Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  “What’s these for?” Peerless asked suspiciously, turning his over like it was a snare of some sort.

  “Those beat-up lids of yours,” Jones made plain with a tap to his own trim Stetson. “Diamond Buckle hatbands. The owner thinks these’ll add a bit of style, he’s big on that. Give you the feeling of working on a first-class place.”

  There was a general moment of uncertainty, going back to the rants in the hobo jungle about the rich with their heel in the face of the poor. This was a step up from that, for sure, but even so it took some thinking about wearing another man’s brand on yourself.

  “Might as well tell you the rest now that you’re signed on,” the foreman said into the general silence. “It’s Rags Rasmussen that owns this spread. World champion bronc rider, got the diamond belt buckle to prove it. Heard of him, haven’t you?” he appealed to Highpockets.

  “More or less,” Highpockets squared himself up as the Big Ole for the hobo contingent. “We don’t exactly ride in the same fashion, boxcars instead of broncoes.”

  Peerless couldn’t keep from harping. “If I had any kind of a diamond and this Rasmussen had a feather up his butt, we’d both be tickled.”

  “You’re bellyaching over nothing,” Highpockets shut him down. “If you’d ridden as many killer horses as that man must’ve, you might have something to show for it, too.” He returned his attention to Jones. “We can maybe stand a little fancying up, if that’s all there is to it,” he decided for the hobo group after a glance around at how the hatbands were being received. Midnight Frankie was scratching the back of the clasp of his with a jackknife to see if it was real silver. “Imagine, the head that wears the crown sharing a touch of it,” Shakespeare said, installing his band on a hat that had seen thousands of suns and the grime of countless fields. Pooch watched to see that it was all right to put his on. Harv pondered his, taking no account of what anyone else was doing, then shined the buckle up on his sleeve and fitted the band on. Herman and I had no qualms about dressing up our battered Stetsons, proud to share the Diamond Buckle, even it was the size of a locket. All we lacked now was the owner of that championship brand, and of the hay land that would give us work and wages and withdrawal from the treacherous world for the rest of the summer.

  • • •

  “ALL RIGHT, let’s get to work.” Jones led the way out of the bunkhouse, the crew so various in so many other ways in hatbanded unison as we followed him across the yard toward the machine shed, a structure open on one side so the workhorses could be backed in to the tongues of the mowers and dump rakes and buckrakes and hooked up right there under shelter, a perfect setup most ranches were too lazy to do and left the haying equipment scattered around to rust in the weather. Let’s hear it for the Diamond Buckle, my head sang with the help of my hatband. I had to stop myself from skipping, everything in me going pitty-pat about this haymaking dream come true.

  Until Herman once again dropped back, motioning me to come close enough for a whisper. When I did, he made my heart stop by asking:

  “Donny? What are sickles?”

  27.

  “THEY’RE THE THINGERS you cut hay with!” I had trouble keeping my voice down when I really wanted to screech, “Fuck and phooey, Herman, you have to know what sickles are or we’re fired and kicked off the ranch to walk to town and right back to where we started in the hobo jungle, only worse off because Highpockets and the others aren’t there to stick up for us and that deputy sheriff could come back and recognize you from a poster and then we’re sunk.”

  Instead, I sort of hissed desperately, “Didn’t you have sickles of some kind to cut hay with in Ger—the old country?”

  His face lit up. “Scythes, you mean, I betcha.” He gestured as if swinging that oldfangled curved implement Father Time is always carrying in cartoons.

  “No, no!” I bleated. “Nobody has used those since the Pilgrims or somebody. Sickles, see, go in mowing machines,” I tried frantically to assemble an explanation of modern haying, “and cut back and forth like crazy when the horses pull the mowers, and there’s all these teeth that need sharpening a couple of times a day, and that’s what you’re supposed to do, what they call riding the stone.”

  “Sorry as all git out”—Herman wrinkled up, trying to imagine—“but riding some kind of rock, I do not savvy.”

