“Yeah, and no horse in the horseradish,” said Archie who’d heard all the feeble bunkhouse jokes.
“Huh. Well, he rubs some the wrong way. Most a them quit. What I done. Some law dog come out there once with his hand hoverin over his shooter and I could see he was itchin to dabble in gore. I felt like it was a awful good place a put behind me. But there’s a few like Karok’s ways. Maybe you are one a them. Men rides for him gets plenty practice night ropin. See, his herd grows like a son of a bitch if you take my meanin. But I’ll give you some advice: one a these days there’ll be some trouble there. That’s how come that law was nosin round.”
Archie rode up through country as yellow and flat as an old newspaper and went to see Karok. There was a big sign on the gate: NO MaRIED MeN. When the dour rancher asked him, Archie lied himself single, said that he had to fetch his gear, would be back in six days.
“Five,” said the kingpin, looking at him suspiciously. “Other fellas look for work they carry their fixins. They don’t have to go home and git it.”
Archie worked up some story about visiting Cheyenne and not knowing he’d been laid off until one of the old outfit’s boys showed up and said they were all on the bum and, said Archie, he had come straight to Karok when he heard there might be a job.
“Yeah? Get goin, then. Roundup started two days ago.”
Back on the Little Weed with Rose, he half-explained the situation, said she would not be able to send him letters or messages until he worked something out, said he had to get back to Karok’s outfit fast and would be gone for months and that she had better get her mother to come down from the station and stay, to help with the baby expected in late September.
“She can’t stand a make that trip. You know how sick she is. Won’t you come back for the baby?” Even in the few days he had been gone he seemed changed. She touched him and sat very close, waiting for the familiar oneness to lock them together.
“If I can git loose I will. But this is a real good job, good money, fifty-five a month, almost twict what Bunk Peck pays and I’m goin a save ever nickel. And if she can’t come down, you better go up there, be around womenfolk. Maybe I can git Tom to bring you up, say in July or August? Or sooner?” He was fidgety, as though he wanted to leave that minute. “He been around? His place was closed up when I stopped there before. I’ll stop again on my way.”
Rose said that if she had to go to the station early September was soon enough. She did not want to be where she would have to tend her sick mother and put up with her drunk father, to see the telegraph man’s face like an eroded cliff, to suffer Mrs. Dorgan’s supercilious comments about “some people” directed at Queeda but meant for Rose to hear, did not want to show rough and distended beside Queeda’s fine dresses and slenderness, to appear abandoned, without the husband they had prophesied would skedaddle. September was five months away and she would worry about it when it came. Together they added up what a year’s pay might come to working for Karok.
“If you save everthing it will be six hundred fifty dollars. We’ll be rich, won’t we?” she asked in a mournful tone he chose not to notice.
He spoke enthusiastically. “And that’s not countin what I maybe can pick up in wolf bounties. Possible another hunderd. Enough to git us started. I’m thinkin horses, raise horses. Folks always need horses. I’ll quit this feller’s ranch after a year an git back here.”
“How do I get news to you—about the baby?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’ll work somethin out. You know what? I feel like I need my hair combed some. You want a comb my hair?”
“Yes,” she said, and laughed just when he’d thought she was going to cry. But for the first time she recognized that they were not two cleaving halves of one person but two separate people, and that because he was a man he could leave any time he wanted, and because she was a woman she could not. The cabin reeked of desertion and betrayal.
ARCHIE & SINK
Men raised from infancy with horses could identify salient differences with a glance, but some had a keener talent for understanding equine temperament than others. Sink Gartrell was one of those, the polar opposite of Montana bronc-buster Wally Finch, who used a secret ghost cord and made unrideable outlaws of the horses he was breaking. Sink gave off a hard air of competence. On roundup the elegant Brit remittance man Morton Frewen had once noticed him handling a nervous cloud-watcher horse and remarked that the rider had “divine hands.” The adjective set the cowhands guffawing and imitating Frewen’s stuffed-nose accent for a few days, but ridicule slid off Sink Gartrell like water off a river rock.
