“And that got to be my way. Night after night. Every little thing. She never woke.
“Well, I came home one day, and I’d been working at the candle factory, which was an easy job to acquire when a feller had no other. Mostly old gals working there, but they’d take anybody on. When I got to the house, my sister-in-law Alice Haley was sitting in the yard on a wet winter’s day, sitting on the greasy grass. Just plunked there. Bawling like a baby.
“‘What is it, Alice?’
“‘My husband’s took a stick to our little daughter Susan! My husband’s took a stick to her! A stick!’
“‘Good God, is she hurt,’ I said, ‘or is it just her feelings?’
“‘Hurt? Hurt?’ she cries at me—‘My little girl is dead!’
“I didn’t even go into the house. Left whatever-all I owned and walked to the railway and got on a flatcar, and I’ve never been a hundred yards from these train tracks ever since. Been all over this country. Canada, too. Never a hundred yards from these rails and ties.
“Little young Susan had a child in her, is what her mother told me. And her father beat on her to drive that poor child out of her belly. Beat on her till he’d killed her.”
For a few minutes the dying man stopped talking. He grabbed at breaths, put his hands to the ground either side of him and seemed to want to shift his posture, but had no strength. He couldn’t seem to get a decent breath in his lungs, panting and wheezing. “I’ll take that drink of water now.” He closed his eyes and ceased struggling for air. When Robert got near, certain the man had died, William Haley spoke without opening his eyes: “Just bring it to me in that old shoe.”
4
The boy never told anyone about William Coswell Haley. Not the sheriff, or his cousin Suzanne, or anyone else. He brought the man one swallow of water in the man’s own boot, and left William Haley to die alone. It was the most cowardly and selfish of the many omissions that might have been counted against him in his early years. But maybe the incident affected him in a way nobody could have traced, because Robert Grainier settled in and worked through the rest of his youth as one of the labor pool around town, hiring out to the railroad or to the entrepreneurial families of the area, the Eatons, the Frys, or the Bonners, finding work on the crews pretty well whenever he needed, because he stayed away from drink or anything unseemly and was known as a steady man.
He worked around town right through his twenties — a man of whom it might have been said, but nothing was ever said of him, that he had little to interest him. At thirty-one he still chopped firewood, loaded trucks, served among various gangs formed up by more enterprising men for brief jobs here and there.
Then he met Gladys Olding. One of his cousins, later he couldn’t remember which one to thank, took him to church with the Methodists, and there she was, a small girl just across the aisle from him, who sang softly during the hymns in a voice he picked out without any trouble. A session of lemonade and pastries followed the service, and there in the courtyard she introduced herself to him casually, with an easy smile, as if girls did things like that every day, and maybe they did — Robert Grainier didn’t know, as Robert Grainier stayed away from girls. Gladys looked much older than her years, having grown up, she explained to him, in a house in a sunny pasture, and having spent too much time in the summer light. Her hands were as rough as any fifty-year-old man’s.
They saw each other frequently, Grainier forced, by the nature of their friendship, to seek her out almost always at the Methodist Sunday services and at the Wednesday night prayer group. When the summer was full-on, Grainier took her by the River Road to show her the acre he’d acquired on the short bluff above the Moyea. He’d bought it from young Glenwood Fry, who had wanted an automobile and who eventually got one by selling many small parcels of land to other young people. He told her he’d try some gardening here. The nicest place for a cabin lay just down a path from a sparsely overgrown knoll he could easily level by moving around the stones it was composed of. He could clear a bigger area cutting logs for a cabin, and pulling at stumps wouldn’t be urgent, as he’d just garden among them, to start. A half-mile path through a thick woods led into a meadow cleared some years back by Willis Grossling, now deceased. Grossling’s daughter had said Grainier could graze a few animals there as long as he didn’t run a real herd over the place. Anyway he didn’t want more than a couple sheep and a couple goats. Maybe a milk cow. Grainier explained all this to Gladys without explaining why he was explaining. He hoped she guessed. He thought she must, because for this outing she’d put on the same dress she usually wore to church.
This was on a hot June day. They’d borrowed a wagon from Gladys’s father and brought a picnic in two baskets. They hiked over to Grossling’s meadow and waded into it through daisies up to their knees. They put out a blanket beside a seasonal creek trickling over the grass and lay back together. Grainier considered the pasture a beautiful place. Somebody should paint it, he said to Gladys. The buttercups nodded in the breeze and the petals of the daisies trembled. Yet farther off, across the field, they seemed stationary.
Gladys said, “Right now I could just about understand everything there is.” Grainier knew how seriously she took her church and her Bible, and he thought she might be talking about something in that realm of things.
“Well, you see what I like,” he said.
“Yes, I do,” she said.
“And I see what I like very, very well,” he said, and kissed her lips.
“Ow,” she said. “You got my mouth flat against my teeth.”
“Are you sorry?”
“No. Do it again. But easy does it.”
The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in — as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream. They spent the whole afternoon among the daisies kissing. He felt glorious and full of more blood than he was supposed to have in him.
When the sun got too hot, they moved under a lone jack pine in the pasture of jeremy grass, he with his back against the bark and she with her cheek on his shoulder. The white daisies dabbed the field so profusely that it seemed to foam. He wanted to ask for her hand now. He was afraid to ask. She must want him to ask, or surely she wouldn’t lie here with him, breathing against his arm, his face against her hair — her hair faintly fragrant of sweat and soap … “Would you care to be my wife, Gladys?” he astonished himself by saying.
“Yes, Bob, I believe I would like it,” she said, and she seemed to hold her breath a minute; then he sighed, and both laughed.
When, in the summer of 1920, he came back from the Robinson Gorge job with four hundred dollars in his pocket, riding in a passenger car as far as Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and then in a wagon up the Panhandle, a fire was consuming the Moyea Valley. He rode through a steadily thickening haze of wood smoke into Bonners Ferry and found the little town crowded with residents from along the Moyea River who no longer had any homes.