by Mike Blakely
“With the cows.”
“Get your brother, boy! I told the two of you to look after each other!”
When Ella slid down to the hole, she reached into the doorway and took Ab’s old Walker Colt from its peg. “Stay quiet, Caleb,” she whispered. “Somebody’s coming.” She handed the revolver to her husband when he appeared on the bank above her. “What is it?” she asked.
“Somebody pulling a wagon. Matthew says Indians, but I don’t think so. He and Pete will be here in a minute, then we’ll wait and see who it is. Where’s Caleb?”
“He’s in the hole. He hasn’t made a peep since his accident with that knife today. Poor thing.”
When the boys arrived, Ella took them below the brink of the creek bank and waited with them beside the dugout door. Ab stayed above and watched the little wagon approach, baffled by the pair that pulled it.
When they arrived, the black man and the squaw dropped the wagon tongue beside the sod chimney sticking out of the creek bank. “Is this the farm of Absalom Holcomb?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Ab said. “Just who in Hades are you?”
The black man smiled. “Buster Thompson. The Abolition Society sent me to find you.”
It took Ab a moment to make the connection. “All the way to Kansas Territory?” He yelled over his shoulder: “Ella, get up here!”
Buster shrugged. “They just said find you. They told me not to trust nobody else.”
“Who’s that?” Ab asked, pointing his pistol barrel at the squaw.
“Her name’s Snake Woman.”
“I don’t care what her name is—I mean, what’s she doing with you?”
Ella climbed the cutbank and came to stand beside her husband.
“I traded a harmonica to Chief Long Fingers for her,” Buster explained. “I didn’t mean to, I just did. I figured you’d know what to do with her.”
“I don’t even know what to do with you!”
“Who are they, Ab?” Ella asked.
“This is Buster, one of your poor fugitive slaves, and his squaw. I thought you told the society not to send any more slaves.”
“I did. Oh, but, honey, we can’t just turn them away. Buster, where did you want to go?”
Buster shrugged. “Canada?”
Matthew and Pete were peeking over the bank at the strange couple. Matthew had never seen a female show as much leg as Snake Woman. It was a filthy leg, but he could see all the way up to her knee.
As Buster explained why he had chosen to go to Canada by way of Pikes Peak, Ella heard a distinctive sound rasp across the valley. “I thought I heard Caleb cough,” she said.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Ab replied.
“He sounded so far away. Pete, is Caleb in the hole?”
Pete ducked into the dugout for a moment. “No, ma’am. He’s gone.”
Snake Woman understood none of the gibberish, but she read the look of insanity that crossed the white woman’s face. The faint noise came again, and the white woman’s eyes pulled toward the creek. There, on the far bank, a little boy was wading in. The crazy white woman saw him, screamed, and leapt over the brink of the creek bank. Snake Woman trembled, wondering what kind of terrible place Buffalo Head had brought her to now.
“Oh, God,” Ab muttered. “Come on, Buster, and help me calm her down.”
They met Ella as she carried Caleb to the near shore. Mother and son were drenched like muskrats from falling on the way across. To Buster’s surprise, Ella put the soaked youngster in his arms as she waded out, as he was the closest one to her.
“He’ll catch his death of cold,” she said. “Ab, help me get a fire going to warm him up. He’s nearly drowned. Caleb, don’t you ever wander away like that again!”
“Miss Ella,” Buster said. “He’s fine.”
“What?”
“The boy’s fine. Just a little wet.” He put Caleb down at the edge of the creek.
Ella looked at Caleb as if she didn’t recognize him, then glared at the black man standing over him. “Don’t you suppose to tell me whether or not my own son is fine, Mr. Thompson. Just you take him up to the hole so I can dry him out.”
* * *
They ruled Canada out over supper. Too far away. Denver had too many southern men—most of them veterans of the old Georgia gold mines. A black man had been lynched there for no good reason recently. Ab suggested Mexico. It made perfect sense to him. Many Texas slaves had escaped to Mexico, and the Snake Woman had probably started out a Mexican anyway, according to Long Fingers.
