Grayfox

by Michael Phillips

  Chapter 8

  Taking the Oath

  This was one of the main home stations, so it was bigger than most of the smaller swing stations I’d come through.

  The house itself had three rooms. The big room where I sat now had kind of a kitchen at one end with a big wood stove, utensils and pans and cooking stuff hanging from hooks on the wall, and a big rough wood table for eating, with benches on both sides. Then over on the side closer to me there was a big fireplace, some stacks of wood, and a couple chairs, but mostly a lot of supplies scattered around in boxes or crates or on shelves. Nothing was very tidy.

  This station was so far away from everywhere that when a wagon came to outfit it they had to bring enough to last a long time. So there were big barrels of molasses and borax and turpentine and things like that, burlap bags stacked all over the place full of wheat and ground flour and sugar and cornmeal and lots and lots of beans. All the meat was dried, and the fruit, too, on account of the heat—nothing would keep for long out there in the desert. Some slabs of smoked bacon hung on the walls, I found out the next day they had a smokehouse out back and had butchered a hog a couple weeks before. And the shelves held bags of coffee, some tea, honey, and lots of tin containers lining the shelves with other cooking odds and ends, medicines, rubbing alcohol, soap, dishes and pots, and all kinds of things.

  The other two rooms off the main one were bunkrooms. One was Hammerhead’s for himself. The other was bigger, with four or five wooden bunks built against the walls for the riders and Mr. Smith to sleep. That’s where I’d put my things.

  When Mr. Smith and Billy Barnes came in for supper, Hammerhead called me over and introduced me, then we sat down around the rough wood table. Neither of them said hardly a word to me.

  Mr. Smith was maybe five or ten years older than Hammerhead, almost bald and a little fat. His eyes were mean and he never smiled. The few times he spoke, his voice sounded surly.

  And even though Hammerhead told Billy I had come to relieve him of half the riding, Billy didn’t seem any too happy about it. He just looked me up and down with an angry glint in his eye, as if he’d rather I hadn’t come at all.

  Everybody around here seemed angry. Any friendliness there was between them wouldn’t have been enough even to match half a smile from Franklin Royce back home—and that wasn’t much! They grabbed at the food, everyone trying to be first and take the most and the best. As far as pleasant supper conversation goes . . . there wasn’t any!

  When I was done, I excused myself and went out to the stable to see how Gray Thunder was getting on and make sure he had enough feed and water, and to brush and settle him for the night.

  The next morning, like Hammerhead had told me, Billy took me out on the first four miles of my run, showed me the trail up to the top of the ridge east of the station, and pointed out the rest of the way to me, showing me everything on a map I’d be carrying with me.

  He hardly said a word to me all the way out. I’d still not seen him smile once. His eyes had a faraway gaze in them that never went away. I found out later that he was an orphan, like a lot of the riders were. But I didn’t find it out from him. Billy never said a word about himself. Most fellows like him never did. They kept everything inside, and you never had a notion what they was thinking.

  Billy was shorter than me by a couple of inches and probably not a day over eighteen. But one look in his face, and anyone could tell he was a tough customer, just like the stationman had said. I don’t know what he’d done or where he’d come from before the Express opened, but I sure wasn’t about to ask!

  That afternoon, back at the station, Hammerhead went over the map again two or three times with me. Then he issued me my blue dungarees and bright red shirt and handed me a light rifle and Colt revolver. He had me shoot both of them to make sure I knew how to use them. He seemed satisfied.

  Hammerhead handed me a Bible, too, and told me to keep it with me when I rode. I was more than a mite surprised. Hammerhead didn’t hardly seem the sort of man who had much religion to him, but I took it just the same.

  Then we saddled up the pony I’d be riding and I took him out for a run so the two of us could get used to each other. He was smaller than Gray Thunder but just as fast, maybe even faster.

  “They give you the oath when you signed on, Hollister?” Hammerhead asked me.

