Shortgrass Song (30 page)

Some kind soul carried him toward the door so he could get some air. The night closed around him, and he seemed to sail out into it. He flew from the saloon porch, tunelessly, fearlessly, until a wall of ice slammed against him.

Caleb tried to breathe but sucked in only freezing water. He lunged up from the creek, gasping for air. Above the rush of the stream he could hear the laughter. He saw the porch above him, lined with jeering miners. He coughed and heaved for breath until, suddenly, all the whiskey in his stomach came out. The acid smell of his own vomit made him heave again and again. He pulled himself to his hands and knees, shivering in the shallow creek, and threw up before the spectators.

“Drinks on the fiddler!” someone said.

Caleb was just grateful that they left him alone and went back into the saloon. He didn't care if they spent all the money in his hat. He dragged himself to the edge of the stream across from the saloon, where his stomach wrenched again, though it had nothing more to get out. He couldn't tell how long he sat there. Occasionally someone walked by and cussed or laughed at him. He was too weak to look at them. He woke himself up with his own shivering.

Finally two men picked him up by the arms. He stumbled across the stream, his boots full of water.

“Let's cover him up under the trestle and let him sleep it off,” Joe's voice said.

“Didn't I tell him to go easy on that nose paint?” Sonny asked.

*   *   *

When daylight woke Caleb, his head ached in a place he had never felt pain in before. Milt Starling was shouting from the front porch for the men to go to work. Sonny pulled the blanket off, sat Caleb up, and waved a cup of coffee in his face. The boy took his aching head in his hands and felt a retch coming on. He pushed Sonny aside, stumbled to the creek, and stuck his head in the water.

“Here,” Sonny said, pulling him to his feet. “Drink the coffee. I don't care if you want to or not. Drink it. The best thing for you is to eat breakfast and go to work. I don't care how much you hurt. You better learn that no boss is gonna give you time off to sober up.”

“Hey, boy,” Milt said, coming out of the saloon again, “what do you mean sleepin' to this hour? Now your breakfast is cold. You shouldn't have drank so much neck oil last night.”

Caleb cradled his cup of coffee and started slowly toward the porch. “You were the one that brought it to me,” he muttered.

Old Milt assumed his grandmotherly pose. “Oh, was it I, boy?” he said apologetically. Then he leaned toward Caleb and yelled in his ear. “Was it also I who took up the glass, opened your mouth, and poured it down your gullet?”

“You had 'em throw me in the creek!”

“Better you air your paunch there than on my floor! Now go eat your breakfast. There's lots of fat bloody bacon and scrambled eggs, cooked just the way you like 'em, sort of gooey and shakylike. Try to make it set.”

The breakfast didn't set, and a queasy feeling stayed with Caleb all morning as he sawed the old sluice-box lumber into stove wood. He thanked God for North Clear Creek. He could dip his bandanna there and sop it across his brow to relieve some of the pain.

When the wood had burned down in the stove, Milt clanged a bucket and a shovel down on the porch and told Caleb to empty the ashes from the stove and bring them to the edge of the porch in the bucket. “And don't spill a jigger of it on the floor.”

As he followed the instructions, Caleb noticed Milt limping along toward the porch with a prospecting pan in one hand.

“Over here,” the old man said when Caleb brought the ashes out. “Set 'em down beside me.”

Milt sat on the porch with his feet on the step that led into the water. Caleb had wondered about that step. Since last night he had assumed it existed to aid miners in throwing drunks into the creek. But Milt made another use of it. With his feet on the step, the old man could easily reach the water with his prospecting pan. He shook some ashes into the pan, let some water pour into it, and began washing the ashes over the rim of the pan.

Caleb stood and watched for a moment. A curious thing happened. Old Milt began to smile.

“What are you doin'?” Caleb asked.

“What does it look like I'm doin'? I'm pannin' for gold. I used to prospect for my wages, you know. Back in Californee. Them was the days, boy. A man could make a hundred a day with just a pan and a shovel.” The ashes swirled in the water like clouds in his own little universe. “Grass Valley to Mariposa. I must have washed a fortune in dust and nuggets from the dirt.” He dumped some more ashes into the pan. “I've never seen a strike like Californee, and I never will again to the day my soul roars up the flumes. Now it's all stamp mills and rebellious ores.”

