“Oh, dern,” Pea Eye said. “Now I guess we’ll get lightning-struck.” “Go back to sleep, if all you can do is be pessimistic,” Augustus said. “I smell rain, which is a blessing. Indians mostly don’t like to fight in the wet. Only white men are dumb enough just to keep on fighting no matter what the weather is like.” “We’ve fought Indians in the wet,” Pea Eye said.
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But through the years they had been so lucky with visitors that Clara had gradually ceased to jump and take fright at the sight of a rider on the horizon. Their tragedies had come from weather and sickness, not attackers. But the habit of looking close had not left her, and she turned with a clean sheet in one hand and watched out her window as the horsemen dipped off the far slopes and disappeared behind the brush along the river.
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To his surprise, he didn’t enjoy the visit to Ogallala very much. He hit the dry-goods store just as the owner was closing and persuaded him to reopen long enough for him to buy Lorie a mass of clothes. He bought everything from petticoats to dresses, a hat, and also a warm coat, for they were sure to strike cool weather in Montana. He even bought himself a black frock coat worthy of a preacher, and a silk string tie. The merchant soon was in no mood to close; he offered Augustus muffs and gloves and felt-lined boots and other oddities. In the end he had such a purchase that he couldn’t even consider carrying it—they would have to come in tomorrow and pick it up in the wagon, though he did wrap up a few things in case Lorie wanted to wear them to Clara’s. He bought her combs and brushes and a mirror—women liked to see themselves, he knew, and Lorena hadn’t had the opportunity since Fort Worth.
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“Come on, July,” she said. “These girls mean to see that we keep up our standards.” He put the rifle back in the saddle scabbard and followed her into the house.AS THE HERD wound across the brown prairies toward the Platte, whoring became the only thing the men could talk about. Of course, they always liked to talk about it, but there had been sections of the drive when they occasionally mentioned other things—the weather, cards, the personalities of horses, trials and tribulations of the past. After Jake’s death they had talked a good deal about the vagaries of justice, and what might cause a pleasant man to go bad. Once in a while they might talk about their families, although that usually ended with everyone getting homesick. Though a popular subject, it was tricky to handle.
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“He only liked pacers,” Newt said. “He wouldn’t be bothered to steal horses as long as he had one to ride. Just beingalong didn’t make him a horsethief.” “It do to the Captain,” Deets said. “It do to Mr. Gus.” “They didn’t even talk to him,” Newt said bitterly. “They just hung him. They didn’t even act like they were sorry.” “They sorry,” Deets said. “Saying won’t change it. He’s gone, don’t worry about him. He’s gone to the peaceful place.” He put his hand for a moment on Newt’s shoulder. “You need to rest your mind,” he said. “Don’t worry about the sleepers.” How do you stop? Newt wondered. It wasn’t a thing he could forget, Pea Eye mentioned it as he would mention the weather, something natural that just happened and was over. Only for Newt it wasn’t over. Every day it would rise in his mind and stay there until something distracted him.
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She longed, sometimes, to talk to a person who actually wrote stories and had them printed in magazines. It interested her to speculate how it was done: whether they used people they knew, or just made people up. Once she had even ordered some big writing tablets, thinking she might try it anyway, even if she didn’t know how, but that was in the hopeful years before her boys died. With all the work that had to be done she never actually sat down and tried to write anything—and then the boys died and her feeling changed. Once the sight of the writing tablets had made her hopeful, but after those deaths it ceased to matter. The tablets were just another reproach to her, something willful she had wanted. She burned the tablets one day, trembling with anger and pain, as if the paper and not the weather had been somehow responsible for the deaths of her boys. And, for a time, she stopped reading the magazines. The stories in them seemed hateful to her: how could people talk that way and spend their time going to balls and parties, when children died and had to be buried?
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Now Bob lay in that bed all day, staring his empty stare. They had moved the bed near the window so that he would get the summer breezes and could look out if he liked and watch his horses grazing on the plain, or the hawks circling, or whatever little sights there might be. But Bob never turned his head, and no one knew if he felt the breezes. Clara had taken to sleeping on a little cot. The house had a small upper porch and she moved the cot out there in good weather.
