Hard Twisted (21 page)

A
: Yes, sir, that's true.

Q
: You were frightened, I should think, to learn you were pregnant?

A
: Yes, sir. A little.

Q
: Living in a strange place?

A
: Yes, sir.

Q
: Your father missing?

A
: Yes, sir.

Q
: This man Palmer, whatever his coarse and reprehensible conduct, your only link to the world you knew?

A
: Yes, sir, that's true.

Q: Is it any wonder then that you clung to him? A mere child, alone and frightened and pregnant and orphaned—

BY MR. HARTWELL
: Objection, Your Honor.

THE COURT
: Order. We'll have no more of that.

Lottie paged through the mail-order catalog while Mike hummed tunelessly, absorbed in her knitting. Outside, Goulding's and Palmer's voices wafted up through the stairwell as they hauled provisions from the wareroom out to the bed of the creaking buckboard.

I sure would like me a doll someday, Lottie confided, folding the page for Mike to see.

The woman paused and studied first the page and then the girl, the latter's face tanned and earnest under the tilt of her cowboy hat.

Honey, you'll have a real live doll soon enough.

Lottie smiled and Mike smiled in reply, until the girl's eyes returned to the page and the woman's smile faded quickly and altogether.

They sat that way in silence, the woman furtively examining the girl and the girl examining with unguarded wonder the offerings of Montgomery and Ward.

We certainly are lucky that you and Jimmy checked on those sheep.

Yes, ma'am. Lottie licked a finger to turn the page. Jim says he thinks somethin musta scared 'em off. Like maybe they seen a panther or somethin. Jim says you can't trust them Injuns for nothin.

Let's go! called a voice from downstairs, and Lottie returned the catalog to the table.

Thank you for the picnic, Mrs. Goulding. The girl's eyes rolled upward. And for the hat.

Mike set her knitting aside. You take care of yourself out there. And if there's trouble, you get to Mary Lee, understand?

Yes, ma'am.

You tell her I said so.

All right.

You promise?

I promise.

And keep that sun off your head. And don't overdo yourself, or smoke or drink any alcohol.

Yes, ma'am. You sound like my mama.

The woman picked up her knitting. You go on now, she said, waving the girl off with a hand. Don't keep your man down there waiting.

The gypsy sheep spent the rest of that summer in the bottleneck canyon, where the grass was high and the water abundant, and where the towering cliffs of the mesa gave shelter both from wind and beating sun. The spring lambs thrived and fattened, and Lottie hailed them each by name as she led them in child games of her own devising, laughing and telling them that she would soon be fattest of them all.

The days were long and languid as she and Palmer napped in the shade of the cottonwoods, or lay in the water pink and naked, or combed the canyon floor like sleepwalkers searching for potsherds and Stone Age arrowheads. They climbed among red boulders to read there, scratched in black varnish, the ancient missives of an ancient people: the spirals and squiggles, the tracks of animals, the effigies of goats and of men with heads of birds,
their meanings lost to modern man by the endless passage of time. They played at rummy and at pitch, and they ate from the wagon, and they slept in the company of Cassiopeia, and under the watchful eye of Vega.

If I'd known sheepherdin was this easy, Palmer told her on one such night of starry repose, I'd of quit cows and roosters years ago.

But the days were growing shorter, and the sun flatter, as the angle of the shadows on the sheltered bed ground tilted inexorably toward the coming equinox. And thus Palmer, turning to survey the old line shack and its copse golden cottonwoods, announced his plans for a dugout.

What all for?

On account of winter, that's what. In case you ain't heard, it snows around here.

But what about Mr. Oliver?

What about him?

Ain't this his land?

Palmer crouched and snatched the stem from his mouth. Hell, no. He's maybe got grazin rights, but this here is public domain, and you and me is the public same as anyone else. Anybody can live out here that's got a mind to.

Are you sure?

Course I'm sure. Why, we could build right next to the old man's shack if we took a notion. Palmer stood again, regarding the cabin. Wouldn't that be a hoot? We could hang us a big ol' sign out front. He framed a square with thumbs and fingers. Posey's Hideout.

