by Les Weil
Nothing to eat since Rax's, and how long ago was that? Night before last by the calendar. No sleep since then except for cold catnaps taken while they waited for darkness to cover the return.
The explanation he and Mike made up had seemed to work. No one questioned that they had had to shoot a man whose name they couldn't learn. A breed, they said, who wouldn't stand and talk but let go with an ancient musket not worth the trouble of collecting. The men had merely nodded. Already most of them had had enough of bloodshed. At the second cabin two more rustlers had been found and put to death.
They reached the barn and dismounted. "Lat."
Evans turned, to see Carmichael speaking over his saddle. "Take my advice! Go armed from now on! In town or out!"
"Not my style, Mike."
"Damn it, rustlers got relatives, rustlers got friends, and word'll leak out. You want to be pot-shot?" It seemed to Evans that some extra thought flicked in the eyes that the years had turned more gray than blue. "You can't tell who might draw down on you."
Evans said, "Well?" Mike was probably right. Now what they needed was food and sleep. Mike looked as played out as Evans felt. The wrinkles around his eyes and mouth were drawn too deep for humor. "You take a couple of days off, Mike. You've more than earned it."
"Providin' you do, too -and providin' you go armed!"
"Just in time, boys," Whitey said as they came in after graining the horses. He stood at the wood stove, a soiled towel over his middle and his hat on his head. "Cook calls the turn, and sowbelly and hen fruit's the special today. Over easy costs you extry." They gave him hello, and he began breaking more eggs in the pan. "And I can remember when eggs was dessert, before Albert Gallatin Evans lassoed himself some hens. First thing you know, Mike, he'll buy a Jersey cow and be askin' us to milk. And what I'll answer is I would except I'm too shy to take them open liberties."
"Please to center on cookin'," Carmichael said.
Whitey looked away from the pan. "You two don't look like you'd fared too handsome." That, Evans knew, was as close as he would come to asking what he could and would be told after food and rest.
"How's the calving?"
Whitey sang to a Sunday-school tune, "Dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping, hear the calvies fall ..."
"Bein' alone sure overstocks your mouth." Carmichael spoke with tired good nature.
"Not alone!" Whitey motioned with his cook spoon. "Who in hell was that old rooster, Lat?"
"Who?"
"That smooth-mouth, cross between cricket and whiskers, touched up with skunk?"
"Didn't he go?"
"Not till this mornin'. Hung around and asked more goddam questions, not as I answered. Then I tied a can to his tail."
"Good."
"He lit out in the direction of town."
Evans drew a breath. Out of the window the sun still lay bright on the mountains.
31
TO PASS the time, Carmichael went into the Lally Cooler. He had had sleep enough, God knew, since that sashay into the breaks. Almost round the clock. Lat's cattle -he couldn't help but think of them as his, too, in a way- were doing fine. Nothing to worry about, but still he worried some.
Three men sat at a table, ready to play cards. Two of them he knew. Then as his eyesight sharpened to the inside murk, he recognized the third one. A cross between cricket and whiskers, Whitey had called him.
Butch Schmidt waved Carmichael over. "Just waitin' for a sucker. Take a hand?"
"A few, maybe." Carmichael sat down. He motioned to the bar. "Bring us a drink, huh?"
"'Y God, that's a pious idea." Whitey had been right, too, in saying the cross was touched with skunk.
They dealt and dealt. Carmichael wasn't interested enough, he knew without caring, to pay attention to the game. Win or lose, he could kill an hour or three.
Between deals the musty whiskers opened and the gums inside them asked, "Where's the chief?"
"Who?"
"Your boss, then?"
"If you mean Evans, he's in town, at home."
"Is he goin' to be around?"
"Why don't you ask him?" Here again was something Carmichael couldn't tally. He asked himself why even Lat, tolerant though he was, didn't boot this scummy scarecrow to Dakota or over the divide.
Howie came in and barely nodded and ordered up one drink and went back out. Solo. Solo was the game. A man ought to keep his mind on it.
Carmichael said, "I'll try one," and went set.
"If you'd led out different now?" The gums showed moist. "Maybe solo ain't your fit, boy. Me, I'm a monte man. Hey, my deal!"
