The Mammoth Book of Westerns

by Jon E. Lewis

  But the spring came, and the ice went out, and that night Bruce went to bed drunk and exhausted with excitement. In the restless sleep just before waking he dreamed of wolves and wild hunts, but when he awoke finally he realized that he had not been dreaming the noise. The window, wide open for the first time in months, let in a shivery draught of fresh, damp air, and he heard the faint yelping far down in the bend of the river.

  He dressed and went downstairs, crowding his bottom into the warm oven, not because he was cold but because it had been a ritual for so long that not even the sight of the sun outside could convince him it wasn’t necessary. The dogs were still yapping; he heard them through the open door.

  “What’s the matter with all the pooches?” he said. “ Where’s Spot?”

  “He’s out with them,” his mother said. “They’ve probably got a porcupine treed. Dogs go crazy in the spring.”

  “It’s dog days they go crazy.”

  “They go crazy in the spring, too.” She hummed a little as she set the table. “You’d better go feed the horses. Breakfast won’t be for ten minutes. And see if Daisy is all right.”

  Bruce stood perfectly still in the middle of the kitchen. “Oh, my gosh!” he said. “I left Daisy picketed out all night!”

  His mother’s head jerked around. “Where?”

  “Down in the bend.”

  “Where those dogs are?”

  “Yes,” he said, sick and afraid. “Maybe she’s had her colt.”

  “She shouldn’t for two or three days,” his mother said. But just looking at her he knew that it might be bad, that there was something to be afraid of. In another moment they were both out the door, both running.

  But it couldn’t be Daisy they were barking at, he thought as he raced around Chance’s barn. He’d picketed her higher up, not clear down in the U where the dogs were. His eyes swept the brown, wet, close-cropped meadow, the edge of the brush where the river ran close under the north bench. The mare wasn’t there! He opened his mouth and half turned, running, to shout at his mother coming behind him, and then sprinted for the deep curve of the bend.

  As soon as he rounded the little clump of brush that fringed the cut-bank behind Chance’s he saw them. The mare stood planted, a bay spot against the grey brush, and in front of her, on the ground, was another smaller spot. Six or eight dogs were leaping around, barking, sitting. Even at that distance he recognized Spot and the Chapmans’ airdale.

  He shouted and pumped on. At a gravelly patch he stooped and clawed and straightened, still running, with a handful of pebbles. In one pausing, straddling, aiming motion he let fly a rock at the distant pack. It fell far short, but they turned their heads, sat on their haunches and let out defiant short barks. Their tongues lolled as if they had run far.

  Bruce yelled and threw again, one eye on the dogs and the other on the chestnut colt in front of the mare’s feet. The mare’s ears were back, and as he ran, Bruce saw the colt’s head bob up and down. It was all right then. The colt was alive. He slowed and came up quietly. Never move fast or speak loud around an animal, Pa said.

  The colt struggled again, raised its head with white eyeballs rolling, spraddled its white-stockinged legs and tried to stand. “Easy, boy,”

  Bruce said. “Take it easy, old fella.” His mother arrived, getting her breath, her hair half down, and he turned to her gleefully. “It’s all right, Ma. They didn’t hurt anything. Isn’t he a beauty, Ma?”

  He stroked Daisy’s nose. She was heaving, her ears pricking forward and back; her flanks were lathered, and she trembled. Patting her gently, he watched the colt, sitting now like a dog on its haunches, and his happiness that nothing had really been hurt bubbled out of him. “Lookit, Ma,” he said. “He’s got four white socks. Can I call him Socks, Ma? He sure is a nice colt, isn’t he? Aren’t you, Socks, old boy?” He reached down to touch the chestnut’s forelock, and the colt struggled, pulling away.

  Then Bruce saw his mother’s face. It was quiet, too quiet. She hadn’t answered a word to all his jabber. Instead she knelt down, about ten feet from the squatting colt, and stared at it. The boy’s eyes followed hers. There was something funny about . . .

  “Ma!” he said. “What’s the matter with its front feet?”

