Cherokee (3 page)

She could tell my mood. She said, “What's the matter, honey?”

I shook my head. “Aw, nothing. I guess.”

“Are you not supposed to talk about it?”

“Probably not,” I said. “I think it'd be for the best if I waited and let it round itself off.”

“You'll talk about it sooner or later. Why take it all on yourself right now?”

I looked across at her. “Now damnit, Nora, don't go to telling me my own mind.”

“Don't swear in the house, Justa. And I'm not telling you your own mind. I can see you want to discuss something that's bothering you, and I wish you'd go ahead and do it without going clean to Houston and back before you get around to it.”

“What's the difference between swearing in the house and cussing outside? You are always telling me not to swear in the house, but you never say a word when I cuss outside. Is that because you don't want to get a bunch of swear words trapped here in the house in case God opens the front door and they all come flooding out? You don't reckon He hears the ones I say outside?”

“Don't be taking the Lord's name in vain.”

“I was not taking the Lord's name in vain! I merely asked you a question, damnit!”

Nora ignored it. “Are you in for the day or have you just stopped by to let me know something was worrying you so I could worry too?”

“Aw, hell, Nora.” I got up and went in the office and picked up the bottle.

She called after me. “Why don't you have another drink? That will certainly help.”

“Damnit!” I said, loud enough to be sure she heard me. I went clumping out through the hall and out the kitchen door. Behind me I heard a squall from J.D. Well, that was going to certainly make me popular around suppertime. I went in the barn and sat down on a barrel of salt blocks. I got out a cigarillo and lit it and sat there thinking. But after an hour I still didn't have any more idea about what Howard was up to than I had before.

Nora didn't make me pay at supper. We had a nice quiet meal of steak and potatoes and gravy with a garden salad of tomatoes and lettuce and onions. Our climate was so mild you could grow garden truck nearly the whole year round. And Nora took advantage of that fact. I had never been much of a hand for vegetables, but Nora put them on your plate and you'd better damn well eat them all or you'd hear what for. For somebody who didn't weigh much more than a hundred and ten pounds, she had a hell of a nice way of throwing her weight around.

J.D. was back in what they chose to call the nursery getting his bottle from Juanita. Nora had weaned him about a month before and, as far as I was concerned, it was that and not cutting teeth that was making him cranky. Looking across at Nora's breasts testing the thin fabric of the gingham frock, I couldn't say that I much blamed him.

I said, “Good steak. Juanita's getting better.”

“She's coming along.”

“I'd of given up on her a year ago.”

Nora put her fork down. “Justa, what is bothering you.”

“Howard wants me to take twenty-five thousand dollars in gold to a man up in Oklahoma. Says it's in payment of an old debt.”

“What's so worrisome about that?”

I looked down at my plate. “He says he stole the money. Thirty years ago or sometime. Says he wants to pay it back before he dies. Make it right.”

She laughed, putting her hand over her mouth.

That made me a little hot. “What the hell's so damn funny?”

“The idea of Howard stealing anything. If everybody was like Howard there wouldn't be a lock in the world.”

“Well, that's what he said.”

“What do Norris and Ben say about it?”

I finished up my salad before I answered her. “I haven't told them. I ain't supposed to mention it to nobody, including you. But I especially ain't supposed to tell Ben or Norris. Though how I'm going to explain taking twenty-five thousand dollars out of company funds without making up an awful good story for Norris is beyond me.”

“Justa, you are saying ‘ain't' more and more. Your grammar is something awful. I do wish you'd be more careful, especially with J.D. growing up.”

I glared at her. “You really figure this is the right time to correct my grammar?
Ain't
I just told you Howard wants me to return some money he says he stole? Wasn't you listening when I was telling you something I wasn't supposed to mention to nobody else?”

“Honey, don't be silly. Howard is getting old. Sometimes he gets confused in his mind.”

I said grimly, “He wouldn't be so confused he wouldn't know whether he stole some money or not. Man don't ever get that confused.”

