by John Larison
“Don’t talk like that, Pa.”
“A husband will tend to you. A husband will look out for you best.”
“I ain’t leaving you, so don’t waste your breath.”
There was quiet for a time and again I thought him to be asleep. His voice stirred me. “Boys sometime or other fight their old man. It’s the order of the world. I’m only sorry you had to bear witness. I’m sorry I wasn’t keen enough to settle it before it rose up like it done. I ain’t been much of a man.”
“He is in the wrong,” I explained. I’d been waiting months to say it. “He forgot his place. You ain’t got nothing to apologize for.”
“Boys need to earn their own trust. That’s the way of this world. Same way that says a girl ought to be married and tending to her own children, not her old man. Your ma wouldn’t have you become a spinster.”
I considered what he was telling me between the words he was saying. “We need another man on the spread, is that it?”
Pa shrugged. “Some truth to that. But I want you to marry off. Rosa was never as happy as the days we arrived here together. That’s what I want for you.”
Her name from his lips shook me. “I’ll do better, Pa. I’ll do more. This here’s my place. Beside you. Don’t make me leave.”
He didn’t answer. He had drank more syrup and now his eyes was shut. I touched his shoulder but he didn’t stir. I put my fingers to his nose to ensure he was breathing. I covered him in the quilt.
* * *
—
Pa took two bottles of medicine with him that autumn when it was time to ride to market, and we drove our steers to the new rail line where we sold them in an afternoon at auction. I watched as rail men loaded the animals into a steel container bound for hungry mouths to the east. We wasn’t players here. Nobody turned to watch us pass. Some cowboys no older than Noah rode all the way from Texas with a thousand head. Pa leaned against the chute and looked over those longhorns. He watched them until each one was loaded and then he listened as they kicked in the cars. The last time we was here, Noah was telling stories.
I pulled his arm. “Come, Pa. Let me warm you up some grub.”
He looked down to me but I wasn’t sure he saw me.
Cowboys was hollering, loose on the liquor they bought with their earnings.
“Come, Pa.”
“Them boys only drove those cattle and they still walking with more than us.” He squinted against a pair of them pissing where they stood in the street. “I’m taking you out. We got something to spend, and damn us if we won’t blow every cent.”
These words scared me, but I wasn’t of no mind to contradict him.
He took me out for my first ever supper cooked by a stranger. It was roast pork with honey sauce. He ordered us each a whiskey. I laughed at the burn in my throat and swore off the stuff for life. Pa thought that was funny and finished mine. A fiddle player started in the corner and Pa watched the man and ordered another whiskey. He didn’t speak a word during the three tunes that man played, and when the musician come around the tables for coins Pa give him a whole dollar.
Pa studied me a time. “She’d be pleased by the sight of you,” he said like we’d been talking of Ma this whole time. “She’d be proud at the woman you is.”
“Pa. I’m only thirteen.”
The folks at the next table paid their bill and stood and their chairs scuffed the floor. It was three men, all of them Pa’s age and one of them still wearing his Yankee cap though it’d gone brown with years and dust. This man stared until Pa met his eyes. Pa tipped his head in the greeting of a hard man who ain’t sure of the specimen before him.
The Yankee put in a plug. He offered one to Pa. I knew Pa wanted tobacco in that moment but he waved it off. He wasn’t the kind to make himself beholden to a stranger.
The Yankee looked on me. He said to Pa, “Remember the trick shooters that come through the camps in the war?” He must’ve noticed some evidence of the war in Pa’s face or manner.
Pa didn’t answer.
“Ever hear of Straight-Eye Susan? Better than anybody who come through the camps. Shooting tonight across town. Why don’t you bring your daughter and join us? We got a bottle.”
“Trick shooters don’t interest us,” Pa said. It was a plain lie, but I saw why he said it. Something about this man had Pa on guard. Something about the way he said ‘daughter’ raised the hair on my neck.
The Yankee shrugged and followed his friends through the bat-wing doors. Pa watched him go and said, “Susan sure a funny name for a trick shooter. What kind father name his boy Susan?”
We found a wide glowing tent on the edge of town with a crowd at the door. We could hear the merriment of a hundred people inside, all loud and drunk on their earnings. “How much?” Pa asked when it was our turn at the door. He paid the three dollars without complaint and I felt sick at the thought of so much money spent in so short a time and on nothing more permanent than spectacle.
Straight-Eye Susan wasn’t no man, of course. She was a woman some years past marrying age wearing a white dress with flowers embroidered on it and a showman’s hat and a golden revolver to match the golden action of her Winchester repeater. The men in the crowd called at her and said things they might only say to a whore, and she picked these men from the audience and dared them to stand still while she shot matches from their teeth and casings from their hats. Not a taunt rose from the crowd after that.
Straight-Eye Susan shot plates from the air, first one, then two, and then four. She shot the rifle behind her with a mirror affixed to its stock. She shot high and low and quick and steady and shot and never missed and all the while she joked with us, and about us, like she was too big to be reduced by anyone. At the end she took free her hat and curtsied and the men leapt to their feet in applause.