She giggled. Keep Out.

No Lawmen Welcome.

This Means You.

Asses Kicked, Inquire Within.

She lay back and laughed, and he squatted beside her and rested his hand on her belly where her shirt rode up, and where the sun shone warm, and where his hand was like some nut-brown flaw on purest alabaster.

It's got like a sourdough biscuit, he said in wonder.

She rested her hand on his.

More like the whole loaf, she replied.

Lottie followed the tracks from the dead lamb up into a side draw, only to lose them there amid rock and rubble. The lamb was called Emily, and her mother stood bleating over its torn and twisted carcass, indignant at the impassive ruminations of her nearby bandmates.

I'll be right back, mama, don't you worry, Lottie assured the forlorn ewe as she hurried off in search of Palmer.

She found him at his excavation, shirtless despite the chill, his hands composed on the handle of his shovel. She started to speak but stopped when she followed his gaze to the canyon mouth, where three figures on horseback were skylit at the edge of the river gorge.

Go on to the tent, he told her.

Who is it?

I don't know, but I can guess.

The men came forward and reined their horses at the point of the escarpment where the canyon opened wide. They clustered again to confer. One of them pointed, and Lottie turned to see with a stranger's eye the spectacle of fifteen hundred hungry sheep scattered in bands and bunches across the beaten and stubbled grassland.

The men came on at a lope.

What should we do? Lottie asked, but Palmer only slipped into his shirt, his eyes still on the riders.

The riders halted again at the line shack, where the eldest of them dropped heavily from his saddle and handed off his reins and approached like a gathering storm to the clash and clang of jingle spurs. A huge man, slab-faced, with a low brow and small eyes burning over a heavy, gray mustache. He was, Lottie noted, the smallest of the three.

What in God's name, the old man sputtered, the sweep of his arm completing the indictment, the gesture encompassing the fresh excavation and the felled timbers beside it and the trampled grassland beyond.

Afternoon, was Palmer's reply, calm as a shopkeeper. Prime day for a ride.

The man's face reddened. Listen, you! I'll give you ten minutes to get yourself packed and get these goddamn sheep movin off my range. After that, we'll start layin in mutton.

This last pronouncement was punctuated by the sound of a shell levering onto the Winchester rifle that the middle rider held upright, the stock butt resting on his thigh.

Palmer stood his ground. No, mister, you listen to me. You show us a legal paper on this range, and we'll move them sheep. But until then, we aim to do just like we're doin, and if you don't like it, you can piss up a goddamn rope.

The old man was about to respond when he noticed Lottie or, rather, noticed her condition.

He removed his hat.

Son, the old man said, extracting a pocket watch from his vest. I don't know who you are or what it is you think you're doing,
but I got two hundred head comin in on the trail in less than two hours, and those sheep are down to eight minutes.

Palmer pitched the shovel. He stepped toward the man, but the man did not budge, and they stood that way, face-to-face in mismatched apposition.

The rider with the rifle turned to the youngest man and snickered.

Less you got a paper on this range, Palmer repeated, them sheep ain't goin nowheres.

The man replaced his watch and half-turned to the riders.

Harrison.

The mounted gunman shouldered the rifle and took aim at the nearest of the lambs.

Wait! Don't!

Lottie rushed forward, into the line of fire. The rifleman looked over his gunsight, and his father turned once again to Palmer.

I'd say it's your call, sonny.

Palmer darkened. He grabbed Lottie by the arm and pulled her, stumbling, toward their makeshift corral, where, under the watchful eyes of three Mormon generations, he cursed and kicked and hitched the big Appaloosa to the buckboard.

There played out, in the weeks that followed, a game of cat and mouse. Whenever the cattlemen would quit the line shack for the comfort of their Blanding homes, Palmer and Lottie would drive the sheep back through the bottleneck, there to graze and water thirstily among the lowing Seeps Ranch angus.

When they were lucky, the sheep were out of the canyon and back on the open range by the time the cattleman returned. When they were not, trouble followed.

