Shortgrass Song (6 page)

The pines came down from the mountains, passed behind the wagon, and swept east and south in a graceful curve extending for miles into the grasslands. The Pinery was a peninsula of timber hooking into a sea of grass. The grasslands embraced by the forest sloped down to the west, to Monument Creek. Across the creek, the pinnacles of the Rampart Range rose sharply, climbing thousands of feet above the prairies. Among the foothills, Ab spotted huge red stone towers—oddly shaped columns of rock, like giant sand-castle watchtowers melted by rain.

“Those are the monuments,” he said, pointing to the formations. “They mark the head of Monument Creek. The man in Denver City told me we'll find more of them along the west side of the creek toward Colorado City. They call this place Monument Park. The Pinery wraps almost all the way around it, except on the south side.”

Ella took his hand. “Well, I told you I'd let you have your choice of land when we got here, Ab, honey. But I can't imagine you choosing any place over this. Everything we'll need is within our reach—land, grass, wood, and water. I don't know why we don't unhitch the wagon right here.”

Ab studied Monument Park for a full minute in silence. He was in no hurry to settle in the wrong place. “I want to drive a few miles farther down the creek,” he said. “I don't want our cattle forever straying into the pines. It would make more sense to get closer to Colorado City, too. The man in Denver said there's an old Indian trail that leads up to a pass in the Rampart Range. He said it would be a good place for a ranch.”

They pulled off the wagon road and eased down toward Monument Creek, crunching over piles of buffalo bones left by white hunters. After another two hours of slow travel, they found the Indian trail leading across the creek, over a bald hill to the west, and into the mountains.

“It's called the Arapaho Trail,” Ab said. “It leads to Arapaho Pass. The man in Denver told me we'll find plenty of game in those mountains. That will get us by until our herd grows and our crops start producing. I figure Colorado City is just a few miles down the creek.” He set the brake on his wagon. “This looks like as good a place as any.”

Ab and Matthew went to the Pinery to chop down enough trees for a cabin, but Ab refused to build before winter. He said the logs would need six months to cure first. He left them stacked in the forest where he cut them.

Ella and Pete carved a rectangular notch into the high bank of the creek and roofed it with stout pine limbs covered with sod. Against the back wall of the dugout, they built a fireplace of sods, extending the sod chimney above the roof so it would draw. They carried in a few articles of furniture they had hauled from Pennsylvania, and reluctantly took up residence. Ella refused to call it a house. She referred to it as the hole. Matthew and Pete slept in the covered wagon until the weather turned cold. Then the little dugout became crowded, but it was plenty warm with the mud-plastered fireplace burning.

Ella wouldn't let Caleb go out in the cold, but Ab took the older boys hunting in turns, and they bagged enough elk, deer, and antelope to get them through the winter without having to kill their own cattle. They had bought some flour in Denver, but it had been hauled in from New Mexico and had so much dirt in it that Ella was afraid the boys would grind their teeth away eating their biscuits. They had enough dried fruit and canned vegetables to keep the scurvy from killing them before spring.

The day Ab hitched his oxen to turn his first furrow, Ella said, “Ab, Caleb is better. He doesn't cough half as much as he used to. We did the right thing, coming here.”

“If he's better,” Ab replied, “maybe you should let him work some. Let him herd the cows for a while.”

“Oh, honey, he's not ready,” she said. “Give him time.”

FIVE

“God Almighty!” Matthew said. “There's Indians comin'!”

“I'm tellin' Mama you said God Almighty,” Pete replied.

Matthew was always sounding false alarms about grizzly bears and buffalo stampedes, so Pete didn't worry much about Indians. He just stared up at the cloudless sky, stretched out as he was along the back of Soupy, the Holcombs' old Pennsylvania mare as she grazed.

“Get off!” Matthew said. “I'm ridin' to tell Papa.”

“I don't want to,” Pete said, sitting up. The instant he spotted the two people pulling the milk wagon, his brother leapt and knocked him from the horse.

Matthew whipped Soupy through the herd of Missouri cows and across the plains to his father's new-plowed cornfield. “Papa! Indians!” he shouted, pointing.

