The Nameless Method

Chapter 5: Oxbow

They came down out of the timber around the middle of the morning, the wagon heavy behind them and the horse down to the last of its patience, and the road flattened out and ran straight, and that was Oxbow.

One street. It ran east and west and the whole town sat on it — houses on both sides and the hills standing up close behind the houses, so the town lay down in the bottom of a trough where the sun came late and left early. Smoke went up off the chimneys and hung. At the west end, where the road came in, there was an inn, the Oxbow House, a long building with a porch across the front and a sign over the walk, and it was the only inn in the town. Any man on that road who did not care to sleep out in the open stopped there and paid what they asked.

The wagon went by it without slowing. A man stood at the porch rail with his thumbs in his belt and watched them come and watched them go past, and he said something to Bert that Hollis did not catch, and Bert said something back that Hollis did not catch either, and then the man called down the street after them, loud: "Going right on through the city, I see." He tipped his chin at the whole of it, one end to the other, and laughed, and Bert laughed too, and the wagon took them on.

At the far end of the street stood the Spring House, where the town itself ate, and it was old — Hollis could see that from the wagon, older than the town or older-looking, the paint gone the color of weak tea and the whole front of the place leaning a little to the east, the way a building learns to lean when it has stood in weather a long time and has quit arguing with it. The door stood propped open with a brick. Every window was up. The sound came out of them in one piece, like water out of a chute.

It was noon and the room was full. Hollis stood in the door at Bert's back and looked, and he had never in his life seen that many people eating in one place. Every table taken, and men standing along the far wall with their plates up in their hands, because the tables were gone. The near edge of every table was worn pale and smooth from years of forearms, the wood rubbed to a shine like a stair rail. The room smelled of boiled meat and wet wool and beer. A boy went between the tables with a tray held up at his shoulder and never once brushed a chair.

Money moved through the whole of it. Men reached inside their coats and set coins down on the boards and took their change and went on eating. Hollis counted the coins without meaning to. Plates went back through the boy's hands to the kitchen and did not come out again.

Bert came through the middle of it like a man in his own kitchen. Two men said his name as he came in. One of them said something about barrels and Bert said something back to him and kept moving, and the men at the tables turned to look at him and turned back to their plates, and the noise stayed loud on both sides of him.

Then a man at the near table put his spoon down.

"Bert. Whose boy's that you've got?"

Bert stopped. He turned around, and it showed on him that he was glad to be asked.

"Look at him," the man said. He pointed with the spoon. "That's your face on a smaller head. Your face and a summer out in the sun."

"It's the family face," Bert said.

"Uh-huh." The man set his elbows on the table and got comfortable. The men on either side of him put their forks down, and he took his time. "You been keeping him up in the hills so your wife won't see him?"

The room came down on that. It was loud, and they meant it, and it was all on Bert.

Hollis stood in the doorway and looked at a knot in the floor.

"My brother's boy," Bert said, and he said it to the room and not to the man. "Come down out of the hills to make something of himself." He put his hand flat on the top of Hollis's head and left it there. "While he's in this town he's mine, and I'll thank every man here to know it."

The room gave it back to him. Somebody at the far end sang the words out — my brother's boy — and two men lifted their cups, and the laugh turned around and came back Bert's way, and he stood in the middle of it and took that too. One man at the far end kept saying it after, my brother's boy, low, and then not so low.

Hollis looked at the knot in the floor until the hand came off his head.

Oxbow was the Order's town, and had been for a hundred years, and if a man stood in the middle of the street and looked both ways he still would not find much to argue about.

The Sevenfold Order had been in that country two hundred years, counting from the man they called the Founder. He came out of nowhere with a following and a book, and he built a thing that lasted exactly one lifetime, and the lifetime was his. When he died the Order came apart. It lost its towns and it lost its wars, and a hundred years ago the last of it went up into the high country and stopped at Redcliff, and for a while Redcliff was a name on a map and nothing else. Then it came back down the way water comes down, on a grade a man cannot see for looking, and it took the timber and the coal and the towns that sat over them. Now it held about a dozen towns and ran them out of one hall, quietly, on paper, by men who did the counting and never came out to look at what they were counting.

