Shortgrass Song

by Mike Blakely

  Pete took the rope from his brother. “You’re sure sellin’ our stock cheap. I’ll whip her. You pull.”

  Pete tied a hard knot in the end of his rope and reared back to hit the cow. Caleb couldn’t stand to watch, but the sound of the hemp slapping against the cow’s flanks hurt him as much as watching would have. Allegheny bellowed, wheezed, and slammed her head against the ground in pain. The number of lashes mounted until Caleb lost count.

  Pete shouted at the cow: “Come on, push it out, dang it!”

  Caleb’s muddy boots slipped out from under him as he pulled on the rope. He couldn’t believe his brother could whip an animal so. Matthew would have done it but never Pete.

  Pete paused a moment to catch his breath, but then Caleb heard hemp whistle through the air again and pop against the old cow’s hide. Allegheny bellowed in anguish and moaned as if with her dying breath. Caleb looked around at her. Her eyes rolled back in her head, her tongue lolled out, and still the rope smacked against her ribs. He had to stop it. He couldn’t stand another lick. He made up his mind to tackle Pete and shoot the poor cow with his pistol. But just as he loosened his grip on the pull rope, he felt the stillborn calf slipping from the birth canal. He leaned back a little harder on the rope, the cow’s legs kicked stiffly, and the calf came out.

  “That a girl!” Pete shouted. “I told you she could do it!”

  Caleb dragged the giant calf out of the way and took his rope off of it.

  Pete was rubbing the welts he had raised on Allegheny’s side. “Go get your hat full of water,” he said. “Maybe she can drink.”

  Caleb ran to the creek for the water. When he came back, Allegheny was trying to get up, but there was something horribly peculiar about her gyrations. She tried to roll to get her back legs under her, but they wouldn’t obey. She moaned in protestation and fell back against the rocky ground, exhausted.

  “What’s wrong with her now?” Caleb asked.

  Pete pursed his lips together to hold back the curses. “I don’t know. Her legs won’t work. I think pushing that calf out must have paralyzed her.”

  “Paralyzed her?”

  “That’s what I said! Have you gone deaf?” He shook the rain from his slicker and walked away to look at the mountains.

  Caleb pushed the cow’s head upright and put the hat full of water under her nose, but the poor dumb brute only sighed into it. He dumped the water out and looked back at his brother.

  Pete had the bridge of his nose pinched between his thumb and forefinger, head bowed, eyes closed. Caleb had seen him in the same attitude the preceding Sunday as he conducted a cow-camp Sunday-school meeting. He knew it was the pose Pete struck when praying, for Caleb had peeked at him when he was asking God for healthy calves, good rains, and grass.

  Caleb figured maybe he should pray, too, but he knew he couldn’t do it as well as Pete; he didn’t believe in it the way Pete did. If there really was a God, Caleb didn’t want to bother him with inferior prayer, so he patted Allegheny on the head and used his hat to shield the rain from her eyes. He knew she was too dumb to appreciate it, but it was the least he could do since Pete was probably going to shoot her when he got through praying.

  His brother prayed for a long time, and Caleb got impatient. What did Pete know that he didn’t? He felt as if he were missing something. He pinched his nose like Pete.

  That didn’t help. Nobody listened when he prayed. “Damn it,” he thought, “that’s enough praying!”

  “Caleb, ride down to the ranch and fetch Buster,” Pete said suddenly. “Tell him to bring that low drop-tongue wagon of his and a team of strong horses. Bring some lumber, too, so we can make a ramp and pull this cow up on the wagon.”

  “What are you gonna do with her?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll be danged if I’ll whip a cow half to death, then shoot her. Maybe Buster can think of a way to get her back on her feet.”

  When Caleb left, he looked back and saw Pete collecting wood to burn the carcass of the stillborn calf. A lot of good all that praying had done. Allegheny was still lying flat on her side.

  * * *

  When Ab saw Buster stop the wagon with the prostrate cow under the doorway of the barn, his curiosity got the better of him. He didn’t care if Caleb was there, he was going to find out what was going on.