But Ella said Mexico was almost as far away as Canada. Besides, she insisted, it was ridiculous to send two able bodies away from the farm when there was so much work to be done. Ab knew he was stuck with them then, and no amount of reasoning would change his wife’s mind.
“Do you farm?” he asked Buster.
“I bossed a truck farm before. I can blacksmith, too.”
“Well, that’s something. We can’t pay, you know. At least not this year.”
“He’s never been paid before anyway,” Ella said. “He was a slave.”
“You and that squaw will have to sleep in your wagon. The boys are using ours till we get the cabin built.”
“They can’t both sleep in that tiny wagon,” Ella said. “We’ll move the boys back in with us. Mr. Thompson and the Indian woman can sleep in our wagon.”
“She can have the big wagon by herself,” Buster said. “I’ll sleep in mine. I’m afraid she might cut me up in the middle of the night.”
Buster and the Holcombs looked through the dugout door at Snake Woman, squatting by the creek, eating her supper alone. No one insisted that Buster had to sleep with her.
“Hey, Buster,” Pete said.
“Pete, you speak to him properly,” Ella warned.
“I mean, Mr. Thompson. Will you play your fiddle now?”
“I will if you’ll run get it.”
Pete and Matthew tore out of the dugout and came back with all of Buster’s instruments. As the fiddler opened his case, Caleb slipped away from his mother’s arms and knelt in front of the mandolin leaning against the dirt wall between the guitar and the banjo. He had never seen anything as beautiful in his life—not even the pocketknife he had lost earlier that day.
It was just his size—barely half the length of the ungainly instruments flanking it. The body of the guitar was just a flat-topped box. The body of the banjo looked like an old drum. But the little mandolin had the graceful outline of a teardrop, tapered everywhere and inlaid with wooden bits of more colors than the mountain showed at sunrise. Yet, there was an intriguing violation of the teardrop form. The hollow box of the instrument grew an odd curlicue from one of its sides. The curlicue had a leather strap attached to it, and Caleb knew instinctively the strap was meant to sling over the shoulder of the mandolin player. Eight strings, stretched in pairs, gleamed yellow in the firelight.
“Mr. Thompson,” he said in a timid voice, “can I have this one?”
“Caleb, please!” Ella said.
But Buster raised his hand. “Little man,” he said, winking at Caleb, “if you learn to play it, you can sure have it.”
Caleb looked at his mother. She smiled. At last he was going to have something he wanted. He was going to learn to play the mandolin.
SIX
The next morning, Buster went to work breaking ground in the creek bottom for his truck patch. He thought he might have to get Snake Woman to irrigate the patch by hand if the rains didn’t come. Maybe next year he could try to dig an irrigation ditch.
“Don’t you go gettin’ ahead of yourself,” he muttered. “You might not be here next year.”
About halfway into the third morning, a rivet bolt broke on Buster’s plow, so he led the oxen to the creek where they could drink and went back to the wagons to get a new rivet bolt and a hammer.
Caleb was sitting in the milk wagon, practicing his mandolin chords, when Buster came to get his hammer out of his tool crate.
“They will at first. Then they get tough. Look at mine.” He showed Caleb the calluses on the fingertips of his left hand. “Wrong fret,” he said, moving Caleb’s fingers to the correct positions.
Ella was nearby, worrying over her flower garden. She was shading the tender plants with her body, trying to keep the sun from withering them.
Buster walked over to the garden to see if he could do anything. He found the lilies lying limp across the ground. “Maybe you should plant somethin’ else,” he said.
“I don’t have anything else,” Ella snapped. It irritated her that Buster wouldn’t let her alone to grow her own flower garden.
