Free West of Here by Jonathan Evison Page B

cried out, her eyes as big as saucers.
    “What is it?”
    Eva clutched her belly and cried out again.
    “Good Lord,” said Jacob, searching madly about the foyer for he knew not what.
----
    WEARY OF VENISON , Ethan was squatting by the fire at dusk in the shadow of his roofless cabin, frying a sockeye in a skillet, when he was startled by a voice.
    “Hello again.”
    Ethan spun around to discover Indian George standing three feet behind him on the bluff. The old Indian looked clownish in his ill-fitting white man clothes. He wore a high-buttoned waist coat, ten years out of fashion, and a shapeless felt hat atop his head. There was a dirty yellow bandanna tied loosely about his neck.
    “Sorry,” said George.
    “Lordy,” sighed Ethan. “You startled me. I didn’t hear you coming.”
    “I tried to whistle,” said George, who attempted once more without success. “The air won’t sing for me.”
    “How did you find me?”
    “A white man is not so hard to track.”
    Ethan finessed the skillet with his good hand. “Well, you’re just in time for dinner.”
    George could not bring himself to look at the salmon; the thought of it made him queasy. “I ate already, thank you.” He squatted by the fire, but when he was confronted by the pungent odor of the fish rising from the skillet, he sidled back a few feet. “Your thumb is no good,” he observed.
    “Crushed it,” said Ethan.
    “Ah.” The old Indian surveyed the little valley in the waning light. Beyond the foothills, the peaks of the divide were socked in by dark cloud cover. More heavy snow was imminent. George had visited this very spot as recently as high summer, when the evening hours were filled with the ghostly trilling of marmots and the tin whistle of thrushes from across the canyon.
    “What brings you up here, George?”
    “Postmaster sent word. It’s your woman. Her time has come.”
    Ethan dropped the skillet and practically leapt to his feet.
    “Sit,” said George. “We’re out of day. We’ll have to wait for morning.”
    “But we can’t wait! I have to be there!”
    George broke into a craggy smile. “Not really, you don’t.”
    Thus began the longest night of Ethan Thornburgh’s life. Oblivious of Ethan’s hand-wringing preoccupation, or perhaps because of it, George talked incessantly throughout the ordeal. Ethan had never heard an Indian talk at such length. His voice flowed as constant and steady as the Elwha. He sung the praises of sourdough bread endlessly, complained about the preponderance of salmon glutting the Elwha, wondered aloud as to the origins of the
first
sourdough bread, inquired as to whether Ethan happened to know where he might acquire some different
varieties
of sourdough bread, and just when it seemed he’d exhausted the subject altogether, Indian George pulled a half loaf of sourdough from his coat pocket and commenced eating it pinch by pinch. But even the tough, impossibly dry bread could not slow the river of his voice.
    And all the while, as George’s voice sounded in the night, punctuated intermittently by the popping of the fire, Ethan’s thoughts raced and bounded in his head. He shifted restlessly on his haunches. Morning seemed so remote that it would never arrive. He ached to be in town with Eva. His only comfort was the knowledge that all the parts of his new life were fitting perfectly into place, engaging harmoniously as though by some process of mechanization: Eva, Ethan Jr., all the blessings that were due to him as a man. In those moments when his mind took firm hold of this idea, he sunk into a sort of reverie. And it was during one of these reveries that Ethan was struckas though by lightning with the single greatest idea of his life, the one idea among all those scribbled notes and tossed off scratchings that would prove the key to unlocking his future. What serendipity, what power of fate was this at work, that he had only to stumble upon his destiny, had only to wade through a swamp