Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

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  It was the last Mother’s Day before World War II. You and Karen was just little bitty. Your ma and me drove into the ranch yard, and Leo, the illegal who worked for me then (Here we go, thinks Clay), said some old fellow had arrived about sundown on a wild horse and rolled out his bedroll under the loading chute, put his head on his saddle, and gone to sleep. I had this feeling that it was old Robert Wood, and sure enough it was. (Yep!) Of course I caught him before he fell asleep, just caught his eye to tell him I would see him in the a.m. I pretty much knew what he was after. (So do I.) He had a band of mares up on the mesa behind our mares, and they were running out with wild horses there. Folks from town had come out from time to time to chase them around, and they was absolutely wild. I had been hoping for the chance to gather them for Robert when we had enough hands, because it wasn’t going to be easy at all. (And what a bitch it would turn out to be.)

  Clay’s only defense against these onslaughts was the things he couldn’t say aloud.

  Several months before this, Robert went out into the sagebrush to catch his red roan stud, which was running with some draft horses by the springs. He came with nothing but a little pan of oats and a lariat. (Wait’ll you see how good this trick works.) Just as he got his stud caught, one of the draft horses bites the stud, and Robert gets hung up in the rope and dragged. Your uncle O.C. Drury was plowing up wheat stubble about two miles away and saw the dust cloud from where Robert was being hauled. At his age, Robert really never should have lived, but he did. He was in the hospital all winter.

  I ran into him after he’d healed some, and he said to me in his kind of whiny voice, “Bill, I been laid up. Can you carry me to the place?” I went with him into his little shack of a cabin, and he stripped down to his long underwear. He pulled back the covers of his bed, and there was a great big nest of mice, just full of little pink babies. He carefully moved them to one side and got in next to them, pulled up the covers, and nodded thanks for the lift. (Set your watches for hantavirus.)

  Gradually, I heard rumors that he was back at work pulling up his poor fence and halfway cowproofing it. He brought back his black baldies and his bulls. He was even seen crawling around the cockleburs packing a sprayer with a full tank and a rag tied across his face. He had always lived and worked alone and was still on the place where he was born. (Same dog bit me.)

  Robert was an old-time spade-bit horseman. His horses were quick and bronc-y, and the only safe place around them was on their backs. But they were quiet in a herd of cattle and had the lightest noses in Montana. O.C. Drury hauled cattle as a sideline, and he hated to haul Robert’s calves. Invariably, he’d arrive in the ranch yard mid-October, and Robert would complain, “O.C., I’m so shorthanded just now. Would you catch up that bay and help me bring these cattle in?” O.C. would feel obliged, and he’d crawl on the old bay or the old sorrel, both of which would know right away it wasn’t Robert Wood. So one false move, and the bronc ride was on. (Nice way to treat someone helping you out.)

  So I let Robert sleep through the night, and by the time I woke, just before sunup, I could smell his fire and coffee. Then in a bit I could hear Leo’s voice, and I knew the two of them were working on a plan. I threw on the lights and got dressed, went into the kitchen, and started cooking. I knew I didn’t want to put on a breakfast for everyone. I was buying time, and I was still hoping I could talk Robert out of his dangerous plan to bring these horses off the mesa with such a small crew. Leo came in with Robert, who had to be helped up the steps, and we shared a big breakfast, and then we smoked and shot the shit. Leo was a little Indian-looking feller from Sonora, with black bangs over his face. You couldn’t joke with him, because he was always serious, but he could work like nobody’s business and make any kind of a horse do like he said, even the ones you’d rather not get on. (Why would he have a sense of humor? Wasn’t nothing around there that was funny.)

  Robert had an old-fashioned, long-nosed face, and you could see a little blue vein in the thin skin of his forehead. He was a puncher who had outlived his time. (Sound familiar?) He hated farming and especially alfalfa, which he thought was the enemy of the Old West. I suppose he was seventy-five. The hat he wore was just the way it came out of the box—no crease, no nothing. He wore it year-round. He said a straw hat was a farmer’s hat. He said that was what you wore when you went out to view the alfalfa.

