Grubbock eased himself on his saddle. He looked pityingly at Koffing ahead of him, keeping up his lead. Boy, I bet that hurts, he thought.
* * *
Jackson opened the gate and let the pack-horse run into the corral. Bert let out a cheery war-whoop. The others waved.
“Well, they look all right,” Mrs. Peel said, with relief. “Just a little more grimy and unwashed than usual.”
“Karl has a bandaged wrist,” Esther Park announced.
Karl Koffing was sitting on his horse, resting his elbow on the saddle-horn. He was looking at the sunset. Nature was giving them a welcome home as spectacular as her early-morning farewell. Nature had won out all around, whether she was setting out to charm or to dominate. One snowstorm, one thunder-and-lightning display, one hail attack with each icy stone as big as a giant-sized pea, one wind-and-dust storm, opalescent dawns with clouds beneath you, flaming sunsets with beaten-brass skies above you. Not to mention, Karl thought, mountains of twelve thousand feet that stretched for a hundred miles as rhythmically as if they were just the ordinary waves in an ordinary ocean. And forests that never ended, big enough to swallow up a city’s millions and have them wandering around, lost and alone, without touch of each other.
“Karl, did you get hurt?” Esther Park was asking.
He shook his head. He was still looking at the range of mountains. Once he had thought them imposing; now he knew that they were only the outer wall to a giant fortress.
“Then why are you wearing a bandage?” Esther asked.
God, Karl thought, I’ll have to dismount. Bert was already on his feet, unsaddling, unbridling, getting the pack-horse unloaded. I’ll have to get this damned saddle off too, Karl thought. But the problem is to get myself off first. The last canter had done it. He’d have been wiser to come trotting along leisurely into the corral like Grubbock. But now, as he looked across at Earl, it seemed that he was also resting for a moment before he tried to swing a leg up and over. This was one night Koffing and Grubbock could have done without an audience. They were all there except Mimi and Atherton Jones.
Fortunately the audience was now too busy asking questions of Bert and Ned to notice Karl Koffing’s silence. The damnedest piece of foolishness was this raw patch of flesh, where the inside seam of his jeans had ground the skin away. He walked stiffly, trying not to limp or hobble, as he uncinched the saddle and carried it to the corral rail. Earl Grubbock, he was relieved to see, was moving just as slowly and carefully.
“How did you get on?” Mrs. Peel was asking Jim Brent.
“Fine.” He had worked quickly and was now turning his horse loose into the pasture. He walked over to the group.
“Run into any trouble?” Robert O’Farlan asked, and everyone waited eagerly for the answer.
“No more than usual. Lost some time trying to find some strays.”
“How was the weather up there?” Carla asked. “We had a very cold wind and some rain two days ago.”
“Just what you’d expect,” Jim Brent answered her.
And the damned thing was, Koffing thought, Brent really meant it.
“Was it wonderful, Earl?” Carla asked suddenly.
“Ask me in three days’ time, and I’ll give you a fair answer,” Grubbock said, with a smile.
“Didn’t you enjoy it?” Mrs. Peel wanted to know. She looked at him, and then at Karl, anxiously.
“Sure. By November we’ll be talking about it with tears in our eyes. Won’t we, Karl?”
Karl nodded. It was easy for Grubbock to admit it had been a tough five days. Grubbock had been in the Army. No one was going to think he couldn’t take it.
Sally said, “Mrs. Gunn’s cooking a special dinner for you. So what about a bath first of all? You’ll have time. We’ve got the water piping hot.”
“Fine,” Karl said. And then, he thought, it wasn’t so fine. For Bert and Ned were walking over to their bunkhouse for a quick wash in cold water, and Robb was about to follow them.
“Hell, I don’t need a hot bath,” Karl said suddenly.
“The hell you don’t,” Grubbock said, and gripped his arm to lead him away. “And I want to see that wrist of yours too, and get a good tight bandage on it.”
Mrs. Peel looked inquiringly at Jim Brent. “It’s nothing too serious,” he assured her. “He was lucky. Now I’ll get cleaned up too.” He looked at Sally as he passed her. “Hello, stranger,” he said. “Good to see you around the corral again. Do you never go riding any more?”
