Читать книгу The Earthbreakers - Ernest Haycox - Страница 4

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THE camp and its echoes faded, the whirling rain mists closed in. Along this well-worn Indian runway loose stock bands moved ahead of Burnett toward the throat of the gorge forty miles away, but he saw nothing of them in the blind day. The river was beside him, bearing its freight of scattered rafts, and though some of these were forty feet long and sixteen wide the wind-trenched water shook them as though they were small boats. The trail, too rough for wagons, crossed an ancient field of lava and moved through a succession of sand dunes until, about two hours from camp, it rose in stairstep creases along the face of a hill. Around noon of an already dying day he found himself following the rim of a bluff loosely covered by pine. The river was a thousand feet below him, unseen in the fog, and he was smothered by the twilight of a cloud's breaking center, and wind shook him on the saddle and the tumultuous rain came upon him in hard-breaking drops. He was thoroughly wet, his shoes were water-filled; coldness passed from a burning to an ache and finally to a lack of sensation in legs and knuckles and ears.

There was a way to handle weather and the way—lying in a man's thoughts—was to retreat from the surface misery and build a wall and when the weather broke through that wall, to retreat to a deeper layer of flesh and build another wall. There was never any danger until the last wall was breached and the weather reached that small center cell which housed the will to exist. At that point a man sat as a spectator and listened to the battle between his will and the thing which came to kill him.

Loose soil and pine stems whipped by; overhead the steady hiss of the wind kept on. The horses footed steadily forward from one rocky ridge to another, down a long slope and across the insecure ford of a swollen little river near its junction with the big river; and somewhere in the noisy day he heard a man's weak voice cry out. Fifty feet distant a horse stood on a rocky flat with its rump to the wind. A few cows stood under the shelter of a tree and a small tent, ripped from its pegs, slapped back and forth beneath a branch to which its peak had been tied. Riding in that direction he discovered Alpheus Stricklin's head stuck out from a cocoon of soaked blankets.

Burnett got down and squatted before that hollow face with its fringe of curly red whiskers. Stricklin's eyes were so deep and round that they seemed to have no pupils. A rank odor came from blankets and from man. Too sick to light a fire or to recapture the tent which had blown off its pegs, Stricklin lay in the day's full blast and could not muster energy enough to shiver.

"How long you been here?"

"Two days."

Burnett walked to a pack horse, hauled off its pack and got an ax. He chopped a set of pegs and tacked the tent cloth around Stricklin; he cut the rope which held the tent's peak to the pine bough and let the canvas lie collapsed over Stricklin. He rustled through the trees and collected a stack of wood and from the pack he got a handful of pitch kindling and crouched close to the ground to build a fire under the shelter of his coat. He stood by until the fire caught on well; and he made a frame of wood chunks around it and found his coffee-pot and filled it from the river and laid it over the fire.

"When did you eat?"

"Yesterday morning," said Stricklin. "Nothing stays down."

"Any fresh blankets?"

"No."

Burnett dragged his pack near the fire. He poured half the water from the coffee-pot into a small bucket, dropped a chunk of jerked beef into the bucket and a hand scoop of coffee into the pot; and put both utensils over the fire. Stricklin made a feeble scratching on the tent cloth and pulled it back until his head was in the weather. "Jesus, what a smell."

"Crawl out of there and sit up to the fire."

"Can't make it."

Burnett squatted over the man. He shoved back his hat to keep its drip from Stricklin and short, sharp critical lines of attention sprang around his eye corners. "You're a down horse and you've decided to die. Crawl out of there."

Stricklin said nothing but Burnett thought he saw the slight shining of resentment, and he reached down and ripped the protecting canvas from Stricklin's body. Stricklin brought an arm from the blankets, doubled his fist and struck at Burnett's face. Burnett laughed at him and pulled the blankets back, rolling Stricklin half over toward the fire. Stricklin kicked out with a leg. Burnett seized the man at the shoulders and dragged him to the edge of the fire.

"Sit up to it," he said and took his ax into the nearby trees to make more wood from the broken deadfall limbs. Stricklin curled himself at the fire and steam rose from his clothes and fresh rain sparkled in his whiskers. His deep-set eyeballs rolled from side to side as he kept his attention on Burnett. Burnett got a cup from the pack and filled it from the simmering bucket.

"Sit up, Alpheus."

"Can't make it."

Burnett circled the fire and took Stricklin by one shoulder and hauled him to a sitting position; he steadied the man with gentle cuffs with his palm until Stricklin made a gesture of protest. Burnett dropped his hand but stood by to be sure Stricklin didn't capsize again.

"All right," said Stricklin irritably. "All right."

Burnett handed over the cup and went into the trees to continue his wood gathering. When he came back the cup lay empty on the ground.

