Shortgrass Song (67 page)

Scrambling, he got to his feet and threw the door open as Tess searched for something else to bounce off his skull. He heard the door slam behind him and didn't look back until he reached the bottom of the stairs. She wasn't coming after him.

Several men looked up from their drinks or their poker hands or their conversations with the harlots. Caleb looked down his nose at them, but the wet spot on the seat of his pants took some of the swagger out of him. He rubbed his head. He just wanted to leave.

“Through already?” the buxom madam said, smirking. “Sounds like you had a row up there. I hope you didn't hit my girl.”

He took his hat and gun belt down from the pegs on the wall by the front door. “She spilt some water.” Gingerly, he positioned his hat around a knot the pitcher had raised on his head, and walked out.

He heard them laughing after he closed the door. He took his bridle reins from the hitching rail. Before he mounted, he looked down the street. He could see corn stalks behind fences on the edge of town.

He shook his head and put a foot in the stirrup. Matthew would have gotten his money's worth whether he knew her or not. What the hell do you care? Why can't you be more like Matthew? He put his foot back on the ground. He couldn't believe himself. Matthew had been only twenty-one when he died, and he was still thinking of turn as an older brother.

It wasn't right to leave her there. Not after what he had said to her. But, damn it, it was not his fault. He put his foot back in the stirrup. The joys of his younger days were not joys anymore. Time was when he could use a whore and never care. He was growing a conscience. That preacher in Denison never should have treated her that way. He slipped his foot from the stirrup again.

He had changed. He was fighting the change, but it was coming anyway. Since Pete died, Caleb looked at things differently. These were supposed to be his wildest oats, this his last summer footloose before he married Marisol and took his children back to Holcomb Ranch to live. But he kept hearing Pete telling him he was living all wrong. He burst back into the whorehouse and stormed across the floor to the bottom of the stairs.

“Wait a minute!” the madam yelled. “Your guns, mister.”

He ignored her and sprinted up the stairs. He blundered into Tess's room and found her sopping water up from the floor, crying.

“Come on,” he said. He grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet.

“You take your hands off of me,” she said, struggling.

“Shut up.” He dragged her out of the room.

“What are you doin' with me?”

“I'm gonna teach you how to make a livin' on your feet. I want to have a look at that farm of yours. And it better be there, or I'll put you over my knee.”

They scuffled all the way down the stairs. When he made for the doorway, Caleb saw the madam loading shells into a shotgun. He drew his pistol and pointed it at her.

“Lady,” he said, “I've never shot a whore before, but I've shot squaws, and as far as I can see, a whore is just the next rung up.” He hoped she couldn't read a bluff. He wasn't about to shoot her.

The madam froze and looked him over. “If you don't want to go with this saddle tramp, I'll give him both barrels,” she said to Tess. “I won't have it said that I don't look after my gals.”

Tess's eyes darted between the two of them. She swallowed hard. “It's all right. He thinks he's tryin' to help me.” She yanked her arm from his grasp. “Just ain't got no manners, that's all.”

The madam lowered her shotgun. “You sure it's all right?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Caleb eased the hammer down on his Colt.

“Well…” The madam tossed the shotgun onto the bar. “You come on back whenever you want.”

“She ain't comin' back,” Caleb said. He reached for the polished brass doorknob.

*   *   *

They rode double, two miles out of town.

“Did Angus Mackland ever come back after you?” Caleb asked as they plodded along.

“No. They sent a bunch of lawmen into the Indian Territory to find him after he shot that town marshal in Denison. They flushed him out, and he went down to Old Mexico. I don't know whatever come of him down there.”

“No good, more than likely.”

Some farmer was using Tess's land to graze his milk cows. She owned a hundred hardscrabble acres in the Brazos bottoms, a few stunted trees on the highest corner.

“We'll build your house there,” Caleb said. “That'll give you some shade.”

She snorted. “Build it with what?”

“We'll buy some lumber.”

“I ain't got no money.”

“Well, Lordy, girl, you got three dollars a customer. What did you do with it all?”

