“Don’t think I have any sympathy for you,” he muttered at the dog. “It’s your own damn fault.”
Peggy was twelve years old. She ought to have known better by now than to nose around in rock crevices the way she had been doing this afternoon when they rode in from the horse trap. When she was young he’d had to whistle her away from brush piles and prairie dog holes a hundred times a day. If she hadn’t got the idea by now that there were rattlesnakes in such places, she had nobody but herself to blame. The problem was dachshunds were burrowers. They cared about crawling into narrow unreachable places more than they cared about any other thing in the world. It was a stupid sort of dog to have on a ranch, but Sarey had seen a picture of a dachshund pup in a magazine and there had been no point in trying to talk her out of it.
The dog had been imperious from the beginning and had assumed she had the right to sleep in their bed with them, wiggling down through the bedcovers to warm herself at Lamar’s feet. He’d put a stop to that, but the pup just migrated to Ben’s bed instead. He tried to stop that too, but the whole household stood up against him and after a while he didn’t have the energy to fight about it anymore.
Looking up at him from her basket now, the dog kept whining in pain and bewilderment and he told her to hush. His voice must have been sharp enough because she moved her head and looked past him at the wall and in a little while she was asleep again. Or dead. He leaned forward and put his hand on her rib cage until he felt her breathing and then he settled back in his chair and read the letter again and smoked another cigarette and sat there awake as another hour or two passed.
His mind was agitated. He did not want the dog to die, but there was a part of him that wanted everything over and done with, for every person and every creature that had a claim on him just to be gone and leave him alone. And while he was at it, he didn’t see much point in not being dead himself.
He recalled how when he was with the Comanches, when they would be coming home from a raid or a hunting party, they would follow the trail up to some bluff or high point of rock. They would find stones there placed by the party that had gone before. The stones were arranged in a manner to suggest the phase of the moon when the first party had passed by, and there were other stones telling you which direction they had gone. It had been so simple and so calming to him to see those stones like that. Here you might be out in the middle of the llano with nothing but grass and emptiness all around you, and it was like somebody was speaking to you, telling you there were others out here, letting you know how close or far they were, showing you the way home.
He felt lost now, alone in open country with no sign to guide him. Worse, far worse, he felt—he could see—that his son’s ghost was lost and wandering, somewhere in those horrible French battlefields, amid the mud and slime and stinking shell craters and twisted dead tree trunks. He sensed that Ben was expecting to discover some sign from his father, some indication of how to get back to Shackelford County. But Lamar had left nothing for him. He had not thought to. He had not wanted to.
He jerked upright and opened his eyes. He had fallen asleep, or close to it. The image of Ben staggering alone through the hellish western front had been a kind of dream, one of those furiously vivid dreams that he had sometimes before settling down into real sleep.
He sat there alone in the room, awake and alert again. The dog fussed and whimpered in her sleep. Lamar did not like being at the mercy of his waking mind at three in the morning or any other time. Lonely hours such as this had never been a problem for Sarey. She had had her books and her magazines, the letters she was always writing to her three sisters. Like Sarey, the sisters were inquisitive, industrious, and chiding. They had grown up on a ranch over on the Clear Fork with a big stone house and rich pastures that back in those days were untouched by mesquite. He had met her at a dinner at the old Stockyards Hotel during one of Fort Worth’s first fat stock shows. Sarey’s father had brought his four daughters with him, joking to everyone who would listen that he was almost as proud of them as he was of his Hereford bulls. They were an exuberant family, always singing around the organ, organizing croquet matches and boating parties on the deep pools of the Clear Fork.
When he married Sarey, Lamar had been almost fifty, a damaged, silent man she had coaxed out of solitude and drawn into her welcoming family. He had picnicked with them and gamely done his untutored best on the croquet lawn, but the sociability had always been a strain, a price he knew he had to pay for the peace he found at home on his own ranch with Sarey. Studying her in bed as she slept, staring at her in the parlor as she read or wrote letters or cradled their drowsy son in her arms, he had felt a calm he had not known since the days of his own childhood, when he would go to sleep at night listening to the hum of his mother’s spinning wheel. In those suspended moments, it was almost as if the child he had been had grown into the man he was meant to be, as if the Quahadas had never walked through the door that day, as if he and his family had been left alone to live out the future that it had once seemed God intended for them.
He had last seen Sarey’s family at Ben’s funeral service. It was at the Methodist church in Albany that Lamar had allowed Sarey to drag him to six or eight times during their marriage. There had been no casket, no graveside service, since Ben’s grave was far away in France, just a morose reception afterward at one of the church members’ houses, the house of a stranger. Lamar had talked beef prices and tick medicine with Sarey’s father as the women from the church handed them plates of lemon cake. Each of his late wife’s sisters—Ben’s bereaved aunts—had kissed him on the cheek and told him to let them know if there was anything at all in the world they could do for him. He reckoned he would run into some of them again from time to time, but there was nothing left to bind that vibrant family to him. Like his dead wife and son, they had come and gone through his life like a fast-moving norther.
