Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  “There, see, that’s half the battle!” Jones called from the safety of half the barn away, where he and the rest of the crew were clustered to watch.

  “Stand back,” Herman warned me as he sidled in to shut the stanchion on the cow’s bowed neck. I thought I was, but still had to leap away when Waltzing Matilda shifted hind feet, flashing a kick that would have taken out a person’s kneecap.

  “Jeezus,” Peerless cried, “watch yourselves, fellas. That critter’s a killer.”

  Herman and I would not have disagreed with that as we huddled to consider our next move. “Any eye-dea?” he started to ask, interrupted by Waltzing Matilda loudly breaking wind and then letting loose as if to empty her bowels to the last degree. In dismay, we both stared at the switching tail now coated with manure, perfectly capable of swatting a person hunched on a milking stool.

  “Puh,” said Herman. “Maybe Smiley was right, a dose of lead is best answer to this creature.”

  “We have to do something about that tail.” I was thinking hard, warily watching the crap-covered pendulum. “How about if we—” I outlined the only scheme that had popped to mind.

  “Worth every bit of try,” Herman agreed, both of us aware of Jones prowling impatiently back and forth in front of the other spectators. “You go git the tool, I git the other. Bunny-quick.”

  I ran to the blacksmith shop and grabbed the longest tong off the forge, about two feet in length. While I was at that, Herman ducked into the tack room of the barn where saddles and such were kept, and came back with a pigging string, such as was used to tie up the legs of calves during branding.

  Our audience craned their necks in curiosity, their mutterings and whispers not exactly a full vote of confidence. “No betting,” Highpockets decreed, to the evident disappointment of Skeeter.

  I made sure with Herman: “Ready?”

  “Betsa bootsies,” he sounded like he was calling up confidence from wherever he could get it. “If sailors know anything, it is knots.”

  Standing carefully to one side, I grappled the tongs in and caught the hairy end of the cow’s filthy tail, tugging the whole thing snug against the nearest rear leg. That brought out a fresh green splurt of manure as expected, but I was out of range. Herman moved in and swiftly tied the tail tight and firm to the joint of the leg. Waltzing Matilda did not know what to make of this and kicked. Which yanked her tail hard enough to make her bawl at top volume.

  “Quick!” I cried, but Herman already was sliding the milking stool into place and in no time milk was streaming into the bucket like hail hitting. There is the old braggart joke about milking a cow so fast she would faint away, and while Waltzing Matilda showed no sign of swooning, Herman was working those teats at incredible speed, his hands flying up and down as the level of milk in the bucket rose perceptibly. The angriest Guernsey on the planet attempted a few more tugs of leg and tail, only to bawl in frustration. Either out of confusion or an inkling of sense, she did not crap like Niagara anymore.

  When Herman had stripped the teats to the last drops and set the frothing and nearly full milk pail safely away, our defeated adversary started to try a kick and thought better of it. Herman gingerly reached in from the side and undid the pigging string. Eyeing him as best she could from the stanchion, Waltzing Matilda now switched her tail, but neither kicked nor unloosed manure. I swear the cow got the idea.

  And Jones surely did.

  • • •

  “ONE EYE, I want to see you after you get that milk up to the house,” the determined foreman headed us off as we were leaving the barn and everyone else had dispersed. Me, he provided, “You’re on your own for the day, laddie buck, find something to do to keep yourself out of trouble.”

  At loose ends, I drifted across the ranch yard, habit directing me to the bunkhouse while my mind sped to every here and there. In contrast, the hoboes had an enviable talent for taking time off, and the crew was a hundred percent at leisure. Sunning themselves in chairs propped against the bunkhouse, Shakesepeare was working a crossword puzzle and Harv was deep in a Police Gazette. At the horseshoe pit, the others were trying to solve Midnight Frankie’s evident ability to win at any game of chance ever invented, without success according to the clangs of his ringers and their echoes of frustration. I went and sat on the steps, waiting.

  It did not take long. Herman emerged from the boss house and headed straight for me, the shift of his eyes as he neared telling me he wanted to talk in private.

