by Celia Hayes
If the cattle numbered so many, it seemed to Magda that there were almost as many people in the farmyard, men and their horses swirling in a grand and purposeful circus. Her brother Fredi was the ringmaster and center of the storm. He looked settled and calm in the saddle of a pinto pony such as he used to ride when he was a boy, working cattle under the tutelage of her husband and Porfirio, in the days when the house on the Guadalupe was new and the limestone it was built of fresh and unstained. The air smelled of cattle dung and dust, and crushed grass. There was Daddy Hurst in the driving seat of the converted ambulance, taking up the reins in his capable hands and nodding respectfully in their direction. Fredi waved his hat to Daddy Hurst, who slapped the reins on the back of his team. His wagon lurched away; heavy-laden by the way his draft-team leaned into their yokes.
“So, now it is time,” Hansi intoned. The sea of cattle had begun to move, slowly yet inexorably, as the tide begins to flow. It spilled out of his pasture onto the tracks leading east and north, down the valley, urged by mounted drovers. Hansi embraced Jacob and George, carelessly saluted Charley Nimitz, who watched the river of cattle flowing past with great interest, and kissed Anna on both cheeks.
“Have a care for your mother,” he instructed, “and the store. But mostly for your mother, Annchen. Try to make her believe I will come to no harm, with all these fine young lads just waiting for a chance to show their mettle in our defense.”
“Yes, Papa,” Anna assured him.
“I’ll send you letters, when we are near to a place we can mail them.” He kissed Magda, “Don’t worry for your investment. I shall see a tenfold return on it, if it’s the least I can do! That’s my promise, hey?” His hat knocked to a jaunty angle, he clapped his sons on the shoulders once more and strode towards the supply wagon, as happy as a boy set free from the schoolroom.
Magda impulsively embraced her son—grown so tall, she thought again. “You are full of lumps!” she exclaimed, for all those hard objects in his vest pockets dug into her ribs.
“Sorry, Mama,” he replied, his eyes as calm and blue as the sky. “It’s all the things I might need—cattle liniment and my brand book and pocketknife and cartridge box.”
“Be well, then,” she said. “Be well and take care that you return to us in one piece, Rudolph Christian Becker!”
“Of course, Mama,” he answered serenely. Magda let her arms go from around him and stepped back. No, no longer a child; her oldest son had not been a child since that certain night in his thirteenth year.
A young man rode towards them, the reins of a pair of saddled but riderless horses held carelessly in his grasp. The rider was dark, Mexican, and he had such a look about him of Porfirio that Magda knew he must be his cousin Alejandro. Comfortably in the saddle, a dusty chevalier in plain workclothes, he hailed Dolph in Spanish, his teeth a flash of white in his dark face.
“’Bye, Mama,” her son said over his shoulder. He went up onto the first horse like a bird settling onto a familiar perch and exchanged what sounded like rude remarks with Alejandro. The two of them joined their fellows at the edge of the moving river of cattle.
Then it was just Peter, holding the reins of the other pony in his good hand. “Farewell, Ma’am Becker, Miss Anna.” He nodded to each of them in turn. Magda thought it was as though he did not presume on anything more familiar. No, Margaret’s son should not have that cold a parting, she thought.
On impulse, she took his other hand in both of hers, his wooden one, with its unyielding jointed fingers. “You return to us safely,” she directed. “Safe and whole. You are one of our own, Peter.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he answered, seemingly gratified by the fond interest. “Don’t worry. I will look after Mr. Richter and Dolph with every care, until we return safely.”
“See to yourself as well,” Anna said with brisk affection. To Magda’s astonishment, she went to him and, on tiptoes, reached and pulled his face down to hers so she could kiss his cheek. “For it seems you feel obliged to look after everyone but yourself.”
“Why, Miss Anna,” he said, with a broad grin, “I shall—and am amazed that you would think of me with such tenderness! Dare I think you have feelings for me?”
“Someone should!” Anna answered him. “As a matter of charity, Mr. Vining,” she teased.
