Leaving Cheyenne

  But, Lord Christ! whan that it remembreth me

  Upon my yowthe, and on me jolitee,

  It tickleth me aboute myn herte roote.

  Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote

  That I have had my world as in my tyme.

  But age, allas! that al wole envenyme

  Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith.

  Lat go, farewel! the devel go therewith!

  The flour is goon, ther is namoore to telle;

  The bren, as I best kan, now moste I selle. …

  The Wife of Bath

  Oh lay my spurs upon my breast, my rope and old saddle tree,

  And while the boys are lowering me to rest, go turn my horses free.

  TEDDY BLUE, from We Pointed Them North

  GO TURN MY HORSES FREE III

  one

  I had just dropped a post in a hole and was tamping the dirt around it with my shovel handle when I looked up and seen Gid hot-footin’ it for the lots. He never said a word to me—he just struck out. Well sir, I thought, we’ll both go. I knew he had some cold beer on ice in the water can, and I thought I’d help him siphon off a little. When I got there he was plopped down in the shade of his new GMC pickup, swigging on the first can. I opened me one and sat down and rested my back against the rear wheel and settled in to listen. Gid had pitched his hat on the running board and set his beer can down between his legs, so he’d have both hands free to wave. I seen the sun had blistered his old bald noggin agin, right through the straw hat. He had the hailstorm on his mind. Molly had come out that morning and argued with us a little about the fence line, and for some reason arguments with Molly always made Gid think of that hail.

  “I’d been over at Antelope, getting the mail,” he said. “Old Dirtdobber thought the cloud was just threatening, but I knew better. You can’t fool me when it comes to hail.”

  “Hell no,” I said. “Nothing simple as weather could fool you.”

  “The Montgomery Ward catalogue had come that day,” he said. “I yanked it out of my saddle pouch, and then I took down my lariat rope. ‘Run, you old bastard,’ I said, and I keewawed him between the ears with that rope. It broke him into a lope he was so surprised.”

  “Watch out, Gid,” I said. “You’re going to knock that can of beer over if you don’t.”

  But he didn’t give a shit for beer when he got to talking. Gid never started talking till he was sixty years old, and then he never stopped. That hailstorm hit Thalia in the spring of 1924, and Gid hadn’t forgotten it yet. None of the old-timers had—in the long run it done more damage to the people than it done to the windowlights or the wheat crops. I guess the worst was Old Man Hurshel Monroe getting his skull cracked outside the door of the bank. They say Beulah Monroe found the hailstone that conked him and kept it home in the icebox for nearly ten years, till one of her grandkids ate it for an all-day sucker. I’ve heard that so many times I probably even believe it myself.

  “We made it to a little mesquite tree,” he said. “Old Dirt was slowing down.”

  “I guess so,” I said. “What a man gets for riding a twenty-two-year-old horse.”

  “So I got down and yanked the saddle off. Uuuups …!”

  “I knew you’d spill it sooner or later,” I said. “Half a can of good beer nobody gets to drink.”

  “You wasn’t gonna get to drink it nohow,” he said. “What difference does it make to you?”

  “Your beer all right,” I admitted. “Why open it if you ain’t gonna drink it?”

  “Why buy it if I ain’t gonna open it?” he said, reaching in the water can for another one.

  “Here,” I said. “Let me pour this one out for you so it won’t interrupt your story.”

  “Just shut up,” he said. “I’ve emptied two cans of beer to your one.”

  “Why sure,” I said. “In the first place you’re older than me. And in the second place, I’ve always had to drink my cans. I never been able to afford just to pour them out.”

  He stopped and swigged beer till there wasn’t much left in the new can. “If you worked as smart as you talked, you have something to show for your long life,” he said. That was Gid—he thought my working for wages was a disgrace. But I got my pleasure out of doing what I wanted to, not out of owning no damn mesquite and prickly pear. I told him that a hundred times, but he never did understand it.