  That meant conferring in the crapper again. With our reflections registering us in the silvered mirror, Herman horse-laughed as he described Mrs. Costello nearly fainting away at receiving a milk bucket without Waltzing Matilda’s splatter on it.

  Then his words slowed, half proud, half cautious. “I am choreboy for good, Jones telled me. More wages, a little.” He held his thumb and first finger apart just barely.

  “I was hoping,” was as much as I could say.

  “Is what we wanted, hah? I hole up in Big Hole.”

  “I’ll come see you sometimes,” I blurted.

  He drew a breath through his teeth as if the next words hurt, and they did. “Not a good eye-dea, Donny. There is trouble in that for us both. Your Gram might get too much curious about how I am here. And I can not have the Kate know my whereabouts.” He paused before making himself say the rest. “So, Fritz Schneider of the Diamond Buckle and Wisdom town I am from now, someone you met on your travelings but must only remember, not come see. Savvy?”

  I nodded, not trusting my voice.

  “Many times have I said you are some good boy. Never more than now.” His eyes damp, matching mine, he looked off past me. “I must make sorry to Highpockets about not going with them.”

  “Yeah, you’d better go do that.” Still neither of us moved, and to break the awkward silence, I asked, “Where’d you learn to milk like that?”

  He managed to smile. “Telled you the cows lived downstairs in Emden.”

  I laughed, a little. With neither of us finding anything more to say, Herman stirred himself. “Now I must see to chickens and hogs, big new responsibilties.”

  “I’ll feed the horses for you,” I volunteered, wanting something to do besides letting our separation eat my guts out.

  • • •

  THE BARN was as quiet as it ever got, the workhorses standing idle in their stalls, straw on the floor absorbing the shifting of their hooves except for a whispery rustle. I was welcomed with some snorts and a neigh or two as I picked up the pitchfork, shiny as new from Herman’s sharpening of everything that would hold an edge, and climbed to the haymow to fork alfalfa into the manger in front of each horse. That chore done, I shinnied down and played favorites as I felt entitled with Queen and Brandy, after the distances we had covered together, stacker path upon stacker path, and treated them to a half pan of oats apiece. As they munched there in the stall, I stroked the gray expanse of Queen’s neck and shoulder, reluctant to start yet another good-bye. Smartly the big mare flicked an ear. Laying my head against her in full confusion of emotions, I clung there with my cheek to the warm smooth hide, unable to do more than sob, “Queen, what am I gonna do?”

  “I’m curious to hear how she answers that.”

  I jerked away from Queen’s side, startled out of my wits by the tall figure shadowed in the doorway from the horse corral. At first I thought it must be Harv, at that size, but no. The unmistakable saunter and lanky presence told me even before the easygoing drawl. “Anything wrong we can fix with something besides spit and iodine?”

  “Rags!” As he materialized out of the shadowed end of the barn, I saw he was in regular ranch wear except for the conspicuous belt buckle. In everyday getup or not, he carried himself like a champion, and I had to gulp hard to speak up adequately as he moseyed toward me. “Sorry, I—I didn’t know you were here, didn’t see your car.”

  “Aw, that
weather last night will teach me about having a convertible,” he said ruefully while he came and joined me in the stall. “It was raining like a cow taking a whiz on a flat rock when I pulled in from the Billings fair, so I stuck the Caddy in the equipment shed.” He patted his way along Queen’s side, softly chanting, “Steady, hoss, stand still, old girl,” until he was alongside me and could reach up and fondly tug at her mane. “A horse and a half, isn’t she. Seems like she just naturally lives up to her name. Pretty good listener, too, I gather.” He looked down at me with a long-jawed grin, but his eyes a lot more serious than that. “Maybe I ought to lend an ear, too—Snag, do I remember you go by?”

  “Uh-huh, when I’m not Scotty,” I broke out of being tongue-tied. “You know how the ho—the crew—does with names.”

  “A little of that got on me ever since I dressed up to ride.” Rodeo’s leading fashion plate acknowledged the way of such things with an amused nod. He murmured something as he scratched behind the mare’s ear that made her nicker and try to nudge him gently with her nose, an intelligent blue eye seeing into us, I swear. Casual but to the point, Rags glanced down at me standing at his side as if I were glued there. “Better let it out. What’s got you talking to the Queen here?”

