The Jump-Off Creek by Molly Gloss Page A

maybe Angell hadn’t wanted to log on the steep grade. She went up under the trees and squatted and then came down to the creek and washed in that cold water without soap or towel, no telling where those were in the heap of goods in the shack. She shook out her cold wet hands, blinked wet eyelashes. She made the best of the unstill water as a looking glass and with stiff fingers worked through the tangle of her hair, retrieving and rearranging the few hairpins she could find, shaping a small, unruly knot. She would have been satisfied with simple tidiness, but in a while gave up ever reaching it and went back through the brush fence to the animals.
    In the bare daylight, in the mud, she let down the goats, catching up a little in a chipped white coffee cup and drinking it down while standing there beside the goats, with her fingers lapped
around the cup and her face held close over the little warmth of it.
    Across the rim of the cup she looked at Angell’s place. Another ridge rose up along the south, steep and high as the one behind the house. The Jump-Off Creek ran between them, along the flattish bottomland where Angell had cut his crossties. It was a narrow clearing, a hundred yards wide at most, running up and down the banks of the creek, maybe twenty acres altogether of weeds and grass and thin saplings and brush growing among the stumps. Where the brush pen was, and in front of the house, nothing grew, it was all mud and rocks and deep tracks of men’s boots, horses’ shod feet. There were slick muddy trails at the near edge of the creek, too, where they’d come for the water.
    Lydia stood and stared at all of it for quite a while. She had spent some of the night sleepless on the bare bunk, folded up in her mother’s Windmill quilt, fitting her bony hip and shoulder into a gap where two logs joined. And in the darkness, lying a long time awake, listening to the dripping roof and the rats chewing the garbage in the yard, she had begun finally, stubbornly, to tally the work. It was an old solace. Her mother hadn’t ever liked to have her list them like that, all the things needing doing ranked from worst to least, first to last.
You’ll make the heart go right out of you.
But Lydia always had liked to see the whole shape to her work. When there was time for it, and paper, she would write the jobs down and afterward mark a line through every one as it was finished. In the blackness last night, inside the cold stinking house, she’d made the list against her closed eyes, inside her head, going over it slowly and over it, getting the order right. Now in the gray daylight, standing looking at the mud and the high wet weeds, looking at the whole shape, all the things needing doing, she felt her heart tighten up like a fist.
    She cut brush all day, grubbing out thickets by the roots with a blunt mattock, leaving the tall skinny saplings and the bracken ferns for the goats. The weather stayed damp and cold, the sky
coming down low so there was no seeing how high the ridges stood. But the rain held off and she got warm enough, working. For a while she wore Lars’s big gray coat but as soon as she’d worked up a sweat it came off and she was able to get by with just the green sweater buttoned all the way up over the navy waist she’d worn for traveling.
    Every little while she stood and filed an edge onto the mattock and then piled up the brush on a tarp and dragged it behind her across the rough ground to the house. She laid out the new fence starting at the back corner of the house and going up under the trees on the steep slope where the ground was not worn slick, tramped to mud. The hill was duffy with moss and old brown needles, and the trees would maybe keep off the rain.
    When the brush was laid in place, she dug a ditch along it for the dead-hedge, using the mattock and a spade, and pushing down the soil around the roots with the mattock and the heel of her boot. The ground