“If I’m asked,” Sally said, her cheeks colouring, her eyes looking very blue and startled.
“Getting formal, aren’t we?” he teased her. “Looks as if I’ll have to start keeping an engagement diary. See you later.”
Now what did that mean, Mrs. Peel wondered. Was it good, was it bad, or was it just...? She glanced at Sally, who had a way of understanding what was meant when it wasn’t said. It must be good, for Sally was smiling as she gave Jim Brent a casual nod.
Carla and Esther and O’Farlan turned to walk back to the house. “It must have been wonderful,” Carla said, looking at the hills lying golden in the sunset. O’Farlan said yes, he envied Koffing and Grubbock: one summer, some years ago, he had gone mountain-climbing, and he had enough to think about for months afterwards.
“I’ve climbed mountains too,” Esther Park said eagerly. And she went on talking as they left the corral.
Mrs. Peel looked after her pityingly. Whatever poor Esther did, and she seemingly had done a lot of things, she would never have anything to think about except herself.
Robb was wasting time. He hadn’t left the corral with the other cowboys. Now he came over to Mrs. Peel and Sally as they turned to go down to the house. He has something to say to us, Mrs. Peel thought, as she halted. But she had learned how to wait. So had Sally.
“Yes,” Robb said at last, as if in answer to a question, “it’s mighty pretty up there.”
“Almost as pretty as Montana?” Sally asked. She looked at the thin, strong-featured face, at the healthy skin that was tight-drawn over the high cheekbones and firm jaw. There was a gentleness round his mouth that might seem weakness unless you also noticed the steady, far-seeing blue eyes. Now, as they smiled back at her, she remembered that she had never heard him say an unjust or petty thing about any other human being. There was no malice, no cynicism in his heart, no hatred of others’ virtues or strength which might be greater than his own. He had seen life at its grimmest reality—for war was the hardest schoolmaster, and Robb had chosen one of its toughest assignments: a parachutist, trained in demolition, who jumped ahead of the airborne troops—and it hadn’t beaten him down. He doesn’t know it, Sally thought, but he has a warmth in him that kindles warmth, in what he writes and in those who read.
“Almost,” Robb was saying, in his slow, quiet voice, making two unhurried words out of one. Then the thoughtful eyes turned to Mrs. Peel. “That book you lent me, Mrs. Peel—” he stopped, half frowning.
“You liked it?” Mrs. Peel asked anxiously. “That’s the poem about the Argentine gaucho,” she explained quickly to Sally.
“Sure did,” Robb said. “Kept me thinking all the way up the trail and back. He knew what he was writing about all right. Seems to me,” and he looked now up towards the hills, “a poem could be written about that too. Not the way Hernandez wrote. The way one of us might write it. Just about a five-day trip into the mountains, going up, being there, bringing the steers back. Just all that.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Peel said quietly. “A poem about that would be something I’d like to read.”
“Is that right?” His frank eyes turned to study her face, as if looking for the truth. “It would be a long poem,” he said, “as long as a novel almost. But different as it went along. There’s one way of writing to get the rhythm of setting out and then climbing the trail, when everyone’s hoping it will be a good journey. Then coming out on top of the plateau, and the world’s before you. And then the day’s work; that w
ould be different again. And then the nights, and talk, and a bit of remembering, and thoughts about all those others who’ve sat, just as you are doing now, around a dying fire in the wilderness. And then sleep, when you don’t sleep, but just lie thinking. That’s a mighty queer thing: you’re lying in the middle of nature, and what you think about is men; you even start planning, seeing things more clearly; right and wrong is easy to understand. And you know it is easier to understand than men make it. All they have to do is to feel the way you’re feeling—for you’re one of them, and they’re a part of you—as you lie out there, listening to the mountains and the night sky. There wouldn’t be so much trouble then. You not only feel it, you begin to know it. Then dawn comes up, and you see nothing but pink clouds below you, and the world is blotted out. You’re a man; you belong to them down there below these clouds; and yet you aren’t a man. You’ve no fears or troubles or hates left in you. You look at these clouds, and they are not the way you see them from the earth. They are a floor of gold and pink and purple and blue, of colours you don’t even know the names of. For a bit you stand and stare. You begin thinking about the way the Greeks made their gods live, high in the mountains, and that makes sense. You even feel you could leap right forward into these clouds; you could fall ten thousand feet and not get hurt. And that’s the thought that makes you know you’re a man again; gods don’t have to think about getting hurt.”