Sink thought the new kid might make a top hand with horses if he got over being a show-off. The second or third morning after he joined the roundup Archie had wakened early, sat up in his bedroll while cookie Hel was stoking his fire, and let loose a getting-up holler decorated with some rattlesnake yodels, startling old Hel, who dropped the coffeepot in the fire, and earning curses from the scattered bedrolls. The black smell of scorched coffee knocked the day over on the wrong side. Foreman Alonzo Lago, who had barely noticed him before, stared hard at the curly-haired new hand who’d made all the noise. Sink noticed him looking.
Later Sink took the kid aside and put the boo on him, told him the facts of life, said that old Lon would bull him good if ever he agreed to get into a bedroll with him, said that the leathery old foreman was well known for bareback riding of new young hires. Archie, who’d seen it all at Peck’s bunkhouse, gave him a look as though he suspected Sink of the same base design, said he could take care of himself and that if anyone tried anything on him he’d clean his plow good. He moved off. When Sink came in from watch at the past-midnight hour, he walked past the foreman’s bedroll but there was only a solitary head sticking out from under the tarpaulin; the kid was somewhere far away in the sage with the coyotes. Just the same, thought Sink, he would watch Lon the next time he got into the red disturbance and starting spouting that damn poem about Italian music in Dakota, for the top screw was a sure-enough twister.
For Archie the work was the usual ranch hand’s luck—hard, dirty, long and dull. There was no time for anything but saddle up, ride, rope, cut, herd, unsaddle, eat, sleep and do it again. On the clear, dry nights coyote voices seemed to emanate from single points in straight lines, the calls crisscrossing like taut wires. When cloud cover moved in, the howls spread out in a different geometry, overlapping like concentric circles from a handful of pebbles thrown into water. But most often the wind surging over the plain sanded the cries into a kind of coyote dust fractioned into particles of sound. He longed to be back on his own sweet place fencing his horse pastures, happy with Rose. He thought about the coming child, imagined a boy half-grown and helping him build wild horse traps in the desert, capturing the mustangs. He could not quite conjure up a baby.
As the late summer folded Sink saw that Archie sat straight up in the saddle, was quiet and even-tempered, good with horses. The kid was one of the kind horses liked, calm and steady. No more morning hollers and the only songs he sang were after supper when somebody else started one, where his voice was appreciated but never mentioned. He kept to himself pretty much, often staring into the distance, but every man had something of value beyond the horizon. Despite his ease with horses he’d been bucked off an oily bronc ruined beyond redemption by Wally Finch, and instinctively putting out one hand to break his fall, snapped his wrist, spent weeks with his arm strapped to his body, rode and did everything else one-handed. Foreman Alonzo Lago fired Wally Finch, refused to pay him for ruined horses, even if they were mustangs from the wild herds, sent him walking north to Montana.
“Kid, there’s a way you fall so’s you don’t get hurt,” said Sink. “Fold your arms, see, get one shoulder up and your head down. You give a little twist while you’re fallin so’s you hit the ground with your shoulder and you just roll right on over and onto your feet.” He didn’t know why he was telling him this and grouched up. “Hell, figure it out yourself.??
?
ROSE & THE COYOTES
July was hot, the air vibrating, the dry land like a scraped sheep hoof. The sun drew the color from everything and the Little Weed trickled through dull stones. In a month even that trickle would be dried by the hot river rocks, the grass parched white and preachers praying for rain. Rose could not sleep in the cabin, which was as hot as the inside of a black hatbox. Once she carried her pillow to the big stone doorstep and lay on its chill until mosquitoes drove her back inside.
She woke one morning exhausted and sweaty and went down to the Little Weed hoping for night-cooled water. There was a dark cloud to the south and she was glad to hear the distant rumble of thunder. In anticipation she set out the big kettle and two buckets to catch rainwater. The advance wind came in, thrashing tree branches and ripping leaves. The grass went sidewise. Lightning danced on the crest of Barrel Mountain, and then a burst of hail swallowed up the landscape in a chattering, roaring sweep. She ran inside and watched the ice pellets flail the river rocks and slowly give way to thrumming rain. The rocks disappeared in the foam of rising water. Almost as quickly as it had started the rain stopped, a few last hailstones fell and against the moving cloud the arc of a double rainbow promised everything. Her buckets were full of sweet water and floating hailstones. She stripped and poured dippers of goose-bump water over her head again and again until one bucket was nearly empty and she was shaking. The air was as cool and fresh as September, the heat broken. Around midnight the rain began again, slow and steady. Half awake she could hear it dripping on the stone doorstep.
