The first thing to strike Hewey about his younger brother was that Walter was wearing bib overalls. In olden times he had rather have ridden stark naked down a cow-town street at high noon than be seen in overalls. The second thing to strike him was that Walter looked like the older brother, not the younger.
He was a little slow setting the plow over. He gave Hewey a tentative and apologetic wave as he paused a moment, stretching his stiffened arms and rubbing his right shoulder. But he grinned with his whole face. Hewey forgot about the plowed ground and walked out hurriedly to meet him. They shook hands, but that wasn’t enough, so they threw their arms around each other. Happy tears ran unashamed down Walter’s dusty cheeks, leaving little tracks of mud across what looked like weathered leather.
“The prodigal son,” Walter exulted, “finally come home. And there’s not a fatted calf on the place.”
“I’d settle for a wing from a drouthy quail.”
“You may have to.” Walter stepped back for a good long look at Hewey, from his face to his thorn-scarred boots. “I’d about decided you’d finally found a bronc you couldn’t ride or a cow you oughtn’t to’ve roped. Thought they’d buried you someplace without us knowin’ it. You had three years of schoolin’. Didn’t you learn to write?”
“Not to where you could read it.”
Walter’s overalls were old and thready, both knees patched with newer material that stood out darker than the faded blue. His old hat was shapeless, the brim flat, showing none of the flair that had been a trademark of the Calloway brothers in their wilder years. The hat now was strictly for business, to keep the sun from his face; the flatter the brim the better it did that job.
Even in a winter bachelor camp where nothing could see him except three horses and a bunch of hungry cattle, Hewey had taken care about the shape of his hat. He watched his shadow sometimes as he rode. Even the shadow had style.
The two brothers, over the first flush of joy, stood back at arm’s length and regarded each other critically, neither altogether pleased by what he saw.
Walter accused, “You ain’t been eatin’ regular.”
“I never did. But I’ll bet I look better than you do. You been drivin’ yourself, ain’t you?”
“Hard work never killed anybody.”
“Neither did hard liquor, taken in moderation. But I’ve seen men that could get drunk on work and business, same as on whisky. You sure you ain’t turned into one of those?”
Walter passed the question without an answer. He demanded, “What’s that mark along your jaw?”
Hewey lied, “Got pawed by a bronc. Only grazed me, kind of.”
“Don’t you think you’ve come to an age where you ought to stop messin’ with them bad horses? They’ll kill you one of these days.”
“Age? I ain’t but thirty-six.”
“Thirty-eight, and in some danger of never seein’ thirty-nine. Don’t try to hooraw me, Hewey. I got a memory for dates and figures.”
Tommy watched them nervously, unsure if he should stay or quietly return to his plow. He couldn’t tell whether his father and uncle were in jest or really quarreling.
Hewey wasn’t sure either. There had always been a fine line between the two, and he had never been able to discern just when they crossed it. He looked at the worried boy. “Better slack up, Walter. Tommy’ll think that brothers argue all their lives. That don’t give him and Cotton much to look forward to.”
Walter broke into a long grin that lifted ten years from his face. He said to Tommy, “We ain’t arguin’, son. You ought to remember; this is the way me and your Uncle Hewey always carried on. We don’t mean nothin’ by it.”
Hewey wasn’t sure about that, but he nodded agreement. “We never used to fight, your daddy and me. We never disagreed in our whole lives, did we, Walter?”
Walter glanced at Biscuit, then turned back to Hewey. “You said you’re hungry. You ride on down to the house and get Eve to fix you somethin’ to eat. Me and Tommy, we’ll be in about dark.”
The sun was still two hours high. “Dark?”
“We need to finish gettin’ this field broken and planted. A spell of wet weather has throwed us late.”
“Two hours won’t make that much difference in a whole year’s crop. You could quit early, just this once.”
Walter appeared tempted. “Two hours wasted is two hours gone forever.”
Two hours. Hewey could remember one time he and Walter had camped for two days outside a coyote den hoping to get a shot at a calf-killing bitch as she came out. When she finally did, they both missed her.
Walter repeated, “You go on in, Hewey. Eve’ll be tickled to see you.”
Like a case of the measles, Hewey thought. He remembered that she had usually been far more tickled to see him leave than to see him arrive. He said, “Where’s Cotton?”
“Over on the French place puttin’ a windmill together.”
Hewey was incredulous. “You let that little boy climb a windmill, all by himself? What if he falls?”
“That little boy is damn near grown. Anyway, he’s puttin’ it together on the ground. A few neighbors are comin’ over tomorrow to eat fried chicken with us and help us raise the mill.”
