The rattler quit rattling and I quit holding at about the same second. I jerked my hand back like I'd grabbed hold of a branding iron, and I got myself back away from the bush as far and as hard as my legs could move. It was a considerable distance, I found, and I landed with a thud—but I never felt it.
I got my feet back under me and crouched there, gulping in air and shaking something fierce, but ready to run for all I was worth if I had to.
Over at the other side of that little bush I saw the rattler crawl out from where it had been laid up. It was maybe four-five feet long, and vicious-looking with that flat, ugly head. It glistened in the rain like it had been oiled, and the shininess made the markings on its back stand out bold and plain in the scaly patterns. It must of been laying up out of the rain there and had got stupid and slow from the cold like snakes and lizards and some other things will do. It wasn't moving fast even now that it was awake, and it hadn't rattled very much nor even very fast as I could judge now that I didn't have it in my hand any more.
The thing slithered off in another direction and pretty soon was out of sight. I straightened up slow and found that my legs was all shaky and my heart still beating fast. I was breathing like I'd just run all the way from Dog Town out to our homeplace.
Rain hitting on my face and dripping into my eyes made me realize that I didn't have my head rag on, and I commenced to take some notice of myself. When I looked down I could see that I was mud all over from rolling on the ground, and some sand and leaves and bits of thorn and other trash were stuck to my leggings and britches.
The rag I'd had tied around my head had kept at least some of the water off my forehead and out of my eyes, but it had come off when I rolled away from the snake. When I found it again, it was on the ground, smack under the heel of my left shoe. It had been wet before; now it was muddy. I wasn't about to put that thing back on my head. Feeling real disgusted—with the rain and the wood and the rag and everything else—I threw that rag as hard as I could toward where the rattler had disappeared. Then I turned and stomped back to camp.
I hiked it in and started to dig another rag out of Bill's stuff before I remembered how touchy he was about that.
"You got another chunk of cloth or an old sack? I lost my fine headpiece."
"Sho ... I'll find it for you. While I'se doing that whyn't you fetch in the wood I thought you was gonna have brung in already."
"There ain't nothing out there that'll burn. Nothin'. I been looking all this time and ain't found anything but one rattlesnake and a lot o' water."
"Boy, I cain't fix up special cookin' over a rattlesnake an' a pail o' water. You can do better'n that. Just you haul in what you can, wet or not, an' let me worry about settin' it to fire—all right? "
"All right," I said. But I figured he was going to be in for a big surprise when he found out how wet all the wood was.
I went out and collected the best I could find. Nothing so thick it would be hard to catch fire even if it was dry and nothing so small it was likely to be sopped through and worthless even if it did catch fire. I brought in a couple good armloads of that kind of wood, but it was awful wet.
When I got back and dumped the second load, Bill left off his fussing over a big pot and came over to the place he'd picked out for a fire.
"We'll need another two loads more anyhow, boy, but you kin get it in a little bit. First, you looky heah."
I bent close to watch while Bill picked out some finger-thick stuff and looked it over careful; then he took out his belt knife and split the sticks in half lengthwise. The inside wasn't too wet. I could see where the wet part was from it being darker, but that didn't go very far into the inside wood. Bill tucked the two pieces of stick under his shirt and went to splitting some more, putting most of them in his shirt when he was done and tossing others away if they were too wet or rotted hollow or something.
Next thing he did was to take a piece of tarp about five foot square. He shook it out and held it over the place where he figured to light the fire. He didn't say anything—just looked up to me and there wasn't any question but that he wanted me to hold the tarp over there, so I did.
While I held the cover in place Bill went and rummaged through his sacks, which he had piled over another piece of tarp. Then he came back holding two things in his hands.
One, a block of lucifers, was obvious. The other I didn't understand right off, but I did when I thought on it for a second. It was a plain old tallow dip candle.
What it was for was easy to see once it was pointed out. Damp wood won't light off to a match for anything. But a candle, something that will burn for a long time without getting your fingers charred, now that could be held to a piece of even pretty darn soggy wood long enough to get a fire going.
