by Nancy Radke
“You looking for a job?”
“Got one. Going there.”
“Where?”
She sure was full of questions, for having refused me water earlier. “Here abouts. I got to find the place. Gent told me to go to his ranch and wait.”
“What was his name?”
“James Cummings.”
“My pa.” She looked me up and down. “Why’d he hire you?”
She made it sound like I was the last person she’d ever hire and I wondered if I was even going to get a chance at this job. “I can calculate. Man wanted someone to keep his books for a spell.”
“Elmer does our bookkeeping.”
“Man said Elmer’s eyes were failing him.”
“I don’t know about that.” She looked down at the ground. “I can’t read. Or write.” She sounded like it was a flaw in her character.
“You’re never too old to learn.”
“For a fact?” It was the most interest she’d shown so far.
“Right. I’ll teach you.” Maybe then she wouldn’t be so prickly. “Didn’t they have a school near here?”
“Not where I was. Take your horse to the barn. I don’t know when Pa will be back.”
I led Hero to the barn. He walked along behind me, right happy. “They caught the man they were after,” I said, as I opened the gate.
She brightened at hearing that. “Did they string him up?”
“No. The kid wanted to.”
“My cousin? I don’t blame him. That man killed his pa. My uncle.”
“Did anyone see it?”
“Yes. My aunt and I. He’d robbed the store and was being chased. He demanded my uncle’s horse, and shot him when he wouldn’t give it to him.”
“Why didn’t he get it saddled?”
“We saw it happen from the house and I grabbed my uncle’s rifle and put a shot near him. If I’d been a better shot, I’d have brought him down. He didn’t stay, just jumped on the horse and took off.”
We reached the barn and I led Hero in, removed my saddle and hung it on a rail that was there for that purpose. The barn was made of adobe, blocks of sun-dried mud that produced a cool but dark place for the livestock and grain storage. Poles supported the roof, which was finished off with cut blocks of sod.
I started rubbing Hero down. “You have any grease I could put on these wounds?”
“Yes.” She started to turn away, then turned back again. “Where are your spurs?”
“I don’t use spurs on Hero.”
“Then?” She looked puzzled and pointed to the deep spur marks on his side.
“Your murderer did that. He took my horse and left your uncle’s horse with me, half dead.”
“Oh.” She put her hand to her face, pushed back a stray lock of her long blond hair. “No wonder things weren’t making sense. I couldn’t understand why my father would hire a man who misused his horse.”
“I wouldn’t either.”
“Your horse had those terrible spur marks, yet you were wearing moccasins.”
“I wear ‘em when I have to walk.”
“I didn’t see you come in. So you were walking, not riding.”
“Your killer just about ruined your uncle’s horse, then took mine. I was chasing him when your pa showed up.” And he made a quick judgement, just like you did.
“Well, I’m glad that’s straight,” she said, and held out her hand. “Welcome to the C Bar C.”
She actually smiled and the change in the air around her was enormous.
“You thought I did this?” I motioned towards Hero’s legs and sides.
“Yes. Sorry.”
“No, don’t be. I should have said something. Especially after watching the show you put on. Impressive.”
“How long were you there?”
“She was running in circles around you. Where did you learn how to tame an animal like that?”
“My father showed me.”
“Most men don’t have the patience.”
“The main thing is to let them have their run. And never look them straight in the eyes. They don’t like that.”
“The piece of rope?”
“To keep them running until they’ve had their run out. Now I just need to get Misty to know what I want her to do.”
“Should be easy now.”
“Yes.” She handed me some ointment to put on Hero’s side. It looked like grease, but smelled like pitch.
“What is this?’
“Bear grease mixed with tree sap. It heals fast.”
I’d never tried it, but it was better ‘n nothing, so I smoothed a little on the deep cuts the outlaw’s spurs had made.
“What’s your name,” she asked.
“My full name is Matthew Joseph Mason Trahern.”
“Now that’s a handle to live up to. Are there any more of you out there?”
“Lots of us. Or at least everyone who survived the war. I know my cousin Trey was a major on the Union side. I don’t know if Trey is alive, but I’d bet he made it. Traherns are hard to kill.”
I got Hero cleaned up and bedded down with a scoop of grain for supper. He ate that, then lay down in that hay like he would sleep till Monday.
I helped her feed and water the horses. “What’s your name?” I asked as she led the way to the house.
“Dawn.”
“That’s a beautiful name.”
“Thank you. My father chose it. He said my hair reminded him of the golden streaks of sunshine in the sky just before sunrise.”
The ranch house was like most, showing that it had been built small, then added onto. It was sprawling, built out and not up. It was pretty impressive for this area but would have been looked down on from southern plantation standards.
She gathered the milk buckets and milked the three cows while I fed the rest of the livestock, some pigs and goats and chickens, then helped her carry the buckets of milk back to the house. She strained the milk through some cloth and put the full jars into the cooler.
The leftover milk we carried back down to the pigpen and poured it into a narrow trough as slop to the hogs.
She did it all with the ease of habit, and we were just finished when two riders appeared.