  We always laid our plans at breakfast, except if I was sitting on the john writing out the day’s work on a matchbook cover. Robert wanted us all to go up the switchback together all the way to the mesa. “When we get there,” he said, “I’ll ride around to the crack.” The crack was a deep washout, and Robert didn’t want the horses to get past it and escape. Instead, he’d hide in the brush and keep them from getting there. Once they were out on the flat, we’d just ride on past them and turn them down toward my corrals.

  That crack was deep and steep, and personally I didn’t think Robert was going to be able to turn them there. I felt sure this herd of canners would jump the crack even if it meant breaking their necks and no horse or rider would consider following them. If it had been me, I’d just fog them off toward the neighbors’ and gather them up when we had us a big-enough crew. (Why take a knife to a gunfight?) But Robert didn’t think a lot of our horsemanship after all his years on the N Bar and Niobrara. So I thought better of voicing my doubts.

  He looked pretty stove up leading his sorrel mare out of the pen behind the scales and tied her to a plank of the chute, just his kind of horse, sickle hocked, good withers, short pasterns, low crouped, and coon footed, a real mutt of a cow horse you wouldn’t take to a halter class. (In short, the whole reason God invented cars.) Robert looked barely strong enough to throw his old Miles City saddle up on her or reach over to pull the Kelly Brothers grazer into her mouth. He led her around to the front of the chute, threw one rein up around the horn, and looped the other around the corner post. She had her nostrils blowed out and white all around her eyes, but then all his horses looked half loco.

  Robert limped around to the holding pen, squeaked open that old gate, went inside, crawled up the chute, out the end, and sorta fell onto his horse. She snorted, backed away stretching out that one rein until he could reach down and retrieve it, plait them both through the fingers of his left hand, which he lifted a tiny bit, and the mare sat down on her hocks and backed across the ranch yard. Robert lifted his hand, and she stopped, straightened up, and looked around for some work to do.

  Karen came in with Lewis, who wanted to talk about his rabies shot, but Karen raised a finger to her lips, and now all three of us had to hear this damn thing all over again. Lewis at least had a coloring book, and Karen could tap around on her smartphone. I was dying for a cigarette.

  Ramrod straight as we go single file up the trail, Robert had his boots plumb home in iron oxbows; he turned to look us over. It wasn’t long before we were on top. Leo loped out to the west and made a little dust. His small form sank and then nearly disappeared as he made a big ride around the horses. They had wheeled up to watch him and only began to disperse and feed as the circle he made came to seem too grand to concern them. I was able to ride straight back to the far side of the mesa, and by the time I got there, Leo was closing in my direction and those horses, two miles off, had already begun to drift away.

  We rode straight at them, and in two jumps they were smoking. Our horses caught their wildness and for a minute or two were pretty hard to handle, kicking out behind and trying to run slap through their bridles until we got the best of them. (I admit this is scary.) The mares had such a cloud of dust behind them it just seemed to drift off into that day’s weather, like from a grass fire. We’d seen Robert just float out of there to remind us how coarse broke we had our ponies.

  Robert was nowhere in sight, and there was no possible way to turn them down the road the way we had planned. We knew the mares had winded him somewhere because they suddenly slowed down and blew out the
ir nostrils. The crack, which was big enough to be an earthquake fault, was the place to turn them, so long as they didn’t try to jump it. All we could do then would be to throw them down the slope and let them play hell with the farming on all those little ranches along the river. What a mess. (Here comes the part I still like hearing even if I sometimes wish I could have been there.)

  Then, everything changed. Way past the crack, Robert broke out of the brush on his horse. Hell, we didn’t even know he was in there, and Leo on the back of his sweaty gelding just looked at me. The mare came out in a flurry, greasewood stobs racking off in the air around her. Those wild horses froze. Either they would leap that crack and fly past him, or Robert could jump it himself and turn them down toward the house. I couldn’t see doing much of anything to save this wad of cayuses, Roman noses, and big feet. Back at the time of the Boer War, some remount outfit had turned draft studs to put some size on them, but it turned up in all the wrong places. Leo looked like they hurt his eyes.

