by Mike Blakely
“What’s wrong with that gelding?” Horace asked.
Buster shook his head. “Colonel Ab shouldn’t never have rode that old horse this far.”
When Horace and Buster got back into the canyon, they found Ab standing at the bottom of the cliff, watching his men dig through drifts of snow in the recesses above him.
“Have they found anything?” Horace asked.
“No,” Ab said.
“I’ll go help ’em look.”
“What was his rifle doing up there, Buster?” Ab asked, as if annoyed at his son for leaving a good weapon in the weather.
Buster swung down from the mule. “He must have dropped it.”
Ab kicked narrow trenches in the snow with his peg leg. “What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know,” Buster said.
“What time do you think he got here yesterday?”
“I reckon about noon.”
“That’s about the time that blue norther came through.”
“Yes, sir. There’s a tree up there that was hit by lightning. Probably yesterday.”
They stood silently together for several minutes until Buster sensed an end to the search. Dan Brooks had been clawing through drifts without a moment’s rest, but now he stopped and stood looking down into the snow. “Colonel!” he shouted.
The men came to stand with Dan. Piggin’ String McCoy knelt in the snow. Ab and Buster arrived as Dan pulled Pete’s body from the snowdrift. Like Ol’ Cedar Root, his limbs were locked in bizarre contortions. Frozen blood molded his face.
Sam Dugan trotted up, out of breath, having climbed down from the north rim. When he saw Pete, he took his hat off. He stared for a minute with everyone else, until he got his wind back. He looked up at the south rim, then across to the north. “My Lord,” he said. “That was sure some shot.”
“I reckon he saw that buck about the time the norther hit,” Horace said.
“Ol’ Cedar Root was about to hit high ground and scat, so Pete had to shoot from the saddle,” String added.
“That stallion would have been spooky anyhow,” Dan said, “on account of the smell of snow in the air.”
“There was lightning, too. Me and Buster found a tree up there that was struck.”
Dan made as if aiming a rifle. “He had both hands on that Winchester. If his horse pitched … He couldn’t hold on.”
Sam was still looking up. “That was one hell of a shot,” he whispered.
Ab hadn’t heard them. He stood, staring at the frozen body of his son, wondering why he should outlive so many of his children. He should have joined Ella long ago. He should have spared himself this misery.
“I got a sougan we can wrap him in,” Buster said. He wanted to cover Pete. He didn’t want to remember him that way.
Ab sat on the old spotted gelding as the boys lashed the frozen body to the back of Buster’s spare mule. The cargo under the tarpaulin hardly looked human. Ab twirled a strand of Pard’s mane around his finger, his eyes staring blankly down at the snow. The gelding was trembling worse now, but Ab hardly noticed.
When they were ready to leave, Sam said, “Let’s get the hell out of this damned canyon.”
They hadn’t gotten far when twilight came. As they rode speechlessly up a mountain trail, old Pard suddenly balked. Ab spurred him, but he refused to move. “Come on, you lazy old cob!” He gouged the gelding fiercely with his spurs. Pard grunted and shuffled sideways a few steps but wouldn’t move another inch uphill. His head dropped. Ab pulled it back up with the reins. “String, give me your quirt.” With the rawhide in his hand, he belabored Pard’s spotted rump mercilessly and jerked forward repeatedly in the saddle, as if momentum would start the horse up the mountain. Pard coughed, craned his neck strangely, and dropped to his knees.
Ab caught the horn as he swung clumsily down from the saddle. “What in Hades is wrong with you?” he shouted at the horse.
“He’s jaded, Colonel,” Buster said. “He can’t go no fu’ther.”
“He’ll go a sight farther! He’ll carry me home to bury my son!” Ab put his shoulder under Pard’s neck and tried to make him stand up. Pard heaved and got one forefoot under him, but the hoof slipped and he went down again, this time all the way over onto his side. Ab yanked his head up with the bridle reins, but the Nez Perce horse was spent.
Buster got down from his mule and took the reins away from Ab. He knew the old man was addled with grief, but he had no cause to treat a dying horse that way. “Let him go. He can’t climb no more mountains. He’s older than your wooden leg.”
