by J P S Brown
A mother who owns a boy who has been down in the dirt one minute and in the top of a tree the next finds that there is no end to the variety of foreign matter a whack can lift out of the seat of his pants. One time after dark when Mikey was long overdue at home because he was so busy playing fort in the dirt with Skippy and the Andersons, Maggie came out and tracked him down, slipped up behind him, and grabbed him. When she lifted him out of the pile of rocks that was his fort and delivered the first whack, she spanked a giant centipede off his pants that was eight inches long and three inches wide across the shoulders. The bruise her hand gave the monster made it squirm and roll on the ground in agony and it clacked his legs together with a sound that was like twenty women's knitting needles picking at each other. Billy squashed it with a rock before it could recover and attack anyone. That centipede scared Maggie so thoroughly, she even forgot that she had intended to spank Mikey in front of all the other mothers and kids.
Mikey got spanked daily and never could figure out why everything he loved to do—and therefore could not help doing—scared Maggie to death. He honest to God did not want to scare her. He might show off for her like his dad did because he was proud of what he could do, but she said the feats that gave him the most pleasure to perform scared the peewadding out of her. He never held his spankings against his mom because it was tit for tat that way and he could pay for getting to do what he wanted and be his own man. Mikey knew a lot of sorrow, though. He was a kid who knew how to give a lot of love and loyalty and he did not spare it. When someone he loved was in distress his own distress was terrible. Paul and Maggie could not get along. By the time Mikey became aware of them as individuals and himself as a person, he realized they fought as though they hated each other. Paul could do no right and he referred to Maggie as Madam Queen. Madam Queen wanted to rule and be paid homage. Paul wanted to run and play and be a happy, common man. Madam Queen allowed Paul to love her on Sundays when he was home, but he did not get to do it—better not even take off his hat—unless he first presented her with an apple and the Sunday funnies.
When Mikey's uncles and their families visited, everybody laughed at Paul's and Madam Queen's separate versions of their stories. However, when Paul and Maggie were alone, they insulted each other so terribly that their love fell away in pieces that they could not ever put back.
Mikey's father was not mean or violent. Drink only made him happy, so Maggie never suffered any black eyes, but he never spent an evening of quietude at home with his wife and son. The vaqueros had nicknamed him Pablo Ligero, Fast Paul, and it fit him. Mikey and Maggie worried every evening that Paul was so late that he might not come home because he was down under a broken~legged horse, then they were given to watch him come in drunk.
Gradually, Paul lost out being Mikey's father and Maggie's husband and he was no longer respected as such for a long time before he was finally and irrevocably banished. By the time Mikey's sister Maudy was born, Paul was off by himself on a high lonesome 99 percent of the time and already lost to his family.
When Paul had been home sober, though, he and his family enjoyed times of great happiness and fun. The gloom brought on by Paul and Maggie not getting along only lasted while they fought. Neither of them stayed swelled up long and neither held a grudge. Normally, the Summerses were prone to happiness. Seeing his parents kiss brought upon Mikey's face the kind of uncontrollable grin that made a kid's jaws ache.
When Mikey was able to sally forth and cowboy with his dad, his mother was happy, his Granny was happy Baxter and Pancho were happy, and the boy found himself immersed in the most awful glory of his boyhood. His happiness was awful because he enjoyed an awesome, worshipful love for his dad and the work he did. Paul's capacity for doing Mikey good, whether it be to give him a lesson, something to eat, a puff of his Bull Durham cigarette, or just the way he turned his head, kept Mikey in awe and wonder for the adventure of it all.
Mikey did not remember when his dad first let him rein Pancho on his own to control the horse's starts and stops and pace at cattle work. He did not know when he first made a hand in the cow work, rode fence, branded, rode circle, and gathered outlaw cattle with his dad and uncles and other grown-up help.
