Centennial (102 page)

There wasn’t much the Zendts could say after that. It was obvious that any preacher who would insult the richest Mennonite family in Lampeter, and at their own table, had no bright future in the Lancaster area, and the goodbyes after dinner were restrained. Levi went down to the grove, to sit among the trees, and it occurred to him that just as the Arapaho had dragged buffalo skulls through the dust, punishing themselves, so white men dragged behind them enormous skulls of another kind. The Indians were smart enough to allow their burdens to rip free; the white man seldom did.

The return to Lancaster had been unbearably painful. He had not said a dozen words to Rebecca Stoltzfus, the girl who had changed the direction of his life; he knew no more about her now than when he stepped off the train. He had discussed nothing of gravity with Mahlon, who seemed as distasteful now as he had forty years ago. He had not even been gracious enough to ride in to Philadelphia to see the family stall in Reading Station, because he had been so wrapped up in his own memories that he didn’t really care what was happening to the family.

It had been a terrible mistake to come here, and he left without being able to improve relations with his family in the way Reverend Fenstermacher had hoped. He was not sorry to go, and the Zendts were even less sorry to see him board the train.

At St. Joseph, Levi changed to the stagecoach, which would take him slowly west; and as the ferry carried them across the Missouri, he relived the journey of forty years ago. He felt he had been correct in leaving Lancaster, for now he knew that nothing had changed in the intervening years: he had found no significance other than tables piled ridiculously high with food. And as they chugged along, everything he saw added to his excitement—the muddy river, the black boys along the waterfront, the creaking ferry, the brooding threat of Kansas, the highway west. How he wished that Elly and proper Captain Mercy and bright Oliver Seccombe were with him now, just starting out with their teams. Even crafty Sam Purchase—he would want Sam too.

But after the coach was well into Kansas and had climbed past the Presbyterian mission, it came to the Big Blue, and Levi called to the driver to stop, and he climbed down to inspect this puny creek, this mere trickle of water in August, and he was aghast to think that this miserable pencil line across the landscape had once been a forbidding torrent where he had nearly lost his wagon and his wife.

It was incredible. Memory was playing him false. Then the image of the buffalo skulls returned, and he visualized himself dragging across the prairies his painful burdens of remembrance. But his robust sense of reality reasserted itself, and he began to laugh at himself. “I missed the whole point!” he cried. “My brothers were uneasy because they feared I was comin’ back to claim my share of the farm. It’s part mine, but let ’em keep it.” He continued laughing. “Never once did they ask about the dinosaur. Biggest thing ever discovered in the west. Must have been in the Lancaster papers.” He shook his head and chuckled. “They’d have asked about the dinosaur if it was something good to eat.”

When he climbed back into the coach a man from Nebraska, staring at the river, said, “Hell, you could spit across that,” and Levi laughed and told him, “Not in the spring of ’44, my friend.” And heavy skulls tore from the sinews of his mind, and he told the man, “Right now, though, you’re right. A good man could spit across it.”

When Levi reached Centennial, neighbors persisted in questioning him about the east, and at first he rebuffed them, but finally he spoke for all westerners when he said, “Back east, wherever you look, you see something. The world crowds in on you. I can’t tell you how homesick I got for the prairies, where a man can look for miles and not see anything ... not feel crowded. Out here the human being is important ... not a lot of trees and buildings.”

Other people were also returning from their travels. When Oliver Seccombe came home with his wife after their six months in England, he found Venneford Ranch in trouble. On the extreme outer edges, over toward Nebraska, squatters were building sod huts on the open range which had long been preempted by Crown Vee cattle. Along the Platte, immigrants from states like Ohio and Tennessee were taking out formal homesteads, as if by doing so they could gain access to the range. Committees were actually visiting the ranch headquarters to see about buying ranch land for the building of small towns.

“We need towns in this state,” they argued, and Seccombe told them, “Not on our land you don’t.”

Worst of all, the sheepmen led by that damned Messmore Garrett were more and more digging in and running their sheep on what had always been considered cattle territory. The situation was becoming intolerable, and on his first day home Seccombe ordered Skimmerhorn and Lloyd to ride out with him to warn Garrett’s men: “Vacate or suffer the consequences.”