He smiled then. He paused, and then, as neither of the women spoke, he said awkwardly, “That’s as far as I’ve got it thought out. The last bit of the poem will be the journey back to earth, I guess. And you’re getting mixed up with men again, and you can’t plan for them any more, and everything is less clear, and the truths become colourless, like the way the clouds are turning as you look up at them now. And you look back at the mountains, too, and all you can say is that it’s mighty pretty up there.”
Chuck’s shout broke through the evening silence. “Hey, Robb! Come and get it!”
Robb grinned. He touched his hat. They watched him walk away, his lean body slouching a little, moving deliberately, with the leather chaps round the thin, blue-jeaned legs still encumbering his stiff stride.
Chuck was yelling, unaware of his audience, “It’s pork chops tonight, split and blast you—not a pot of stew that don’t mind waiting!” He talked for two more sentences about Robb, without failing in his descriptive vocabulary.
Mrs. Peel, who could never stop flinching when she heard a swear word—the only remaining relic of her Calvinist upbringing, she thought—now listened in calm wonder. It was strange how they could use an oath so that it was really only the normal way to address a friend. It was, in its rhythm and imagination, a kind of poetry too. But how had she imagined that she heard the word baroque?
“I was wrong to suggest that he should go east this winter,” Sally said as they walked towards the house. “New York or Chicago would be no good for Robb. Not at the moment. Not until he gets that poem all out of his heart, just as it is, without other influences spoiling its simplicity.”
“He’s got to live on something. He’s got to earn money somehow. If he stays in the West he’ll probably go with Ned to Arizona to work on a dude ranch there for the winter.”
“Yes. If only he could stay here! He’d get plenty of time to work here in the winter.”
“The ranch is half closed. Old Chuck and Bert have priority on jobs here over him.”
“What about Rest and be Thankful?” Sally asked thoughtfully.
“He earns his own way,” Mrs. Peel told her. “Sally, I’d spend every last penny I had on keeping the house open this winter, but do you see him living here as our guest?”
Sally shook her head.
“If we could give him a job, not a faked one, a real one...” Mrs. Peel hesitated, trying to think of such a job. “We’ve got to try and arrange that, Sally. Somehow. He should stay here, within sight and touch of these mountains.”
“Arrange it without arranging it. Take an interest without seeming to take interest. Margaret, you’re facing a riddle more elaborate than Cocteau’s Sphinx.”
Mrs. Peel’s delicate eyebrows were set in a determined frown.
“It was the highest compliment ever paid us,” Sally said, “when he talked to us like that.”
Mrs. Peel nodded, still frowning, but she said nothing.
“And to think I once thought I could write poetry,” Sally went on. “All I worried about was the lisp of a consonant or the echo of vowel sounds, or how free in metre or rhyme I could be. Like the young bard of Japan, whose verses never would scan...”
Mrs. Peel smiled at that. She even finished the limerick. “Because I try to get as many words into the last line as I possibly can.”
They were laughing as they entered the house. And then Mrs. Peel, remembering Karl and Earl, became serious. “I’m going to look for some Band-aid,” she announced.
23
THE BEAR AND MR JERKS SHARE AN EVENING
Earl Grubbock and Karl Koffing had thought that, after one of Mrs. Gunn’s biggest and best dinners, they might slip away from the living-room with a nonchalant air and set a straight course for their beds. But it was pleasant to be given the two most comfortable armchairs in front of a roaring fire, and have all the others—even Prender Atherton Jones—gather round with questions. Mimi had threatened to come downstairs if she was going to miss all the fun, and had only stopped climbing out of bed when she had been promised that Earl and Karl would pay her a visit before they went back to the cottage.
“If we can get up these stairs,” Grubbock admitted frankly. He had already been put through that test when he borrowed one of the bathrooms in the house. (Koffing had reached the bath in the cabin first.) “You never know how many muscles you’ve been born with until you start climbing stairs.”
