Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  The atmosphere around the campfire changed like a gun had gone off. Certain hoboes evaporated into the willow thicket on the riverbank, others sat up rigid in a collective stare toward the road, where a black-and-white patrol car with a big star on the door luminescent in the moonlit night was pulling up. Harv stayed as he was, as though none of this turn of events applied to him, and Herman and I were caught up in his example, whether or not we should have taken to the brush.

  Right away, Highpockets was on his feet and in charge. “Anybody been yaffled lately?”

  “I done a jolt a little while back,” Buttermilk Jack, the oldest of the hoboes except for Skeeter in our bunch, owned up to. “Fifteen days, vag, in Miles City.”

  “Good time, or did you scoot?” Highpockets pressed what must have been the most veteran vagrant to be found anywhere.

  “Served my sentence honest and true,” the old hobo swore. “Then they run me out of town. If anybody’s on the lam, it ain’t me.”

  No, it was the trio of us at the other end of the log from old Jack who fit that description up, down, and sideways. Fear gripped me so savagely I could scarcely breathe. Would my all too readable face, between Harv’s imperturbable one and Herman’s contorted one, give us away, first of all to Highpockets? He had no stake in us, and as the Big Ole, his responsibility was toward the bunch he traveled through the fields of the West with, the Johnson family compressed into that last bus. He could dust his hands of strays like us to any inquiring lawman, to everyone else’s benefit but ours. I am sure my eyes were rabbity and my freckles gone pale as I watched Highpockets read faces in the firelight.

  Just before he reached ours, Peerless Peterson spat a sizzle of tobacco juice into the fire. “Why can’t the bastards let us alone? We got as much rights as anybody, but they treat us like dirt when we’re not sweating our balls off doing the work for them.”

  “Shut your flytrap,” Highpockets snapped at him, “until we see what this is about. You go poking Johnny Law like that and he’s likely to poke back with a billy club, you ought to have learned that by now.”

  The circle around the campfire went tensely silent as he checked from man to man. “Anybody else the bloodhounds might be after, for anything? No? Let’s make sure or we’re all in for it.” On one side of me, Harv looked on innocently, and on the other, Herman somehow was an equal picture of guiltlessness. For my part, I had to sit tight and try not to appear as guilty as I felt about landing the pair of us in this fix. Luckily, Herman’s whisper put some backbone in me. “Remember, big medicine you have. Makes you brave.” Newly conscious of the arrowhead and whatever power it carried, there next to my heart, I managed to guilelessly meet Highpockets’s eyes as his gaze swept over the three of us, lingered, then moved on.

  “All right, we seem to be in the clear. We’ve lucked out, some,” he reported in a low voice as he recognized the advancing lawman in the moonlight. “It’s Mallory, the deputy sheriff over here. He’s not the worst as hick dicks go.” But he still was some kind of sheriff and Herman still was featured on a MOST WANTED poster, and I still was his accomplice or something, skating on thin ice over the bottomless depth of the orphanage. I gripped the arrowhead pouch through my shirt, my other hand clasped in Herman’s to tie our fortune together, good or bad.

  • • •

  THE DEPUTY and Highpockets acknowledged each other by name as the local lawman stepped into the circle of light cast by the campfire. They did not shake hands, which would not have set well with either of their constituencies. This officer of the law was half again bigger than Harv’s banty-size Glasgow nemesis, somewhat beefy the way people get from sitting behind a desk too much, but without that air of throwing his weight around unnecessarily. He did not look overly threatening except for the pistol riding on his hip. That six-shooting symbol of authority, however, was more than enough to draw resentment, loathing, hatred in some cases, from men harried first by railroad bulls and then the lawmen of communities that wanted them gone the minute their labor was no longer needed. The shift of mood in the encampment was like a chilly wind through a door blown open.

  “Only checking to make sure you boys are comfortable.” Mallory spoke directly to Highpockets but all of us were meant to hear.

  “There ain’t nothing like it, bedroom of stars and the moon for your blanket,” Skeeter contributed ever so casually, as Peerless spat into the fire again. “Care to kip with us for the thrill of it all?”