  They boiled back toward us, and we whooped and hollered at them. Leo took down his slicker and got them bunched up once more toward the trail, where they didn’t want to go, but Robert kept yelling for us to drive them. They advanced his way like a bright cyclone; and just before they broke around him, Robert spurred his horse straight at the huge crack like he was riding into hell, but the mare burned a hole in the wind, and when she reached that yawning gap, she just curved up, into the air, Robert easing back into the saddle with his stirrups pushed out in front, the mare’s legs reaching toward the far shore. I saw them land, but Leo had his eyes covered.

  I guess when the wild horses challenged Robert to raise them, he just raised them out of their chairs, because as he leaned up in his saddle, deep slack of reins hanging under the sorrel’s neck, taking time to count them, they were just the quietest most well-behaved herd of critters, ready to jog on home to my corrals. When we had them locked in, Robert said, “There, done. I was afraid we might have trouble with them.” He rode over to where he left his bedroll and said to me, “Mind if I ask your Mexican to cheek this mare while I slide off? She’s bad to paw at you when you get down. Man’d rather piss down her shoulder than go through that.”

  In the hall, Clay admired some of Lewis’s coloring before following Karen to the cemetery to pick out a plot, leaving Lewis in the car with an electronic game he played with his thumbs. They strolled through the old part with a kind of Boot Hill of wild old-timers, before they hit some of the kids they’d gone to school with, Charlie Derby (gored by a rodeo bull), Milly Makkinen, homecoming queen (overdose), and so on.

  They selected a plot near two trees and a long view to the west. “Well,” said Karen, “at least we got that out of the way.” Efficiency was always her tonic; Clay felt rotten. He stopped to see his father before he locked up at the car shack. He was surprised to find him back so soon. Clay tried to make light of it. He said, “So, I interrupted something? What’re you doing?” He wished he hadn’t asked.

  “Dying. What’s it look like?”

  Clay didn’t know what to say, so he said, “And you’re okay with that?”

  “How should I know? I’ve never done it before.”

  Clay was surprised to feel so shaken. He’d known when he’d brought his father here that it was the end of the trail, but hearing him admit it reminded Clay that he was more frightened than his father was. Soon he would be gone and the stories with him. Maybe he’d be able to remember them during hard times or, really, whenever he needed them. Maybe he needed them now.

  THE CASSEROLE

  We waited under the cottonwoods for the ferry to come back across the Missouri River. But the heat still throbbed from the metal of our car, and it turned out to be better to stand close to the water. The river seemed so big, its incongruous whisper belying its steady speed. Clouds of swallows chased insects over the water, and doves rested in the shadows. My wife kept touching her forehead with a Kleenex and staring across at the ferry, as if to hurry its return. We could see the ferryman chatting with his passengers, which only increased her agitation. We were heading from our home in Livingston to Ellie’s family ranch to celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Twenty-five years and no children: her parents had stopped interrogating us about that. They assumed that it was a physical problem that some clinic could solve, but we didn’t want children. We lacked the courage to tell them that. We both liked children; we just didn’t want any ourselves. There were children everywhere, and we saw no reason to start our own brand. Young couples plunge into parenthood, and about half the time they end up with some ghastly problem on their hands. We thought we’d leave that to others. But my in-laws were elderly, and they had the usual views of hereditary landowners: they longed for an heir. They had acquired their land from my wife’s grandfather and, with it, a belief in family values that did not stand up to scrutiny, since most ranches these days were the scene of bitter inheritance battles. But even if my wife had had siblings, she would not have been part of this sort of trouble, as she had never—at least, not since adolescence—wanted to pursue ranch life, rural life, agricultural life. She would have said to a sibling, Take it! It’s all yours. I’m out of here. There would have been an element of posturing in this, because she was very attached to the land; she just didn’t want to own it or do anything with it. Neither did I.

