Shortgrass Song (72 page)

“Go get your gun.” He seethed with rage. Javier was remorseless.

“No. I don't care if you want to kill me, but I will not try to kill you. I would rather die than shoot at you, my old friend.”

“Don't ‘old friend' me, you son of a bitch. You've dishonored me and my woman.”

“I have honored her where you would not. I married her. Marisol is my wife.”

Caleb staggered back. “You married
my
woman?”

“Not your woman. My wife.”

“The mother of my children!”

“And I will care for them as if they were my own. You will never have to worry about them. You can still come to see them if you wish. But they will stay here with their mother and me.”

The shadows of the mountains were on Peñascosa now, and a breeze chilled the sweat on Caleb's forehead. “What are you tryin' to say?” His anger turned to sick fear.

“I am telling you that if you want Marisol and the children, you must kill me now. That is the only way I am going to let you have them.” He lifted his eyes to the mountains, held his creased chin high, and awaited Caleb's decision.

It was unthinkable. Caleb had never considered that Marisol might quit him for an aging don like Javier, who was growing gray haired and paunchy. Seven winters had gone wasted. Amelia was right. He should have married her long ago.

He was late again. He had let one year too many pass. He could have had them all with him under one roof. Now he was expected to turn his back on his children. He did truly love them. He thought about them often, bragged on them all over the shortgrass plains, cuddled and wrestled them when he was with them. That they would so quietly, so readily, adopt a new father stung him hard.

It was like that winter on the Cimarron, when the cowboys held him down and clipped his dead fingers off with the dehorner. He could feel his own flesh and blood tearing away from him again, leaving him huddled and shuddering in pain and disbelief.

“You can visit them, just like always,” Javier said. “But they live under my roof now, and Marisol is my wife.”

Meekly, he slipped his pistol back into the holster. He grasped for something to salvage from Peñascosa. He felt like a dog sniffing for scraps.

It was worse than the Cimarron. He could visit his children, but he would sleep alone in a dusty Peñascosa adobe while Javier warmed himself with Marisol's body. There would be no more hunts in the mountains, no more songs sung in the
casa consistorial.

“Now I think you better go away and cool down someplace,” Javier said. “Do you want some food to take with you?”

“Hell no, I don't want no food from you! If I want food, I'll go shoot somethin'!”

Javier shrugged.

Caleb shuffled in his tracks. “Well, I'd like to tell 'em so long.”

“I will tell them for you. I think it is best that you come back to see them when you are not so mad.”

“What about Marisol?”

“I will tell her you said
adiós.
”

He felt the remorse in his stomach. There was nothing he could do but go. He wasn't going to shoot Javier. He walked toward the footbridge, avoiding the black eyes of the old ranchero as he passed. He reached the woodpile, then stopped. “I thought you liked 'em big,” he said.

Javier smiled a sad, sympathetic smile. “I have seen her big many times. Big with your children. And now she is big with mine. I have been here when you have not.”

He started again and didn't look back. He took an agonizing stroll across the footbridge, down the lane, to the corrals. He saddled up and went to spend a lonely night on the prairie ground. He would be cold, hungry, and alone. He would probably get the mandolin out and play a couple of the saddest songs he knew. Certainly he would play the “Shortgrass Song.” With a musical instrument in his hands, Caleb could make a kind of celebration even out of agony. He found beauty in sorrow. The music was his only refuge. The fiddle would drone and wail, and gush high clear melody like tears from his eyes.

EIGHTY-SEVEN

“Shorty had eleven bullet holes in his carcass.” Caleb leaned back on his old saddle, its stirrups spread-eagle on the ground between the fire and stone. “Looked like a chunk of rat cheese. I whitewash that story when I tell anybody else, Pete, but I'm here to tell you it was the bloodiest mess I ever seen. It was almost as bad as the time we found poor old Elam butchered by the Comanche.”

He sighed, looked out over Monument Park, speckled as he had never seen it with the lantern lights of homesteaders where once he and Pete had ridden together on unfenced range.

