When the Legends Die (22 page)

The next day they took more X rays, and they kept him quiet with sedatives for three days. The fourth morning he refused all medication, and, when the doctor came in, Tom had his pants and his boots on and was trying to get into his shirt. “ What do you think you’re doing?” the doctor demanded.

“I’m getting out of here.”

“All right. I came in to tell you you’re all right inside, no internal injuries. But you can’t go back to rodeoing till that arm knits. A couple of months or so. Where are you going?”

“I’m going home.”

“Where do you live?”

“New Mexico.”

“How are you going to get there?”

“Drive.”

“Who’s going with you?”

“Nobody.”

“You’re going to drive to New Mexico with one arm?”

“Why not?”

“Tough as rawhide, aren’t you, and stubborn as all hell.” The doctor stripped the tape from Tom’s chest. “These ribs will be sore for a while and it will hurt to take a deep breath. But they’re knitting. I’m telling you, though, stay off a horse for two months. Understand? And have a doctor look at that arm when you get home.”

So Tom left the hospital. He got his car and his gear and headed west.

I
T WAS MIDAFTERNOON WHEN
he came to the bluff and looked down at the cabin. In that first look he had the uneasy feeling that something was wrong. He drove on down the slope, parked the car and went to the cabin. He pushed open the door and saw that no one was there. He went out to the garden, found the beans and chilies choked by knee-high weeds, and returned to the cabin. Meo’s bunk was made, the cooking pots were empty and clean, the dishes washed and in their places. Whatever happened, Meo had left the cabin in order. He went out to the barn. It was empty and Meo’s saddle was missing.

Tom got in his car again and drove to Aztec. He went to Dr. Wilson’s house, banged on the door and walked into the empty waiting room. The doctor came out of his office and exclaimed, “Tom Black!” and reached out to shake hands, then saw the splinted arm. “What happened to you?”

“Just a broken bone or two. Where’s Meo? Have you see him? That’s what I came about.”

“Come on into the office.”

They went in and sat down, and the doctor said, “Meo is dead.”

“When?” Tom asked. “What happened?”

“About a month ago. He rode into town one afternoon and came to the office and sat out there in the waiting room for an hour, I guess, before I saw him. I brought him in here and asked him what was wrong, and he said, ‘I am going to die.’ He didn’t look sick to me, but I took his pulse and blood pressure. They were normal. I couldn’t find anything wrong.”

“How was his mind?”

“Clear as a bell. I told him to go home and forget it, that he’d live another twenty years. But he just shook his head and said, ‘No. Tonight,’ like that, just as if he knew all about it. And he gave me a roll of bills and said I should see that he was buried right, with a coffin and a priest. Then I asked him if he had seen the priest, and he said no, so I took him over to the rectory and Father Gomez said he would take care of him. He sent a boy back to get the old man’s horse and I figured Father Gomez would listen to him, put him up for the night, and the next morning he would stop in, pick up his money and go on home, satisfied.”

The doctor paused for a moment. Then he went on. “The next morning, while I was eating breakfast, a boy came and said Father Gomez wanted me to come right over, so I went. Meo was dead. Father Gomez had put him up for the night and he’d died quietly in his sleep.” He looked at Tom, frowning, baffled. “That’s the story. I wish now I’d done an autopsy, but I’d swear there wasn’t anything wrong with him. His heart was as good as mine!”

“He knew,” Tom said.

“What do you mean, he knew?”

Tom shrugged.

“I’ve known some of these old people to wish themselves to death, but that was when they were dying anyway. He wasn’t sick! I’m telling you, he wasn’t sick.”

Tom made no comment. Dr. Wilson shifted uneasily in his chair. “Anyway, I gave the money to Father Gomez and he arranged the funeral. Did it up right. So,” he concluded, “that’s what happened. … Now, let’s have a look at that arm of yours.”

He examined the arm, said it was knitting nicely, and readjusted the splints and bandages. He probed Tom’s chest with his fingers, listened to it, and said as he put away his stethoscope, “Young bones knit fast. What are you going to do now?”

“Go out to the place till this arm’s all right.”

“That’ll be another month. Better let me have a look at it again next week. You all through rodeoing?”

“No.”

