Nevertheless, Ma gave birth to a baby boy nine months and ten minutes later. He was a fretful and troublesome baby and they named him Henry. He was an odd little boy who liked to be alone and draw pictures of monsters. Many years later, Laura wrote Little House on the Prairie and put Henry in it, except not fussy. Her daughter Rose edited Henry out.
“But why?” said Laura. She and Almanzo had earned buckets of money from Little House in the Big Woods and were living in the St. Regis Hotel in New York.
“You don’t need him. He only confuses the story,” said Rose.
“But he is my brother,” said Laura. “He may be odd but he’s part of the Ingalls family.”
“If you put him in the book, then I’m out of here,” said Rose. She was a stubborn little cuss. “And if I go, then I plan to tell the world how the Ingalls family really lived in Arizona and not on the prairie.”
Laura wanted to shoot her on the spot. Rose could be such a pill. She considered herself superior to Laura because she had traveled in Europe and Laura had not. Granted, Laura had never been close to Henry, who had become a cowboy and was now in Nevada and involved with the gaming industry. He was impetuous and cruel but a real charmer with the ladies. Nonetheless, he was her brother and she felt it would be dishonest to cut him out of the story. But Rose was insistent and Laura needed her help in order to finish the series. And Laura thought of the hundreds of thousands of schoolkids who adored the Little House books and would be heartbroken if they didn’t continue. She also thought how sad she would be if she and Almanzo had to leave the St. Regis and go back to live in Missouri.
“Okay, take him out,” she said.
“Good,” said Rose. She put her hand on Laura’s arm. “It isn’t a memoir, it’s a work of art, and art is a creation, not a photograph. The good that the books will do far outweighs the slight dishonesty of omitting your ne’er-do-well brother.”
“I suppose,” said Laura, but she wasn’t sure. She kept a picture of Henry in her jewelry box. He had long black hair that he kept slicked back and a thin black mustache and he wore a black shirt and white tie and a pink sportcoat with a red carnation in the lapel. He was quite a looker. Maybe, she thought, when the Little House books were done, she could write a book about her trip to Nevada in 1928 to visit Henry, when he introduced her to Jelly Roll Morton and Theda Bara and Douglas Fairbanks. She discovered the tango and the gin fizz and the meaning of the term “one-man band” and also “juicin’ the jasper.” It was quite a week.
3.
BILLY THE KID
A legendary figure of the West about whom not much is known for sure, so some people have made him into a Robin Hood and some have seen him as a punk caught in a range war and some as a cold-blooded killer. I alone see Billy as a crafty shape-shifter who made himself into a great success.
Billy the Kid
Didn’t do half of what they said he did
He rustled cattle, I guess that’s true,
But nobody knew who they belonged to
He killed some men, but if you knew ’em
You’d say they had it coming to ’em.
Billy the Kid went on the run
Down to Mesilla in 1881.
Sheriff Pat Garrett put on the heat
And came to the ranch of Billy’s friend Pete
But it wasn’t Billy who was shot by Pat,
It was someone wearing his pants and hat,
Billy the Kid was miles away
In Santa Fe with flowers in his hair
And I know ’cause I was there.
He made a fortune in fermented juices
And built a mansion in Las Cruces,
Changed his name to William Bonney,
Wrote “Way Down upon the Swanee”
And he may have been guilty to a degree
But he was always real good to me
And generous to my family.
Always sent us a Christmas turkey
From Albuquerque
And a bottle of brandy
From the Rio Grande.
They called him a killer and I guess he could be
But he was always good to me.
I spoke at his funeral in 1942.
He was living in Malibu,
Big house
On the beach.
I gave a nice speech.
People were impressed.
They didn’t know he was
The most famous outlaw in the West,
Feared from Tucson to Reno.
They knew him as Rudy Valentino.
4.