They rode east to where Amos Calendar had parked his lonely wagon—bed, commissary, refuge from storms for months on end—and it was some time before they could find the lean Texan. He rode toward them with his rifle across his saddle and grunted a meager hello to Skimmerhorn and Lloyd.

“I’m Oliver Seccombe,” the Englishman said. “You’re trespassing with your sheep. This is cattle country.”

“It’s open range,” Calendar said.

“I’m warning you to get your sheep out of here.”

“I’m stayin’ till Mr. Garrett tells me to move.”

A dog now ran up, a collie-type with white and black hair. “Good-looking dog,” Seccombe said. “You ought to get him out of here, where he’ll be safe.”

“Rajah’s safe anywhere,” Calendar said slowly. “Long as I got my Sharps.”

The ranchers were getting nowhere with this difficult man, but Seccombe was determined to deliver the warning: “If you don’t move the sheep, Calendar, we’ll move them for you.”

“You tried that before and failed.”

Seccombe flushed. “What do you mean by that?”

“Them gunmen who tried to kill me didn’t come from Brazil.”

“Are you suggesting that I ...”

“I ain’t suggestin’ nothin’. I’m simply tellin’ you that if any of you sonsabitches fire at me, I’m gonna fire back.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Seccombe said, spurring his horse and starting west.

They headed for Line Camp Four, among the piñons, and as they rode Skimmerhorn said, “I better explain Buford Coker, Mr. Seccombe. He’s a hot-tempered Confederate from South Carolina. He’s not like Calendar at all. As you’ve seen, Calendar likes being alone. Coker don’t. He’s gone in to Cheyenne and spent a lot of time at Ida Hamilton’s House of Mirrors, and last time I saw him he’d persuaded one of the girls, Fat Laura ...”

“I’ve heard of Fat Laura,” Seccombe said.

“Well, you’ll find Fat Laura in the sheep wagon with him. Or maybe in a shack. Corker’s building himself a shack at Fox Canyon.”

“Building!” Seccombe exploded. “That’s cattle country. We let him build, we’ll have half the sheepmen in the west ...”

Coker was building. He and Fat Laura had hired two men to come down from Cheyenne and build them a substantial shack at the mouth of Fox Canyon. It was not elegant, but it was sturdy, and when Seccombe saw it he wanted to shout, “Skimmerhorn! Have that thing torn down!” for it was a visible warning of what would happen across the range if corrective steps were not taken, and quickly.

At the door of the new house stood Fat Laura, a Virginia woman in her late twenties and obviously a graduate of Ida Hamilton’s academy. In her teens she must have been pretty in the buxom, bucolic way that cowboys appreciated, but ten years of hard life and constant movement from one brothel to the next could not be disguised, and the accumulation of forty pounds gained through the only activity she really enjoyed had made her a slattern. She was six inches taller than Coker and thirty pounds heavier, and why he had associated himself with her remained a mystery.

But here she was, a Cheyenne castoff, living on the edge of nowhere with a sheepman. A woman could hardly sink any lower, Seccombe thought, and he had no desire to enter into conversation with her. He let Skimmerhorn do the talking.

“Where’s Coker?”

“Out.”

‘Which direction?”

“Make a noise, his dog might bark.”

“You living here permanent?”

“Looks like.”

She was a repulsive woman with fat lips and heavy eyes and faded hair. She had no intention of informing these men as to Coker’s whereabouts, and now she stood gross and ugly in the doorway as if daring them to enter.

“I have a gun,” she said, “so don’t start nothin’.”

“We don’t shoot ladies.” Skimmerhorn laughed. “But tell Coker to get his sheep off this land. And get that shack off it, too.”

“I homesteaded this shack.”

“You what?” Seccombe shouted “A Cheyenne whore homesteading cattle country?”

Fat Laura stared at him with her basilisk eyes and said nothing, but from behind the doorjamb she produced a heavy shotgun. Bringing it forward, she plopped the butt end in the dust, then leaned her fat bosom on the barrel.

“You tell Coker to get off this land,” Seccombe warned, and Fat Laura’s huge face broke into a contemptuous smile.

“Up your fancy ass, Englishman.”

The three ranchmen rode back to headquarters, bewildered as to what they must do next. If Venneford sat by supinely while sheepmen invaded the range, and if they made no protest when immigrants squatted on the outer edges of the ranch and homesteaders took up government land, pretty soon the whole intricate structure would begin to fall apart, the trend would accelerate and a noble way of life would be lost.