Stricklin had both hands across his belly and showed his misery. "It's started again." He lifted his glance to Burnett and dropped it. Sick as he was, he was embarrassed. "I can't get up."

Burnett lifted Stricklin by the armpits and walked ten feet from the fire; he slipped down the man's galluses and trousers and he spraddled his legs and lowered Stricklin to a squatting position. Stricklin wrapped his arms around Burnett and butted his head against the latter's stomach for support; he swayed like a half-filled sack of flour and body cramps shuddered him and the coldness of the day made fine tremors through him. "What a hell of a thing," he groaned. "Jesus, I'm ashamed."

"It's all right, Alpheus. Let 'er go."

"No use. Nothing in me."

Burnett pulled up the man's trousers and guided him back to the fire. He filled the cup from the bucket and passed the cup to Stricklin. "Keep at it." He built the woodpile until it was big enough to last a night; he fried himself a chunk of bacon and warmed himself with the coffee. Three boys crossed the little river with a band of stock and disappeared in the rain-downed twilight; wind ripped through the timber and smashed down branches and felled a tree, and rain walked across the earth wave after wave. Burnett took Stricklin's blankets from the collapsed tent and laid them flat in the rain, weighted by rocks, for washing. He pulled up the tent pegs and dragged the canvas around Stricklin. After he had restored the loose pack to its proper horse he stood a short time at the fire, attempting to read Stricklin's face.

"Keep the fire going. I'll leave the bucket with the meat in it. Just work away at it. You be all right?"

Stricklin dropped his head. He said something which was lost in the wind; he raised his voice. "Sure."

"That diarrhea lasts about three days. You've had two. Lay over tomorrow." He got in the saddle but delayed his departure; for Stricklin's eyes, fixed on him, were like the entrances to the emptiest of tunnels, and around his mouth an expression had settled. It wasn't sickness, Burnett thought, as he turned away to collect his pack outfit. He found the trail and worked his way about a rocky point and up another ridge. The image of the expression, with its unremembered familiarity, haunted him. A good mile down the trail he stopped his horses and sat still a full minute, and at last he shook his head and turned back to Stricklin's camp.

Stricklin had dropped flat before the fire and was entirely covered by the tent. He pushed the canvas back when he heard Burnett and sat up, and the stiffness dissolved from his face and left it weak; his eyes glinted in the firelight. Burnett said: "It'll be dark in half an hour so I might as well camp here." He unloaded the packs and covered them with the canvas and let the animals drift. He dragged his bedroll to the fire and crawled into it and lighted his pipe.

"What's your age, Alpheus?"

"Fifty-three." Stricklin sat up and filled his cup from the bucket; he curled both hands around the cup and sucked at the beef water. "If I'd known it was like this, I'd never come West. It's too late for men old as me. I had a good farm in Missouri."

"You'll feel different—couple nights' sleep and a few good meals."

"I'll put ten years' sweat into a new farm, but it won't please me no more than the last. It's not the constitution of a man to be happy with what he's got...This stuff ain't cramping me as much. I think I'll sleep." He fell back and pulled the tent over him.

Burnett left his bedroll and squatted beside Stricklin. He straightened the folds of the tent beneath the man, and wrapped the upper part over him. He laid a hand momentarily on Stricklin's shoulder. "You were at the forks of the creek for a couple of minutes," he said, and returned to his bedroll. He was hungry, but he had a short stock of food which had to last him until he got to Oregon City or Fort Vancouver and so he lighted another pipe, stored his boots in the bedroll and fed the fire.

Stricklin said: "Been married?"

"No."

"How about that Edna girl?"

Burnett made no answer. Presently Stricklin said: "What'd you do back East?"

"A little clerkin', a little farming. I was in the Rockies trapping a couple years. Soldiered in the dragoons."

"If you'd not come back I'd been dead by morning."

"You're not that sick."

"Sick is one thing. This is another. It's like hanging to a rope forty feet off ground. Pretty soon you can't hold on and you don't give a damn anyhow."

Burnett settled into his bedroll and scrubbed hip and shoulder along the ground to make comfortable trenches for them. Night moved in full of sound; the little river roared over its stones, the racing clouds broke above camp and rain rattled like buckshot and blackness closed on him as the jaws of a vise. It was aloneness which had broken through Stricklin's last wall. Nature, hating the solitary thing—for the solitary thing has no function—had placed in man a sense of incompleteness which made him drift toward others; denied this closeness, he shrank and died. Not that she cared; for man was a vessel she created by the millions, and it didn't matter how many of these claypots were cracked along the way so long as a few survived to transmit the liquid she had poured into them; it was the liquid that mattered to her, not the pot. Man's dream of dignity was his own creation, not hers, and his suffering came of trying to make the dream real against the indifference of earth and sky to his individual fate.