  • • •

  HOW MANY CHANCES in a lifetime does a person have to bare his soul to a Rags Rasmussen? If confession was good for the soul, mine was being reformed with every word that tumbled out of me. “I’m sort of caught between things. See, I’m supposed to go back to my grandmother, she’s better after her operation and can be a cook again like she’s always been, except it’d be in dumb Glasgow, and we’d live together with Letty, she’s a waitress but a lady, too, and you’d really like her, everybody does, Harv especially, and I thought that’s what I wanted most in the world. But I’m a handful for her, Gram I mean, she’d be the first to tell you, and I haven’t exactly done what she thinks I was doing, all summer. She’ll think I got too redheaded, as she calls it.”

  I faltered, but had to put the next part together to my intent listener.

  “What happened was, I met up with, uh, Gramps I call him, although he’s a sort of uncle.” I sent a despairing look out the line of barn windows to where Herman could be seen joining the horseshoe players, still receiving slaps on the back for his triumph over Waltzing Matilda. “And now I don’t want to leave him, he needs me too much.”

  “The new choreboy, while Smiley follows other pursuits.” Rags made sure he was tracking the dramas of the ranch correctly. “What makes you think this gramps of yours needs you more than your granny does?”

  There was a whole list of that all the way back to Fingerspitzengehfühl, but I made myself stick to the simple sum. “Bad stuff happens to him when he’s on his own. And to me when I am, too. But when it’s both of us, we sort of think our way out of things.”

  Not in a wiseguy way but just prodding me a little, he pursued that with “That’s a pretty good trick. The two of you together amount to more than one and one, you figure? Like Queen and Brandy here?”

  “Yeah, that’s it! Something like that.”

  “And you need to stay on here for that to keep happening.”

  “Right.” My hopes rose to the rafters of the barn.

  Only to be dashed again as he contemplated Herman out there jawing happily with the horseshoe players, and then me dippily telling my troubles to a horse. “Nothing against being redheaded, understand,” he began. “But we’re running a ranch, not a charitable institution, and Jones is a bearcat about everyone on the place pulling his own weight. I don’t see—”

  The thunderous whump of a car on the livestock crossing took care of whatever he was going to say. Even Queen sharpened her ears at the telltale sound. Rags and I watched wordlessly as the Wisdom deputy sheriff’s car, the star on the door a blaze of white, pulled into the yard.

  My mouth went dry and Rags whistled silently through his teeth as the arriving car drew us out of the barn toward what could amount to trouble. “You happen to know anything about why we’re being honored by this visit?”

  Reluctantly I enlightened him that the crew had been in a little bit of a fight at the Watering Hole with the Tumbling T outfit. He frowned, saying that was simply Saturday night behavior and for as long as he had known her, Babs always wrote off fights as the cost of doing business. “This must be some other can of worms.”

  “Excuse me,” I threw over my shoulder, already on the run, “I have to get over there to Gramps.”

  By the time I dashed across the yard to where Herman stood, caught motionless beside the horseshoe players, the deputy sheriff from Wisdom was climbing out of the patrol car and giving a sickly smile all around.

  “Sorry to disturb you, gents.” Which every one of us there knew meant disturbance of some sort was about to reach into our number. But I in particular should have seen what was coming when, on the passenger side, a big crow-black hat barely appeared above the top of the car.

  • • •

  HIS FIRST STEP out of the patrol car, the mean little sheriff from the first dog bus of all, back at the start of summer, spotted Harv taking life easy in the shade of the bunkhouse.

  “Well, if it isn’t the object of my affection.” Sheriff Kinnick made a mock simper. “Harv the Houdini of the stony loneseome. Took me a while to run you down, but here we both are, just like old times.”