  “I think I heard a feather bed call my name,” Mallory chose to joke in return with a hand cupped to his ear. No one laughed. Heaving a sigh, the deputy got down to business. “Speaking of relaxation, maybe it’d help everyone’s mood to know I’m only coming back from a hearing at the county courthouse over in Dillon, not on the lookout for anyone in particular. But”—he paused significantly—“I figured I’d stop by Highpockets’s old stomping grounds here just to keep myself up-to-date. Any new faces I ought to be acquainted with, on the odd chance they’d show up in town on Saturday night and I wouldn’t recognize them as haymakers instead of plain old drunks?”

  Several of the hoboes who were already at the kip when our bus bunch arrived grudgingly owned up to being first-timers in Big Hole haying. The deputy made a mental note of each, then raised his eyebrows as he came to Harv and Herman and me. Harv merely nodded civilly to him. I was tongue-tied, and Herman did not want to sound the least bit German. In these circumstances, muteness could be construed as guilt—we certainly had a nearly overflowing accumulation of that among the three of us—and just as the silence was building too deep, Highpockets stepped in.

  “Snag and his gramps there, One Eye, have been with us since we were apple-knocking, over by the Columbia. The big fella, too. They’re jake.”

  “If you say so, Pockets.” The deputy apparently could not help wondering about me, though. “Say there, Moses in the bullrushes. You’re sort of young to be hitting the road like this. What brings you to hay country?”

  “My s-s-summer vacation. From school.”

  “Some vacation.” Mallory was growing more curious, the audience around the campfire restless with his lingering presence. Highpockets was looking concerned. “These your folks here,” the deputy persisted, “this pair of specimens?”

  Herman’s hand firmed on mine, helping to take the quiver out of my voice. “You guessed it. My Gramps, here, and my, uh—”

  “Cousin,” said Harv offhandedly. “First cousin.” He glanced at the deputy sheriff barely an instant as if that were the issue.

  Mallory’s jaw came up an inch, but he did not challenge Harv’s version of family life. He turned to Herman, studying the ruined side of his face where the eye had been and the facial wrinkles that looked deeper than ever in the flicker of the firelight. “Must be nice to have a helper in raising the youngster out in the rough like this, huh, old-timer?” His question was not without sympathy.

  Giving the lawman a sad sweet smile, Herman uttered, “Ja,” which for once I was really glad sounded close enough to good old American “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’ve seen worse bunches of renegades,” the deputy tried joking again, making a move toward leaving but not before a conciliatory nod to Highpockets and a general one to the rest of us. “Just don’t tear the town up on Saturday night and you won’t see my smiling face again.”

  • • •

  “HERMAN?” MY VOICE sounded hollow in the confine of the culvert where we were stretched feet to feet. “Do you think that deputy sheriff believed Harv?”

  “Does not matter much.” He, too, sounded like he was at the bottom of a well.

  “Mister Deputy made believe he did. Sometimes make-believe is as good as belief, hah?” I heard him shift inch by inch to try to get anywhere near comfortable on the corrugated metal, the bedrolls literally saving our skins. “Better catch winks, Donny. Tomorrow might be big day.”

  25.

  THEY
ALL WERE big days, in the Big Hole. And I was among the first to see this one come, at least as represented in human form.

  Herman and I crawled out of the culvert at earliest daylight, stiff in every joint and sore in corrugated bands across our bodies, the morning chill making us ache all the more. Were we ever thankful that down at the kip Skeeter was already up—hoboes do not sleep late—and rebuilding the fire while Midnight Frankie was working on mush of some kind in the mulligan pot. The encampment was gradually coming to life as its inhabitants groaned their way out of their bedrolls, abandoning the bed of earth to face another day. Harv could be seen rolling up a bedroll no doubt provided by loyal Lettie. As we crossed the road to head on down for whatever this day would bring, Herman blearily said he was going to the river to wash up, while I needed to take a pee so badly after the night of confinement in the culvert that my back teeth were swimming. Off he went to the gravel bar and I ducked into the brush below the road.