LONESOME SHORTY
Written for The New Yorker, this story inspired the radio serial “Lives of the Cowboys” on A Prairie Home Companion, with Dusty and Lefty, Lefty’s lost love, Evelyn Beebalo, and the villain Big Messer, which takes place in and around Yellow Gulch, Wyoming. It’s Samuel Beckett for fourteen-year-olds. The cowboys suffer extreme loneliness, which drives them to visit town, where, in a short time, they are disgusted by society and return to the godforsaken plains, where, in due course, they suffer extreme loneliness and return to Yellow Gulch, only to be disgusted. That’s how life seemed to me when I was fourteen.
The summer before last, I was headed for Billings on my horse Old Dan, driving two hundred head of the ripest-smelling longhorns you ever rode downwind of, when suddenly here comes a balled-up newspaper stuck inside some tumbleweed. I had been without news for weeks so I leaned down and snatched it up and read it trotting west, though the front page was missing and all there was was columnists and the Lifestyle section, so bouncing along in a cloud of manure I read an article entitled “43 Fabulous Salads to Freshen Up Your Summertime Table,” which made me wonder if my extreme lonesomeness might not be the result of diet. Maybe I’m plumb loco, but a cowboy doesn’t get much fiber and he eats way too much beef. You herd cattle all day, you come to despise them, and pretty soon, by jingo, you have gone and shot one, and then you must eat it. Meanwhile, all those cattle tromping around on the greens takes away your taste for salads, just like when you arrive at a creek and see that cattle have tromped in the water and drunk from it and crapped in it, it seems to turn a man toward whiskey.
I thought to myself, Shorty, you’ve got to get out of this cowboy life. I mentioned this to my partner, old Eugene, and he squinted at me and said, “Eeyup.”
“Eugene,” I said, “I’ve been cowboyin for nigh onto two decades now. I know every water hole between Kansas and the Sierra Nevada, but consarn it, I miss the company of my fellow man. Scenery ain’t enough for me, Eugene, nor freedom. I’m sceneried out, pardner, and freedom is vastly overrated as an experience, if you ask me. I got to be with people. I’m a people cowboy, not a cow cowboy.”
A few miles of purple sagebrush drifted by and a hawk circled high in the sky. “Do you hear what I’m sayin?” I inquired.
He said, “Eeyessir.”
A few miles later, I said, “You ever think of just calling yourself Gene, Eugene? Gene is more of a cowboy name. Eugene is sort of a bookkeeper’s name. How about I call you Gene, Gene?”
He thought this over for a few miles as we jangled along, eating dust. Then he said, “You do that and I’ll lay for you and jump you and gouge your eyes out and bite off your ear.”
“You’d rather be Eugene, then?”
“Eeyup.”
We rode along for a ways. “Is there some topic you have a desire to talk about, Eugene?” I inquired.
“Nope.”
A taciturn sidekick is like buying a ticket to see the sun set. Who needs it? You go humping along the trail, you would like some conversation, but no, Eugene could no more think up things to say than he could sing La Traviata.
That night, I was feeling low. The wood was wet and the campfire smoked, the beans were cold and the pork half raw, the mosquitoes descended in a
cloud, and then it took hours to get the cattle bedded down, and as I was fetching a camp stool from the saddlebags, Old Dan accidentally stepped on my foot and about broke it. I hopped around on the good one and swore a blue streak, but none of it woke up Eugene. He was wrapped in his blankets, dead to the world.
To distract myself, I sat down and drew up a list of pros and cons on the back of a picture of my mother.
REASONS TO BE OR NOT TO BE A COWBOY
Freedom to be your own man. The awful loneliness of doing so.
Most beautiful country on God’s green earth to look at. No home, nowhere to sleep but on the cold ground.
You get a bad back, pretty soon you’re too bent over to look at scenery.
Good old Dan—what else can he do but ride the trail? You can’t live for your horse, especially not one who steps on you.
Love to be with my pals. Those cheating lying gin-soaked idiots? They all moved to town a long time ago.