  “I figured old Dirt would stand,” he said. “So I crawled under him and scrunched up under the saddle.” He kept wiping his face with his shirt sleeve, and I knew the sweat was stinging his old nose, where it had blistered and peeled. “Shore hot,” he said.

  “Finish your story. It’ll be sundown before we get back to work.”

  “About the time I got under the saddle I heard water falling on it. I thought it must have quit hailing and gone to raining, and then I smelled it, and it didn’t smell like no rain water I ever smelled. I peeped out to one side and saw some of it trickling along the ground, and it didn’t look like no rain water I ever saw. It was still hailing to beat the dickens, and all I could do was sit there thinking about it. Finally I raised up and jobbed him in the stomach with the saddle horn. ‘Damn you,’ I said. ‘You could have waited a minute.’”

  “Haw,” I said. “That’s pretty good. I’d have paid money to have seen that.”

  “I wouldn’t laugh, if I was you,” he said. “It wasn’t nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “No, but it ain’t much to brag about, either,” I said.

  He waved his beercan in my face. “You better not talk,” he said. “Where was you when we had that storm? At least I was home where I belonged. I wasn’t off in New Mexico living with no Indian woman.”

  “Neither was I,” I said. “I knew you’d drag that in. I can tell what you’re going to say before you even say it. For the nine hundredth time, I wasn’t off in no New Mexico. I was right near Bailey-boro, Texas. And I wasn’t where no horse could weewee on me, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Not on me! On the saddle!” Gid was very particular about that point.

  “It’s too hot to listen to you explain.” Actually, when they had that storm, I had done been busted up in my horsewreck and was in the hospital. I wasn’t even living with Jelly.

  “When I jobbed him, he kicked me,” Gid said, and he looked kinda sad, remembering. Contrary as he was, I could feel sorry for Gid sometimes. He was getting old, and he wouldn’t admit it. Middle of July, hot as a firecracker, and the old fart wouldn’t stretch out and rest for love nor money. Telling them old stories, getting himself in a stir, remembering them. I wish I could have talked some sense into him, sat him down and told him, “Now goddamnit, Gid, you’re getting about old enough to slow down. It won’t hurt you to take a little rest in the afternoons.” But when it come right down to saying it, I just let him go. Making him mad would have done more damage than the advice was worth. Besides, I kinda got a kick out of hearing the stories agin myself.

  “Put your hat on, Gid,” I said. “You’ll go off and forget it and take a sunstroke.”

  “That was the first time Dirt had kicked in ten years,” he said.

  “It surprised me. And then he run off.”

  “Did you cuss him?” I said.

  “Yeah, but it didn’t do no good.”

  “Why no, that don’t surprise me,” I said. “It don’t do no good when you yell at me, either.”

  “Yeah, but you ain’t a horse,” he said.

  “That’s all right. Neither one of us can understand you when you yell. You don’t talk plain.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “If you’d just get you one of them little invisible hearing aids, you could hear fine. Nobody’s going to blame you for getting old.”

  Gid was the worst about that kind of remark I ever saw. “Who said anything about old?” I said. “You splutter when you yell; maybe it’s them false teeth, I don’t know. And the next time I wish you’d buy Pearl if you’re going to buy beer. You let this get a little warm and it tas
tes like horsepiss.”

  He threw his beer can on the pile we were building up by the loading chute. “You know, Johnny, we’re going to have to haul them cans off, one of these days,” he said. “Cattle will get to where they won’t load with all them tin cans shining at them.”

  I chunked one on the pile myself. It’s nice to have a pile to throw a beercan at. A man can see he’s been accomplishing something. “Leave them cans where they are,” I said. “The pile’s just now getting big enough it’s easy to hit. Besides, we ain’t gonna load no cattle recently.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” he said. And that can pile is still right where it was. We never got around to hauling it off, and I’m glad. It’s kind of a monument.

  “When are we going to get to work?” I said.