Koffing was still not admitting anything. In any case, there was more reason for him to be silent: his arm hurt badly, in spite of the neat bandages which Ned had wrapped round the swollen wrist and forearm. Ned, when he had come over here after supper to look at Karl’s arm, had said he didn’t like the look of it too much and that Karl might be wise to see Dr. Clark in Sweetwater tomorrow. Sally suggested that it might be even wiser to drive into Sweetwater with Jackson tonight. Karl refused this idea so definitely that Mrs. Peel then remembered the quantity of iodine, zinc ointment, sticking-plaster, talcum powder, and Band-aid which Grubbock had collected from her in a very offhand way. She wondered how she could suggest that Ned ought to be invited back to do a little more extensive bandaging. After all, there was such a thing as blood-poisoning. And when Earl Grubbock made a joke about barbed wire being the one thing he couldn’t argue with, and pulled up his sleeve to show an iodined gash in his forearm, so that Esther Park would stop suggesting that Karl was half-way to tetanus, Mrs. Peel rose unobtrusively and went into the hall.
Miss Snodgrass at the Sweetwater telephone exchange said why of course she’d find out if Dr. Clark was too busy tonight; glad to—no trouble at all.
And after a conversation with Mrs. Clark, mostly about the two Clark children who were going to be on one of the 4-H floats on Saturday, Miss Snodgrass could report back that Dr. Clark was attending a meeting of the Sweetwater Improvement Committee this evening at the Purple Rim Bar. Did Mrs. Peel want to be put through to him there?
“Just a minute, Miss Snodgrass. Let me think this out,” Mrs. Peel said, discovering she hated to disturb Dr. Clark enjoying one free evening.
“Sure,” Miss Snodgrass said helpfully. “I’ll wait. Choose your words.” Mrs. Peel stared thoughtfully at the receiver in her hand for a full minute while she listened to the clack of Miss Snodgrass’s knitting-needles.
“I’ve decided just to ask his advice,” she said at last. And after a three-minute wait Dr. Clark’s calm voice was produced out of a background of cheerful noise.
“It’s nothing serious,” Mrs. Peel began, “but they won’t listen to anything except professional advice, I k
now.” She began to explain. “You see, it isn’t very much. But what does worry me is the fact that he’s a writer. If something is wrong with a bone or ligament, then he may not be able to write or type for weeks. That’s what is serious. I should insist that he comes and sees you tomorrow, shouldn’t I?”
Even with the door of the Purple Rim’s telephone booth firmly shut, it was difficult to hear Dr. Clark’s voice. He was, she found after two wrong guesses, interested in open wounds.
“Just small ones,” she said reassuringly. “And Ned got all the gravel out of them, I’m positive. The arm is swollen, but that’s because it is badly bruised. And the other writer has a two-inch tear, barbed wire, but not very deep. What’s that? Sorry. Tetanus shots? Well, one of them was in the Army, and I’m sure he must be full of shots... I don’t know at all about the other one... No, he wasn’t in the Army or anything... Then I’ll send them both in to see you tomorrow. Even if I have to drug their breakfast coffee and bring them stretched out in the ranch truck. No, there’s no need for you to come over tonight—absolutely not. No. See you tomorrow. I just needed your authority, that was all. Good night and thank you.”
And that, Mrs. Peel thought, was exactly what I wanted to know. Sweetwater tomorrow, and no protests from any heroic young men.
She returned as quietly to the living-room as she had left it. They were discussing cowboy clothes. Earl Grubbock was saying they were certainly practical. Karl Koffing agreed.
“There’s nothing comic about cowboy dress once you’ve found that out,” Grubbock insisted, watching the smile on Atherton Jones’s face. “There’s a meaning for everything. Take these chaps they wear buckled round their legs, for instance. Wish I had been wearing chaps when we went through that brush: thorns as long as your little finger. My legs began to feel like pincushions. Or take these high heels we’ve all been laughing about.” He looked pointedly at Atherton Jones’s flat-heeled riding-boots. “If you’re hanging on to a steer’s head while he’s pushing you along you’ve got to be able to brake his force with your heels stuck out in front of you.”