Ab scanned the plains and accounted for Ella, carrying her water bucket toward the dugout where Caleb lay. His eyes kept searching until he spotted the wagon. “Where's your brother?” he asked as Matthew rode up.

“With the cows.”

“Get your brother, boy! I told the two of you to look after each other!”

When Ella slid down to the hole, she reached into the doorway and took Ab's old Walker Colt from its peg. “Stay quiet, Caleb,” she whispered. “Somebody's coming.” She handed the revolver to her husband when he appeared on the bank above her. “What is it?” she asked.

“Somebody pulling a wagon. Matthew says Indians, but I don't think so. He and Pete will be here in a minute, then we'll wait and see who it is. Where's Caleb?”

“He's in the hole. He hasn't made a peep since his accident with that knife today. Poor thing.”

When the boys arrived, Ella took them below the brink of the creek bank and waited with them beside the dugout door. Ab stayed above and watched the little wagon approach, baffled by the pair that pulled it.

When they arrived, the black man and the squaw dropped the wagon tongue beside the sod chimney sticking out of the creek bank. “Is this the farm of Absalom Holcomb?” the man asked.

“Yes,” Ab said. “Just who in Hades are you?”

The black man smiled. “Buster Thompson. The Abolition Society sent me to find you.”

It took Ab a moment to make the connection. “All the way to Kansas Territory?” He yelled over his shoulder: “Ella, get up here!”

Buster shrugged. “They just said find you. They told me not to trust nobody else.”

“Who's that?” Ab asked, pointing his pistol barrel at the squaw.

“Her name's Snake Woman.”

“I don't care what her name is—I mean, what's she doing with you?”

Ella climbed the cutbank and came to stand beside her husband.

“I traded a harmonica to Chief Long Fingers for her,” Buster explained. “I didn't mean to, I just did. I figured you'd know what to do with her.”

“I don't even know what to do with you!”

“Who are they, Ab?” Ella asked.

“This is Buster, one of your poor fugitive slaves, and his squaw. I thought you told the society not to send any more slaves.”

“I did. Oh, but, honey, we can't just turn them away. Buster, where did you want to go?”

Buster shrugged. “Canada?”

Matthew and Pete were peeking over the bank at the strange couple. Matthew had never seen a female show as much leg as Snake Woman. It was a filthy leg, but he could see all the way up to her knee.

As Buster explained why he had chosen to go to Canada by way of Pikes Peak, Ella heard a distinctive sound rasp across the valley. “I thought I heard Caleb cough,” she said.

“I didn't hear anything,” Ab replied.

“He sounded so far away. Pete, is Caleb in the hole?”

Pete ducked into the dugout for a moment. “No, ma'am. He's gone.”

Snake Woman understood none of the gibberish, but she read the look of insanity that crossed the white woman's face. The faint noise came again, and the white woman's eyes pulled toward the creek. There, on the far bank, a little boy was wading in. The crazy white woman saw him, screamed, and leapt over the brink of the creek bank. Snake Woman trembled, wondering what kind of terrible place Buffalo Head had brought her to now.

“Oh, God,” Ab muttered. “Come on, Buster, and help me calm her down.”

They met Ella as she carried Caleb to the near shore. Mother and son were drenched like muskrats from falling on the way across. To Buster's surprise, Ella put the soaked youngster in his arms as she waded out, as he was the closest one to her.

“He'll catch his death of cold,” she said. “Ab, help me get a fire going to warm him up. He's nearly drowned. Caleb, don't you ever wander away like that again!”

“Miss Ella,” Buster said. “He's fine.”

“What?”

“The boy's fine. Just a little wet.” He put Caleb down at the edge of the creek.

Ella looked at Caleb as if she didn't recognize him, then glared at the black man standing over him. “Don't you suppose to tell me whether or not my own son is fine, Mr. Thompson. Just you take him up to the hole so I can dry him out.”

*   *   *

They ruled Canada out over supper. Too far away. Denver had too many southern men—most of them veterans of the old Georgia gold mines. A black man had been lynched there for no good reason recently. Ab suggested Mexico. It made perfect sense to him. Many Texas slaves had escaped to Mexico, and the Snake Woman had probably started out a Mexican anyway, according to Long Fingers.