  He left Daisy’s head and came around, staring. The colt’s pasterns were bent, so that they flattened clear to the ground under its weight. Frightened by Bruce’s movement, the chestnut flopped and floundered to its feet, pressing close to its mother. As it walked, Bruce saw, flat on its fetlocks, its hooves sticking out in front like a movie comedian’s too-large shoes.

  Bruce’s mother pressed her lips together, shaking her head. She moved so gently that she got her hand on the colt’s poll, and he bobbed against the pleasant scratching. “You poor broken-legged thing,” she said with tears in her eyes. “You poor little friendly ruined thing!”

  Still quietly, she turned toward the dogs, and for the first time in his life Bruce heard her curse. Quietly, almost in a whisper, she cursed them as they sat with hanging tongues just out of reach. “God damn you,” she said. “God damn your wild hearts, chasing a mother and a poor little colt.”

  To Bruce, standing with trembling lip, she said, “Go get Jim Enich. Tell him to bring a wagon. And don’t cry. It’s not your fault.”

  His mouth tightened; a sob jerked in his chest. He bit his lip and drew his face down tight to keep from crying, but his eyes filled and ran over.

  “It is too my fault!” he said, and turned and ran.

  Later, as they came in the wagon up along the cutbank, the colt tied down in the wagon box with his head sometimes lifting, sometimes bumping on the boards, the mare trotting after with chuckling vibrations of solicitude in her throat, Bruce leaned far over and tried to touch the colt’s haunch. “Gee whiz!” he said. “Poor old Socks.”

  His mother’s arm was around him, keeping him from leaning over too far. He didn’t watch where they were until he heard his mother say in surprise and relief, “Why, there’s Pa!”

  Instantly he was terrified. He had forgotten and left Daisy staked out all night. It was his fault, the whole thing. He slid back into the seat and crouched between Enich and his mother, watching from that narrow space like a gopher from its hole. He saw the Ford against the barn and his father’s big body leaning into it pulling out gunny sacks and straw. There was mud all over the car, mud on his father’s pants. He crouched deeper into his crevice and watched his father’s face while his mother was telling what had happened.

  Then Pa and Jim Enich lifted and slid the colt down to the ground, and Pa stooped to feel its fetlocks. His face was still, red from wind-burn, and his big square hands were muddy. After a long examination he straightened up.

  “Would’ve been a nice colt,” he said. “ Damn a pack of mangy mongrels, anyway.” He brushed his pants and looked at Bruce’s mother. “ How come Daisy was out?”

  “I told Brucie to take her out. The barn seems so cramped for her, and I thought it would do her good to stretch her legs. And then the ice went out, and the bridge with it, and there was a lot of excitement . . .” She spoke very fast, and in her voice Bruce heard the echo of his own fear and guilt. She was trying to protect him, but in his mind he knew he was to blame.

  “I didn’t mean to leave her out, Pa,” he said. His voice squeaked, and he swallowed. “I was going to bring her in before supper, only when the bridge . . .”

  His father’s somber eyes rested on him, and he stopped. But his father didn’t fly into a rage. He just seemed tired. He looked at the colt and then at Enich. “ Total loss?” he said.

  Enich had a leathery, withered face, with two deep creases from beside his nose to the corner of his mouth. A brown mole hid in the left one, and it emerged and disappeared as he chewed a dry grass stem. “Hide,” he said.

  Bruce closed his dry mouth, swallowed. “Pa!” he said. “It won’t have to be shot, will it?”

  “What else can you do with it?” his father s
aid. “A crippled horse is no good. It’s just plain mercy to shoot it.”

  “Give it to me, Pa. I’ll keep it lying down and heal it up.”

  “Yeah,” his father said, without sarcasm and without mirth. “You could keep it lying down about one hour.”

  Bruce’s mother came up next to him, as if the two of them were standing against the others. “Jim,” she said quickly, “isn’t there some kind of brace you could put on it? I remember my dad had a horse once that broke a leg below the knee, and he saved it that way.”

