Shortgrass Song

by Mike Blakely

  Pete slid the latch on the gate with unnecessary ferocity. “See what I mean? You’re just like him.”

  Caleb shook his head. There was no way he could make Pete understand. He couldn’t explain why he felt more welcome among strangers than he did on his own family ranch. A year had shown him how folks would cook their best grub and spread their cleanest linen for a man with a fiddle. They would laugh at his stories and dance to his songs. The welcome seldom lasted long, but there was always another one down the road somewhere. Maybe he was meant to be adrift in the world.

  “So long, Pete,” he said. He nudged Five Spot to the west.

  “Hey!” Pete shouted when Caleb had ridden beyond the barn. “You better come back with some more of them wild stories next spring!”

  Caleb nodded, waved, and rode on. There was nothing for him here. Pete had more ranch than he had ever dreamed of owning. Pete had Amelia to marry soon, start a family. Old Ab had every last plat on the Monument Valley map, save for the one Terence Mayhall claimed, and Ab would find a way to cheat the southerner out of that one soon enough. Buster had his own quarter section and plenty of additional work to do for the homesteaders who continued to populate the creek bottoms.

  Caleb Holcomb had only guilt to live with here: his mother and his brother buried together on the shortgrass plains, the indifferent wildflowers speckling the mounds of their sepulchers with bandanna colors. He caught himself indulging a sinister desire. He wished old Ab would just die, so he could come back here, burn that damned cabin, and watch the chinooks scatter the ashes of that cursed ridge log across Monument Park. What kind of son was it who would first cause his mother’s death, then wish for his father’s? This place, as much as he loved it, made him backslide into the worst order of contemplation. He felt small here; he thought mean thoughts. His place was among strangers.

  A bugle blared amateurishly, and Caleb saw an obstreperous column of fours riding from the old soldiers’ campground. His father led the rabble on old Pard. His first thought was to spur Five Spot out of the way, avoid the conflict. Then he looked back at the corrals to make sure his brother was still watching and reined Five Spot to face the oncoming soldiers’ colony. Now Pete would see who was afraid of the fight and who wasn’t.

  When the soldiers approached, he caught a glimpse of his father’s eyes, but Ab’s hat brim quickly broke the line of sight between them. Bursts of laughter punctuated the general din of the party as the old soldiers reached Caleb’s place in the road. Ab turned his back to his son, twisting in the saddle as if to look behind him at the column of fours. The old soldiers rode blindly all around the spotted mare, and Ab turned his eyes to the front again, his son behind him.

  “Hey, watch out!” the gambler with the diamond-stuck cravat warned as Five Spot grunted and leapt forward between Caleb’s spurs.

  The young drifter drove hard through the ranks, circling his father. Caleb’s nostrils flared with anger as he tried to make the old man look at him. He galloped ahead, placed the mare in Pard’s path. Colonel Ab turned in the saddle again, guided the party off the road, around his son. Caleb fell in beside him at a walk, but the old man mounted a trot.

  “What’s that kid doin’?” somebody said.

  It was almost comical, Caleb thought. The old man would not look at him. He would ride this close to his own son, his wooden leg only a foot from Caleb’s stirrup, and still not acknowledge his presence. He laughed aloud—loud enough that his father would hear—then he reined hard to the right, his mare raising a dust plume for the old soldiers to ride through. As he galloped back toward the ranch, and the head of the Arapaho Trail, he took off his hat and waved it arrogantly at Pete, who stood motionless at the corrals.

  Buster was waiting at his toolshed with a hoe when Caleb rode up. The homesteader simply nodded, his lips pursed, trying to smile. He had seen this coming. Caleb could no more stay here than a wild goose could stay north in the winter.

  “I guess you gotta go,” Buster said.

  The drifter smiled and looked away, his eyes sidling toward the shed, settling on the old spring buggy that once had hurtled before the wind like a clipper ship. There were fine memories here, but all of them lost like vague dreams to a waking man.

  “Which way you headin’?”

  Caleb shrugged. “Just headin’ out.”

  Standing there in silence, they felt as if they were strangers, yet strangers would merely have shaken hands and parted.

  “You still got that pocketknife?” Buster asked, a grin turning one side of his mouth.

