Joe Henry - Lime Creek

Lime Creek is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Joe Henry

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work were originally published, in somewhat different form, in New Letters.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Henry, Joe.
Lime Creek: fiction / Joe Henry.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60503-4
1. Fathers and sonsFiction. 2. BrothersFiction. 3. Ranch lifeWyomingFiction. I. Title.
PS 3608 .E 573 L 56 2011
813.6dc22 2010026779

www.atrandom.com

Title page and part-title images iStockphoto.com/ Stefan Ekernas

Jack photograph: American Broadcasting Company

v3.1

for
Roscoe Lee Browneand
Anthony Zerbe

it is not the statistics that tells the story.
It is what went on in your heart.

Mark Harris, The Southpaw

She came on the train with her folks, Spencer says. For the waters. For the mineral hot springs in that part of the state. Her daddy suffered from the lumbago and in those days it was thought to be a cure. And too, the journey would be another facet of her education before she went back to one of those eastern girls colleges. She was nineteen years old. Course I was young too, twenty, and fixing to go back to school myself. Which was my book learning, but I still knew the horses better than anything else.

And that summer I was breaking and starting the roughstock on a great big spread at the foot of the Wind Rivers while my own folks were still busy with their hay back home, which was maybe sixty or seventy miles to the north. And you know I druther be bucking broncs than haybales any day that the sun comes up. I been able to talk sense to animals, especially the horses, since I was a boy. And in the early evenings when her folksd retire before dinner, Elizabethd come out by herself and watch me working the unbroke creatures in the big corral.

The red disk of the sun is setting directly in my eyes whenever I look up from this lovely two-year-old bay colt that Im working. And every so often hell snort and tense and prepare to throw me away from him, with my left hand smoothing down his neck and my right arm resting over his withers. I keep talking to him rubbing softly up and down the bridge of his nose and he snorts again but still doesnt jump away because by then he already knows that he likes the sound of my voice.

And who knows how long I stand there like that, with my hands on him and speaking softly and all the while watching his eye and his ears. Which go from wanting to lie back and get away from me to coming forward again so he can hear what Ive got to say. His brow lifts up real nervous-like and he snorts again with his eye big and showing all its white, and then for whatever reason he glances at me one more time and looks away like hes finally figured out that Im not gonna be a danger to him and so maybe he can ease down enough inside his fear to allow how good my touch feels too.

Its full-on dusk and Im still talking to him, rubbing the corners of his mouth as I position myself where he can look into my eyes whenever he wants to. But by now I can see that hes decided that he can trust me. I always carry this length of braided rawhide that my granddadd given me when I was a boy, and I take it out and let him smell it and taste it too as I slowly move it past his teeth. And then I make one turn with it around the back of his lower jaw, Indian-fashion.

I rub his back down from his shoulder, talking all the while and leaning against the barrel of his body with more and more pressure until hes actually supporting my full weight. He walks ahead a few steps with some concern, because by now Im pretty much hanging off him with my arms across his back. He stops and I leave my right arm over him holding both sides of the rawhide rein snubbed up in my left hand, and without altering the calm reassurance of what Ive been telling him I slide up and onto his back.

He locks his knees and starts to hump up his spine and his ears begin to come back and then go forward again. He snorts and kind of bounces once or twice stiff-legged like that and then just relaxes and walks me over to the fence. Where Elizabeth is perched up on the top railing watching us with this funny expression on her face. Not hard but not smiling either. In a green sweater. Ill never forget that green a green coat-sweater. Isnt that foolish after all these years?

Back across the dark, the clashing of the iron triangle calls everyone to come and eat, the hands at one long table and the foreman and his family and the guests of the ranch at another. Elizabeth walks a pace or two ahead of me as I come up behind her coiling my piece of rawhide. She turns when I get alongside and says, They always seem to trust you, dont they? And I say, Mam? And she says, The horses. They trust you because you dont try to trick them, do you?

Its too dark to see her eyes and I say, Nom, I just put myself in their place until we both seem to understand what the others thinking. Well I think theyre lucky, she says. And I say, Mam? And she says, The horses. I just think theyre lucky. And as we approach the wide veranda I mumble mostly to myself I guess, Well I reckon I probably am too.

We dont really get to talk again for their stay is at an end the following morning and theyre bound back east. And in a few days Im headed home myself and then back to school too. In Cambridge. In Massachusetts of all places. And as they say, the die seems tove already been cast without me understanding or even being aware of the wheels thatd been set in motion a long time before I looked up like that squinting into the setting sun and probably smelling not unlike the dust and rank horsehide of my then present occupation. For Ill soon be taking my own train ride. In the same direction too. And I remember my father and me leaving a little after three in the morning for Cheyenne, where the railheads at.

My last night home, my ma comes in while Im still packing and sits on my bed watching me choosing from the stack of clean clothes shes brought thatre all folded perfectly like a pile of books, but soft and warm from her ironing. And without looking up, as Im arranging everything in my case the way I want it, I say, You know I met a very lovely girl down at the Y-Cross Ranch. And I think Im gonna marry her.

And when the words come out in the open like that so they cant be taken back, with my ma setting on the corner of my bed for a witness, it shocked me even more than her. And scared me too I have to say, because I hadnt had the time or maybe just the courage to dwell on it. But to tell the truth, when I heard those words myself spoken right out loud, it was as if I was just repeating what had already been signed and sealed and delivered even though I hadnt stopped to wonder if Elizabeth had gotten the same message too. Like as if it was already a settled and complete thing although it hadnt hardly even begun yet. Ma, I says, I met this beautiful girl and Im gonna marry her.