After, Pa and me walked back into the night air and he guessed what I was thinking. “Don’t you go getting no notions.”
“About what, Pa?” I played the dumber.
“That ain’t no life for a woman. Even if you could learn to shoot you wouldn’t never be able to talk like she done. Dirty mouth like that. A crowd of faces looking at you. You a ranch girl, a wife, someday a ma. Them is good things, them is the best things. Shooting ain’t no life for females.”
“Yessir.”
* * *
—
Pa never again practiced with his pistols.
I on the other hand waited until I was sure the medicine had taken Pa into sleep and then rose and stoked up the fire for light and practiced what I’d seen. I practiced even though I knew I was to be a ranch wife in this valley and wouldn’t never have cause to know such skills. I practiced because I knew in my bones I could do what she done. Sometimes when it got real late I gave in a touch to the fanciful notion of Straight-Eye Jessilyn. “As quick with her tongue as she is with her revolvers, and at home anywhere she can find a target.”
* * *
—
Come the snows I awoke earlier and dressed against the cold and started in on the chores Noah would’ve done. I began each day at the lake breaking open a patch of ice so the cattle could get at the water. In the barn I milked our heifer and checked for a stray egg or two among the cold chickens. Then I forked hay in a path for the cattle. The bright ones trotted in for first bites while the sad few got to the hay late, and so I led the healthy ones away with fresh forkfuls and then returned to give the sickly feed of their own and time to eat it.
Some nights I heard wolves and cattle stomping the earth and rose in the dark to holler at the darting shapes of dogs. By firelight I mended the leather works with a hand punch and rawhide.
Mostly Pa just sucked for breath from his bed.
A blizzard hit on Christmas night and the snows kept on for eight days. Pa and I was pinned inside with only our minds. I tried to distract him from his medicine wit
h games and stories. It was of little use.
He took the syrup in surprising pours and thereby hastened its shortage. The day it finally depleted he stormed the house as if I had hid bottles from him. He cursed me, then he cursed the Lord for laying snows so deep, then he cursed the sky for listening to the Lord. This was Pa at his smallest.
He set off into the winds despite my pleading for him to wait. He and Ol’ Sis was turned back before the edge of our land by drifts so deep the old mare couldn’t push on. He had to climb off her and lead her to the barn. Pa come back inside and stomped off the snow and said things that I will do him the favor of not repeating here.
A sickness come over him in the day after and he shook and dripped and cursed. I couldn’t get him to take no sustenance. I understood then why he was so set on that medicine.
The sickness passed before the snows cleared. When a warm spell opened the road, he spent a long morning looking toward town. He was eating again, and done shaking. He called me close. “I want you to go,” he said. “This house needs things and I figure you best learn how to dicker.”
It was true we best stock up before the next snow, and I understood why he wanted to avoid going anywhere near that dentist. He handed me the Colt. “Keep this in your bag and don’t take it out unless you intend to use it.”
“Yessir.”
He then took some care explaining how the sights worked and how I had to remember to aim before pulling the trigger. “It’s so heavy!” I played my part.
I waited for dawn before setting out on the half-day ride. It was my first travel off the ranch by my lonesome. I will admit I rode with the Colt in my hand pretending to be a gunfighter on the way to a rich bank. I took aim at birds that flushed and imagined them to be bandits. I didn’t shoot it off, not once. Even then I knew how quick my life might come to depend on a single ball of lead.
At the mercantile I found my tongue for haggling by imagining Straight-Eye Susan was doing the talking. At home I was quiet on account that’s how I imagined Ma to be. And because Noah had filled every crevice with five words before I might muster one. But here I was flush with the knowledge of the Colt in my jacket, and words come tumbling out with rhythm and order. When the shopkeep high-priced the goods, I cut his words short and his eyes widened in surprise. I liked how he looked at me then, like he didn’t know what I might do next. Men always seem to think they know what a girl is thinking. What Straight-Eye Susan showed me was that seeing men unsure is its own fast horse.
But then the shopkeep would not hand over my bill of sale. I tried to take it yet he held fast. His moustache was yellowed and his teeth was rotten in the gums. “You act like you something but I know you. You just a mushhead’s daughter. Your coward Pa ain’t no better than a Chinaman for that syrup.”
The pistol was so close and I wanted to see this man on his knees, begging forgiveness, kissing my pa’s boots, and taking it all back.
I swiped the bill from his hand. I folded and tucked it in a pocket and heaved up my saddlebags from the floor. “Bastard.”
“Such a waste for your kin to sit on all that water. Everybody says so. A shame, they say, a mushhead and his half-breed daughter wasting that fertile spread. That land should be putting out two hundred steers a year easy. There’s a dozen men in this town better than your pa who ain’t getting no lucky breaks. So don’t you come in here acting like you some queen.”
On the ride back I felt the world as if for the first time, big and in all directions and with its cruel eye on me.
I didn’t tell Pa nothing about what the shopkeep said. I tried to put it out my mind. But his words lingered like grease smoke sticks in your nose, tainting smells long after. When I looked on Pa from then on I was fighting to hold on to the man I remembered, not the man they scorned.