  Caleb was almost panic-stricken when he saw his one-legged father coming. He turned his back and pretended not to have seen him.

  “Pete, what in Hades are you and Buster doing with old Allegheny?” Ab demanded.

  Caleb shoved his hands into his pockets and stood as if his legs were paralyzed like the cow’s.

  “She strained herself calving,” Pete explained. “She can’t stand up.”

  “Well, then, haul her to the slaughterhouse—don’t leave her here in the way.”

  “Buster thinks we can get her back on her feet,” Pete said.

  “Just how do you plan to do that, Buster?”

  “We’re gonna make some straps to fit under her belly and hang her from the barn door.”

  Ab looked at the cow, at the barn door, at Buster, at Pete. But he wouldn’t look at Caleb.

  “We’re gonna let her stand on her front legs and hang her back end up for her. Buster says if we let her back end down a little every day, where she can put a little more weight on her back legs, she might get used to standin’ on ’em again.”

  Ab smirked. “What happened to her calf?” he asked.

  “It died,” Caleb said. He saw his father’s gaze shift to his boots. He felt the nervous stare climb up and down him a couple of times, but it would not look him in the eyes.

  Ab pivoted on his peg and marched to the bunkhouse to dole out orders. He wanted fences repaired, prime beeves chosen for butchering, arbors built, cord wood piled for the barbecuing. The First Colorados—the old Pikes Peakers—were coming any day for the reunion, and he wanted them to suffer for nothing. It was a puzzle to everyone on the ranch that Ab had developed such a sudden streak of hospitality.

  “I guess them old soldiers feel obliged to one another,” Buster suggested as he rigged Allegheny’s sling.

  Caleb was furious to think that his father would invite his old war chums to stay at the ranch, yet would not welcome his own son. He was almost sure that Ab was holding the reunion to gall him. Well, he had learned to gall back. He didn’t have to stay where he wasn’t wanted.

  FORTY-ONE

  Allegheny was still hanging from the doorway when the old soldiers began arriving. Some came on horseback with bedrolls to sleep on. Others rode the narrow-gauge tracks down from Denver or up from Pueblo. Some walked across plains or mountains, some brought wagons, some brought tents. Ab organized a committee among the early arrivals to designate chosen areas as campgrounds, speech platforms, and picnic grounds. The committee also approved a three-day schedule of events. Of music and food there would be no shortage.

  Pete brought Amelia to the ranch on Friday, the first full day of festivities. A former infantry captain was slated to give a patriotic speech as they arrived. Amelia listened politely to an hour of it, then heard a fiddle tuning up near the barn and nudged Pete.

  A bunch of old soldiers’ children were feeding handfuls of grass to Allegheny as Amelia turned the corner of the barn. “My gracious!” she said. “Why have you hung that poor beast from the barn door?”

  Buster and Caleb were just passing by with their instruments, on their way to join the band.

  Pete shouted at Caleb. “You haven’t said hello to Amelia,” he reminded his brother.

  Caleb removed his hat and approached. “My pleasure to see you again, Miss Amelia,” he said.

  “Charmed,” she said, only glancing away from the swinging cow. Allegheny’s back feet had been lowered just enough to scrape circles in the dust and straw of the barn floor. She seemed to like shifting her weight around on her front legs to make her tail end sway. “Charmed,” Amelia repeated. “But why have you allowed your brother to suspen
d this poor creature here to be tormented by children?”

  “She can’t walk on her back legs,” Caleb explained.

  “Can’t walk? Why in heaven’s name not?”

  “She had some trouble dropping a calf,” Pete said.

  “Dropping?”

  “Yeah,” Caleb added, “that calf looked like a yearling. She got it stuck halfway and couldn’t push it out.”

  Amelia’s lip began to curl in horror.

  “It was a dead calf, but it was a big one,” Caleb said.

  Amelia glowered as Allegheny swayed in her sling, merrily eating grass given to her by the children.

  “You know, I had a thought about that,” Pete said to his brother. “Since the calf was dead anyway, I was thinking maybe we should have cut it out of her. Maybe that would have…”

  “Stop it!” Amelia shouted. She clapped her hands so suddenly over her ears that she knocked her chiffon hat off. “Stop it this instant! I won’t hear another word. I’m going to listen to the musicians, Pete Holcomb. Join me when you will.”

