Shortgrass Song (44 page)

Pete Holcomb was the first to tender a handshake as his little brother slipped his foot from the stirrup. “What happened to Five Spot?” Pete asked, after the initial round of howdies.

“Now that's a long story,” Caleb said. “And a sad one, too. I'll tell you all about it if Lee Fong will whip me up some supper while I play a few songs with Buster.”

The Chinese man groused in his native tongue as he turned for the kitchen.

“Where's your fiddle?” Buster asked as Caleb gave his mount some room in the saddle cinch.

“That's part of the same sad story, Buster. But, listen, I've been practicing on this mouth organ and I want to play a few songs.”

They went to the bunkhouse, and a few songs were all that Caleb got played before Buster tried to hand the banjo to him.

“No, thanks,” he said. “I'm through playin' the stringed instruments.”

Lee Fong came in with a plate of grub, and Caleb took off his gloves to eat.

Buster looked puzzled. “What do you mean, you're through?”

Caleb held up his left hand. The tips of the first two fingers were gone. “I can't make the chords anymore. I borrowed a guitar and tried for about a week, but I just can't press down on the strings right. I can still play the harp, though.”

“But can you sing to it?” Dan Brooks asked.

Sam Dugan jabbed him with his elbow. “How'd it happen?” he drawled.

As he ate, Caleb told about Thin Ben Jones, Boss Mose, the Christmas Eve murders of the Hutchinson family, and the lucky escape of Little Hank. “Lee Fong, have you ever heard any stories about an outlaw called Angus something-or-other that hides out in the Indian Territory?”

The cook searched his bank of stories, then shook his head.

“Next week,” said Piggin' String, “he'll be tellin' us about how he used to ride with him.”

Laughter shook the windowpanes, and Caleb went on with the story.

“The little feller also remembered what they called one of the Indians. Buster, you'll never guess who it was: Kicking Dog.”

“He's still alive? I figured somebody would have shot him by now.”

“That's the Injun that came near stabbin' you with a spear when you first come to this country, ain't it, Buster?” Dan Brooks asked.

“How'd you know about that?” Buster said.

“Read it in that book Sam's writin' about you.”

The black man glared at Sam. “You still writin' that book?”

“Yep,” Sam said.

“It ain't all that bad to read if you can wade through Sam's style of writin',” Dan said.

Caleb went on about No Man's Land, the blizzard, his instruments, the wolves, and Five Spot.

“I wouldn't have known it was her except I recognized the stripes in her hooves. Them wolves didn't leave much else of her.”

“What about the outlaws?” Sam asked. “Did Mose git 'em?”

“He caught one of the Indians and killed him. Brought the scalp back. It wasn't Kicking Dog.”

“Now, see, there, Buster,” Sam remarked, “that Boss Mose is a real nigger hero. Why won't you git after some outlaws like that every now and then?”

“Write your book about him if you want to.” He turned to Caleb. “What about your fingers?”

“Oh, I got the blood goin' in the rest of 'em,” Caleb said. “But these two turned black and we had to cut 'em off.”

“Who cut 'em off?” Pete asked.

“The boys got me drunk, then they all piled on me to hold me down while Boss Mose clipped 'em off with a dehorner.” Caleb laughed. “They talked about brandin' me and earmarkin' me while they had me down, but I guess none of them wanted to maverick a puny head of stock like me.”

The hired hands laughed, grateful that Caleb didn't expect them to mourn his lost fingertips. He didn't tell them how he had fought the cowboys to keep those fingers. They had held him down like a wild animal and clipped the pieces from him. He had screamed himself hoarse and bitten Thin Ben on the elbow. He had cried alone on the plains, sick to his stomach because he couldn't press the strings anymore. But that kind of story tended to wear a welcome thin, so he whitewashed the entire episode with a couple of jokes.

Buster couldn't manage even a smile. He saw everything he had taught Caleb about music lost to the cold plains wind. Worse than lost. Imprisoned in his brain, denied release through his fingers. Only he knew how it must have horrified Caleb to watch those fingers blacken and die.

“If I'd have froze my strummin' hand, I could have still played. I could have held a fiddle bow with it, too.” He shrugged. “But, I can still blow a harp.”