The next morning it was cold and sleety and her back ached; she wished for the heat of summer to return. She staggered when she walked and it didn’t seem worthwhile to make coffee. She drank water and stared at the icy spicules sliding down the window glass. Around midmorning the backache increased, working itself into a slow rhythm. It dawned on her very slowly that the baby was not waiting for September. By afternoon the backache was an encircling python and she could do nothing but pant and whimper, the steady rattle of rain dampening her moaning call for succor. She wriggled out of her heavy dress and put on her oldest nightgown. The pain increased to waves of cramping agony that left her gasping for breath, on and on, the day fading into night, the rain torn away by wind, the dark choking hours eternal. Another dawn came sticky with the return of heat and still her raw loins could not deliver the child. On the fourth afternoon, voiceless from calling for Archie, her mother, Tom Ackler, Tom Ackler’s cat, from screaming imprecations at all of them, at god, any god, then at the river ducks and the weasel, to any entity that might hear, the python relaxed its grip and slid off the bloody bed, leaving her spiraling down in plum-colored mist.
It seemed late afternoon. She was glued to the bed and at the slightest movement felt a hot surge that she knew was blood. She got up on her elbows and saw the clotted child, stiff and grey, the barley-rope cord and the afterbirth. She did not weep but, filled with an ancient rage, got away from the tiny corpse, knelt on the floor ignoring the hot blood seeping from her and rolled the infant up in the stiffening sheet. It was a bulky mass, and she felt the loss of the sheet as another tragedy. When she tried to stand the blood poured, but she was driven to bury the child, to end the horror of the event. She crept to the cupboard, got a dish towel and rewrapped him in a smaller bundle. Her hand closed on the silver spoon, her mother’s wedding present, and she thrust it into the placket neck of her nightgown, the cool metal like balm.
Clenching the knot of the dish towel in her teeth, she crawled out the door and toward the sandy soil near the river, where, still on hands and knees, still spouting blood, she dug a shallow hole with the silver spoon and laid the child in it, heaping it with sand and piling on whatever river stones were within reach. It took more than an hour to follow her blood trail back to the cabin, the twilight deep by the time she reached the doorstep.
The bloody sheet lay bunched on the floor and the bare mattress showed a black stain like the map of South America. She lay on the floor, for the bed was miles away, a cliff only birds could reach. Everything seemed to swell and shrink, the twitching bed leg, a dank clout swooning over the edge of the dishpan, the wall itself bulging forward, the chair flying viciously—all pulsing with the rhythm of her hot pumping blood. Barrel Mountain, bringing darkness, squashed its bulk against the window and owls crashed through, wings like iron bars. Struggling through the syrup of subconsciousness in the last hour she heard the coyotes outside and knew what they were doing.
As the September nights cooled, Archie got nervous, went into town as often as he could, called at the post office, but no one saw him come out with any letters or packages. Alonzo Lago sent Sink and Archie to check some distant draws ostensibly for old renegade cows too wily or a few mavericks too young to be caught in any roundup.
“What’s eatin you?” said Sink as they rode out, but the kid shook his head. Half an hour later he opened his mouth as if he were going to say something, looked away from Sink and gave a half shrug.
“Got somethin you want a say,” said Sink. “Chrissake say it. I got my head on backwards or what? You didn’t know we was goin a smudge brands? Goin a get all holy about it, are you?”
Archie looked around.
“I’m married,” he said. “She is havin a baby. Pretty soon.”
“Well, I’m damned. How old are you?”
“Seventeen. Old enough to do what’s got a be did. Anyway, how old are you?”
“Thirty-two. Old enough a be your daddy.” There was a half-hour silence, then Sink started again. “You know old Karok don’t keep married fellers. Finds out, he’ll fire you.”
“He ain’t goin a find out from me. And it’s more money than I can git on the Little Weed. But I got a find a way Rose can let me know. About things.”
“Well, I ain’t no wet nurse.”
“I know that.”