The West must be won for the White Man. I done my part.
The chance to be a True Cowboy, who stands up for what’s Right and Fair. Fine, but it’s time to settle down and start building up equity. You have got nothing to show for your hard life, nothing.
So it was an even draw, six of one, half a dozen of the other, but my foot hurt me so bad, I couldn’t sleep. I dosed it with a few slugs of whiskey and only managed to give myself a sour stomach. When morning came I announced to Eugene and the other boys that I was packing it in.
I said, “The problem is I don’t drink enough water and I don’t eat right. That pork last night was full of fat, for example. And riding a horse, you never get the cardiovascular exercise you need. I’ve got to think about my health.” Well, you’da thought I’da put on a dress and high heels the way they laughed and carried on. I said: “I quit. I’m a cowboy no longer. It’s a rotten lonely life and I’m done with it.” And I jumped on Old Dan, who luckily was right there, and I rode away.
I headed into a friendly town named Pleasant Gulch, having read in the paper that it offered a healthy climate, good soil and water, good schools and churches, a literary society, and “all the adornments of advanced civilization.” That’s for me, I thought. I became deputy to Sheriff Dibble, a full-time job with a decent pension plan, and bought a condo over the saloon. The Realtor, Lefty Slim, had a four-bedroom ranch house with great views for cheap—“Must sell, owner is wanted for murder,” he said—but I had seen all I wanted of ranches, so I bought the condo. Partly furnished with a nice walnut bedroom set and dining-room table and carpet, and I could move in right away because the previous owner had been shot.
I bought sheets and towels and hung up blue dotted-swiss curtains. You miss curtains so much on the trail; there’s really no way to hang them. (I know. I’ve tried.) And I bought myself a set of china. A cowboy gets sick of the sound of his fork scraping a tin plate, and this was the first good china I ever owned: four place settings with salad bowl, soup bowl, cup and saucer, dinner plate, and dessert plate, plus two platters, two serving bowls, gravy boat, teapot, and soup tureen, in the Amaryllis pattern.
The truth was, I didn’t know three other people in Pleasant Gulch well enough to invite to dinner, but I felt confident I soon would because the town was perfect, its lawns and porches and street lamps so welcoming and warm compared to rocks and buttes. I hiked around town twice that first evening, just to absorb the beauty of it, and then returned home and fixed pork and beans, but they looked like cassoulet on my Amaryllis.
I had eaten exactly two bites when shots rang out and some cowboys whooped and bullets tore through my curtains and one busted two teacups, and another one hit my good serving platter and blasted it to smithereens. But when I stalked downstairs and out into the street, it was deserted except for a cowboy lying facedown in the dirt.
“What in the Sam Hill is going on around here?” I yelled.
He said he had been shot clean through the heart and was done for.
I knelt down by him and yelled, “You busted my Amaryllis china, you dink! I came in off the trail to get away from your ilk and here you are messing around in town. Well, not for long.”
He asked me to take a letter to his mother in Pittsburgh.
“Your mother has no interest in hearing from you, so don’t even think of it. You’re nothing but a filthy savage and death is too good for you,” I said. And then he died, presumably. At any rate, he didn’t have any more to say.
Next day, I went back to the General Store to replace that serving platter, and they were plumb out of Amaryllis. And that night, the old couple next door banged on my door and said, “You’re gargling too loud in there, Mr. Shorty, it’s driving us nuts, and you twirl your rope and jingle your spurs, and your yodeling is a pain in the neck. No more yodeladihoo or whoopitiyiyo, okay?”
I told them that it was my home and I would yodel in it as I pleased.
So they called the sheriff and he said, “Sorry, Shorty, but they’re right. We have a yodeling ordinance here and also one against gargling after ten p.m.”
