Mountain time, p.19
Mountain Time, page 19
The phone made her jump. She muted the music and picked up the ringing instrument.
“It’s me, done with the dance of death Bing’s putting the paper through.” Mitch sounded a whole lot older. “Can you talk?”
“As they say in this town, yup indeed,” Lexa tried to cheer him up with her own tone. “Your dad turned in early tonight. Mariah went to the bunkhouse to mark up her proof sheets because there isn’t a flat surface anywhere in this house. I’m holding out against a solo swim in the springs. When you coming back?”
“Tomorrow late. I’m about to head out now, drive as far as the Columbia at least. How’s he doing?”
“Same.” She saved the news that Lyle was parceling out branding irons one per capita. “Mitch, I’m sorry as hell about no more ‘Coastwatch.’ ”
“Lex, listen, I found something out. Called every old source I could think of in the ’crat bureaus, the Forest Service, Interior, the bunch. And here’s what: those reef leases are being put on a fast track. The big feds don’t want to take any more heat on energy giveaways, so they’ve bucked the decision down to the supervisor of the Two.”
“Then I hope he has a head on his shoulders,” declared Lexa.
“It’s a she.”
Into the unaccustomed silence at her end, Mitch resumed:
“But here’s the thing. I had our tax guy run all the numbers for me on Dad’s so-called finances. No wonder he’s got gravel and the Aggregate deal on his brain.”
It was his turn for expressive silence. Don’t vague out on this, Mitch. The bastards don’t need to pipeline-and-road this country next. Standing there in the gloom behind Lyle’s crammed desk, Lexa felt as if she was back in the tight confines of a fishboat. “You know, you don’t sound like somebody happy to have a surplus of gravel.”
“I’m not happy to give the world another gravel pit either, Lex,” his voice came reluctantly, “but without one the Rozier family finances look like a black hole.”
• • •
Bushed and, of course, hungry, Mitch pulled into the driveway late the next afternoon. The van was gone, Lexa more than likely downtown buying groceries, he figured, but Mariah was on the lawn trying to draw Rin’s attention to his dog dish.
“Hi,” Mitch made his manners, “at least to the one of you who can hear me.”
“Yeah, hi.” Without a camera swaying somewhere on her, Mariah looked oddly lost out there on the lawn.
“Where’s Lex?”
“In Choteau.”
“Big-time shopping?” He started for the house and whatever razzing greeting his father would have for his return from the Coast.
“Mitch, she’s . . . she’s at the funeral home.”
He froze at her words. Not even the hospital?
Mariah took some steps toward him, long legs scissoring slowly. “Your dad didn’t wake up this morning. Lexa went in his room and found him—” She didn’t need to finish. Almost to him, she halted and crossed her arms on her chest as if squeezing out the next words. “Damn it, there just isn’t a good way to say any of this. But I’m sorry, Mitch.”
He stood looking at her, still trying to register what was over now and what wasn’t. Absurdly he wondered what expression was on his father’s face in the last picture she had taken of him.
“I hung on here,” Mariah was saying, tone as wan as her face, “we didn’t want you walking in cold on this, finding everybody gone when you came.”
“Mmhmm”—the family load couldn’t get more impossible than this—“I, ah—” after everything, he hadn’t even managed to be on hand when his father died—“I’d better . . .” Dazed, he headed on into the house to call to the funeral home.
• • •
The evening was all but night by the time the three of them returned from Choteau and Mitch’s making arrangements for his father to be cremated.
Lexa and Mariah quietly offered to fetch some fast food, giving Mitch a little time to himself, and he said that would be appreciated.
He flipped on the lights in the machine shed. The branding irons had not quite taken over every inch of the place. Here and there along the walls were tools and implements like sidelined players. He hauled out a sledgehammer about the weight of a small barbell. Next, found a steel fence-post driver, about twice that heavy. Then there was the anvil, big weight. He lined them up, stripped off his shirt.
In the rust silence of the machine shop, he began lifting.
• • •
“Mitch, help me get the Blue Goose ready.”
His father’s day-starting voice, that distant morning when they were to begin rock picking on the Donstedder Bench.
Out the two of them trek to the faded Dodge truck and take off the high boxboards used to haul grain. In place of those went a set of two-by-ten boards along both sides of the truck bed, enough wall to hold rocks on the truck but low enough to toss over.
By the time the truck was ready, Sharpless and Loper and the third kid showed up, managing sleepy grins when Lyle razzed them about how much work he was going to wring out of their sissy hides. The man wasn’t kidding. Lyle considered that teenage boys barely had the brains of sheep, but you could stretch their day’s work—twelve hours instead of ten if a field could be finished by keeping at it until dark—in ways that would make an older man keel over.