“It’s gonna get awful dry,” he said. “Those flowers won’t grow here like they did back in Pennsylvania. You need some flowers that will stand this hot, dry weather. You need some western flowers. There’s wild ones down the creek a ways. All different colors.”
Ella loosened the strings of her bonnet under her chin. “Mr. Thompson, don’t you have some plowing or other such nonsense to do? I don’t recall asking for your advice.”
“Oh. Yes, ma’am.” He touched his hat brim and went back to the wagon to get the rivet bolt.
“If you’re so smart, Mr. Thompson, you’ll get me some seeds!” she yelled when he started back.
He knew she was right. “Buster, you’ve got to learn to keep your mouth shut,” he muttered to himself.
That evening he walked down the creek to look at the wildflowers. He found five or six varieties in bloom. If they were like other plants he had studied, he figured they would go to seed a couple of weeks after blooming. He would just have to watch them closely, check them every other day or so.
He squatted down to study an orange variety with tiny five-petaled blossoms. Another type grew pink flowers on the ends of meandering stems. He wondered if he could transplant them to Miss Ella’s garden. He decided to bring a spade next time and dig some up.
The most prolific tribe was the fire wheel. It had multiple lancelike petals, flame-red with yellow tips, leaping like fire from a central hub the size of a vest button.
A hummingbird attracted him to a stalky variety with small purple blossoms. He thought Miss Ella might like something that would attract hummingbirds. He got down on his stomach to inspect the roots.
“Buster, what in Hades are you doing?”
He jumped and retreated halfway down the creek bank before he realized it was Ab. “I’m studyin’ these flowers,” he admitted.
Matthew started laughing. Ab and the boys had gone downstream looking for the cattle and were herding them back toward the dugout for the evening.
“What do you want with flowers?” Ab said.
“Miss Ella needs some seeds,” Buster answered.
“She’s already got five gallons of flower seeds,” Ab said. “Come on and help with these cows—quit wasting your time.”
“Hey, Pete!” Matthew shouted. “We caught Buster looking at flowers!”
* * *
Matthew caught Buster in the wildflower patch several times in the weeks that followed. Buster spent almost every evening there, studying the plants. He tried transplanting a specimen of each to Ella’s garden, but the yellow primrose was the only one that took.
As summer began, he painstakingly collected the tiny seeds shed by the different varieties. He put them in envelopes he made of paper scraps and labeled them: fire-wheel, butterfly weed, bird’s eye, primrose, prairie aster. When the time was right, he intended to make a gift of them to Ella.
While on his last foray down to the wildflower patch, Buster happened to glance across the creek to see Long Fingers and a dozen braves watching him. The chief waved. He had seven spare horses and three Holcomb cows with him. As he led his party across the creek, he put Buster’s old harmonica in his mouth and began to blow on it. He avoided the high notes and droned monotonously on three or four of the lower tones.
Buster put his paper envelopes in his pocket and stood to greet the warriors. Mounted and painted, they appeared ten times prouder than when he first met them in the stinking gully on the plains. Kicking Dog rode behind Long Fingers and carried a lance with a scalp of black hair, stiff with blood, tied to the shaft.
“Buffalo Head,” Long Fingers said, “I see you and Holcomb cut down more trees. Why do you cut down that many? To build a lodge?”
“Yes,” Buster said.
“A lodge of trees is better than living in the ground like a prairie dog. But I hope you do not cut down all the trees.”
“We won’t,” Buster said. “We cut the last ones we needed today. Where’d you find those cows?”
“In the mountains. My boys want to eat them. I do, too, but they do not belong to my people. Not like the trees you cut for Holcomb’s lodge.”
On the way to the dugout, Buster had to explain what he had been doing with the flowers. Long Fingers wanted to know if the whites used them for medicine. When he found out that Buster was trying to grow them, he said, “Leave them alone and they will grow plenty good all by theirself.”
