South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  “My man Powell over there’ll take you to pick out a couple horses from the remuda,” he said.

  “When you’re done with that, go get your gear and find yourself a bunk, Griffin,” I added and shook his hand again. “Glad to have you with us.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  JUST PAST NOON, on a ranch many miles south of us, the first of the government trucks appeared.

  Teresa Pineu narrowed her eyes and saw the trail of powder their tires kicked up off the hard-packed caliche road that cut along the wire fence that marked the border between her parcel and the BLM. She dried her hands on a dish towel and reached for the binoculars that rested on the ledge beside the trailer’s kitchen sink.

  The trucks bore no markings, but made no effort toward concealment, though their distinctive shape made clear the nature of the cargo they carried.

  So this is how it begins, she thinks.

  WILD HORSES had roamed the landscape since the Pleistocene era, but the bloodline that marked this herd could be traced back to the arrival of the first Conquistadores in the fifteenth century. The ocean voyage from Spain was long and arduous, and many of the animals lost their lives, so it was natural that only the strongest, most robust would survive, serve, flourish, and procreate on the shores of the New World.

  Somewhat smaller than many of their European counterparts, but larger than the animals favored by the indigenous population, they thrived in the new environment and were prized for their speed, agility, stamina, and conformation.

  Battles were fought, wars won and lost, ranches overrun, and rough stock stolen; but the truth was in their blood. They served and died by the tens of thousands in the armies of the Civil War, the Spanish-American and Boer Wars; more than 500,000 of these fine animals perished in World War I alone, thousands more exterminated just for their hides during the years of the Great Depression.

  Still many survived and escaped into the meadows and river valleys, gathering into herds of their own construction. Of these, some made it farther west, through treacherous Rocky Mountain passes drifted deep with ice and snow, and on to survive the waterless desert wastes of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, eventually to find safe pasture in the verdant wilds of Oregon.

  THE NATION was expanding, as well.

  Vast tracts of land were purchased, stolen outright, or confiscated and partitioned as a spoil of war.

  Some was given away as an incentive offered to adventurers and settlers. Considerably more was set aside as a public trust to be overseen by governmental agencies mandated to preserve, protect, and manage its possessions. Perhaps predictably, it was this third objective which was to precipitate an ongoing struggle between the rights of private citizens and the bureaucracies engaged to oversee the protection of its resources that would engender ironic, frequent, armed, and bloody conflict.

  TERESA PINEU put down the binoculars and stepped outside. The air was cool and dry, the dome of sky strewn with a chain of white clouds. She followed the passage of the distant vehicles until all trace had disappeared, the trail of dust torn away on the wind.

  She had heard the rumors for some time, but had chosen to believe they were nothing more, and that a more enlightened perspective had gained a foothold in the world. She now believed she had been a fool to have engaged in such a fantasy.

  The last time something like this had transpired was just after the turn of the century. Teresa had seen the faded tintypes of the carnage, and had wondered as to why the perpetrators would have failed to do their evil outside the presence of photographers. But this was the vanity of man. The government had determined that the wild mustang population had exceeded optimal allowances, and therefore threatened the viability of the herd’s own survival.

  Teresa knew the slaughter would occur much as it had before. This, too, was the vanity of man.

  The trucks would be first to arrive, hauling a payload of steel poles and wire that would be formed into makeshift corrals. The private contractors—mercenary drovers and stockmen hired by the government and funded by tax dollars—would follow: accepting their pieces of silver in exchange for scouring the rock-strewn country on horseback, motorcycles, and aircraft for evidence of the herd, then methodically forcing it westward where the animals would find themselves imprisoned inside massive manmade enclosures, denied freedom for the first time in their lives. Some of these men would be issued permits for the privilege of “hunting” the horses with firearms.

  When they were finished, the unwanted animals would be eradicated, swallowed up inside refrigerated trucks and processed for use in canned food for our pets, and rawhide chew toys for their amusement.