But Ella said Mexico was almost as far away as Canada. Besides, she insisted, it was ridiculous to send two able bodies away from the farm when there was so much work to be done. Ab knew he was stuck with them then, and no amount of reasoning would change his wife's mind.

“Do you farm?” he asked Buster.

“I bossed a truck farm before. I can blacksmith, too.”

“Well, that's something. We can't pay, you know. At least not this year.”

“He's never been paid before anyway,” Ella said. “He was a slave.”

“You and that squaw will have to sleep in your wagon. The boys are using ours till we get the cabin built.”

“They can't both sleep in that tiny wagon,” Ella said. “We'll move the boys back in with us. Mr. Thompson and the Indian woman can sleep in our wagon.”

“She can have the big wagon by herself,” Buster said. “I'll sleep in mine. I'm afraid she might cut me up in the middle of the night.”

Buster and the Holcombs looked through the dugout door at Snake Woman, squatting by the creek, eating her supper alone. No one insisted that Buster had to sleep with her.

“Hey, Buster,” Pete said.

“Pete, you speak to him properly,” Ella warned.

“I mean, Mr. Thompson. Will you play your fiddle now?”

“I will if you'll run get it.”

Pete and Matthew tore out of the dugout and came back with all of Buster's instruments. As the fiddler opened his case, Caleb slipped away from his mother's arms and knelt in front of the mandolin leaning against the dirt wall between the guitar and the banjo. He had never seen anything as beautiful in his life—not even the pocketknife he had lost earlier that day.

It was just his size—barely half the length of the ungainly instruments flanking it. The body of the guitar was just a flat-topped box. The body of the banjo looked like an old drum. But the little mandolin had the graceful outline of a teardrop, tapered everywhere and inlaid with wooden bits of more colors than the mountain showed at sunrise. Yet, there was an intriguing violation of the teardrop form. The hollow box of the instrument grew an odd curlicue from one of its sides. The curlicue had a leather strap attached to it, and Caleb knew instinctively the strap was meant to sling over the shoulder of the mandolin player. Eight strings, stretched in pairs, gleamed yellow in the firelight.

“Mr. Thompson,” he said in a timid voice, “can I have this one?”

“Caleb, please!” Ella said.

But Buster raised his hand. “Little man,” he said, winking at Caleb, “if you learn to play it, you can sure have it.”

Caleb looked at his mother. She smiled. At last he was going to have something he wanted. He was going to learn to play the mandolin.

SIX

The next morning, Buster went to work breaking ground in the creek bottom for his truck patch. He thought he might have to get Snake Woman to irrigate the patch by hand if the rains didn't come. Maybe next year he could try to dig an irrigation ditch.

“Don't you go gettin' ahead of yourself,” he muttered. “You might not be here next year.”

About halfway into the third morning, a rivet bolt broke on Buster's plow, so he led the oxen to the creek where they could drink and went back to the wagons to get a new rivet bolt and a hammer.

Caleb was sitting in the milk wagon, practicing his mandolin chords, when Buster came to get his hammer out of his tool crate.

“My fingers hurt,” the boy said.

“They will at first. Then they get tough. Look at mine.” He showed Caleb the calluses on the fingertips of his left hand. “Wrong fret,” he said, moving Caleb's fingers to the correct positions.

Ella was nearby, worrying over her flower garden. She was shading the tender plants with her body, trying to keep the sun from withering them.

Buster walked over to the garden to see if he could do anything. He found the lilies lying limp across the ground. “Maybe you should plant somethin' else,” he said.

“I don't have anything else,” Ella snapped. It irritated her that Buster wouldn't let her alone to grow her own flower garden.

“It's gonna get awful dry,” he said. “Those flowers won't grow here like they did back in Pennsylvania. You need some flowers that will stand this hot, dry weather. You need some western flowers. There's wild ones down the creek a ways. All different colors.”

Ella loosened the strings of her bonnet under her chin. “Mr. Thompson, don't you have some plowing or other such nonsense to do? I don't recall asking for your advice.”

“Oh. Yes, ma'am.” He touched his hat brim and went back to the wagon to get the rivet bolt.