Helmer, too, had a favor to ask of Grainier, once he’d taken the body off his hands. “If you’ll deliver a coffin over to the jail in Troy and pick up a load of lumber for me at the yard on Main, then take the lumber to Leona for me, I’ll pay you rates for both jobs separate. Two for the price of one. Or come to think of it,” he said, “one job for the price of two, that’s what it would be, ain’t it, sir?”
“I don’t mind,” Grainier told him.
“I’ll give you a nickel for every mile of it.”
“I’d have to stop at Pinkham’s and bargain a rate from them. I’d need twenty cents a mile before I saw a profit.”
“All right then. Ten cents and it’s done.”
“I’d need a bit more.”
“Six dollars entire.”
“I’ll need a pencil and a paper. I don’t know my numbers without a pencil and a paper.”
The little undertaker brought him what he needed, and together they decided that six and a half dollars was fair.
For the rest of the fall and even a ways into winter, Grainier leased the pair and wagon from the Pinkhams, boarding the mares with their owners, and kept himself busy as a freighter of sorts. Most of his jobs took him east and west along Highway 2, among the small communities there that had no close access to the railways.
Some of these errands took him down along the Kootenai River, and traveling beside it always brought into his mind the image of William Coswell Haley, the dying boomer. Rather than wearing away, Grainier’s regret at not having helped the man had grown much keener as the years had passed. Sometimes he thought also of the Chinese railroad hand he’d almost helped to kill. The thought paralyzed his heart. He was certain the man had taken his revenge by calling down a curse that had incinerated Kate and Gladys. He believed the punishment was too great.
But the hauling itself was better work than any he’d undertaken, a ticket to a kind of show, to an entertainment composed of the follies and endeavors of his neighbors. Grainier was having the time of his life. He contracted with the Pinkhams to buy the horses and wagon in installments for three hundred dollars.
By the time he’d made this decision, the region had seen more than a foot of snow, but he continued a couple more weeks in the freight business. It didn’t seem a particularly bad winter down below, but the higher country had frozen through, and one of Grainier’s last jobs was to get up the Yaak River Road to the saloon at the logging village of Sylvanite, in the hills above which a lone prospector had blown himself up in his shack while trying to thaw out frozen dynamite on his stove. The man lay out on the bartop, alive and talking, sipping free whiskey and praising his dog. His dog’s going for help had saved him. For half a day the animal had made such a nuisance of himself around the saloon that one of the patrons had finally noosed him and dragged him home and found his master extensively lacerated and raving from exposure in what remained of his shack.
Much that was astonishing was told of the dogs in the Panhandle and along the Kootenai River, tales of rescues, tricks, feats of supercanine intelligence and humanlike understanding. As his last job for that year, Grainier agreed to transport a man from Meadow Creek to Bonners who’d actually been shot by his own dog.
The dog-shot man was a bare acquaintance of Grainier’s, a surveyor for Spokane International who came and went in the area, name of Peterson, originally from Virginia. Peterson’s boss and comrades might have put him on the train into town the next morning if they’d waited, but they thought he might perish before then, so Grainier hauled him down the Moyea River Road wrapped in a blanket and half sitting up on a load of half a dozen sacks of wood chips bagged up just to make him comfortable.
“Are you feeling like you need anything?” Grainier said at the start.
Grainier thought Peterson had gone to sleep. Or worse. But in a minute the victim answered: “Nope. I’m perfect.”
A long thaw had come earlier in the month. The snow was melted out of the ruts. Bare earth showed off in the woods. But now, again, the weather was freezing, and Grainier hoped he wouldn’t end up bringing in a corpse dead of the cold.
For the first few miles he didn’t talk much to his passenger, because Peterson had a dented head and crazy eye, the result of some mishap in his youth, and he was hard to look at.
Grainier steeled himself to glance once in a while in the man’s direction, just to be sure he was alive. As the sun left the valley, Peterson’s crazy eye and then his entire face became invisible. If he died now, Grainier probably wouldn’t know it until they came into the light of the gas lamps either side of the doctor’s house. After they’d moved along for nearly an hour without conversation, listening only to the creaking of the wagon and the sound of the nearby river and the clop of the mares, it grew dark.
Grainier disliked the shadows, the spindly silhouettes of birch trees, and the clouds strung around the yellow half-moon. It all seemed designed to frighten the child in him. “Sir, are you dead?” he asked Peterson.
“Who? Me? Nope. Alive,” said Peterson.
“Well, I was wondering — do you feel as if you might go on?”
“You mean as if I might die?”
“Yessir,” Grainier said.
“Nope. Ain’t going to die tonight.”
“That’s good.”
“Even better for me, I’d say.”
Grainier now felt they’d chatted sufficiently that he might raise a matter of some curiosity to him. “Mrs. Stout, your boss’s wife, there. She said your dog shot you.”
“Well, she’s a very upright lady — to my way of knowing, anyways.”
“Yes, I have the same impression of her right around,” Grainier said, “and she said your dog shot you.”
Peterson was silent a minute. In a bit, he coughed and said, “Do you feel a little warm patch in the air? As if maybe last week’s warm weather turned around and might be coming back on us?”
“Not as such to me,” Grainier said. “Just holding the warm of the day the way it does before you get around this ridge.”
They continued along under the rising moon.
“Anyway,” Grainier said.
Peterson didn’t respond. Might not have heard.
“Did your dog really shoot you?”
“Yes, he did. My own dog shot me with my own gun. Ouch!” Peterson said, shifting himself gently. “Can you take your team a little more gradual over these ruts, mister?”
“I don’t mind,” Grainier said. “But you’ve got to get your medical attention, or anything could happen to you.”
“All right. Go at it like the Pony Express, then, if you want.”
“I don’t see how a dog shoots a gun.”
“Well, he did.”
“Did he use a rifle?”
“It weren’t a cannon. It weren’t a pistol. It were a rifle.”
“Well, that’s pretty mysterious, Mr. Peterson. How did that happen?”
“It was self-defense.”
Grainier waited. A full minute passed, but Peterson stayed silent.
“That just tears it then,” Grainier said, quite agitated. “I’m pulling this team up, and you can walk from here, if you want to beat around and around the bush. I’m taking you to town with a hole in you, and I ask a simple question about how your dog shot you, and you have to play like a bunkhouse lout who don’t know the answer.”
“All right!” Peterson laughed, then groaned with the pain it caused him. “My dog shot me in self-defense. I went to shoot him, at first, because of what Kootenai Bob the Indian said about him, and he slipped the rope. I had him tied for the business we were about to do.” Peterson coughed and went quiet a few seconds. “I ain’t stalling you now! I just got to get over the hurt a little bit.”