Papa stood up a little straighter. “I say we let bygones be bygones, unless you are looking for trouble.”
“Not at all. I was going to explain that due to some difficulties I experienced during the onset of the war, I was forced to leave my home in Cooke County, Texas.”
“The rebels down there hung forty Union Leaguers,” the sheriff said.
“And what side were you on?” Papa asked the sheriff.
The sheriff stood a little straighter, exactly like Papa had earlier, although Papa was a tall man and the top of the lawman’s head barely cleared Papa’s chin.
“Ninth Minnesota Volunteer Infantry,” the sheriff said.
“I remember you boys at Brice’s Cross Roads,” Papa said.
The sheriff’s mouth went tight. “And were you at Fort Pillow, too?”
“I was.”
“They gave us badges to commemorate those poor black soldiers you massacred.”
“That’s a damned lie, but we picked up a few of those badges you Yankees dropped when we chased you back to Memphis.”
I thought that sheriff was going to grab his pistol, and townspeople that had overheard Papa’s words in passing stopped and gave him hard looks. Kansas was no place for a rebel.
Clayton Lowe stepped between Papa and the sheriff. “I didn’t wish to rehash sore spots from the war.”
“Then what do you want?” Papa asked.
“As I said before, due to hard feelings in Texas toward those of us with Federal sympathies, I was forced to retire to Kansas for the duration of the war. And as it was, I was also forced to leave many of my holdings behind.”
“And?”
“I understand it that you have settled in what was once Clay County, and that you gathered and drove your herd from there?”
“You are correct.”
Clayton looked uneasier, if possible, than he had when he first approached us. “Please don’t take this wrong, but might I ask to see your tally book to check what steers carrying my brand I might be owed compensation for?”
“Are you calling me a thief?”
“No, not at all. Sometimes when gathering range cattle, it is easier to gather everything and settle with the rightful owners later for any of their cattle you may have gathered. Minus your expenses and profit, of course. I would say that any steers of mine that you may have sold were worth ten dollars in Texas. That still leaves you a handsome profit.”
“Those were maverick steers.”
“Yes, but you must understand the difficulties that the war presented. We men of Montague and Cooke Counties had long run our herds where you have settled, but were forced to abandon our seed cattle due to difficulties such as my own, or because of the Comanche raids. The stock you gathered must, in part, stem from my efforts and considerable investments.”
From his vest pocket Papa pulled the tally book in which he kept our herd count. He did it so fast that the sheriff took a quick step backward. Papa held the tally book in front of Clayton’s face. “I left Texas with over two thousand steers. Every one of them was at least five years old and they wear no brand but my own,” he said.
“Yes, but you must understand that . . .”
“You show me one of those steers wearing your brand and I’ll pay you the going market rate for them.”
“It’s a matter of principle, sir. You are taking advantage of the efforts and misfortune of others. I know for a fact that several Confederate widows have interests in the range cattle in your area. You wouldn’t rob from the mouths of widows, would you?” Clayton turned and played to the crowd.
A group of Papa’s vaqueros passed by and heard the commotion. They formed a half ring outside of us.
Papa took a deep breath. “Mr. . . .”
“Lowe,” Clayton said.
“Mr. Lowe, if you mention me robbing or stealing one more time, I shall take great offense. So much so that I would suggest you arm yourself,” Papa said. “When I came to my home in Texas I saw no Confederate widows or Union Leaguer ranchers. All I found was wild cattle without brands, and nobody to claim them but the Indians, which I’ve fought to get these cattle to market. When you speak for others, I think you are speaking for yourself and hoping to play me for a fool.”
“So, you won’t listen to reason?”
“You want cattle, Mr. Lowe, you by God come to Texas and get them.”
Clayton jerked down on both of his coat lapels to straighten them. “Rest assured, Mr. Dollarhyde, I will not be bullied and I will use the full recourse of the law. You haven’t heard the last of this matter.”
