Painted Horses (20 page)

They studied the glyphs before them in silence for a spell, wandering past one another and pausing and then moving on to pass again. Many of the figures had been washed and faded by time into mere shadows, suggestions of shapes and symbols, and some were overlapped one atop another and obscured even further. But after awhile Catherine formed the first vague image of who these people were, imagined them climbing into the cave from the valley floor with their coarse pigments and their torches, imagined a different tribe a thousand years later making the same steep climb. Other visions. Other symbols.

She swung her pack to the dirt floor of the shelter and undid the buckles. She pulled the camera free and set the aperture for the shadowy light of the cave. She thought she understood now how the camera worked and she brought the camera to her eye, gave a start at the image she saw through the lens. Splayed, painted fingers of a human hand.

She pushed the shutter release. The gears inside whirred to life.

John H

II

Sometimes he sees horses in the distance, running on the plains before drovers on their own soaring mounts, manes and tails flowing like fire. Sometimes he rides over a lip in the land and startles a wild herd into flight, the horses spooky and skittish as birds. And sometimes, with the wind right and his wits in order, he catches them undetected while they graze. He bellies as close as he can and simply watches.

They are like the nation itself a mixed-breed bunch, derived and descended from scattered Indian ponies, escaped cavalry stock from the remount at Fort Keogh (once John H spies a grizzled, gray-flecked old bay, the letters
US
ghostlike beneath her hip), Percherons stolen from the honyocker’s plow and cow horses from the rancher’s remuda. Every color under the sun. They are not fine limbed and leggy like the thoroughbreds he grew up with but they are tested by weather, selected by climate. Tough as a scar.

He trails sheep that first spring with Jean Bakar Arietta, in the cinder cones and red scoria of the Powder River badlands. John H is little interested in the bleating, milling sheep but he loves the sapphire sky, the smell of sage and damp stone after a rain, the raw and endless ground.

Jean Bakar shepherds for the Meyer outfit out of Miles City. He makes it to town only twice each year so for months nobody realizes the old man has adopted an understudy.

In June the shearers come. A company foreman rides out and locates Jean Bakar’s camp in the desert west of Ismay. John H sees him coming on a buckskin quarter horse, sees the holstered revolver and fears he has been tracked even here. He bolts for the wagon, knocking over a stack of clean tin plates.

Jean Bakar stands from the fire, his slim little shepherd dog springing from the shade with her ears pricked. He speaks to her in Basque, then sticks his head inside the wagon box. The boy is on the front bunk, poised to dart through the driving window.

“What are you doing?”

“Rider coming.”

Jean Bakar withdraws and looks around, sees the foreman nearly to them. He peers back inside and holds his hands in the air, a show of rhetorical exaggeration.

“Might be coming for me.”

“Ten riders, that you worry about. Not this one rider. Come out here, please.”

John H gives a resolute shake of the head.

“Trust me, rubio.”

John H looks at him intently. Those quiet brown eyes, clear as amber, solid as the side of a mountain. He climbs down from the bunk.

Two days later they drive the sheep to the ranch. Jean Bakar is summoned to the offices. John H sits in the kitchen with a piece of pie in front of him, an audience of giddy little girls in the doorway. He is jittery as a bat and he barely tests the pie. From outside he hears muffled swearing, a male voice at wit’s end, the thump and drum of an obstinate horse. Thwack of coiled rope.

Soon the walls and the low ceiling are more than he can bear. He has not been in a room without wheels in months. He pushes back the chair and strides for the back entry. Behind him the little girls giggle at his tattered shoes, the cuffs of his pant legs too short by an inch or more. The screen door bangs shut behind him.

Most of the hands Basque or not are down at the sheep pens, but close to the barn a single wrangler pits himself against a piebald horse in a small corral. The horse is not especially large, perhaps fourteen hands, but feisty and quick as a cat. The wrangler has a saddle on the ground, hobbles and a burlap sack tucked through the back of his belt. A lariat whirls in his hand.

A snubbing post stands like a mile marker in the center and horse and man circle this post like two equal but opposite hunters around the same fallen prey. The horse eyes the lariat, seems to know not to give the man a clear throw.

Twice the wrangler pitches his loop, and twice the horse runs clear. The wrangler mutters and reels his rope and whirls again. He does not acknowledge the presence of the boy at the rail.

The wrangler narrows the gap between himself and the snubbing post, and the horse turns slightly away. John H can smell ammonia, hear the dim bleat of sheep in the distance. The man moves to the right, gathers his loop and fishes the burlap from his belt. He lunges and snaps the sack at the horse’s face, and the horse shies and bolts for the fence, spies the boy and bolts the other direction.

So the wrangler did know he was there.

The loop floats over the horse’s head, wobbles like a bubble on the breeze. The mustang feels the scratch of the rope and twists and avoids it again, this time by a hair. The wrangler throws a shouting fit, kicking dirt and flinging his hat on the ground.

Laughter erupts behind John H and he jumps like a pinched girl.

“Easy, sonny. Stay in your skin. Come on out, Clive. Let that bronc simmer down.”

Clive clamps his hat back and lugs saddle and rope to the side. He straddles the rail, sweat rolling from his temples. The horse peers again around the snubbing post.

“That’s a live one.”

“Told you she would be.” The ranch manager looks down at John H. “I prefer a little fire.”

John H nods.

“Your benefactor tells me you got no folks. That how it is?”

“Near enough.”

“Tells me you’re some hand with horses yourself.”

John H says nothing.

“Know anything about cow horses?”

John H shakes his head. “Thoroughbreds. Mostly.”

The wrangler snorts.

The manager shoots him a look, then studies the piebald mare. “Pound for pound, a few weeks in this country and that little paint’d run a thoroughbred underground.”