“You'll see, it'll all come to nothing. A misunderstanding.”

“Howard don't make those kind of misunderstandings.”

“Why don't you talk to your brothers about it?”

“I told you. He don't want me to even hint at it to Ben or Norris. He got all upset at the very idea.”

“You told
me
.”

“Yes, and I shouldn't have. But I had to talk to somebody about it, and you've generally been pretty good at helping me in the past. And keeping your mouth shut.”

“It's a whim of his,” she said. “Now finish your supper and go on over to the big house and get your business done and don't be so late getting back. I'll let J.D. stay up a little past eight if you get back in time.”

I got up from the table. “I'll still bet you that kid ain't never going to forgive you for hanging my name on him. Wasn't enough I had to wear it. Now he's got it as a hand-me-down.”

“Stop saying ‘ain't.' It's not a word.”

I went on out the kitchen door and walked afoot the half mile over to the big house. It was a nice night. We were finally getting just a little nip of fall in the air. Made the walking pleasant. With it quiet as it was, I could hear the far-off sounds of the ocean. It took me back to when I was a kid and would lay awake nights thinking I could hear the sound of the surf booming up on the beach. Sometimes, when the wind blew hard in from the east, you could actually hear it. We used to go swimming down at a little beach about three miles away, but it had been a long time since I'd done that. I looked forward to J.D. getting up to an age when him and me could do such things together.

I went in through the back door of the big house. Just off the long hall that ran from front door to back was the large dining room with the huge round table in it. I passed by its open doors. It was still lighted with kerosene lamps, and the two Mexican women were clearing dishes away from supper. I reckoned my brothers and Howard had gotten lucky and Buttercup had been too drunk to cook, and the Mexican women had fixed their supper.

The big old dining table had been in our family since I could remember. It was an immense, heavy round thing. In my mother's day it had been polished and clean and unmarked. But since her passing, I was sorry to say, we had reverted to the manners of ruffians and the table reflected that. It bore spur marks where we'd propped our boots up on its surface, cigarillo bums, scuffs of all kinds, scars, and even a little carving with a pocketknife.

I turned to the left at the next door into the big office. It was funny, but we all sat the same way and in the same place for our evening meetings. We'd been doing it for as long as we'd been having them, and that was going on for five or six years. Ben always sat in a straight-backed chair against the wall facing the door. He always had it tipped back so its front legs were off the floor. Beside him was the sideboard table where the whiskey and tumblers were kept. If he was up, Howard always sat in his rocking chair just a yard from the door to his bedroom. Norris always sat on his side of the two desks we had pushed up against each other to make one big double desk, the desk Howard had been sitting at in the afternoon when he'd laid the light-running surprise on me. Norris had an office in town, in the building of the bank we owned, but he kept some work at home or brought some home that he had to check with me about or get my okay for. Besides the ranch and the real estate in town, we also put money in different municipal bonds and other such ventures as Norris thought profitable. He couldn't stand to see money just laying around and not working. He was harder on it than Howard had been on us, in turn, as boys. Howard had always figured if a boy had his eyes open he ought to be doing something with his hands. He didn't expect you to work when you were asleep, and our mother wouldn't let him work us on Sunday, but those were about the only exceptions.

I didn't sit at my desk in the evenings. I keep my herd books and my breeding records there, documentation that I used in the upgrading of our cattle. In the evenings I sat in a big overstuffed chair by the wall.

When I came into the room everybody already had a drink in their hands, so I walked on over to the sideboard table and poured myself out a tumbler of whiskey. I made as if to kick the legs of Ben's chair out from under him, and then looked over at the glass in Howard's hand. I said, “How many that make today, Dad?”

He give me a sheepish look, but he said, “Been waitin' and savorin' it all day.”

Ben said, “Oh, yeah. We
all
believe that. Justa, I want to talk to you about gettin' some new breeding stock in here. You keep saying wait, wait, but we wait much longer we're going to be breeding back brother to sister.”

I sat down in the big chair and took a sip of my drink. “I somehow doubt that. How many horses you got in the remuda, six hundred? Seven?”

He shrugged. “Round figures? About seven-fifty.”

“That's a lot of brothers and sisters.”

“I need some Thoroughbred stock, damnit.”

“Don't swear in the house. Makes holes in the roof.”

Howard said, “Dadgumit, Nora hasn't been over to see me in a coon's age. She forget me? And when is she gonna bring my grandbaby by to see me?”

I said, “Howard, he's cutting teeth right now and I guarantee you can consider yourself lucky to have him at least a half a mile away.”

“Pshaw,” he said. “Couldn't be no worse'n what you was. I swear your mother . . .” He stopped all of a sudden and looked away. It got kind of uncomfortably quiet. The death of our mother, Alice, had hit Howard uncommonly hard. I'd been about sixteen at the time, old enough to see and to understand what was happening. She'd died and, overnight, Howard had gone from a strong, full-of-life man to someone who seemed to be shrinking right in front of our eyes. It was about that time that I'd started having a hand in running the ranch matters. Howard seemed to have lost all interest in anything, including living. And then, just as he was starting to come out of it, he'd taken the bullet through the chest and that had completed the decline.

Into the silence Norris said, “Shay Jordan paid me a visit at the office today.”

That was Norris for you. He'd been busy at some papers when I'd come in so he'd made no motion to signify he knew I was in the room. So now, without so much as a howdy, he was straight into business.

I said, “Yeah?” Shay was the oldest son of Rex Jordan, the man who was disputing our property line. Shay was twenty-four or twenty-five and he had a kind of swaggering way about him, just enough of the bullyboy that I hadn't cared for him even on short acquaintance. Besides him there was the younger brother, Roy, who was about nineteen or twenty and showed every sign of wanting to grow up just like his big brother. The father, Rex, was a man I figured to be in his late forties or early fifties. I'd never met the missus, but I understood that Rex's brother lived with them. They had moved out from somewhere in far west Texas, and did not appear to be interested in being sociable. They had bought Old Man Fletcher's place when he'd moved back to Tennessee to live with his married daughter. They hadn't much more than settled in when they'd started a squabble with us about our boundary line.

The trouble had come up over a drift fence we'd built to keep our cattle from straying too far to the southwest. It wasn't much of a fence, just three strands of smooth wire strung on cedar posts, and wasn't much more than a mile long. It wasn't intended to keep anyone out of our property or limit anyone's right-of-way. Its only purpose had been to throw our cattle back toward the east to keep them from mixing with the numerous brands on the smaller ranches that lay to the south and west of us. But the Jordans had taken it as an attempt to fence them in. They'd declared that where they came from was open range country and a man didn't go to fencing his neighbors out. They'd said the grass was there for all, that no man owned it, and that by gawd, they weren't going to stand for it. We'd agreed with them, and had said we weren't trying to fence anybody in or out, that we'd just put up a drift fence because our cattle tended to drift to the southwest on account of the eastern wind off the gulf and we were just trying to make for less work when it came time to gather.

But unfortunately, it was at the time that the troublesome barbed wire was just being introduced into the Southwest, and squabbles were breaking out all over the country about it. We'd tried to explain to the Jordans that we believed in open range also, and that the drift fence wasn't intended to do more than turn back a few wandering cows, that it wasn't strong enough to stop a herd of prairie jackrabbits. But that hadn't been good enough for them. They'd been convinced that the drift fence was the first step in a planned campaign on our part to fence off the whole range and shut out the small rancher. Nothing we had been able to say had seemed to convince them otherwise. The discussion had taken place on our front porch, the Jordans declining to enter the house or to accept any form of hospitality. Norris had dismissed them as trash, but even trash can be trouble if it keeps showing up on your doorstep.