  Teresa turned her head skyward, breathed deeply, and contemplated the flight of a red-tailed hawk as it traced circles on the slipstream. Then she stepped inside and placed a call.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MY WIFE, Jesse, was spreading compost and red bark dust in the vegetable garden when I came back to the house. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, blue jeans, and a sleeveless blouse, her left cheek marked with a dark smudge where she had wiped away the sheen of perspiration with a soiled glove.

  “How goes the search for the world’s finest cowboy?” she smiled.

  “You’re looking at him.”

  She leaned the rake handle against a tomato stake and stood on her toes to kiss me. The late afternoon sun shone on her bare arms and highlighted the dusting of freckles on her skin, and her hair smelled of green apples and musk.

  I kicked at a channel of loose soil with the toe of my boot where a family of voles had bored furrows between the seed rows.

  “We lost another cow,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Did Powell come over to tattle?”

  Lately, tiny lines had begun to appear at the corners of her eyes and mouth when she smiled. I had met Jesse shortly after I returned home from Korea. I had taken a job as a wrangler on a movie set where she was working as a location scout. It took me a week to work up the courage to ask her if she’d join me for dinner. By the time we’d finished dessert that night, I could not envision a future that didn’t have her in it.

  “No,” she said. “I was over by the sorting pen when you brought in the calves. I could see that one of them was an orphan.”

  I looked down the slope, in the direction of the pens where the hands were finishing their work with the day’s final group of calves. Wyatt was trotting up the dirt track, his tongue hanging loosely from his mouth, and an expression on his face that I’d swear resembled a smile. He wagged his tail and circled Jesse and me, and I bent down to scratch him behind his ears before he walked off in search of shade beneath the porch.

  “I love that sound, don’t you?” Jesse asked.

  We both listened as the voice of the iron tender shouted out the last of the calves, and the hollers of the crew of cutters, branders, and vaccinators worked together in the chaotic and rough-hewn opera that defined the season. A minute later, a diaphanous bulb of gray smoke carried through the tree limbs when they killed the branding fire with metal pails of well water, and the smell of singed hair and superheated steam followed behind.

  “You are a country girl,” I said. “You probably like the stink of a farrier’s shed.”

  “You know I do.” She smiled and wrapped an arm around my waist.

  Jordan Powell waved his arm and shouted something I couldn’t quite hear from where he stood between the trees and the horse barn. He was carrying something up the gravel path toward Jesse and me, wearing leather work chaps and a snap-button shirt that were powdered with dust. The Resistol hat he wore was banded with a stain of sweat along the crown.

  “Miz Dawson,” he said and touched his fingers to the brim.

  “Long day, Jordan?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. But I didn’t break no bones, so I guess it was a good one.”

  “Don’t be too long,” Jesse said to me as she turned to go inside. “We’re going to the Corcorans’ tonight, and you’re not going any
where with me if you don’t take a shower. And soon.”

  It had become our custom to go visit with our nearest neighbors at least once a month and bring a casserole, a side of ribs, or some other form of home-cooked sustenance and a little conversation to the father-and-son set of bachelors who now lived alone: one a widower, the other a cuckold. It was a kindness I credited exclusively to Jesse’s compassionate nature.

  The kitchen door squeaked on its hinges as Jesse pulled on the handle, and Wyatt jumped up to follow her inside.

  “You left your duster down by the barn,” Powell told me once Jesse had disappeared indoors. “Figured you’d want it.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “One other thing: Mr. Wheeler’s sending me and the new man, Griffin, out to the Three Roses parcel tomorrow to root out the cows hiding in the trees up there. He asked me to see if you thought you’d want to come along.”

  I appreciated what Wheeler was trying to do. Running a family operation is a complicated business, and while Caleb Wheeler had been my foreman for more than a decade, there was still a balance to be observed between who was the boss and who was in charge. A ranch is a business, but it’s also a family.