Papa opened an account in a Kansas City bank and deposited a draft for forty thousand dollars there. The other forty thousand left over he took in coin, and after we loaded out with supplies at the Frontier Store, he put that coin under the wagon seat in a strongbox. I drove the wagon, sitting above that fortune all the way back to Texas, with a span of six mules in front of me, and Speck, our oxen and lead steer, tied to the wagon bed.
“Papa, I want to go to school,” I said our first day on the trail south.
“You’ve been to school.” Papa kept his eyes straight ahead.
“I mean I want to go to college. Mama and I talked about it some before . . .”
“Son, that may seem like a lot of money there beneath you, but there’s a thousand things we need to spend it on if we’re to keep at this business.”
“You aim to do this again?”
“Next year we will take two herds up the trail, if not more, and I’m going to need your help.”
I started to tell Papa that he had plenty of help, but bit my tongue. “What about the next year? Could I go to college then, once we finish the drives?”
“You want to leave me and your brother? Gunn relies on you. You steady him some.”
“Papa, there are all kinds of things I don’t know, things I want to see and do.”
“Son, I like stories and history as much as you do, but for the life of me, I can’t see how you could live with your nose poked in a book.”
“Look at those rain clouds building. Wouldn’t you like to know what makes it rain? What are those clouds made of?”
Papa shook his head. “Wouldn’t help me a lick. Seeing them is enough to tell me I ought to put my oilcloth on or look for high ground to make camp. It’s still going to rain, whether I know why or not.”
“I want to be . . . something else. I don’t know what it is yet, but something.”
Those pale blue eyes of Papa’s searched me for whatever failing he could find. “Maybe next year. We’ll see.”
At least I had some new books. Papa met an immigrant headed west on the Smoky Hill Trail and needing to lighten his load. He bought me the naturalist Thomas Nuttall’s Genera of North American Plants and a well-worn copy of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. The plant taxonomy book intrigued me greatly, and I could read aloud Plutarch’s stories of Alexander the Great and other famous ancient rulers to the men around the campfire. They were always high on stories with swords and bold deeds. Many a time I’ve heard cowboys and vaqueros who couldn’t sign their own name argue for days about some story I had read them, debating the decisions and actions of a ruler born thousand of years before.
“Papa?” I asked a little farther down the trail.
“What?”
“Do you think that man back in Abilene, that Lowe fellow, will cause us trouble?”
Papa scoffed. “No, son, he struck me as the kind that’s all talk. Forget about him.”
It wasn’t the first time that I didn’t agree with Papa.
Chapter Twenty-three
1869
Papa said that if the army would show up and kill all the Indians that the country would fill up with people in a hurry. The 6th U.S. Cavalry moved onto the site of the abandoned Butterfield stage station at Buffalo Springs fifteen miles south of us, and a few rawhide settlers started a little settlement around the temporary post. We all waited to see if the soldiers
could catch any Indians, much less outfight them. They didn’t have much luck.
Papa and José loaded a packhorse in late winter and left to go buy cattle in South Texas. When Papa returned in early summer, he had purchased two mixed herds of cows and calves, and paid trail crews to deliver them to us. He also purchased seven hundred Mexican steers, taking delivery of them at Laredo on the Texas side of the Rio Grande and hiring another trail crew to drive them to Kansas.
He paid nine dollars a head for those wet steers, and minus a dollar a day average in expenses for the trail crew and the fluctuations of the market, we stood to make a good profit. Papa drilled the importance of our financial ledgers into us, and said that any business idea that couldn’t prove out on paper wasn’t worth tackling. Gunn acted like he listened but never really paid any attention to the numbers. That left me to keep Papa’s books.
Gambling with the last dollar we made to make the next, that was how things went. Indians stealing our stock. Ledger books and dollar columns. Drought and rain. High prices and low. Profits and expenses on the hoof. Hurt cowboys and lame horses. But those aren’t what I remembered most about that year.