“I am gratified,” he said, then proceeded to return her kiss with a more enthusiastic one—on her lips. She pulled away from him with a gasp, flushing as pink as one of the primroses that starred the un-trampled grass. She lifted her hand and Magda thought she meant to slap him for impertinence, but he stepped away laughing and vaulted up into the saddle of his horse.
He was gone in a moment, and Magda observed, “Annchen, did you mean to encourage him? He may want another kiss like that, upon his return!”
Anna fumed. “Ridiculous man! How dare he be so forward!”
“Well, you did kiss him first,” Magda pointed out, inwardly amused. “He would see that as an encouragement, you know. Most men would.”
“I only thought to kiss him in farewell, as I would one of my brothers, or cousins. He had no right to read anything more into it.”
“But you did not kiss Dolph, or your father,” Magda reasoned, “Only Peter. Why would that be, Annchen? Do you have a special regard for him?”
Still blushing pink, Anna answered, “I might.” But then she straightened her bonnet and turned to climb back into the wagon, “If I thought . . . oh, never mind, Auntie. He’s as faithless as a silly bumble-bee, going from flower to flower. Let’s go back to town. At least we can open the store for this afternoon!”
Chapter Twelve: Long Trail Winding
“What was that all about, Cuz?” Dolph asked of Peter, as they rode away from Hansi’s old farm. They drifted slowly at the edge of that sea of moving cattle, taking up their positions on the point, a little way behind Fredi. The kitchen wagon and Hansi’s supply wagon had already moved far ahead. The other riders spread out, riding swing and flank on either side of the herd. Even heavy-laden, the wagons moved faster than the plodding cattle. Those youngest and newest to the drive were stuck riding drag at the herd’s tail, choking on dust and chivvying the stragglers along.
Laughing, Peter answered, “Miss Anna? I think she might hold me in more than the usual regard!”
Dolph ostentatiously sniffed the air. “It’s morning and you are sober, Cuz. And so was she.”
“She kissed me,” Peter insisted, “in front of your mother, and most fondly, also. What do you suppose she meant by it?”
“Truly?” Dolph began to laugh, “Oh, Cuz, if Anna meant it seriously, then you are a marked man. Once we get to Abilene your only escape is to just keep going north on as fast a horse as we can provide.”
“That isn’t funny, Cuz,” Peter responded with indignation. “Supposed I quite liked being kissed by Miss Anna?”
“Then you’ve been branded as neatly as any of these critters,” Dolph answered. “And since that was the last kiss you will have from a woman until we get to Kansas, it’s just as well that you enjoyed it.” He added a rude description of what else was done with young cattle at their first branding, at which comparison Peter protested with loud indignation. A handful of cattle near to them started at his raised voice, a sudden eddy in a placid stream.
Fredi wheeled his horse, reproving him in a low but tense voice, “Be still, then! These beasts panic and stampede at the least thing! Hell, I’ve even known a cow to begin stampeding at the sound of their own dung hitting the ground!” Chastened, Dolph and Peter dropped the subject of Miss Anna’s intentions for the moment, being that she was the daughter of Hansi, a man still hale and with shoulders like a bull. They rode too far apart for conversation the rest of that day, as they would during most of those days following, their attention always on the herd—that exasperating, wayward, deeply stupid, and enduringly impulsive collection of almost completely wild longhorn heifers and steers. Of every color imaginable; white and roan, grey-blue or sp
otted black and brindle brown in every combination, all the cattle had by way of commonality was a pair of wide-branching horns and a collection of brands on hip and shoulder, or notched ears and a trail-brand. All were as wild as deer and nothing any sane man would want to approach on foot, not without a lariat in hand and a watchful friend at back.
