Fine Just the Way It Is (6 page)

“Oh Archie, I didn’t mean to hurt, Archie—”

“You did not,” he groaned. “It’s. I ain’t never been. Loved. I just can’t hardly
stand it
—” and he began to blubber “feel like I been shot,” pulling her into his arms, rolling half over so that the salty tears and his saliva wet her embroidered waist shirt, calling her his little birdeen, and at that moment she would have walked into a furnace for him.

On the days he was away she would hack at the garden or take his old needle gun and hunt sage grouse. She shot a hawk that was after her three laying hens, plucked and cleaned it and threw it in the soup pot with a handful of wild onions and some pepper. Another day she had gathered two quarts of wild strawberries, her fingers stained deep red that would not wash away.

“Look like you killed and skinned a griz bear by hand,” he said. “It could be a bear might come down for his berries, so don’t you go pickin no more.”

The second winter came on and Bunk Peck laid off all the men, including Archie. Cowhands rode the circuit, moving from ranch to ranch, doing odd jobs in return for a place in the bunkhouse and three squares. Down on the Little Weed, Archie and Rose were ready for the cold. He had waited for good tracking snow and shot two elk and two deer in November when the weather chilled, swapping a share of the meat to Tom Ackler for his help, for it could take a lone man several days to pack a big elk out, with bears, lions and wolves, coyotes, ravens and eagles gorging as much of the unattended carcass as they could. One rough acre was cleared where Archie planned to sow Turkey Red wheat. The meat house was full. They had a barrel of flour and enough baking powder and sugar for the city of Chicago. Some mornings the wind stirred the snow into a scrim that bleached the mountains and made opaline dawn skies. Once the sun below the horizon threw savage red onto the bottom of the cloud that hung over Barrel Mountain and Archie glanced up, saw Rose in the doorway burning an unearthly color in the lurid glow.

By spring both of them were tired of elk and venison, tired of bumping into each other in the little cabin. Rose was pregnant. Her vitality seemed to have ebbed away, her good humor with it. Archie carried her water buckets from the river and swore he would dig a well the coming summer. It was hot in the cabin, the April sun like a furnace door ajar.

“You better get somebody knows about well diggin,” she said sourly, slapping the bowls on the table for the everlasting elk stew, nothing more than meat, water and salt simmered to chewability, then reheated for days. “Remember how Mr. Town got killed when his well caved in and him in it?”

“A well can damn cave in and
I
won’t be in it,” he said. “I got in mind not diggin a deep killin well, but clearin out that little seep east a the meat house. Could make a good spring and I’d build a springhouse, put some shelves, and maybe git a cow. Butter and cream cow. Hell, I’m goin a dig out that spring today.” He was short but muscular, and his shoulders had broadened, his chest filled out with the work. He started to sing “got to bring along my shovel if I got a dig a spring,” ending with one of Tom’s yo-heave-hos, but his jokey song did not soothe her irritation. An older woman would have seen that although they were little more than children, they were shifting out of days of clutching love and into the long haul of married life.

“Cows cost money, specially butter and cream cows. We ain’t got enough for a butter dish even. And I’d need a churn. Long as we are dreamin, might as well dream a pig, too, give the skim and have the pork in the fall. Sick a deer meat. It’s too bad you spent all your money on this land. Should a saved some out.”

“Still think it was the right way to do, but we sure need some chink. I’m ridin to talk with Bunk in a few days, see can I get hired on again.” He pulled on his dirty digging pants still spattered with mud from the three-day job of the privy pit. “Don’t git me no dinner. I’ll dig until noon and come in for coffee. We got coffee yet?”

Bunk Peck took pleasure in saying there was no job for him. Nor was there anything at the other ranches. Eight or ten Texas cowhands left over from last fall’s Montana drive had stayed in the country and taken all the work.

He tried to make a joke out of it for Rose, but the way he breathed through his teeth showed it wasn’t funny. After a few minutes she said in a low voice, “At the station they used a say they pay a hunderd a month up in Butte.”