“That’s John and Lewis,” she said, speaking for the first time in a while. “They’ve been checking the amount of pasture left up river.” She watched them ride closer. “You can bunk with them.”
“Thank you.”
“We’ll eat as soon as they’re ready.”
I put my gear into the bunkhouse, cleaned up, and joined the two men as they came in for supper. Dawn put out some good cooking, and I wondered anew why she wasn’t married.
I was attracted to the quietness of her, and the grace with which she did things. Had her pa not liked her suitors, or had she run them all off, treating them like she had me? Or had she loved a man who got killed in the war? There were many war widows in the land.
One more thing was a puzzlement. The men called her Marianne and she answered to it.
They also bossed her around with a lack of the respect they should’ve showed any woman, much less the boss’ daughter. I was getting my curiosity all worked up, but knew better than to say anything while I was new here. After dessert of dried apple pie, the men sauntered down to the bunkhouse for a game of poker.
They invited me, but I begged off, saying I had no money. The sun was setting and I needed to get some sleep. I was looking forward to that bed.
“We’ll play you for that horse of yourn,” Lewis said.
“And your saddle,” John added.
“Then I wouldn’t have nothing, would I?” I said and moved over to sit by the fire they had going in a small pot-bellied stove. “Count me out.”
Now one thing my Ma taught me, was to not put on airs. She told me when I speak to folks who hadn’t much education, I should slip in a little of my Tennessee mountain talk, so they’d feel comfortable. I’d done it all my life and it came more natural t
o me than speaking like I had me an education.
I watched them deal the cards. “I’ve got me a question, fellas,” I said. “Why do you call her Marianne? She said her name was Dawn.”
3
“Dawn?” John laughed with a scornful snicker. “That’s her Injun name. Her real name’s Marianne. I bet she didn’t tell you about herself, did she?”
“No.” I didn’t know if I wanted to hear it from him.
He volunteered the information anyway. “She got herself caught by Injuns when she was about five years old. They had her to themselves until she was thirteen. Some soldiers out on patrol spotted her yeller hair and rescued her. She didn’t want to come back. Can you imagine that?”
“Yes.” I could. Dawn had adapted to her new life. This would be a strange way of living now.
“The first time she started one of those Injun chants, her pa knocked her clean across the room. He wasn’t going to have any of her redskin ways. That’s why she’s not married. No one wants her, her and her strange ways. She’s dumb. She don’t even know her letters.”
I bet she could read sign though, and tame a wild horse using just her presence. She would know how to live off the land, where to find water in a dry desert and how to skin a deer.
John didn’t know how wrong he was. Rather than putting her down, he had just made her more attractive to me. Where I planned to go, no gently bred woman would survive. She would have to be as strong as the Texas prairie.
“Thanks for the information. I’ll take it into consideration.” I also neglected to tell him that my grandmother was part Cherokee.
It told me why Dawn was interested in my footwear. Most men wouldn’t wear moccasins, but I found them sturdy, comfortable and incredibly silent when stalking an animal. They weren’t made to ride a saddle in, since they had no heels to keep your foot from passing through the stirrup and getting you dragged to death. The rider’s boot is thin soled so you can feel the stirrup, and the heel keeps you alive.
“Mr. Cummings told me to break that young filly while he was gone. I figure she’ll put on quite a show. You wanna watch?” John asked me.
“Is that the one with the white snip on her nose?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Nothing. Just wondering.”
I shut up. While you are getting the feel of a place it pays to keep your mouth shut and your ears open.
The next morning during breakfast, John described how he broke a horse. He tied up one foot, so the horse could only use three legs, then rode it until it gave up.
“You’ll ruin a fine horse that way,” I said, noticing the anguish on Dawn’s face. “Why don’t you let me ride her first?”
“Are you a bronc buster?”
“No. I just like horses. Why I bet I can ride that animal without a buck.”
The bet had him considering me. Dawn looked about to cry when he announced his plan to ride, and after his description, I knew why she had broke the filly herself. She’d done it while everyone was gone, which told me that no one around here took kindly to her Indian ways. Some of their ways didn’t work in our world, but some did, and that way of gentlin’ a horse worked.
“What’ll you bet? You said you didn’t have money.”
I pulled out my knife, which I had won from a soldier from Kentucky, a long, slender-bladed toad-stabber.
“What’ll you put up?” I asked.
He thought about it for awhile.
“That two dollar gold piece I won off’n Lewis last night.”
“All right.” I wondered how often that had changed hands.
We all went down to the corral and John drove the filly in, yelling at her to make her skittish.
Lewis shook out a loop, ready to catch her. I pictured that filly with the noose tightening around her neck, going berserk from fright, and stopped him.
“Don’t bother,” I said, and motioned him back on the rails.
“Don’t look the horse in the eye,” Dawn had told me, so picking up the short piece of rope she had left there, I walked up to the filly’s shoulder, slow and quiet like, keeping my hands down and looking at her shoulder and not into her eyes. She let me come, snorting a little when I rubbed my hand on her shoulder, then up and down her neck. I talked to her some more, hoping she’d respond to me like she had to Dawn. I could tell the moment she relaxed, as she took her weight off one foot.
