The Long Table

Domingo took his place at the long table the way he had taken it every night that winter, on the bench along the wall, with his back to the plaster and his face to the room.

The hotel stood on Lake Street, a narrow brick building near the tracks and the river, one of a handful of its kind packed into a few blocks down there among the rooming houses and the shut doors of a district the town did not talk about in daylight. From the outside it was nothing, a sign and a door. Inside, past the little bar where the old men sat, was the dining room, and the dining room was the whole reason a man like Domingo could stand the country he had come to, because the dining room had the long table in it, and the long table had everything else.

There was no menu. There had never been a menu in a house like this and there never would be. The woman who ran it, the etxekoandre, the mistress of the house, brought the food out in the order it had always come and you ate what there was. A tureen of soup first, passed hand to hand down the oilcloth, and everyone filled his neighbor’s bowl before his own. Then a dish of beans with a little pork worked through it. Then a platter of lamb stewed down soft, and bread torn from long loaves, and a salad dressed sharp with vinegar, and all of it kept moving, the platters going down the table and coming back and going down again, and the jug of dark wine going with them, so that no glass along the whole length of it ever stood empty for long. Twenty men could eat at that table and it fed them like one family, because that was what it was pretending to be and what, for the length of a meal, it managed to become.

Domingo was twenty-six. He had come over from the French side, from a stone village above the road that ran up to the pass, in a valley of green so different from this country that in his first months he had lain awake trying to believe both places could be on the same earth. He had not been a shepherd at home. Nobody asked whether you had been a shepherd at home. Sheep was the work there was for a Basque who came over with no English and a strong back, and so he had gone up into the mountains behind a band of them with a dog and a burro and a camp outfit, and he had stayed up there through the summer and into the fall, alone, more alone than he had known a person could be, weeks at a stretch without a human voice, until his own had gone rusty in his throat.

Up there in July he had done what the ones before him did. He had found a stand of aspen in a high meadow, the bark of them pale and soft as a girl’s arm, and with the point of his knife he had cut his name into a tree, and the name of his village under it, and the year, drawing the lines fine and careful so they would scar white and dark as the tree grew and last longer than he would. Others had carved that grove before him, names and dates going back thirty years, and a few drawings a priest would not have blessed, and the outline of a woman, and a single word in Basque that meant only that whoever cut it had wanted, badly, for someone someday to know he had been there. Domingo understood that word better now than he had understood anything in school. A man needed a witness. Even a tree would do.

“Pass it down,” said the old man across from him, in Basque, meaning the wine, and Domingo passed it.

The old man had been in this country forty years and had lost most of one hand to a mowing machine and all of his desire to go back. He held forth most nights, and tonight he was holding forth about the law. There was always talk of the law now. The talk was that the government back in Washington was going to open a door, that a senator from this very state, a hard old man with a Irish name, was pushing to let more of them in, because the war had taken the young men off the ranges and the ranchers could not get anyone born here to go up alone into the mountains for a summer and the sheep still had to be walked. There was talk that men already here on papers that were running out would be allowed to stay. Domingo had come across in the last few years himself, in the little window the war had left open, and his own standing was one of the things nobody at the table was entirely sure of, including Domingo, and so he listened.

“They will let them come,” the old man said. “You watch. They need us too much to keep us out.” He tapped the table with his good hand. “Twenty years I was a tramp on that range, before they fenced it and tied every blade of grass to some rancher’s deed. Now there is no grass a man can call his own and they want to bring a thousand more of us to walk it for wages.” He laughed, not unkindly, at the shape of the thing.

“And if they do not,” said a younger man down the table, “you will still be here, and I will still be here, and the sheep will still be up the mountain in June.”

“That is true,” the old man allowed. “That is the one thing that is always true.”

Domingo ate his lamb and listened and did not say much, which was his way. Somewhere out past the walls the town was doing what the town did at night, the clubs on the main street throwing their light up into the sky, the trains working the yard, the divorce women he had heard about but never met waiting out their six weeks in the good hotels for a freedom he did not fully understand. None of it had anything to do with the table. The table was a piece of the old country set down whole in the middle of Nevada, the food and the wine and the language and, out back past the kitchen, the high blank wall where in summer the young men played their handball in the long evenings, throwing and catching the small hard ball against the stone the way their fathers had against the church wall at home.

The etxekoandre came through with a fresh loaf and set it down and took away the empty platter, and touched Domingo once on the shoulder as she passed, the way she did with the quiet ones, the ones far from anybody, and went back toward her kitchen.

He tore the bread and passed the first piece to the old man before he took his own.

Outside the snow had started again, he could hear it in the softening of the street sounds, and that was good, because snow in town meant more snow in the mountains, and more snow in the mountains meant water in the range come spring, and grass, and the sheep going up, and Domingo going up behind them into the country that was killing him a little with its silence and that he already, God help him, could not wait to see again. The aspen would be leafing out by June. His name would be up there waiting, gone a shade darker in the bark, one more line among all the lines, and he would find it and stand a minute and know that at least the tree remembered.

The wine came back around. The old man was starting another story. Domingo settled his back against the wall and let the warm room hold him, and did not think past spring, because past spring there was nothing yet a man could know.

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