Shortgrass Song (74 page)

“Don't feel so ungrateful,” she lectured, no sympathy in her voice. “There are others with far less than you have. Your father still owns a substantial amount of property.”

“It wouldn't matter if he owned it all. It's all changed now. It'll never go back to what it was when I came here.” He sat up and looked at her, as if startled by a sudden revelation. “And you know what the worst of it is? I dug the first irrigation ditch myself. I built the first windmill, the first fence. Hell,” he said, chuckling, “now I've gone and strung the first damned telephone!”

Amelia forced a smile. “It's still a beautiful place. The mountains are just as high and lonely as when you came here. The wildflowers are just as lovely. I didn't come here as early as you did, of course, but I have seen this land change, too, and I have changed with it. When Pete brought me here, I was still a squeamish little city girl. Now the ranch has changed me, and I've changed the ranch. But there are some things, Caleb, like those mountains, that will never change. You can hold onto them while everything else is changing around you. It gives you your place in the world.”

He got up, walked to the window, and saw the snowy mountains under the moon. “You know, there's a place, right up on top of the hill, just the other side of Pete's grave. If you sit there in the grass beside the old Arapaho Trail and look west, you can't see a fence or a road or a windmill or a house. I remember the first time I climbed up there as a boy—the way I felt lookin' up the Arapaho Trail, where it winds up into the Rampart Range.” He turned back to her. “I hope that's one of them things you're talkin' about that'll never change. It's the last place like that I know of around here.”

She rose and joined him at the window, slipping her hand around his arm. “I'll tell you a secret, Caleb. One you've never learned on your own, because you've never stayed in one place long enough to learn it. If you look at something every day, then even if it changes, you don't notice so much. It doesn't come as such a shock to you. It's the same with people. You don't notice the wrinkles, or the gray hairs showing up, if you see them every day. And when you see the children every day, you don't even notice them growing. But if you see them only once in a while, you realize how much you must have missed. And it hurts you to have missed it. That's why people have homes. That's why we settle.”

He nodded. “I've learned more than you think I have,” he said. “The hard way, mostly.” He stared at her a long moment and felt closer to her than he ever had before. He had seen her first wrinkles appear in this year since Pete died—tiny hairlines around the corners of her eyes. But there was no gray among the chestnut tresses. Amelia was still soft and smooth, and more beautiful than the day Matthew brought her home.

It had always shamed him to see her beauty. He usually looked away. He thought of her first as his brother's wife. But now he stared and felt no shame. Pete was gone. Dead a year, as a matter of fact. It had taken that long for him to accept Pete's death and to see his widow as Amelia, instead of Mrs. Pete Holcomb. There was no dishonor in seeing her beauty now.

The logs shifted in the fireplace.

“Well, it's late,” he said. “I better get back to the bunk-house.”

She walked with him to the kitchen door, gave him his hat, and helped him with his coat. Before he left, she put her small, warm hand in his and squeezed his fingers. “Good night,” she said.

He stepped out into the dark Colorado winter.

He tried to clear his head as he trudged back to the bunkhouse with his hands in his pockets. “What did you say?” he said to himself. “Did you tell her you'd stay, or not? Nowhere else to go. Plenty of reasons to stay. That life's gone now, ain't it? The wandering? That's a hard life, and you know it. Why the hell don't you want to stay? The old man, that's why. How are you ever gonna get the nerve to speak to the old man? Not much of a ranch here now, either. You need room. Who's gonna listen to the music? My Lord, what did you tell her? Did you tell her you'd stay? You did, didn't you? You up and did it. You damn fool, you should have thought first!”

EIGHTY-NINE

The barbed wire telephone system sent tendrils all the way to town, where Caleb and Buster installed a box in Ab's office one day while he was out. They also put one in the colonel's cabin on the ranch.

Tess Wiley bought a telephone box with her own money and had Caleb hook her boardinghouse up to the system.

Gloria became so enraged with Ab ringing the bell in her house every night to talk to Buster that she made Buster tear the telephone out and put it in his old cabin. He usually went there in the evenings anyway, where he worked on various contraptions or played music with Caleb.