  Caleb drew his eyebrows together, then stood in the stirrups, the well-worn leather squeaking only a little. He forced a hand into his right pocket and brought forth the knife, bone handled and double bladed.

  “Let me see it,” Buster said, letting his hoe handle fall away from him. He caught the knife in the air and deftly flipped the long blade from its place in the handle. With his thumb he tested the well-honed edge. “You keep it good and sharp.”

  “A dull knife’s more dangerous than a sharp one. Ain’t that what you told me when you give it to me?”

  Buster folded the knife and lobbed it back. “When I give it to you? Colonel Ab give you that knife, boy.”

  Caleb smirked. “If he’s a colonel, I’m a rear admiral. Anyway, you give me that knife, Buster. I remember you puttin’ it in my hand.”

  “Maybe I handed it to you, but it came from him. That’s just the way Colonel Ab gives you somethin’. Can’t do it hisself.”

  The drifter shook his head. “I only recall him takin’ it away from me.”

  “You ain’t the only one’s had things took from you, Caleb. Colonel’s had things took from him, too.”

  He set his teeth together. “Not on account of me.”

  Buster sighed and stood to pick up his hoe. “This how you want it?”

  “Want what?”

  “You just gonna drift?”

  “I’ll come back next spring.”

  Buster laughed. “That’ll make it worse. How you gonna find you a place to live if you go driftin’ in and out of here every spring? You ain’t gonna have no place you can call home.”

  “Not much I can do about it.”

  The homesteader twisted the hoe handle in his strong hands. “It took guts you standin’ up to your father the way you did last year. But it’s gonna take more than just guts to undo it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Somebody’s gonna have to shed their fool pride.”

  “You talkin’ about me, or him?”

  Buster shrugged and grinned. “Whichever one it is with the fool pride. Give you somethin’ to think about out there.”

  Caleb nodded. He didn’t want to think about it but knew he would. Buster had a way of putting a hold on a man’s mind. “Them wildflowers sure looked pretty from up yonder on the trail when I rode in this year. You gonna keep spreadin’ them seeds?”

  “Every spring.”

  Caleb nodded his approval. He breathed deep, feeling anxious to move. He thrust his hand downward and felt the good sure clap of Buster’s strong grip in his.

  “Don’t you go cowboyin’ so rough you bust up them fiddle-playin’ fingers, you hear?”

  “I hear. So long, Buster.”

  Each touched the brim of his hat, and Caleb reined toward the creek. As he turned, a surge came over him, and Five Spot gouged the ground with her hooves as if she sensed it, too. The drifter felt a power greater than he alone could conjure. The willing horse, the tune within him, and the swift current of freedom swept him up in a glory even the old soldiers’ reunion couldn’t match.

  Five Spot’s dark wisp of mane streamed upward at him as he plummeted down the creek bank, across the water, and up to the bald hill. The high cantle lifted him like the palm of Providence, until he reached the treeless crest.

  He reined his mare in and turned to look eastward. It’s not too late, he thought, as he looked back from the head of the Arapaho Trail. I can sti
ll change my mind. Pete’s still watching. So’s Buster. There’s Mama and Matthew. But Papa’s gone. Gone to the land office with the old soldiers.

  Only the dust from the column of fours remained to remind him.

  He felt the pocketknife in his hand, pressed between his palm and the slick side of a leather rein. His eyes found the place on the creek bank—just a beaten-down notch in the cutbank now—the place his mother had called the hole, where once he had whittled a mountain and dreamed of taking a mysterious trail over the hill his brothers played on. The hill he was forbidden to climb.

  Now this was his hill, his trailhead; and it didn’t matter who owned the deed according to the land-office ledgers. The trail was still a mystery, but it was his to explore. He saw them watching, and he smiled. They could take nothing more from Caleb Holcomb.

  He drew his hand behind his head to hurl the pocket-knife but balked there as if seized. It wasn’t this simple. His cares could not be cast away like a hunk of metal and bone. He would carry them with him, feel their weight. He opened his fingers, holding the knife against his palm with his thumb.

  They waved back: Pete and Buster—faceless miniature men.