Up until this point in life it had not particularly bothered Mitch to be the rock boss’s son. His father made no exception for him in prodding all the work he could out of drifty teenagers, and whatever god is assigned to rocks knew that Mitch wanted no soft treatment—maybe there was something worse than your football buddies teasing you about being babied, but so far he couldn’t imagine it. Consequently he could not believe the fix he found himself in by the middle of this first morning, deputized to drive the truck and having to hold forth on the running board while Sharpless and Loper and the other one insisted on sluffing off, his father due back any minute and sure to fire those three so fast their heads would swim.
Gulping, Mitch shut off the truck and jumped into the field. He aimed himself toward Sharpless, who was ahead of him in growth, filled out like a bulging grain sack.
“Sharps, come on. I’m telling you, my old man will kick your asses down the road if you guys don’t get back to work.”
Sharpless only laughed. And caught in the infection of goofiness, now Loper giggled, stutter-stepped over to Sharpless and faked a handoff to him, spun about, and lobbed an oval rock toward the truck in a pass that fell ten feet short.
“You’re right out here with us now, Mitchmo,” Sharpless crooned. “How’s your daddy gonna fire us and not you?” Loper giggled again.
Mitch gauged the two of them. Then he jumped Sharpless, half wrestling, half mauling him, managing to land a couple of solid wallops before Sharpless could gather himself. When Sharpless did get his feet set in the loose soil of the field, he hit Mitch a painful whack on the side of the neck. Then as he drew back for another one, Mitch drove into him in a tackle stunningly perfect, his right shoulder into Sharpless’s midriff and his lowered arms lifting and dumping him. Mitch and his momentum must have carried Sharpless a full ten feet backward before Sharpless pancaked to the ground on his back.
Sharpless lay stunned, no breath nor battle left in him. Puffing, Mitch scrambled off him and whirled around to take on Loper. But Lope looked at the heap that was Sharpless, swallowed and put up his hands only to fend off Mitch if he came; he offered no fight. Off to the side, the kid none of them knew that well looked as if he wished he had a hole to crawl into.
Mitch stepped back over to where Sharpless was struggling to sit up.
“Come on, Sharps,” Mitch gasped and put a hand down to help him up. “Let’s call it quits on this.”
“Mitch?” His father came boiling around the truck to them. “What the devil’s going on?”
“Little argument,” Mitch panted. “School stuff, right, Sharps?”
“It’s okay, Mr. Rozier,” Sharpless managed to cough out. “I asked for it.”
“The whole grab-butt bunch of you are asking for it here if you don’t watch out,” Lyle started in on them, laying it to Mitch especially. When he wound down, he made Mitch and Sharpless shake hands and go back to work together, a piece of Lyle sergeantry that his son took in silence.
The four boys rock-picked like good fellows, the truck soon filled and then the clatter and chain-thunder crack of the rocks being dumped in the Donstedder coulee. By then Sharpless and Mitch were exchanging sheepish smiles. What wasn’t over yet, however, was Lyle’s powwow with Donstedder. Soon into the second load he had to tromp off again and check whether the farmer wanted the patch of alkali just ahead in the field picked or ignored.
“See if you can not draw blood on each other while I’m gone,” he instructed. This time he left the truck idling but pointedly did not tell Mitch to get in there and drive.
While he was at that, the boys scooped up the rocks in the usual span on either side of the truck, then stood around waiting, four cases of conspicuously good behavior there under the sun’s eye.
Sharpless was confining himself to a baseball dream, tossing up little stones and taking swings, the tlock of his tongue the sound of the imaginary bat. Leaving well enough alone, Mitch moved around to keep warm, restlessly glancing over at the truck to see when his father would get things under way again.
He saw the rock caught between the dual tires. “Under the truck, Sharps,” he called out the code.
“Sure thing,” came back from Sharpless, unleashing another home-run swing.
Mitch crouched under the truck bed to work the piece of stone loose before mud built up behind it and clogged solid against the frame, making an even nastier mess to dig out. Oblong, about the size and taper of a bowling pin, the rock was wedged hard, and he dug in his heels, bracing to give it enough of a pull. No sooner had he done so than he heard the truck go into gear and his father’s shout, “Okay, make those rocks fly.”
Mitch slipped in the muck of the field as he flung himself sideways. The outside tire of the duals ran over his right leg just above the ankle with a disheartening sound of bone cracking. What flew through his mind was that this could cost him football next fall. Before the gouge of pain made his eyes clamp shut he saw Sharpless semaphoring his arms, screaming to Lyle to stop the truck, and he hoped the truck was not going to back up.