  The thing was that we were quite poor. We were both grade-school teachers, and owning a house had been the extent of our indulgences. We loved our house and our work and were suitably grateful for both, though Ellie felt that if I hadn’t been so hell-bent on retiring the mortgage we might have done a few more things for fun. My in-laws couldn’t believe that we had no interest in owning a ranch that was worth millions. But they wouldn’t have allowed us to sell it. We’d be stuck with it if we went along with them, which we weren’t about to do, and so now they were stuck with it: cows, farming equipment, fences—the whole enchilada. And they were getting old.

  The ranch was going to eat them alive, and they knew it. The fences would fall down; the cows would get out; the neighbors, old friends, would start to think of them as a problem. Once across this river, we’d be heading for a very sad story.

  Well, not that sad. They’d had their day, and it was almost over. That’s how it is for everybody. They liked to be seen as heroic strivers, alone on the unforgiving prairie, but they could have handed the ranch over, no strings attached, and headed for Arizona; after the sale, there would have been plenty for everybody. I had an extensive collection of West Coast jazz records, including the usual suspects, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Stan Getz, and so on—not everybody has Wardell Gray and Buddy Collette, but I did—and if I’d had a bit more dough I could have added a room on to our house specifically to house this collection, with an appropriate sound system. But when I complained about things like this to Ellie, she just said, “Cue the violins.”

  It looked as though our appallingly high-mileage compact car was going to be the only one going on the ferry. My wife and I sat in the front, while the backseat was filled with her belongings, as was the trunk. I had no idea why she’d felt called upon to bring this exalted volume of luggage, unless it was to store things on the ranch that were cluttering up our little house. I could have asked, but I just didn’t feel like it.

  “I think he’s turning around,” Ellie said, and I came out of my trance. The cable groaned next to us, and, across the river, I could see the ferry finally moving our way. Ellie was looking forward to this visit. I certainly was not. The ranch was where she had grown up, a nature lover. Despite all its deficiencies, it was her place on earth.

  We watched the ferry tack across the Missouri, tugging at an angle to the cable, then landing with a broad thump on the ramp. The ferryman, who was far too young for the wide red suspenders he affected, motioned us forward, and I drove our piece-of-shit car onto the dock.

  While we crossed, my wife stood on the ferry deck, looking out at the river, smiling and sighing
at the swallows circling the current. I told her that they were just after the bugs. She said she understood that, but they looked beautiful whatever they were doing, all right? I’ve long had trouble with people picking out some detail of the landscape and pretending it’s the whole story, as though, in this case, the blue light around those speeding birds could do anything to mask the desolation of the country north of the river, a land I traverse holding my nose.

  “Aren’t you going to get out of the car?” she asked.

  “Who’s supposed to drive it off the ferry?”

  I looked away from my wife and turned on the radio: no signal. I thought about her peculiar cheer today. I supposed it was the prospect of seeing her mother and father, of revisiting the scenes of her childhood, which she had done often enough to prove the utter heroism of my patience. Though, in recent times, we had talked less and less, which begged the question: What was there to talk about? We worked and we saved. We saved quite a bit more than Ellie would have, had she been in charge of things. What was becoming a comfortable nest egg would have disappeared in jaunts to Belize or some other place, where Ellie could show more of the body she was so proud of to anyone and everyone. She once had the nerve to point out that all this saving up for old age was remarkable for someone who had so much contempt for the elderly. I said, “Ha-ha-ha.” She was going to have to settle for wiggling her butt in the school corridors until the inevitable day when the damn thing sagged.

  At last we landed, and I drove off. Ellie was having a lively chat with the ferryman, and she took her time getting back in the car. I stared straight through the windshield until she got around to it. When she climbed in, with a sort of bounce, she exclaimed, “He grew up on the neighbor’s place, the Showalters’. He’s a Showalter. Graduated from Winnett, where I went.”