  He only leaned in the saddle, and the wise mare knew to turn. Now it was as if the world swiveled under him; instantly the old places fell behind. Ahead were new things, the mountains, the trail snaking gracefully among the foothills. The trillion unknowns, each one a solitary grain passing momentarily through the narrows.

  Hooves drummed below him like the echoes of humankind’s first ride; but he heard it, faintly, and it rang with familiarity: a voice he would someday hear calling down a box canyon. Caleb ducked and rode on, knowing he would not catch it here. It would slip up on him somewhere else—surprise him with a whisper or a solitary note. And one day it would consume him—fill him with the whole rapture and anguish of life in one expression.

  But now it was gone, vanished like the Arapaho who had beaten this trail for a time, like Long Fingers and Kicking Dog. The trail was long. Long …

  He let Five Spot choose her pace, slowing to a trot as she surmounted a rise in the trail. She was horse again now. Dumb honest brute. For a furlong back there she had been the engine of discovery, the vehicle of a wanderlust as old as the mind of man.

  Caleb wondered if he was crazy. This wilderness had addled Cheyenne Dutch. Maybe tonight—at some camp whose site he had yet to choose—he would check his rump for spots. But now to ride.

  The rhythm his mare settled into was slow and methodical, and words droned in Caleb’s head. New words, yet it seemed they had always been there:

  At nights, ’round the fireside, they’d listen to tales

  Of wide-open country and hard-ridden trails,

  Of mountains so high, there the trees wouldn’t grow,

  Of deserts so wide and of canyons so low.

  What it would say in the end, Caleb couldn’t guess. But someday he would finish that song.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Caleb so stroked the taut hair of horses across the stretched gut of cats that a cloud of rosin dust rose above the fiddle bridge, red-hued by firelight. He ended “Boil That Cabbage Down” with a monotoned flourish to the cadence of “Chicken in the bread tray pickin’ up dough” and heard a wind moan replace the music. Holding his breath, he glanced at his one-man audience, then gazed into the darkness downwind of the campfire.

  The pair of glowing wolf eyes blinked once, peered for several seconds. Then the old lobo, his age-frosted coat catching flickers from the fire of twisted grass and cow chips, sat back on his haunches, pointed his nose star-ward, and whistled a practiced song up his throat.

  The half-dozen horses in the pole corral stirred, and the two cowboys sitting by the fire outside the sod shanty burst into laughter. Every night for a week, “Ol’ Bitter Creek,” as Ben Jones had named the wolf, had traded his primal song for fiddle music at the northernmost line camp of the Cimarron Cattle Company’s sprawling free-range outfit. Any other wolf would have had his hide nailed to the door by now. But Caleb Holcomb could not see killing a fellow singer.

  “What do you reckon he’s sayin’?” the musician asked, only now taking the ebony chin piece out from under his stubbled jaw.

  “Well, partner, I talk a little wolf,” Ben began, “and Ol’ Bitter Creek’s sayin’ the same damn thing I been wonderin’ to myself ever since you drifted onto this godforsaken range. ‘What in the hell are you doin’ here?’ If I could fiddle like that, I’d hole up in some whorehouse, turn my hat over to catch the double eagles, and go to swappin’ them gals out of their wares. Where’d you learn to play that thing anyway?”

  Caleb shrugged modestly and tightened the nut on the end of the bow. “The man that raised me up taught me.”

  “Raised? How old are you?”

  “Just turned twenty.”

  “Same as me. Hell, we ain’t neither one of us raised yet. What grown man in his right mind would be squattin’ out here in no-man’s-land when there’s towns and womenfolk in the world?”

  “Guess you’re right.” Caleb noticed a broken horsehair trailing from the end of his fiddle bow. He started to pull it off but thought he’d judge the wind by it for a spell.

  Ben spread his bedroll and lay down on it fully dressed. The sky showed no sign of storm, and the line riders preferred sleeping outdoors to a night in the shanty, where rodents and snakes chased overhead in the brush-and-sod roof. Suddenly he sat back up and reached for his lariat. “Hey, make that thing go like a wounded jackrabbit again, Caleb. Maybe Ol’ Bitter Creek’ll come close enough to rope at tonight.”

