Shortgrass Song (39 page)

“What's that kid doin'?” somebody said.

It was almost comical, Caleb thought. The old man would not look at him. He would ride this close to his own son, his wooden leg only a foot from Caleb's stirrup, and still not acknowledge his presence. He laughed aloud—loud enough that his father would hear—then he reined hard to the right, his mare raising a dust plume for the old soldiers to ride through. As he galloped back toward the ranch, and the head of the Arapaho Trail, he took off his hat and waved it arrogantly at Pete, who stood motionless at the corrals.

Buster was waiting at his toolshed with a hoe when Caleb rode up. The homesteader simply nodded, his lips pursed, trying to smile. He had seen this coming. Caleb could no more stay here than a wild goose could stay north in the winter.

“I guess you gotta go,” Buster said.

The drifter smiled and looked away, his eyes sidling toward the shed, settling on the old spring buggy that once had hurtled before the wind like a clipper ship. There were fine memories here, but all of them lost like vague dreams to a waking man.

“Which way you headin'?”

Caleb shrugged. “Just headin' out.”

Standing there in silence, they felt as if they were strangers, yet strangers would merely have shaken hands and parted.

“You still got that pocketknife?” Buster asked, a grin turning one side of his mouth.

Caleb drew his eyebrows together, then stood in the stirrups, the well-worn leather squeaking only a little. He forced a hand into his right pocket and brought forth the knife, bone handled and double bladed.

“Let me see it,” Buster said, letting his hoe handle fall away from him. He caught the knife in the air and deftly flipped the long blade from its place in the handle. With his thumb he tested the well-honed edge. “You keep it good and sharp.”

“A dull knife's more dangerous than a sharp one. Ain't that what you told me when you give it to me?”

Buster folded the knife and lobbed it back. “When I give it to you? Colonel Ab give you that knife, boy.”

Caleb smirked. “If he's a colonel, I'm a rear admiral. Anyway, you give me that knife, Buster. I remember you puttin' it in my hand.”

“Maybe I handed it to you, but it came from him. That's just the way Colonel Ab gives you somethin'. Can't do it hisself.”

The drifter shook his head. “I only recall him takin' it away from me.”

“You ain't the only one's had things took from you, Caleb. Colonel's had things took from him, too.”

He set his teeth together. “Not on account of me.”

Buster sighed and stood to pick up his hoe. “This how you want it?”

“Want what?”

“You just gonna drift?”

“I'll come back next spring.”

Buster laughed. “That'll make it worse. How you gonna find you a place to live if you go driftin' in and out of here every spring? You ain't gonna have no place you can call home.”

“Not much I can do about it.”

The homesteader twisted the hoe handle in his strong hands. “It took guts you standin' up to your father the way you did last year. But it's gonna take more than just guts to undo it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Somebody's gonna have to shed their fool pride.”

“You talkin' about me, or him?”

Buster shrugged and grinned. “Whichever one it is with the fool pride. Give you somethin' to think about out there.”

Caleb nodded. He didn't want to think about it but knew he would. Buster had a way of putting a hold on a man's mind. “Them wildflowers sure looked pretty from up yonder on the trail when I rode in this year. You gonna keep spreadin' them seeds?”

“Every spring.”

Caleb nodded his approval. He breathed deep, feeling anxious to move. He thrust his hand downward and felt the good sure clap of Buster's strong grip in his.

“Don't you go cowboyin' so rough you bust up them fiddle-playin' fingers, you hear?”

“I hear. So long, Buster.”

Each touched the brim of his hat, and Caleb reined toward the creek. As he turned, a surge came over him, and Five Spot gouged the ground with her hooves as if she sensed it, too. The drifter felt a power greater than he alone could conjure. The willing horse, the tune within him, and the swift current of freedom swept him up in a glory even the old soldiers' reunion couldn't match.

Five Spot's dark wisp of mane streamed upward at him as he plummeted down the creek bank, across the water, and up to the bald hill. The high cantle lifted him like the palm of Providence, until he reached the treeless crest.

He reined his mare in and turned to look eastward. It's not too late, he thought, as he looked back from the head of the Arapaho Trail. I can still change my mind. Pete's still watching. So's Buster. There's Mama and Matthew. But Papa's gone. Gone to the land office with the old soldiers.