  “No, I don’t reckon so,” I answered. “The man in Sacramento just had me sign a paper, that’s all.”

  “All right, then you gotta take the oath before you can ride for Russell, Majors, and Waddell. Stick up your right hand.”

  I obeyed.

  “Now say what I say after me,” said Hammerhead. “You ready?”

  I nodded.

  “All right . . . I, Zack Hollister, do hereby swear before the Great and Living God—” He stopped. “Go on, say it,” he told me.

  “I, Zack Hollister, do hereby swear before the Great and Living God,” I said.

  “—that during my engagement, and while I am an employee of Russell, Majors, and Waddell—”

  “—that during my engagement, and while—” I stopped. I was a little nervous and had forgotten what he said.

  “—while I am an employee of Russell, Majors, and Waddell—” repeated Hammerhead a little impatiently.

  “Oh, yeah—while I am an employee of Russell, Majors, and Waddell.”

  “—I will, under no circumstances—”

  “I will, under no circumstances,” I said, and then went on to repeat after him everything he said: “use profane language, that I will drink no intoxicating liquors, that I will not quarrel or fight with any other employee of the firm, and that in every respect I will conduct myself honestly, be faithful to my duties, and so direct all my acts as to win the confidence of my employers.”

  “So help you God,” added Hammerhead.

  “So help me God,” I said.

  “All right, Hollister, you can put your hand down. It’s all official now. You’ll be on the trail for the Express by tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder, after seeing what was in Billy’s eyes and hearing Hammerhead talk about boxing my ears, how serious the two of them were about the Pony Express oath.

  Chapter 9

  My First Ride

  When I laid down that night on the hard bunk to go to sleep, I was thinking and wondering if I’d done the right thing. Everything I’d said to Pa came back into my mind again, along with everyone’s talk about the Paiutes. I only half slept and half dreamed the whole night, turning over a lot, and listening to every sound outside. As much as I wanted to think of myself as a man and grown-up and not needing nobody else, down inside there was part of me that was scared. ’Course that part of you that is trying to act more grown up than you really are won’t let you admit you’re scared, and I wouldn’t either.

  Bright and early the next morning, everybody was up, and after breakfast they put me right to work. Mason Walker was due in about ten, and that’s when I’d start my first ride east. Two or three hours after that, Billy’d be heading off west.

  There was plenty to do to get ready, and Hammerhead wasn’t one to let anyone be slack when there was work going on. He fixed me lunch to take with me, and we had to make sure my mount was good and fed. I had grain for him and water for us both in waterproof pouches slung across behind the saddle. There was a lot to getting ready, and Hammerhead had to show me everything that first time. Billy mostly did all his preparation by himself.

  “Now, you got eighteen miles ahead of you this first stretch,” Hammerhead told me. “Ain’t no water between here and Stephens’ Canyon. That’s why you’re carrying it, and that’s why you can’t ride flat out, neither. Let your horse tell you the pace he’s comfortable with. Some of the runs are ten or twelve miles, and then you can fly. Eighteen or twenty, then you gotta pace it back just a bit. You got that, Hollister?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Well, looks to me like Walker’s headed this way,” he
said, glancing off toward the west. There was no sound, but a tiny dust cloud on the horizon got gradually bigger as we watched it. “You know the route?”

  “Think so,” I said.

  “Got the map?”

  I nodded.

  “Your gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I don’t reckon there’s more for it than for you to be off.”

  We stood there waiting, and within five minutes Mason Walker’s dust cloud was billowing right into the station, with him and his horse right in the middle of it.

  Walker reined in the foaming horse, jumped off, grabbed the leather mochila that carried the mail, and ran with it to me.

  The exchange wasn’t as fast as usual because I was new at it, but Hammerhead helped me sling the mochila over my saddle, then I jumped up and took off.

  “Good luck, Hollister!” he yelled after me.

  The next minute I was out of the station, galloping east up the ridge Billy and I had climbed the day before and then down across the flatland of central Nevada, riding hard but not what I’d call real fast.

