Chapter 7: The Dead Show

We ate where we were standing, and while we ate we laid everything out on the flat rock and counted it.

Dolores had her father’s rifle, an old .30-30 with the front sight bent over to the left the way a thumb bends when somebody has hit it with a hammer, and a lever that would not throw a fired case unless you hit it with the heel of your hand. I had the single-barrel shotgun, one shell in the chamber and four in my jacket pocket. Tank had the machete out of the truck.

Chestnut would not go up. She had run the scent as far as the wet rocks under the falls in the dark and lost it there, and she was not going to pick it up again, and Dolores knew it before either of us said anything out loud.

“There’s a rule about the second spring,” Tank said.

“There is,” Dolores said, and she put the rifle up on her shoulder and started climbing the rocks at the end of the flat.

I should have asked her what the rule was.

We went up all day. The canyon climbed in shelves and the timber got older with it, and the water fell away below us until we only heard it when the wind turned. Prospect holes opened in the rock on the west side, and three of them went back far enough that a man could lie down in one out of the sun and not get up again.

The second spring came out from under a shelf of gray rock about a mile up, where the water ran off the shelf in a sheet and went away down a channel it had cut in the stone.

She stood and looked at the water a while.

“My father said the dark,” she said. “It’s light.”

Then she stepped across the channel and went on, and we went up after her.

It was past four when Chestnut stopped.

She was fifty yards out ahead of us, and she stopped and put her nose up and barked into a stand of young spruce, and she barked the way a dog barks at a person.

“Nate,” Dolores said. “Get up a tree.”

“What?” I said.

“Get up a tree. Go.”

“Hollis,” Tank said, “she’s run this canyon since she was—” and then the spruce came apart, and I quit listening to Tank.

Tank could not climb. He had never climbed anything in his life. He could not get over a fence without a bucket to stand on, and here he was with his arms around the trunk of a big pine, his boots working at the bark, going down about as much as he was going up. Dolores got her shoulder under his boot and I got both hands into his belt from behind, and we put him up to the first fork, where he lay on his face with his arms and both legs around the limb.

The bear came out of the spruce on four legs and then stood up.

It was black and heavy and wet to the chest from the creek, and it stood up the way a man stands up.

Dolores was still on the ground with the rifle up.

“Shoot it,” Tank said, from the fork of the pine, in a voice I had never heard him use on anything.

She shot it in the belly from about twelve feet.

The bullet opened it and the gut came out and hung, and the bear sat back on its haunches like a dog and pushed the gut back in with a front paw, the way a man pushes his shirttail back into his pants.

The old men in the valley had a saying about that animal. A bear will leave you alone. A bear that is bleeding will not. I had heard it all my life and never once had a use for it.

Then it came for her.

She worked the lever. The case stayed in the chamber. She hit the lever with the heel of her hand, and the case stayed in the chamber.

I put the shotgun into the side of its head at eight feet. The pattern took the eye out of the socket and left it hanging on the cheekbone.

It turned.

Before it got its weight around, Chestnut had a mouthful of its hind leg. The bear swung on that leg, and the dog let go and went back ten feet and stood there with her teeth showing, and that was ten or twelve seconds, and it was all we were going to get. Dolores went up a cottonwood and I went up the one beside it.

I don’t know how I got up. I know I had the shotgun in one hand and the bark in the other and my knees did the rest. The bear came to the bottom of my tree and put its shoulder into it and moved the whole trunk a foot and a half with me in it, and the pine cones came down out of it like hail.

We buckled our belts around the trunks and through them and sat.

By dark it had stopped pushing. It went down on its belly under my tree with its hind feet out and its chin on the ground, and the flies came to it, and it lay there and watched me with the one eye it had left.

“Tank,” I said.

“What.”

“I don’t believe it’s going anywhere.”

“I know it isn’t going anywhere. I’ve been watching it not go anywhere since five o’clock.”

The light went off the west wall and the canyon went cold, and we sat in the dark and listened to the bear breathe. We had been up all night on the grade and all day in the trees. Tank had one arm through the limb and the other one free, and he used the free one to throw pine cones at the bear, which he did for a while and then quit.

“Hey. Hollis.”

“Hey what.”

“You know what I’ve got in my pocket?”

“I don’t.”

“Two dollars and a pocketknife.” He said it like a man settling an account. “If I go off this limb tonight, you tell my mother I had two dollars.”

“Tell her yourself.”

“I would, but you’re the one that’s going to die first. You’re in the worse tree.”