“Missus McLaverty, I wouldn’t work in no mine. You married you a cowboy.” And he sang “I’m just a lonesome cowboy who loves a gal named Rose, I don’t care if my hat gets wet or if I freeze my toes, but I won’t work no copper mine, so put that up your nose.” He picked a piece of turnip from the frying pan on the stove and ate it. “I’ll ride over Cheyenne way an see what I can find. There’s some big ranches over there and they probly need hands. Stop by Tom’s place on my way and ask him to look in on you.”

The next day he went on the drift. We need the chink, she thought, don’t we?

Despite the strong April sun there was still deep snow under the lodgepoles and in north hollows around Tom Ackler’s cabin; the place had a deserted feeling to it, something more than if Tom had gone off for the day. His cat, Gold Dust, came purring up onto the steps but when Archie tried to pet her, tore his hand and with flattened ears raced into the pines. Inside the cabin he found the stub of a pencil and wrote a note on the edge of an old newspaper, left it on the table.

In a saloon on a Cheyenne street packed with whiskey mills and gambling snaps he heard that a rancher up on Rawhide Creek was looking for spring roundup hands. The whiskey bottles glittered as the swinging doors let in planks of light—Kellogg’s Old Bourbon, Squirrel, McBryan’s, G. G. Booz, Day Dream and a few sharp-cornered gin bottles. He bought the man a drink. The thing was, said his informant, a big-mustached smiler showing rotten nutcrackers, putting on the sideboards by wrapping his thumb and forefinger around the shot glass to gain another inch of fullness, that although Karok paid well and he didn’t hardly lay off men in the fall, he would not hire a married man, claiming they had the bad habit of running off home to see wife and kiddies while Karok’s cows fell in mud holes, were victimized by mountain lions and rustlers, drifted down the draw and suffered the hundred other ills that could befall untended cattle. The bartender, half-listening, sucked a draught of Wheatley’s Spanish Pain Destroyer from a small bottle near the cash register.

“Stomach,” he said to no one, belching.

Big Mustache knocked back his brimming shot of Squirrel and went on. “He’s a foreigner from back east, and the only thing counts to him is cows. He learned that fast when he come here back in the early days, cows is the only thing. Grub’s pretty poor, too. There ain’t no chicken in the chicken soup.”

“Yeah, and no horse in the horseradish,” said Archie who’d heard all the feeble bunkhouse jokes.

“Huh. Well, he rubs some the wrong way. Most a them quit. What I done. Some law dog come out there once with his hand hoverin over his shooter and I could see he was itchin to dabble in gore. I felt like it was a awful good place a put behind me. But there’s a few like Karok’s ways. Maybe you are one a them. Men rides for him gets plenty practice night ropin. See, his herd grows like a son of a bitch if you take my meanin. But I’ll give you some advice: one a these days there’ll be some trouble there. That’s how come that law was nosin round.”

Archie rode up through country as yellow and flat as an old newspaper and went to see Karok. There was a big sign on the gate: NO MaRIED MeN. When the dour rancher asked him, Archie lied himself single, said that he had to fetch his gear, would be back in six days.

“Five,” said the kingpin, looking at him suspiciously. “Other fellas look for work they carry their fixins. They don’t have to go home and git it.”

Archie worked up some story about visiting Cheyenne and not knowing he’d been laid off until one of the old outfit’s boys showed up and said they were all on the bum and, said Archie, he had come straight to Karok when he heard there might be a job.

“Yeah? Get goin, then. Roundup started two days ago.”

Back on the Little Weed with Rose, he half-explained the situation, said she would not be able to send him letters or messages until he worked something out, said he had to get back to Karok’s outfit fast and would be gone for months and that she had better get her mother to come down from the station and stay, to help with the baby expected in late September.

“She can’t stand a make that trip. You know how sick she is. Won’t you come back for the baby?” Even in the few days he had been gone he seemed changed. She touched him and sat very close, waiting for the familiar oneness to lock them together.

“If I can git loose I will. But this is a real good job, good money, fifty-five a month, almost twict what Bunk Peck pays and I’m goin a save ever nickel. And if she can’t come down, you better go up there, be around womenfolk. Maybe I can git Tom to bring you up, say in July or August? Or sooner?” He was fidgety, as though he wanted to leave that minute. “He been around? His place was closed up when I stopped there before. I’ll stop again on my way.”