“But you're just pannin' ashes,” Caleb said.

Milt washed the last wisps of ash over the rim of his pan. “The cracks in them old sluice boxes we've been burnin' is full of gold dust. It ain't hardly worth the time it takes to wash it, but it reminds me of Californee.”

Caleb leaned over Old Milt's shoulder as he pushed the gold dust out of the pan and into his pouch. It hardly looked like gold to him at all. It had no glint or glow to it. It looked like fine sand of a rich dark color.

“‘In the days of old, the days of gold, how often I repine,'” the old man sang, gravel-voiced and monotoned. “‘For the days of old, when we dug up the gold, in the days of '49.' There's a song for you to learn, boy.” Milt looked up and saw the expression of wonder on Caleb's face. With a sudden motion he filled his pan with water and splashed it on the fiddler.

“Hey, what…”

“Fight it, boy,” Milt shouted.

“Fight what?”

“You've got the prospectin' fever, boy. The grip of the color's got you!”

“No it hasn't!”

“Don't let it get you, boy! It'll suck your pride down a prospect hole. It'll leave your soul in a slag heap. I've seen boys like you grow old and die muckin' out a barren drift. I've seen 'em strike it rich and blow it overnight. Let them others root in the dirt for it, son. You mine it from their pockets. That fiddle music's your lode. You'll wash more dust with your hat turned up in a saloon than ever you will with a pan by the crick.”

“I never aimed to prospect anyhow,” Caleb said, drying his face on his shirttail. “I'm huntin' ranch work.”

“That's the spirit, boy! Don't let the prospectin' fever get you. And when you find your ranch, you'll have Old Milt to thank for it, too. Now get back to that stove. I've a mind to pan today.”

*   *   *

But Caleb's vision of ranch life continued to elude him. No cattle barons came offering employment. He began to miss his home, but knew his returning before the year was up would represent a failure.

“Stay with it,” he told himself. “Remember what it was like. Remember why you left. This ain't great, but it's better. Something right will come along.”

His bankroll kept growing, but he kept whittling away at it with purchases of spurs, pistols, blankets, hatbands, and other trinkets that caught his eye. Still, he would have funds to get him out of Gregory Gulch when the opportunity to work on a ranch came.

A big Scot found him whipsawing lumber one day with Sonny, Joe having quit to work a new claim at Idaho Springs.

“Which one of you is looking for a ranch to work?” the Scot said.

“I am,” Caleb answered. Within ten minutes he had collected his wages from Milt, saddled Five Spot, and was on his way to a ranch in South Park.

He wondered why a man with such a beautiful lilt to his voice didn't like to talk, but the Scotsman didn't. He had no objection to Caleb playing the harmonica as they rode though. The third night of their journey they reached a cabin just built on a wooded hill that looked like an island of trees in the moonlit park.

“How many head have you got?” Caleb asked.

“Just brought three hundred up from New Mexico,” the beautiful voice said.

“Where are they?”

“Over the next ridge. You can find them in the mornin'.”

After breakfast the Scotsman pointed the way for Caleb. “There's a Mexican with them now, but he won't stay this far north for the winter. You'll be top man if you'll stay year-round.”

“Yes, sir!” Caleb said. He spurred Five Spot to the west to find the herd. After riding an hour he saw a column of smoke and figured it to be the Mexican's campfire. He rode through a line of trees that grew on a ridge and found the Mexican packing his tent on a burro. The camp overlooked three hundred head of bleating sheep.

“Where are the cattle?” Caleb asked.

“Cattle? There are no cattle. Only sheep.”

Caleb was so disgusted that he didn't even get off his horse. His disappointment ran so deep that he felt like crying out in anguish. He thought something right had come along. He thought he had found a home where he would be top man and have people look up to him, like people looked up to Pete at Holcomb Ranch. No one looked up to a sheepherder any more than they did a drunken fiddler. He didn't even bother riding back to the cabin to tell the big Scot he would sooner raise yardbirds than sheep.