The doctor looked at him, speculating. “I’d think you’d want to settle down. You could buy that place cheap, I imagine. Put a little herd of sheep out there, or a few cattle—”

But Tom was shaking his head.

“Look,” the doctor said, “I know you’re a reservation boy, but you’re smart and you could make something of yourself. You saw what happened to Dillon and old Meo. Dillon was a tinhorn gambler who drank himself to death. Meo Martinez was an illiterate Mexican just two steps away from
ajacal.
He still believed in
espiritn.
But you’ve got a chance, if you’ll take it.”

He stopped, wondering if he had said too much. Tom seemed to have retreated into himself. You talk to a Mexican that way and he smiles and nods and seems to agree, even though he goes out and does things the way he always has. But time after time he had seen an Indian just sort of draw the curtains and retreat, as though he was slipping back into the remote past, into a kind of pride that was all mixed up with hurt and resentment. Tom Black was doing that right now, retreating into an emotional cave. When that happened there wasn’t a thing you could do. You could talk yourself blue in the face and get nowhere.

The doctor shrugged. “Well,” he said, “it’s your life. As George Herbert said, ‘The wearer knows where the shoe wrings.’ We’ve got our own demons and our own necessities, I suppose. There may even be a pattern all laid out for us. Who knows?” He got to his feet. “Come back to see me next week?”

Tom thanked him and left. What the doctor had said made him remember the agent at the reservation. But he shrugged it off. It was of no consequence. He didn’t want to think about those things.

He went back to the cabin on the river, aired it out and tried to settle in. But the cabin, for all its familiar corners, was a strange place, alien. For two days he sat in the sun, going inside only to cook his meals and sleep. Then he looked at the garden, at the bean plants and the chilies being choked by the weeds. He was tempted to pull the weeds, as Meo would have done. Then he thought: Meo is gone. His sweat and his footsteps are almost forgotten. If the beans and the chilies cannot live with the weeds, they do not belong here. I do not hate those weeds. I do not belong here either, and now Meo is gone.

Instead of weeding the garden, he walked, to keep his legs strong. He walked upstream, and five miles up the canyon he saw four of Reds old rough string, the broncs. They were wild as deer, snorted, tossed their heads and ran at sight of him. He walked a few more miles, then went back to the cabin. Neither then nor in the next few days did he see the other broncs or the second saddle horse. They had either wandered off and joined some other horse herd, or a mountain lion had come down the canyon and made a few meals of horse meat. It didn’t matter any more than the garden mattered. They had been Red Dillon’s horses, and Red was gone.

Two weeks passed before he remembered the doctor. It didn’t seem important to go and see him. His bones would heal. They were his bones, not the doctor’s. He flexed his arm to keep the joints from stiffening, and he took off the bandages and the splints and massaged the muscles, forced the circulation to help the healing. He began using the arm, carefully.

Then he walked out onto the flats. He saw an occasional jack rabbit and a few pronghorns, and almost every day he saw a prairie falcon hunting ground squirrels. Then he found a small prairie dog town and he sat and watched the prairie dogs and the burrowing owls. He sat there, not thinking, feeling the sun on his back and the strength of the earth beneath him, and vague, cobwebbed memories came back, memories of Albert Left Hand. They drifted through his mind, like shadows, and they left a dull ache that brought back memories of Benny Grayback and Blue Elk. He pushed the memories away and got to his feet and walked back toward the cabin.

He was a stranger here. He had always been a stranger. All he had here was a hatful of memories. And what did the memories mean? Nothing. Less than nothing. They were like scars. You looked at them and remembered old hurts that had healed over.

He went back to the cabin, and it was a place full of strangeness. He knew every corner, and yet he didn’t belong there. He cooked his supper and ate, and he went outside and sat in the dusk. Bullbats “peened” overhead and dived on roaring wings. The first stars came out and the cool dampness crept in from the river. The afternoon’s memories came back, and he put them away again, and he looked at the corral, its poles now tumbling down, unused, neglected. He looked at the barn, empty, meaningless. Then he saw himself in the corral, learning to ride, to match and master the violence of the fighting, squealing broncs. Learning to punish with raking spurs, a vicious rein, a brutal ride.