  Powell looked off in the direction of the ranch office and chewed a hangnail off his thumb.

  “No,” I said. “You boys can handle it on your own. It’ll be good for you to get to know Griffin anyway. He looks like he’s got the makings of a permanent hand.”

  “Whatever you say, Captain.”

  Powell looked like he was about to speak again, but checked himself.

  “Something else on your mind?” I asked.

  “No, sir,” he said and turned back toward the barn. The rowels of his spurs rang like tiny bells as he slowly walked away.

  FOR MY fortieth birthday, a year ago, my wife surprised me with the gift of a brand-new 1972 Ford Bronco. Its body was the color of the river when it ran deep and blue, and had white fenders and a top I removed when the weather was good. She’d had a local sign painter ornament each of the two doors with a representation of our ranch’s brand, a capital D enclosed within the outline of a diamond. The Diamond-D. We referred to it as our Sunday car, in that Jesse had developed an unwillingness to be seen in my work truck, or the military surplus jeep I sometimes used to haul tools around the property, when we drove to church on Sundays. It had since expanded its role to include transport to any social occasion that involved nonranch personnel.

  I held the door open for Jesse as she settled herself into the passenger seat, balancing the casserole dish and pie plate on her lap while I placed the bundle of handpicked flowers on the seat.

  Back in the early twenties, when the country was booming with postwar expansion, my grandfather had taken an uncharacteristic long-shot risk on a new breed of cattle that had shown early promise in its resistance to certain bovine diseases and produced a richly marbled, tender beef product that was beginning to bring top dollar at auction. Neighboring ranchers considered him crazy to bet on livestock that had not been tested in climates less temperate than Southern California, and felt free to let him know about it. But the gamble paid off and, largely due to their robust health, the herd grew far more rapidly than those on any other ranch in the state. The Diamond-D came to be widely known for the quality of the beef that derived from this unusual crossbreed of Welsh Black and Tarentaise cows that carried a hide so dark that they appeared nearly purple in direct sunlight.

  As a cattleman, his neighbor Eli Corcoran had not been so fortunate.

  He and my granddad had planted their stakes about the same time, starting out with a few hundred acres, and sharing a boundary that defined the northern border of Corcoran’s place and the southern border of the Diamond-D. They were affable competitors who developed a mutual respect for one another as the years progressed. Both men married good women, raised sons, and worked their respective properties with the tirelessness of much younger men. But the Great War came and claimed the oldest Corcoran boy. Eli missed the boom when it came to an end, and found himself unprepared when the depression came.

  Granddad proved his friendship by purchasing small parcels—parcels my grandfather had no need for—of Corcoran’s ranch to provide his friend the cash he needed to keep going. Eli worked his shrinking property with the help of his only remaining son, Denman, who had earned the nickname “Snoose” since that was what they would most frequently find him doing if they left him alone to work a string, or mend a length of fence. By the time the Second War came along, Corcoran was down to his last one hundred acres, which he offered for sale to my family.

  Grandfather refused, and offered instead to lease the acreage for grazing. The payment on that lease continues to this day, the only thing that stands between the Corcorans and outright destitution.

  THE FIRST stars had only begun to reveal themselves in the early evening sky, the moon a thin white crescent rising over the horizon, and my headlights exaggerated the shadows of the washboard ruts etched in the surface of the road.

  Like most locales in this valley, the simplest way to get to the Corcoran place was on horseback. A horse trail ran the length of the wire fence that enclosed the BLM land to the east of us and straight to the Corcorans’ back gate. But the trail was far too narrow, and far too rough, to accommodate a motor vehicle, especially this time of year. Instead we took the longer route over a road meant for use by delivery trucks that had been carved out of hardpan and gravel, and was now deeply scalloped by years of rainfall and neglect.