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And yet he loved the girls in his unspeaking way. His love mostly came out in awkwardness, for their delicacy frightened him. He was continually warning them about their health and trying to keep them wrapped up. Their recklessness almost stopped his heart at times—they were the kind of girls who would run out in the snow barefoot if they chose. He feared for them, and also feared the effect on his wife if one of them should die. Impervious to weather himself, he came to dread the winters for fear winter would take the rest of his family. Yet the girls proved as strong as their mother, whereas the boys had all been weak. It made no sense to Bob, and he was hoping if they could only have another boy, he would turn into the helper he needed.The only hand they had was an old Mexican cowboy named Cholo. The old man was wiry and strong, despite his age, and stayed mainly because of his devotion to Clara. It was Cholo, and not her husband, who taught her to love horses and to understand them. Cholo had pointed out to her at once that her husband would never break the mustang mare; he had urged her to persuade Bob to sell the mare unbroken, or else let her go. Though Bob had been a horse trader all his adult life, he had no real skill with horses. If they disobeyed him, he beat them—Clara had often turned her back in disgust from the sight of her husband beating a horse, for she knew it was his incompetence, not the horse’s, that was to blame for whatever incident had provoked the beating. Bob could not contain his violence when angered by a horse.
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Then the next winter both boys had died of pneumonia within a month of one another. It was a terrible winter, the ground frozen so deep there was no way to dig a grave. They had had to put the boys in the little kindling shed, wrapped tightly in wagon sheets, until winter let up enough that they could be buried. Many days Bob would come home from delivering horses to the Army—his main customer—to find Clara sitting in the icy shed by the two small bodies, tears frozen on her cheeks so hard that he would have to heat water and bathe the ice from her face. He tried to point out to her that she mustn’t do it—the weather was below zero, and the wind swept endlessly along the Platte. She could freeze to death, sitting in the kindling shed. If only I would, Clara thought—I’d be with my boys.
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“No, señor, he is buried,” Po Campo said. “A victim of lightning.” “That’s a pity,” Augustus said. “He was young and had promise.” “It kilt thirteen head with one bolt,” Pea Eye said. “You never seen such lightning, Gus.” “I seen it,” Augustus said. “We had a little weather too.” Newt felt warm and happy, his clothes on and Mr. Gus back with the crew. The sky had cleared and the clouds that had caused the terrible hail were only a few wisps on the eastern horizon. In the bright sun, with the river crossed and the cattle grazing on the wet grass, and Lorena rescued, life seemed like a fine thing, though every once in a while he would remember Bill Spettle, buried in the mud a few miles back, or Sean O’Brien, way down on the Nueces—the warm sun and bright air had brought them no pleasure. Po Campo had given him a hailstone dipped in molasses and he sat licking it and feeling alternately happy and sad while the men got dressed and prepared to be cowboys again.
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“Good lord, we’re a bunch of beauties,” Dish said, surveying the crew. “Deets is the best-looking of the lot, at least he’s one color. The rest of us is kind of brindled.” Nobody expected weather conditions to get worse, but it seemed that in plains weather there was always room for surprises. A squall blew up as they were starting the cattle into the water, and by the time Old Dog was across the twenty yards of swimming water, Dish on one side of him and Call on the other, the gray sky suddenly began to spit out littlewhite pellets. Dish, who was out of the saddle, hanging onto his saddle strings as his horse swam, saw the first pellets plunking into the water and jerked with fear, for he assumed they were bullets. It was only when he looked up and had a small hailstone peck at his cheek that he realized what was happening.
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“Good lord, we’re a bunch of beauties,” Dish said, surveying the crew. “Deets is the best-looking of the lot, at least he’s one color. The rest of us is kind of brindled.” Nobody expected weather conditions to get worse, but it seemed that in plains weather there was always room for surprises. A squall blew up as they were starting the cattle into the water, and by the time Old Dog was across the twenty yards of swimming water, Dish on one side of him and Call on the other, the gray sky suddenly began to spit out littlewhite pellets. Dish, who was out of the saddle, hanging onto his saddle strings as his horse swam, saw the first pellets plunking into the water and jerked with fear, for he assumed they were bullets. It was only when he looked up and had a small hailstone peck at his cheek that he realized what was happening.
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“This weather’ll slow Call up,” Augustus said. “I expect they all think we’re dead by now.” Lorena still had not spoken. She found her silence hard to give up—it seemed her best weapon against the things that could happen. Talk didn’t help when things were worst—no one was listening. If the Kiowas had got to do what they would have liked to do, she could have screamed her voice out and no one would have heard.
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They made a wet camp and Po Campo poured hot coffee down them by the gallon, but it still promised to be a miserable night. Po and Deets, the acknowledged experts on weather, discussed the situation and admitted they didn’t know when it might stop raining.