I eased the rope around her neck, fashioned it into a rope halter, and then led her over to my saddle.
Blanket, then saddle. I set it on gently, rather than throwing it on. Dawn had not used a bit, so I just left my halter on her and climbed aboard. She looked around at me, like she wondered what I was doing up there. But she didn’t buck.
John suddenly jumped off the corral fence and yelled at us, waving his hat. The filly jumped sideways, then spun around and looked at him. She was quivering and I put my hand on her neck to steady her, talking low. One ear flicked back, the other cocked toward John.
“Back off,” I told John. “That wasn’t in the bet.”
“You been riding her?” John demanded.
“No. Absolutely not.”
“I don’t believe it.” Lewis said. “We jist brought her off the range the day the boss left.”
“I only got here yesterday,” I said. “Late afternoon. Just before you rode in.”
“What did Cummings hire you for?”
“To keep the books.”
The expression on his face was comical. Nothing added up and I wasn’t about to help him. I figured if Dawn wanted them to know what she’d been doing, she would tell them.
“Walk in front of her, give her someone to follow,” I told him.
He turned and walked around the corral while I urged the filly to follow. She was a smart girl and picked up the rein signals right away. I worked with her for a half hour, then got off.
“If that don’t beat all,” John said. “Who’d a thought it?” He pulled out the gold piece and handed it to me.
“I ain’t never seed anythin’ like it,” Lewis said.
Dawn was standing behind them, a smile on her face. She winked at me. I had no idea why she didn’t want the credit, but it seemed to be so. I took off my saddle and turned the filly loose.
The rest of the day I took one of the ranch horses out and got the lie of the land. Cummings had a big ranch with the Rio Brazos providing plenty of water as it meandered past. I’d never seen so many streams that couldn’t make up their minds which way they wanted to go as I’d seen in Texas. My Tennessee rivers had all been in a hurry to get somewhere, dropping down the mountains as fast as a hawk swooping in to catch a rabbit.
The saddle creaked as I shifted my weight. A creaky saddle meant the leather was getting dry. I needed to take it apart, clean it and oil it. I’d never had my saddle creak and I wasn’t about to start in now. It gave you away when you were hunting or being hunted. It was a sign of a careless horseman. While I was waiting for Cummings to return, I’d clean it up. I would also check Hero’s shoes.
After supper, the two riders took off towards the bunkhouse and I lagged behind with Dawn, helping her clear off the table.
“What’s with the secrecy? I take it you don’t want them to know what you did?”
“They think I’m strange. Anything that I do that don’t fit in with their ideas, they scorn. Thank you for not telling them.”
“You’re welcome, ma’am. I thought it a thing of beauty, the way you worked that horse. They missed out.”
“Pa, too. Don’t tell him.” There was fear in her voice and I wondered why she should fear her pa in this. Hadn’t she just told me earlier that her father was the one who had taught her how to train horses?
I looked at her, trying hard to live in two worlds. “Would you like to learn to read, ma’am?”
“Yes!” She said it with an intensity that only those who can’t read feel.
“Then come outside.”
I walked over to the horse trough, to w
here the water had leaked out and formed mud. I picked up a piece of wood, just barely more than a shaving, and scratched in the mud.
“Our language is written with letters. This one is an A.” I drew it on the ground. So is this and this.” I drew the small letters, printed and written. “Just different forms of the same letter.”
It was the way my mother had taught me. I learned to read and write at the same time. Mom let us kids make letters out of clay and even bread dough. We didn’t have pens and paper much, and she wasn’t going to waste them on teaching.
She had taught us the most important letters first, as parts of words, so that’s what I did with Dawn.
“It’s a type of sign language, just more complicated than what you’ve seen.” I picked up some clay and formed an A. “Try it this way, if you want to.”
She formed an A, then a little a.
I wrote her name, Dawn, then asked her to form it in clay. She did, and I told her the names of the letters.
It took us all of five minutes. I don’t know why anyone hadn’t taken the time with her before and said as much.
“My pa tried, but he used a pen and paper and the words just ran all over the paper. These stay still.” She waved at the clay letters. “I can see these. I think I can remember them, too.”
“Then do them this way. It’s how I learned.”
“D A W N.” She smiled and stroked the letters carefully as she said their names. “Thank you.”
I nodded. “We can add a few every day. I can show you numbers, too.”
She smiled even more broadly, the light sparkling in her eyes. She was beautiful and I caught my breath. The loveliness of her face, the grace of her movements entwined me like a cowboy’s loop dropped over the head of a stray.
The stillness that had spoken to the filly now spoke to me and bonded me to her as if I was a wild horse she meant to tame.
I shook my head to deny the spell she cast over me. I was my own man. I was headed for the far western lands. To take anyone with me, much less a woman, was not in my plans.
And yet this woman...with her I might consider it.
“Goodnight,” I told her, and headed for the bunkhouse.
Inside, John and Lewis were still talking about the filly. I washed my hands and face, pulled off my boots and was asleep before I lay down.