Shortgrass Song (24 page)

Buster and Caleb, however, indulged in all the fancy mitering and finish work they thought they could get away with. They carved out letters to spell
Holcomb
and nailed them above the depot door. They even put a widow's walk on top so they could watch for the smoke of the locomotives when the trains started running. The depot lacked only a few coats of paint and an inclined loading chute for the Texas longhorns Ab was running on his ranch.

Ab had bought five hundred heifers and cows, some already bred, from Oliver Loving after the war. Loving and Charles Goodnight had herded the longhorns all the way from Texas. The Texas beeves thrived on the free grass in Monument Park. They also killed almost every one of the old oxen and shorthorns Ab had brought from Missouri, not to mention Buster's milk cow. The Texas cattle carried a sickness known as Texas fever that would kill almost any bovine but a longhorn. It gave Ab yet another good reason to despise Texans.

Trail herds occasionally came up the Monument, along what had become known as the Goodnight-Loving Trail. Ab hated to see their herds linger on the free grass, and he hurried them along in every way he could. The hated Texas drovers did keep Ab supplied with cowhands, however. He had little trouble hiring them away from the trail herds when he needed them. He didn't like them because they were Texans, but he didn't mind using them to homestead the creek for him, knowing he could buy them out and fire them as soon as they proved up.

And actually he seldom had to buy any of the boys out. He had established a store on the ranch and given all the hands credit. The boys could buy grub, ropes, tack, and clothing through the ranch store. By the time each man proved up on his homestead after five years, he was usually so deep in debt to the store that he owed the land to his employer. Ab figured the Texans deserved what he dealt them for what they had done to his leg at Pigeon's Ranch, even though none of his cowboys had taken part personally in the fighting there.

Javier didn't like the Texans much either. They were good cowboys, but they took all the beauty out of the work. They were “hard and fast” men who tied the ends of their short ropes to their saddle horns, instead of taking dallies the way Javier did. They threw a variety of loops, but few of them cared for the flourishes Javier made with his noose. To his great sorrow, even Matthew and Pete had gone over to the Texas style of roping.

About noon, Ab rode old Pard to the depot to check on the carpenters' progress. His wooden leg clacked around on the hardwood floors for a few minutes, then he shouted, “Buster, you and Caleb better go get cleaned up. Matthew's bringing that little gal to supper this evening, and I guess we ought to try looking civilized.”

He went up to the widow's walk before leaving and looked back toward the ranch. He could see the ridge log of his cabin from there. The graded bed of the Denver and Rio Grande snaked across the free-grass country to the north, ribbed with crossties and double-spined with steel rails. Somewhere out of sight to the south, the crews were still laying tracks at the rate of a mile a day.

Ab's ranching and farming interests had enjoyed moderate growth since the end of the war, but he knew the railroad would make him even more prosperous. He had sold cattle from Pueblo to Denver, and beyond. The gold mines, the Indian agencies, and the railroad construction crews had provided a steady market; the U.S. Army forts preferred to buy their beef from a former Union hero rather than a bunch of beaten Confederates up from Texas. Whatever surplus Ab had that he couldn't sell in Colorado, he had Javier, Matthew, Pete, and the hired hands herd to the cow towns in Kansas. But with the Denver and Rio Grande building right past Holcomb Ranch, he would no longer have to drive cattle across the plains. He could simply load them at the depot and be done with them.

The Denver and Rio Grande had its critics, but Ab was not one of them. He had confidence in the little locomotives that would run on the narrow-gauge tracks. He didn't know squat about railroading, but he knew of William Jackson Palmer, founder of the D & RG. Palmer was a former Union general and resident of Pennsylvania, a man of religion and an advocate of temperance. Ab was proud to have a station on General Palmer's road.

The railroad would probably bring more homesteaders to the Front Range, but Ab had found ways of keeping the nesters out of Monument Park. His cowboys had already proved up or filed on enough quarter sections to reach six miles up the creek. Many of them were due to prove up within the year, with a little help from witnesses who would bend the truth for them at the land office and swear that the cowboys had lived on and cultivated their homesteads for the duration. As he found reasons to fire those who proved up, and hired new men to take their places, Ab would gain control of more creek frontage, until he owned the whole of Monument Creek above his cabin.