* * *
—
Things improved for a time after Pa quit the medicine. He was up by daybreak again and out tending to chores. He was always the last to sleep, which impeded my pistol play, but I enjoyed pulling Ma’s quilt over my ear and falling asleep to the sight of him and his pipe before the fire. By day his eye still hung low and his conversations at times revealed ravines inside his thoughts, but he was my pa and he was out trying again and we come into a rhythm of our own. I figured it would go on like that forever, and one day Noah would return with a wife, and we’d set to building this place up together.
* * *
—
The spring of my fourteenth year I drug out Ma’s chest. I felt Pa’s eyes on me when I did. When its top opened he said, “There ain’t nothing in there.” As if I hadn’t studied its contents hundreds of times in his absence. “Go on, put it back.”
I lifted the Bible and showed it to him. “A woman best know the Good Book better than the men in her life.” It was his own truth and he couldn’t refute it.
He looked to the book. “Come on then. I’m a bit rusty myself.”
That was the first night of many we spent before the fire working on our words. He gave me a letter at a time, and soon I could sound through a stubby word, and then a long one, and then I could piece a few together. The first sentence I ever read on my own was, “Let there be light.”
By summer we was rolling, half a page a night working together. It was the joy I looked forward to all day, being close to Pa and figuring the sounds and meanings together. The first work I ever done that didn’t require sweat and scuff. I thought I might have a skill for words, though Pa never said as much.
Summer got busy and Pa give up on the effort of learning. I didn’t hold it against him. He preferred to smoke his pipe on the porch and listen to the darkness settle upon the desert. A cattleman works his body hard all summer and ain’t got much left come those purple evenings. I took to reading the book myself in candlelight. Sometimes I read it out loud just to hear the words. I carried them all day like music to my chores. My thoughts dwelled with kings and floods and men wandering the desert and who begot who. I liked Moses best, I liked how he led those in his keeping. He was always so sure the Lord was on his side, and not playing him as the fool.
What I read troubled me too. One night over supper I asked Pa about Genesis. “It say here, ‘The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.’ Does the Lord really believe that?”
Pa hung over his bowl of grub. “A girl shouldn’t be thinking so heavy.” He spooned up a bite and chewed.
I ate. I ate and then I asked, “How come we don’t go to church? Huh, Pa? Everybody go to church, even the injuns got church. I ain’t intending to be contrary. I just wonder is all. We got something against church? Or is it the Lord we got issue with?”
Pa’s eyes found mine. “We got issue with men. There’s a shortage of answers in this world. It’s the fool who thinks he got them.”
* * *
—
Autumn turned to winter and winter to spring and Pa got three months older for every one that passed. He was slowing down and his slips was commonplace now, two or three a day when he seemed to be waking up from some dream that was only his. One time I come into the house to find him looking into the ceiling. He didn’t answer at his name. I believed him dead for a moment, and then his eyes blinked and he said, “Just resting, dear.” I checked his old places for a bottle of syrup but didn’t find none.
Around Pa there wasn’t no dodging talk of husbands now. I was fifteen, though my body wasn’t growing much curve. The marrying talk come most days, sometimes morning and night. “We’ll get you fancied up and go into town and show you off,” he said. “Won’t take a hour to find you a man.” I would nod and say my yessirs and then proceed with my chores like regular.
I had been to town enough times to know men didn’t turn to look on me. I wasn’t nothing that held their fancy. That troubled me some, but not in the manner it should. I wasn’t turning to look at no men neither. I was turning to look at their sidear
ms.
* * *
—
We was up to forty-eight head in my sixteenth autumn, the last autumn we was together. The garden was taller than ever and the chickens was laying two eggs a day apiece. The fowl was less on the lake, just as there was less lake, but still we ate goose and duck as much as beefsteak and pork. I was tall for a girl and my muscles was strong through the shoulders like Noah’s had been. My voice too was deep, I thought. When Pa was around I tried my best to sound girllike. When he was gone I let myself be.
What I knew by then was a woman is her place. Straight-Eye Susan was the big tent with all them people watching, and I was our valley. For all the talk of marriage I didn’t give the notion much credence. Marrying meant moving onto another man’s spread, and I didn’t intend to become anybody new.
* * *
—
The last time I spoke with Pa was the morning before he set out for the high country to bring back our wayward head. It was a morning like every one before it. I cooked us eggs in lard and potatoes. Pa’s beard was more gray than rust now. His low-hanging eye had taken to watering continually and out of habit he wiped it with his knuckle between bites.
“Patch that coop while I’m gone, can you?” Pa asked.
“Yessir.” I was glad he remembered the coop. It needed work.
“Leave it another week and we’ll wake up with a bobcat shitting one of our hens.”
I laughed at the curse. Pa smiled with me, and I was grateful to see some lightness in his eyes.
After breakfast I followed him outside. He put on his hat and slid the Sharps into the scabbard on Ol’ Sis’s saddle. Her spine drooped with age now and her hips punched at flesh. He would need a new riding horse come market, if there was money for one.