  Pete handed her the chiffon hat, and she stalked away.

  Buster could barely contain his amusement. “I guess we ought to let her down a notch,” he said, jerking his head toward the cow.

  Caleb put down his instruments to help lower Allegheny’s hooves more firmly onto the ground. “Sorry if I said anything wrong,” he said.

  Pete lent a hand with the rigging. “It ain’t you. Amelia hates ranches and cattle and all. She keeps tellin’ me she’d rather die an old maid than marry me and move out here.”

  “Marry you?” Caleb said. Pete had talked a good deal about seeing Amelia, but the subject of matrimony hadn’t come up.

  “Said she’d marry me in a minute if I’d go to work for her father on the railroad and move to town.”

  Caleb watched Amelia walk away, the skirts swaying and the hair bouncing behind her, and knew that if he were in Pete’s place, he would be considering working for the railroad about now. “When do you start?” he asked.

  “You know me better than that. I’m a ranch man. She’ll get used to the idea of livin’ here, and I’ll build her a big house when we get the money, and then we’ll see if she won’t marry me my own way.” He threw a double half hitch into the rope he had let out to lower Allegheny and patted her bony hip. “I think she’s usin’ those legs some, don’t you, Buster?”

  “I don’t know,” Buster admitted. “But that little gal of yours sure used hers gittin’ out of here.” He almost tore himself open holding back the laughter. Amelia, with all her refinements, was a regular source of amusement to him.

  * * *

  The infantrymen held a shooting contest that afternoon, the winner shooting the neck from a bottle of Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters at three hundred paces, freehanded. The fiddlers, guitarists, harmonica players, banjo pickers, and accordion squeezers rotated among the three areas designated for musicians. Children splashed in the flumes and fed Allegheny green grass and alfalfa hay. The few women who had come found lines of dancers waiting.

  Ab was everywhere, flaunting his wooden leg, shaking hands, slapping backs, laughing at jokes. Buster saw lines on the man’s face that had never before appeared—laugh lines. The reunion’s able host seemed particularly interested in what had happened to his former comrades since the war: the places they had seen, the work they had taken on, and most important, the hardships they had suffered. He pretended not to see the occasional flask of whiskey.

  That night, at one of the many campfires, Ab noticed a gambler in a frazzled derby hat and a silk cravat dealing a lively game of three-card monte. He stood for several minutes beyond the light of the campfire and watched. Finally he broke in on the game.

  “Sir, a word with you,” he said to the dealer.

  After conversing privately for a minute or two with the host, the gambler returned to the game, straightening his cravat. “All’s well, men,” he said. “Sergeant Holcomb insists on low stakes, however. ‘Recreational gambling,’ he says. Wants no man going home broke.”

  The tale of Holcomb’s Charge rang from every campfire that night. Though Ab had fought in only the one brief skirmish of the New Mexico campaign and in none of the Indian fights the First later engaged in, his charge at Apache Canyon had earned him high fame among the soldiers. Every assault that followed for the duration of the hostilities, every attack and maneuver, every advance, had to suffer the comparison with Ab’s great dash at the enemy line. It gave rise to the war cry of the Pikes Peakers: Remember Holcomb’s Charge! None who had seen it could forget.

  By the same token, none could forget that two spotted horses had carried the charge. Two fearless riders had jumped the fallen bridge over the arroyo. Two had leapt into immortality at Apache Canyon. But it was also widely known that Cheyenne Dutch had killed Ab’s oldest son, and so the old scout’s name, when spoken, was whispered, the speaker glancing about for sign of the host before breathing the epithet.

  * * *

  On the second day, the old cavalrymen staged a race to the Garden of the Gods and back. Several of the old troopers came in hours late, having detoured through the saloons of Old Town.

  Buster straightened some old shoes his draft horses had worn out and gave them to the men to toss at iron stakes pounded into the ground with a single jack. The children organized their own sack races. Music played, beef roasted, a few good-natured fistfights broke out, guns fired randomly, and Allegheny’s dewclaws settled ever nearer to solid ground.