  “It’s a grindstone, get it?” I practically chewed the words up for him. “There’s a seat on it and you sit there and pedal it like you would a bicycle and it makes the stone go around fast and—”

  I was growing a little hysterical, trying to conduct a lesson in sickle sharpening, with Herman not comprehending that his chore was the absolutely essential first task in haying. As sure as Murphy’s Law, the heavy green hay would clog the mowing machines if the teeth were dull when Peerless and Midnight Frankie pulled in to the first field to start cutting, and we’d be hoofing it back to town on that long road, right back to being on the run. And wouldn’t you know, with the rest of the crew busy on their machinery with grease guns and oil cans and general fixing up, now here came Jones to deal with us.

  “One Eye”—the foreman was in his usual hurry—“let’s get you squared away at the blacksmith shop so you can start right in on the sickles.” As for me, he jerked his head toward the towering wooden framework of the beaverslide stacker parked behind the shed. “I guess you know where you’re headed. Give all those pulleys a helluva good oiling.”

  “Uhm, I’ll get right at it,” I claimed, not moving an inch. “Maybe it’d be a good thing for me to stick with Gramps a little bit while you get him started, though? To, ah, translate, sort of.”

  “Come on, the both of you,” Jones said, as if it were his own idea, “I don’t have time to parley voo in some other lingo.” He set off in his bustling stride toward a low old log building near the barn. Trailing him just out of his hearing, I managed to whisper to Herman to simply watch me when we reached there.

  The way things were done in haying season, the grindstone had been moved out of the inside of the shop into the big open doorway for space to handle the sickles, which were nearly as long as a man is tall. Herman caught on to this part of it quick enough as I hopped into the seat and with false enthusiasm—“Oh man, I wish we could trade jobs, Gramps!”—pedaled madly to set the wheel-like grindstone spinning at top speed. I could also see it dawning on him that the wicked-looking limber spans of metal propped against the wall in the cluttered blacksmith shop, each with treacherous teeth from end to end presenting countless chances to cut a finger off, must be the sickles, and he had no idea in this world how to handle the dangerous objects.

  Jones noticed his hesitation, too. “This is the sort of thing you did in the old country, right? Up there in the yodeleer meadows?”

  “Ja. Sure. Might be rusty some, like the siskles—”

  “Sickles, Gramps, rhymes with tickles.” I hopped off the grindstone seat and behind Jones’s back pantomimed to the best of my ability, grabbing a sickle from the back by the bar that the teeth jutted from and carrying it the do-or-die way a tightrope walker uses a pole to keep his balance.

  With something like numb determination written all over him, Herman gingerly approached the sickles and picked up one the excruciatingly careful way I’d shown, while I silently cheered him on.

  “Sharpen the bejesus out of the first couple of those,” Jones ordered, “so I can send the mower guys out to the field. And don’t round off the goddamn points, like Smiley tends to do. It wears them down too fast.” The foreman whirled to go, impatiently glancing over his shoulder at me. “That stacker is still waiting.”

  “I’m just about to be there,” I maintained, waltzing wide around the sickle as Herman shakily balanced it while climbing onto the grindstone seat. “I need to tell Gramps one last thing about how we do it in this country.”

  “Hurry up about it,” Jones warned. “Standing around gabbing doesn
’t put up any hay.”

  As he departed, I pulled the medicine pouch out from under my shirt and over my head. “Here, I’ll leave this with you a while to go by,” I told Herman, unsheathing the arrowhead and placing it on the frame of the grindstone in front of him. “This is what he means about sharp and not rounded off, see? Grind them until they have an edge like this and no more, savvy?”

  “Like maybe so?” He tentatively pedaled and sent sparks flying from the bevel of steel meeting the grindstone. Then, though, he halted the encouraging screech of the grinding to pick up the arrowhead and feel its whetted edge with his thumb.

  “Lucky one more time, you and it, Donny,” he said so softly I didn’t correct him to Scotty. Holding the charmed piece, he gazed around at the prosperous-looking buildings of the ranch and the shielding mountains beyond and past even that horizon, I believe, to the ups and downs the dog bus had carried us through all the way from Manitowoc. Then at me, the hunted look gone from him at last. “Knocked, we have still got it, ja?”