The words hit Ab like an avalanche of years. Pard came before Ella went, before General Palmer brought the railroad, before Cheyenne Dutch killed Matthew. He had failed to take account of the toll of decades. To Ab, Pard would always be fleet of foot and bulletproof—the way he was at Apache Canyon. Only now did he realize what the suns, the moons, and the Indian winters had taken out of the old warhorse.
For the first time, he thought of himself as a one-legged old man. His life seemed suddenly near its end. How much longer could a man endure this agony? How many more mountains could he climb? How many sons did he have to bury?
Buster loosened the saddle to let Pard breathe easier.
Ab took the bridle off. He knelt over the head of the dying horse. “He’s hurting. We can’t leave him here to freeze.” He stood, paused. He sighed. “Give me your rifle, Sam.”
Sam reluctantly drew his Winchester from the scabbard and handed it to his boss. Ab opened the breech to make sure he had a live round in the chamber. He stood between his horse and his men and cocked the hammer. He put the weapon to his shoulder and aimed down at Pard’s head. He stood motionless for a long moment as the men looked away and gritted their teeth.
Then Ab began to shudder with the gun at his shoulder. A single sob escaped his throat almost like a cough. “Damn those white eyes!” he blubbered. “You’ll have to do it for me, Buster,” he said, handing over the gun. He wanted to turn it on himself.
Ab stumbled down the trail, brushed the snow from a boulder, and sat down. The rifle cracked. He didn’t move. Twilight had passed and the mountainside grew dark.
Buster came to Ab’s side. “We better get goin’.” he said. “You can ride behind me on the mule.”
Ab sniffed and rubbed his sleeve under his nose.
“Colonel?”
He looked up with a world of terrors in his eyes. “Who’s going to tell him, Buster?”
“Tell who?”
“Who’s going to tell Caleb?”
“About Pete? You’re gonna tell him. You’re his family.”
Ab shook his head. “I can’t tell him. I can’t talk to that boy anymore.”
“He’s a grown man now,” Buster said. “And you can tell him.”
Ab looked up, his eyes begging for pity. “You could tell him for me.”
Buster wanted to pick the old fool up by the collar and shake him. “Colonel,” he said, growling under his breath, “I’ll be damned if I have to tell your own son his brother has died. I’ll put your poor old horse out of misery for you, but I won’t ease your conscience about the way you’ve treated your son.”
Ab shook his head, grief-stricken, afraid, alone. “But I can’t tell him,” he whispered. “I can’t think of any way I could possibly tell him.”
“Then you had better find a way, old man.” He pulled Ab to his feet by the collar, angrier than he had ever been at him. “You find a way to do it.” He turned back up the trail, leaving the old man in the dark. Amelia was giddy with relief and joy. She hugged Gloria around the neck and watched the foal wobble on spindly legs, rooting vaguely for his first taste of milk.
Gloria touched the lily-white arms squeezing her neck. The little white woman was strong! “I told you, Miss Amelia. You don’t need those menfolks around here.”
“Oh, hush. The old girl did it all by herself. I only watched.”
“But you was here, just in case.”
“Yes, I was. I never thought I’d see such a thing.” She beamed with accomplishment as the foal found the bag. “Do you think it will be as easy for me when my time comes?”
Gloria bunched her eyebrows and shot questioning glances all over the barn. “Why, Miss Amelia, are you in the family way?”
Amelia nodded, blushing. “Pete doesn’t know yet. I wanted to be sure.”
“I s’pect I’ll be right after you.”
“Are you…?”
“I don’t know, but the way that fool man of mine comes after me of a evenin’… Every evenin’!”
“Buster?”
“Uh-huh! He tried to git me in the mornin’, too, but I just roll on over. I ain’t no mornin’ glory!”
Amelia gasped and laughed all at once. Imagine! She relished Gloria’s ribald candor.
