Shortgrass Song (45 page)

To prove up under the Timber Culture Act, Buster had to grow forty acres of trees on the one-hundred-sixty-acre claim. The idea was that trees would bring rain to the plains. Buster knew the legislators who had passed the bill were mistaken. It was rain that brought trees, not the other way around. Still, it wouldn't hurt to have a woodlot handy.

He and the Holcomb brothers planted the trees along the northern quarter of the claim, outside of the new barbwire fence. Buster feared the cattle would stomp the saplings down if he raised them in the same pasture.

When the trees were all in the ground, Pete drove into the new pen on a wagon loaded with lumber for the windmill tower, and barrels of water to be used in the drilling process. Buster planned to drill the shaft near the high corner of the pasture so the well water could run down through the trees when they needed it.

“Did you bring that willow fork I cut from the orchard?” Buster asked.

“It's right here,” Pete said. “What are you gonna do with it?”

“Watch,” he said. “I'll show you.”

Grasping the branches of the slender fork unnaturally in his upturned palms, Buster pointed the stub of the fork ahead of him and started pacing aimlessly about the pasture.

Caleb exchanged a shrug with Pete. “What are you doin', Buster?”

“Witchin' for water,” he replied.

“Like hell,” Caleb said. “You don't believe in that stuff, do you?”

“No. Except when I feel that stick start pullin' down.” He slowed and turned to his left. “I feel a little right in here,” he said.

Caleb looked at Pete and rolled his eyes.

“Gettin' stronger,” Buster said. “Watch that stick go down.”

As the brothers watched, the stub of the willow fork angled slowly downward, finally pointing at Buster's feet.

“You're makin' it do that,” Caleb said.

“I'm tryin' to hold it back,” Buster replied. “Feels like a good stream under here. Try it yourself if you want to.”

Caleb jumped off the wagon and took the stick. Grasping it as Buster had, he changed the angle of his fists, making the stub of the fork point up, then down, then up again. “See, I can make it point any way I want,” he said. “You're tryin' to pull one over on me, Buster.”

“No, I ain't,” Buster said. “You back off over there and walk this way, and see if you don't feel that stream.”

Caleb sighed and shook his head but agreed to try. He wore a smirk on his face, feeling like a dupe as he paced toward Buster's stream. Then, for reasons he could not explain, the stick began to twist in his grasp.

He stopped, held the willow fork tighter. It continued to angle down in spite of all the strength he employed. “Hey,” he said. “By golly, I feel somethin'.”

“Told you,” Buster said.

Caleb walked slowly forward, trying to control the stick by angling his fists, but it only pulled downward. When he had reached Buster, the stub of the willow was pointing straight at his feet. “Yeah, there's a stream down there,” he said. “Hey, Pete, come try this.”

Pete grinned. “You two have planned this whole thing, haven't you?”

Buster shook his head innocently.

“No,” Caleb insisted. “This really works. Come try it.”

“You can witch all the water you want. I'll just stick to prayin' for it.”

They built a wooden tower over the ground they had witched, and under the tower Caleb started the well shaft with a post-hole digger. He got down to about four feet, then he and Pete drilled deeper with an auger that had a crossbar for a handle. They added sections of pipe between the auger and the handle until they had drilled as deep as they could, about twenty feet, hauling dirt up the shaft a gallon at a time in the container above the auger blade.

“They call this here a cable-tool rig,” Buster explained as he bolted his twenty-pound drill bit to the end of a cable. He had made the bit at his forge from a section of eight-inch pipe, cutting the bottom end at a slant and pouring it full of molten iron with an eye on top to attach the cable.

“You sure you know how to do this?” Caleb asked as he helped rig the cable through a pulley on the wooden platform above the well shaft.

“I watched them drill that railroad well down at Colorado Springs a couple of years ago,” Buster said. “They didn't have to drill but fifty feet or so.”

“How does it work?” Caleb asked.

“You just drop it down the hole.” Buster lowered the bit into the shaft, then released the cable, letting the bit drop to the bottom of the shaft that Pete and Caleb had dug with the auger.

