Lonesome Animals by Bruce Holbert

Author:Bruce Holbert
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2012-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

thirteen

When the horses returned them over the ridge lining the San Poil, Strawl directed Elijah to inquire at the houses and line shacks in the valley. Strawl took the ridgeline and looked for smoke. Late afternoon, he saw Elijah ascending once more. Jacob, Taker of Sisters, had a woman in the Swahila Basin. She took in his laundry and cooked for him several times a month. He’d been there two mornings before, then boarded the Wilbur Ferry. Apparently he had some history with the Cloud boys. One of them had insulted him.

“He might’ve went to old Canada.”

“What makes you think so?”

“No reason.”

“Exactly,” said Strawl.

Jacob would be carousing in the towns across the big river, where the wheat had been cut and the farmhands were flush and whiskey-inclined following a month of seven-day weeks and fourteen-hour days. Cards and dice made them easy marks.

“It’s supposed to be harder,” Elijah said.

“What’s that?”

“Finding them.”

“What makes you say so?”

“Books.”

“Books don’t know,” Strawl said.

At the Keller store, Strawl purchased flour and dried beef enough for a week of camps and Elijah a whole cake in a box, which he tied carefully to his saddleback, employing three ropes to anchor it against the horse’s bouncing back quarters. The old Keller Road wound them through the north and eastern portions of the Swahila Basin, the best farming country on the entire reservation. Yellow wheat bent, then relaxed under the evening wind, the bearded stalks bouncing like froth upon a flaxen sea.

Across the river, the only true palisades north of the Big Bend bordered the water for three miles, leaving no beach or bank. The granite glittered silver and green and red, depending on the light. The two-hundred-foot cliff threw a shadow over the hastening river and the opposite bank, where Strawl and Elijah rested and watered the horses. The two of them collected wheat stalks and rubbed the kernels from the hairy seed heads and fed them to the horses. They continued until dark, meandering toward the ferry until the horses were well fed. Twilight, they shared the flat ferry’s deck with three Fords and a Chrysler. Their drivers sat sullenly at their steering wheels or fooled with their radios, though no station transmitted past a hum in this low country. The ferryman pitched his bow into the wind to bisect the river’s waves. The spray spattered the cars’ window glass and wet Strawl’s face. He lifted his hat and let the top of his head cool, then wiped his hand across his damp hair and his hooded brow and the orbs of his eyeballs and his abrupt triangle of a nose and then the thin lips and worn teeth beneath them. They felt like corpses might to the mortician who prepared them.

The horses tipped their faces into the air and enjoyed the wet breeze. Elijah chewed a jerky strip in silence. The pilot swung the bow opposite the lined pilings, then gunned the throttle a moment and cut the engine. He scrambled to the bow, gaffing

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