Oliver threatened the sheep, and he threatened Palmer, and he rode his big bay walking horse into Monument Valley to personally comfort Harry Goulding. He lodged a formal complaint at the county seat in Monticello. And, true to his former calling, he took to wearing his old sidearm, a single-action Colt revolver, in a tie-down leather holster.

Palmer divided his time between helping Lottie with the sheep and working alone on the dugout; between their roving camp outside the canyon and their future home within. He too traveled to Monticello, a three-day pilgrimage on horseback to file his own claim on the canyon. He too began carrying his pistol for the other man to see.

Goulding first sought allies among the Mormon stockmen of the area, and finding none, he traveled to Monticello to plead his case to the authorities, citing the hardship attendant to his forced vacation of the Strip. He carried chuck and gear and updates to Palmer and Lottie, urging them to do what they could to avoid further conflict, but insisting they do what was necessary to keep the flock alive.

Lottie, for her part, tended sheep. She rose before dawn to fix breakfast, and at first light she moved the bleating flock to what little browse there was over the next hillock, beyond the next arroyo. With the sheep thus bedded, she returned to break their camp and move the buckboard wagon. Then, at long day's end, in the violet light of dusk, she gathered wood and built their fire and set up camp again.

The forage in the Garden of the Gods, thin even in summer, grew scarcer still as the flock's migration in and among the buttes and spires doubled back upon itself. By mid-October the grass was all but gone, and the greasewood and the shadscale all but
stripped, and the incessant bleating of the lambs took on a new and poignant urgency.

As old man Oliver despised the sheep, and the shepherd, so he pitied the girl, and under one guise or another would ride out to watch her, small on the vast horizon, driving her buckboard or waddling after her charges, ripe with child and as helpless looking in that desolate rockscape as the feeble lambs she tended.

And so it was that, on a cold and moonless evening in early November, the old sheriff appeared without warning at their campsite.

They'd heard no hoofbeats, yet there he sat astride the walker, his collar upturned, horse and rider sudden and rippling in the orange fireglow. Palmer, oblivious to the apparition, dropped his plate when the old man finally spoke.

I see you eat about like you build.

Palmer scrambled to his feet, his eyes moving to the rifle stowed in the buckboard.

There's some would say it's customary to offer a night visitor some coffee.

What do you want? We ain't done nothin.

Oliver stood down from his walking horse, leather creaking and spurs chiming, the eyes of the animal glowing beside him like a pair of stolen embers. He brushed past Palmer and sat on the ground where Lottie sat, his canvas duster fanning like a carriage robe beneath him, his Colt pistol winking in the firelight.

Here, Lottie said as she leaned for the coffeepot. That's a clean cup right there.

Much obliged, the old man said as Lottie poured. There are few things in this world to top the smell of fresh-made coffee over a wood fire.

He held the cup with both hands. You're gonna give me a sore neck like that, he said without looking at Palmer, and after a moment, Palmer sat.

Somewhere beyond the firelight, a lone coyote cried, ragged and plaintive, and the sheep around them stirred. The horse turned its head; two red eyes becoming one, then none, then two again.

Frost this morning, Oliver spoke into his cup. Expect you noticed that. Snow soon, the Lord willing. His chin lifted slightly. Even if you get a roof over that thing, you'll freeze come Christmas. That ain't a suitable shelter, son, that's just a fact. And as for living out here, I've seen grown steer froze to the ground in open country like this.

I reckon we'll make it, thank you very much.

Oliver's eyes held on Palmer where he sat cross-legged on the ground. Diminished, somehow, under the bigger man's gaze.

Maybe you will and maybe you won't. Far as you're concerned, I can't say that I care. But I can guarantee one thing, and that's this right here. You keep on like you're doing, and you'll lose this baby here.

It must be a comfort, Palmer sneered, knowin all there is to know.

The old man nodde, his hat brim, underlit by the fire, a burnished crown of light.

The good Lord has blessed me with seven children and sixty-three grandchildren. Over fifty great-grandchildren by my last count. I reckon I know a thing or two about childbirth.