That was little comfort to Buster. He yearned to hear Caleb's fingers stretch the strings again. A harmonica could make just so much music.

*   *   *

The next day Pete and Caleb helped Buster dig the last of his post holes around his new timber-culture claim and prepared to stretch the barbed wire that had arrived on the Denver and Rio Grande. Curious homesteaders showed up to watch from time to time during the day.

Buster carried the spools of wire in the back of one of his wagons. He ran a pole through one of the spools and fastened the pole horizontally across the sideboards. After Pete attached one end of the barbed wire to the first corner post, Buster drove the wagon forward and let the wire play off the spool beside the new fence posts.

“How do you stretch this stuff?” Pete asked when they arrived at the far corner.

“You use the wagon wheel,” Buster said.

He set the brake and put another pole through the spokes of the front wheels to make sure the wagon wouldn't roll back. He told Caleb to set the wagon jack under the rear axle and jack the back wheel off the ground. With the wheel spinning freely, Buster clipped the wire and wound the end of it around the hub of the wheel.

“Now, you strong young men grab this here wheel,” he said, “and the leverage of them spokes will help you stretch that wire right taut.”

Pete and Caleb turned the wheel as if fighting the rudder on a great sailing ship, until the wire trembled with a strange metallic timbre when they thumped it. Another pole through the spokes would hold the wheel in place as they nailed the wire to the posts with staples.

“It's like tunin' up a great big o' banjo, ain't it, Buster?” Caleb said as they worked. “They were stringin' this stuff in places between here and the Cimarron. Mostly nesters tryin' to keep the cows out of their crops.”

“That's about all it's good for,” Pete said.

Caleb nodded his agreement. “Don't put any horses in this pasture, Buster. This wire will ruin a good horse.”

“How's a fence gonna ruin a horse?” Buster asked.

“Well, after Five Spot got et, I bought me another mount from a horse trader—a little black mustang caught up in Nebraska, he told me. Now out on the open range that horse had cow sense to make you think his grand-pappy was a bull.” Caleb measured the wire boot-high on the post and straddled it with a staple.

“But I rode up to Lamar for a tear with the boys on the way here, and we came to a homestead where some farmers were puttin' up a barbwire fence. They didn't even have the wire strung yet, but that mustang wouldn't walk between the posts to save his hide. I like to have quirted him to death. Thin Ben and the rest of the boys thought it was the funniest thing they ever saw. I had to ride clean around the line of fence posts to get that horse into town.”

“What was wrong with him?” Pete asked around the staples he held between his lips.

“Well, come to find out, this mustang had been turned loose in a barbwire pen in Kansas while he was still green broke. He took one look at that wire, and I guess it looked about like spiderweb to him, and he decided he'd run through it. He got tangled up in the wire and like to have cut himself to pieces. After that, he would never go between two fence posts for fear he'd get carved up again.”

“What did you do with him?” Pete said.

“I had to trade him in Lamar for that bay I rode in on. So don't you put no horses in there, Buster, it'll ruin 'em.”

“He couldn't put 'em in there anyway,” Pete said, tapping another staple into a post. “That windmill he's gonna build would scare 'em to death. I'm not even sure the cows will go near it.”

“They will if it pumps water,” Buster said.

“We better build it stout,” Caleb suggested. “Those two-year-old heifers are liable to push it down rubbin' their hind ends on it.”

Once the wire stretching began, Buster's fence took shape with remarkable rapidity. Homesteaders continued to ride up the creek to investigate. They tested the barbs with their fingers, kicked the posts with worn-out boots, pulled against the staples holding the wire on.

“Looks good, Buster,” said one of the farmers from just down the Monument.

“Thank you, Mister Josh. You want me to come build you one?”

Josh chuckled and took a bite from a plug of tobacco. “Them grasshoppers didn't leave me with the means to buy wire right off. Maybe in a couple of years.”

The day they hung the gates, Buster reckoned they had three hours of light left, so he took the Holcomb brothers to the Pinery to dig up the first load of pine saplings. They drove their spades through the forest litter, sniffed deep the acrid sweetness of the conifers, and lingered in the shade.