Sure enough, that's what Bill did. As easy as you please, he took a lucifer and snapped it alight, touched the candle on fire with that, and then held a piece of split stick over it. Didn't take him more than five minutes to get a little fire going. In ten minutes, I didn't need to hold the tarp anymore. And inside of fifteen minutes, I couldn't of held a tarp there without getting both me and it burnt up. There wasn't enough rain in the state of Texas to put that fire out by then.
Bill never said a thing, just went back to fussing over his pots. I went over and brought back more wood until we had a real good pile there. By the time I had enough to satisfy myself, Bill came over with another rag for me to use for a hat.
"I'd give you some paper or something fer a brim, but it wouldn't hold up in th' rain. This here's the best I can do."
"It'll do. But when we get to Rockport and get them animals sold, the first thing I'm gonna do is get me a proper hat— real fur felt, maybe."
Bill nodded and kept on with his work. Now, he was reaching inside a pot that was covered over so the rain couldn't get in. He worked his arms up and down like pistons, up and down and up and down just as steady as the driving rod in a steam engine like the ones I'd seen drawings of in the Police Gazette. I got the notion that whatever was in there was going to be worked to death so it wouldn't be anything I'd want in my stomach. But I sure was wrong.
When the rest of the bunch came wandering in from the herd it was still pretty early, but they were wet and cold and beat. They came in and sat quiet, pulling long drinks of hot coffee out of the tin cups that Bill had ready for them. They ate their steaks and fried beans without talking much.
Then, still feeling low, they were about to clomp back to their horses when Bill came over, not saying a word, and lifted the covers off a couple of low pans that he'd had covered and sitting beside the fire to keep warm. We'd all figured they was just more beans to be refried later. Instead they were about the prettiest deep-dish dried apple pies any man ever laid eyes on.
I'd not seen Bill put them together, but he had somehow, some time. They sure perked up everybody's spirits.
Mister Sam Silas went over and punched Bill on the arm, and most everyone had something to say.
It's sort of customary that nobody ever says anything nice about a trail cook's food, but everybody around that fire busted the custom right down to nothing that day. Even Tommy Lucas mumbled "fine" when he handed over his plate for seconds.
I guess what really made it so remarkable about all the compliments was that the pies really didn't taste too good. Bill hadn't had any coals to get his Dutch ovens working right so the crust was soggy and sort of runny and the apples kind of mushed in together with what was supposed to be crust. But it was a mean and miserable day, and we hadn't been expecting anything special, and that seemed to make the apple and flour mixture taste near as good as anything Ma had ever baked at home. We went back to work that afternoon feeling a lot warmer and a lot less wet than we might have.
17
"WE'RE GONNA HAVE to change your name, boy—call you Mud instead o' Duster." Crazy Longo sat up on his horse all high and dry and comfortable and grinned at me. He had sort of a wide, squared-off face with a great, broad mustache
that was a dark, rich red in color even though his hair was as brown as fancy-tanned leather. When he smiled, the bottom half of his face split open straight across, and it seemed like he had a line of teeth that went clear from one end of that mustache to the next.
He must of thought he was in some position to brag from, and in a way he was. He was up on top of that horse and wearing britches he had got to wash out the night before, after the rain quit.
As for me, I was on my feet again, like it seemed I always was any more even if I had signed on for a riding job, and I was just about covered over with sticky mud from carrying in armloads of wood. Half my waking hours I seemed to spend on my feet with a load of damp, dirty wood clutched tight against my chest.
The night before, I'd tried to get my stuff clean too, but I didn't have an extra pair of britches or another shirt, so the scrubbing hadn't really done too much to improve my appearance. By noon that next day I was near about as dirty again as ever I had been—but not so wet, so there was something to be thankful for. My shoes was heavy with caked and drying mud until it was becoming a real chore to walk, especially since they stayed wet and they were beginning to gall me some.