He sat, and the late moon rose, and the shifting shadows and the thin moonlight seemed to set the rails in place again and he saw a deep-set snubbing post and a bear cub chained to it. And in the vague tree-shadowed light the barn became a barn where a boy who hated the smell of cows was forced to clean the stinking stalls, where a tormented boy was flogged for turning on his tormentors.

He sat there a long time. It was almost midnight. He shifted his legs and felt the cramps in them, and the ache was in his arm. He got to his feet, eased the cramps and rubbed the ache, and then he went to his car, got in and drove it over to the foot of the bluff and left it there. He came back to the cabin and got an ax and a handful of matches and went out to the corral. He carried the fallen rails and piled them against the barn and he loosened the other rails with the ax and added them to the pile. Then he went into the barn, started at the far end and set a series of fires in the litter of old hay, and went back and sat down in front of the cabin.

The barn was tinder dry. Within fifteen minutes the flames were leaping through the roof. Then the roof fell in with a roar and a great billowing of embers. Some of the embers came all the way to the cabin and hissed and smoldered on the roof and died in the night dampness there. The grass, midsummer green and wet with river dew, steamed like fog in the blast of heat and shriveled and charred in a great circle around the barn and halfway to the cabin. The big cottonwoods rustled, and those near the barn sizzled and spat and set up little spurts of flame all along their coarse-barked branches.

Then the flames began to die down. They slowly subsided into a great bed of coals that winked and hissed and spurted in sudden, angry life. The darkness crept back, now twice as dark as before, with the huge torch burning out. The valley was gray with acrid smoke, held close by the night’s damp air, the smolder of old hay adding its sour stink to the woodsmoke and the smell of charred green cottonwoods.

At last Tom got to his feet and went inside and to bed.

It was midmorning when he wakened. The cabin smelled of smoke and smoldering hay, and the ashes of the barn still fumed and sent up curls of white smoke. He cooked and ate breakfast, then packed his gear. He brought the car to the door, loaded it and took it back and left it at the foot of the bluff. Then he returned to the cabin, split a big armload of kindling and piled it carefully in the middle of the floor. He moved the table and benches over beside it, then set fire to it and went back to his car and sat down in the shade and waited.

The windows began to glow with the flames inside. Then the smoke threaded out through the cracks and began to billow out the doorway. A window fell in and flames reached out and licked at the eaves. The flames burst through die roof and towered, hissing and crackling. When the roof fell in, a great shower of fine white ash was carried high into the air by the blast of heat and, drifting on the breath of a breeze, fell like fine snow around him and on the car, harmless white ashes, fine as dust.

The big cottonwoods beside the house withered and seemed to shrink and curl, and flames crept up their big limbs like hungry red tongues. The trees hissed and spat, then began to pop like gunfire. The weedy garden withered as though under a sudden frost, and the tall weeds crumpled and fell and the whole garden disappeared, leaving only a patch of charred ground. The grass seemed to melt away in a spreading circle that met the circle scorched last night in the moonlight, and flaming embers fell there and blossomed briefly—red flowers that bloomed and faded in a few minutes. Then one wall tottered, sagged, fell with a fresh showering of embers and a new surge of flame.

Tom waited almost an hour, watching the flames consume the cabin, log by log. Then the fire subsided into a great, smoldering heap of ashes with the chimney thrusting up like a stubborn black thumb. He got to his feet, brushed the fine white ash from his clothes and was aware for the first time of the deep, dull ache in his arm. he kneaded the muscles, accepting the pain almost gratefully. Then he got into his car, found the circuit schedule, saw that he had missed four shows. He had been here two days over a month. The next show was at Wolf Point, on the Missouri River up in the northeast corner of Montana. He had four days to get there, find a place to sleep, make his entry.

He took one more look at the dying fire that had been the cabin and at the scatter of char and white ashes that had been the barn. Then he started the motor and drove away.

B
EFORE
T
OM’S RIDE IN
the first go-round at Wolf Point the announcer said, “The next man out is just back in business after a month out with an assortment of broken bones. A bronc put him in the hospital, and could be he’s out for revenge. Anyway, here he comes, out of Chute Number Two, on High Tension—Tom Black!”