Rose said that if she had to go to the station early September was soon enough. She did not want to be where she would have to tend her sick mother and put up with her drunk father, to see the telegraph man’s face like an eroded cliff, to suffer Mrs. Dorgan’s supercilious comments about “some people” directed at Queeda but meant for Rose to hear, did not want to show rough and distended beside Queeda’s fine dresses and slenderness, to appear abandoned, without the husband they had prophesied would skedaddle. September was five months away and she would worry about it when it came. Together they added up what a year’s pay might come to working for Karok.

“If you save everthing it will be six hundred fifty dollars. We’ll be rich, won’t we?” she asked in a mournful tone he chose not to notice.

He spoke enthusiastically. “And that’s not countin what I maybe can pick up in wolf bounties. Possible another hunderd. Enough to git us started. I’m thinkin horses, raise horses. Folks always need horses. I’ll quit this feller’s ranch after a year an git back here.”

“How do I get news to you—about the baby?”

“I don’t know yet. But I’ll work somethin out. You know what? I feel like I need my hair combed some. You want a comb my hair?”

“Yes,” she said, and laughed just when he’d thought she was going to cry. But for the first time she recognized that they were not two cleaving halves of one person but two separate people, and that because he was a man he could leave any time he wanted, and because she was a woman she could not. The cabin reeked of desertion and betrayal.

ARCHIE & SINK

Men raised from infancy with horses could identify salient differences with a glance, but some had a keener talent for understanding equine temperament than others. Sink Gartrell was one of those, the polar opposite of Montana bronc-buster Wally Finch, who used a secret ghost cord and made unrideable outlaws of the horses he was breaking. Sink gave off a hard air of competence. On roundup the elegant Brit remittance man Morton Frewen had once noticed him handling a nervous cloud-watcher horse and remarked that the rider had “divine hands.” The adjective set the cowhands guffawing and imitating Frewen’s stuffed-nose accent for a few days, but ridicule slid off Sink Gartrell like water off a river rock.

Sink thought the new kid might make a top hand with horses if he got over being a show-off. The second or third morning after he joined the roundup Archie had wakened early, sat up in his bedroll while cookie Hel was stoking his fire, and let loose a getting-up holler decorated with some rattlesnake yodels, startling old Hel, who dropped the coffeepot in the fire, and earning curses from the scattered bedrolls. The black smell of scorched coffee knocked the day over on the wrong side. Foreman Alonzo Lago, who had barely noticed him before, stared hard at the curly-haired new hand who’d made all the noise. Sink noticed him looking.

Later Sink took the kid aside and put the boo on him, told him the facts of life, said that old Lon would bull him good if ever he agreed to get into a bedroll with him, said that the leathery old foreman was well known for bareback riding of new young hires. Archie, who’d seen it all at Peck’s bunkhouse, gave him a look as though he suspected Sink of the same base design, said he could take care of himself and that if anyone tried anything on him he’d clean his plow good. He moved off. When Sink came in from watch at the past-midnight hour, he walked past the foreman’s bedroll but there was only a solitary head sticking out from under the tarpaulin; the kid was somewhere far away in the sage with the coyotes. Just the same, thought Sink, he would watch Lon the next time he got into the red disturbance and starting spouting that damn poem about Italian music in Dakota, for the top screw was a sure-enough twister.

For Archie the work was the usual ranch hand’s luck—hard, dirty, long and dull. There was no time for anything but saddle up, ride, rope, cut, herd, unsaddle, eat, sleep and do it again. On the clear, dry nights coyote voices seemed to emanate from single points in straight lines, the calls crisscrossing like taut wires. When cloud cover moved in, the howls spread out in a different geometry, overlapping like concentric circles from a handful of pebbles thrown into water. But most often the wind surging over the plain sanded the cries into a kind of coyote dust fractioned into particles of sound. He longed to be back on his own sweet place fencing his horse pastures, happy with Rose. He thought about the coming child, imagined a boy half-grown and helping him build wild horse traps in the desert, capturing the mustangs. He could not quite conjure up a baby.