hitched the secondhand camper trailer to the pickup and packed
the tackle box and the cooler and hauled us west across Montana
to the smaller but closer Castle Mountains—where each day
since, the rain has come at us hard and slantways, where each
day we fish the creek and fail, try a fire and fail, where we huddle
now in the camper, play another hand of cards, which my sister
wins like always, where dinner is again cold canned chili topped
with cheese and onions.
Yet what a time it was. Like a slanting rain, I want to whisper
across the years: it was enough. There was a mountain. Fir and
cedar leaned in around us. Even for the rain I had a can of strawberry soda cooling in the creek. Astonishing, that we made it there
at all, that in the years to come we would make it back most every
summer. Mother, I don’t know how you did what you did. It would
have been easy to say, Enough. To say, I’m tired. To say, I tried. Most
everyone expected it, expected you to let whatever rain came soak
us and whatever wind blow us like dry weeds across creation.
But here you are, with a fire in your hands. You’d gone down
the road, in the rain, and found someone who’d been camped
there for weeks and had a load of good kindling. You must
have begged an armful— what force and fury, I think now, to
knock on their camper door and beg an armful of good, dry
wood — for when we peek out, we see you kneeling in the rain,
kneeling before the ring of black stones, a fire leaping up before
you, rising from your outstretched hands.
That fire burns hot and high, it burns all night. And the creek
in the next valley, we discover, runs deeper, colder. In the morning
we go out with jigs and hoppers and corn kernels and catch a mess
of brookies. Back at camp, you gut them and dust them with flour
and fry them with their heads on in a slick of bacon grease. The
pink flesh falls hotly o= the bones. We eat it and are filled.
Washed
My grandfather leans out the pickup window, says he’ll be having
co=ee at the Lazy JC. “And Ed,” he adds. “Try not to scare the boy.”
Ed sucks his teeth, eyes me up and down. “Shit, Jim, it ain’t
up to me if the boy gets scared or not.”
As my grandfather grins and drives away, Ed waves me
around the corner of the house. We weave through a sloping
dirt yard spotted with tough bunch grass and variously arranged
piles of bolts and rebar and blown tires and engine parts and
make our way up to a windowless, tin-roofed shed slumped near
the back fence. He yanks on the strap of hide stapled to the
door — the gray boards biting into the dust, the clanking knock
of steel chains and wood from somewhere inside—and even
for his age and bulk, Ed slips gracefully into the dark yawn of
shadow he’s opened between the shed door and the shed. After
a moment, I follow.
What light there is falls thinly from cracks and knots. Motes
of dust hover and spin in each wedge and shaft. The air feels
ancient, tastes of rot and spice. The floor, like the yard, is hardpan dirt, a few pale weeds twisting for the light. The ceiling is
just high enough for a man to straighten himself, and the clanking comes from the rows and rows of steel traps hung along
the walls: the slender curves of number ones like the wings of