  I was relieving myself when someone came thrashing through the willows, swearing impressively, right into the path of what I was at. He cut a quick detour, giving me an annoyed look. “Hey, PeeWee. Watch where you’re aiming that thing.”

  “Oops, sorry.”

  Still swearing enough to cause thunder, he plowed on through the brush toward the encampment, leaving me red with embarrassment, but what was worse, slapped with that tag. There it was. PeeWee, peeing in wee fashion in the bushes, homeless as a tumbleweed. Nowhere near making Believe It or Not! but already dubbed into the funnies. My shameful fallen state in life, a tramp, a shrimpy one at that.

  No, damn it, a hobo. A haymaker, I resolved nearly to my bursting point, if anyone would just let me. Buttoning up quickly, on a hunch I set off after the visitor crashing his way toward the campfire.

  • • •

  AS HE BURST through the brush into the clearing with me close behind, the tandem of us drawing the attention of the entire kip, I saw he was wearing good but not fancy cowboy boots and a stockman Stetson with a tooled leather hatband complete with a miniature clasp. He probably was around forty years old, although his brown soup-strainer mustache was tinged with gray. Halting on the opposite side of the campfire from where Highpockets and Harv and others were lining up for Midnight Frankie’s version of breakfast, he held his palms toward the blaze to take the chill off. “Morning, men.”

  “We can agree with both of those,” Highpockets acknowledged, the rest of the hoboes risking no commitment beyond silent nods. “What’s on your mind otherwise?”

  “Putting up hay fast and furious, what the hell else?”

  By now Herman had silently joined me, ruddy from the cold water of the river and with his glass eye in and his eyeglasses on. I can’t say he looked like a new person, but at least he looked like the old Herman the German, the one ready to hop a bus for the Promised Land somewhere south of the moon and north of Hell. His strong hand on my shoulder lent support as we found a place in the growing circle of hoboes crowding around to hear what came next from the man warming himself by the fire.

  Identifying himself as foreman on a ranch plentiful with those Big Hole hayfields, the new arrival glanced around the circle, right over me and past Herman, sorting faces with his quick eyes.

  “I’m hoping some of you are the genuine haymaking article, unlike your pals next door.” He jerked his head in disgust toward some kip farther up the river. “They don’t want to hear about anything but tractors and power mowers. You’d think they were all mechanical geniuses.” He paused, studyng the waiting faces more intently. “What I’m saying, we’re still a horse outfit.”

  Can a person jump for joy standing still? Not really. But his words set off that kind of upspring of elation in me. At last! Surely an outfit like that would need a stacker team driver, wouldn’t it? If only one of the older hoboes didn’t beat me out for the job. In an onrush of anxiety at that and wild with desire at the same time, I seesawed so nervously that Herman couldn’t help but notice my agitation and whispered, “Stand steady as a soldier, Donny.”

  “We don’t have anything in particular against horses so long as they don’t have anything against us,” Highpockets was saying. “Am I right, boys?” Amid answers such as “Pretty much” and “More or less,” Peerless took care to specify, “Although we ain’t no bronco busters, either.”

  “Don’t worry, that’s taken care of.” The ghost of a smile visited under the foreman’s mustache. “Here’s the setup,” he brusquely went on. “The spread I work for used to be the Hashknife—maybe some of you put in some time there?” On our side of the campfire, someone muttered, “That sure as hell fit the grub there. All knife, no hash.”

  “Don’t get your feathers up,” the foreman forged on. “The spread is under new management. Fresh owner, wants things done right. I was brought in to cut loose anything that wasn’t working, which meant just about every stray sonofabitch on the place. So, but for a few riders summering the cows and calves up in the hills, my crew is out of whack.”

  “Enough said,” Highpockets took over. “Try us.”

  “First of all, I’m looking for a man who isn’t allergic to hay by the load and hard work.”

  A number of the hoboes took a half step forward. “What’s the work?”

  “Stack man.”