  The fiddler smiled, looked into the darkness where the wolf lurked, and put his violin under his chin. Fingering high on the E string, he began coaxing the most plaintive squeals from the instrument, and Ol’ Bitter Creek leapt nervously into the full light of the fire.

  The wolf stalked cautiously, ever nearer the artifice of the musician, as Ben Jones waited on his knees, the loop spread to his right and behind. He knew he would have no time to whirl the noose. He would have to throw in one fluid stroke, as if roping last year’s bronc in a corral.

  The wolf took courage from his empty stomach and made a deliberate advance on the fiddler as Ben Jones swooped the noose through the air. The hemp took Ol’ Bitter Creek by surprise, blinded as he was by the fire, and fell perfectly on his shoulders. Ben jerked at the slack, but the lobo had already sprung, the noose just slipping free of his hind paws as he vanished like dust blown into the darkness.

  “Damn, I had him!” Ben cried, rolling back onto his blanket.

  They laughed and stomped the dirt, flailing on their backs like madmen, Caleb holding the fiddle protectively in the air. The rowels of their spurs made a music of their own.

  “What were you gonna do once you had him roped?” the musician asked.

  “Hell, I don’t know. If I could think that far ahead, I’d be someplace.”

  Caleb sat up and squinted at the darkness, but Ol’ Bitter Creek was probably a mile away. He felt suddenly lost, as a sailor must feel at sea. He looked upwind, over his shoulder, and saw the Two Buttes in the light of the half moon on the southern horizon.

  It was the Two Buttes that had drawn him out onto the plains and into the range of the Cimarron Cattle Company. He had bid farewell to Pete and Buster weeks ago and had ridden into the Rampart Range on the old Arapaho Trail. Continuing west, he had made his way through South Park, looking for work, singing and playing for his room and board. Striking the headwaters of the Arkansas, he had followed it downstream, fiddling under the cottonwood sprouts the homesteaders had planted in orchard rows around their houses. The Arkansas had led him out of the high country and onto the open plains, beyond sight of the mountains.

  Talk of the Two Buttes had lured him out of the settled Arkansas Valley and into the shortgrass country. They were stark landmarks on the High Plains, he had heard, visible at thirty miles or more. Caleb needed landmarks. He felt like a drunk, spinning in bed,
with no mark on the skyline to fix his place in the world.

  With the Two Buttes in view, he had drifted onto the ranges of the Cimarron Cattle Company, a free-grass outfit whose herds lapped over into Kansas, New Mexico, and even into the wilds of No Man’s Land and the Texas panhandle. A rider at Ben Jones’s line camp had quit, scared of Indians. Caleb took the job.

  He lived in a sod house, ten by twelve. His only partner was Ben Jones—“Thin Ben,” as he called himself, and he was whip skinny. Ben tormented himself nightly with talk of lewd women.

  Ben and Caleb rode the northern fringes of the company’s ranges, turning cattle back as they strayed too far north. The beeves were half-wild Texas longhorns, branded and earmarked, growing fat on the grass of the Northern Range.

  For the first time in his life, Caleb was earning the wage of a cowboy. He had found his place in the cattle business. It was what he had always wanted. But it wasn’t fair that he had to drive another man’s beeves. Matthew and Pete had never been cast out on a lonely divide and relegated to the monotonous work of a line rider. They had been straw bosses, foremen, ranchers. But Colonel Absalom Holcomb had made Caleb a sodbuster—helpmate to the hired man.

  But now his place was here, on the free range. He worked alone most days. Ben rode west from the sod camp and Caleb rode east, sometimes two days east, where the cow chips fell in with buffalo chips. There were still great herds of woollies south and east, he had been told, and bands of wild Indians to hunt them. One day he spotted a lone bull on a distant grassy rim.

  Another day he saw three braves trotting across a slope, angling away. Vaguely he recollected that strange winter among the Comanche in the Territory. Another life, it seemed. Another time. Buster had come for him, his father busy with his old pals at war.

  The three Indians quartered away from him, but all that day he scanned the rolls of ground around him. They would kill him for his horse, he thought. He wasn’t riding his top horse that day, but Caleb suspected any horse might make an Indian murder.