Piggin' String McCoy made a weekly inspection of fences, paying particular attention to the top strand on the south pasture. After Tess got her telephone, he started riding fences on Saturdays and would wind up at her boardinghouse in the evenings to wrangle an invitation for supper.

Tess stopped Caleb in the street one day as he was coming out of the general store. “What is Piggin' String's real name?” she asked. “He won't tell me.”

Caleb chuckled. “When he first came here, he used to go by his initials—P.S. Said his real name was too embarrassing. We all just took to callin' him Piggin' String.”

“I'm gonna find out what it stands for if it's the last thing I do,” she said.

“He won't tell. I've tried for years to get him to tell.”

The next Sunday afternoon, Caleb was saddling Whiplash, the stallion who had thrown Pete into Cedar Root Canyon, when Buster found him in the corral.

“Where you goin'?” Buster asked.

“Huntin'. Want to go?”

“No. What do you want to ride ol' Whiplash for? You tryin' to give the old man a stroke?”

“Oh, he ain't no outlaw,” Caleb said. “Just a little high-strung.”

Buster shook his head. “I just talked to Tess Wiley on the telephone. She was lookin' for you.”

“What did she want?”

“I don't know. She wouldn't tell me. Said she only wanted to talk to you.”

“I guess I better talk to her before I go,” Caleb said. “Can I use your telephone?”

“Sure.”

He rode Whiplash to Buster's cabin, got down, wiped his feet before stepping in on the burlap carpet, and took the earpiece off the side of the telephone. He gave the crank five short turns. Tess's was the fifth telephone on the system, so her signal was five rings. He waited a few seconds and gave the crank another five turns.

“Tess?” he said. “Buster said you wanted to talk to me.”

“I found out,” her voice said, crackling through the barbed wire.

“Found out what?”

“What
P.S.
stands for. Piggin' String's real name is Pendrake Sydney McCoy.”

“My Lord!” Caleb said, laughing. “No wonder he wouldn't tell. How did you get it out of him?”

A mad whir of static came over the fence line.

“What?”

“I said that's none of your business!” Tess repeated. “Now, don't you tell anybody, Caleb. He might get riled at me.”

“Lord, woman, if you don't want anybody to know, don't say it over the telephone. Gloria listens in on every conversation when she's at Amelia's house.”

“I know, but this is her day off.”

“Well, you can't be too careful. I have to go now. Tell Pendrake I said howdy.”

“Caleb!” she said as he hung up the ear horn.

He chuckled as he went back out. But as soon as he got up on Whiplash, he heard the single ring that represented Buster's signal. He climbed back down and went into the cabin as the bell rang again.

“I was just jokin',” he said into the blunderbuss. “I won't tell nobody.”

“Buster?” a gruff old voice said.

He stood in sudden surprise. “This is Caleb.”

“Caleb? Oh. Tell Buster to get over to my house. I have some things for him to do tomorrow.”

“All right.”

They listened as the line hummed between them.

“Thanks,” Ab's voice finally said.

“You're welcome.”

There was a pause, and an empty drone of static, then a tripped switch broke the link between them.

Caleb hung up the earpiece, fascinated. His father had thanked him over the telephone. The old man had spoken to him with real civility. It had taken two miles of barbed wire to reach across the years of silence and anger. It was a precarious link, but Caleb felt the beginnings of a twist that he thought he might form into a solid splice. He felt an electric surge rise from his heart and travel up the back of his throat. The telephone was a wonderful invention.

NINETY

Green came to the plains along the Washita, and patches of locoweed pushed blue-purple blossoms into sunlight. Long Fingers yearned for the timbered grades of the mountains. He left his canvas-covered house at dawn, wearing a broadcloth suit, a moon-white shirt, a flat-brimmed Stetson, and new moccasins of golden deerskin and multicolored quill work. He carried a leather satchel.

Walking slowly down the dirt lane of his village, he came to Red Hawk's farm, where the young chief was preparing the foundation of his house among stacks of rough-sawn cottonwood lumber. He stood silently and. watched until Red Hawk noticed him.