Whitlock entered and then Rax. They might be strangers from their manners. They drank and left. Natural, Carmichael figured, natural for all of them to come to town after the big doings. They'd make the rounds, listening sharp for any talk, and act cold to each other while in secret bound together. He sluffed a ten-spot.
The man they called Nevada Jim got a bid and made it.
There wasn't any talk yet, none that he had heard. Things were quiet, men going peaceable about their little businesses. Today was just like any other sleepy, small-town daypalaver, cards, a drink or two unless, like Lat, a man stayed home to appreciate his family.
Carmichael said, "To hell with this game!" He kicked his chair back and rose and paid off standing up.
"Like a little stud, or freeze-out?" the old man asked.
"No."
Outside, a sheepherder by looks was coming up the walk, trailed by his dog. The dog was sober. Both of them managed to enter the Lally Cooler, the dog just squeezing through the closing door. Across the street the preacher's wife was giving a wide berth to the Jackson Hotel Bar, her head turned away as if to say that things not seen weren't there. "Whoa, now!" The blacksmith's hoarse voice grated on the air. Soo Son, the Chinese cafe keeper, must be frying onions.
Carmichael backed up beside the window of the Lally Cooler and rested his behind on the frame. He'd lost his taste for town, he thought, or was it just that he had scratched into a sore his senseless little itch of worry? More like a woman than a man, he was, hunting boogers underneath the bed. What was like to happen!
Woman? Bed? Think one way and you thought another. That new girl at Callie's, or Miss Callie's as most people called the place now, the girl nick-named Gus for Gertrude, with whom he'd lain before? Long after he had figured, the wild oats in a man kept springing up, if not so green or thick as once. Blood and bed, it seemed to him now, somehow went together, or one behind the other. All that time up in the breaks the hunger had grown on him. Maybe, more than all, a man wanted the tenderness that life was shy of. Maybe he wanted to go home.
Before he went home, Carmichael told himself while saying goodbye to such crackpot ideas, he'd see that Lat was home. Then, for himself, he'd find home enough, all the home he could. He rolled a cigarette.
In an hour or so it would be dark. Across, the west side of the street lay in shadow. Overhead a bullbat sounded like a quivered shingle. He couldn't see Callie's place from here even if he tried. It lay behind him, shut from sight by the line of buildings at his back. His mind idled away to Whitey and the thumb he'd dallied off against the saddle horn. "A greenhorn asked me how I done it," Whitey was repeating, "and I told him I'd plain wore it down by thumbin' ignorant pilgrims to the cathouse."
The Evanses would be eating now or in a little while. He'd go down to the Chink's and take a bait himself. He straightened from against the wall and gave his belt a hitch and then stood still and waited.
Tom Ping was coming, walking with his hands loose, his eyes busy in a face that a week's beard didn't help. He went by with his head up, not speaking, not showing that he saw at all.
"Dried-apple pie," Joyce said, opening the oven door. "I wish we had fresh apples, even Ben Davis." She could almost taste the rich fruits of Indiana, russet apples, for example, strawberries, grapes, green corn. There were the wild crops, too, the pawpaws and persimmons to contrast with the chokecherries an
d serviceberries that were the meager riches of this western land. Here, even canned tomatoes were a treat.
She looked at Lat and Little Lat and had to smile. "I'm not complaining really."
Lat was bouncing the baby on his instep. "Me neither."
"I, either." She ought not to correct him even fondly, she thought. It wasn't as if he didn't know better. And even if he didn't? Count your blessings!
"Here we go, boy! Ride 'em high!"
Little Lat laughed a bubbling laugh and sobered in surprise at it.
Count your blessings, name them one by one ...
It had been a good day, a warm, gently flowing, family day, one of those days in which a person, instant by instant, felt the touch of the All-Purpose and almost understood. Except that Lat had been a little restrained, a little aloof somehow. She thought she knew the reason for that, too, and she knew its cure. Later, soon, tonight! The air was different afterwards, like air rained fresh and clean of dust. For Lat's sake -and her own- she wished she oftener felt this way. Tonight!
"You can put Little Lat into the high chair," she said. "It's getting late, and we're almost ready."
A couplet -she couldn't remember whose- ran through her head.
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings ...
