Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  Most of the hands Basque or not are down at the sheep pens, but close to the barn a single wrangler pits himself against a piebald horse in a small corral. The horse is not especially large, perhaps fourteen hands, but feisty and quick as a cat. The wrangler has a saddle on the ground, hobbles and a burlap sack tucked through the back of his belt. A lariat whirls in his hand.

  A snubbing post stands like a mile marker in the center and horse and man circle this post like two equal but opposite hunters around the same fallen prey. The horse eyes the lariat, seems to know not to give the man a clear throw.

  Twice the wrangler pitches his loop, and twice the horse runs clear. The wrangler mutters and reels his rope and whirls again. He does not acknowledge the presence of the boy at the rail.

  The wrangler narrows the gap between himself and the snubbing post, and the horse turns slightly away. John H can smell ammonia, hear the dim bleat of sheep in the distance. The man moves to the right, gathers his loop and fishes the burlap from his belt. He lunges and snaps the sack at the horse’s face, and the horse shies and bolts for the fence, spies the boy and bolts the other direction.

  So the wrangler did know he was there.

  The loop floats over the horse’s head, wobbles like a bubble on the breeze. The mustang feels the scratch of the rope and twists and avoids it again, this time by a hair. The wrangler throws a shouting fit, kicking dirt and flinging his hat on the ground.

  Laughter erupts behind John H and he jumps like a pinched girl.

  “Easy, sonny. Stay in your skin. Come on out, Clive. Let that bronc simmer down.”

  Clive clamps his hat back and lugs saddle and rope to the side. He straddles the rail, sweat rolling from his temples. The horse peers again around the snubbing post.

  “That’s a live one.”

  “Told you she would be.” The ranch manager looks down at John H. “I prefer a little fire.”

  John H nods.

  “Your benefactor tells me you got no folks. That how it is?”

  “Near enough.”

  “Tells me you’re some hand with horses yourself.”

  John H says nothing.

  “Know anything about cow horses?”

  John H shakes his head. “Thoroughbreds. Mostly.”

  The wrangler snorts.

  The manager shoots him a look, then studies the piebald mare. “Pound for pound, a few weeks in this country and that little paint’d run a thoroughbred underground.”

  “Probably so.”

  “Bakar wants to keep you with him. Not sure I can let him.”

  John H stays silent.

  “Reckon he likes the notion of having a son around. Can’t say I blame him. I’ve put in quite some effort for a son myself. So far what I’ve managed to throw is a whole passel of daughters. A regular Henry the Eighth.”

  Clive laughs from the fence.

  “How old are you, exactly?”

  “Sixteen this fall,” John H lies.

  “That a fact.” The man seems amused but certainly not hoodwinked. “Small for your age. Don’t let it worry you none. You’ll fill out. Thing about Bakar, now—he ain’t getting any younger. I’m half tempted to let him take you along.”

  John H looks at him. “You don’t have to pay me.”

  “Yeah, I know that. For your own edification, you don’t want to toss that out this early in the bargaining. Play a little closer to the vest. Thing is, even if I don’t salary you, I’ve still gotta feed you. I know Bakar’s some able to rustle grub in the sticks, but staples is staples. There’s bread for one and there’s bread for two, and what there ain’t in life is any kind of a free lunch.

  “What’s more there’s men coming off the rails in Miles every day looking for work, full-growed men and boys not much older but a damn sight more filled out than you are. When they come around I generally point ’em to the mines over in Butte, or the cannery in Bozeman.”

  He holds up his hands, a gesture of such-is-life futility.

  “Look. I don’t mind a risk, but I need to know you’re some kind of asset. A quick study at the minimum. We’ll be shearing for a few days, before the herders head back out to pasture. I’ll give you that time to prove yourself. Fair enough?”

  “What about that mare in there.”

  The manager had assumed they were finished and he’d turned to leave but now he stops short. The horse in question has never ceased watching them, the post still between them. She bats an ear at the bawling sheep, and turns it forward again. “What about her?”

  “Wouldn’t mind working with her. See if I can gentle her down.”