Mikey was so hungry for the life that Paul could give him that he never asked how much farther they had to ride that day, or when they would get where they were going, or what they would have to do. He did not always know where he was going when he left the house with his dad. One minute after Paul's car started moving away from the house, he fell into a coma that lasted until the car stopped. He was headed out to do the work for which he had been sired and he needed to be fresh and rested so he could . think straight and make a hand. He might wake up down in Magdalena in Sonora on a ranch owned by Cabezon Woodell or Del Mercer, or he might find a day's riding needed to be done on Uncle Buster's 61 Ranch, or his Leatherman Ranch, or he might have to make a circle alone somewhere on his dad's cattle. He learned early that he'd better be able to think before he jumped Pancho out after something, opened a gate, took down his rope, or opened his mouth.
At times, when Paul was off on a high lonesome of one kind or another, Uncle Buster would come and take Mikey and Pancho out to work cattle. Mikey was almost as crazy about Buster as he was his dad. Paul and Buster were so easygoing and good at cowboying that Mikey never learned that it was supposed to be work. Because of those two, cowboying was an adventure that included love, concern, and admiration for the animals and the cowboy companions on the job. Other elements of cowboying were fun, excitement, risk, and athleticism. Those were ordinary elements of cowboying, but Paul and Buster punctuated it all with the eye-watering abandon of headlong, downhill, brush-popping, open field horseback runs that other little kids did not ever experience in the company of their elders.
Whether Paul was home or not, the corral at Mikey's house served as a hospital where cattle and horses recovered from their ailments and injuries. Before he was able to handle and doctor the animals, Mikey's job was to watch them, keep them in the pen, and feed them. He did not think of his participation as work. The duties came as a natural function of a child like Mikey who was raised as a partner in the family livestock. It became fun from the first day that Mikey was asked if he was strong enough to help carry a full bucket.
Mikey learned to get on his horse by himself when he was three. For some time he had sensed that Paul did not appreciate having to lift him to the back of his horse when it was time to ride. Mikey believed this must be because he was Fast Paul and did not want any son of his to go through life having to be lifted onto his horse. Paul put up with doing it for Mikey while he was little, and though he never said anything about it, Mikey felt that he was expected to get himself on his own horse just as darned soon as he was able. He sensed that every time he asked Paul to boost him onto his horse he borrowed on a diminishing credit. If he waited too long to learn to get on by himself, Paul might someday decide he was too much trouble and leave him behind. Paul's mouth still smiled when he said, "Up you go, Mikey," but his hands never lingered to steady him, and his eyes said, "I have seen you climb into the tops of the trees where the limbs are so small a cat would fear the sway, so make me the same kind of hand horseback as soon as you can, or you will find yourself left at home with the kids and the women."
Mikey learned to get on his horse by himself the day he rode Pancho out to Sonoita Creek with Paul to bring in a band of mares. Paul rode a big four-year-old paint bronc that day. The horse had never been touched by human hands before he was four and Paul had only been riding him a month. However, when Paul Summers rode a bronc, he got rode and schooled every minute the sun shined. The paint was already smarter in the ways of a cowhorse than most old gentle horses of the region. He was being hackamore broke and he carried his head right and already knew how a cowboy needs a horse to stop and turn and keep a prize angle on a cow.
Paul and Mikey rode down the Tucson highway past Dalton's Dairy and Bill Knox the blacksmith's, across the
Santa Cruz River, and on to Sonoita Creek. Paul cut for his mares' tracks along the creek, found them, and tracked them through tall cottonwood, willow, walnut, and mesquite groves. The stream was clear and full of minnows and after they had been on the tracks a while, they dismounted and lay down on their bellies on a sunny rock to have a drink. The horses made little sound in the dampness and shade and for the rest of Mikey's life, every time he rode beside a creek, he was reminded of that day with Paul by the feel of the horse under him, the smell of leaves underfoot, the brush of branches on his face, the sun on his back, and the cool shade of the trees.
In the beginning the boy's only responsibility when he rode with Paul was to keep him in sight. Paul did not expect him to turn a herd, or get in front of it and stop it, or even to keep it going in the drags, only to keep him in sight. No matter what his pace, Mikey was obliged to stay with him because Paul did not want to finish a sashay and then have to leave the work he had accomplished to look for a lost boy.