Lat lifted the baby to his lap, on his face such a look of proud affection that she was almost sorry to be hurrying things. "Patty-cake, patty-cake," Lat said, working the chubby hands.
The ranch would be better now, she told herself while she dished up the food. She could stand it. With the two Lats she could stand anything. And maybe, after Little Lat? There was tonight, and there was God in His wisdom. She ought to feel guilty, she supposed, connecting carnality and God, but carnality was His will, and surely He would understand.
Lat put the baby in his high chair and sat down and waited for her and then asked the blessing. Little Lat sang, "Mum-um-um," as food was spooned to him. She felt like singing herself, proper or improper at the table.
Lat smiled at her, and she knew he knew. Words weren't necessary, or seemly.
They had just finished supper when a knock sounded. Carmichael came in. "Hello, Mother. Hi, you little broncbuster. I've et, so don't be lookin' in the kettle."
She asked, "Coffee, then?" and served him.
He sat sipping it, not telling stories as he often did. His expression, it seemed to her, was more serious than usual, but what little he said was light enough. After a while he asked, "When you goin' back to the ranch, chief?"
Lat looked at him. "Chief?"
"Boss," Carmichael said with an easy smile.
Carmichael never addressed Lat in these terms. She spoke the old declamatory lines he brought to mind. "'Ye call me chief . . .' "
"How's that?"
"That's 'Spartacus to the Gladiators.'"
"Turn him loose!"
For the fun of his reaction she lowered her voice and went on. "'. .. and ye do well to call him chief who, for twelve long years, has met upon the arena every shape of man or beast the broad Empire of Rome could furnish ...' " Her memory failed her.
"Don't camp there!" Carmichael said. "Got to get to grass and water."
It was Lat who remembered lines he'd learned from her. "'If there be one among you who can say that ever, in public fight or private brawl, my actions did belie my words, let him stand forth and say it.'"
She and Lat regarded each other, trying to summon up some of the rest. Into the silence Carmichael said, "Not that you don't tell it nice, but that Spartacus was a mouthy man. Mighty high-toned talk."
It hadn't really struck her before how overblown the language was. As if he understood, too, the baby had started to complain. She took him into her lap. "You're right, Mike." It took a cowpuncher, she thought, to set her right. No. It took Carmichael.
Lat had recalled more of the speech. "'If there be three in all your company dare face me on the bloody sands, let them come forth.'"
She laughed. "Those words don't fit you at all."
Carmichael said, "No'm." His gaze went to Lat. "Except they're too fancy for him, they're more fittin' to a man, oh, say, just for example since I just seen him, like Tom Ping."
His eyes met Lat's, and for a silly moment she imagined they shared some piece of knowledge outside hers. Looking at Lat, it occurred to her that it wasn't really Carmichael who had set her right about Spartacus and his bombast; it was the fact of Lat. She studied him, renewing for herself the shapes of brow and nose and mouth and jaw that went together to make a quiet strength, to make -she hunted for the word- rectitude. She wished Carmichael would go.
"I asked you when you're goin' back?" Carmichael asked Lat.
"Tomorrow sometime."
Carmichael refused more coffee. "Aim to be downtown tonight?"
"Hadn't figured on it."
Carmichael gave one nod of his head. "Don't forget the winter has drove them wolves down from the north. Like me, you better take some hardware goin' back." He pushed his chair out and got up and made for the door. Lat let him out.
She put the baby to bed. In a few minutes he would be asleep.
Long after Joyce was asleep, Evans lay awake, her head on his shoulder, hearing her even, peaceful breathing, feeling her breath on his throat. Here, he thought, was the joined flow of quieted blood. Here was tranquillity pooled.
He saw her again as she had sat brushing her hair, doing this last chore before bedtime. He halted at the doorway to watch her, for she had opened the door after getting into her nightgown. Her hair remained lustrous in a climate too dry for luster. The years in every way had been good to her. Even her pale and delicate skin hadn't weathered, like most, to Montana winds.
Then she had asked as though the question were casual, "Don't you think girls are nice?"
"Sure I do. I've got the nicest of all."
The brush stopped its movement and hung arrested over her head, wanting something to start it again.
He stepped inside. "Why do you ask that?"