  “Gentle her down. And how much time you figure to waste on that?”

  John H lifts one shoulder. “Long as it takes. Overnight, anyway.”

  Clive snorts again, snorts as though he has truly heard it all.

  The manager shakes his head. “You got sand. I’ll give you that.”

  “Say I do it. What then.”

  “Son if you could tame a wild mare in one day I doubt very highly you’d be standing in my barnyard.”

  “Say I tame her.”

  “All right, say you do. Then I will put you on salary.”

  John H wiggles through the rails and sits in the dirt in the corral. “I need a tub of water, and a rope. Not a stiff one like a lariat, just a soft length of rope.”

  “A tub of water.”

  Though the mare eyes him nervously John H looks not at the horse but at the horizon, at the angular bench of red earth interrupting the sky to the north. “There’s no trough in this pen. I need something she can drink from.”

  The two men stare at this boy for a bit, each contemplating the unspoken absurdity they are not simply witnessing but have somehow become accomplice to. Finally the manager seals their fate. “Well, go on.”

  Clive gives him a look. “Go on and what?”

  “Go on and fetch him his water.”

  The kid hasn’t moved much by suppertime. Jean Bakar brings him a plate of food, a slab of beefsteak covered in a low mound of kidney beans, pickled beets the color of a deer’s heart fanned like a rind on one side. A battered galvanized tub sits inside the corral, situated so the tub, the kid, and the horse form the points of a triangle.

  The horse has relaxed her guard in the previous hours, assumed a posture in part of curiosity. Several times she has called out loudly for others of her kind, her cry brassy and desperate. The call has not been returned. She has not ventured to the water though she knows it’s there. She will look away, and always look back to the boy.

  Jean Bakar asks if he should push the plate over with a stick. At this new commotion the mare once again squares off behind the snubbing post.

  John H stands and lets the blood come to his feet. He rubs his knee, kinks and unkinks his leg. He takes the plate through the rails, his first fresh beef in a coon’s age. When he walks across the pen to the water tub he can feel the mare’s eyes upon him, tracking him across the lot. He dips one hand into the tub and he drinks.

  With the solstice only a few weeks away the sun is still hours from setting, the evening bearing yet the sharp heat of afternoon. He looks at Jean Bakar as he walks back to his station. “Can I have my blanket?”

  In the new light of morning Clive walks down to the corral, sloshes hot coffee over his fingers and with a wince and an oath turns and heads back for the offices.

  The manager ambles down. John H stands by the piebald mare, his length of rope fashioned into a hackamore, which now resides on the horse’s head. He holds the headstall beneath the mare’s chin with one hand, the trailing rope with the other. The horse flares at the sight of the man, and the boy calms her with his voice.

  “Well,” says the manager. “I don’t see no saddle on her.”

  “Tame,” says the boy.

  “How’s that?”

  “You said tame. Nobody said saddled.”

  The manager stands on the lower rail and crosses his arms on the upper, and from here looks d
own on the discarded heap of the kid’s blanket, the flat spot in the soil where he spent much of the night. He spies something else—scratchings in the smoothed-out earth, the curved backs and high heads of horses. Not simple doodlings but closer to proper likenesses. He says, “You got me there, sonny.”

  A day later in Miles City John H receives two new sets of clothes at a dry-goods store, crisp indigo dungarees and long-sleeved work shirts and a pair of properly fitted eight-eyed lacers for his feet. A straw hat for the summer sun. With this accomplished Jean Bakar turns him loose on the corner of Main and Seventh and departs for an hour on his own errands.

  John H looks down the buildings with their antique fronts and hitching rails, saddled horses tethered here and there between parked Reos and Model-T Fords and one gigantic Packard sedan, gleaming like the eye in a jeweler’s loupe.

  John H wanders a half block toward the green line of the river, the concrete sidewalk foreign beneath the soles of his stiff new boots. A brick building across the road catches his eye, its twin upper windows gaping above the wide lip of an awning. The letters AL. FURSTNOW’S SADDLERY. The Packard glides by and he crosses.