• • •
So there they were in bed for the rest of the summer, Mitch and his cast-encased broken leg. Doubly broken; the bone had been snapped at the ankle and the shin. And but for the softness of the mud beneath, the wheel would have crushed his foot and ankle as well.
The first week or more, his mother was dangerously silent toward his father, and constrained in how to try to handle a household with the chores of a nurse dumped on it. She could not go off to the Sweetgrass Hills with this situation. “Let me know,” she kept saying to Mitch, wanting to do more for him than she had been able to think of so far. Her square-cut face, more striking than any kind of lovely, would knit in concentration as she tightened the sheets for him or brought him a warm basin of water and a washcloth for his daily bath. (Planted there in bed for those months, Mitch for the first time had the leisure to wonder about such things as whether his parents had got married because they looked like each other.) Then she would have to go back to life downstairs, and there would be the occasional sound of her at some kitchen chore or the murmur of her soap operas on the television in the living room.
Those first bedridden days, Mitch read the Great Falls Tribune for the baseball scores and roundups. Then, since you can read a sports page only so many times, he began reading everything else in the paper. Then everything in the house, and a good amount of the library at school when his mother arranged to fetch books for him.
Sharpless came around a couple of times, tongue-tied with apology, and so morose that Mitch immediately felt better when he left.
It was his father who registered on the million hours of that summer. From his service in the military he had some feel for the monotony Mitch was going to have to endure. The first morning of haying season he came into the bedroom, his work-stained straw hat already on, to ask:
“How you holding up?”
“Okay, I guess.” Mitch smiled as best he could. He hadn’t yet found what he could cheerfully say to the father who had run over him.
For a minute or two they talked haying, Lyle bluffly complaining about the shortcomings of his crew as he did every year, Mitch maintaining how much he was going to miss being out in the field. Then Lyle suddenly said:
“How about you keep the days, this summer? Give you something to do.” With both hands he gave Mitch the clothbound daybook.
Surprised didn’t say it, for his son. The daybook was the Bible of this household, holy writ and sacred accounts combined, as Lyle ritually sat down at the end of each working day to keep record of wages and expenses in the waiting pages.
Momentarily Mitch blanked on words. Then mustered the ones he had to, even wanted to:
“Sure, I’d like to.”
With enough pillows propped under him he could see out to the machine shed where the haying crew assembled each morning, his father laying out their day for them. Dark good-looking Ferragamo, on vacation and downtime from the Black Eagle smelter. Fritz Mannion, the joker of the crew, bowlegged as a bulldog and as staunch if he wasn’t drinking. Some new men every summer, this time Truax and Larsen with an e, and a young Hutterite man from one of the colonies that would cautiously hire somebody out if Lyle Rozier went to them and dickered just right. And others from around the area like Tom Tourniere, all carefully recorded by Mitch in the big timekeeping pages. Creamy paper, with a light green crosshatch of little squares. When each crew member worked a day, a I went into that day’s square on the line with his name; half a day, interrupted by a toothache or some such, a slash across the little box. No work, such as Sundays or the Fourth of July or Labor Day or what his father called AWOA (away without alibi), that day’s square was left empty—Lyle’s system, although Mitch was mightily tempted to write a goose egg in there, as more apt.
Sitting up there in bed musing and bookkeeping, a clerk of ideas for the first time in his life, Mitch soon noticed what a jinxed summer this was turning out to be. The machinery was often as crippled up as his leg. Equipment was always breaking in the hayfield, but this year the power buckrake was chronic that way. With Mitch to be tended to, his mother couldn’t make the runs for parts, so it would be his father who would have to dash down to the auto supply place in Great Falls, time and again coming in at night shaking his head as he brought the sales slips up to Mitch to enter expenses in the daybook: a carburetor filter, an epidemic of burst radiator hoses, new rotor for the distributor cap—the mechanical items became a casualty list down a page of their own, that summer of fractures.
But gradually the haying progressed, and so did the boy with the shattered leg. Came the monumental day, that week before the crew picnic in the park, when Mitch was at last up on crutches. He swung himself on them, learning how to get around on arm stilts, until his armpits started to go raw. “Mitch, don’t overdo,” his mother said more than once, and even his father instructed him to take things a little easy. But he was determined to be set for school. Truth be told, he did not at all mind that the crutches might make him a bit heroic there.
The last Saturday night, when his father was writing out the checks for the hayhands, Mitch made sure to be on hand outside as the crew said their good-byes. He took their kidding about his summer off from the labors of haying. Then one by one they were gone. Ferragamo’s wife had come for him; Mitch’s mother was delivering Truax and Larsen to the bus station in Choteau. Mitch went back in the house feeling a little lonely for the names he’d had in his care all summer. He was heading for the stairs and the still not easy climb to his room when he heard his father say:
