The double drowning affected their entire lives. Their mother, Priscilla, died soon after of a broken heart; Rosemary’s mother, Delia, deserted Rosemary. In the end, Gramp and Gram finally had to raise the four grandchildren themselves: the brothers Cain and Harry and Dale, and cousin Rosemary.
There was even a further oddity. Harry had seen with his own eyes that Gram had loved old Mabry to idolatry; that, like a mare parted from her foal at its birth, she hadn’t shown much affection for any of her grandchildren.
Much much later, Cain and Harry and Dale found out that Gramp had been a second son. Gramp’s older brother and his mother had conspired against him at every turn, so that, even though his family was a well-connected one in the East, he’d had to run away from home to get his freedom. The experience had embittered Gramp for life. Bitterness, the dark secret turnings of fate, and disasters in the form of drownings had left their indelible imprint on the Hammett strain.
It was hardly a wonder that Harry was an outlaw, a Robin Hood rebelling against the mighty. The grandsons could all have been outlaws. Yet, while Harry might steal beef from Lord Peter, and alter the Derby brand to his Rocking Hell, there was one thing he would never do—take as much as a drink of water from a nester without first asking. As an outlaw, Harry had a higher code than the cattle kings themselves did. They consistently stole not only from each other, through hired cowboys, but they often overran, and then took, everything the little stockman and the nester owned.
Thinking about all these things, Cain went into the cabin and shaved and cleaned up and changed clothes.
Finished, he went in to see Harry. He held up three fingers. “How many?”
“It’s still a moose, Dale.”
“What?”
“Say,” Harry said then, grinning, “Cain, what’re you going to do with that young bighorn?”
Cain grinned in turn. “Good. I see you’re tracking again. That young buck? I promised him to Rory for supper tonight.”
A look of disgust wrinkled the groove under Harry’s nose. “So that’s where you’re going in them dude clothes.”
Cain looked down at his new outfit: black shirt with white buttons, black pants with silver belt buckle, and fresh black silk bandanna. “Wanna come with?”
“With the shirt even buttoning down the back. Stylish.”
“Sure. Makes it easier to get at that unreachable itch.”
“New spurs with jinglebobs too.”
“Nothing like having a private band along.”
“You never did get over Rory, did you, Cain?”
“Ain’t we all still cousins of hers?”
Harry sat up, hide spring under him creaking. “Some of the best meat I ever et was a hunk cut from a man’s breast.” He got out his makings and rolled himself a cigarette.
“What was that?”
Cigarette hanging from one corner of his lips, and a match from the other, Harry hopped out of the bunk. “No, after my near trip to hell, a catfight with Rory would be the last straw.”
Cain said, “One thing before you run off to your boar’s nest in Hidden County. Did Jesse happen to mention my name? Or Dale’s?”
Harry’s eyes couldn’t quite hold up to Cain.
Cain nodded. “I thought so. Well, then I should probably tell you Jesse made the rounds today. He threatened poor Dencil and his wife too.”
Again Harry’s eyes shifted to one side. “They didn’t hang him?”
“Not yet.”
“Them strangling sons-a-bitches.”
Cain
Lonesome didn’t like the idea of going on. Lonesome was home. And Lonesome also shied at the skinful of fresh bighorn meat and the bedroll that Cain got ready to pack behind the saddle. Lonesome showed his disgust by distending his belly, full out, when Cain started tightening up the cinches.
“Dummed hoss always swells hisself up like a poisoned pup when he contraries,” Cain muttered to himself. He whacked the flat of his hand under Lonesome’s stifle. The whack made Lonesome cough and shoot out his breath in a gush. In that instant Cain jerked up the leather latigo to its usual mark in the cinch ring. “Ah, beat you to it again.” Cain next slapped on a new silver-mounted bridle with a chirker in the bit. “All right, now let’s ride. Rory will skin us alive if we don’t make it by sundown.”
Riding along in his shiny leather seat, of a piece with the horse’s motion, hat tipped back with buckskin thongs knotted under his chin, jinglebobs on his spurs and the chirker in the horse’s bit dingling a steady tune, and Lonesome’s tail trailing in kingly style, Cain ahorse was a pretty sight.
They loped down a narrow two-wheel trail on the south or right-hand bank of the Shaken Grass. Grass grew green on both sides of the stream. Occasional high cutbanks showed strata of former floods: black, pink, black. Where the first rise of the bench lifted, the grass gave way to sage and greasewood.
Behind them the sun was almost down, about to be cut to bits by the long-toothed saw of the Big Stonies. From where they rode, some twenty miles east of the footslopes, the full silhouette of the mountains could be seen. The least ridge, the least rise, every prick and peak, became part of the thorny back of vast tyrannosaur risen out of the bed of the earth.
Most prominent were two points on the north end, the Old Man and the Throne. Wind, frost, storm had not been able to emery them off much and wash them down to the sea by way of the Shaken Grass. The Old Man looked like an ancient sage sitting on a stump, deep in thought, back bowed, head down, and crowned over with a great head of white hair, some of it falling far below his shoulders, with a ridgelike arm supporting the head on the near side, the hand or fingers hidden under the snowy crest. The figure sat unmoved, calm, full of stern grandeur. It suggested Old Man Reality Himself resting from his sorrows and labors. The Throne, which towered just north of the Old Man, and some higher by a thousand feet, was something else. It lent itself to ribald as well as reverent regard. From one vantage point it looked like a weathered cowboy privy without a roof; from another it looked like the pure white mount of Ascension. Another version had it that the Old Man was weeping because he’d never been able to climb aboard the Throne. Of the two mountain peaks, the Throne was the most famous, since to the north of it, on one of its rock plateaus and below the summit itself, men had found a curious thing: a gigantic Medicine Wheel made of boulders and slabs, mostly limestone, the whole wheel some eighty feet in diameter. The hub of the wheel was a circular mound of stones, three feet high and thirteen feet across, from which twenty-nine spokes radiated. A stone resembling a buffalo skull, its eyes facing the east, the rising of the sun, rested exactly on the center of the hub. Along the rim of the wheel stood six stone tepees. The stone tepee on the east side was the largest. It stood just outside the rim and its door also faced toward the rising sun. The doors of all the other stone tepees faced inward, toward the hub. Old worn paths, still evident in the forests and the upland meadows above the timberline, led up from the plains. Professors from the East believed it to be a place where ancient Indians had once worshiped the sun, perhaps a people related to the Aztecs. The professors thought the six tepees, stood for the six major planets in the solar system, the twenty-nine spokes for the days of the lunar month. Cain himself had once climbed up to see it; and had sat on his horse Lonesome a while, a whole hour in high silence; and finally, shivering involuntarily as his mind slowly went back to that time, had broken off and quick climbed down, a different man for a few days.
Riding along the Shaken Grass, he watched the country flatten out ahead of him, saw it slowly turn to a gray and violent country. Sage and bunch grass grew out of alkali soils. The green along both sides of the Shaken Grass became but a narrow strip, in some places no more than a few feet wide. The color of the trickling splashing water changed too, pink becoming grayish, like dishwater, with the taste of it bitter and sharp on the tongue.
Far to the south a pink butte could be seen just barely riding out of the gray sloping and resloping country. F
ar to the north a low gray ridge fell away gradually until it mingled with an enormously distant horizon. And ahead to the east, very far, on the other side of where the Bitterness River took its turn to the north, the Cucumber Hills lofted vaguely in the oncoming dusk. The shadows everywhere were long. Except for the gathering regathering throws of Lonesome’s hooves, it was very still out, silent, full of wait.
No matter how he tried to push it from his mind, the image of brother Harry’s black face hanging from the cottonwood kept coming back to him, making him shudder to himself now and then. He’d come just in the nick of time. Another minute or so and Harry would have been gone, and no amount of slapping and shaking would have brought him back. He could feel dark anger gather in him, deep down, at the same time that a sick sad feeling worked through him too. For all their wise-cracking talk, he knew, and Harry knew, that bad times were ahead for the three Hammett brothers.