“What's happened to the ranch, Pete? You're not a year in the ground, and it's busted to pieces. Damn, I had some big ideas about bringin' Marisol and the kids here, and takin' things over.” He threw a chunk of wood on the fire. “Hell, I don't know what I'm gonna do now.”

He listened to the fire pop and caught himself looking at the dim light shining from Ab's cabin. “I wish I could patch things up with the old man.”

He fell back on his saddle and looked at the stars twinkling in the clear winter sky. “What do you do up there all day?” he said, watching his breath cloud take an orange light from the fire. “Maybe turn them longhorn devil-critters back from the pearly gates, and chouse 'em back to hell.” He smiled. “That would make a pretty good song, wouldn't it?”

He closed his eyes, heard tunes, saw memories, and fell off to sleep.

*   *   *

The next morning Caleb saw the Rampart Range in its full cloak of snow for the first time in ten years. Buster was waiting for him in the Cincinnati house when he came down. Caleb met Buster's newborn baby, Frederick, then walked to the mansion to get a look at his new nephew, Pete Holcomb, Jr.

“My stars,” Amelia said, hugging him. “What are you doing here this time of year?”

“I've come to see Little Pete.”

She puffed her cheeks with a sigh. “Oh, please, not now. He's been up all night with the colic, and I just got him to bed. Come back tonight for Sam's farewell dinner.”

He left the mansion, and Buster drove Caleb to town in the old spring buggy. Looking under the seat as they drove, Caleb saw the hole in the floorboard where once he and Buster had stepped the mast. How old had he been that day they drove through Monument Park on the wind wagon, the triangular sail billowing before a chinook? Ten? Eleven?

They stopped at the Holcomb depot the two of them had built together. Nearby stood a new store, a bank, a café, a livery, a laundry, and a few other businesses. Caleb went into the boardinghouse to see how Tess was getting along.

“How come you to end up workin' here?” he asked.

“The colonel give me the job,” she said. “He read your note to Buster and asked me if I wanted to work here.”

Caleb merely shrugged. “The old man sure knows how to throw a town together quick.”

That night Caleb and Buster were arguing lyrics in Buster's old cabin when Ab burst in without knocking.

“Buster!” he shouted. Then he saw Caleb, but it was too late. He looked away from his son and glared at the black man. “Where were you today when the stovepipe caved in at the café and filled the place with smoke?”

“Me and Caleb was up tendin' the ditches, colonel. I don't know when things are gonna break.”

“Well, why won't you come by my office every afternoon to see if I need anything done?”

“Because if you don't need anything done, I've wasted a ride to town.”

Ab stomped his peg leg ineffectually on the burlap carpeting. “Once was the time, Buster, when I'd holler and you'd come running. What's gotten into you?”

“Nothin', colonel. You're just more spread out now. Used to be all the work you needed done was right here on your farm. Now you've got that town and those ditches and they're spread over miles.”

Ab hissed and turned toward the door. “Tell Amelia I won't be able to make her dinner tonight. I've got books to go over.”

Caleb drew a breath. He wanted to thank the old man for giving the boardinghouse job to Tess. But he let his father get out of the cabin before he could bring himself to speak.

“He's been like that ever since he built that town,” Buster said. “You ain't never seen him so ornery in your life.”

“Hell, that's the way he shows his joy,” Caleb said. “He likes that town.”

Buster chuckled. “I guess you're right. Come on, we'd better pick up and get over to the big house.”

They carried their instruments together in the twilight, past the grove of pines on Buster's timber-culture claim, under the cottonwoods around Ab's cabin, and up the lane toward the mansion Pete had built for his bride. “I can't figure Amelia,” the drifter said as they walked. “She never did like Sam Dugan, and here she is throwin' him a farewell dinner.”

“She ain't as particular as she used to be since she took to workin' them horses,” Buster said. “A while back Dan come in all bloody from castratin', and she didn't even turn her lip up when she seen him.”

The other guests had gathered at the mansion by the time the musicians arrived. The cowboys looked out of place sitting in the parlor drinking coffee, but they seemed at ease.

“Sam,” Caleb said as he sat on the sofa. “You never did show much good sense. Here you are, finally manager of this ranch, and you're gonna up and leave us.”