“Probably so.”

“Bakar wants to keep you with him. Not sure I can let him.”

John H stays silent.

“Reckon he likes the notion of having a son around. Can’t say I blame him. I’ve put in quite some effort for a son myself. So far what I’ve managed to throw is a whole passel of daughters. A regular Henry the Eighth.”

Clive laughs from the fence.

“How old are you, exactly?”

“Sixteen this fall,” John H lies.

“That a fact.” The man seems amused but certainly not hoodwinked. “Small for your age. Don’t let it worry you none. You’ll fill out. Thing about Bakar, now—he ain’t getting any younger. I’m half tempted to let him take you along.”

John H looks at him. “You don’t have to pay me.”

“Yeah, I know that. For your own edification, you don’t want to toss that out this early in the bargaining. Play a little closer to the vest. Thing is, even if I don’t salary you, I’ve still gotta feed you. I know Bakar’s some able to rustle grub in the sticks, but staples is staples. There’s bread for one and there’s bread for two, and what there ain’t in life is any kind of a free lunch.

“What’s more there’s men coming off the rails in Miles every day looking for work, full-growed men and boys not much older but a damn sight more filled out than you are. When they come around I generally point ’em to the mines over in Butte, or the cannery in Bozeman.”

He holds up his hands, a gesture of such-is-life futility.

“Look. I don’t mind a risk, but I need to know you’re some kind of asset. A quick study at the minimum. We’ll be shearing for a few days, before the herders head back out to pasture. I’ll give you that time to prove yourself. Fair enough?”

“What about that mare in there.”

The manager had assumed they were finished and he’d turned to leave but now he stops short. The horse in question has never ceased watching them, the post still between them. She bats an ear at the bawling sheep, and turns it forward again. “What about her?”

“Wouldn’t mind working with her. See if I can gentle her down.”

“Gentle her down. And how much time you figure to waste on that?”

John H lifts one shoulder. “Long as it takes. Overnight, anyway.”

Clive snorts again, snorts as though he has truly heard it all.

The manager shakes his head. “You got sand. I’ll give you that.”

“Say I do it. What then.”

“Son if you could tame a wild mare in one day I doubt very highly you’d be standing in my barnyard.”

“Say I tame her.”

“All right, say you do. Then I will put you on salary.”

John H wiggles through the rails and sits in the dirt in the corral. “I need a tub of water, and a rope. Not a stiff one like a lariat, just a soft length of rope.”

“A tub of water.”

Though the mare eyes him nervously John H looks not at the horse but at the horizon, at the angular bench of red earth interrupting the sky to the north. “There’s no trough in this pen. I need something she can drink from.”

The two men stare at this boy for a bit, each contemplating the unspoken absurdity they are not simply witnessing but have somehow become accomplice to. Finally the manager seals their fate. “Well, go on.”

Clive gives him a look. “Go on and what?”

“Go on and fetch him his water.”

The kid hasn’t moved much by suppertime. Jean Bakar brings him a plate of food, a slab of beefsteak covered in a low mound of kidney beans, pickled beets the color of a deer’s heart fanned like a rind on one side. A battered galvanized tub sits inside the corral, situated so the tub, the kid, and the horse form the points of a triangle.

The horse has relaxed her guard in the previous hours, assumed a posture in part of curiosity. Several times she has called out loudly for others of her kind, her cry brassy and desperate. The call has not been returned. She has not ventured to the water though she knows it’s there. She will look away, and always look back to the boy.

Jean Bakar asks if he should push the plate over with a stick. At this new commotion the mare once again squares off behind the snubbing post.

John H stands and lets the blood come to his feet. He rubs his knee, kinks and unkinks his leg. He takes the plate through the rails, his first fresh beef in a coon’s age. When he walks across the pen to the water tub he can feel the mare’s eyes upon him, tracking him across the lot. He dips one hand into the tub and he drinks.

With the solstice only a few weeks away the sun is still hours from setting, the evening bearing yet the sharp heat of afternoon. He looks at Jean Bakar as he walks back to his station. “Can I have my blanket?”

In the new light of morning Clive walks down to the corral, sloshes hot coffee over his fingers and with a wince and an oath turns and heads back for the offices.

The manager ambles down. John H stands by the piebald mare, his length of rope fashioned into a hackamore, which now resides on the horse’s head. He holds the headstall beneath the mare’s chin with one hand, the trailing rope with the other. The horse flares at the sight of the man, and the boy calms her with his voice.

“Well,” says the manager. “I don’t see no saddle on her.”

“Tame,” says the boy.

“How’s that?”

“You said tame. Nobody said saddled.”

The manager stands on the lower rail and crosses his arms on the upper, and from here looks down on the discarded heap of the kid’s blanket, the flat spot in the soil where he spent much of the night. He spies something else—scratchings in the smoothed-out earth, the curved backs and high heads of horses. Not simple doodlings but closer to proper likenesses. He says, “You got me there, sonny.”

A day later in Miles City John H receives two new sets of clothes at a dry-goods store, crisp indigo dungarees and long-sleeved work shirts and a pair of properly fitted eight-eyed lacers for his feet. A straw hat for the summer sun. With this accomplished Jean Bakar turns him loose on the corner of Main and Seventh and departs for an hour on his own errands.

John H looks down the buildings with their antique fronts and hitching rails, saddled horses tethered here and there between parked Reos and Model-T Fords and one gigantic Packard sedan, gleaming like the eye in a jeweler’s loupe.

John H wanders a half block toward the green line of the river, the concrete sidewalk foreign beneath the soles of his stiff new boots. A brick building across the road catches his eye, its twin upper windows gaping above the wide lip of an awning. The letters
AL. FURSTNOW’S SADDLERY
. The Packard glides by and he crosses.