Sometimes, Peter wondered if they had all gone insane, thinking they could take this herd all the way to Kansas, winding a slow and tedious way through Indian Territory and across all that howling wilderness in between. It would be like shepherding a handful of mercury, a thousand droplets all eager and ready to separate and roll away in a thousand different directions. Especially when they got out into the unsettled country; Peter did not like to think any farther ahead than that. He counted it fortunate that it was not his job—that was Fredi’s. And it was also Fredi’s burden to command the drovers, as if he were the captain of the company. Dolph and Peter rated as something a trifle lower, perhaps as sergeants. There were thirty-three of them, including the Mexican horse-wranglers, all young and single, some more foolish perhaps than others. They were clothed in motley of work clothes, canvas pants patched with buckskin, linsey-woolsey or homespun cotton work shirts. Those who had previous experience with cattle on the trail had calico kerchiefs tied around their necks. Their hats were motley also; wide-brimmed Mexican sombreros or home-made of plaited straw. Billy Inman had a black cavalryman’s hat with a bit of tarnished gold braid around the crown. They all had brought along sidearms of one kind or another, as it had long been the custom among Texians to go armed. Daddy Hurst and Hansi equipped themselves with shotguns, short in the barrels and triple-loaded.
Nearly all of Hansi’s drovers were American-born, either kin to Porfirio, sons of old Verein settlers, or formerly soldier-comrades in various military companies with Fredi or Dolph. Four or five were connections of the Brown family, the Becker’s old neighbors from the Guadalupe holding. At twenty-three Billy Inman was about the oldest of the cowhands, a younger brother of Captain Inman, whose Ranger company had pursued the war party which had taken Willi and Grete. The youngest were too young to have served in the war at all; they hoped to earn enough money on this drive to help their families, left impoverished or homeless in the aftermath of the war. Hansi approved of this, in a fatherly way. He had arranged to send half their pay directly to their families, rather than see them tempted to go on a spree with it all once the end of the end of the trail was reached.
“We’ll cross the Colorado tomorrow,” Fredi advised them when they bivouacked one afternoon, bedding down the herd in a meadow below a ridge grown with oak trees. “Swim them across. Likely it will take all day. Then in the morning, we take them north. I’ll scout on ahead.”
“You want one of us to come with you?” Dolph asked.
Fredi shook his head. “No, we’re close enough to Austin and the settlements along the river. I won’t worry until we cross the Red River. Then, I’ll want everyone to go two and two.”
Days slipped past like beads on a string, indistinguishable from each other, endless under the blue sky that arched over them like a bowl. Like water, cattle followed a line of least resistance, pooling in the bottomlands, in the valleys, drifting out to graze a little apart from the line of their fellows, then coaxed into line again by a watchful and dusty horseman.
“That old blue steer with the broken horn; watch him,” Dolph said to Peter as they began to turn the herd into their bedding-ground, one afternoon. “He’s the leader. I been watching him, every day. He moves out as if he is the drill master, forges up to the front and stays out ahead.”
“That does beat all,” Peter chuckled, for sure enough, the big dark-grey steer with one horn shortened about five inches so that it ended in a blunt stub rather than a sharp point, was indeed stepping out as proudly as if he led a parade.
“If he were one of Stieler’s goats, I’d have him wearing a bell around his neck, so that all the others would hear it and know to follow after.”
They bent the mass of cattle into a curve, shooing the moving line of the herd into itself, until the narrow line joined and spread into a round mass, eddying and slowing like a whirlpool losing momentum, spreading out a little at the edges as individual cattle began to graze. The cook wagon and Hansi’s supply wagon had been parked a little apart from the cattle herd’s bedding ground, under the branches of a sparse grove of cottonwood trees. Daddy Hurst’s cook-fire had already burned down to fine ruddy coals, and the smell of salt-bacon and beans came up to meet them. Alejandro and the other wranglers had set up a makeshift corral, running grass-rope between the wagons and tree trunks. Peter and Dolph unsaddled their horses and hobbled them to let them graze free for a while. They collected their bedrolls from the pile of them by the cook wagon, carried them a little apart, and dropped them with their saddles on a handy patch of ground in a rough semicircle around the fire. So it went every evening, assuming that it wasn’t raining and neither one of them had night-guard on the herd.
Daddy Hurst handed them two plates, piled with beans and pone, and some kind of roasted meat. “Mistah Richter, he killed us some jackrabbits this afternoon, while waiting for you-all to catch up,” he explained.
“Damn, that smells good,” Peter said. “Daddy, I am so hungry I could about eat it raw.”