  A mock debate took place under a brush arbor, the question being whether the properly attired gentleman should wear a fob ribbon or a watch chain. A less formal discussion on a more significant subject occurred around one of the campfires that night. The question was whether the action at Sand Creek under the command of Colonel John Chivington in the year of 1864 had been a massacre as opposed to a battle.

  Taking the affirmation was Horace Gribble. Horace had fought with the Third, the Hundred Dazers, not the First. But he had become acquainted with many of the Pikes Peakers during the Indian campaign and had come to attend the reunion by personal invitation of Pete Holcomb.

  Taking the negative was a former corporal of the First who had climbed Rowe Mesa behind the Confederate lines with Chivington to destroy the Texans’s train of supplies. And he had later followed Colonel Chivington into battle at Sand Creek. “If it were a massacre,” he asked, rubbing the stubble on his chin, “why weren’t Colonel Chivington court-martialed?”

  “If it wasn’t, why was he investigated by Congress?” Horace countered.

  “Congress!” The old corporal spit a stream of tobacco juice through a gap in his teeth. It blackened an orange ember with an exclamatory sizzle. “Politicians ain’t soldiers.”

  “Neither are men who kill unarmed women, or children carryin’ white flags of surrender,” Horace said calmly. He was squatting near the fire with his knees in his armpits.

  “And what do you call heathen Injuns that kill white women and capture chil’uns?” the corporal answered. “To say not a word of rape and torture! An eye for an eye, the Good Book says.”

  “Don’t preach to me about revenge,” Horace said. “The Cheyenne killed my two brothers. That’s why I joined the Third. But the Indians at Sand Creek had surrendered at Fort Wise. They were under army protection. They were lookin’ to make peace.”

  “And what of the scalps of yaller-haired women found in their lodges?” The brown stream killed another coal.

  “They were lost under the piles of scalps taken from dead squaws on the battleground that night by the likes of you.”

  The old corporal sprang to his feet. “Goddamn you to talk to me that way! I must have my satisfaction!” Tobacco juice punctuated the challenge as he put up his fists in the style of a pugilist.

  Horace sprang from his squat, and each man tried to beat his opinion into the other’s head for a couple of minutes before the two were pulled apart and made to shake hands.

 
* * *

  The next morning, Pete organized Sunday services utilizing the talents of all the clergymen among the former soldiers. He gave the invocation himself and left it up to the others to read the scripture, lead the prayers, and deliver the sermons.

  Caleb accompanied the hymns, but Pete’s righteous streak was starting to vex him. His brother prayed just too damned much. He actually felt jealous of God.

  Just at the close of the benediction, Captain Dubois and Amelia arrived from Colorado Springs in a three-spring surrey. The captain drove his team into the midst of the worshipers as they said amen, then stood in his buggy to make an announcement.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the captain said, “General William Jackson Palmer sends his regards to this gathering of loyal Union fighting men. The general regrets he could not attend himself. However, on behalf of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, the Fountain Colony, the city of Colorado Springs, and General Palmer himself, my daughter, Amelia, and I are pleased to present to this reunion of patriotic souls a grand and lavish feast! Behold!” and the captain swept his hand toward the plains.

  Down the road from Colorado Springs came a regular processional of supply wagons, prompting a gasp and a cheer to issue from the crowd. The wagons were met by former troopers who galloped out to escort them to the reunion grounds. They carried chefs who would serve raw oysters, mock turtle soup, Mackinaw trout in egg sauce, boiled leg of mutton in caper sauce, roast loin of beef with oyster dressing, glazed sweetbreads, baked chicken pie, boiled potatoes, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, peas, tomatoes, spinach, celery, and olives. One wagon hauled nothing but watermelons. Another, the box of which was lined with ice, carried pies, cakes, puddings, and custards of every description.

  The rest of the day favored the speechmakers, as the gluttons rendered indolent by the feast fell to lounging about under the arbors. And every orator who stood before his old comrades sang the praises of Ab Holcomb, generous reunion host and hero of Apache Canyon.