  “Close call,” I expelled in relief, relaxing back into the haze of well-being that came with a Diamond Buckle hatband. “But yeah, we still do.”

  • • •

  IN THAT SUMMER of flying calendar pages, Big Hole haying was a streak of time, when I take account of myself then, that I can scarcely believe packed so much into my life in so short a period. I suppose it would be like a kid of today thumbing through the holdings of some smartphone that shows him himself and realizing that a couple of years and robust inches have been slipped onto his pouty eleven-year-old self without notice. Electrifying, to use a word that still holds true of such a shot of overnight growing up.

  Exactly as I had seen myself when I ventured into Wendell Williamson’s lair to offer myself as stacker team driver in Double W haying before the sparrowhead turned me down in favor of a dumb truck, I proudly was in charge of my own pair of workhorses and a steel cable that the team pulled to hoist the stacker fork laden with hay, and—here truly was the weight of responsibility to rest on eleven-year-old shoulders—of halting the horses every time at just the right instant to drop the thick cloud of hay atop the stack wherever Harv indicated with his pitchfork.

  In doing so, I had to manipulate a ton and a half of actual horses at the end of leather reins, back and forth the fifty-foot-length of the cable each time Shakespeare or Highpockets delivered an overflowing buckrake load onto the broad fork for sending up. Horses are not thrilled with walking backward—me either—yet that was half our job, backing to the stacker after the hay was dumped at Harv’s altitude, and I needed to steadily cluck and coax and tug the reins just so to return us to our waiting spot for the next load. My salvation was Queen, as magnificent to me as the Trojan horse must have been in that age-old tale and as smart as she was grand, dutifully tugging Brandy—dumb as they come except when oats and the barn stall were involved—along with her in the pulling power that ran the stacker.

  Love is a strong word to use anytime, but I loved that big gray mare, already taking a giant step or two before I could say “Giddyup” or “Whoa back,” her big hooves largely responsible for the steady path we wore into the stubble beside each stack, like the front walk to the mansion of hay Harv was building with his pitchfork. Without Queen’s steady horse sense, in the true meaning of that, I would have been sunk those first few days of trudging that same line of march over and over with the sun beating down and no rest for the weary, in Jones’s unrelenting way of putting up hay.

  All in but my toenails by quitting time, I was anxiously asked by Herman when I dragged myself into the bunkhouse to wash up for supper, “Tell the Jones it is too much for you, can I? He can put Fingy on stacker team and you on dumping rake, you can sit at your work like me.”

  “Don’t you dare.” I found the strength to sound offended. “I’ll toughen in.” Which I did, day by day, that path worn into the earth beside the haystacks leading me into the gritty line of Camerons and Blegens who had hunched up and taken it since time immemorial.

  And see, by the end of the first week of Big Hole haying I held a triumphant mental conversation with Gram, I’m not too young to live in a bunkhouse like a regular ranch hand.

  • • •

  THE CAST OF CHARACTERS Herman and I joined were proof that the Johnson family tree had branches of all kinds. Midnight Frankie was from what he called Lousy Anna, and spoke with a deep southern accent. Shakespeare’s tale was one of youthful indiscretions, when he became adept at what he called dialing the treasury, which amounted to safecracking, and it drew him an education written on jailhouse walls and in prison libraries. Peerless had hit the road during the Depression, starved out of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl farm to the California orchards, where the miserable Okie migrant camps turned him into an agitator and bunkhouse lawyer, and as aggravating as his mouthing off on practically anything could be, he was not often wrong. Skeeter went farther back in the workingman’s struggle against the crapitalists, as he called them, when he fought the cops in the Seattle general strike of 1919 that got beaten down. Fingy never brought his background out except once when Smiley, obnoxious as usual, asked, “How’d you lose them fingers anyway? She close her legs on you too quick?” Fingy gave him a look as if about to squash a bug and only said, “Iwo Jima.”