I got so dagnabbed mad, I stomped home, put my Amaryllis into saddlebags, climbed on Old Dan, and left town at sundown. I was burned up. I yelled at them, “Okay, I’ll show you! You can take your damn piddling laws and ordinances and regulations and stuff ’em in your ear!” And back out on the range I went. Frankly, I’d left so many towns by then that I was used to it and didn’t get nearly as mad as in the past. Leaving town is what cowboyin is all about.
You find a nice place and it’s wonderful and then suddenly you can’t stand it. So you drift off down the trail and get wet and miserable and lonesome till you can’t bear it for another minute, so you gallop into the nearest town and are overwhelmed by the beauty of society—cheap floozies, old coots, preachers, lunatics, hoboes, schoolteachers, old scouts with their sunburned faces and their voices raised in song, the jokes and gibes and yarns, the barn dances, the woman who invites you to stay the night—people are great when you haven’t seen any for a few months!
So you find a job and an apartment, settle down, get comfortable, think, “This time it’s for real”—and two minutes later you are brokenhearted, mad, miserable, and back in the saddle again. This is the basic cowboy pattern.
From Pleasant Gulch me and Old Dan headed for Dodge, with all the china, and ten miles beyond the Little Crazy River a rattler sprang at us and Dan shied away and I slid off and we busted a gravy boat! And one morning a grizzly came into camp and I reached for something to throw at him and I tossed my teapot—it was the worst trip—and the next night, two cougars snuck in and stole my pants as I slept and it was snowing and I headed for a little town called Pit City. Rode along in my underwear, cold and soaked to the skin, and a woman waved from a porch, people smiled at me, and a nice lady cried out from a white frame house: “My brother Dusty is just your same size, mister—if you need a pair of pants, you can have one of his. And if you haven’t eaten I’ll rustle you up a plate of grub. And if you care to set and talk a spell, why, that’d be just hunky-dory.”
The Andersons. Euphonia and Bill Anderson. Kindest people you’d ever meet.
I sat in their toasty warm kitchen by the coal stove and gabbed for three hours and told them everything about myself, personal stuff, and it was satisfying.
“Your problem is that you never found the woman you loved enough to make you want to come in off the range and settle down,” said Euphonia. She introduced me to their daughter, Leonora, a beautiful redhead who worked at the Lazy Dollar Saloon—“as a bookkeeper,” Euphonia emphasized.
Leonora treated me like the lover she never had. She and I went for long walks out across the prairie to the ridge above the town. I sang to her, “Mi amor, mi corazón,” and she liked that pretty well. We got close. She did my laundry and saw the name tags on my shirts and started calling me Leonard, which nobody had done since I was a child.
“You’re
a gentle person, Leonard. Not like other cowboys. You like nice things. You ought to live in town,” she said, lying with her head in my lap in a bower of prairie grass.
I told her, “Leonora, I have tried to live in town, because the cowboy life is a hard, wet, miserable, lonesome life, so town is wonderful, but doggone it, you go there and two days later, somebody kicks you in the shins and it’s back in the saddle again. A guy can’t live with people and he can’t live without them. And besides, I am a cowboy and have got to be on the range.” I spat on the ground to emphasize this.
“When you fixin to go?” she inquired.
“Tomorrow. Mebbe Tuesday.”
“For long?”
“Six months. Mebbe longer. Depends.”
“Six months is a long stretch of time to be away from a relationship,” she said.
“Sometimes it is,” I said. “And sometimes it’s just long enough.”
“Well, Shorty, you just go and do whatever you’re going to do, because that’s what you’re going to do anyway, makes no matter what I say. I know cowboys,” she said.
I cried, “Well, if I don’t cowboy, tell me—what would I do for a living in town?”
“You could write a western,” she said.
So I started in writing a western novel with lots of hot lead flying and poetic descriptions of western scenes: “The setting sun blazed in the western sky as if a master painter had taken his brush to the clouds, creating a multihued fantasy of color reflecting brightly off the buttes and mesas.” That night I showed it to Leonora. “Not what you’d call a grabber,” she said.
The Keillor Reader Page 14