Grainier had known Claire Thompson when she’d been Claire Shook, some years behind him in classes in Bonners Ferry. She’d been a fine young lady whose looks hadn’t suffered at all from a little extra weight and her hair’s going gray. Claire had worked in Europe as a nurse during the Great War. She’d married quite late and been widowed within a few years. Now she’d sold her home and would rent a house in Sandpoint along the road running up and down the Idaho Panhandle.
The town of Noxon lay on the south side of the Clark Fork River and the widow’s house lay on the north, so they didn’t get a chance even to stop over at the store for a soda, but pulled up into Claire’s front yard and emptied the house and loaded as many of her worldly possessions onto the wagon as the horses would pull, mostly heavy locked trunks, tools, and kitchen gear, heaping the rest aboard the Model T and creating a pile as high up as a man could reach with a hoe, and at the pinnacle two mattresses and two children, also a little dog. By the time Grainier noticed them, the children were too far above him to distinguish their age or sexual type. The work went fast. At noon Claire gave them iced tea and sandwiches of venison and cheese, and they were on the road by one o’clock. The widow herself sat up front next to Eddie with her arm hooked in his, wearing a white scarf over her head and a black dress she must have bought nearly a year ago for mourning; laughing and conversing while her escort tried to steer by one hand. Grainier gave them a good start, but he caught up with them frequently at the top of the long rises, when the auto labored hard and boiled over, Eddie giving it water from gallon jugs which the children — boys, it seemed — filled from the river. The caravan moved slowly enough that the children’s pup was able to jump down from its perch atop the cargo to chase gophers and nose at their burrows, then clamber up the road bank to a high spot and jump down again between the children, who sat stiff-armed with their feet jutting out in front, hanging on to the tie-downs on either side of them.
At a neighbor’s a few hours along they stopped to take on one more item, a two-barreled shotgun Claire Thompson’s husband had given as collateral on a loan. Apparently Thompson had failed to pay up, but in honor of his death the neighbor’s wife had persuaded her husband to return the old.12 gauge. This Grainier learned after pulling the mares to the side of the road, where they could snatch at grass and guzzle from the neighbor’s spring box.
Though Grainier stood very near them, Eddie chose this moment to speak sincerely with the widow. She sat beside him in the auto shaking the gray dust from her head kerchief and wiping her face. “I mean to say,” Eddie said — but must have felt this wouldn’t do. He opened his door quite suddenly and scrambled out, as flustered as if the auto were sinking in a swamp, and raced around to the passenger’s side to stand by the widow.
“The late Mr. Thompson was a fine feller,” he told her. He spent a tense minute getting up steam, then went on: “The late Mr. Thompson was a fine feller. Yes.”
Claire said, “Yes?”
“Yes. Everybody who knew him tells me he was an excellent feller and also a most … excellent feller, you might say. So they say. As far as them who knew him.”
“Well, did you know him, Mr. Sauer?”
“Not to talk to. No. He did me a mean bit of business once … But he was a fine feller, I’m saying.”
“A mean bit of business, Mr. Sauer?”
“He runned over my goat’s picket and broke its neck with his wagon! He was a sonofabitch who’d sooner steal than work, wadn’t he? But I mean to say! Will you marry a feller?”
“Which feller do you mean?”
Eddie had trouble getting a reply lined up. Meanwhile, Claire opened her door and pushed him aside, climbing out. She turned her back and stood looking studiously at Grainier’s horses.
Eddie came over to Grainier and said to him, “Which feller does she think I mean? This feller! Me!”
Grainier could only shrug, laugh, shake his head.
Eddie stood three feet behind the widow and addressed the back of her: “The feller I mentioned! The one to marry! I’m the feller!”
She turned, took Eddie by the arm, and guided him back to the Ford. “I don’t believe you are,” she said. “Not the feller for me.” She didn’t seem upset anymore.
When they traveled on, she sat next to Grainier in his wagon. Grainier was made uncomfortable because he didn’t want to get too near the nose of a sensitive woman like Claire Shook, now Claire Thompson — his clothes stank. He wanted to apologize for it, but couldn’t quite. The widow was silent. He felt compelled to converse. “Well,” he said.
“Well what?”
“Well,” he said, “that’s Eddie for you.”
“That’s not Eddie for me,” she said.
“I suppose,” he said.
“In a civilized place, the widows don’t have much to say about who they marry. There’s too many running around without husbands. But here on the frontier, we’re at a premium. We can take who we want, though it’s not such a bargain. The trouble is you men are all worn down pretty early in life. Are you going to marry again?”
“No,” he said.
“No. You just don’t want to work any harder than you do now. Do you?”
“No, I do not.”
“Well then, you aren’t going to marry again, not ever.”
“I was married before,” he said, feeling almost required to defend himself, “and I’m more than satisfied with all of everything’s been left to me.” He did feel as if he was defending himself. But why should he have to? Why did this woman come at him waving her topic of marriage like a big stick? “If you’re prowling for a husband,” he said, “I can’t think of a bigger mistake to make than to get around me.”
“I’m in agreement with you,” she said. She didn’t seem particularly happy or sad to agree. “I wanted to see if your own impression of you matched up with mine is all, Robert.”
“Well, then.”
“God needs the hermit in the woods as much as He needs the man in the pulpit. Did you ever think about that?”
“I don’t believe I am a hermit,” Grainier replied, but when the day was over, he went off asking himself, Am I a hermit? Is this what a hermit is?
Eddie became pals with a Kootenai woman who wore her hair in a mop like a cinema vamp and painted her lips sloppy red. When Grainier first saw them together, he couldn’t guess how old she was, but she had brown, wrinkled skin. Somewhere she had come into possession of a pair of hexagonal eyeglasses tinted such a deep blue that behind them her eyes were invisible, and it was by no means certain she could see any objects except in the brightest glare. She must have been easy to get along with, because she never spoke. But whenever Eddie engaged in talk she muttered to herself continually, sighed and grunted, even whistled very softly and tunelessly. Grainier would have figured her for mad if she’d been white.
“She prob’ly don’t even speak English,” he said aloud, and realized that nobody else was present. He was all alone in his cabin in the woods, talking to himself, startled at his own voice. Even his dog was off wandering and hadn’t come back for the night. He stared at the firelight flickering from the gaps in the stove and at the enclosing shifting curtain of utter dark.
8
Even into his last years, when his arthritis and rheumatism sometimes made simple daily chores nearly impossible and two weeks of winter in the cabin would have killed him, Grainier still spent every summer and fall in his remote home.
By now it no longer disturbed him to understand that the valley wouldn’t slowly, eventually resume its condition from before the great fire. Though the signs of destruction were fading, it was a very different place now, with different plants and therefore with different animals. The gorgeous spruce had gone. Now came almost exclusively jack pine, which tended to grow up scraggly and mean. He’d been hearing the wolves less and less often, from farther and farther away. The coyotes grew numerous, the rabbits increasingly scarce. From long stretches of the Moyea River through the burn, the trout had gone.