Free Moontrap - Don Berry by Don Berry Page A

Mary's body and his own, side by side. This
morning he was back in a world of complexity he had not made. Seemed
as though just as soon as a man got to feeling loose, somebody had to
remind him of the way things really were.
    Mary was already up, moving about the fireplace.
Monday turned his head to watch her. With a long scoop she was
dipping up the feathery gray ashes and dumping them into the ash
hopper that stood at the side of the fireplace.
    Monday hoisted himself up to his elbows, blinking
with sleepiness, and rubbed the back of his neck. It was always hard
for him to wake when there were things he didn't want to do.
    Mary turned briefly to see him rise, then returned to
the slow, gentle pouring of the ashes. Monday watched the pale cloud
of gray that floated up as the stream ran into the hopper.
    " Makin' lye?"
    "In a week, maybe," Mary said. "We
have not much soap left. And I could use it to sweeten the sourdough,
if we got some flour."
    She could make a pie, if they got some flour. She
could make sourdough, if they got some flour.
    " I'm going to put the field in wheat," he
said. "We'll have plenty of flour in the winter."
    But even as he spoke he knew it wasn't certain. There
were only two mills in the country, one at the Methodist Mission
upstream and the other on the island at Oregon City. There was no
credit at either place, and the percentages were always too high.
Worse was the simple fact of being there. At the mission mill they
saved his soul for God, while they cut his purse strings, and at
Oregon City the mill was run by friends of Thurston, which was almost
as bad. He had come to dread both places and always found some excuse
to avoid them.
    He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and
reached for his boots. Before he could put the field in wheat he had
to have the wheat. Thank god for Swensen, he wouldn't have to plow.
The endless, wearisome, monotonous trudging back and forth behind the
animals, and them borrowed . . . A man wasn't made for work like
that, the same movement over and over again, endlessly using exactly
the same muscles. It made him ache at night.
    He would get the seed wheat from McLoughlin in Oregon
City. If McLoughlin didn't have it, he'd see that it came out of the
Hudson's Bay storehouse in Vancouver. There'd been a hell of a bunch
of people through here in the last ten years, and McLoughlin had seen
that none of them starved. Lost his job for it, too. And the
directors in London had charged his personal account sixty thousand
dollars for the things he'd given to the Americans to keep them alive
those first bad winters.
    What the hell was wrong? Seven years here, and he
still had to go on his knees begging for seed wheat. Short of seed,
short of soap, short of flour, short of clothes, even short of powder
and ball. In the mountains it had never seemed so complicated, just
to stay alive. He couldn't recall ever giving it much thought. And
now, already, the eternal damp was beginning to rot the foundations
of the cabin and the beams of the roof, and they would have to be
replaced before winter came again. He sighed, dragging on his
trousers. "Mary, sometimes I think I just wasn't cut out for
farming."
    Mary shrugged. "There is much to do," she
said.
    "Seems like I take two steps forward and fall
back three. I'm gettin' farther behind all the time."
    " Is bad luck, maybe."
    " A man can take just so long a run of the bad,"
Monday said. "Then he's got to have some good, or he goes
under."
    Mary finished scooping the floating ashes and wiped
her forehead with her wrist. Her husband's back was turned, as he
took the linsey-woolsey shirt from the peg on the wall above the bed.
Mary looked at him for a moment and turned back to the coffee pot.
"You will be here today?"
    "No," Monday said morosely. "I got to
go into Oregon City. See about the wheat."
    After a moment Mary said, "Is maybe better you
stay here a day."
    "Why?"
    "You are gone a long time. The meat is gone,
now."
    Monday closed his