  He had to strike five matches to get his stogie lit, and then it went right out. He just bought them to chew, anyway.

  “Looks like you’d be willing to rest,” he said. “I try to ease up on you in the heat of the day and you go to rearing and tearing. You have to sit on an old bugger like you to keep him from killing himself. I guess you just want to prove you can still work.”

  “Blame it on me,” I said. “I’m handy.”

  “Now if you were able to work in weather like this, it’d be different. I seen you get the weak trembles yesterday, digging that corner posthole.”

  “It was hot yesterday,” I had to admit. “Anybody that works hard can get too hot.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said.

  “Don’t be sure, suring me,” I said. “You had the weaves yourself a dozen times. You just had the crowbar to prop up on or you’d have gone down fifteen times.”

  “Aw,” he said, “that’s just your imagination. The sweat drips on my bifocals and I stumble once in a while, that’s all.”

  “Of course,” I said. “That must be it. That’s why you’re going to have that operation next month. Sweat’s what does it.”

  “Making fun of a sick man,” he said. “Let me finish my story.”

  I knew that story like a good preacher knows the Bible, but I listened anyway. I liked to hear what new lies Gid would put in.

  “What happened,” he said, “was old Dirt squashed my hip when he ran over me.”

  “No wonder you’re so bunged up nowadays,” I said. “You ought to have taken better care of yourself when you were young.”

  “There’s a blister bug on your hat,” he said. “You better get him before he gets you. What do you mean bunged up? I’ve got a crick or two, but I ain’t feeble.”

  I caught the brim of my hat and flipped the blister bug halfway across the lot. “Them sonofabitches are going to take this country,” I said.

  “Yeah, them and the mesquite. And the government. I hope I ain’t alive to see it.”

  “You won’t be,” I said. “The country ain’t that far gone.”

  “Then it don’t like much,” he said. “Ten more years like this and it will strain a man to make an honest living in this country.” He flipped about four inches of stogie over toward the can pile.

  “It strains the ones that make an honest living now,” I said, “but that don’t affect the majority. What was the matter with that cigar?”

  “Nothing. Good cigar. That little piece I threw away wasn’t worth lighting.”

  “Kiss my butt,” I said. “I guess if you laid down a dollar and they give you two bits change, you’d let it lay, like it wasn’t worth keeping.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “It ain’t worth keeping. Won’t buy nothing.”

  “Now, Gid,” I said. “Think a minute. That’s a hamburger you’d be throwing away. That’s five Peanut Patties.”

  “Think yourself,” he said. “Who wants a goddamn Peanut Pattie anyway, much less five of them? You’d think a man your age would get over craving candy.”

  “Nothing wrong with Peanut Patties. They stick to your ribs.” Everybody hurrahed me about my sweet tooth. But I’ve craved candy all my life, and I don’t believe in doing without something just because a bunch of idiots thinks it’s silly. Delaware Punch is another thing I like.

  “And anyway we’re letting the cool part of the day go to waste,” I said. “I guess it’ll be a hundred and ten tomorrow.”

  “We ain’t gonna work tomorrow,” he said. “I promised Susie I’d take her to see Snow White.” Then he went back to his story. “I don’t know how I survived,” he said. “Finally the hail was piled up around me and the saddle like it was an igloo, I remember that.”

  I reached in and got my pocketknife and slipped the boot off my right foot. “You’re gonna talk till suppertime I might as well trim my corns,” I said.

  “Poor bastard,” he said. “I guess a man’s feet give out first.”

  “Not mine,” I said. “I’ve had sense enough not to use mine much. I just got a few corns.”

  “Mabel talked me into having Susie a pair of little boots made,” he said. “Made outa javelina skin. Shore purty.”

  “I bet,” I said. “And probably didn’t cost over five times what they were worth. What’d you want to spend money on that javelina skin for?”

  “Soft. Don’t hurt a kid’s feet so much.”

  “That’s the way the whip pops,” I said. “The first pair of shoes I ever bought felt like they was made out of tin.”