After a while the tracks lined out together in one direction and Paul straightened in his saddle and turned the paint loose in a high lope. When Granny wanted to say something good about Paul, she always said, "The man sat a horse straight as an Indian." His back was straight over the horse and his body from the waist down became part of the horse.
Pancho knew what he and Mikey had to do. He sighted on the paint and kept up. If Mikey was about as hard to lose as a bobcat on his back, it was because the boy wanted to be with his dad so much he did not yet know what it was like to fall off. Nobody he knew ever just fell off. They got knocked off or bucked off, but by the time he was three, Mikey could go sound asleep on Pancho and not fall off.
The mares sensed the horsemen and loped away so they would not be caught standing still. Paul swung out in a half circle to get ahead and stop them. The brush was so thick, the band's dust could only be seen when they crossed sand or loam. The paint stretched into a run and Pancho sprinted to keep up. Pancho was gentle and quiet, but he was equal to any speed the paint could show.
All of a sudden, Mikey saw the band running hard through brush on his right. Paul skimmed by a tree and turned at a sharp angle around its other side. Pancho made the same turn. A big limb loomed in front of Mikey's eyes, sheared him out of the saddle, and dumped him on his head under the tree.
Mikey left the world for a place that was black and quiet for a while, then his ears suddenly opened with a bright ring that brought him back. A black shadow blocked the sky when he opened his eyes. Then he realized that Pancho was standing over him. The horse had been at a dead run and could not have stopped so suddenly. He had come back for the boy, for he was straddling him. To get going again, Mikey put a foot on a chestnut inside Pancho's leg, shinnied up and caught a saddle string, pulled himself up to the horn and into the saddle, and kicked Pancho into a lope.
Mikey was on the ground a long time because Paul had time to stop the mares and hold them until they quieted. When the mares were completely under control and Mikey still had not shown up, he rode back to look for him. The boy met him in the brush. Mikey was glad that his dad had not whistled or called for him. He did not ever want him to worry. Mikey was sure that he only got to ride with his dad because he did not require that the man act like a father all the time.
Paul drove the mares away from the creek and penned them at Bill Knox's where he could have a drink of moonshine whiskey. Even then, Mikey accepted that his father would rather pen his livestock before sundown with someone who was generous with his whiskey than drive on and reach home after dark.
Bill Knox was a World War I veteran who did all Paul's ironwork. He had been wounded and shell-shocked in France. He and Paul were close buddies, but most everyone else in the region gave Bill a lot of room because of his being shell-shocked. A picture of soldiers in their trenches in the very midst of battle hung over his forge. The picture was highlighted by the red fire of bursting shells as soldiers fell under the intense weight and storm of battle. Mikey understood being shell-shocked meant that when Bill looked at that picture of the mayhem of combat it made him happy. When he fired his forge and its heat swelled under the bellows, the glow rose into that picture and Mikey could see and feel the heat of battle and could not wait until he grew up to become a soldier so he could go off to war and come home shell-shocked like Bill Knox. Bill Knox was tall and gaunt and his skin was ivory white. His blacksmith's hammer had caused spatterings of molten iron to pepper his skin. The spatterings were tiny and far apart and some were smudged and some were still fat little dots waiting to get wiped into smudges with his sweat. He wore a vestlike undershirt with a great gap torn out over the ivory page of his middle and the creases in his belly were lined with black iron residue. He wore an old fedora that looked heavy with the weight of dirt, sweat, and the powder of his iron.
Mikey looked down that day and saw that Bill Knox's long, fragile, white toes were bare against the black dirt floor of his shop. He handed his jug of corn whiskey to Paul and stretched his legs out before him and the boy saw to his delicious fascination that thick lines of black, moist, ironized clay sealed his toes uniformly together. Mikey looked up at his dad in time to watch him shape his mouth to fit the jug before the ceramic touched it, and with the shaping of his lips came a preparatory grimace that showed extreme respect for what he knew the drink was about to do to him.