“Old Rose got to keep most of it.”

He shook his head. “But she won't have it said that she don't look after her gals.”

“She did look after us.”

“Well, now you can look after yourself.”

She snorted again. “With what? I ain't got no house, no plow, no mule, no seed. I ain't got nothin'.”

“We'll buy everything you need.”

“I told you I ain't got no money.”

“I've got enough to buy a wagon and team of mules.”

She could see a woman looking at them from the porch of the nearest farmhouse. “I thought you were gonna make me a farmer. Now you're gonna make me a mule skinner.”

“We have to earn enough money to buy the stuff you need for this place. With a wagon we can do it.”

She felt her sweaty dress sticking to her. The backs of her hands were going to burn crisp as cracklings working outdoors. Her skin hadn't seen much sun in the past few years. “What are we gonna haul?”

“Bones.”

EIGHTY

They made fifteen miles the first day in a secondhand Studebaker freight wagon. Their two mules, one brown and one gray, didn't like each other. The second morning it took thirty minutes of cussing and flogging to get the team in harness. By the time they left camp on the Salt Fork, the mules were already worn out from kicking and biting each other. Tess had stood back and laughed.

For lunch they ate canned beef and stale biscuits on a blanket spread under the wagon. A hot breeze blew in from the south. They were on the divide between the South Wichita and the Salt Fork of the Brazos. They could see a lot of open country. Caleb was trying to cheer Tess up, telling her about the Extravaganza of the Western Wilds.

“… So, anyway, when I left, Captain Singletary talked me into taking a horse as part of my pay. He had this herd of paint ponies for the Indians to ride in the show, and he had taught 'em this trick where, after we killed all the Indians, we'd round up the horses and shoot our guns in the air and they'd sit back on their haunches and paw the sky.”

“What for?” Tess asked.

“I don't know. I never did figure out the meanin' of it. The crowd liked it though. Anyway, this one little paint colt never could get it right. He thought every time a gun went off, he was supposed to sit down right there and start pawin'. It didn't make any difference to him whether the show was goin' on or not. So Captain Singletary traded him to me to make a cow pony out of.”

“How come you didn't bring him with you?” she asked. “I like paint horses.”

“Well, I took to ridin' that colt to spell ol' Powder River, and I just happened to be on him the day I rode into Dodge City. Some boys there were havin' some fun, tearin' down the street, shootin' their irons, and that dang colt just sat down right there in town and went to pawin' the air. I slid right off his rump and landed in the mud.”

Tess laughed, throwing her head back, showing the gap in her smile. “What did you do with him? Sell him to some poor ignorant cow waddie?”

“No, I took him down into the Indian Territory and gave him to old Chief Long Fingers. The chief thinks I'm a pretty good white man ever since I got Red Hot Frost to send his squaws all them buffalo hides back in '74. I'magine he's probably butchered and ate that little paint by now.”

Tess looked across the desolate ranges, the smile falling from her lips as she remembered where she was. “How do you know we'll find bones out here?” she asked.

“I hunted buffalo out here on the narrows. I remember where we made our biggest kills. They say you can get eight dollars a ton for buffalo bones if you haul them to the railroad. A hundred buffalo skeletons makes a ton. Hell, we killed a hundred a day. Badger Burton killed a hundred all by himself one day. I figured it out. We can get eight cents for every skeleton. It'll be like pickin' up pennies.”

“Which railroad are we gonna haul 'em to?” Tess asked.

“The Fort Worth and Denver is at Wichita Falls now.”

“How far is that?”

“About seventy miles, I reckon.”

“Oh, my God,” she said. She had already had enough of riding in the wagon. “How many tons can this wagon carry?”

“About half.”

“Half a ton?” She sat up so quickly that she almost bumped her head on the running gear. “Four dollars a trip?”

He was unconcerned. “I can make a trip a week while you stack the bones. I'll go in on Saturday so I can earn some fiddlin' money on top of the bone money. In a month or so, we can buy a bigger wagon. Maybe a train of 'em, and a team of bulls. By wintertime you'll have enough to build you a little shack on your farm and get you through till spring.”