They took turns lifting the bit and letting it drop. One man poured water into the shaft as the sharp edge of the bit cut deeper with every fall. The water turned the loosened dirt into mud, which they brought to the top in a narrow bailing bucket.

The shaft deepened by inches.

After days of drilling, the bailing bucket started bringing up more water than was being poured in from the barrels. They had struck the water table. The well was in.

“How deep did you have to go?” a homesteader shouted across the new barbwire fence.

“Fifty-seven feet,” Buster yelled. “And we got six feet of water.”

Buster had ordered and received the pipe he would need to turn the shaft into a pumping well. He and his helpers hauled the pipe to the windmill platform and prepared to sink it into the shaft. First came lengths of six-inch iron casing that would line the dirt shaft and keep it stable. The well drillers stood the ten-foot lengths vertically and lowered them into the hole with their cable until six lengths were inside the shaft, end to end. The last length stuck about three feet above ground level.

Inside the iron casing, the well drillers inserted lengths of smaller-diameter pipe, threaded together at the ends to make a continuous stretch of “drop pipe,” as Buster called it. This pipe would carry the water to the surface.

In the bottom of the drop pipe, a brass pumping cylinder was installed. A rod ran from the pumping cylinder all the way up the inside of the drop pipe and into view above the ground. The rod, when worked up and down, would move the piston in the pumping cylinder, whose valves would raise water to the surface through the drop pipe.

Buster went back to the forge and made a flange with a spout that would fit on top of the drop pipe and conduct the water into a trough.

All that was left was to build the windmill on top of the platform. Buster had decided to build a simple windmill of the baby-jumbo variety. It would take advantage of the chinooks that came down from the mountains during the dry seasons. He told Caleb to build a stout box on top of the windmill platform—with sides three feet high and no lid. Caleb used scraps of lumber and old coffee crates to accomplish the task.

Buster, in the meantime, built a wooden paddle wheel, six feet across with six blades. It looked as if it belonged on the tail end of a miniature stern-wheeler.

An iron brake rod from an old wagon became the axle for the paddle wheel, beaten arrow straight with a crank plate welded to one end. With ropes, the windmillers hoisted the paddle wheel to the top of the platform and fastened the axle to the top sides of the box Caleb had built. The wind would come down from the mountains, strike the blades of the paddle wheel sticking up above the box, and push them over the axle, turning the wheel. The box would keep the wind from catching the blades as they swung under the axle. The wheel would turn the axle, which would turn the crank plate, which would transfer the circular motion of the wheel to up-and-down strokes of the pump rod.

“What happens if the wind comes out of the north or the south?” Caleb asked.

“Then she don't turn,” Buster admitted.

“You ought to make it so you can turn it into the wind somehow.”

“Them factory windmills turn theirselfs into the wind, but I think this one here will work good enough for me. They build 'em like this in Nebraska. I read it in the almanac. Now all we got to do is connect that pump rod to that crank plate.”

“Then we're through?” Pete asked.

“Pretty near.”

“Thank the Lord. I've never done so much work without a horse under me in my whole life. These boots are killin' my feet.”

“You better get used to it,” Buster said. “Barbwire and windmills—that's the future for ranchin'.”

“Not for this ranch. The future for this ranch is free grass and open range.”

“If you have another dry year,” Caleb said, “you ain't gonna have no grass. The cows have et about all you have now anyway.”

“Except for that up on the divides,” Buster said.

“Now, Buster,” Pete said irritably, “that shows what you know about the cow business. The cattle won't eat that grass up on the divide.”

“How come?”

“Because it's too far from water. Walkin' that far makes 'em too thirsty. All the buffalo wallows have gone dry up there.”

“Then fill 'em up,” Buster said.

“How? I'm not God. I can't make it rain. All I can do is pray for it.”

“You can do more than that,” Buster said, kicking the pipes sticking up from the ground.

“You mean, drill a well?” Pete said. “Then all the dang cows from across the divide would come over, too. Gribble's and everybody else's.”

“So, stretch some barbwire along the divide,” Caleb said, catching on.

Buster grinned and started climbing the windmill platform.