Snake Woman was gathering firewood when she saw the Arapaho coming. A breath caught in her throat, and she dared to hope that maybe Long Fingers had come back for her. She hated living with the whites. She was so ashamed of the cloth dress they made her wear that she kept it covered with a blanket except in the heat of the day.
She had never eaten so well or worked so little, yet she knew the white people and Buffalo Head would do something horrible to her sooner or later. The crazy white woman had already started a daily torture of pulling her hair with a fine-toothed comb. She feared she would be scalped alive, but so far the white woman had managed only to rid her head of lice and nits. Now her scalp felt barren and unhealthy because nothing lived there anymore.
She hated the wagon they made her sleep in. The wind whistled under it at night. And that oldest boy kept watching her when he should have been hunting rabbits. If he came after her—she didn’t care what the whites did to her—she would kill him.
But now maybe she wouldn’t have to. Long Fingers was driving three cows before him. Maybe he had brought them to trade for her. She picked up one more stick of wood and scrambled toward the hole in the ground where the white people lived.
“Hey, Pete, here comes the snake lady,” Matthew said as the squaw neared the dugout. “I’m gonna ask her.”
“She doesn’t understand English, stupid,” Pete replied.
“Ask her what?” Caleb said. He missed out on everything.
Matthew approached the squaw and pulled on her sleeve as she dropped her wood on the pile. She ignored him and watched the Arapaho ride nearer over the rim of the creek bank.
“Hey,” he said, pulling on her sleeve again.
She looked at him.
“Open your mouth.”
She stared, her lip curling with hatred.
“Open your mouth, I want to see your tongue.” Matthew wiggled his tongue at her and motioned for her to open her mouth.
Snake Woman looked away and prayed the three cows would be enough. She hated living with the whites.
“Leave her alone, Matthew,” Pete said.
“Yeah,” Caleb said. He didn’t know what it was all about, but he usually sided with Pete.
Buster looked like a captive walking among the horses of the Indians. He waved at Ab to let him know everything was all right.
“Hello, Chief Long Fingers,” Ella said, formally, when the Indians stopped near the roof of the dugout. “I see you’ve found some of our cattle again.”
“I bring them back to you. Your children need them like mine need the buffalo.”
“Chief, why don’t you keep that big bull calf. We owe it to you for bringing so many of our cows back.”
Ab was stunned. “What? Didn’t you give them some sugar or something before?”
“Oh, Ab, one calf won’t hurt. We wouldn’t have any by now if it wasn’t for them.”
“Yes. I think she likes it here.”
“Maybe so she will come to our camp and cut up this calf. It is a job women like to do.”
“I’ll mention it to her,” Ella said.
“Buffalo Head, tonight you come to our camp and play music on the thing that pushes your wagon like a cloud. The round one. I will play the harp with you this time.”
Matthew was rolling on the dirt threshold of the dugout, giggling.
“What?” Pete asked.
“He called Buster ‘Buffalo Head’!”
The chief and his war party drove the calf about a quarter mile downstream. As the Holcombs looked on, Kicking Dog goaded the calf into a run and killed it with his lance.
“My God, woman,” Ab said. “Why did you go and give them that calf.”
“I had to, honey. I was wrong before when I told you this land was free for the taking. It’s their land, really, and we owe them something for using it.”
“Who says it’s theirs?”
“It’s theirs by treaty. I read it in that newspaper you got at Denver City. We’d better stay friendly with them if we don’t want them to take it back.”
“I can’t be friendly with a bunch of murdering savages.”
“They’re not murderers.”
Ab gestured fiercely. “Didn’t you see that scalp?”
“They’re at war with the Utes. You went to war once, you should understand.”
“I didn’t take scalps.”
“The scalps are their war medals.”
Ab gawked at his wife in silence. What had brought on this sudden love for red men? Then he recognized the fiery glaze over her eyes, and he understood. There were not enough fugitive slaves in the West. Caleb was getting better, and Ella was looking for a new cause. These Arapaho seemed available.