  There ain’t much to do while you’re riding except stare ahead to make sure you’re on the trail . . . and think. That’s one thing you can’t help, ’cause your mind’s about the only part of you that’s free to leave the trail and go off someplace else.

  Well, that first day I found my mind doing a lot of thinking all of a sudden about things I’d rather not thought of just then. But I couldn’t help it!

  First off, I started thinking about everyone back home. I reckon the first person to come into my mind was my brother, Tad. Just seeing his face, smiling and maybe wanting to tell me something, sent such a stab of loneliness into my heart I couldn’t stand it.

  One day, not long before I’d left, when Pa wasn’t home, he’d come to me all wet and muddy from up by the mine, with his face all lit up.

  “Zack, Zack,” he said excitedly as he ran up to me. “Come up to the mine with me.”

  “What for?” I said without much interest.

  “I think I found a new vein of gold!”

  “Aw, Tad, you didn’t either.”

  “Just come and look—please, Zack. We could surprise Pa as soon as he gets home.”

  “Forget it, Tad,” I snapped. “Let him find his own gold.”

  Tad’s face had looked so disappointed I thought he was going to start crying. He walked off slowly, back toward the mine.

  It was the last time I’d talked to him.

  Remembering it made my eyes blurry, and I had to wipe them with my sleeve.

  Then I thought of all the other times I hadn’t been as helpful to him as I should have or hadn’t had time for him when he’d wanted to play or show me something. Then pretty soon I was thinking the same way about Becky and Corrie and Emily.

  That same day, I’d walked into the house after talking to Tad like that and had snapped rudely at Corrie too. That same look of hurt and confusion I’d seen on Tad’s face came over hers too. And for the next couple of days I could tell she was avoiding me, probably afraid to talk to me, wondering if I’d get mad at her.

  All kinds of little things came into my head, things I’d completely forgotten till right then. I couldn’t get those two images of Tad and Corrie out of my mind—how they’d looked at me after I’d hurt them.

  Seeing all their faces and remembering things we’d done together and hearing their voices in my head—it all made me realize how far away and alone I was.

  There sure wasn’t nothing I could do about it, though! There I was, riding in the middle of nowhere!

  And I had to keep going!

  Getting to Flat Bluff and getting started with my new job had kept me occupied, so I could mostly push my thoughts about my family and what I’d done to them down and away from me. The feelings were there, I reckon, because there was a kind of continual gnawing in the pit of my stomach. But I didn’t open the door so my feelings could come up into my head and become actual thoughts that I’d have to look at.

  I could already tell that the Pony Express was the kind of place where no one asked too many questions or got too personal. I always thought men and boys weren’t supposed to get personal like women did, anyway, but it was even more like that in this kind of a place. Everyone out here was running away from something or someone, just like Hammerhead said, or else was trying to prove something—mostly, I reckon, to themselves. I figured that everyone here, just like me, had a story to tell about people they’d left and pains they were suffering inside without telling no one about it. Except maybe the orphans, and I reckon they were looking for something to belong to more than something to get away from.

  Once I was out there on that first ride, it all began to come into my mind, kind of like water that finally rises up so high it breaks over the dam, and I couldn’t stop the thoughts from coming anymore.

  Especially I thought about Pa and what I’d said to him the day I left.

  It wasn’t easy to think about, and I kept doing my best to shove the memory of that day out of my mind.

  By the time I rode into Stephens’ Canyon station a couple of hours later, I was glad to have something to distract me from my thinking.

  I met a few new people there, took a short rest, had some water and ate part of my lunch, and was off again on a fresh horse in less than fifteen minutes.

  The next two stretches were fourteen and then twenty-three miles, and there was nothing to see along the way. It was the most boring land I could imagine. I don’t think there was a single thing living out there. I couldn’t imagine how the Indians survived in such country.

  When I bedded down that night in the middle of the Utah-Nevada territory, I was plumb tuckered out!