  “Mine did too,” he said. “No wonder we’re both cripples.”

  “What’d you do when it quit hailing?”

  “Stood up,” he said. “When I looked around I seen I wasn’t but just across the peach orchard from the Eldenfelders’ house. So I got me a limb for a crutch and hopscotched across the orchard.”

  “A man’s taking his life in his hands, going up to a Dutchman’s house on one leg,” I said. “It’s a wonder the dogs didn’t rip you up.”

  “I thought about that,” he said. “We was near neighbors, and the dogs knew me a little, else I wouldn’t have gone up at all. I picked me up a pocketful of big hails, just in case.”

  “Just in case what? You couldn’t hit a dog with a hailstone in fifteen throws.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I could always chunk good and straight. Remember the time we played that baseball game in Thalia and I chunked that Methodist preacher they had playing second base. I chunked him good enough.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “By god I do remember. I remember he got you down and beat hell out of you after the ballgame, too. You didn’t chunk him hard enough.”

  “He surprised me,” he said. “Got in the first lick. I didn’t figure a preacher would hit a man without warning him.”

  “A preacher’s got that much sense,” I said. “He may not have much more.” And there’s a sad end to that story. The preacher waited a year or two and got in a hell of a last lick—he was the one married Gid and Mabel.

  “Anyhow I didn’t need the hails,” he said. “The dogs come charging out all right, thirty or forty of them, but that little bitty old rat terrier they used to have was the only one actually went for my legs. The rest just stood around growling and showing their teeth.”

  “By god now, that took nerve,” I said. “If you’d a fell, there wouldn’t have even been a belt buckle left. I might not have ragged you so hard all these years if I had seen that. I admire a man with the kind of backbone you showed.”

  “Just shut up,” he said. “I limped on to the house. That rat terrier give me hell, too. I meant to come over some day when the folks were gone and kick the shit out of that dog, but the coyotes got him first. Finally the old man heard the commotion and came out on the porch. He thought it was funny, me fighting that rat terrier with my peach limb. ‘Get up steps,’ he said. ‘Dead cow’s for dinner.’ Only I didn’t find out what he meant till it was too late.”

  “Find out whose cow it was, you mean?”

  “Naw, how long it had been dead. I thought it tasted all right for Dutchman’s cooking. So did old Wolf. ‘Good-cow,’ he said. ‘Dead mit de lightnin’ vee days
ven we find her.’”

  “Poison you?”

  “No, it didn’t hurt me. Wasn’t as spoiled as some of the stuff you buy in grocery stores nowadays.”

  “Was Bartle home then?” I asked. I remember Bartle Eldenfelder; he was a fighting demon.

  Gid had to stop and laugh when I mentioned Bartle. “No, he was gone,” he said. “That bastard.” He had to wipe the laugh tears off his cheeks. “Frank Scott come by my place one morning and said he was going to whip Bartle for dancing with his wife. I told him I hoped he’d eaten a big breakfast—it just made him madder.”

  “Who won?” I said. I had underestimated Frank Scott’s fighting ability once myself.

  “Bartle whipped him right off. Frank came dragging back by bleeding like a stuck hog. Said Bartle hit him with a hoe handle.”

  “That was about the time his wife left him, I guess. She told everybody Frank hit her with a hoe handle, but nobody believed her, neither.” But if he never, he should have. She was too pretty for her own good, and a whole lot too pretty for Frank’s. Once I was taking her out the door at a dance and met Frank coming in. If he hadn’t taken time to hit her first, I would have got whipped worse than I did.

  “Anyhow, that’s the story,” he said. “After I ate the rotten cow Annie hitched up the wagon and took me home. I had to wade the creek.”

  “Okay now,” I said. “It’s what you and Annie did before you waded the creek that I been waiting all this time to hear. Just tell that.”

  Gid grinned a little. “I swear you got a filthy mind,” he said.