She got up from her chair, not looking him in the face, and came to him and bent her head to his chest, and his arms were welcome, and he breathed her clean fragrance. She dared to whisper, "I mean a baby girl."
Afterwards they had talked -about a still larger family, perhaps, about worthy, fine lives for all, about the ranch, about the Senate and maybe higher places. "Oh, Lat!" she said, close in his arms. "We can do it. Respecting each other, loving each other, we can do anything."
Anything, he said to himself, lying awake. Anything.
Quieted blood. Tranquillity. The rustlers were a dream to be told in time and understood. She would understand. Being Joyce, she would make herself understand, strange and wrong though violence was to her. She would understand the accident of Grandpa McBee, if he had to be acknowledged. It wasn't her inability to adjust to circumstance, he thought; it was his own wish to shield and protect her, to save her from trial and hurt. Also, for his own part, he had to admit, he wanted always to stand high with her. So, for one reason and another, he had denied McBee when she had said, "A dirty old man, very old and very dirty, with whiskers, was inquiring for you."
"Hmm. Could be anyone, I guess."
He felt sleep drifting on him, felt his muscles loosen and flow into the sheets and his mind ease off and put him, swimming, in the air. One stroke of his hand would lift or raise him, like the easy tilting of a hawk. Below him lay the lovely land and the birds of the field and the beasts of the forest that were His, and the earth and the fullness thereof and the cattle on a thousand hills.
It was Joyce's voice or the measured knocking that dragged him out of dreams. Waking, it seemed he'd heard them both at once.
"Lat!" she kept on saying. "Someone's at the back door, Lat!"
Again he heard the knocking.
"Not in your nightshirt!" Her voice was a whisper.
He found his pants and pulled them on and felt for matches and, in the kitchen, lit a
wick. He went to the door and opened it and looked out.
No one was to be seen. He looked hard, night-blind from the flash of match. "Hello, there!" The moon was lipping at the mountains. The time was midnight, maybe later. "Hello, there!" From yesterday, Carmichael: Rustlers got relatives . . . He stepped outside.
Then he saw.
"Mist' Lat?" From the side Happy came up, his face like an egg of darkness with twin spots of white.
Evans closed the door behind him. "What?"
"Please, Mist' Lad Please!" Happy held out his hat like a cup to be filled.
"Quiet! What?"
The black hand came out almost invisibly, the white slip in it showing clear.
Evans took the slip and unfolded it and backed up to the gleam of light out of the window.
The note, unsigned, said, "I am lonesome."
32
WALKING in the night, Evans tried not to think. He told himself: wait and see; no use to cross bridges that might not be there. The Callie he had known wouldn't undo him, that was sure. She wouldn't ask the impossible. Nor would she think to tease him back to her, now that his way was cut out. Maybe she needed a loan.
It was too late for anyone to be out. Even the saloons were dark. With the moon down, the stars had come out of hiding, pinholes of stars that shone distant and cold. A stray dog lay curled by a door. The town was silent except for the march of his feet.
Happy's words turned and turned again in his head. "Please, only come, Mist' Lat. Dey tell you why."
So he was coming, leaving Joyce warm and trusting in bed and the baby asleep in his cradle.
"It's Whitey," he had told Joyce after he had sent Happy on.
"At the door?"
"No."
"Drunk?"
"Sick, too. Needs help. Can't take it any more," he answered while he dressed. Whitey would forgive him, he knew. Whitey wouldn't care much, unfair as the words were. "And he'd been doing so well, you said."
"Yeah."
"What will you do?"
"I'll see. Get him in bed at the hotel probably."
He was within a block of the house now and could see a light from it. He felt divided and disloyal and caught. He had put Callie out of his life and nearly out of his mind, had hardly even glimpsed her for years, for not often did she come out in public. Happy himself was a stranger -a jog in the memory quickly smoothed out. Of a sudden all had come back. He saw again the sunflower hair and the apricot skin and the small, high-breasted body. She was bringing in breakfast and saying he ought not to fret but only get well. Openly, naturally, somehow purely, she was teaching him the ways of woman and man. She was pressing a loan in his hand. "Lat, don't you see? Being you're you, it's as good as cash in the bank." Other days, old love, old sin. Old obligation. Today was never a new day. Within himself he cried out, "Don't you see, Joyce! Don't you see!"