The Hour of Lead by Bruce Holbert

Author:Bruce Holbert [Holbert, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023802
Publisher: Counterpoint

20

THEY DIDN’T BRUSH HIS HAIR, and, though cut, it was less a tangle, his head still appeared a tumbleweed, and his sloe-eyed gaze left him looking half-asleep well past noon. His clothes, aside from the hand-me-downs in which she had dressed him that first night, were thin as a veil where they had not been patched or let out to account for his growth. Beard peppered his chin. Lucky was sixteen, but so strange and uncultured that no number, outside height and weight, could accurately describe him. He followed her like a pup, nodded at what she told him, smiled in submission when it wasn’t appropriate, and performed tasks with such vigor he missed their intent then moped when she corrected him. He hummed, though the sound was hardly musical, more like bugs careening about a light. The boy seemed unaware sound emitted from him at all.

He was underfoot at first, but once she’d assigned him a routine of duties he could manage on his own, he proved productive enough. And he was, of course, young and tireless. Wendy realized she must have been strange country for the boy to come upon. Outside his mother, Wendy had witnessed him speak to no one until his first night on the ranch. Linda was not unneighborly when encountered but traveled wide circles to avoid such meetings. From birth, the boy knew little other than her voice. Wendy wondered if his mother’s presence was as oppressive as Wendy herself found God or the comfort believers knew.

On the skyline, a pair of riders appeared and disappeared throughout the day. She recognized them the next day and the one following. Drifters, she figured, sharing part-time work at another ranch or laying over before a push west across the desert and the pass between here and Seattle, or north and west to the dam in the coulee. Perhaps they weren’t paired at all, or only out of convenience or necessity, like she and the boy.

She broke from seeding the spring crop and studied the boy drive a nail in a post and twist and loop barbwire over the head, then hook the nail, and wire into the wood. Finished, he started another a foot higher. She wondered if cities were lonely, if a hundred people stacked into twenty apartment floors could remain separate. If distance and geography didn’t keep them apart, what was loneliness, what did she share on a hillock, gazing across livestock and grain and a great river, a hundred square miles of country with a thousand others whose vista most days did not extend past a flat’s walls or the streets piled with buildings? The boy looked up, found her, and grinned. She raised her hand to acknowledge him before returning to her planting.

Wendy’s physical labor piled muscle and sinew upon her like a man’s, and she perspired far beyond the restraint implied by femininity. The latter forced her to break her work into two-hour pieces with fifteen minutes between in which she undressed and dried the cold sweat with a bathing towel.

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