Cool Water (2 page)

Most of whom quit cheering when they saw it was the young buck galloping toward them, whooping and waving his hat, his horse lathered and foaming. They'd bet on the wrong cowboy.

And then their jaws truly dropped when they saw he was riding the same bay horse that he'd set out on.

Impossible, they said.

The horsemen among the spectators looked carefully for signs that this was, in fact, a different horse. As the young cowboy cooled him out, they examined his markings— a star, a snip and one white foot—and concluded that he certainly
looked
like Ivan's first-leg horse. Then one of the spectators from the first change station rode in and verified Ivan's claim that, after giving the bay a brief rest, the young cowboy had carried on, leaving his fresh horse behind. This spectator also brought the news that Henry Merchant's first horse had thrown a shoe and with it a piece of his hoof a fair distance short of the change station, and Henry had lost precious time walking.

The gamblers gave the win to Ivan Dodge and accepted their loss. The newspaperman made his notes about the race (
won in a time of 12 hours and 32 minutes
), the weather (
seasonably hot
) and the young cowboy's sensational mount (
purchased from Mister Herbert Legere of Medicine Hat and
said to have Arab blood
), and took a front-page photograph of Ivan and his horse, prancing as though he was ready for another twenty-five miles, which was good, because they still had to get home to the ranch headquarters five miles to the southwest.

The ranch hands were mostly disgusted and tired of spending the day among farm families with noisy children and plow dirt under their fingernails, and they drifted into town in search of new excitement. Most of the towns-people—the implement dealers and hotel owners and railroad men—went home for supper, except for the few serious gamblers who had won money and were now happy to stick around and shoot the breeze with Ivan Dodge, who was telling the story of his heroic race over and over, and couldn't wait for Henry Merchant to come into view so he could rub the old cowboy's nose in his loss. A couple of the men had flasks with them and when the farm women noticed, they moved their picnics and their families away from the buffalo stone and the bad influence of the gamblers. They knew that their husbands had bet good money too, but they pretended not to know.

The children were tired and cranky at the end of a long hot day. The fiddler was still there and he was trying to play for them, but his tunes had taken a sad turn, as though he were lamenting something lost—his homeland perhaps. When one little boy put his hands over his ears and began to cry, the young but forthright Mrs. Sigurd Torgeson handed the fiddler a pie plate of cold chicken and boiled eggs and dill pickles, and firmly tried to say in a mix of Norwegian and newly acquired English that everyone had heard enough fiddle music for one day. She noticed that the fiddler's hair was unkempt and his clothes were not all that clean, and she wondered why she hadn't noticed that earlier, and why the mothers had let him near their children in the first place.

A malaise settled over the farm families, one that they didn't quite understand. They weren't sure why they were waiting. They ate their picnics quietly, feeling strangely depressed about Henry Merchant's absence. They kept looking to the west, watching for a horse and rider to come into view. They wanted to see Henry Merchant cross the finish line, as though doing so would punctuate a disappointing day with something good. After they'd finished eating and he still hadn't arrived, they concluded that he'd given up and gone home to the ranch, that there was nothing to do but pack their picnic things and leave. They said their goodbyes and headed off in various directions to homesteads that suddenly felt lonely and tentative. They were, all of them, sombre, not because of money lost, but because they'd been
so certain.
This was a determined lot who wanted badly to believe in the future. It was disconcerting to be wrong.

Eventually, it became known that the old cowboy's race was pretty much a lost cause from the time his first horse threw the shoe. He'd failed to make up the time on the second and third legs, and on the fourth his best horse, pushed beyond what his usually sensible rider knew was wise, quit on him. When the horse stretched out and released a stream of urine the colour of coffee, the old hand knew the race was over.

Into the evening, the young cowboy sat on the buffalo rubbing stone and smoked cigarettes and talked to the few people who remained—the newspaperman and the three or four others who were still there—and finally he said, “Well, boys, I don't suppose there's any point waiting much longer. It's past old Merchant's bedtime and I imagine he's sound asleep somewhere. Either that, or he's up and died.” He guffawed in a way that annoyed even his new fans, and then he mounted his horse and rode back the way he'd come. His own body felt a little worse for wear when he climbed into the saddle, but of course he kept that to himself. He felt let down that he hadn't had the chance to rib Henry Merchant in public; that had been the whole point. He thought about riding into town to find the other ranch hands and then realized he didn't want to see them. He tried to reason why that was and grew dejected when he figured out it was because they really hadn't wanted him to win.

Just as he was about to turn south and head for home, he saw Henry's bow-legged hobble coming toward him in the dusky light. The young cowboy waited, having planned something smart to say, but thrown off guard because Henry was without his horse.

“Tied up on me” is all Henry said when they met.

The two of them turned south toward the Perry ranch, the excitement over and the challenge won or lost, depending on whose perspective you were looking from.

By now it was almost dark. The two cowboys walked together for a ways without talking, young Ivan still horseback, not thinking that Henry might want to change places with him after his long walk, and then Ivan grew impatient with the slow pace and said he was going to ride on ahead.

“Well, I guess I won,” he said. He couldn't help himself.

The old cowboy stopped and took off his worn Stetson hat and shook sand from the brim and then gave his head a good scratch before putting the hat back on.

“I guess you did at that,” Henry said.

“I won good.”

“You did.”

“Fair and square.”

“I wouldn't go that far,” said Henry. “Fair's got nothing to do with it.”

“How's that?”

“You needed to be taught a lesson and you weren't.”

“Who's the one with a million-dollar horse?” asked Ivan. Then he added, as though the idea had just come to him, “I could make money with this horse.”

“He's got distance,” said the old hand, “I'll give you that. But he's about as cowy as a housecat.”

The young cowboy moved his horse out and tried to urge him into a lope, but this time the horse wasn't anxious to pick up his pace. He balked, and when Ivan hit him with a spur, he gave a good buck, straight up, all four feet off the ground, and Ivan wasn't expecting that and was just plain lucky that he managed to stick. When the horse finally moved out, Ivan called back, “I'll tell you who needed to be taught a lesson and it wasn't me.”

Henry let it go. He dearly would have loved to see Ivan and his fancy new chaps in the dirt, to at least have that bit of victory, but he was exhausted, and he thought maybe he
had
learned a lesson, although he didn't want to admit it. A hundred miles is a long way to ride in one day, even for a man who made his living horseback, and he was feeling his age, and wondering why he'd been so stupid as to rise to Ivan's challenge. Worst of all, he had pushed a good animal too hard and had risked losing him. Now here he was walking as the last of the daylight disappeared, alone, his feet and his hip joints killing him, the insides of his calves raw as skinned rabbits, his savings fifty dollars leaner, and it served him right, or at least this is what he thought as he limped home, not knowing whether his horse would be dead or alive when he rode back to get him and his saddle, or maybe just his saddle, in the morning.

To add to the humiliation, when Henry went to strike a match and check the time on his pocket watch a half-hour later, he found the watch was missing. He couldn't remember where he'd last looked at it, somewhere along the trail. Well, he'd just have to accept that loss too, even though the watch had cost him a week's wages.

When he finally reached the Perry ranch yard he headed straight for the barn and lay down in an empty box stall. He was thirsty but too tired to risk running into anyone, too mad at himself to tell the story of what happened, not wanting to see Ivan Dodge again until he'd had a good sleep. Ivan Dodge, who was bound to be lying in his bunk waiting with one more irritating remark. Tomorrow would be soon enough to hear it.

But even though he was bone tired, Henry couldn't sleep. His throat was dry and he didn't feel right. His body felt heavy. He was lying in a deep bed of straw, but he could still feel the ground underneath him, like a hard clay pallet. And although the night was dark as pitch, he could see pictures drifting by in front of his eyes. The whole country moving, as though he were watching it through the window of a slow-moving train. He could hear sounds in his head. A train whistle. The repetitive clacking of steel wheels on the railway tracks. And off in the distance another sound, the pounding of thousands upon thousands of hooves. The buffalo. He'd wished many times that he'd seen the buffalo. He'd witnessed the prairie before crops and barbed-wire fences and towns like Juliet, before it was divided into townships and sections and quarter-sections for men with one-way plows and wives who tended vegetable gardens, but he'd been too late for the great woolly herds that migrated through the grassy expanse. He listened to the thundering of their hooves and it turned the pictures in his head into rolling black clouds that seemed too big to fit within the contours of his skull. They pushed outward against the bone, colliding with one another and changing direction, rolling and bumping until they slowed and flattened out into blackness and, finally, the night was still. The sounds that emerged were quiet, comforting sounds. The breeze whispering through the sage and buck brush. The rustle of poplar leaves. A fiddler's sad tune, barely audible. Fine grains of sand spilling to the ground off the brim of a hat.

A cat descended from the hayloft above Henry and curled up beside him in the straw and began to purr in his ear. The cat's domestic purring was the most comforting sound of all and Henry considered something he had never considered before: that a prospect besides death might be out there waiting for him beyond the boundaries of his life as a ranch hand. There was talk that the Perry Land and Cattle Company would soon close its northern operation, give up on the harsh Canadian winters and let the government parcel off the grazing land for cultivation. Henry thought about the homesteaders who had congregated at the buffalo stone and the other three corners of the hundred-mile square. He'd hardly given them a glance twenty-four hours ago, but now he began to envy them their self-contained lives and the privacy of the homes they'd built to return to at the end of the day. He pictured one of the houses that now dotted the landscape—a simple, two-room wooden structure with a single-pitch roof, like a chicken shack. He saw his dusty boots on the doorstep, a white curtain blowing through an open window, a houseplant in a coffee can on the windowsill. A good deep well nearby, the first furrows of cultivation and planting. Although it was travesty for a cowboy, he imagined himself stealing away from his ranch hand's life into a new one, on a piece of land with his name on the deed, not here, so close to the Perry ranch, but north maybe, or east along the rail line. He could leave the ranch quietly and just disappear. He liked the idea of that, disappearing without a nod to anyone.

As his departure became a certainty, his heart slowed and his body lightened, and the straw beneath him became as soft as a feather bed. In the hot barn, tomorrow was cool and clear, like water on his tongue.

With the cat purring next to his head, Henry Merchant fell asleep.

By morning, he was gone.

Soon forgotten.

Night Travel

Ancestors

Just east of Juliet, there's a little campground known to the locals as Ghost Creek, even though there has never been a ghost sighting that anyone can recall. Perhaps it once had an Indian name that translates as Ghost Creek—the evidence of an encampment lies in the half-dozen teepee rings in a nearby pasture—but if the place was named by the Cree or the Blackfoot, that's not common knowledge.

The campground is usually a peaceful spot. The highway traffic sounds at night are muted and the noisiest neighbours are the coyotes, whose eerie falsetto voices carry like sirens in the darkness. The town kids might drive through and rev their engines or spin their tires, but it's not a place they're much interested in. It's too quiet for them.

On this particular August night, though, there
is
one loud tenant in the campground: a horse making a racket inside a steel horse trailer while his owner sleeps soundly in a pup tent. Bored with standing around in the trailer, the horse plays with the dangling end of the lead rope that secures him, biting and tugging with his teeth, loosening the carelessly tied knot. When he backs up, the rope pulls free, and when he leans his weight against the trailer door he's surprised that it swings wide, allowing him to make an escape. Moonlight glints off his white coat as he ambles around the side of the trailer, sniffing at the spot on the ground where he'd earlier had a good feed of hay and picking with his lips at the bits he left behind. Then he walks over to the tent and gives it a good snort before heading toward a fence and the grass that grows tall beneath the strands of wire. He grazes his way west along the fence line, lifting his head periodically to listen to the night sounds.