Over a rise of land on the right rose a thin fringe of cottonwoods. It was the Bitterness River coming in from the southwest. The line of trees quartered off ahead to the east where they merged with the cottonwoods coming down with the Shaken Grass.
He followed the dim two-wheel trail over a dusty hummock and below him opened a new view. In the middle of a triangular meadow stood Dale and Rory’s flat cluster of ranch buildings— cabin, bunkhouse, barn, sheep shed, fences, corral—all of it weathered brown log. An irrigated garden grew bright green behind the house, so green it was solace to tired eyes. The cottonwoods on both sides of the point of land made a fine windbreak, to the northeast and to the southeast. The evening sun striking underthrough the cottonwoods caught the gleam of slow streaming gray water where the creek and the river met beyond. The further reaches of the sliding Bitterness were in deep shadow. The Bitterness was a river spotted with terrors, quicksand in the turns, bottomless silt in the dips.
The two streams coming together made a natural fence to the north, east, and south. Dale claimed all the land inside the triangle back to the first water divide to the west. All Dale and his sheepherder had to do was guard the divide. Looking back, narrowing his eyes to mere slits, Cain could barely make out Dale’s sheep on a slope of land a mile to the southwest, just above the Bitterness. The sheep streamed slowly across the evening land, moving over the slope like an army of snubnose maggots on the march, cleaning off the green bunch grass as they went. Every now and then over the sound of Lonesome’s hooves, Cain thought he could hear the tinkle of sheep bells. Higher on the slope Cain could see the tiny figure of the sheepherder walking toward his white-canvas sheep wagon. Two collies followed at his heels.
Looking ahead again, Cain saw something else. He reined in his horse. There in the middle of the green irrigated garden stood cousin Rory. She was a good hundred yards away but he could see her plainly. She hadn’t heard him come in the soft dust in the trail. What she was doing made him gasp a little. There was glory in it.
Facing the mountains to the northwest, the Old Man and the Throne, Rosemary was combing her long golden hair, first to one side, then to the other, and, lashing her hair forward, also on the underside, whipping it about in the sunset, revealing the nape of the sturdy Hammett neck. With each stroke her hair seemed to gleam brighter. She had on an old dark skirt, a light blue shirtwaist, and a faded gray gingham apron, and she was pregnant, but the glory of the Hashing gold hair more than made up for the drab clothes and the laden body. Cain was too far away to see the expression on her face, but he could imagine it. For this one moment, this sunset evening, it would be absorbed, full of distant wonder as well as private thought, the very deep blue eyes in part sad, the lips some turned down at corners. The sight of her there alone, lonely in her garden at sunset and combing her hair while facing the mountains, became a pain, a stone, on his heart. Only a man with a bad conscience could fail to be moved by the sight. He wanted to rush over and crush her in his arms; yes, even bite her.
Rosemary. Rory. Sweetheart. Cousin.
Cain recalled how, because of her, he had killed his one and only man. Cecil Guth. Slim darksome Cecil had been a braggart and a no-good gambling fool. He’d been a bustard to get along with, touchy as a mad weasel, and everybody had agreed he deserved the killin’. Even the sheriff at the time had agreed it was a good killin’ and had refused to arrest Cain. “It’s the mean thing we don’t like,” the sheriff told the new reverend, “no matter what it is. If the killin’ ain’t mean, and the man had it comin’, as he did in this case, then we let it go. Out here.”
Yet Cain had never felt right about the killing. Darksome Cecil had wanted to marry Rory and that made the killing a bad thing. Cain had not killed with clean hands.
As long as Cecil was courting her, all three brothers, Cain, Harry, and Dale, felt free to see her, even dance with her, and that though all three were in love with her. Had Cecil married Rory, all that trouble about cousins marrying would never have come to a head. But, with Cecil dead, they were back where they started. Many things happened after that killing, with Dale the weakest and the youngest of the three finally getting her.
… The killing happened this way. They were all at a country dance: Cain, Harry, Dale, Cecil, and Rory.