Only the dust from the column of fours remained to remind him.

He felt the pocketknife in his hand, pressed between his palm and the slick side of a leather rein. His eyes found the place on the creek bank—just a beaten-down notch in the cutbank now—the place his mother had called the hole, where once he had whittled a mountain and dreamed of taking a mysterious trail over the hill his brothers played on. The hill he was forbidden to climb.

Now this was his hill, his trailhead; and it didn't matter who owned the deed according to the land-office ledgers. The trail was still a mystery, but it was his to explore. He saw them watching, and he smiled. They could take nothing more from Caleb Holcomb.

He drew his hand behind his head to hurl the pocket-knife but balked there as if seized. It wasn't this simple. His cares could not be cast away like a hunk of metal and bone. He would carry them with him, feel their weight. He opened his fingers, holding the knife against his palm with his thumb.

They waved back: Pete and Buster—faceless miniature men.

He only leaned in the saddle, and the wise mare knew to turn. Now it was as if the world swiveled under him; instantly the old places fell behind. Ahead were new things, the mountains, the trail snaking gracefully among the foothills. The trillion unknowns, each one a solitary grain passing momentarily through the narrows.

Hooves drummed below him like the echoes of humankind's first ride; but he heard it, faintly, and it rang with familiarity: a voice he would someday hear calling down a box canyon. Caleb ducked and rode on, knowing he would not catch it here. It would slip up on him somewhere else—surprise him with a whisper or a solitary note. And one day it would consume him—fill him with the whole rapture and anguish of life in one expression.

But now it was gone, vanished like the Arapaho who had beaten this trail for a time, like Long Fingers and Kicking Dog. The trail was long. Long …

He let Five Spot choose her pace, slowing to a trot as she surmounted a rise in the trail. She was horse again now. Dumb honest brute. For a furlong back there she had been the engine of discovery, the vehicle of a wanderlust as old as the mind of man.

Caleb wondered if he was crazy. This wilderness had addled Cheyenne Dutch. Maybe tonight—at some camp whose site he had yet to choose—he would check his rump for spots. But now to ride.

The rhythm his mare settled into was slow and methodical, and words droned in Caleb's head. New words, yet it seemed they had always been there:

At nights, 'round the fireside, they'd listen to tales

Of wide-open country and hard-ridden trails,

Of mountains so high, there the trees wouldn't grow,

Of deserts so wide and of canyons so low.

What it would say in the end, Caleb couldn't guess. But someday he would finish that song.

FORTY-FOUR

Caleb so stroked the taut hair of horses across the stretched gut of cats that a cloud of rosin dust rose above the fiddle bridge, red-hued by firelight. He ended “Boil That Cabbage Down” with a monotoned flourish to the cadence of “Chicken in the bread tray pickin' up dough” and heard a wind moan replace the music. Holding his breath, he glanced at his one-man audience, then gazed into the darkness downwind of the campfire.

The pair of glowing wolf eyes blinked once, peered for several seconds. Then the old lobo, his age-frosted coat catching flickers from the fire of twisted grass and cow chips, sat back on his haunches, pointed his nose star-ward, and whistled a practiced song up his throat.

The half-dozen horses in the pole corral stirred, and the two cowboys sitting by the fire outside the sod shanty burst into laughter. Every night for a week, “Ol' Bitter Creek,” as Ben Jones had named the wolf, had traded his primal song for fiddle music at the northernmost line camp of the Cimarron Cattle Company's sprawling free-range outfit. Any other wolf would have had his hide nailed to the door by now. But Caleb Holcomb could not see killing a fellow singer.

“What do you reckon he's sayin'?” the musician asked, only now taking the ebony chin piece out from under his stubbled jaw.

“Well, partner, I talk a little wolf,” Ben began, “and Ol' Bitter Creek's sayin' the same damn thing I been wonderin' to myself ever since you drifted onto this godforsaken range. ‘What in the hell are you doin' here?' If I could fiddle like that, I'd hole up in some whorehouse, turn my hat over to catch the double eagles, and go to swappin' them gals out of their wares. Where'd you learn to play that thing anyway?”

Caleb shrugged modestly and tightened the nut on the end of the bow. “The man that raised me up taught me.”