SEVENTY
Every spring, when wildflowers began to bloom along the Rio Peñasco, Caleb knew it was time to drift north. He would hug his children and tell them to obey their mother. He would kiss Marisol and promise to return earlier next time. He would wander up through Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos, stopping to play at ranches for food, or saloons for money. The vanguard of wild blossoms would follow him northward as spring advanced. By the time he arrived at Monument Creek, Buster’s flower garden would be putting out colors, and Pete would be watching for him to appear where the old Arapaho Trail ran over the bald hill to the west.
He liked to appear at dusk on the bald hill and stand there in the stirrups until someone noticed him. Then he would trot down the slope, splash across the creek, and lope up to the ranch with a flourish of his hat, singing some cowboy ditty. The Arapaho Trail approach also gave Ab time to spot him and get out of the way somewhere. Caleb didn’t any more want to speak to his father than his father cared to speak to him. They had built the wall of silence together. It was the only thing they cooperated in.
It was late afternoon when he came through Arapaho Pass in the Rampart Range. He had come from Leadville, where he had filled his pockets with the former wages of drunken miners. Wildflowers were breaking out in bevies on the hillsides and in the coulees flanking the trail. The open range had become overstocked in recent years, and grass had grown scarce, but nothing ate the wild-flowers. If anything, they had become more prolific, claiming the former range of retreating grasses. He knew Buster’s garden would be resplendent with blossoms.
It was the place he loved most on the face of the earth, where the High Plains met the Rocky Mountains. The Front Range, the Eastern Slope. He rode a little lighter in the saddle under the Ramparts. Monument Park, the Arapaho Trail. He loved the sounds of the place names.
He was going home. Would he ever stay? Was it right to stay? Was it wrong to leave? Should he be living like Pete instead of drifting like some shiftless vagabond? Would he ever bring Marisol to Holcomb Ranch? Did he want to?
Pete has a big ranch. I have a horse and some instruments. Pete works the land. I play songs. Pete does good in the world. Pete knows God. What do I do? What do I know?
He had perfected the timing over the years. At dusk he recognized the west side of the bald hill, green with new grass. Powder River knew it, too, and his hooves chopped the ground a little quicker. Holcomb Ranch, just over the hill. Caleb cocked his hat, stroked his mustache, and tucked his pants legs down into his boot tops. Home, not a mile away. He started the climb up the west face of the bald hill.
He stood in the stirrups as the trail rolled under him. He craned his neck. In a moment he would see his home spread. A tremulous breath of anticipation fluttered in his lungs. He knew which story he was going to tell first. He had practiced it well. He had rehearsed them all.
He squinted. A strange dark square had appeared on the summit, against the pale sky. Powder River looked at it sidewise, suspiciously. They approached it cautiously. It was a stray chunk of rough stone, standing on the apex of the Arapaho Trail. Beyond it, now, the dark-green penisula of the Pinery jutted into the plains. As he climbed higher over the bald swell, the gossamer rails of the Denver and Rio Grande came into view, then the windmills, the big pastures, the plowed fields, the Cincinnati house, the bastioned mansion, the cabins, and Monument Creek.
Only the chunk of stone on the trail was unfamiliar. It was quarried granite, large and imposing. The gelding gave it a wide berth as Caleb urged him around it. The side of the stone that fronted the plains had a polished face, smooth as glass, except for a few characters gouged in two severe lines. He leaned from his saddle to read it in the waning light:
PETE HOLCOMB
1852–1882
Caleb dropped from the saddle, touched the letters, drew his fingers back from the cold stone. He fell to his knees as the helplessness crawled under his flesh, like worms tunneling the dark earth. There was an empty place in the world where once Pete had stood, a dearth of life sucking a million moments into oblivion.
He had felt the vigor of Pete’s handshake all day, glimpsed his sallow eyes. But now he held nothing, saw darkness. The wildflowers were blooming, the new moon rising. It was spring on the Front Range. He had come home to tell Pete some stories.
* * *
Buster could not bring himself to watch for Caleb’s arrival that spring. The stone on the hill marred his view and he felt responsible for its placement there. He was the one who had told the old man to find a way to tell Caleb himself. The old man had found a way. He had buried Pete under the Arapaho Trail.
