Duster (9781310020889) (2 page)

This particular morning Ma
had us get dressed in a hurry. She never made a move toward the
fireplace, so I could tell she
had
something special in mind, and I helped her hurry the little kids
along.

As soon as we were all dressed she had me
get a bucket of water and then she gave us each a fistful of cold
fritters left over from the night before, and we each got a cup of
water. I asked her about the milking, but she said there wasn't
time. Those half-wild cows we had been milking still had their
calves so it would be all right to leave them be for the
morning.

Anyway, by then it was near daylight and Ma
took each of the littlest two, Molly and Little Bo, by the hand and
blew out the candle, and we set off walking.

We had it figured out where we were going by
then. We were going to MacReedy's place about nine miles off. There
was supposed to be a circuit preacher stopping there.

We had to walk it since the only horses we
owned was my grulla and an old scrub pony that was on the lame
side. Besides which, we didn't have a wagon any more since Ma had
sold it a year or so before when Little Bo got so bad sick he had
to be doctored.

The walk took a little while, but Ma and me
took turns helping the small fry, and there was road most of the
way.

By the time we got to MacReedy's the
preacher was already warmed up and well into his talking. There was
a whole gang of people there—sixty or more, I'd guess. There was
about eight wagon rigs pulled up in the yard, and the corral looked
like it would bust from all the saddle horses turned loose in
it.

Folks was sitting all over the packed earth
yard. Most of the grown-ups had pulled chunks off MacReedy's
woodpile for stools, and the little kids just spread out around
them. A few families, Mister Sam Silas's for one, had buckets of
food with them, and most of the rest had brought sacks along to
hold their lunches.

The preacher was set up on MacReedy's front
stoop. Someone had put a chair there for him, but by the time we
got there he was too wound up to set in one spot. He was pacing up
and down that little stoop, and I got the feeling that even with
the pacing he hardly had room enough to swing his arms when he
needed to.

We'd never heard this particular preacher
before, maybe because we so seldom got over to one of the ranches
that had preachers in to give services. This fellow had mighty good
wind. His voice was maybe a little too thin and whiny for
politicking, but it carried good and had a lot of follow-through,
so he did all right as a preacher. When he turned fast his coat
would flop back against him, and you could see he was awful skinny—
looked like you might be able to fold him up like a jackknife and
tote him home rolled up in your slicker. But what he lacked in
meat, he made up for in hair. He had a beard that hung down near as
far as the strings of his tie, and his head hair pretty much did
justice to the beard.

When we got settled so that we could listen
to what he was saying, he was talking about damnation and what
brings you to it, like most of the preachers did. But this fellow
wasn't taking any chances on folks missing out on the meaning of
the quotations. He'd rattle off a few book names and chapter
numbers without reciting them—figuring, I guess, you could
recollect them and look them up later if you were of a mind. Then
he'd pitch in with a real down-to-earth explanation of what it was
that would lead you to damnation.

I couldn't follow some of what he said about
painted harlots and stuff, probably because out here we didn't have
extra money for paint and the like; we just had to let things
weather. And some of it didn't seem to apply, since I'd never had a
drink of hard liquor and didn't figure on it real soon.

Then along toward noon he got onto a subject
that I could follow pretty good. He started talking on tobacco and
other knockshus weeds, and I could understand that all right.

Last summer Jaimie Roe and me rolled up some
cigarillos out of weeds and dried shucks, and we smoked up a mess
of them like we'd seen some of the Mex vaqueros do. The preacher
said that would make you a sure candidate for punishment, but we'd
already been punished pretty good right on the spot. It could be we
used the wrong weeds.

I have to admit I didn't get much out of the
other preaching, but I could tell it was plenty powerful and had I
been much of a sinner at the time I might of enjoyed it more.

Ma always enjoyed singing the hymns best,
and she'd turn to good and loud when the preacher called off a name
to be sung. When she was singing those hymns, her eyes would get
all crinkledy-like at the corners, and she looked sort of pretty. I
think the little kids noticed that, too, because I'd catch them
looking up at Ma every time when they was supposed to be
singing—even Molly who loved to sing her own self. Molly didn't
know all the words then, so she'd listen long enough to catch onto
one or two key words and then kick in real hard with them every
time they came due in the song.

Along about midafternoon when it was getting
time for us to be leaving before they broke for dinner—so folks
wouldn't be trying to give us some of their lunches—Ma stood up and
asked the preacher if he'd say her a special prayer.

The preacher hollered "Yes, sister," at her,
expecting her to give testimony or something probably.

"Brother," she called out to him, "I've
listened to you preach, and I know you tell the Lord's word. I
would feel better in my heart if you would pray with us for the
safety of my eldest. He has to leave tomorrow to do a man's work,
and he will need the Lord's guidance to bring him safely home from
that cow drive. Will you do that, brother?"

The preacher stomped his foot on MacReedy's
stoop and bobbed his head so that his beard flew. "That I will,
sister," he said. "Where is the boy?"

Ma pointed me out, and he
hollered at me, "Stand up, boy, stand up so the Lord can spot you."
So I did, and he proceeded to pray just as loud and hard as he
could for the next
ten minutes or maybe
more. It was sort of obvious from the praying that he didn't know
much about cows or the working of them, but I reckoned the Lord
did, even if His servant didn't, and He could make out the meaning
all right.

As for me, I felt awfully funny standing
there with all those folks looking at me and that preacher talking
about me, most especially when he got to asking the Lord to forgive
me for all of my sins and named some of them that I didn't know I'd
done but couldn't argue over since I wasn't positive what they
meant.

I was mighty relieved when it was all over
and we could head back for home. I felt sort of good about it
later, though. I hadn't guessed Ma would ever do such a thing to
embarrass me. But once it was over and I could reflect on it, it
made me feel sort of warm inside.

