Buffalo Summer

by Nadia Nichols

  “Whoa!” Caleb said, alarmed at the thought of losing such a phenomenal cook and housekeeper. “They’re Steven Young Bear’s nephews. They’re his sister’s children. You like Steven.”

  Ramalda turned and slammed the frying pan down on the woodstove, cut a big chunk of lean salt pork into it and turned again, wielding the knife as if she intended to use it on Caleb. “Six Indians here, I queeet,” she repeated emphatically.

  “Well, it’s too late. I’ve already hired them,” Caleb said. “But I’d sure hate to lose you, Ramalda. I can’t imagine coming into this kitchen and not having you cussing me out in Spanish or feeding me those delicious meals. Look at me. I’m getting fat.” He glanced down and felt a twinge of alarm at the truth of his words. “I guess maybe it would be better for my waist if you left, but I’d sure hate it. I hope you stay. You’re important to this place. We need you here, and Jessie’s coming home soon. It would be awful if you weren’t here for her wedding to Guthrie.”

  Jessie. That name had been enough to melt Ramalda’s stern visage. She turned back to the stove to stir the sizzling pork with the point of her knife and never said another word about quitting. Maybe she remembered that Jessie was part Indian, too; that Jessie’s father had been a half-breed, and that the history of the Bow and Arrow had been linked with Native Americans since the very beginning.

  Or maybe she’d really quit when Pony and her five boys came in three weeks. “You’re looking mighty pensive,” Bernie said, sliding a piece of apple pie in front of him. “Thinking about what having five kids stampeding around the place will be like?”

  Caleb picked up his fork and grinned. “I’m thinking about all the work we’ll get done this summer,” he said, feeling another twinge at this half-truth and recalling Badger’s troubling prophecy. “One good boy can do the work of half a man,” the old cowboy had said when Caleb told him about the new hires. “But two boys? Put two boys together and they’re worthless. Five, you say? Hell, boss, I don’t even want to think about it.”

  Five boys. Caleb forked a piece of apple pie into his mouth and savored the blend of tart apples and spices and tender crust. Five boys…and one very intimidating young woman, Oo-je-ne… He shook his head and gave up. Pony. Strange name, but a whole lot easier to say. Put all of them together with a herd of buffalo rampaging across the ranch… Caleb laid his fork down and pushed the plate away, overwhelmed with a sudden surge of anxiety.

  In three weeks the summer would begin, and quite suddenly he was dreading it.

  PONY WASN’T SURE how the boys would take the news that she had hired out their services for the summer. She was especially leery of Roon, the latest of the five to have taken refuge in her little shack on the edge of the Big Horn foothills. Roon was an introvert with so much anger and confusion bottled up that Pony sometimes feared he would explode. She had taught him in her third-grade class. He had been like the others then, a normal nine-year-old on the brink of discovering the universe. Now he was thirteen and the world was his enemy. Four years had passed. What had happened? She had not pried. When he’d shown up one cold snowy night on her doorstep, she’d stood aside and let him in. He had been there since December, a quiet brooding presence who listened to the lessons she gave the others but did not participate.

  One of the rules of her household was that any child she took in had to learn the lessons she taught and eventually take the GED. It was a fair trade. Since she had been living on the reservation in the capacity of teacher and unofficial foster parent, she had launched four young people into far more promising futures than they might have had the opportunity to explore otherwise. Two of them had gone on to college, a major triumph for her. The other two had taken mining jobs off the reservation, and she still had contact with all of them on a regular basis.

  So what of Roon? How would she ever reach him, turn him around, make him obey the rules she laid down? She had threatened repeatedly to throw him out, but in the end she never did. Where would he go? His own parents had left the reservation. They had leased their land allotment to a white farmer and gone to Canada, to live on a Cree reservation where the wife had blood relatives. They had taken the younger children with them. Roon had stayed with Pony, and she did not have the heart to displace him.

  But would he work willingly for Caleb McCutcheon? That, and so much more, remained to be seen. She would tell the boys about the job, and if they didn’t want to go to the ranch, they could return to their own families for the summer. That was fair.