Buster didn’t look forward to witnessing Caleb’s return, so he avoided looking at the hill, concentrating on his fields and pastures instead. That night, however, Buster couldn’t ignore the campfire that burned on the hill near the gravestone.
“What is that up there?” Gloria asked.
“It’s got to be Caleb,” he answered. “Nobody else would camp up there.”
Gloria grew wide-eyed. “With that grave up there! You won’t catch me around there at night.”
“It’s just Pete, woman.”
She shook her head and pulled the curtains.
He debated on whether or not he should go up there, thinking maybe Caleb would come down after a while. But the fire kept burning for hours after dark, and he finally decided he should climb the hill.
He left the Cincinnati house, using Caleb’s fire as his guide. Cool wind sang through winter wheat. The creek, swollen with snowmelt, laughed at him as he crossed the dam; then it gave way to the distant songs of night birds and the faint rustle of new leaves in the cottonwoods. A lone coyote howled somewhere in the mountains. They were all familiar sounds, well loved. But as he neared the top of the hill, an unexpected strain reached his ears. It was Caleb’s voice.
The drifter had built his fire close to the gravestone on the Arapaho Trail, and the polished face of the stone caught the flickering light of the flames. Caleb sat on his saddle between the fire and the stone. When Buster came near enough, he could hear Caleb telling Fete a story:
“… well, this Rhode Island gambler had never seen one before, so he asked me why I called it a stout lizard. And I says, ‘Because it’s so stout, you can’t hold it down on the ground by pokin’ your finger in the middle of its back.’ Well, he just had to try it, of course, and when he poked it on the back, that scorpion lifted its tail and stung him right smart on the trigger finger so he couldn’t deal off the bottom of the deck for a week. It just happened to take me about that long to win back everything he had cheated me out of…”
Buster smiled. The fire blurred. He listened only a minute or two, just beyond the firelight. He knew he wasn’t needed. When he reached the creek, he could still hear Caleb’s voice and see the flames flickering great sorrow and beauty on Pete’s stone.
* * *
At dawn Buster went back up to the hill and nudged Caleb in his bedroll.
“Mornin’, Buster,” he said, propping himself on his elbows. He lingered for a moment in the innocence of dreams, then saw the gravestone and felt a new despair.
“I b
rought you some breakfast.” He opened a basket, steaming with the aroma of biscuits. He pulled Powder River’s stake pin from the ground and led the horse to fresh grass. When he came back, Caleb was groping around in the basket.
Buster piled wood over the coals and got the fire going again. He put a coffeepot on as Caleb ate boiled eggs, bacon, and biscuits smeared with butter and honey. He handed Caleb a tin cup steaming with coffee and they sat together silently, warming their fingers on the hot metal as the sun rose beyond the Pinery.
“I had practiced a whole string of stories to tell him,” Caleb said, “and I wasn’t about to let nobody stop me.”
Buster nodded. “I know.”
The sun clung desperately to the horizon, then lost its hold and became a perfect sphere.
“How’d it happen?”
Buster told how Pete had died in the place that had come to be called Cedar Root Canyon, though not a single cedar was known to take root there. The sun was high when he finished. The denizens of Holcomb Ranch were up and working. Gloria had walked over to the mansion to cook Amelia’s breakfast. It seemed that only Ab had failed to show himself.
“Is Amelia still here?” Caleb asked.
“She sure is,” Buster said, almost proudly. “I thought she’d run back to her daddy in town, but she won’t leave her house. Won’t leave her horses either. She’s been out in the pens almost every day, tellin’ the boys how to work ’em. I caught her pitchin’ hay last week. Says she’s gonna take up ridin’ after the baby comes.”
“Baby?”
“That’s right. You’re gonna be an uncle.”
Caleb turned to grin at Pete but found only a cold stone there beside him. He clutched the tin cup, cold and empty now. “Things sure happen sudden.”
“Yeah,” Buster said, staring blankly, arching his eyebrows, and pressing his lips together. “You ready to come down to the ranch now?”
He nodded, threw the tin cup into the basket, and rolled his sugan.