Paul then asked his son to show Bill and his wife and daughters how he could get on Pancho by himself. He told them that Mikey always kept his dad in sight when they rode together and no matter what Paul needed to do, he had never been able to shake Mikey. That was why he had worried when he stopped the mares and looked back and the boy was not with him. Mikey had to tell how the limb knocked him off Pancho and how the horse was standing over him when he revived. He had to move aside the black foretop of his hair and show them the scraped lump on his forehead.
Every time Paul told that story he marveled at how Pancho had stayed with Mikey instead of running off. Mikey also decided that Pancho was marvelous for stopping and coming back, but when it had happened he did not think Pancho's faithfulness was anything out of the ordinary. He was used to having the horse stay with him. That was where he thought his horse was committed to be because he was Mikey's horse and Mikey was his boy. Bill's three girls were towheaded and pretty. Lorraine, the oldest, was a year older than Mikey. She brought a tiny vial of Mercurochrome, which she called "monkey blood," to nurse the lump on his forehead. She stood very close to him and gently swabbed the scratches with a cotton ball soaked with the brilliant medicine. She stood with her face close to his and blew on his scratches to cool the medicine's sting. She looked down and stumbled into him, an eyelash grazed his cheek, and her smell and touch caused a deep, mysterious itch inside him. No one but his Nina, Granny, and Maggie ever touched him up close like that. Their touch was nice but left no effect after they quit. Lorraine's touch caused him to slip into a dazed paralysis.
Mikey had never been around a girl who handled him as she pleased. Lorraine just did as she wished with him right in front of everybody as though nothing was wrong with it. That moment with Lorraine sweetly slowed down Mikey's heart. He did not want to move even a corpuscle out of her way. He enjoyed it so much it worried him.
Paul fell under the power of Maggie's anger when he and Mikey returned home that evening. Mikey could not see that his dad had done anything wrong. The man had only enjoyed himself a little with Bill Knox and his whiskey at the finish of a good job. He had celebrated Pancho's nobility and Mikey's graduation from earthbound kid to horseman big enough to mount by himself. Poor old shell-shocked Bill enjoyed Paul, and even Mikey could see it was rare for him to have someone he liked stop to talk and drink with him.
Maggie's unreasoning anger made their home an awful place that evening. Mikey's heart sickened at the words she said to relieve the pain he saw in her eyes. The humble pain he saw in Paul's made him weep. Maggie seemed to need to instill hate in them both because of Paul's dr
inking, but this time Mikey had seen for himself that Paul had done nothing wrong. He could see how much trouble the drinking caused, but he did not see why his mother and father should hate each other over it.
Nobody in the family gave a darn what the kid felt. Maggie and Paul did not seem to think their fights would have a bad effect on Mikey. However, if anyone had asked the boy how much it hurt to see his mother and father fight, he would have said that he thought the pain his parents caused was deadlier than any childhood disease he could imagine. He knew kids who were real sick. He believed his pain made him more frail and sorrowful than the kid with a weak heart who could not go out and play. He was chronically unhappier than his friend who was crippled by polio. Mikey would have been happy to carry any kind of pain right to his death, if that would make his parents stop hurting each other.
Mikey worried that his parents would someday become so mean to each other that they would go away and leave him. He even worried about it during happy times when they forgot to fight. Nobody ever asked to help make his worry go away and it sure never occurred to him to ask anybody for that kind of help.
Nobody recommended a medicine that could alleviate that type of pain. Nobody patted the boy and told him they knew how it felt, or offered a cool rag, or a cool hand, or even a vaccination, to make him feel better. The pain that enveloped his heart when his mother and father tore at each other's feelings and took each other's hearts in a death grip choked his throat and filled him with tears.
Mikey's weeping would not turn his parents away from their fights, because if there was anything they considered more contemptible than the hurt they did to each other, it was to see Mikey cry about it. His heartbreak did not hurt anybody but him, so he had to take himself away from it. Luckily for him he could sit by Granny, his Nina, Pancho, and Baxter and get away quickly to run with Billy.