It was a slow process, but Ab thought he could keep directing the homesteaders elsewhere until he tied up all the land along the Monument. He had taken on the title of Absalom Holcomb, Land Locator, and found it astounding that homesteaders would actually pay him to steer them clear of the best farming land along Monument Creek. As one of the earliest settlers in the region, and an erstwhile farmer, he was supposed to know all the best farm sites. He guided the settlers to farmsteads on Camp, Bear, and Cheyenne creeks, and even along the Monument, downstream of his ranch. But he kept them away from Monument Park above his cabin.

After Ab climbed down from the widow's walk and rode back to the ranch, Buster and Caleb loaded their carpentry tools into the buckboard and followed. The drive back to the cabin led them over a regular mat of browning grass. It had been a good year for rain, and all the old buffalo wallows were brimming with water. Hand-cut hay stood in stacks as high as houses. The rye and fall wheat were going to produce bumper harvests, and the corn cribs were jammed with full-kerneled cobs.

Ab claimed the climate was getting “more seasonable” as more settlers established farms. He believed the crops themselves caused the rain that sustained them. But Buster was silently cautious in his optimism. Old Chief Long Fingers had told him of the great circles of the plains and mountains. Circles of time, life, weather. He thought it possible that the year of 1871 had simply passed through the wettest curve of the rain circle.

“Come over to my house after you wash up,” Buster said as Caleb jumped out of the wagon, “and we'll tune everything up for tonight.”

“All right,” Caleb said. He went into the cabin, got his best pair of pants and his newest shirt, and walked up to the irrigation flume to bathe. He opened the sluice gate enough to let the water run about a foot deep. He stripped and leapt into the flow, bracing himself against the cold, gripping the sides of the flume so he wouldn't slip along the bottom and get splinters in his butt. The irrigation ditches ran near enough to the cabin to fill a washtub, but he preferred to bathe in the gushing water of the flume, where he could lie back and let the current do all the work. When he finished his bath, he closed the sluice gate and sat in the flume until the sun dried him. Then he got dressed.

The wooden flume began at the reservoir on Javier's quarter section. Caleb followed it downstream until it reached the top of the cutbank and emptied into an irrigation ditch on his father's homestead. The ditch led near the cabin, where Caleb veered from it, passed Buster's wildflower garden, walked under the limbs of the young cottonwoods, and went into the cabin to throw his dirty clothes in a pile at the foot of his bed.

He went back outside, passed his mother's grave, and rejoined the irrigation ditch between two fields of waving wheat. Crimson paintbrushes bloomed along one stretch of the ditch where Buster had scattered their seeds. He jumped the morning glory vines that climbed the fence rails bordering Buster's claim. The ditch branched into laterals that fed a thirty-acre truck patch. Buster could grow enough there to get through the dry years, as long as it didn't get so dry that the creek quit running.

Buster always washed up with warm water and lye soap outside the one-room cabin on his homestead. When Caleb got there, he found the tub emptied and resting upside down on the ground, and heard fiddle music coming from the open cabin door.

“Come on in,” Buster said, when Caleb stuck his head through.

“‘Turkey in the Straw,'” Caleb suggested.

Buster's cabin stood on bare ground, but he had hauled several loads of sawdust from Colorado City to spread across the floor. He had sewn a bunch of burlap bags together, stretched them over the sawdust, pegged them to the ground around the inside walls, and made a fine carpet of them. He didn't even have to sweep because dirt and dust filtered through the burlap and into the saw-dust.

There was just enough room inside for the two pine bedsteads strung with rope, a table and chairs, a cook-stove set on a flagstone foundation, and shelves where Buster kept his food, clothes, and personal possessions.

One of the shelves held a number of cloth tobacco pouches the cowboys had emptied and thrown away. In the little drawstring pouches, Buster kept different varieties of wildflower seeds, which he planted around his cabin and in the garden Ab made him keep up to supply Ella's grave with color. He had seeds in such variety that blooms opened from April to November in the garden, along the irrigation ditch, and all around his house.