When Papa came back to the ranch he was alone. At first, we thought he had left José with one of the trail crews, but that wasn’t the case at all. José drowned while swimming a flooded creek to cross a herd somewhere in that way down part of Texas. Juanita wore a black dress for weeks.
I guess her mourning makes what I did all the more shameful, but it’s no wonder that I thought about her so much. I was sixteen, without a girl near my age anywhere around. There were times when I lay awake at night, thinking of her, even when José was still alive. In the hot time of the year the sweat would stick her dress to her and you couldn’t help but notice. And then I saw her one day, wading in the river with her skirt gathered up about her knees. Legs so long and smooth and brown, and making you wonder about that dress lifting higher.
I was doing my best to draw a picture of a little yellow bird—Spinus tristis, a goldfinch, I believed—perched on a mesquite limb, but the wind was blowing my last sheet of paper all over the place, and I was almost too tired to hold my charcoal pencil, anyway. Papa was working us from sunup to sundown, and every muscle in my body was sore. Besides, I had little knack for art and was never going to be the next Audubon. But the thought that I might sketch what I saw, along with my observations, and send them back East for publishing like Audubon or Nuttall excited me immensely. I never told anyone about my plans to become a famous naturalist.
The brush grew thick to either side of the pathway leading down to the river, and Juanita walked right past me without seeing me. She had a laundry basket under one arm. Without being quite sure of my intentions, I kept to cover and paralleled her course.
Maybe it was only the devious curiosity of a growing boy or a weakness for temptation on my part. She was pretty and she was young—not much older than myself. Nineteen, maybe, but it was hard to tell and she never said. There were times when she flashed a smile at me and I felt my face and neck flushing with embarrassment.
It was an exceptionally hot morning, even though the sun was barely on the rise. The gnats and flies flittered and swarmed over the river in a cloud, and a big blue heron stretched its neck and flew farther down the river. The Little Wichita was spotty at best, dry for great stretches in the wrong times of the year, and we used a particularly large pothole at the foot of the pathway for gathering drinking water, doing our laundry, and watering the stock. But Juanita didn’t stop there. She turned upriver and went out of sight.
I cast a look behind me to see if anyone else was coming along, but nobody was stirring among the jacales, except for Mama’s white chickens scratching and clucking beneath the tree limb they had roosted in. Papa was a hard driver, but it was his habit to give his men Sundays off. Nothing but the saddle horses lifting their heads and flaring their nostrils above the pole corral saw Juanita and me slip down to the river.
There was another, smaller pothole up the river where the water ran clearer. By the time I reached a vantage point on the high bank above it, Juanita had already removed her blouse and was standing knee-deep where the water spilled lazily over a rocky shoal at the head of the pothole, with her skirt tucked into her belt to shorten it. Her black hair was already wet and she was working soap into it.
I stirred uncomfortably in the brush and accidentally crunched the gravel under my feet. She never heard me, and continued her bath, wading in a little deeper downstream and dunking her head underwater to rinse it, bent at the waist and the vertebrae in her backbone showing through the tight crease of her back.
I watched the swing of her hair and then how it draped across her chest, down to those swaying breasts, so large above her tiny waist, and the brown nipples turned slightly outward and hard and risen. I tugged at my pants and fought the urge to take hold of myself.
I thought of the story Gunn told me of the whore in Abilene who would suck you for fifty cents. As preposterous and unrealistic as the thought of any woman being willing to do such a thing was, I immediately imagined Juanita doing that to me. And she didn’t do it because I paid her. She did it because she wanted to, without me asking.
I squinted my eyes tightly to shake away the vision, and lurched to my feet. The first thing that I saw was Gunn’s face across the river. I don’t think he saw me. He had climbed a blackjack tree and was perched in a fork, staring intently at Juanita—no easy task for someone with one arm, but Gunn could always climb like a monkey.