“Ain’t no call for that.” Daddy wiped his hands on an indescribably filthy towel, tied apron-wise around his waist, and took back an empty plate from a drover who was already finished eating. “There wuz time enough to roast ‘dem jacks.”
“And a splendid meal did they make,” said the drover, with elegant precision. “A Lucullan feast. My compliments to the chef, of course; I only wish we did not have to hurry so over this elegant repast.” They called that man English Jack, to differentiate him from the wrangler Nigra Jack, a cousin of the Phillips family, free blacks who had settled a small farm near Friedrichsburg before the war and treated cattle with great skill. Like the Phillips father and son, Nigra Jack was a dab hand with cures and medicines.
“De other hans’, dey need de plate, Mistah Jack,” Daddy Hurst replied.
English Jack sighed, as if it were a great tragedy. “Alas, the sacrifices we make, bringing beef to the tables of — where the hell are we bringing it? After Abilene, of course. Does anyone know?”
“Chicago and points east,” Dolph said. “But after Abilene, the herd becomes the buyers’ problem.”
“To which they will be more than welcome,” English Jack drawled. If he had another name only Fredi ever heard it. He was a wiry, sunburnt man, slightly older than Peter, refined of manner in a way that would have made him the butt of much coarse humor if he had not also had a cold and assured way of looking at someone who had drawn his ire. He had turned up several days into the drive, when they passed close to Austin. A local dray appeared on a nearby road, bearing a passenger and all his trash slung on the back: a bedroll and saddle and a fine walnut stock carbine with engraved silver trim. One of the young drovers had fallen too sick to carry on, so Hansi had paid him what was due of his wages and sent him home that very day, scowling all the while and audibly worrying about where he was going to hire a replacement as trustworthy. English Jack’s appearance had been providential. Better yet, Fredi knew him.
“He’ll ride anything with four legs, as if he has no consideration for his own neck,” was what Fredi said, “and dead aim with any weapon handed to him. The rumor is that he left England after killing a man in a duel—but there is also a tale that he stole silver from the regimental mess. Or stepped on the train of the Queen’s dress.”
Jack was nearly not hired at all when Hansi asked, “Do you drink?”
Jack looked down his nose and coolly replied, “Only to excess.”
“Not while you’re working for me, you don’t.” Hansi drew in his breath with a hiss and hired him anyway. It turned out that he could read and write—and he spoke German well. “There’s a story in that man,” Hansi had observed upon watchin
g English Jack throw his bedroll into the back of the cook wagon and pick out a horse from the remuda.
Fredi said, “It’s bad manners to ask, Hansi. Me, I’d bet that he’s a younger son of a First. He has disreputable tastes or filthy habits and his family pays him a remittance to keep him the hell out of England. Not that I care,” Fredi shrugged. “As long as he does what I tell him for the next three months and doesn’t bugger the cows in the middle of the trail.”
“I suppose he plays cards, then.” Hansi brightened, for that was about the only common amusement among those who had any energy at the end of the day. That and talking about what they would do at the end of the trail, or what plans they had for such money as they earned. About the only variant on that was the ongoing and never settled dispute on whether grass-rope or braided leather made for a better lariat. Fredi and the Mexican wranglers insisted upon hide, insisting such was superior for length and accuracy, but the younger men held out for the strength and utility of grass-rope. Hansi and Daddy Hurst, when appealed to for settlement of this burning question, preferred to remain agnostic.
The cattle drive was, Peter reflected, uncommonly like the Army. The days combined lengthy and mind-numbing stretches of tedium interspersed with back-breaking labor and the occasional moment of innards-melting terror; all of it in the open air and in the exclusive company of men, day after day after day. Lazing around the cookfire in the evening reminded him of a bivouac in Tennessee or Virginia, save for the presence of cattle in their bed-down pasture providing a constant lowing and shifting in the background. Overhead the stars spun in glittering constellations in a dark-velvet sky; so close, Peter thought some nights, that he could reach up and pluck one from the sky, as easily as plucking an apple from the trees around his mother’s home place. Again like the Army, all of them had forgone shaving; and those men who were of an age to have them boasted the beginnings of magnificent sets of whiskers. Hansi particularly resembled a large badger peering through a hedge.