Hewey loosened some. “I been itchin’ to see that boy. How’ll I find him?”
Walter’s eyes narrowed. “It’s a ways over there. Cotton’ll be home directly, and you can see him without tirin’ your horse out so bad.”
Hewey shrugged. “Maybe I could be some help to him.”
Walter shook his head knowingly. “You never used to be afraid of anything, Hewey, but you’re scared to go down to the house and meet Eve all by yourself. She don’t bite.”
“She don’t bite you, maybe.”
“I never did understand what got wrong between you two, but that’s been a long time ago, and long forgotten about.” Walter kept looking at Hewey, knowing he wasn’t convinced. Finally he shrugged, giving up. “Hell, it’s Saturday, and tomorrow’s the Sabbath. The Lord won’t condemn us for sloth just this once. We’ve got company to celebrate. Tommy, let’s unhitch the teams.”
He didn’t have to say it twice. Tommy was already at his plow before his father had taken three steps. Hewey went to help Tommy. They left the plow where it stood in the newly turned earth at the end of the row, ready for a fresh start on another day. Tommy gathered up the lines and jumped easily onto the bare back of a gray mule.
Hewey smiled. “Mind if I ride the other one and lead Biscuit? He’s kind of wrung out.”
“Hop on.”
Hewey grasped the mane and bent his knees, then sprang up, throwing his belly across the mule’s broad back. That part wasn’t so hard, but dragging his right leg up and over seemed to take about all the strength he had. Funny, didn’t seem like it used to be so hard to mount bareback. He guessed it was just that he hadn’t done it in a spell. It wasn’t a thing that came up every day in his normal routine. He swung the mule around so he could gather up the bridle reins and lead Biscuit.
He watched Walter struggle to get onto one of the horses bareback. Maybe he was just tired. Plowing a half-wet field was hardly restful.
Hewey quickly discerned why Tommy had chosen the other mule. This one had a trot that would jar the innards out of a seventy-dollar pocket watch. Hewey pulled his hat down tight and made it a point not to look at his shadow.
Walter said, “You can ride this other horse if you’d rather.”
Hewey had much rather, but he did not wish to back down in the sight of his nephew. “I’m doin’ just fine. I ain’t used to no rockin’ chair.” He wasn’t used to a sledgehammer, either.
Three trees were beginning to reach up well beyond the roof of the plain frame house. Hewey found it hard to believe they had grown so much. He turned to Tommy and pointed. “Those can’t be the chinaberries we set out that time, me and you two buttons?”
“It’s them,” Tommy said with pride. “Three of them just like we said when we did it … one for me and one for you and one for Cotton. You promised that when they got big enough we’d climb up to the tops of them, the three of us. They’re big enough now.”
“I said that?”
“You sure did. You made a promise and took the oath of a Cherokee chief.”
The oath of a Cherokee chief? Hewey frowned, unable to remember. Some wild idea he had thought up on the spur of the moment, probably. He had always done that with the two boys, and with other boys he came across in his travels. If they wanted a story and he didn’t have one to fit, he made one up as he went along, indulging in wild fancies that seemed to drift effortlessly to him out of the clouds, and as effortlessly return there, quickly forgotten.
He was going to have to quit that. The boys were older now and had good memories.
Tommy said, “I’ve climbed up in them. I want to see you clear at the top, Uncle Hewey.”
Hewey shook his head. “I can’t do that kind of thing anymore, button. Doctor’s orders.”
“Doctor’s orders?”
“I ain’t supposed to go up high anymore. Makes my blood get thin.”
Tommy didn’t accept that. “How come?”
Hewey never knew where the inspirations came from. All of a sudden the yarns would be spinning and he had no real idea what the source was, or even how they would end. “Well, it was when I was up in Colorado, up in the high country. There was a boy I met up yonder … same age as you, looked a whole lot like you, only his name was Timmy instead of Tommy, and he had built him a great big kite, big as a haystack. He wanted me to help him get it started. Well sir, a little breeze came up, and I taken out runnin’ with it to get the kite started, and somehow I got my arm tangled up in the string, and one of them big winds come along the way they do sometimes in that country. It picked me up with the kite and sailed me way up high. Just like a bird, I was, with the prettiest view of that valley down there a thousand feet under me. I just went sailin’, nice and free as you please, higher and higher up into them mountains, till I got all the way to the top. Then the breeze died down, and I floated to earth on the peak of the very highest mountain there was. I could look down in all four directions and see a hundred … no, two hundred miles.