The other thing in that country was the Grey Wolves, up in the next three counties and leaning this way, and nobody could say clean what they were. They had started as horse thieves. Part of them had taken a deal off the government and turned steady, and the rest had not taken it and did not mean to, and the two halves of them still knew each other at a table. The Wolves held more towns than the Order and were poorer for it, because they could take a thing and never run it. They wanted what the Order had, and lately they had begun to come down and try to take it. Which was most of the reason the Order was bringing boys up the mountain now, out of every hollow where there was a boy to bring.

Bert took Hollis out through the back — the kitchen, steam and clatter and a door — into a little court with a pump in it and a shed and a line of washing, and off the court was a room with a bed and a chair and a window that looked at the shed wall.

"You'll sleep here," Bert said, and set the bag down on the chair. "Rest up, keep your strength. When the man from the Order gets here I'll come get you." He was already turning for the door. "Right now I've got people out front."

At the door he stopped, one hand on the frame.

"Don't go wandering," he said. "Too many people in this town and not one of them knows you, and a boy gets lost quicker in a place this size than you'd believe. Best you don't leave this yard."

"Yes," Hollis said.

He heard Bert go back through the kitchen and into the noise, and then it was quiet in the court except for the pump dripping into its tin and the wash on the line.

Hollis sat on the bed, and then he lay down on it, and then he slept. He had been three days in a wagon with the road going under him. A strange house had never bothered him and this one did not either.

That night the boy brought him a plate — stew and bread and a cup of water — and stood in the door while he ate and then took the plate away, and after that Bert came in.

He filled the doorway and then he filled the chair, and he was tired, and he sat with his hands on his knees.

"Food all right?"

"It's all right."

"Missing home some?"

"A little."

Bert nodded at that. It was the answer he wanted. He got his pipe out and did not light it yet.

Then he talked. He talked about the town and the people in it, and about a man up the valley who sold water, creek water, out of a barrel, at a price, and had half the Order buying it by the jug, because a thing that costs money must be worth money. Hollis had heard that one already, on the road. He laughed anyway. Bert told it like it was new, and then told him another one, about a man who came through that country every spring with a bear he said could read, and Bert swore the bear could read, and by dark Hollis was arguing with him about the bear.

Then Bert got onto the Order.

"The Order," he said, "is the biggest thing in this part of the country, and it isn't close. Nobody's got land like they've got land. There's money behind them you couldn't count in a month. And here's what they'll do that nobody else in this country will do — you give them what they ask and they take care of their own. That's the whole of it."

"What about the Grey Wolves?" Hollis said. The name had come down the road with them for three days.

Bert made a face and put the pipe in his mouth.

"Thieves," he said. "Thieves with a flag over the gate. A thing they've got, they took. A thing they take, they lose again before the year's out, because a thief is a fool and the Order is not. You stay where the Order is and you're fine." He took the pipe back out and pointed it at Hollis. "That's why your father was right to let you come. There's nothing over there but a man with a knife and a day's head start."

That was the first night. The second ran the same — the plate, the pipe, the stories — and on the third day Hollis ate his supper and set the plate on the chair and sat on the bed with his back against the wall and waited, because the stories had got to be the part of the day he liked.

He heard a wagon come up the street. Wagons came and went at the Spring House all day and meant nothing. But this one came along slow and stopped at the front of the house, and after it stopped it made no sound at all — no trace rattling, no horse blowing out after the pull.

And Bert was crossing the court toward him with the pipe going good and a story already started, and he stopped in the middle of the court.

Hollis had had two days of that face. This was a different one.

Bert took the pipe out of his mouth and set it down on the post of the pump, and did not look at where he was putting it, and went in through the kitchen toward the front of the house.

Hollis stayed where he was in the court. Out front the door opened and shut, and light from the eating room lay out across the court, and then the door was shut and the light was gone.

He looked at the pipe on the post of the pump.