He was right. I was lower. The branch I was sitting on was green and had a crack in it that you could see even in the dark if you had your hand on it, and I worked the arithmetic on that branch for a while and it did not come out.

“Hollis,” Tank said. “You’re doing the thing with your face.”

“Tank,” I said, “I think I’m going on ahead.”

“Going on ahead.”

“On ahead of you,” I said. “It looks like this is where I get off. I’m sorry about it. I’ll walk down the road and get us a table while they’re still setting up, and I’ll hold you a chair, and if either of you has anything you want carried over, say it now in your own words and I’ll carry it exactly as you gave it to me.”

For a while nothing was said, and the water ran, and Dolores breathed.

“All right,” Tank said. “Then go on, and don’t make a speech out of it. There’s plenty of this valley without you standing in it, and it’s been quieter since you stopped talking. Save me the chair. And I hear they feed you beef and potatoes over there, three times a day, so pace yourself, because I want that seat back.”

“Beef and potatoes is fine,” I said. “I’ve never turned anything down yet.”

“You turned down okra.”

And then I sang him the one about the river and the far shore, because I could not think of anything else big enough, and I got through the first verse and the chorus and lost the second verse, and Tank finished it for me from his tree, loud and off key, both of us hanging in the dark over the Nine Springs singing at the top of our lungs at a bear.

Dolores started crying somewhere in the middle of it. She cried with her hand over her mouth so we would not hear it, and then she gave that up and took her hand down.

“You two,” she said. “It’s the middle of the night and you’re picking out coffins. Do something. Do anything. There’s a girl up this canyon.”

Neither of us had anything to say to that.

The bear stayed under me. It bled and it stayed. Chestnut had worked her way back to within thirty yards of the tree and lay down in the timber with her head on her paws, and she would not come closer and she would not leave either, and after a while Dolores put two fingers in her mouth and whistled her off down the canyon, and the dog got up and looked back twice and went.

I don’t remember deciding to sleep. I remember Dolores telling me twice to keep my belt on, and I remember the second time, and then I remember waking up with my chin on my chest and no feeling in either hand.

The moon was up. The tree was quiet.

I lay there a while and listened.

“Tank.”

Nothing.

“Dolores. Hey. Dolores.”

I said it four or five times. The canyon took it and gave it back to me off the rock, and nothing else in it made a sound. The branches were thick where the two of them had gone up, and I could not see either tree from where I was, and no dog in the timber.

I got my belt off and came down the trunk a foot at a time with the shotgun in the crook of my arm, and at the bottom I stood still for a long count and put my hand down in the dirt under the tree where the bear had been lying, and the dirt was cold, and the bear was gone.

The dirt had blood in it, a good deal of it, and there was a track through the leaves going off into the spruce, and whatever was at the end of that track was in the spruce, and I did not go in after it. No dog on the trail either. No Dolores.

I want to put down the order of what happened next and I can’t do it honestly, because I know what the next thing was and there was a while where I did not know it. What I had was a light.

It was up the canyon, past the second spring, and it was not one light. It was a place with lights on it, sitting with its lights on the way a house sits when somebody in it is still awake. Down the canyon the water was loud and getting louder, and I had been awake since the night before and had eaten nothing since bread.

I went up, and while I went up I had a man in my head who lived at the end of it. He had a white mustache and a fire in a stove and he was not going to ask me anything until I had eaten. I had him all the way to the coffee. I have thought about that man since, more than I have thought about the bear.

It took me an hour, maybe two. I came up through the timber onto a level shelf cut into the rock, and above it rails came out of the hill on a narrow gauge with the ties still under them, and over the rails was a face of rock with a doorway cut in it and framed square with old timber the color of rope, and thirty feet inside the doorway a lamp was burning on a ledge. It had a good flame and a clean chimney.

It was a mine. It had been worked and let go. I have heard this told since as a city under that mountain, with towers in it. There were no towers.

I stood at the mouth of it and said hey. My voice went in and came back to me off the roof, and nobody answered, and the lamp kept on burning.

I put a shell in the shotgun and went in.

The drift ran straight for a hundred feet with the rock closing over it and old square sets holding it up. Black from years of somebody’s smoke lay on the roof timber, and the smell was cold rock and burnt oil and water that has been sitting in the dark a long time. Farther in, where the drift turned, there was music. Not loud, and not close. A radio in the next room with the door most of the way shut.

