down, or remaining halfway, scouring the boys’ exposed skin.

  A week later, the papers would report a seventy-five-degree temperature drop in fifty-seven minutes. Four feet of snow, light as down, piled onto the hardening earth in the next three hours, and double that the six that followed, all so far past the almanac records as to render the whole book inadequate. Seventy-year-old farmers from Norway and the Russian North, usually quick to reduce the New World’s winters to minor annoyances, when asked about the storm of ’18 remained mute and just shook their grey heads. At the river’s bank, sheep huddled near the steaming water and eventually waded into it, since it was warmer. Dozens would pock the steely surface as the ice stilled even the fastest waters. Gusts spun the windvanes until the spindles stripped their couplings and the blades and ribbing spun from barn tops to be discovered months later and miles away.

  The boys cussed the horse, separate and together. They quirted her face with the reins. The snow piled against their torsos and welled in the lee sides as if they were trees or hills. Wind snapped Luke’s hat from his head and it vanished across the road. In his brows the ice thickened. It clotted his hair. Matt pulled the reins hard and Mule lunged forward. She accepted their weight when they mounted, swayed in the wind, and tried another step. The wind shoved the boys’ heads into their shoulders and blistered their hands and faces. Luke couldn’t clench his fingers over the reins. The twins gazed at the snow, eyes tearing, tears freezing to their skin. The muscles in Mule’s chest bunched when she stepped, the hole her hoof punched obliterated before she could attempt the next. They traveled half a mile. Frost reached the mare’s chest, ascending past the stirrups. After each step she rested before attempting another. Her breath pressed out in short, dutiful gasps and she ran a half dozen uneven strides until her weight tipped.

  Matt expected Luke to act, but when he didn’t Matt kicked one foot from the stirrup and hauled Luke clear of the horse’s falling weight. Together, they disappeared in the high snow. Matt shook Luke and he rose. In the slanting snow, they watched the mare paw and roll and regain all fours and back away, steam coming from her nostrils.

  Matt pushed Luke’s shoulder. “Which way?”

  “Out of the snow.”

  “Don’t seem likely.”

  “Give me your hat.”

  Matt set his gloved hand atop the wool cap. “I got ears to warm, too,” he said. Luke nodded.

  “Can you drown in snow?” Matt asked.

  “I don’t want to find out,” Luke said. He shoved Matt in the direction of an elm skeleton.

  •

  LINDA JEFFERSON COAXED THE FURNACE fire. Some coals pinked but most had fallen to grey ash. A hard chill buffeted the room. Heat from the open stove barely pierced it and only for a few feet. She alternated between facing the flames and warming her back with them. The snow and the biting wind had frosted inside the window glass. Outside, the road passing the school and leading to her
small house had become indistinguishable half an hour before, like everything else, just drifts and swells of white. Wind hammered the north side of the building. The storm was unlike any she had witnessed or read of. She checked the latch on the window and wondered how simple pine and glass could restrain such weather.

  Though no friend of cold, she enjoyed the snap and aroma of burning wood. Winters, the log camp abandoned the woods and Vernon, when he wasn’t hired out as a handyman, assigned himself the cooking. She would be treated to apple and berry cobblers and read a book or her students’ work, while next to her he tinkered at songs from memory on an old mandolin like temptation itself. Occasionally, she’d turn and kiss his shoulder as he played. If the number of pecks passed three, he was allowed to lead her off to the heavy-quilted bed. Sometimes he cheated, bumping into her lips without her conceding. They would argue until she’d kissed him honestly and ended the squabble. Later, the shepherd dog would climb to the bed foot. It slept with her still. She spoke with the dog often, and at times thought she might be daft, but allowed that being alone granted a person privileges not permitted others.

  She approached the window in her reverie and permitted the snow to sketch the steely air, flakes spinning a familiar image then destroying it before she could attach it to a name. She imagined a story the wind was attempting to recount, wondering if it might be prophecy she was seeing. She wanted to prepare. A darkened shape appeared, at first she thought it a shadow, but the ebbing light was too unclear to cast it. The form dangled just outside her comprehension but did not vanish like the others. She squinted to study it. Shoulders and the thick neck of a horse began to appear.

  A pair of her husband’s wool pants hung in the closet. She tugged them over her pantaloons and under her skirt. Outside, her arms swam in the white air, and flying ice beat her face. The horse belonged to the twins. The frozen saddle was taut against its chest. She touched its jaw, which was rigid as rod iron. The animal’s glassy eye did not close. Snow had drifted to its withers.

  •