Lamb

Picture the black dawn. The spray of stars overhead. Alison Foster, poor old son of a bitch, limping back up the dirt drive of the old Calhoun place with his red Maglite, gray head trembling, eyes impossibly small and hard and squinting ahead as if he could see David Lamb and the child in the dark. As if he knew. As if he’d catch them at it. As if Lamb didn’t know Foster was out there prowling around and peering in the cabin windows. Thinking what?

Foster didn’t get it that when Lamb drives her in his truck off the paved roads and into a place bright and stark and sere, beyond the humid Midwestern acres of hog feed and furrowed till, the girl—his girl, Lamb’s girl—is perfectly okay. Foster didn’t get that it’s a favor, a gift, say, taking her beyond the miserable reaches of prairie restoration reeking of sewage processing plants and cornstarch factories. That she rode along in the passenger seat with her eyes half closed and fixed upon Lamb as though he were the handsomest, wisest, most beneficent man on planet Earth.

Besides, Foster wouldn’t have found them in the cabin. Runny moonlight cast long, bent shadows across the concrete floor of the bunk room, though Lamb had tried to cover the windows with squares of a stiff and mildewed drop cloth he found folded beneath the workbench. Faint smell of woodsmoke, fire snapping in the iron stove. Outside the shop the north fork of the river running black past a stand of narrow-leafed cottonwoods just beyond the county road. A spectral mist hung rib-high among the water birch along its banks. A single box elder clenched its branches against the cold.

And his girl was sleeping beside him, her wonderful blue-and-white flowered nightgown twisted up around her bare, freckled waist. Soft belly rising a little with each breath, her warm damp head resting on Lamb’s outstretched arm, sweat shining at her temples, her mouth open, her little lips open—Christ, she was small—and he was swearing mutely into the space above him that this was good for her. That as long as he was honest and approached this thing from every possible angle, everything would line up and fall into place of its own accord, like atoms helixed and pleated tight within the seeds of cheatgrass needling the hems of her tiny blue jeans: fragile, inevitable, life-giving, and bigger than he. Such was his faith in the forces that had given rise to the girl herself, to the rapid trills of violet green swallows up the mountain, to the spoon-shaped leaves of prairie buttercups they’d seen blanketing the roadside in eastern Wyoming.

Lamb was just a man in the world. He’d fed her well and told her stories and loved her up all the way through the dim-lit outskirts of Rockford, Iowa City, Omaha; across the national grasslands, stiff and pale in the increasing cold; over the continental divide as the sky shed itself in falling snow, and up to where there were no trees, no birds, no life but the slow force of rock rising up from a thin and frozen crust of ground. Say this was all in hopes of glimpsing something beautiful. And is there anything wrong with that?

The next morning was just like all of their mornings: three little silver pans going at the tapered end of Tommie’s trapper fire. Coffee and canned meat and beans and toast with jam and four eggs.

“There. Now tomorrow your fire will be even better.”

She pulled her lips into her mouth and lifted her little face up at him. “It’s working, though.”

“You won’t forget how to do it, will you?”

“Nope.”

“Should I send you little reminder notes? With directions and diagrams?”

She made a face.

“It’ll give you dreams of the next man you’re going to build a trapper fire with. Only this guy, you’ll have to teach him how to do it.” He lifted his chin and turned his face away. “It hurts my feelings to say that, Tom. But we have to say it.”

She stirred the beans. “Nope,” she said. “Only building a fire with you. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Don’t say that, Em. Someday you’ll get married and you’ll go camping with your husband, and he won’t know how to build a fire. You’ll have to show him what I taught you.”

“I won’t get married.”

“Won’t you work for the forest service when you’re out of college? And tell me how to find you so I can come visit you in your tent? I’ll be that old camper who’s always haunting the high plains, right? I’ll wear an orange cap so you’ll know me. Even from far away.” He bent over and kissed the crown of her head. “I want you to always remember that I never let you eat a meal out here that was something we added hot water to.”

“Like oatmeal, puke.”

“Or dehydrated vegetables. I want you to remember all the meals we made together, and how every one of them had whole beans it. What’s happening underneath that toast?”

She tipped her head sideways and checked the smoke, checked the flames, and looked up at him.

“Go ahead. Let me see you fix that.”

With a white branch she rearranged the logs to keep the natural windbreak from burning it up too quickly, then turned to the little pile of sticks and tree punk and pine needles and twigs and pushed a handful in beneath the lowermost level of burning wood.

“If you’re ever alone in the woods waiting for me,” he said, “you’d be okay. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yep.”

“You’d know how to make it through the night.”

“Yep.”

She placed the white branch behind her in the cold grass.

“You’ve learned a thing or two about being an outdoorswoman.”

“I know.”

After eating and rinsing the pans, Lamb would drink his second cup of coffee and they’d walk up the hill across the spans of sagebrush and sumac and along a deep empty draw. Rust-bitten iron and steel lay in broken pieces in the weeds—comb of a hay rake, the axle and wheels of a mowing machine. They’d pass it on their way to the same grassy promontory each morning from where Lamb would point to the distant foothills, the innermost point, he told her, of a spiral of mountain and rock, like a granite wall corkscrewed around the little mountain lair she’d inherit—he promised—when he died.

If we were going to stay out here, he told her, we’d set up this little coal-burning stove, polish it till it turned black again, and we’d bring a little life back to this place. Then we’d build a new stable of blond wood, and I’d buy you a string of ponies. You could learn all the old ways. Boiling pudding in a bag. Decorating caraway seed cakes with burnt sugar. Trapping and roasting prairie chickens. We’d get some hired help, nice young guys from Idaho or Oregon who could put up a new rail fence around front and keep all the fences mended.

We’d bring it all back. You’d pack us lunches in metal lard buckets we’d hang from our saddles, and you’d sneak the best things into my pail, wouldn’t you? A thick layer of butter on my ham sandwich. By day you’d boil my shirts and hang them to dry outside. And when we got back at the end of the day and scrubbed our faces and hands with gritty soap, we’d line up at our long wooden kitchen table, you at the head in a flowered dress, passing down all the warm dishes of food. When it’s all set out upon the table, we’ll all bow our heads, and I’ll say the blessing, right? In the winter when it’s just you and me by the fire, we’ll commit whole chapters of the Bible to memory, so I’ll really be prepared. And do you know who will be the first person I pray for? Your mother.

And Christ he wanted to freeze her in time on the mountain, her tangled hair the color of pale tree bark, her burnt skin peeling off her face in bluish flakes, and he’d lie down with her there in the magnificently bright light, beside her on the bittercress and weeds, the old rusted hay rake beside them, angry red-winged blackbirds wheeling in great dark hoops above them.

We’re all alone out here, he would say. Is the sky bright, or what? Listen to those mad birds. We’re reinventing the world, my dear. Here. Yes. Like that. Are you comfortable? Isn’t this nice? Do you know how lucky we are to have this?

He stared at her little heart-shaped face and kissed her cheek and kissed her mouth and a thrilling horror spread like a stain through the hollow of his chest.

“We can’t help it, can we?” he whispered hoarsely. He opened his hand over her heart and held her there. “This was too big for us. It was too big for us it swallowed us up didn’t it?”

Shrug.

“Oh, you sweet child. Do that again.”

Shrug. She shut her eyes.

“Just hold my hand, okay? And we’ll sleep. Just as we are, just like this. Just a nap out in the wind and light. Yes. We’re not taking this any farther. Just this. Thank you.”

In a little while, he lifted her up out of the grass and carried her down the hill and back inside and tucked her into bed beside him.