“I can’t describe it to you, button; I ain’t got words big enough. It was the most beautiful sight ever I seen in my life, big tall pine trees and big blue lakes stretchin’ off out yonder as far as an eagle could see. A little bit like it must look to God, I reckon, sittin’ way up high. I sure did enjoy it. But I got to thinkin’ about my little friend Bobby down there at the foot of the mountain, cryin’ for his kite, maybe figurin’ I had stolen it from him. So, there wasn’t nothin’ for me to do but start down, walkin’ all the way. It was summertime, but it gets cold up in them mountains. The longer I walked the colder I got, and when I come down finally to the valley where it was warm, I was still cold. I gave Johnny his kite and then went to the doctor. He told me the chill had thinned my blood too much, and I had to get it thickened up again. You know how I done that? I done it eatin’ syrup. Blackstrap molasses, the thicker the better. I reckon I must of eaten a barrel of it before my blood stiffened up to where I wasn’t cold anymore. Doctor told me I couldn’t afford ever to go to high places again. So that’s why I can’t climb trees. I reckon that’s a pleasure I’ll have to give up for the rest of my life.”
Tommy rode along in silence, digesting all that. At length he asked, “Uncle Hewey, I don’t reckon you saw God while you was way up on that mountain?”
Hewey shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”
Tommy nodded. “He’d of told you where He sends people who tell stories like that.”
* * *
Riding in to Walter Calloway’s little headquarters from its back side, Hewey couldn’t see that much had changed. The barn was a box-and-strip building, not one foot larger that it had to be to house his saddles and harness, some sacked stock salt, scooped from the edge of the big Juan Cordona Lake, and the assortment of livestock medicines and liniments which gave off a smell that reached beyond the door and struck a man squarely in both nostrils before he touched the latch. On one side was a lean-to roof with a trough and a hayrack where the work stock could be fed dry during infrequent rainy weather. On the other side was another rude lean-to, walled only on the north, sheltering a forge and an anvil where Walter and the boys could do whatever blacksmithing was necessary. Most horses and mules in this country went unshod. The hoofs were simply kept trimmed so they wouldn’t break or split and cause lameness.
Next to the barn stood a wooden windmill tower, topped by a twelve-foot Eclipse wheel turning in the warm afternoon breeze. Its sucker-rod clanked with a steady rhythm in the pipe. Its water flowed first into a big wooden barrel, the mouth of the pipe set high enough that a bucket could be placed under it to fill with clean drinking and cooking and washing water for the house. From the barrel the water passed through a short pipe into another frame building even smaller than the barn. Hewey looked at his brother.
“There’s somethin’ new. You built Eve a milk-house?”
Walter proudly held the door open for Hewey. Hewey saw that the water from the pipe flowed into a slanted open concrete trough into which Eve had set several cloth-covered milk and cream jars to keep their contents from souring too soon. The water fresh from the ground was always cool.
Walter said, “We built the trough with just enough slope to keep the fresh water runnin’ through and out the far end.”
Hewey saw scratched into the cement before it had hardened “Cotton—Tommy ’05.”
Walter said, “It was Cotton laid it all out.” The water gurgled as it eddied into another pipe which led to a big open-surface tank. There it was available to the livestock after the people had finished with it. There was no water in the family house except that which somebody carried in a bucket. The windmill supplied all the water for man and beast. Without it, or another of its kind, life could not long be sustained here. Nature had not provided it at the surface, free for the taking; it had to be worked for. That was the reason this part of Texas had been slow in settling up, the last to be claimed other than by the free-sprawling cattlemen such as C. C. Tarpley. The real enemy here had not been Indians or the thin scattering of outlaws; it had been the lack of water. The windmill had done more for settlement than all the cavalry and all the sheriffs since the Civil War.
Hewey looked up at the family’s meat supply, beef wrapped in a protective tarp to keep the flies off. It was hanging from a steel hook attached to the end of a lever. Walter reached over to a peg and untied a short length of rope. Running up through a pulley, it freed the lever so that the quarter of beef was lowered by its own weight to about shoulder level. Walter pulled on the rope. The lever moved up, raising the meat back almost to the ceiling.
“Cotton’s idea too,” Walter said. “He designed it to make more workin’ room and still keep things easy for his mother.”
Moving out, Hewey stepped to the side of the barn and ran a thumbnail along a plank, testing the peeling paint. He had helped Walter put this barn up; he hated to see it looking this way. “Needs paintin’.”
“First things first. We’ve had other things more in need.”