“Long as you know it.” Damn fool kid, he thought, his life already too complicated to live, and said aloud, “Me, I wouldn’t never git hitched to no fell-on-a-hatchet female.”
The next week half the crew went in to town and Archie spent an hour on the bench outside the post office writing on some brown wrapping paper, addressed the tortured missive to Rose at the stage station where he believed her to be. What about the baby, he wrote. Is he born? But inside the post office the walleyed clerk with fingernails like yellow chisels told him the postage had gone up.
“First time in a hunderd year. Cost you two cents a send a letter now,” he smirked with satisfaction. Archie, who had only one cent, tore up his letter and threw the pieces in the street. The wind dealt them to the prairie, its chill promising a tight-clenched winter.
Rose’s parents, the Mealors, moved to Omaha in November seeking a cure for Mrs. Mealor’s declining health.
“You think you can stay sober long enough to ride down and let Rosie and Archie know we are going?” the sick woman whispered to Sundown.
“Why I am goin right now soon as I find my other boot. Just you don’t worry, I got it covered.”
A full bottle of whiskey took him as far as the river crossing. Dazedly drunk, he rode to the little cabin on the river but found the place silent, the door closed. Swaying, feeling the landscape slide around, he called out three or four times but was unable to get off his horse and knew well enough that if he did he could never get back on.
“G’up! Home!” he said to Old Slope and the horse turned around.
“They’re not there,” he reported to his wife. “Not there.”
“Where could they be? Did you put a note on the table?”
“Didn’t think of it. Anyway, not there.”
“I’ll write her from Omaha,” she whispered.
Within a week of their departure a replacement freighter arrived, Buck Roy, his heavyset wife and a raft of children. The Mealors, who had failed even to be buried in the stage station’s cemetery, were forgotten.
There were no cattle as bad as Karok’s to st
ray, and ranchers said it was a curious thing the way his cows turned up in distant locations. December was miserable, one storm after another bouncing in like a handful of hurled poker chips, and January turned cold enough to freeze flying birds dead. Foreman Alonzo Lago sent Archie out alone to gather any bovine wanderers he could find in a certain washout area, swampy in June, but now hundreds of deep holes and snaky little streams smoothly covered with snow.
“Keep your eyes peeled for any Wing-Cross leather-pounders. Better take some sticks and a cinch ring.” So Archie knew he was looking for Wing-Cross cows to doctor their brands. But the Wing-Cross had its own little ways with brand reworkings, so he guessed it was more or less an even exchange.
The horse did not want to go into the swamp maze. It was one of the warm days between storms and the snow was soft. Archie dismounted and led his horse, keeping to the edge of the bog, waded through wet snow for hours. The exercise sweated him up. Only two cows allowed themselves to be driven out into the open, the others scattering far back into the coyote willows behind the swamp. In the murky, half-frozen world of stream slop and trampled stems there was no way a man alone could fix brands. He watched the cows circle around to the backcountry. The wind dived, pulling cold air with it. The weather was changing. When he reached the bunkhouse four hours after dark, the thermometer had fallen to zero. His boots were frozen, and, chilled to the liver, he fell asleep without eating or undressing beyond his boots.
“Git back and git them cows,” hissed Alonzo Lago two hours later, leaning over his face. “Git up and on it. Rat now! Mr. Karok wants them cows.”
“Goddamn short nights on this goddamn ranch,” muttered Archie, pulling on his wet boots.
Back in the swamp it was just coming light, like grey polish on the cold world, the air so still Archie could see the tiny breath cloud of a finch on a willow twig. Beneath the hardened crust the snow was wallowy. His fresh horse was Poco, who did not know swamps. Poco blundered along, stumbled in an invisible sinkhole and took Archie deep with him. The snow shot down his neck, up his sleeves, into his boots, filled eyes, ears, nose, matted his hair. Poco, in getting up, rammed his hat deep into the bog. The snow in contact with his body heat melted, and as he climbed back into the saddle the wind that accompanied the pale sunlight froze his clothes. Somehow he managed to push eight Wing-Cross strays out of the swamp and back toward the high ground, but his matches would not light and while he struggled to make a fire the cows scattered. He could barely move and when he got back to the bunkhouse he was frozen into the saddle and had to be pried off the horse by two men. He heard cloth rip.