  But the boys were not at Nana’s place. “They took your uncle’s old truck,” Nana said, sitting in her rocker and smoking one of her acrid-smelling hand-rolled cigarettes. “Went back home.”

  “But none of them can drive. None of them even have licenses!”

  Nana shook her head, her deeply wrinkled face impassive. “They went home.”

  Pony drove the five miles to her little house much too fast, but the tribal police were not on patrol. She spied no wrecked vehicles along the way, and was relieved to see Ernie’s truck parked safely in her yard. She ran up the steps and burst into the kitchen. The boys, four of them, were crowded around the table, eating peanut butter sandwiches and drinking cans of soda.

  “Where’s Roon?” she said.

  “In the back room,” Jimmy replied, mouth full of sandwich. “Nana gave him a book to read.”

  “Who took Ernie’s truck? Who drove here?”

  “Dan did,” Jimmy said. “Nana said we had to leave.”

  Pony looked at Dan. “Why?”

  Dan’s dark eyes dropped and he lifted his shoulders. Pony looked at Joe. “Why did she tell you to leave?”

  “We took her tobacco,” he said. “We told her we’d replace it.”

  “Yes, you will,” Pony said grimly. “Right now. Let’s go.”

  “We already smoked what we took,” Martin said, staring at her ruefully through his thick glasses. “It’s gone. But we’ll get her more. Don’t worry.”

  “How? By stealing it from someone else? You promised me you wouldn’t smoke, but I never thought I would have to make you promise not to steal.” Pony sat down and dropped her head in her hands. There was a long moment of quiet around the table. She raised her head and studied each boy in turn. “Right now I think I should open the door and ask you all to leave. Right now I feel as if all of you have betrayed me.” She drew a deep steadying breath. “Right now I am very angry, so I am going to take Ernie’s truck back to Nana’s and then walk home. That will give me some time to think about things.”

  She stood up from the table and left her little house and the silence of the four boys that filled it.

  THE SECOND WEEK in June came faster than it should have, and Caleb glanced at the calendar on his way out the kitchen door. He paused, coffee cup in hand, to look at the scrawl that was written on this date. “Five boys/Pony” was a memo that he had made, but in another hand was written, “Day I quit!!!” The word quit was underlined strongly three times. He glanced to where Ramalda stood at the kitchen sink, washing the breakfast dishes. The brightly colored bandanna she always wore covered most of her white hair, but a few strands lay on her shoulders. A wave of affection warmed him, and he shook his head with a faint grin and pushed through the door, stepping onto the porch where his ranch manager waited patiently. He looked for the little cow dog who was never very far from Guthrie Sloane.

  “Where’s Blue?”

  “Left her to home. Figured you’d be wantin’ to ride after the buffalo.”

  “You figured right. There are ten old cows and one huge bull out there, and we have no idea where they are. It would be nice to be able to tell my buffalo expert that they’re still on the home range, but for all I know they’re halfway to Canada.” The sun wasn’t up quite yet but the horses were saddled and tied to the hitch rail. “If the last you saw of them was over on Silver Creek, maybe we should start there.”

  “I saw signs of them this past week near the head-waters of the Piney.”

/>   “That high up?”

  “Yessir.”

  Caleb drained the last of his cup and set it on the porch rail. “Let’s ride.”

  Guthrie’s halting footsteps followed Caleb’s down the porch steps. Caleb unwrapped Billy Budd’s rein from the rail and stepped into the saddle, wishing the old gelding’s legs were a little shorter or that his own legs were more flexible. It was a hard thing to look graceful while hauling his six-foot frame into the saddle. Still, he couldn’t complain. Guthrie was still so crippled up that he had to use the porch steps to mount his horse. That had to burn deep down inside, because Guthrie Sloane had been one of the best horsemen in Park County before that mare had fallen on him last October.

  The ranch manager was a hard man to read. He didn’t say much, didn’t reveal himself in long-winded conversations the way some people did. He was quiet and competent and he worked damn hard. Caleb liked him very much and counted himself very fortunate to have the skilled cowboy in his employ.

  “Steven’s sister is coming today,” he said, nudging Billy into a walk and giving him a loose rein.