It surprised him now that he hadn’t started drinking again. He just never thought to. Maybe it was Sarey, still lingering on in his mind, still holding him up to her standards. Probably it was just that drinking seemed like another damned thing to do, and he didn’t feel like doing anything except being out with the cattle.
And if he had held himself to Sarey’s standards after she died, things would have been different with Ben. The gulf between living father and dead son would not now feel so dismayingly, impossibly wide.
“You been awake all night?” George’s Mary’s voice startled him. Was he asleep again? He looked over to see her standing there in her housedress, tying on her apron.
“What time is it?”
“Four in the damn morning. I was about to start the biscuits.”
She squatted down and stroked Peggy’s head. The dog opened her eyes and craned her head upwards, staring at George’s Mary with a woeful look.
“Well, she’s alive,” George’s Mary said. “You think she’s going to have to lose that leg?”
“I doubt it. It wasn’t a big snake and this early in the winter it probably didn’t have that much poison stored up.”
He started to stand up but he did so too fast and inside his head it felt like a flock of birds had just flown up off the ground all at once. George’s Mary reached out and grabbed him and helped him back into the chair. One by one, the birds started to return.
“You better not be having a heart attack.”
“No, I was just dizzy for a minute.”
“Well, that’s what you get for sitting there in one place all night. Stay here and I’ll get you something to eat.”
She went into the kitchen and came back with a handful of crackers and a glass of milk.
“What’s that letter there in your lap?” she said as he was eating the crackers.
“It’s about Ben.”
He handed the letter to her. She was a slow reader and it took her a long time to work her way through it, but there were tears coming out of her eyes soon enough. When she was through reading the letter she held the p
iece of tin in her hand and stared at it. Her face had grown fleshy, and her thick gray hair was coarse and tangled and she didn’t seem to take much care of it. It was hard for Lamar to conjure up anymore what she had looked like when she was young. Pale and thin, the best he could recall. He remembered her shivering in the wagon when he brought her home from Fort Griffin, even though it had been summer. She had probably thought he was going to rape her and beat her the way those teamsters had who had left her lying in the mud in front of Conrad’s store. He’d had no thought along those lines at all—he just needed a cook—but it took her a long time to accept that fact, and when she did she went right from fearful to bossy. She’d never thanked him for his good turn and it didn’t matter to him whether she did or not.
“Well, hell, Mr. Clayton,” she said now.
“Well, hell is about it.”
“You be sure to write this boy back and thank him.”
“I will, but it’s no business of yours if I do or not.”
She handed him back the letter and walked into the kitchen. He heard her opening the cupboards, getting down her mixing board and the flour and lard and starting the cooking fire. She shut the steel door of the stove with a hard shove, and when she struck a match it seemed there was fury in that too. She made enough noise for Peggy to forget about her snakebite and get curious, and he had to give the dog a harsh look to stop her from getting out of her basket and limping over to investigate.
He stood himself up—the dizziness was gone now—and bent over and picked up the dog so she wouldn’t follow him. Then he carried her into the kitchen and stood there holding her as he watched George’s Mary knead the biscuit dough as if she was trying to strangle it.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m making your damn breakfast, is what I’m doing.”
“Well, be quiet about it.”
She took the mixing board with the dough still on it and threw it hard on the floor, where it broke in two.
“I loved that boy,” she said.
“I never said you didn’t.”
There was a little hardback chair in the kitchen she used as a stool and she sat down on it and began to wail in a way she never had, not even when they first got the telegram that Ben had been killed. She cried so hard she had trouble getting her breath, and Lamar couldn’t think of anything to do except to stand there with the snakebit dog in his arms and watch her.
It went on for a minute or two and then she was over it. She picked up the dough and threw it in the trash, along with the broken mixing board.
“I had that for forty years,” she said.
“You would have had it for another forty if you hadn’t thrown it on the floor like that.”
She laughed at herself and smeared the tears from her cheeks and then got down a mixing bowl and reached into the coffee can where she kept the lard.
“Look at that dog,” she said. “She’s trembling. We ought not to have got her so excited, not with that snake poison in her.”
Lamar reached out and got a dish towel off the rack and wrapped it around the dog, careful not to touch her bandaged and swollen leg.
“I guess I’ll go sit on the porch till breakfast’s ready,” he told George’s Mary.
He walked with the dog out onto the porch and sat down on a weathered wooden chair whose legs were so uneven it was close to being a rocker. The sun was almost up. The night horse, a little roan called Chesty, was chuffing at him from the fence line. He could hear mourning doves calling and there was a hawk silhouetted at the top of a tree across the creek, preening itself for its morning hunt. Soon he could smell the biscuits cooking in the wood oven. He reflected to himself that if he had ever been at peace, this would have been his favorite time of day.