Where the drift turned, the rock opened up. I came out into the place where they had turned the cars, high enough that a man could not touch the roof with a pole. Lamps stood in the ledges of the rock, twenty or thirty of them, all of them lit. The floor had been swept. I noticed that before I noticed anything else, because everything above ground was August and dust, and the broom marks were still in the dirt.

A long table ran along the near side with a white cloth on it that had been ironed. On the cloth were plates and cups with no saucers, a red glass tray of dried apples, and a whole cake under a clean cloth. Three chairs stood along the near side of it, turned to face the back of the place, and the middle one was empty. Somebody had set three places and put out two napkins.

Farther back they had built a stage up off the floor on planks, a foot high, with a front to it, and a curtain hung on a wire across the front of it, closed, and the lamps along the edge of the stage were turned up.

The band sat in front of the stage on both sides. I counted eleven of them and then I counted again and got twelve. They had fiddles and a cornet and a drum and a clarinet, and they sat with their heads over their instruments and none of them was talking, and the music I had heard coming in the dark was the music they were playing. I could not have told you whether they were men.

Then the women came out from behind the stage. Five or six of them, young, walking together along the far wall with their heads together, and it was August and they were in fur, coats down past the knee with the collars up, cut in a style that nobody had worn in my lifetime. They talked low and easy among themselves and they stopped talking when they saw me, and every one of them was polite.

Then one of them moved aside and I saw who was with them.

She had on a blue work shirt buttoned to the collar and canvas pants and boots, and her hair was in two braids down her back, and she looked like a girl who had walked up the canyon that morning and was going to walk down it that afternoon.

“Nate,” Ruthie said.

I did not say anything for a second. I had her in front of me, and I had been looking for her since her father stood in our yard with his hat in his hands, and what I felt was not what I expected to feel.

“You have anything to eat?” I said.

“Come here,” she said, and she took my arm at the elbow and turned me toward the table. “I’m sorry. I went up past the second spring and I got turned around and I couldn’t find the way back down, and the ladies up here took me in and fed me. There’s a show. They’re going to play it, and then we’ll go home.”

“Tank’s up that canyon in a tree,” I said. “Dolores too. And the dog. Did they come past here? Did you see a light? Did you hear a dog?”

She looked at me a while and did not answer any of it.

“I didn’t see anybody,” she said.

“Ruthie. You went up this canyon before daylight yesterday morning.”

“I got turned around,” she said. “Sit down. There’s a chair for you. Eat something first, and then we’ll watch it, and then we’ll go home.”

“Your father came down to our yard last night. He stood in it with his hat in his hands.”

“He worries,” she said.

One of the women had a knife out and was cutting meat off a piece that looked like venison, and she put some of it on a plate and set the plate in front of the left-hand chair and stood back with her hands folded.

“Eat,” she said, in the voice the old women in the valley use.

I sat down, because the food was there and my legs had been carrying me all day and because Ruthie wanted me to, and I ate. I ate four pieces of the meat and half a piece of the cake and could not have told you afterward what any of it tasted like. Ruthie sat down in the right-hand chair and watched me do it. She cut a piece of the cake and set it on the edge of the cloth by my plate.

“Take that to your mother,” she said. “She’ll like it.”

Then the women at the back of the room moved, and I stood up, and Ruthie stood up with me, because two of them were helping an old woman out from behind the stage.

She was small and bent and she had white hair pinned up off her neck, and she was dressed for a wedding or a funeral in a black dress with jet beads, with a collar up to her chin and a brooch at the throat, and there were rings on her fingers. They brought her over with a hand under each of her arms and stood her at the middle chair. She looked at me and at Ruthie and nodded once, like a hostess greeting people who had come a long way, and I nodded back and Ruthie nodded back, and then they sat her down. She did not say anything. She folded her hands in her lap and turned her face toward the curtain and waited.

I stood there wanting to ask somebody what year they thought it was.

The card was on the table by my plate, where it had been the whole time and I had not seen it. It was printed on stiff card stock the color of old paper, the kind of thing they handed you at the door. THE PACE COMBINATION, it said, FOURTEEN PEOPLE AND A BAND. Under that, towns ran down the left side in a column, and a date was printed at the top, and the date was May 1907. The bill was for one night and for two pieces. Under the titles of the pieces somebody had checked the acts off in pencil — overture, act the first, act the second. The pencil stopped there, and the card had been laid down with the pencil beside it, and that was where I came in.

One of the young women raised her hand.

The band came in together, and the curtain went up on its wire, and behind the cloth somebody began to talk, and I reached out and put my hand around the cup.