The four boys had a few drinks. Cecil needed only a few drinks, and then the devil in him showed. Cecil got to bragging about how good a shot he was, the best in Bighorn County. Cecil picked off the screw on a hanging kerosene lamp. He drilled the drum in the bandstand plumb center. He cut the E string on the fiddler’s violin. He shot off the tip of Cain’s boot toe.
Cain tolerated it all without comment. Because Cain despised him. Cain’s nickname for Cecil was Pretty Shadow. He had often seen Cecil riding along gazing in admiration at his own shadow. A cloudy day was a bad day for Cecil.
It was when Dale was dancing with Rory, with Cecil and Cain and Harry watching, that Cecil finally said something that caught in Cain’s craw. Cecil said, fawncing at the bit like an overeager stallion, “I don’t know how you waddies feel about it, but that Rosemary, man, now there’s the filly for me. I could snort her flanks all day long and not regret a minute of it.”
Cain said, “All right, Pretty Shadow, that’s it. I’ve heard enough.” Cain backed a step to give the two of them room. “Go for it,” Cain said.
“Me?” Cecil said. “You want to shoot it out with me? When you know I’m the quickest shot in Bighorn County, left or right?”
“Left or right, go for it. You’ve had your last dirty say of a woman,” Cain said, young face dark with rage.
“All right,” Cecil laughed, snickering; and went for it.
Cecil’s shot came first, because he was the quickest, like he said, but it went wild.
Cain’s shot came almost on it, and it hit Cecil in the chest, because Cain was the steadiest, like he knew.
Cain looked down at where Cecil Guth lay on the floor. “Dummed fool should’ve known better. He saw me shoot down that wild Longhorn steer on the Red Fork last summer.” Cain was referring to the time when his cow pony had slid out from under him, pinning down his right leg, cracking it, with the steer suddenly reversing itself and bearing down on him with long wicked horns set. Cain had calmly drawn his gun left-handed and shot the triangular onrushing forehead dead center. Calm….
Even as Cain watched from his horse, Rory was suddenly done combing her golden hair. She turned and walked heavily back along the garden path, past lettuce and onions, past marigolds and petunias, and went around the side of the cabin out of sight.
Cain waited a decent interval. And then, waving his hat, he rode onto the yard with a flourish, whooping, “Ya-hoo! Yil”
Just as he hoped, his six-year-old nephew Joey came scooting out of the barn to greet him. Joey had hair that was a part of the sunset, with fair tanned face and bold blue eyes. The boy had thin bowed legs, much too light for a heavy head and neck, and running fast he looked like he might at any moment fall on his face. He came riding a stick horse and swinging a looping lasso. It was the circling momentum of
the loop which seemed to keep him upright. Around his waist was a belt studded with empty .45 shells and a wooden homemade six-gun. A Hammett if there ever was one. “Hi, Unk! So you made it after all.”
“Sure I did, my bucko.” Cain stepped down, groundhitching Lonesome.
“I told Mom you would.”
“You did, huh? Mom didn’t give up on me by any chance, did she?”
Joey examined Cain’s black boots critically; then held out one of his own flashy red ones for comparison. “Boy, I wish I was growed already.”
“How so, button?”
“Then I would ride a black horse too in black clothes. With silver shining all over like a fair.”
“Don’t you want to become a sheepman like your paw?”
“No. They stink too much like goats.”
“Well, well. Look now, sonny, you go in and tell Mom I just now blew in with the tumbleweeds.”
“You go tell her yourself.”
Cain slid the skinful of fresh bighorn meat to the ground. “Hey, what kind of talk is that now to your uncle?” He carried the meat to a bench off to one side near the front stoop. The bundle was heavy and his sharp heels cut into the hard gray ground. He grunted as he straightened up.
“Wait’ll you see Mom. Then you’ll know why I said it.”
Cain held. “Oh?” The door to the cabin was open an arm’s length away. He sensed someone listening inside. He threw a cautious look at the curtains in the window on the other side of him. “Where’s your paw?”
Riders of Judgment Page 7