  Then there was Pooch, who seemed to be the sad sack of the crew, his contribution to conversation almost entirely “Damn straight” and “You said it” as he plodded through life. At first I wondered at his lack of teasing by these often rough-mouthed men, because in a schoolyard anyone with a slow mind was in for it. But I overheard Highpockets take Jones aside in the barn and explain that Pooch had been seriously worked over by a notorious sap-wielding railroad bull in the Pocatello yards, and been a little off in the head ever since. Jones, to his credit, said nobody needed to be a mental giant to drive a scatter rake, and he’d make sure Pooch was given the tamest team of horses, after my own.

  The one among them who did not share much about what turned him into a hobo was Highpockets himself. He did not need to, so obvious was he as a “profesh” who could make things happen in a collection of men otherwise as stray as cats.

  And of course, Harv was Harv.

  So, life in the bunkhouse was much like an extended version of that last bus to Wisdom, crowded and crude and somehow companionable almost in spite of itself. But also, with that many of us rubbing elbows in so small a space, an existence in which some friction was bound to occur.

  • • •

  READING MATERIAL in the bunkhouse never approached the Condensed Books level, and I was propped in my bunk after supper spending time with one of the pink Police Gazettes that were passed around until they fell apart. Ostensibly deep into “Is Marciano a Cheese Contender or a Legit Champ?” and the amazing number of secret lives of Elizabeth Taylor, I was all ears for Smiley’s latest lustful tale of conquest. Herman was in the crapper, as the convenience with the toilet and sink and shower was always called in a bunkhouse, shaving as he did each evening to stay out of the morning crush for the sink, so I was free of frowns warning me not to listen too much. Smiley was a surprise candidate for rodeo Romeo, to call it that, with his moonface and globular belly, but to hear him tell it, he was God’s gift to women.

  This particular tale of lust involved a devastating Canadian blond fence-sitter at the Calgary Stampede who couldn’t keep her eyes off Smiley as he went through his clown routine in the arena. To make a really long story short, he got word to her to meet him in back of the chutes while the chuckwagon race was being run, when he’d have a break from clowning. “And we hightailed off to the little trailer I traveled the circuit in back in them days,” he finished, his rubbery face stretched into a triumphant leer. “Probably in record time, we done the deed every which way. Didn’t even have to shed my overalls.”

  “Ye never even took off your clown outfit first?” Skeeter registered probably everybody’s s
hock at the lack of etiquette. “What are ye, some kind of deviated prevert?”

  “You’re just jealous,” said Smiley smugly, “of how them rodeo sweethearts liked to play rooty toot toot on my gazoot flute.”

  I was working on that rooty toot toot part and and not really getting anywhere when Highpockets raised onto his elbows on his bunk and spoke up sharply. “Watch your mouth around the kid, can’t you?”

  “I ain’t burning his ears off, am I, Snag,” Smiley protested. “He has to learn the facts of life sometime.”

  “Sure, I’m kind of interested,” I encouraged Smiley. “What’s that flute business mean?”

  This brought about a rare hesitation in the lady-killer choreboy as he studied me there propped on my bunk, rough-clad in a thousand-miler shirt like the rest of the crew but still plainly a youngster, although a husky one. Whatever other changes the summer may have produced in me, I had grown considerably, right past any semblance of eleven going on twelve. Even so, young was still written all over me, from freckles to boyish oversize feet, despite my efforts to camouflage it.

  “Come on, everybody, it ain’t nothing but the facts of life,” Smiley defended his position to the bunkhouse in general but Highpockets in particular. “When I was his age, I knew plenty. Ain’t it about time he learned about sailing around the world?” By now I felt like Herman when he’d listened to the hoboes rattling on in their lingo and asked me, “How many languages does English come in?” It was years down the line before I fully understood that Smiley’s lip-smacking phrase meant something like learning the encyclopedia of sex by hand.

  “It’s up to One Eye,” Highpockets ruled, sharp again. “None of your concern, so can that kind of mouthing off and—”