For some reason, the sight of Gunn shamed me and it also made me mad at him. Jealous, I guess. I quickly started back to the house, but froze when I had taken no more than a step or two. Somebody else was coming down the riverbank on my side.
It was Papa. He had his pistol belt hung over one shoulder and a smile on his face. I couldn’t move without him hearing or seeing me, so I hunkered down again and watched.
I thought Juanita would shout to him in modest warning or shriek at the sight of him. But she didn’t. Instead, her smile matched his and she went to the creek bank to meet him. He kissed her and sat down and let her pull his boots off and then his shirt. When one of her breasts brushed his face he kissed it, too, and then she stepped back from him, still facing him, and unbuckled her belt and let her skirt fall to the ground.
I glanced across the river before I fled, and Gunn was gone from his tree. I plunged through the brush blindly and only stopped once I reached open ground not far from the house. Gunn showed up and he was wet to the waist from wading the river.
Neither of us said anything about what we saw. Not to each other and not to Papa.
There was no conspiracy on our part, or at least Gunn and I never planned it or discussed it. Through our own individual efforts we went about the business of making sure Papa didn’t get any time alone with Juanita after that. Call it silly if you want to. If Papa left where we were working the range, one of us slipped off with him. If one of us saw those two wander off in the same direction, we went, too.
On several occasions, Papa asked why we were so quiet around him, but we mumbled some excuse and found a reason to be elsewhere. That lasted about a month until we took delivery of the first cow herd up from the south. As soon as that herd was scattered where Papa wanted them and the trail crew paid off and sent back where they came from, I woke in my bedroll that night and noticed Papa was gone. It was still an hour before daylight and we were all going to ride into the headquarters at the same time that next morning. Gunn woke when I went to saddle my horse, and so did the others.
“Where’s Papa?” I asked one of the men.
He rubbed his eyes and squinted at the stars overhead. “I don’t know. Last night he said maybe he would ride in early. Something about his leg aching and he had left his liniment at the house.”
Gunn and his damned Kiowa roan were hard to keep up with, but I hung with him and we quickly covered the ten miles to home. Papa wasn’t at the house, but we ground-ti
ed our horses in front of it so that he would know we were there if he saw them. I imagined the frown on his face when he realized his plans were foiled.
Gunn went to check on Juanita’s jacal while I prepared to cook us steaks on the fire pit in front of the house. I barely had a fire built when he came back.
“She’s gone.”
“She’ll be around here somewhere,” I said.
I left our steaks uncooked and we slipped through the morning light, walking amongst the jacales and then checking the barn. We were on our way back from checking the river when we heard the sounds coming from inside the dugout. That dugout—where else?
We climbed the hill and approached it from above, standing at the edge of the roof. Inside, Papa grunted like an old bull and Juanita moaned.
“This is the third time I’ve hated him.” Gunn didn’t whisper. “I don’t give a damn if he hears me.”
Papa grunted and Juanita panted things to him in Spanish, while Gunn and I stood on the roof and watched the sun coming up.
“We should have torn it down a long time ago.” Gunn stomped the roof. “It would serve him right if we caved it in on top of him this instant.”
“I’m leaving. Maybe not right now, but the first chance I get.”
Gunn nodded. “Figured as much.”
“What about you? Why don’t you come with me?”
“No, I belong here.”
I waved my hand before us, motioning at the “out there”—places I saw as more of the same, but that made Gunn want to saddle a horse and go see them. “There? What’s out there? You go find you a mountain or the tallest bluff you can climb and jump off it. Nobody would ever know. Nobody would even hear you hit the ground.”
“I like that.”
“Not me. Are you going to stay with him? Texas is big enough that you don’t have to put up with him.”
“He couldn’t make me leave.”
“He’s spitting on Mama.”
“He won’t let you leave. Why do you think he didn’t let you go off to college? He might as well put his brand on us like he does those longhorns.”
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