Tess fell back on the blanket. “You're gonna leave me alone out here to pick bones while you drive to town every week?”

“A friend of mine named Cole Gibson is workin' a line camp near here. I'll have him check on you every now and then. Of course, you could drive the wagon if you want, and I'll stack the bones.”

She covered her face with her hands.

Caleb finished his lunch and took a drink from a canteen. He nudged her with it. She took the canteen, tilted it over her face, and let some water trickle on her brow.

“You know,” he said, looking out from under the wagon, “when it rains here on the narrows, the water runs off two different ways.”

Tess wasn't interested.

“On the south side of this divide it goes into the Brazos and runs all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. On the north side it runs into the Wichita, then into the Red, then into the Mississippi, then into the Gulf. So two drops of rain, fallin' an inch apart, could end up hundreds of miles away from each other.”

“Like you and me done,” she said hoarsely. “‘Cept, somethin' done washed us together again.” She closed her eyes. “Two drops of rain.”

*   *   *

They arrived at the South Wichita before dusk. Caleb drove the wagon into a line of trees near the riverbank. They had just enough daylight left to set up a camp. He built a stout tent of the wagon sheet, held erect with straight green oak limbs and staked with willow pickets. He hobbled the jaded mules and turned them loose to graze.

“Caleb!” Tess shouted from a stand of brush. “Look! I found some already!”

“Don't mess with those,” he said, coming to her side.

They stood over two old buffalo skulls, bleached and crumbling, gnawed by rodents, overgrown with bushes.

“Those are grave markers. That's where we buried Old Elam Joiner and a kid named George somethin' or other.”

“What kilt 'em?”

“Indians.”

“There ain't no more Indians around here now, are there?”

He chuckled. “Nope. Long gone. We cleaned 'em out in '74. The army and us buffalo hunters.”

She breathed a sigh of relief.

“I better go see if I can shoot a coon or a rabbit or somethin' to eat. Can you imagine that all these plains used to be covered with game?”

He seemed to recall that she had once bragged on her singing, so Caleb got Tess to sing some songs that night after supper. She preferred hymns—“Amazing Grace” and “Shall We Gather at the River.” The husky quality of her voice carried over into song. She hit every pitch without a hint of any wavering or vibrato in her voice. Caleb harmonized and strummed a mandolin.

The next morning they went in search of bones. Caleb drove the wagon among the ridges, scanning the far horizons for landmarks. After a couple of hours he stopped and stood on the wagon seat.

“That's it,” he said. “Over that next ridge.” He sat down, shook the reins, and growled at the mules.

Tess was riding Powder River. “What is it?”

“That's where me and Badger Burton killed sixty buffalo in one morning. Two miles down is where he killed sixty-three by himself the same morning. We'll make our first load there.”

When they topped the ridge, Caleb recognized the clump of bushes where he and Badger Burton had fallen out. He rode the brake down a precarious grade and trundled into the slaughter grounds. Bleached bones cropped up everywhere through the short clumps of grass.

He drove the wagon from pile to pile until he and Tess had filled it up. Then he unhitched and hobbled the mules. They started stacking the skeletons that were left in one central pile so they could be easily loaded on the next trip.

They took their dinner break during the heat of the day, in the shadow of the wagon. Tess napped while Caleb carved a sign on a piece of sideboard that had broken off. He fastened it to a stake with a strip of rawhide from his saddle wallet. He woke Tess and told her to stake her claim on the bone pile with the sign: T. W
ILEY.

“Nobody'll bother it now,” he said.

“Nobody's fool enough but us,” she replied, climbing down from the small stack of bones.

They left the loaded wagon, rode double on Powder River to Badger's old stand, and starting stacking the bones there. They situated the main pile in the middle of the kill. The afternoon was hot and still, and the work was monotonous. Tess remembered Arkansas: the hard labor, the scorching sun in the fields, the good days before her mother died.