ONE MINUTE, THERE was nothing but that
airless heat, shoving down with all the force of a straight fall
from the sun, plus the sting of sweat in my eyes and the worry
about thorns in case Mister Sam Silas's hammerheaded dun decided to
pitch again and loosen up his muscles at my expense. Then, there
was this awful crashing noise coming at me through the brush like a
mile-wide drag being hauled over every stump and dry twig between
the Frio and the Nueces.

I couldn't see it coming yet, but what
sounded like the world's biggest longhorn was headed my way.

I found out right away that that stubborn,
lowbred, mean dun horse might resist being ridden, but once he
heard a beef coming through the brush he was ready to go to work
right now. He busted into a run toward that noise with one big jump
that almost left me behind, even though I thought I could ride
pretty good. By the time I caught up with him and got to sitting in
a pointed-up direction again, he had tore through a couple of
clumps of thorn and had the cow—it was really a big brindle
steer—in sight.

The dun was moving for all he was worth, and
so was that steer. Both of them were scrambling over the small
brush, through the middling-size stuff and under the tallest
growth— which, of course, had the biggest, strongest, sharpest,
longest thorns. That tall stuff was what the hammerhead was
dragging me underneath. If it was high enough for him to get under,
he just naturally figured I could squeeze under too—and away we
went.

For the first few jumps, I was too busy
hanging on to think about the rawhide rope in my hand. For the next
few, I was too busy getting my seat back again, having learned a
valuable lesson in brush popping.

The thing is, I'd been
practicing roping since I was big enough to dangle a string in my
hand, but I'd never done it quite like this before. By the time I
learned that a mesquite will reach out and try to snatch a meal of
braided rawhide
reata
, I was turned sideways in my saddle with one leg back on
that dun's rump and a right arm that felt like it was near jerked
out of my coat. It was just lucky for me that my big, corral-style
loop slipped off the branch when it did, or I'd have been walking
back to camp on my first morning out.

Anyway, I caught up with the dun again, and
this time I remembered to build a small loop and leaned down over
the dun's neck to make my pitch low and straight. Rawhide is heavy
enough to carry through a little brush, and the short ropes used
out here aren't long enough to let you throw from a distance that
would hang you up on something—that is, as long as you remember
about holding that loop in small and close.

My first throw was a good
one, everything considered. I don't know whether you'd call it
a
mangana
at the
wrong end of the animal or a
peal
that didn't turn over. Anyway, it caught that
steer's hind feet and drew them up tight together, even if it
didn't have a
peal's
neat figure-eight shape with a little bitty loop for each
foot.

The steer's front feet kept running, of
course, and he was stretched out flat on his belly with that crazy
dun horse hauling back on him quicker than it takes to tell. I
could hear the air rush out of him when he hit, and I figured he
was down real good for the next minute or two.

The dun was walking back a little to keep
some strain on the rope, so I let him do it his way and sat up real
straight, sort of proud of myself and not even minding the chunks
of skin I had lost on the way from there to here chasing that
steer.

I tipped back my wide-brimmed straw hat and
used the tail end of my bandanna to wipe my face off, sort of
casual like.

About then, the steer began to try to get
his hind legs under him so he could get up and do it all over
again. And I began to wonder for the first time just what I was
going to do with him now that I had him.

I mean, it hadn't really occurred to me
before, but here I was in the middle of the brush with a strange
horse tied to one end of my rope and a full-growed longhorn steer
at the other end of it. I had him down on the ground where I could
get to him if I wanted him, but he was already wearing a brand I
could see now—it hadn't really got through to me before, but
there's no such thing as a maverick steer because bulls don't get
to be steers by themselves—and I couldn't see any reason to walk
over and pat him hello. And I sure wasn't going to drag him out by
the hind legs.

I sat there for a minute
and let the hammerhead do his work a while longer, but the more I
thought about it, the less I knew what I wanted to do with that
animal. The steer was lying sort of half on its side with its legs
stretched out in my direction, and it turned its head once and
rolled its eyes at me like it was asking me, "Well, fella, where do
we go from here?" I just stared back at it like I had sense enough
to know what to do, and it flopped its head back around. I noticed
its left horn pointed straight out to the front instead of sweeping
out and up like the right horn. I guess we were both a pretty sorry
pair right then. About then I heard a good, loud horselaugh right
behind. I looked back real sudden, caught there like I was with
that steer on the ground, and saw Ike Partley sitting his horse
just a few yards away and laughing 'til I thought he was going to
fall off it. I wished he
would
fall off into the patch of cactus his gray was
straddling. He must of come up while I was so busy thinking about
that steer that I didn't pay any mind to the noise of him riding
up.

I started to say something to Ike, but I
didn't know what to say, so I clamped my mouth shut again and
turned back toward my steer.

"Kid, you sure busted him down flat," Ike
said. "Now, if you want to drag him out just give me the nod an'
I'll break trail for you. I figure if you got enough rope for the
job you oughta have him out on the holding ground by tomorra noon."
He went off into another laughing fit, and I could tell right then
what I'd be listening to when we bedded down that night.

"Yes sir, you really dusted him down," Ike
said, and right then he hung the name on me that I carry to this
day. "You're a real cow duster, you are, Duster Dorword."

I just sat there and got redder in the face
while he yukked it up for a while longer. When he got tired of
that, he kicked his horse up beside me and talked at me between
giggle fits.

"Kid, pretty soon you'll know all about
these critters you an' me are chasin', but for right now, you just
try to remember a couple of things. One is that they're bigger an'
meaner than you, an' got more pure fight in them than you and your
horse put together. So, what you got to do is let them do the work,
an' you just sort of point them in a direction to go.