  “The boys, too?” Guthrie said, falling in beside him.

  “As far as I know. I didn’t dare broach the subject at breakfast. Didn’t want to get Ramalda too upset.”

  “She cleaned the bedrooms yesterday.”

  Caleb’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”

  “I saw her bring out the rugs and hang ’em over the porch rail to air. Then she disappeared down the back hall carrying a whole bunch of clean bed linens, muttering away to herself.”

  “I’ll be damned. Maybe she isn’t going to quit after all.”

  “If Ramalda leaves, she knows Jessie’d never forgive her.”

  “No, I guess she wouldn’t,” Caleb agreed. “Speaking of Jessie, when’s she coming home? Classes must be over for her.”

  “Yessir, they are. She’s way ahead of where she thought she’d be, and the school has advanced her into senior-year studies.”

  “Does that mean she’s going to be graduating sooner than you thought?”

  “Yessir. She’s apprenticing with that horse doctor down in Arizona again to finish her credits.”

  “She’s down there now?”

  “Yessir. She’s there for the summer.”

  “Huh. Too bad she couldn’t come home for a little visit, but at least you got to see her at spring break. And she’ll be back in September. I assume she’s planning to be here for her own wedding.”

  “Oh, probably,” Guthrie said with a faint grin, smoothing his horse’s mane with one gloved hand. “She said she might.”

  They rode up along the creek to the place where a smaller tributary fed into it, then threaded through groves of Engelmann spruce and across high meadows of greening grass spangled with wildflowers. They caught sight of some cattle but no buffalo. After an hour they stopped to rest their horses on a high knoll from which they could survey the valley. The wind pushed tall, bunched-up clouds across the vast expanse of blue sky. “I’m buying the leases back,” Caleb said, leaning his forearm on the saddle horn. “The ones Jessie’s father had to sell. Ten thousand acres of leased land, most of it belonging to the Bureau of Land Management. That gives the whole ranch a footprint of fifteen thousand acres. Enough room to run us some buffalo.”

  “Damn,” Guthrie said. “That’s good news.”

  “I didn’t want to tell Jessie until it was a done deal.”

  “She’ll be real glad to hear about it.”

  “I paid too much for them, but the ranchers who sold them needed the money.”

  “Ranchers always need money,” Guthrie said, smoothing his horses mane with one gloved hand.

  Caleb nodded. “I guess. I know they think what I’m trying to do here is nuts, but how much crazier is it than what they’re doing—fighting a losing battle trying to raise enough cattle to make land payments when cattle prices keep falling?”

  “It’s the only way of life they know.”

  “How many buffalo do you figure we can run on fifteen thousand acres?”

  Guthrie’s gaze swept over the valley. He shook his head. “That’s a question for your buffalo girl,” he said. “In the meantime, we have ten cows and a bull to find, and five thousand acres to search. We’d best get at it.”

  PONY TURNED her old truck down the ranch road with a premonition of impending doom. Her hands gripped the steering wheel far more tightly than necessary. Jimmy and Roon shared the bench seat beside her. Roon sat pressed against the passenger door, staring broodily out the side window. Jimmy squeezed against him, trying to avoid the stick shift. Jimmy was the youngest at eleven. The other three boys rode in the back of the truck. Dan was fifteen, Martin and Joe were both fourteen. None of them was smiling, but all of them were clean and presentable, and all had agreed—albeit grudgingly—to be on their best behavior.

  Pony knew from past experience that their perception of what constituted best behavior was the reason why she was gripping the steering wheel so tightly. By the time she pulled up in front of the ranch house, her hands were so badly cramped that she had to sit for a moment rubbing them together. “Okay,” she said to Jimmy and Roon. “Now remember. Best behavior!”

  They both stared at her. Nodded. Roon wrenched his door open and dropped to the ground. Jimmy followed. The boys in back jumped out. Pony was the last to climb from the truck. She stood in the yard, looking up at the ranch house and then down toward the barn and corrals. The place was quiet. Peaceful. She could hear the flutelike song of a meadowlark and the distant bawl of a cow. The wind was moderate, warm and out of the south. The sky was a wide blue dome overhead, providing a vivid backdrop to the snowcapped peaks of the Beartooth Mountains. She drew in a lungful of sweet air and exhaled slowly, willing the tension from her body.

