Free The Hour of Lead by Bruce Holbert

in this country, and over the season he would glimpse Wendy pruning them off and on, or nursing them with water buckets until midsummer, when they were a thicket of color. Both were red, the color of blood, he knew, but the color of love, too, Mrs. Jefferson had declared in her poetry talks.
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    H E SAW IN PASSING A LFRED , too, who recognized the new grave and paused with his animals to offer prayers. Miller, he met briefly on the town road, navigating a clanking Ford toward his shop, the Indian in the passenger seat beside. Each waved in the ocher dust the machine raised. Two weeks later, he encountered the men again, this time on horseback, and he assumed better humored. Matt had thought talk of him might have halted after word traveled that his mission was finished and a failure; however, the citizens in Peach and Plum and other nearby towns had not forgotten him. According to Miller, he remained news, though the balded preacher, who spoke only when necessary in light of his waylaid jaw, was now the subject of the tale. The preacher had tried to press the law for an arrest, but his public saw the charges as pathetic, seeing he had brandished the gun, and the authorities could discover no one impartial to witness, though they had not spent much time on the inquiry, Miller reported.
    Autumn, girls at school were old enough to fill their dresses past skin and stuffing. Some girls flirted with him, mostly the ugly ones, with bad teeth or fathers poor enough to hope to draw easy land. Wendy he no longer spoke to, and soon he stopped attending altogether. At the farm, he cleared a brushy quarter, fresnoed thebowled edges and rodweeded and harrowed the ground for spring and seed.
    He worked if there was light and sometimes beyond by lantern in the barn, when the equipment required attention. The dog remained his shadow out of doors, but in the barn or the house, he mirrored Matt’s restlessness. The dog would not eat indoors, rather preferring even to spoil a piece of meat and its gravy in the rain. He refused Matt’s bed and instead made a nest near the stove from the old blankets Matt’s mother deposited for him. In the barn, when a nut would frustrate Matt and he belted it with the wrench handle, the dog would race to the door to be put out or belly into the hay and remain there until Matt departed.
    Winter, once he had sharpened the blades and replaced failing parts and organized his tools, little was left to occupy Matt’s time. His mother had improved mightily after interring his father and at meals attempted conversation, but when he tried to listen, his mind would leave his head and the room, though where it went, he was unsure.
    He read some of his father’s books and the few magazines his mother had saved in a box and taught the dog to fetch sticks, though he learned so quickly Matt figured it had been in him all along. He had less luck with teaching him shake or roll over, and as the dog rarely made any sound, he didn’t attempt to make him speak as Wendy had. They walked hours each day despite the lengthening freezes, and his thoughts traveled in wide loops that encircled all he’d witnessed or forgotten or remembered or dreamt and bent them into smoky spirals without order and so thinned they broke apart before him. He did not attempt to make sense of them with thoughts or words; they were not of that nature, though if they were, and if he could add them like numbers in a book, he knew the sum would be different each time until the idea of addition and numbers turned ash.
    On one of these excursions, he encountered Alfred again. His congregation was down to two spaniels, and neither he nor the dogs looked like they had eaten in a good while.
    Alfred gazed at him. “Coyote names the thickets in creek bottoms Woods of Her Private Hairs because water is desirable, but to retrieve it without tearing yourself on the brambles, well, it is beyond Coyote.”
    Matt nodded as if he