“Raised? How old are you?”

“Just turned twenty.”

“Same as me. Hell, we ain't neither one of us raised yet. What grown man in his right mind would be squattin' out here in no-man's-land when there's towns and womenfolk in the world?”

“Guess you're right.” Caleb noticed a broken horsehair trailing from the end of his fiddle bow. He started to pull it off but thought he'd judge the wind by it for a spell.

Ben spread his bedroll and lay down on it fully dressed. The sky showed no sign of storm, and the line riders preferred sleeping outdoors to a night in the shanty, where rodents and snakes chased overhead in the brush-and-sod roof. Suddenly he sat back up and reached for his lariat. “Hey, make that thing go like a wounded jackrabbit again, Caleb. Maybe Ol' Bitter Creek'll come close enough to rope at tonight.”

The fiddler smiled, looked into the darkness where the wolf lurked, and put his violin under his chin. Fingering high on the E string, he began coaxing the most plaintive squeals from the instrument, and Ol' Bitter Creek leapt nervously into the full light of the fire.

The wolf stalked cautiously, ever nearer the artifice of the musician, as Ben Jones waited on his knees, the loop spread to his right and behind. He knew he would have no time to whirl the noose. He would have to throw in one fluid stroke, as if roping last year's bronc in a corral.

The wolf took courage from his empty stomach and made a deliberate advance on the fiddler as Ben Jones swooped the noose through the air. The hemp took Ol' Bitter Creek by surprise, blinded as he was by the fire, and fell perfectly on his shoulders. Ben jerked at the slack, but the lobo had already sprung, the noose just slipping free of his hind paws as he vanished like dust blown into the darkness.

“Damn, I had him!” Ben cried, rolling back onto his blanket.

They laughed and stomped the dirt, flailing on their backs like madmen, Caleb holding the fiddle protectively in the air. The rowels of their spurs made a music of their own.

“What were you gonna do once you had him roped?” the musician asked.

“Hell, I don't know. If I could think that far ahead, I'd be someplace.”

Caleb sat up and squinted at the darkness, but Ol' Bitter Creek was probably a mile away. He felt suddenly lost, as a sailor must feel at sea. He looked upwind, over his shoulder, and saw the Two Buttes in the light of the half moon on the southern horizon.

It was the Two Buttes that had drawn him out onto the plains and into the range of the Cimarron Cattle Company. He had bid farewell to Pete and Buster weeks ago and had ridden into the Rampart Range on the old Arapaho Trail. Continuing west, he had made his way through South Park, looking for work, singing and playing for his room and board. Striking the headwaters of the Arkansas, he had followed it downstream, fiddling under the cottonwood sprouts the homesteaders had planted in orchard rows around their houses. The Arkansas had led him out of the high country and onto the open plains, beyond sight of the mountains.

Talk of the Two Buttes had lured him out of the settled Arkansas Valley and into the shortgrass country. They were stark landmarks on the High Plains, he had heard, visible at thirty miles or more. Caleb needed landmarks. He felt like a drunk, spinning in bed, with no mark on the skyline to fix his place in the world.

With the Two Buttes in view, he had drifted onto the ranges of the Cimarron Cattle Company, a free-grass outfit whose herds lapped over into Kansas, New Mexico, and even into the wilds of No Man's Land and the Texas panhandle. A rider at Ben Jones's line camp had quit, scared of Indians. Caleb took the job.

He lived in a sod house, ten by twelve. His only partner was Ben Jones—“Thin Ben,” as he called himself, and he was whip skinny. Ben tormented himself nightly with talk of lewd women.

Ben and Caleb rode the northern fringes of the company's ranges, turning cattle back as they strayed too far north. The beeves were half-wild Texas longhorns, branded and earmarked, growing fat on the grass of the Northern Range.

For the first time in his life, Caleb was earning the wage of a cowboy. He had found his place in the cattle business. It was what he had always wanted. But it wasn't fair that he had to drive another man's beeves. Matthew and Pete had never been cast out on a lonely divide and relegated to the monotonous work of a line rider. They had been straw bosses, foremen, ranchers. But Colonel Absalom Holcomb had made Caleb a sodbuster—helpmate to the hired man.