That night I surely intended to wash my stuff out again and then, by golly, I'd sleep in my drawers so my clothes and shoes could get dried out proper for a change. "Just you wait," I told Crazy Longo. "I haven't hardly had a chance to get clean, what with fetching wood for the rest of you dandies to dry off by. I ain't a bit nastier than the rest of you, an' even dirty I smell better than some I could name. And what's more, some people I know don't stick a fistful of hair into everything they drink. That ain't clean either, you know."
Crazy Longo was always a great one for joking and he never minded if it was him or someone else that was on the taking end of a joke or a prank. He just grinned a little bigger and brushed his mustache up tall and ruffly with the back of his hand. Then he turned around and started to walk his horse past, making a big show of going around me but actually coming so close I had to be careful I didn't get knocked down or didn't step backward onto a patch of real slick, greasy-looking mud just behind. He was likely figuring I didn't know that was there and would step back and slip on that bit of slick clay and go falling down in the mud, wood and all.
What I did instead was to hop over to one side, right up next to his horse. It was one he'd brought along on the drive with him and I'd noticed it was awful touchy about anything coming close to its left flank. There was a big, jagged scar on it back there, and maybe that had something to do with it. Anyway, I stepped in real close and gave that horse a good, hard scrape with the broken off end of a pecan branch. The stick rubbed straight across that old scar. And did that old horse ever move. He squatted down just long enough to get his muscles bunched right and then he jumped like a bobtailed cat being shot out of a cannon.
Crazy Longo's head snapped back till his hat come clean off his head, and for about two seconds, there, he was moving probably as fast as he ever would in his whole lifetime. He was a good one for staying up on a horse, though, and I never had any notion I'd get Crazy Longo flung off his own horse. Which I did not do.
Something else I did not do was to reckon just where I stood and just where that horse was going. When it commenced to jump out like it did, it sort of favored the side with the scar on it. And that threw it just a little bit to one side as it went. And that put me and my fool self right up against one corner of a nine-hundred-pound piece of fast-moving hide, meat, and bone.
I got belted a little by the hip and nudged some on my leg and shoved over just enough to knock me off my balance. When I went to step out to get my balance back, I hit that patch of clay and mud and my left foot went sliding forward at a good clip. Since my right foot stayed planted right where it was, I pretty much had a choice. I could end up on the ground stretched out with my feet front to rear or I could take a fall. Not that I had time to think it out—just natural-like, I took the fall.
Crazy Longo seen it all. He come back and leaned down and picked up his hat and then kind of hung there upside down and watched under his horse's neck while I picked myself land my wood up off the ground, but he never said a thing while I got myself back on my own feet where I belonged.
I got up and shot him what I hoped was a real mean look, and to show him I wasn't letting it bother me none I stuck my nose up in the air and beat at the seat of my britches to sort of dust myself off. Instead of getting anything off of me, though, that pounding just smeared it around some. From the feel of it, I was all over slick, red mud from hipbone to tippy-toe. I didn't look, though. I wasn't going to give Crazy Longo that satisfaction. I just brushed away like it was doing some good, got my bundle of wood back together when I'd brushed at my hip long enough, and proceeded back toward camp.
Crazy Longo rode alongside of me, still not saying a word until we got back to where Digger Bill was working over his slabs of slightly soured beef. "Sure hope you get caught up on your wood gatherin' soon, Duster. You shorely need that chanct to get cleaned up. But let me know if you need help picking out a puddle to wash in, 'cause you don't pick 'em so good for yer-self." He gave me a real serious and helpful nod and rode off back to the crew to tell them where we was and where they could hold the herd close to both us at the fire and some good graze.
I slapped the wood down next to the fire and told Bill, "I'm tired o' being all covered over with mud. Do you need me anymore?"
He never even glanced up from what he was doing. "Naw, take off. Go on up the river four-five miles to a crick that comes in from the nawth. Has a stand o' willas maybe three chains upstream. Get me a good pile o' wood on the far bank an' then do whatever you want," he said. "On the far bank, mind you. They'll want t' cross over tonight."