Sam shrugged. “Well, when them homesteaders took over the park, the colonel told me I could pick one man to help me run the place and fire the rest. I just couldn't do it. I've about had a bellyful of punchin' cows, anyhow. Dan and String are gonna stay and run the outfit. I'm goin' to New York to sell my book.”

Amelia and Gloria brought in a silver serving set and refilled the coffee cups.

“You finally get that thing writ?” Caleb said. “What's it called?”

“‘Thom Moses, Colored Hero of the West,'” Sam said.

“Buster says it reads pretty good, but he don't hardly like the way I changed up his fight with Indians back in '64.”

“With the wolf-getter gun?” Caleb asked, dredging up the recollections as if he had only read them in a book himself.

The author nodded. “I had Thorn Moses shoot one brave and stab three others with the spike he built to stick that wolf-getter gun in the ground. Buster said that was just too much killin'.”

Ab's Chinese cook had been listening quietly in a cushioned armchair. “Next book you write, you call it ‘Lee Fong, Chinaman Outlaw,'” he said.

“Lee Fong,” Dan Brooks said, “nobody'd have you as an in-law, much less an outlaw.”

Piggin' String McCoy laughed so hard that he spilled the coffee he was blowing in his saucer.

“Why must you always saucer your coffee?” Amelia said, running for a towel.

“To cool it off,” String said. “What else is a saucer for?”

“To rest the cup on, of course,” she shouted from the kitchen.

“I thought that's what the coffee table was for,” String said, leaving a ring on the hardwood. “Speakin' of outlaws”—he paused and drew back as Amelia worked furiously with the towel—“that Miss Wiley at the boardin' house in town told us about you killin' off a couple of bad ones in the territory.”

Caleb nodded vacantly. He didn't feel like going into that again. “Had some help from Long Fingers,” he said. “That reminds me. The chief says he's comin' up in the spring, if the agents will give him a pass.”

“How old is he?” Dan asked.

“I don't know. He still sits a horse straight. Tough old stob.”

“What's he comin' up here for?” String said.

“Buster's been invitin' him for years.”

“What?” Gloria said, wheeling on Buster as she carried a coffeepot among the guests. “You ain't gonna have no wild Indian stay with us!”

Sam tried to laugh and swallow at the same time. He sprayed coffee all over Dan and started coughing. He reached for the makings of a cigarette, as he always did when the fits of hacking came on him.

“Oh, woman,” Buster said. “He ain't a wild Indian. Is he Caleb?”

Amelia went back to work with the towel.

“He ain't no wilder than Piggin' String.”

“That's wild enough,” String drawled. “Gloria don't 'llow me in her house neither.”

The laughter of the cowboys rose and fell, and a shrill cry came from the stairway.

“That's Little Pete,” Amelia said to Gloria. “I'll get him.” She took the front of her skirt in hand as she sprinted up the stairs.

Sam licked the cigarette paper and rolled it around the tobacco.

“Looks like you're about to meet your nephew,” Buster said.

“About time,” Caleb replied. “It's a good thing you and Gloria had a boy, too, Buster. That way him and Pete can grow up playin' together.”

“It sure is a good thing,” Gloria said. “I couldn't stand to see no daughter of mine pushin' them plows.”

“I wouldn't make a girl plow,” Buster said.

“I don't know…”

Buster rolled his eyes at the men.

Amelia entered with her baby and put Little Pete in Caleb's arms. “Meet your uncle Caleb,” she said, cooing to Little Pete. “Yours is sleeping like an angel, Gloria.”

Caleb blushed and held the baby awkwardly in his arms. He put the stub of his left index finger in the baby's hand. “Good firm grip,” he said. “I don't know if that's for holdin' onto broncs or makin' chords on a banjo.”

“He could learn both, if someone would stay around long enough to teach him,” Amelia said. She looked curtly at Caleb, ignoring the sudden silence around her.

EIGHTY-EIGHT

“How did you learn about these things?” Buster asked. He was holding the walnut box of a telephone against the wall of his Cincinnati house so Caleb could nail it in place.