FOURTEEN
The grand ballroom of the Gunter Hotel was filled with men who looked, in one way or another, like Lamar Clayton. The members of the Old Time Trail Drivers Association were indeed old trail drivers. Some were small and wiry and bowlegged, some had grown mountainous in the decades since they had herded cattle along the now-extinct open range. Those that did not trust the young women at the coat check sat with their Stetsons in front of them on the banquet tables, making life difficult for the waiters trying to serve plates of well-done ribeyes and anemic salads. Many of their faces were hidden behind cascading white mustaches and chin beards. Some wore expensive clothes and looked like they were accustomed to being seen in them, some like Lamar Clayton wore shapeless suits with the lingering scent of mothballs. But they were mostly men who still bore detectable traces of vigor. No matter how broken down they looked, they still had a dogged physical bearing. Their eyes were keen with nostalgia.
“We deplore the loss of these old pioneers,” the speaker at the podium declared after reading off the names of half a dozen “Old Trailers” who had died during the previous year. “And it would be the father of all mistakes to allow their daring and valuable efforts in taming this country to be forgotten by future generations. And so I ask that we bow our heads and vow always to remember our old partners on the trail.”
Gil bowed his head, as did Maureen and Vance Martindale, who kept scribbling in a notebook as he pretended to pray, determined to get everything down. Only Lamar Clayton, who had invited them to the dinner, kept his head upright. When Gil glanced up during the moment of silence, his eyes met Clayton’s. Gil could not read the look he saw there. Maybe it was amusement, maybe it was a hardheaded disdain for being instructed on the manner of how to show his feelings.
Gil responded with an ambiguous half smile. They were at a delicate stage of the approval process for the sculpture and he didn’t want to risk a careless reading of his patron’s mood. Clayton had wired him only three weeks before that he was coming to San Antonio for the Old Time Trail Drivers annual meeting and that as long as he was in town he would be pleased to come by the studio to check on the progress of his statue. This news had sent Gil into a frenzy of effort to complete the scale model, since he wanted to take advantage of an opportunity to get Clayton’s approval of the work so far. He had still not quite finished by that afternoon, but had to leave off to give himself time to get dressed for the banquet that Clayton had insisted he and Maureen attend as his guests. When Maureen mentioned the event to Martindale, who happened to be in town for some reason or another, he immediately bought himself a ticket, eager for the chance to mingle with some of the old pioneers who were the subject of his research.
After the dead had been remembered, another old drover who looked near-dead himself was called to the podium to discuss, in halting speech and numbing detail, the vanished cattle trails of Texas. He went on for forty-five minutes, ponderously recounting the various river crossings on the way to the Red.
“Now after crossing the Llano,” the speaker mumbled about a half hour into the talk, fortifying himself with a long drink of water, “it went up Saline Creek, up there to the head of McDougal Creek over in Menard County, and down to Pegleg Crossing on the San Saba.”
He looked out at the white-haired audience until he found Lamar Clayton. “That about right, Lamar?”
“Near as I can recall,” Clayton growled back.
“Well, I reckon as near as you can recall is about as accurate as we’re going to get.”
A ripple of knowing laughter passed through the audience. Clayton brushed off the recognition but called back at the speaker.
“About how soon you gonna finish, Bud? You ain’t even got to the Brazos yet. We could have driven a herd of cows all the way up the damn trail by now.”
The room erupted in laughter and applause. The cattlemen and their stout wives turned in their seats to grin at Lamar Clayton, who looked across the table and winked at Gil and Maureen.
“You think you can give this damn speech any faster, Lamar,” the ancient speaker said, “then by god you get on up here and do ’er.”
Martindale beamed in delight, still scribbling. If there was a heaven for the academic
study of old-time Texas, he was in it. Meanwhile Clayton jokingly halfway rose out of his chair as the audience kept laughing, but he settled back down again and after a few more good-natured interruptions the speaker was droning on once more, cataloging endless feeder trails and minor watercourses, until he came to Doan’s Crossing on the Prairie Dog Town Fork and began a sentence with the words that the audience had been longing to hear: “In conclusion …”
When the dinner was over, Gil and Maureen and Martindale waited in the lobby while Clayton shook hands with some of his old trail-driving friends and their wives. There was an air of convivial vitality about him that neither Gil nor Maureen had seen before, and a strange kind of urbanity too. He seemed oddly more at home in this hotel ballroom in San Antonio than he did in his own house. And Gil noticed the way he talked to the wives of those tremulous old cowboys, the way he held their attention with a steady, undistracted look. It was the sort of look that men naturally interpreted as challenging but that women saw as flattering. Seeing Clayton in this company helped Gil to understand how this temperamental and solitary rancher had ended up marrying a beautiful and sophisticated woman twenty years younger; and at the same time how he might have ended up driving away his only son.
“Sorry that dinner took so long,” Clayton said when he returned to them. “That fella always was a little long-winded. I recall that three or four months on the trail with him was about plenty.”
“It was a privilege to hear it, Mr. Clayton,” Vance Martindale said. “A privilege just to be at a gathering like this.”
Remember Ben Clayton Page 16