“Thing I cannot understand,” Seccombe said as they approached headquarters, “is how a decent man like Levi Zendt could sell his land to sheepmen.”

“There’s a theory going around,” Skimmerhorn said, “that the open range is ended. Zendt told me he thought sheep were a better investment, especially with a man like Garrett supervising.”

“Garrett!” Seccombe exclaimed: “Isn’t there any way to run that scoundrel off the range?”

Skimmerhorn ignored the question and continued with Zendt’s reactions: “He says maybe we ought to consolidate around the land we own. Fence it in and concentrate on about half the cattle we now run.”

“But this is cattle country!” Seccombe said. “It belongs to us.”

Skimmerhorn was reluctant to point out that for the past seven hours the riders had not once been on Venneford land. They were on open range, land that belonged to anyone; it was cattle country only because the cattleman had always said so.

Confusing days followed. This was the finest time of year, late August before the first frost, with calves grown sturdy on rich grasses. A man should be enjoying these days, and Charlotte entertained numerous visitors at the castle, with her usual flair and merriment, but Oliver Seccombe enjoyed none of it.

He could not comprehend how the citizens of Centennial could permit sheepmen to invade their land. “The animals are filthy,” he said to the banker. “Look at the pitiful men who work them. This fellow Calendar, a miserable hermit talking to his dog. And that wreck of a man, Bufe Coker, living with his Cheyenne harlot. Hell, he’s slept with sheep so long he probably can’t tell the difference.”

All cattlemen believed the accusation that the lonely sheepherder engaged in sexual intercourse with his charges, and many funny stories circulated regarding this supposed custom: “You hear about the Englishman countin’ sheep in Wyomin’?” ‘One, two, three, four. Good mornin’, Pamela. Don’t forget. Tea at five.’ ”

“Look at a sheepman when he comes to town,” Seccombe said bitterly to the editor of the
Clarion
. “He walks alone. His eyes are downcast. He’s ashamed to speak up to people he meets. In a bar he stays at the far end, drinking with no one. He’s an outcast and he knows it. His smell alone, sleeping with those woollies, would make him a lonely man.” He shook his head mournfully, then brightened.

“On the other hand, you take a cowboy. Frank, honest, clean-cut. He sleeps with girls, not sheep, and his joy shows. He’s never alone. Likes a crowd. In a bar he heads right for the middle, where the people are, and when he speaks to you he looks you in the eye. The cowboy is a clean, fine man. I’ve seen thousands of them. But the sheepman is craven. They ought to be run out of here.”

The Old Testament bothered Seccombe. It was full of sheep and shepherds, and he began to wonder if perhaps the Jews were not also contaminated people. “They spent all this time worrying about pork,” he told Charlotte’s guests at dinner one night, “when their real problem was mutton, and they didn’t recognize it.”

“Abraham was a shepherd. David was a shepherd. Joseph was a shepherd,” one of the guests pointed out.

“Yes!” Seccombe cried. “But when Our Lord was born you didn’t find Him looking for a sheep pen. He was born with the cattle, where He belonged. I could have little respect for Him if it had been otherwise.” His tirade was proof of his total adaptation to American customs, for certainly in his native England, where there was no inbred resentment of sheep, fine spring lamb was as welcome on the discriminating table as beef.

“Don’t forget, Oliver,” an argumentative guest said, “that the first man born on earth tended sheep, Abel, and when he handed God one of his sheep, God accepted it and blessed it.”

“God was careless that time,” Seccombe growled. “It’s a sad day when I hear sheep being defended in my own house,” and he stiffly excused himself and headed for the Cheyenne Club, where he could associate with men dedicated to cattle and the proper use of the range.

He found little levity. Claude Barker was bitter against the invasions made by sheepmen on the north end of his Horse Creek ranch, and the Chugwater people felt the same. “This country is goin’ to hell,” Barker protested, and various plans were proposed for counteracting the drift.

“All we’re asking,” Seccombe said, “is to have things go on as they were. We don’t need cities out here, and sheep, and homesteaders trying to grub out a meager living. This land should be kept open. It was made for cattle the way Chicago was made for people. There’s an honesty about raising cattle ... a dignity ...”