  “Not much chance,” Enich said. “Both legs, like that.” He plucked a weed and stripped the dry branches from the stalk. “You can’t make a horse understand he has to keep still.”

  “But wouldn’t it be worth trying?” she said. “ Children’s bones heal so fast, I should think a colt’s would too.”

  “I don’t know. There’s an outside chance, maybe.”

  “Bo,” she said to her husband, “ why don’t we try it? It seems such a shame, a lovely colt like that.”

  “I know it’s a shame!” he said. “I don’t like shooting colts any better than you do. But I never saw a broken-legged colt get well. It’d just be a lot of worry and trouble, and then you’d have to shoot it finally anyway.”

  “Please,” she said. She nodded at him slightly, and then the eyes of both were on Bruce. He felt the tears coming up again, and turned to grope for the colt’s ears. It tried to struggle to its feet, and Enich put his foot on its neck. The mare chuckled anxiously.

  “How much this hobble brace kind of thing cost?” the father said finally. Bruce turned again, his mouth open with hope.

  “Two-three dollars, is all,” Enich said.

  “You think it’s got a chance?”

  “One in a thousand, maybe.”

  “All right. Let’s go see MacDonald.”

  “Oh, good!” Bruce’s mother said, and put her arm around him tight.

  “I don’t know whether it’s good or not,” the father said. “ We might wish we never did it.” To Bruce he said, “It’s your responsibility. You got to take complete care of it.”

  “I will!” Bruce said. He took his hand out of his pocket and rubbed below his eye with his knuckles. “ I’ll take care of it every day.”

  Big with contrition and shame and gratitude and the sudden sense of immense responsibility, he watched his father and Enich start for the house to get a tape measure. When they were thirty feet away he said loudly, “ Thanks, Pa. Thanks an awful lot.”

  His father half-turned, said something to Enich. Bruce stooped to stroke the colt, looked at his mother, started to laugh and felt it turn horribly into a sob. When he turned away so that his mother wouldn’t notice he saw his dog Spot looking inquiringly around the corner of the barn. Spot took three or four tentative steps and paused, wagging his tail. Very slowly (never speak loud or move fast around an animal) the boy bent and found a good-sized stone. He straightened casually, brought his arm back, and threw with all his might. The rock caught Spot squarely in the ribs. He yiped, tucked his tail, and scuttled around the barn, and Bruce chased him, throwing clods and stones and gravel, yelling, “Get out! Go on, get out of here or I’ll kick you apart. Get out! Go on!”

  So all that spring, while the world dried in the sun and the willows emerged from the floodwater and the mud left by the freshet hardened and caked among their roots, and the grass of the meadow greened and the river brush grew misty with tiny leaves and the dandelions spread yellow along the flats, Bruce tended his colt. While the other boys roamed the bench hills with .22s looking for gophers or rabbits or sage hens, he anxiously superintended the colt’s nursing and watched it learn to nibble the grass. While his gang built a darkly secret hideout in the deep brush beyond Hazards’, he was currying and brushing and trimming the chestnut mane. When packs of boys ran hare and hounds through the town and around the river’s slow bends, he perched on the front porch with his slingshot and a can full of small round stones, waiting for stray dogs to appear. He waged a holy war on the dogs until they learned to detour widely around his house, and he never did completely forgive his own dog, Spot. His whole life was wrapped up in the hobbled, leg-ironed chestnut colt with the slow-motion lunging walk and the affectionate nibbling lips.

  Every week or so Enich, who was now working out of town at the Half Diamond Bar, rode in and stopped. Always, with that expressionless quiet that was terrible to the boy, he stood and looked the colt over, bent to feel pastern and fetlock, stood back to watch the plunging walk when the boy held out a handful of grass. His expression said nothing; whatever he thought was hidden back of his leathery face as the dark mole was hidden in the crease beside his mouth. Bruce found himself watching that mole sometimes, as if revelation might lie there. But when he pressed Enich to tell him, when he said, “ He’s getting better, isn’t he? He walks better, doesn’t he, Mr. Enich? His ankles don’t bend so much, do they?” the wrangler gave him little encouragement.