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“I miss Gus,” Pea Eye said. “I get to expecting to hear him talk and he ain’t here. My ears sort of get empty.” Call had to admit that he missed him too, and that he was worried. He had had at least one disagreement a day with Gus for as many years as he could remember. Gus never answered any question directly, but it was possible to test an opinion against him, if you went about it right. More and more Call felt his absence, though fortunately they were having uneventful times—the cattle were fairly well trail-broken and weren’t giving any trouble. The crew for the most part had been well behaved, no more irritable or contrary than any other group of men. The weather had been ideal, water plentiful, and the spring grass excellent for grazing.
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“I lived on the llano once,” he said. “I wanted to raise sheep but I was foolish. The wolves killed them and the Comanches killed them and the weather killed them. Then Blue Duck killed my three sons. After that I left the llano.” “Why don’t you think Gus will catch him?” Call asked.
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But Janey didn’t want to ride. “I’ll walk and all you have to do is keep up,” she said. Of course it was no trouble for a man on horseback to keep up with a girl on foot, and Roscoe began to relax and even to enjoy the trip a little. It was pretty weather. All he had to do was trot along and think. What he mostly thought about was how surprised July would be when they showed up and told him the news.
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“I like to snatch a minute for Mr. Milton, and the morning’s my only hope,” Wilbarger added. “At night I’m apt to be in a stampede, and you can’t read Mr. Milton during a stampede—not and take his sense. My days are mostly taken up with lunkheads and weather and sick horses, but I sometimes get a moment of peace after breakfast.” The man looked at them sternly through his glasses. Joe, who had hated what little schooling he’d had, was at a loss to know why a grown man would sit around and read on a pretty day.
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Dear Ellie—We have come a good peace and have been lucky with the weather, it has been clear.No sign of Jake Spoon yet but we did cross the Red River and are in Texas, Joe likes it. His horse has been behaving all right and neither of us has been sick.I hope that you are well and have not been bothered too much by the skeeters.Your loving husband,July He studied over the letter for days and wanted to put in that he missed her or perhaps refer to her as his darling, but he decided it was too risky—Elmira sometimes took offense at such remarks. Also he was bothered by spelling and didn’t know if he had done a good job with it. Several of the words didn’t look right to him, but he had no way of checking except to ask Joe, and Joe had only had a year or two of schooling so far. He was particularly worried about the word “skeeters,” and scratched it in the dirt one night while they were camped, to ask Joe’s opinion.
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Deets was different. Deets observed, he remembered; rarely would he volunteer advice, but when asked, his advice was always to the point. His sense of weather was almost as good as an Indian’s, and he was a superlative tracker.
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“Look at them,” Augustus said happily. “Ain’t they swimmers?”AS THE DAYS PASSED, Lorena found she liked the traveling more and more. The nights were no easier—almost every night the lightning flickered and thunderstorms rolled over them. Often, while she and Jake slept, big drops of rain would hit them in the face and force them to grab for the tarp. Soon the blankets seemed permanently damp, causing Jake to grumble and complain. But the tarp was hot and stiff, and he himself never thought to keep it handy. She would have to stumble around and arrange it in the dark, while Jake cussed the weather.
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The cattle, still fresh to the trail, were not easily controlled. The brush was bad, the weather no better. It rained for three days and the mosquitoes were terrible. The men were not used to the night work and were irritable as hens. Bert Borum and Soupy Jones had an argument over how to hobble a horse and almost came to blows. Lippy had been put in charge of firewood, and the wood he cut didn’t suit Bolivar, who was affronted by Lippy’s very presence. Deets had fallen into one of his rare glooms, probably because he felt partly to blame for the boy’s death.
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JOE KNEW RIGHT OFF that something was bothering July, because he didn’t want to talk. It was not that July had ever been a big talker, like Roscoe could be if he was in the mood, but he was seldom as silent as he was the first week of the trip. Usually he would talk about horses or fishing or. cowboys or the weather or something, but on the trip west it just seemed he didn’t want to talk at all.
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“I hope the weather didn’t treat her too bad,” Dish said, feeling wistful suddenly. He could think of nothing pleasanter than taking coffee with Lorena in the morning.
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“Whoa, now,” Augustus said. “I’m just eating my bite of bacon. But I will say you should have brought a tent if you mean to take a sprightly girl like Lorie out in the weather.” Jake didn’t intend to spend any time bantering about women with Gus. It was good they had the horse back, of course. “I reckon we’ll pack up and move on to San Antonio,” he said, just as Lorena came back with an armful of dry clothes.
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