  The house door opened and an enormous figure emerged, carrying a broom. It was Ramalda, the Mexican woman who had shut the door in Pony’s face, and she looked as grim as ever. “Good morning,” Pony said. “I’ve come to see Mr. McCutcheon. We’re reporting for work.”

  Ramalda held the broom as if she wished it were a rifle. She scowled fiercely at the boys, who stood in a group, seeking safety in each other’s short midday shadow. “Work?” she said as if she had never heard the word before. She threw her head back and laughed. It was neither a long laugh nor a friendly one. She lowered her head and scowled at them again. “Come. Entra.” She turned and squeezed her body through the kitchen door, letting the screen bang shut behind her.

  “Get your things,” Pony said to the boys. She lifted her own small satchel out of the truck bed and climbed the porch steps. The last place in the world she wanted to be was inside that ranch house with that woman, but she squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, pulled open the screen door and stepped inside.

  The room she found herself in transported her into another time. There was almost no hint of modern life among the simple furnishings and wall cupboards, the huge wood-fired cookstove, the hand pump at the big slate sink, the oil lamps—some in their wall gimbals, others set on the table. Even the gas stove was an antique, a cream enamel with green and gold piping and the words White Star scrolled ornately across the oven door. It was a beautiful kitchen, and in spite of her initial trepidation, Pony felt instantly at home.

  Ramalda was standing by the sink with her hands on her hips, watching them with great suspicion. “You’re hungry,” she accused.

  Pony shook her head. “If you could just show us where to put our things, we can get right to work.”

  She was afraid Ramalda would laugh at them again, but instead she turned and walked out of the kitchen and into a back hallway that ran the length of the rambling ranch house and exited at the far end of the porch. Pony and the boys followed. Off the hallway were several doors. She pushed the first one open. “This is my room,” she said, and before they could glimpse inside, she pulled the door shut again with a sharp bang. “My room,” she repeated. She led them to the next door and o
pened it, turning to Pony. “Your room.” Pony stepped inside, followed closely by all five boys. It was a small room, perhaps ten by sixteen feet, papered in an antique rose print of pinks and greens, with a double bed, a bureau, a chair and a mirror hung above the dresser. A braided rug fit neatly between the bed and the bureau, and a narrow door opened onto a little closet. Pony set her satchel on the chair and smiled.

  “It’s very nice,” she said, and the boys all nodded in solemn agreement.

  Ramalda led them down the hall and opened yet another door. This room was a third again the size of Pony’s and had two sets of bunk beds on opposite walls and a twin bed set beneath the single window. The boys looked around at the plain whitewashed walls hung with old cowboy prints, the well-worn desk and chair, the one tall bureau, the small closet. A braided rug similar to the one in Pony’s room graced the floor between the sets of bunk beds. The boys laid their duffels down on the bunks, each choosing by order of rank. Roon, Pony noticed, though not the oldest, chose first, and he picked the bed beneath the window. Dan and Martin took the top bunks, Jimmy and Joe got the bottom.

  The next room they were shown was the bathroom. It was small, basic, no bathtub, just a shower. Clean, Pony noticed. The entire place was spanking clean. The Mexican woman might not care to host a passel of Crow Indians, but she was a good housekeeper.

  Ramalda led them back to the kitchen. “You eat now,” she said gruffly, motioning for them to sit. Pony stood for a moment in indecision, wondering if their hunger was that obvious, and then nodded to the boys, who immediately dropped into five chairs. Pony slowly followed suit. Ramalda then served them a meal that could have fed Pony and the boys for a week. It began with a thick spicy stew of lamb, onions, beans and chili peppers ladled into deep colorful Mexican bowls and set before them with big bone-handled soupspoons on the side. A platter of fresh soft tortillas, still warm, was plunked down in the middle of the table, along with a brimming pitcher of cold milk and six tall glasses. The savory aroma of the stew overcame the awkwardness of the moment. They glanced respectfully at the strange old woman who stood by the stove and watched them eat with a fixed scowl on her face.