  “Let him be a while. He’s growin’, sure enough. Maybe give him another month.”

  May passed. The river was slow and clear again, and some of the boys were already swimming. School was almost over. And still Bruce paid attention to nothing but Socks. He willed so strongly that the colt should get well that he grew furious even at Daisy when she sometimes wouldn’t let the colt suck as much as he wanted. He took a butcher knife and cut the long tender grass in the fence corners, where Socks could not reach, and fed it to his pet by the handful. He trained him to nuzzle for sugar-lumps in his pockets. And back in his mind was a fear: In the middle of June they would be going out to the homestead again, and if Socks weren’t well by that time he might not be able to go.

  “Pa,” he said, a week before they planned to leave. “How much of a load are we going to have, going out to the homestead?”

  “I don’t know, wagonful, I suppose. Why?”

  “I just wondered.” He ran his fingers in a walking motion along the round edge of the dining table, and strayed into the other room. If they had a wagonload, then there was no way Socks could be loaded in and taken along. And he couldn’t walk thirty miles. He’d get left behind before they got up on the bench, hobbling along like the little crippled boy in the Pied Piper, and they’d look back and see him trying to run, trying to keep up.

  That picture was so painful that he cried over it in bed that night. But in the morning he dared to ask his father if they couldn’t take Socks along to the farm. His father turned on him eyes as sober as Jim Enich’s, and when he spoke it was with a kind of tired impatience. “How can he go? He couldn’t walk it.”

  “But I want him to go, Pa!”

  “Brucie,” his mother said, “don’t get your hopes up. You know we’d do it if we could, if it was possible.”

  “But, Ma . . .”

  His father said, “What you want us to do, haul a broken-legged colt thirty miles?”

  “He’d be well by the end of the summer, and he could walk back.”

  “Look,” his father said. “Why can’t you make up your mind to it? He isn’t getting well. He isn’t going to get well.”

  “He is too getting well!” Bruce shouted. He half stood up at the table, and his father looked at his mother and shrugged.

  “Please, Bo,” she said.

  “Well, he’s got to make up his mind to it sometime,” he said.

  Jim Enich’s wagon pulled up on Saturday morning, and Bruce was out the door before his father could rise from his chair. “Hi, Mr. Enich,” he said.

  “Hello, Bub. How’s your pony?”

  “He’s fine,” Bruce said. “I think he’s got a lot better since you saw him last.”

  “Uh-huh.” Enich wrapped the lines around the whipstock and climbed down. “Tell me you’re leaving next week.”

  “Yes,” Bruce said. “Socks is in the back.”

  When they got into the back yard Bruce’s father was there with his hands behind his back, studying the colt as it hobbled around. H
e looked at Enich. “What do you think?” he said. “The kid here thinks his colt can walk out to the homestead.”

  “Uh-huh,” Enich said. “Well, I wouldn’t say that.” He inspected the chestnut, scratched between his ears. Socks bobbed, and snuffed at his pockets. “Kid’s made quite a pet of him.”

  Bruce’s father grunted. “That’s just the damned trouble.”

  “I didn’t think he could walk out,” Bruce said. “I thought we could take him in the wagon, and then he’d be well enough to walk back in the fall.”

  “Uh,” Enich said. “Let’s take his braces off for a minute.”

  He unbuckled the triple straps on each leg, pulled the braces off, and stood back. The colt stood almost as flat on his fetlocks as he had the morning he was born. Even Bruce, watching with his whole mind tight and apprehensive, could see that. Enich shook his head.

  “You see, Bruce?” his father said. “It’s too bad, but he isn’t getting better. You’ll have to make up your mind . . .”

  “He will get better though!” Bruce said. “It just takes a long time, is all.” He looked at his father’s face, at Enich’s, and neither one had any hope in it. But when Bruce opened his mouth to say something else his father’s eyebrows drew down in sudden, unaccountable anger, and his hand made an impatient sawing motion in the air.

  “We shouldn’t have tried this in the first place,” he said. “It just tangles everything up.” He patted his coat pockets, felt in his vest.