I waved him a quick thank-you and got out of there before he could change his mind.
The horses had had enough time for a breather and were ready to go, or anyways they weren't so unready that they were going to make trouble about it. As soon as the boys had their afternoon horses, I eased them along, then picked up the pace some when we was going good.
There wasn't much worry about them getting over hot. It had quit raining the day before, after three days of steady downfall, but the sky was still clouded over solid. A sky like that is a rare thing in McMullen County, but now we'd left McMullen a ways behind us and I didn't know what to expect. The land here was different—more soil and less rock, a little more green and a lot less thorn—so I figured it might be natural for the weather to be different too. I'd never been this way before, and I couldn't judge what was usual and what was not.
This sky now, normal or otherwise, looked awful strange and almost scary to me. It wasn't real black with big, tall storm clouds. Instead they was a darkish gray, some like light-smoked glass and some almost white. They were low, too—so low I could almost reach up and grab a handful of whatever it is clouds are made of. Looking up at them I decided it would be near to possible to catch one if I stood up in the saddle and jumped or maybe climbed a tall tree and tossed a loop up to trap one.
I guess what made it seem so scary instead of just different was how fast them clouds was moving. I'd never seen anything go so fast. There wasn't a whole lot of wind, but these clouds was racing overhead. They come just flying in from a downstream direction, which meant they were coming in off the water, the Gulf of Mexico that is, and from a good ways off. Between them being so low and coming so fast it almost seemed that they was coming down at me like a runaway team.
Still and all, I rode easy and with my eyes up. After a little while, when I had got used to it, it didn't seem at all scary any more, just exciting somehow. It made me want to get up and go places I'd never been before—maybe on a ship across the Gulf or to just get on a fast horse and go as far and as fast as he could take me. It sounded fun, but when I thought about it I had to laugh at myself. Here I was on a cattle drive, going to a place I'd never been, already seeing things I'd never seen. When I remembered that, I
had to admit that I couldn't of asked for much more. Except maybe to be clean and dry for a change.
But putting it all together, I had to figure I was almighty lucky. Maybe that skinny preacher's words had took. I don't know. But I had it pretty good. I had all the food and coffee I could hold and a good horse to ride always, and when it was all over I'd have some cash money to outfit myself and more left over to carry the family of us for a year and better—two if need be.
Just the other night, I'd heard B.J. Hollis talking to Mister Sam Silas about some fellow they both knowed but whose name I hadn't heard. This fellow had been hurt something awful during the war and had laid up in a hospital over in Georgia somewheres until just this past winter.
To hear B.J. tell it, when this man come through Georgia and then Alabama and then Mississippi and then finally got on home to Texas, he figured we was about the best-off folks he'd seen the whole way along. Bad off as we'd been at times in Texas, we never had to worry for meat nor for garden truck neither. We always had something to eat, though at times it didn't spread too far. Still, our biggest lack was for cash money.
This friend of B.J.'s had said out east there was folks whose fields had been burnt off and their stock stole. Now, their fields was starting to come back, but they didn't have meat more than once a month some of them and if we was lacking in cash money they had clean forgot what it was. This fellow had told B.J. he had to walk it from Georgia to Texas and along the way he'd seen many a boy with no shirt of his own and feet that had never been in a pair of shoes.
Riding along like I was, I wiggled my toes inside my shoes and thought about how they might be damp and mud covered, but those shoes was mine—made up good and sturdy from the hide of an old cow that wore our brand. We had carried that hide and half the carcass in town to old Jedediah Soames and he had tanned the skin into leather and made up shoes for the bunch of us. We got the shoes and Mister Soames had got half a beef and what leather he had left over after he made up our footgear. I'd wished at the time that I could of had boots, but Ma had said no. She said boots take up too much leather, and it wouldn't of been fair to Mister Soames.
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