  “Howdy, Carl. You out seeing the country?” Casual as anything, Harv unfolded out of his chair and sauntered toward the lawmen, although not too close. Veterans at knowing trouble when they saw it, the rest of the crew guardedly drifted near enough to follow what was happening, with me doing all I could to steer Herman—looking guilty as sin, the way he did in the Butte depot—to the rear of them in the hope we wouldn’t stand out. In the meantime, Skeeter set the tone for hobo attitude toward visits from the constabulary by piping up. “Shouldn’t ye be tracking down horse thiefs or somethin’ instead of botherin’ honest citizens?” He was more or less backed in that by Jones arriving at a high trot and caterwauling, “What the hell’s this about?”

  “If you have to know, I been on the track of this character”—the sheriff from Glasgow pointed an accusing finger at Harv, standing quietly there looking like the least troublesome man on earth—“every chance I got all summer. Talked to bus drivers until they was running out my ears, but I lost his trail in Butte. Then I got smart and asked myself who else makes regular runs to burgs off the beaten path. Beer truck drivers.” He let out his mean little laugh. “You make sort of a conspicuous hitchhiker, Harv.”

  “You’re barking up the wrong gum tree, big hat,” Highpockets took that on, bringing no small challenge with his height as he stepped forward and confronted the much shorter wearer of the badge. “Got the wrong man. I’ll testify Harv’s been with us following the harvests, California fruit to this here hay.”

  Hand it to Sheriff Kinnick, he didn’t give ground, only chuckled that chilly way. “Nice try,” he said up into Highpockets’s face, “but no hearing judge in his right mind is gonna take the testimony of a hobo over the Wolf Point jailers who had Harv for company days on end, when the fool wasn’t busting out. Besides”—he looked over the rest of the crew scornfully, with me half tucking out of sight behind Herman, standing so still he barely breathed—“you get in court, and there might be some natural curiosity about this crowd’s propensity for law-abiding or not.”

  Harv followed that with a warning hand to the angry circle of men. “It’s my tough luck, Pockets, Skeets, the whole bunch of you, thanks anyway.”

  Jones still was stomping mad at the intrusion, arguing to the deputy sheriff from town, “Goddamn it, Mallory, can’t this wait until we’re done haying in a few weeks? Harv’s the best stack man I’ll ever have.” Looking sheepish, the local lawman replied that his colleague from up north seemed to be in more of a hurry than that.

  By then Rags ha
d strolled up. Mild as the day is long, he drawled, “What seems to be the difficulty?”

  Mallory looked like he wanted to go someplace and hide rather than get into the difficulty, but he did his duty, introducing Rags to the strutty little visitor who barely came up to the shoulder of anyone in the gathering except me.

  “Thanks for nothing, Mallory,” the Glasgow sheriff huffed out. “You didn’t tell me this is his spread.” He rocked back on his pointy heels, impressed in spite of himself as he took in the most famous cowboy conceivable. “Saw you ride at the Calgary Stampede,” he told Rags, as if that amounted to a private audience. “You do know how to stick on a horse.”

  “It’s an honest living,” Rags replied, glancing at the tin star on Kinnick’s narrow chest as if comparing not that favorably. He turned to the other lawman. “What is this, a badge toters’ convention? Should I be charging rent?”

  “Sheriff Kinnick says your man here broke out of jail, more than once,” came the reluctant answer.

  “We could have told you he’s a hard worker,” Rags said. “Harv, what were you in for?”

  “Fighting in a bar.”

  Harv aside, every man there gave Sheriff Kinnick a sideways look. Rags scratched his head and spoke the common thought. “Something like that means you could arrest just about everybody on the place, starting with me.”

  “That’s as may be,” the little sheriff muttered, glancing around the hostile ring of faces, “but none of you acted up any in my jurisdiction. I’m only interested in this knothead. Or am I.”

  It happened then. He peeked past the men in front, spotting me as I tried to fade behind Herman without appearing to. Parting the onlookers, the sheriff headed straight for me, prissing out, “Who’s this I see over here?” with all too much recognition registering in the apple-doll face. “Huh, I thought you was going to visit relatives, punkin. Back east someplace. Doesn’t look like that proved out, does it.” He stopped short as Herman put a protective arm around me. “And just where do you fit into this, Horseface?” he asked suspiciously.