  Chapter 10

  Thoughts on the Trail

  For the rest of the summer and through the fall, I rode mostly on the same stretch I rode that first day—the fifty-five miles between Flat Bluff and the other stations, with two changes of horses along the way. But there were times when I’d ride on further east and times I had to ride west into what was usually Mason’s territory too.

  Things would come up, like somebody’d get sick or there’d be a change in schedule or one of the riders would quit—there were all kinds of things that happened that meant you’d have to ride a different run than you thought. That was part of what being an Express rider was all about!

  The Pony Express wasn’t exactly the kind of place you met people you’d call “good friends.” You met interesting people, that’s for sure, but they were all like Billy Barnes and Hammerhead Jackson—a tough breed, and not somebody you’d necessarily trust or talk to.

  It made me think sometimes, when I was out alone on the trail, about how different men and girls were. Corrie and I talked about it later, but I noticed it out there too—how men like Hammerhead and Billy seemed to wear a thick crust all around themselves. That crust never cracked. They talked enough to go about the business of life, but they didn’t ever show what they were thinking or feeling inside.

  It made me think how I’d been around womenfolk a lot of my life—my mother and my sisters and then Almeda—and that maybe, just from watching them, I learned to think different and feel things more than some fellows like Billy Barnes.

  All this started me wondering about myself and if I was the same as Hammerhead and Billy, with a crust growing around myself too. At the time I don’t reckon I saw it as a weakness, though now, looking back, I can see that it’s just about the biggest weakness there is about being a man.

  In fact, I went through a time of trying to be that way myself, because it seemed that was the way men were supposed to be. I talked hard and tried to make the riders and the stationmen think I was just as tough as any of them. And I guess, too, I figured that was about the only way to get by out there. If those fellows started thinking you were soft, they’d make no end of trouble for you.

  No matter what I started thinking about out on that trail, though, I always came back to Pa
. At first I thought he was a little like Billy—tough and not talking too much. And then I began to realize that maybe I had some of that in me, too, and that part of why him and me hadn’t talked much had to do with me, not him.

  One day I was riding along—I think it must have been toward the middle of October, because it was cooler and I felt a bit of a chill in the air. I was thinking about Pa, like I did a lot, and about Hammerhead’s saying that everybody out here was running away from something.

  Suddenly the thought struck me: What if I was running away by joining the Pony Express—just like Pa and Uncle Nick did when they left Bridgeville? What if I was trying to avoid facing what I needed to, just like I always figured Pa’d done?

  I didn’t like thinking that way. But I had left my family behind, just like he did—a family that cared for me and was probably worried about me.

  But no, I thought. My own case was totally different. I was a man now. I had a right to be out on my own. I wasn’t running from anything. I was facing my life on my own. Pa had run away from the trouble facing him. I was not doing that. I wasn’t afraid of danger.

  Then I got to thinking about what it was like, as a kid, back in Bridgeville after Pa had left with Uncle Nick. Word got out that they’d been in a gang and got put in jail and then broke out. And not long after that I started having trouble at school, with other kids calling me names and making fun of me on account of Pa. Ma didn’t believe the rumors, and she told us not to pay no attention to them, neither. But I couldn’t help it.

  And then I started thinking on one particular day back when I was about ten years old. No matter how hard I tried during the years after that, I could not erase the bitter memory of what happened that day. But I never told anyone about it, not even Ma. I kept it inside all these years, trying to make myself forget. But it still seemed as clear as yesterday as I remembered it that day on the Pony Express trail.

  It happened just at the end of a school day. The big bell had just been sounding, and I was thinking of the plans I’d made to take little Tad fishing. He was just such a little tyke and looked up to me almost like I was a man, though I was just a little boy still. I can’t remember why, but I was the last one to leave the classroom. Even the teacher had already left—I thought everyone had. But as I walked out and down the steps, suddenly somebody stuck out a leg and tripped me.