“Where are you going?” Red Hawk asked, setting down the square, quarried stone he was carrying to a corner.

“I am going to see Man-on-a-Cloud.”

“Do you want me to go with you to the agency?”

“No. I will go alone.” He put his satchel on the ground. “Sit down, I want to tell you something,” he said, and they both sank to a bench of stacked lumber. “When the white men come to break our land apart, it will be the first time since the Great Spirit made the Arapaho mother of all people that we will have no land to call our own. Just little pieces of land for different Indians. No longer a big piece for the tribe. It is the time of great change.”

“I know.”

“You have to hold the people together. I do not know how. It is for you to learn…”

As they talked, the sun rose higher, brighter, and threw light into a million dewdrops clinging to the fresh spring grass.

“You will be the last chief to remember the old ways,” Long Fingers finally said. “You must remember the way you endured your test, and saw the vision of a Red Hawk in the morning sun. The others chose to fight, and now they are dead and are doing nothing for the people. You chose the right way. You must keep the old ways of the Arapaho in your heart, while you guide the plow in your hands. Remember the most important thing: the Arapaho tribe is the mother of all others on earth. It must never die.”

He leaned forward and tried to stand on his tired old legs. Red Hawk stood quickly and boosted Long Fingers with a strong, gentle hand.

“I will tell you something else, too,” Long Fingers said. “If you like a white man, and you want him to be a friend, give him an Indian name. Call him Standing Bear or Running Horse or something like that. Then he will be your friend.”

Red Hawk nodded and smiled.

“Now, I am going to find a boy to put a saddle on my horse for me. Let your heart laugh when you see me ride away. I am going back to the old, sacred lands. I am going to see the mountains.”

Red Hawk tried to let his heart laugh when the old man left, but it sank like a stone in a river and grew cold down in the beautiful murky depths of his sorrow. He sat on the cornerstone, hoping to see the bird of his vision quest soar into the red glow of the morning sun, but the hawk did not appear.

*   *   *

Long Fingers rode all day, plodding slowly on his paint mare. He reached Darlington that evening and stayed with the Indian agent of the Cheyenne-Arapaho reservation. He was a favorite of the agent for his long and steadfast friendship and cooperation.

“Here's your pass,” the agent told him that night. “I'll see you off at the station in the morning. Remember, you'll have to ride in the immigrant cars.”

The rails took him north to Wichita, where a black man he had traveled with out of Indian Territory helped him purchase his ticket for Pueblo, Colorado, and find his train. As he rode westward, the homesteads grew more scarce and the towns farther apart, until, beyond Garden City, he saw only the great, green swells of the prairie, marred occasionally by the sawtooth jags of barbed wire fences, zigzagging across the Great Plains.

Darkness came, but he did not sleep. He stared all night at the moon and the stars, their light streaked and smeared by the grimy windows. He could not feel the permanence of earth through all the gnashing steel pieces below him. In the morning he saw the homesteads lining the Arkansas. Too many of them to count. The cotton-woods planted in orchard rows around their homes were growing large now and casting ample shadows.

He searched the western horizon through the moist, hazy spring air. His heart rose until finally he saw them: the dark, purple faces of the sacred mountains. They were the same. He knew them. Some things didn't change.

At Pueblo he bought his ticket and waited for the regular afternoon run to Colorado Springs and, beyond, to Holcomb. As the rails carried him northward, he gazed with silent wonder at what the white man had done, in less than half his lifetime, to this place where the plains and mountains met. Everywhere he saw towns, houses, roads, fences, trash heaps, and huge square patches of scarred earth where once buffalo had lumbered in numbers too great to calculate and antelope had sprinted like light above the ground. He saw naked hillsides, once thick with timber. The power and stupidity of white men awed him.

The high ridge of Pikes Peak drew nearer. Long Fingers became almost hypnotized by its slow approach. He came to Colorado Springs and watched the rich white people come and go as the train sat in the station. Finally the cars jerked northward for the last stretch into Holcomb.