Caleb entered the cabin and sat on the bunk he often slept in when he stayed too late at night practicing songs with Buster. “What do you think she'll be like?” he asked, tapping his foot to “Turkey in the Straw.”

Buster lifted the bow from the strings. “Who? Matthew's gal? Well, I gather she'll be pretty. Matthew has a weakness for the pretty ones. And I reckon she'll be stuck-up—rich gal like that. What do you think?”

“I guess she'll have to be about as crazy as a coot to want to marry that hardhead,” Caleb said.

Buster laughed, propped the fiddle up in its open case, and tightened the horsehairs on the bow a couple of turns. “Go out to the wagon and get that ripsaw for me.”

“What for?”

“Just go get it. I want to show you something.”

Caleb went out to the wagon and brought back the saw.

“Watchin' you rip those boards today made me remember somethin' I learned a long time ago,” Buster said, taking the tool. He held the saw handle between his knees, with the sawteeth pointing in toward him, and grabbed the end of the blade in his left hand. He took the fiddle bow in his right hand, stroked it against the straight back of the steel blade, and arched the blade with the thumb and fingers of his left hand.

The saw began to sing. It sang higher when Buster bent the blade in a tighter arch, and lower when he curved it less. Its voice wavered like a tortured soul of the spirit world when he wobbled the vibrating steel. It sang in a tone more lonesome than the most distant wolf howling on the darkest night, and more sorrowful than the coldest winter wind whipping down a smokeless chimney.

However doleful the saw sang, though, it was still music, and music made Caleb smile. He shivered with the weird vibrations as the saw moaned “Come to the Bower.”

Pete's freshly polished boots stepped onto the burlap carpet. “What in the world is that sound?”

“Buster's playing' a ripsaw,” Caleb said over the trembling voice of the musical tool.

Pete eyed the saw with disbelief. “Well, I'll be danged. I would have never guessed. It sounded just like a cross-cut saw.” He elbowed Caleb and listened to the saw wail as if every stroke of the fiddle bow pained it like a hot iron.

Javier entered the little cabin and took off his sombrero.
“¡Válgame Dios!”
he said. “That music, it makes my heart like a bullet.” He clutched his shirt in the V of his vest.

Buster ended the tune with a long, lonesome note that climbed two octaves and quavered to death on its way to the third.

“I swear, Buster,” Caleb said, “I believe you could make a sledgehammer play if you touched that fiddle bow to it.”

“Y'all had the dogs howlin' all the way over to the bunkhouse.” Sam Dugan, the new ranch hand, followed his voice into the cabin. “What was that god-awful racket, anyhow?”

“Buster burned hisself pissing up the stovepipe,” Javier suggested with a ribald grin.

“Sounded like it.” Sam leaned his lanky body against the doorframe and stuck his thumbs under his belt. “What are y'all doin' sittin' around here. There's a lady comin' to the ranch, ain't there? Shouldn't we be shovelin' up all the horseshit or somethin'?”

“What for?” Javier asked. “Matthew is going to bring her here in a surrey. She is going to have to look at a horse's ass all the way here anyway.”

“Two horses' asses, countin' Matthew,” Caleb said.

Sam sat down on Buster's handmade table and seemed not to care that it creaked under his weight. “I guess y'all don't appreciate the fairer sex the way I do. I'd have shoveled up all the horseshit for her. At least that around the house that she might step in.”

“Hasn't anybody showed you where the shovels are?” Pete asked.

Buster put the ripsaw aside and grabbed his fiddle. “Get that guitar out and we'll tune up,” he said to Caleb.

As they plucked the strings and adjusted the tuning keys, Sam said, “Buster, the fellers tell me you escaped as a slave.”

Buster glanced and nodded.

“They say you rode off to the Indian Territory to rescue one of these boys.”

“It was Caleb,” Pete said. “The Comanche had him.”

“I want you to tell me about all of that sometime,” Sam said.

“That high E is still flat,” Buster said to Caleb. He looked at Sam. “What for?”

“Well, I got me an idea. I've been punchin' cows too long. I'm gittin' so bowleggedy I couldn't stop a pig in a ditch. I've decided I'm gonna make a writer.”