With money in his pocket and food in his stomach, he figured it was as good a time as any to light out for the Palouse country. Maybe somewhere along the way he would find what he was looking for, though he didn't know anymore exactly what it was.

THIRTY-FOUR

It wasn't until Pete stepped onto the gallery of the Dubois mansion that he thought to give thanks for his time on earth. He had taken to giving thanks for many things: rain, grass, banjo music, the taste of fried venison. But it didn't strike him to offer thanks for the time the Good Lord had chosen for him until his hand touched the lacquered banister of Captain Dubois's portico.

The rail at his palm and the milled lumber underfoot reminded him of the house he had left as a child to come to the wilderness. Now houses finer than any he had known in Pennsylvania stood in neighborhoods where, before, wind and buffalo grass had reigned for centuries uncounted. The Lord had seen fit to bring him into a time of Old Testament wonder, to a place where Amelia Dubois was unattached and of marriageable age. For that great privilege, Pete silently and sincerely gave thanks as he knocked on the door of the Dubois house.

A house servant answered the door, and Pete asked to see Captain Dubois. The captain took his time in coming downstairs to the parlor.

“What can I do for you, young man?” he asked, when he finally appeared.

“Sir, I would like your permission to court your daughter,” Pete said.

The captain stared for a moment, then fanned himself with a ledger sheet he held in one hand. “You come to the point quickly enough. What's your name?”

“Pete Holcomb, sir.”

“Holcomb. That would make you the brother of Matthew. Are you the one that plays the violin or the one that preaches?”

“I don't exactly preach, sir. Just teach some Sunday-school lessons to the boys on the ranch.”

“I see. Well, Mr. Holcomb, you have my permission to court my daughter, but I'm afraid my endorsement will benefit you very little if Amelia finds the arrangement in any way unsatisfactory. She makes up her own mind about who will or will not enjoy the pleasure of her company.”

“As long as I have your permission, sir, I'll take my chances with Amelia.”

“Very well. We have a picnic scheduled for Saturday at the Garden of the Gods. Come along as my guest, if you will. My guest, you understand, not Amelia's escort. She would think it rather forward of me if I chose her escort for her. Do you have any idea, Mr. Holcomb … Well, no, I suppose you don't. See yourself out, will you? I have quite a load of work to get through today.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, by the way,” the captain said before he mounted the stairs, “I was frightfully upset about what happened to Matthew last year. Terribly sorry I couldn't attend the funeral.” He looked blankly at the ledger sheet in his hand. “I indulged in some rather pious notions about how he may have deserved what happened to him, until I recalled the younger days I spent in … well, shall we say, rather inappropriate pursuits? The same might have happened to me.”

“He meant to do the right thing,” Pete said.

“I'm sure he did. Saturday, ten o'clock.”

When Saturday came, Amelia agreed to share her coach with Pete so they could ride together to the picnic. “Why didn't you bring your little brother?” she asked as the coach rattled over the planks of the Monument Creek bridge. “We should have enjoyed some music.”

“He's gone,” Pete said.

“Gone where?”

“The Palouse River country. He won't come back till next spring. The boys have been pesterin' Buster somethin' fierce about plantin' wildflower seeds.”

“Your chef? The negro violinist?”

“He's not really a chef. He just don't mind cookin'.”

“What does his planting wildflowers have to do with your brother?”

“Caleb promised he'd come back when the flowers started in bloomin' next spring.”

Amelia smirked. “Hasn't anyone got a calender at that ranch of yours?”

“Papa's got one somewhere. But we generally go by the moon and the seasons unless we're writin' a letter or somethin'.”

The coach crossed Camp Creek and neared the magnificent rock formations of the Garden of the Gods. The party traveled in awe through a narrow gap, three wagons wide, between two giant sheets of red stone that jutted, leaning, high above the tops of the piñon pines and red cedars. Magpies cavorted inside the curve of monoliths that embraced the garden, some spare and spirelike, some squat and bulbous. Between the towers of rock and the foothills of the Rampart Range, a beautiful carpet of grass spread, studded with evergreens.