  A bell on the door chimes when he enters, the smell of saddle leather dense and sweet as the meat of a nut. A hammer taps in back. A moment later a man in a leather apron emerges, the hammer still dangling from his hand. It does not seem to dawn on him that here is only a kid. “Help you out with something?”

  “I’m hired on with the Meyer outfit.”

  “In off the range, are you? Got some new duds?”

  He nods.

  “Looking to buy a rig?”

  John H scans the stock of stiff new display saddles with their tall pommels and almond-colored fenders. Minor variations in cantle design and horn shape and tooling. A single black parade saddle, heavily bedizened with latigo and silver pendants. John H ignores this and walks over to a simple working outfit with a deep seat and a double cinch, a small steel horn perched atop the pommel like the arching neck of a swan. He runs his fingers across a star stamped into the leather of the seat. A circle inside the star bears the Furstnow name, also the number 215. John H looks at the proprietor and says, “Someday.”

  Decades earlier with the bones of the great bison herds glinting in the sun the first large droves of beef cows trailed in out of Oregon and Texas. Fortunes were staked on these natives of European bog and fen, loosed on an endless swath of ripe Montana wheatgrass, the same fortunes shortly and summarily gutted by a single, epic winter.

  Thirty-nine years after Jean Bakar Arrieta drifted into Montana he still can hear the brogue of the Scot who hired him, the Scot ceaselessly expounding on that season as though the winter of ’86 was a tour of combat seared permanently on his soul.

  Whiteouts. Rivers of ice. Snow and stiff cows, piled to the rims of the coulees. “A vast and empty middle continent, ripe with agricultural promise. A stockman’s paradise.”

  Well. By the spring of ’87 that notion looked about as fruitful as the staves of a rib cage, juttin’ from a rottin’ bank of snow. What money remained went into sheep.

  By the close of the century cattle reigned once again, if not in actual numbers then certainly in the currency of romance. Cowboys were king, sheepherders roughly equivalent to railroad coolies, practitioners of a low task suited mainly to the brown of skin. Long months living out of a tent wagon, coddling dull-witted sheep and pining for homeland and companionship.

  He tells the boy he came to this vastness from his own land-poor nation, to work and to save American money, and then to return. Buy a plot, marry a farm girl or a fisherman’s daughter. Sire a brood. Now he has overstayed by forty years and has little to his name. This does not come across as grumbling.

  Jean Bakar teaches the boy to read the country on behalf of sheep, to locate grass and water, when to prod them and when to let them be. He teaches him to set a snare or a deadfall, to tell wild onion from death camas. To brew proper coffee in the enamel pot.

  Up in the aspens bordering high summer pasture Jean Bakar takes a blade and scores words and symbols into the skin of silver trees. John H follows him and sees he is not the first. The grove is a gallery, names and dates and renditions. Other carvers have left messages one to another, some in decades long past so the girth of the trunk has stretched or scarred the lines of the original carvings into shapes and texts inscrutable.

  Bakar busies himself with his knife while John H wanders. He sees stars everywhere, crosses here and there. Terse messages, none in English. Rudimentary carvings of four legged mammals and what appears to be a woman’s naked torso, with an oversized bosom and no head. Nearby a set of arcing lines cross and curve and cross again to form a narrow slot. He sees this image repeated in other places and has the odd feeling that somewhere within him he knows how to interpret it, has known it deep within the twists of some dream, its meaning clear while he slept and even now only barely beyond the grip of his wakening mind.

  Jean Bakar has carved another object, a sort of swastika composed not of hard angles but gentle, looping hooks. “Lauburu,” he says. “Basque cross.” Below it he forms the word Bilbao.

  He waves his hand to take in the glade. “Some of these men I know only through the trees. In this grove, or in many others like this. Across the West, wherever there are aspens. Some of these messages pertain to water, some to grass. Pasturage.”

  He grins at the boy, a look of mischief. “Many pertain to women, for it is a lonely life. Some of us left sweethearts behind. Betrothals.” The grin turns to something else. “Some of us never got so far as that.”