“I think I'll take some of these with me,” Pete said, holding a sprout by the roots, “and plant them for shade over there where Amelia's house is going to go.”

“Amelia's house?” Caleb said. He had been so busy telling his stories to Pete that he hadn't given his brother a chance to tell his own.

Buster grinned. “She says she won't marry him till he builds her a big of house. Bigger than her daddy's house in town.”

“Where are you gonna get the money for that?” Caleb asked.

“This ranch will make that kind of money quick after the drouth's over. Give me four or five years and I'll build her a place big as a castle.”

“Captain Dubois said he'd give Pete the money,” Buster said. “I think he wants that gal out from under his roof.”

“Why didn't you take it?” Caleb asked.

“If my bride wants a house, I'll build it myself. I don't need no railroad money to do it for me.”

*   *   *

That night, before they went to the bunkhouse to entertain the boys, Buster brought Caleb a guitar and put it in his hands. “You learn to play ‘Camptown Races' in three different keys, and I'll give you that guitar,” he said.

Caleb wondered why Buster, of all people, would taunt him so about his lost ability to play. “I told you I tried. My fingers won't reach like they used to.”

Buster bunched his eyebrows. “Take hold of that guitar, boy. Don't you see?”

“See what?” The familiar feel of the slender guitar neck pressed against his palm. His fingers fell into a pattern on the grid of frets and strings. But the stubs of his amputated digits groped awkwardly for their places. “I see myself wastin' my…”

Something felt out of place. The strings under his good fingers were too thick. He strummed the guitar with his right hand. “You strung it upside down!”

“No I didn't,” Buster said. “You're playin' it upside down. Turn it over.”

“Turn it over?” Caleb looked at the instrument in his arms as if it had fallen from a cloud.

Buster shook his head. “Play it left-handed.” He yanked the guitar away, turned it around, and put it back in Caleb's hands. “You got all your fingers to chord with on that hand, and you can still strum with the mangled one. What do you think about that?”

Caleb held the guitar as if it were a newborn baby. “I think it's like dancin' with a woman and she's leadin'. Oh, Lordy, no, I've been heifer branded!”

“You'll get used to it that way. That's the way you look in the mirror, ain't it?”

Caleb smiled sadly and shoved the guitar back at Buster. “You don't expect me to learn playin' that thing left-handed. Dang, Buster, I'll be another fourteen years just gettin' as good as I was.”

“No, you won't.” He refused to take the instrument back.

“Yes, I will!”

“No, you won't. All that guitar learnin' you done the past fourteen years you done with your head, not your fingers. You ever know a man could learn somethin' with his fingers? Your head still knows how to make that ol' flattop sing. All you got to do is train your hands over again. Train the right one left-handed and the left one right-handed.”

Halfheartedly, Caleb fixed his untrained fingers to make a chord, strummed it, and heard the familiar combination of notes tremble from the sound hole, though it seemed someone else had made them.

“There, you see,” Buster said, triumphantly. “You done learned a chord already. By the time those fingertips toughen up, you'll be playin' good as you ever did. The guitar's in your hands, but the music … Well, that's in your brains.”

The blizzard had taken more than fingertips from Caleb. It had robbed him of identity. Anyone else could recognize him less the extremities, but he hardly knew or liked himself. He was sure that folks liked to see him coming only when he had a fiddle in his hands. His instruments were his companions between the camps and towns. Without them, he felt less significant. It was as if his stringed friends had died and he had only his harmonica left.

But now, with a left-handed hope in his grasp, he felt justification within reach again. He didn't belong on Holcomb Ranch or any other spread. He had found no home. But with his fingers on the strings and his voice in a song, he could go on with the search. People would see him coming and their eyes would brighten. And he could stay for a while and make them happy.

FIFTY-ONE

The next day Caleb brought the guitar with him and practiced in the wagon on the way to and from the Pinery. His fingers groped the graceful throat of the instrument with ungentlemanly clumsiness. The strings bit his tender fingertips. Dead chords thumped like clods against a wall, and misplaced fingers rendered hideous sharps and flats. But Buster was right. The knowledge of the thing was in his head, and his hands would learn their new roles in time.