Pete scoffed and groused for a while as Caleb aligned the pump rod with the crank plate. But then he looked silently off toward the divide to the east. “Barbwire and windmills,” he finally said. “Even if you're right, at least I'll never have to plant another forty acres of pine trees.”

Buster wrapped his leg around one of the trusses of the platform to steady himself as he worked. “I bet you'll plant a hundred acres if Miss Amelia wants 'em around her mansion,” he said. “I can hear her now: ‘Pete Holcomb, why don't we have us a woodlot good as that negro fiddler's?'”

Caleb laughed so hard he almost hit Buster in the head with the pump rod.

“Hand me that rivet bolt,” Buster said. “And the big hammer.”

Caleb fetched the tools and watched as Buster flattened the head on the rivet bolt to hold the pump rod onto the crank plate.

“All right,” Buster said, handing the hammer down. “I guess we can try her out. We got a west breeze today.”

Pete pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered a prayer that all his work afoot would not go unrewarded.

“Caleb, prime the drop pipe with a bucket of water,” Buster said. He climbed to the top of the platform to untie the ropes holding the paddle wheel steady.

“She's primed!” Caleb said. “Let her whirl!”

Buster set the wheel free, and the wind started turning it. The axle shrieked in its sockets, the pump rod groaned down the drop pipe. Buster jumped down to watch his creation work.

“It needs some grease,” Pete said.

“Listen.” Buster put his ear to the top of the pipe. The well sighed as if coming to life. It moaned a cool breath up its long throat with every stroke of the pump. And the moans, at first deep as canyon winds, climbed in pitch, one after the other. “The water's comin' up,” Buster said.

The wooden platform trembled in its struggle to turn wind into water as Buster and Caleb and Pete, like hopeful alchemists, raised their eyebrows to one another and turned their ears to the mouth of the well. The sighs from the well shaft, sensual and plaintive, moaned higher and whispered the coming of water.

“I think I can smell it,” Buster said. He looked along the length of the pump rod, down into the drop pipe. “I can see it!”

Each revolution of the windmill, each stroke of the rod, brought the water closer to the surface, the groaning voice of the well speaking higher, the hollow whisper of the pipe climbing, until, suddenly, the whisper died. In its place came a gurgle of brown, muddy water over the spout and a splattering of the pulse on the ground around the windmillers' feet.

A cheer came from a small crowd of onlookers across the fence. Buster cupped his hand and drank, in spite of the grit of the water from the new well. Pete filled his hat and splashed it on Caleb. Caleb bent before the spout and let the water, chilled by the earth, pour onto the back of his neck.

“Now,” Buster said, grabbing a hoe from the wagon. “You fellas can build me a stock trough while I channel this water down through the trees.”

“Don't he ever rest?” Pete asked, shaking water from his hair.

Suddenly Caleb felt a presence, like a dark cloud. He looked down toward the creek and saw his father standing, water trickling around his wooden leg, his eyes squinting at the baby-jumbo windmill. Ab marched to the well, cooled his palms in the water, watched the pump rod work up and down.

“Damn it, old man, why won't you look at me?” Caleb thought. He remembered the day he cussed Ab and left home—a time of awful triumph. It was time to go again. He didn't belong.

“Buster, you take the prize,” Ab said, shaking his head in wonder. “Good job.” He slapped Pete on the shoulder. “I'd have never thought.” He turned back toward the gate and hobbled away.

FIFTY-TWO

Pete tried to talk Caleb into staying, but Caleb would remain only long enough to herd the heifers into Buster's new pasture. He wasn't going to live and work where he wasn't wanted when elsewhere he could feel the welcome of song-poor strangers.

“Where are you gonna go this time?” Pete asked, as he listened to his brother struggle with the left-handed guitar in Buster's cabin.

“I thought maybe Texas. Find me a herd to drive up the trail.” He adjusted the ungainly fingers of his right hand on the fret board.

“Good idea,” Buster said, “as long as you stay the winter down there. It don't get so cold in Texas. The last two winters you come near to starvin' yourself and freezin' yourself. You better go south for the winter.”