  He waves again at the tree, its green meat laid bare. A crude tattoo. “Some of us, this is all the mark we are going to make.”

  In 1934 another cataclysm, not a force of nature but legislation. The Taylor Grazing Act soughs out of Washington like a breeze, strikes the high plains like a hurricane.

  For decades the expanses of Wyoming and Nevada, Oregon and Montana have borne the tracks of free-ranging cattle and sheep, also the bristly contention between husbanders of same. Cattlemen maintain that sheep destroy grass, that their hooves leave a taint offensive to cattle. At times the competition becomes downright lethal, with shootouts at watering holes and beatings in saloons.

  With the stroke of a pen the free range ends. Public land may now be fenced and regulated, grazing rights granted to a single leaseholder. For Jean Bakar and John H and ten thousand others like them, the new law spells the end of their peripatetic ramblings.

  For Bakar especially this is disaster. Trailing sheep in the solitary wild is the only vocation he has known and he is not a young man. In the final weeks of their time in the mountains John H notices a new stoop to his shoulders, a dullness to his eye.

  John H is now legitimately sixteen years old, lean as an ax handle and tall as he will ever be. He finds himself less sad than scared, worried the blow will make his friend crack the way his father cracked, worried that life will change too quickly to keep up.

  They drive the last band of sheep to the Miles City feedlots and Jean Bakar and John H and a roiling lot of fellow drovers collect their severance and with Prohibition ended divide themselves between the Range Riders and the Bison Bar and the Montana Bar on Main Street. When Jean Bakar asks John H which establishment strikes his fancy, John H replies, “How about the saddle shop.”

  Jean Bakar grins broadly for the first time in a month. He shakes his head and grips John H’s arm and tows him toward the Range Riders. “Later, rubio. Later.”

  John H is years from the legal drinking age but nobody seems to notice or care. He’s had bootlegged whiskey a time or two but never a cold beer. Somebody sets a frosted glass before him. He sniffs the amber fluid, can practically smell its chill. He takes a drink, wonders why such an icy marvel was ever against the law in the first place.

  Later with more of the stuff solid in his belly and light in his head he perceives he is the object of some discussion. Bakar is across the room leaning again
st the bar, talking to a handful of other Basques. He gestures toward John H a time or two, and the others laugh and look his way as well. A little later John H catches the eye of Clive, the ranch wrangler. Clive wags a finger as though scolding a puppy and John H mouths, What?

  His glass has remained empty for some time. He stands and steps toward the bar and makes it halfway before Jean Bakar and an entire throng catch him like a tide and pull him toward the door, empty glass still in his hand. “Not too drunk, rubio,” Jean Bakar tells him. “Only enough for courage.”

  Despite this John H assumes they will be making the rounds, heading forthwith to another saloon.

  Instead the pack steers him toward the river then down off the roadway to the looming forms of three houses in the trees. He sees the wink of a pond in the twilight, a flicker of red on the water from a bulb above a doorway. Through the mist in his head another light goes on. His heart begins to thump.

  The pack is ushered into the middle house by a hefty woman in a velvet dress, her tremendous bosom barely contained by the plunging neckline. She wears a pillbox hat with a fishnet veil and her voice booms when she speaks though for the life of him John H can’t retain a thing she’s said once the words are out of her mouth.

  They crowd into a parlor, all dim lighting and old-fashioned claw-foot furniture, and a line of girls forms as if by magic at one end of the room.

  At first he pays no attention to age or hair color or any other distinguishing feature, because not a one of them is close to properly clothed. Legs in stockings with garters that vanish beneath vague little shifts, bare shoulders crossed by the merest of silken straps. His eye zips from one cream-colored swath to another, lands for a second on the hypnotic shade of a woman’s cleavage and zips awkwardly away again.

  Finally he lands on a face and gives a start because he is looking at Cora.

  Not Cora herself but a girl who could well be her sister. Same black bob and arched black brows, but a red set to her mouth and a narrowness to her eyes entirely her own. She is certainly skeptical, possibly cruel, and he thinks all of this even as his eyes lock on to hers and she folds one lid closed in a bright blue wink.