  The Jersey Mosquito, who looked like it would be all he could do to push around an empty pitchfork let alone one shoving swads of heavy fresh hay into place, asked possibly out of pure mischief, “Do ye favor building them haystacks big as Gibraltar?”

  “Sizable” was as close to that as the foreman would come, but it was admission enough.

  The hoboes, even Highpockets, stepped back to where they were. “A strong back and a weak mind, is what he means,” Shakespeare expounded.

  “Donny, what are they talking?” Herman whispered worriedly. “Nobody wants haymaking job?”

  “Shh. Watch Harv.”

  Without twitching a muscle, the fugitive from the Wolf Point stony lonesome still seemed to be studying the first pronouncement, before the strong back and weak mind wisecrack. Then, slowly he stepped forward as if to take the world on his shoulders. “I suppose that’d be me. Up top of that Gibraltar.”

  The foreman sized him up as if he were too good to be true. “You’ve stacked hay before?”

  “Tons of it.”

  Inasmuch as any haystack held several tons, that was not as impressive as it might have been. But seeing no chance of a miraculous stack man materializing among the rest of us, the foreman made up his mind. “Well, hell, you look the part anyhow. What’s your name?”

  “Harv.”

  The foreman waited, then gave up. “If that’s the way you want it, I guess I can stand the suspense until your first paycheck to find out if that’s a first name or a last or what you call yourself when the moon is full.” The wisp of a smile appeared under his mustache again. “Who am I to talk? I go by Jones myself, one hundred percent.” Even to the hobo nation that mocked society by calling itself the Johnson family, going through life as just a Jones sounded like quite a dare, but the man by the fire wore the moniker with bulldog authority.

  With that out of the way, Jones scanned the collection of ragtag individuals beyond Harv, his gaze passing me—did he show a flicker of interest at how I was all but falling out of my shoes with eagerness?—as he briskly ticked off on his fingers. “Now, I need two mower men and a couple of buckrakers and dump rakers each and a scatter raker. Any of you balls of fire ambitious enough some for that?”

  “Bucking,” Highpockets got his bid in. Followed by Peerless Peterson: “I can handle a mower team if they ain’t runaways.”

  The Jersey Mosquito laid his claim. “Maybe it don’t look it, but I c’n still climb onto a rake seat.” Pooch mustered, “Damn straight. Me, too.” Midnight Frankie chose driving a mowing machine and Fingy, the simpler task of riding a dump rake, while Sha
kespeare, the last person I would have picked out as a teamster, announced he was a buckraking fool. So tense that my skin felt tight, I prepared to spring up the instant when the man doing the hiring would realize he was one haymaker short and announce he lastly required a stacker team driver.

  Instead came the awful words “Good enough. That finishes the crew, so let’s get a move on. The pickup’s parked up the road.” Jones gestured beyond the brush of the hobo jungle. “Come on up when you’ve got your bindles together and I’ll pull out the daybook to talk wages and catch whatever you’re using for names. Soon as we’re squared away on that, we’ll go make hay.”

  • • •

  AS HIGHPOCKETS and Harv and the others started making their farewells to Oscar the Swede and Snuffy and Overland Pete and Bughouse Louie and the California Kid and the others from the last bus who would wait for other haying jobs to come along, I turned as numb as a cigar store Indian. This was clearly inconceivable, that a Big Hole horse outfit would not use a teamster but some automotive monstrosity like a Power Wagon on the stacker. Yet it all too evidently was about to occur that bright-as-a-new-penny Jones was committing the same kind of sin against common sense as dumb Sparrowhead on the Double W. Some lofty writer who probably had never held an honest job once claimed that the ability to grapple with two contrary facts at the same time was the mark of higher intelligence, but I must not have been marked that way. Trying to do so only made my head swim.

  Seeing how stricken I looked, Herman leaned down anxiously, telling me there were other ranches, nothing to worry, we would be haymakers yet somewheres.

  Then I glimpsed it when the foreman stopped to check on something with Highpockets and turned his head a certain way, the wink of morning light as the sun caught the small silvery clasp, not much bigger than a locket but distinct as anything, that held his fancy hatband together.