  I cast a glance at Jesse as we rumbled over the cattle guard and underneath the lodgepole arch that identified the entrance to the Corcoran ranch. As I turned toward the house, my lights brushed across the desiccated skin of a coyote, which had been strung up on the barbed-wire fence as a warning to the rest of the pack.

  A Massey Ferguson tractor was parked inside a lean-to shed with no doors, whose wooden exterior had gone gray with weather and dripping moisture from holes in the roof where the wind had stripped it of shingles. Farm implements lay exposed in the open, bled rust, and gave the appearance of dead or dying insects from a distant geological age.

  I parked beneath a walnut tree that grew on the near side of the house. A thick layer of green moss encrusted its trunk and exposed roots like a second skin.

  Several years ago, before Eli’s wife, Marie, had passed away, he had taken down the wood-framed house he had first built as a young man, and replaced it with one constructed out of river rock, heavy timber, and mortar. It was built up off the ground on broad redwood posts and beams that had been sunk deep into concrete footings, much like the pilings of a pier. The sagging treads of the original stairway, and the wood stoop they led up to, though, were a monument to the interest he lost in completing the project after she had died.

  This was where Eli and his sixty-one-year-old son, Snoose Corcoran, were seated as Jesse and I got out of the Bronco.

  Despite the property’s decrepitude, the evening air was sweet, laced with the smell of rain-dampened soil, bailed hay, and the spilled contents of feed sacks.

  Eli Corcoran removed his straw Stetson as Jesse came up the stairs.

  “Miss Jesse,” he said, and smiled, and some of the weariness slid off of him.

  “You know you make me feel like a matron when you call me that,” Jesse said.

  She leaned in and pecked him on the cheek and I could see a flicker of youth hidden deep in his eyes when he put his hat back on.

  “Can’t help it,” the old man said. “I was raised by proper Baptist parents who taught me to show respect for a lady.”

  I shook hands with Snoose and noticed again the resemblance between father and son. Both had the angular faces and suntanned complexions of their Black Irish ancestors, and shared the deep lines that had been chiseled on their cheekbones; but the old man’s eyes were red along the rims and the bone structure of his face had hollowed out. He had shaved in preparation for our visit, and his chin had been nicked by the razor, a scrap o
f toilet paper still stuck to the wound.

  Snoose, too, looked tired, his eyes shot through with the swollen look of worry and deprivation from sleep. Unlike Eli, it looked as though Snoose hadn’t shaved for days, and the smell of Kentucky brown seemed to emanate from his pores.

  “Why don’t you take those flowers inside,” Eli said to Jesse. “Miss Marie can give you a hand finding something to put them in.”

  A momentary expression of confusion passed over Jesse’s features, before a simple sadness took its place.

  Snoose shot me a look that contained an entire conversation.

  “Let me give you a hand with that food,” Snoose said. He took the casserole and pie from me and followed Jesse inside.

  “Pull up a seat, Dawson,” Eli said, and gestured to the willow chair his son had been using.

  He pulled a plug of tobacco from his shirt pocket, flaked some off with the edge of a pocket knife, and rolled himself a smoke while I listened to the low murmur of conversation mingle with the rattle of cookware that drifted through an aluminum screen door decorated with scrollwork and the images of swallows in flight.

  “You going to speak to the sheriff about those dead cows?” Eli asked.

  He lit a wooden match with a flick of his thumbnail and touched it to the end of his cigarette. He inhaled deeply as he waved the match dead and dropped it to the floor.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Planning on calling him tomorrow.”

  “Don’t you let him slow-walk this thing. It’s damn serious. I ain’t seen nothing like it before.”

  “I haven’t either.”

  He stopped for a moment and gazed out into the dusk, blinking like he was seeing something there, the images of lost friends squinting into the gleam of a meat fire spinning stories and lies from the trail. He picked a piece of loose tobacco off his tongue and wiped his fingertips on the leg of his blue jeans.

  “These animals suffer—or not—depending on our choices, son. We can choose whether their last day is a good one or a bad one.”