“I’ll paint it for you if you’ll fetch some red paint first time you go to town.” Red paint was the cheapest; its color was dark enough that even a cheap grade would cover.
“Paint don’t come cheap. Barn won’t fall down if it goes another year without new paint. Eve’s gone two years without a new dress.”
Hewey frowned and said nothing. The whole barn wouldn’t take but a dollar’s worth, maybe two. Many a time he had put a dollar’s worth of whisky down his throat between two breaths and never begrudged the money. A dollar had never meant much to him, beyond whatever pleasure it might bring to him or to somebody whose company he enjoyed. Want of money was a thing he never experienced and never understood. He had been broke often, but he had never been poor.
He had never had a wife to support, of course, or two sons, or a homestead to prove up. He guessed to Walter a dollar bill must look as big as a saddle blanket, and as scarce as July rain.
Walter had added no new corrals that Hewey could see; four sections of land wouldn’t carry a great many cattle, not in this part of the country. Hewey had helped him build all the pens he needed several years ago. They had used mesquite timber, stacked horizontally between pairs of heavy posts, making a fence tight enough that a kid goat couldn’t crawl through. They had cut rawhide strips to tie the pairs of posts at the top instead of buying wire. They hadn’t used five dollars worth of bought materials.
They hadn’t had five dollars to spend.
Tommy dipped a tin bucket into an oat bin. The oats, cut last May or June and almost a year old now, had a dry and dusty smell as he spread them along the bottom of a wooden trough. The two work horses and the mules went straight to the feed. Biscuit had stood apart from the other stock, a little superior in attitude, his custom among strangers. But when he heard their teeth grinding the oats, he turned democrat and joined them at the trough.
Hewey said, “I wouldn’t want to spoil him. He don’t get this style of treatment everywhere.”
Walter said, “He won’t get enough of it here to do him any harm. You wouldn’t believe, Hewey, what a bushel of oats is worth these days.”
Tommy said, “We gather up most of these down at the freighters’ campground, what they spill when they feed their stock.”
A freight-wagon road ran nearby, a couple of hundred yards below the house. For years freighters had made a custom of camping in a grove of wild chinaberry trees and had led their horse and mule teams up to the corrals to water them from Walter’s tank. It was a point of pride with Walter not to charge them for it because the Lord had provided the water. The Lord had not provided the windmill, however, except in an indirect manner. The freighters recognized this fact and usually made it a point to waste some feed that the boys could gather up in a sack.
From somewhere appeared a droop-eared burro, its brown hair still ragged with unshed winter growth. It pushed in beside Biscuit and shoved its nose into the oats. Biscuit, nettled by the uninvited familiarity, bared his teeth and took a nip at the burro’s flank. The burro wheeled, showed his backside and kicked Biscuit squarely in the stomach. His point made, he went back to the oats. Biscuit stood to one side, surprised and shamed. Finally he turned back to the trough but kept one of the work stock between him and the burro.
Hewey grimaced, sharing Biscuit’s shame at the hands of an inferior. “He ain’t met many burros. He’s got a right smart to learn.”
Tommy said, “He’ll learn it if he stays around this one. The burro’s Cotton’s. Alvin Lawdermilk gave it to him for helpin’ him work some bronc mules.” Many ranchers used burros to teach young broncs to lead and obey the rope. They would simply tie the burro and the bronc together. The stubborn burro would go where he wanted to and make the bronc come along whether it suited him or not. Size and weight counted for little. The burro almost always won.
“Every boy ought to have him a dog and a burro,” Hewey said. “What do you call him?”
Tommy glanced quickly at his father, then back at the animal. “Mostly just ‘Burro,’ or ‘Hey, you!’ He don’t answer to a name. He just answers to feed.”
Hewey watched the horses and mules and the burro eat, a thing that had always given him pleasure. He had heard few sounds in his life that he liked better than a strong set of teeth grinding at a bait of oats, unless it was a good rain beating upon a tin roof in a dry country that needed it. He noticed finally that Walter was waiting for him, holding the gate open. Hewey walked out so Walter could shut the gate behind him. Walter said, “Tommy, you can milk the cow before supper.”
“It’s Cotton’s turn.”
“Cotton’s still out workin’. I let you quit early.”
The argument was over; neither Walter nor Eve stood for it from the boys.
They all started walking toward the house. Hewey’s skin began to prickle. He never knew what kind of reception Eve would have for him on any given day. He remembered a couple he wouldn’t wish on Fat Gervin. “You better go on ahead and tell her I’m here, Walter.”
“She’ll know it when she sees you. Come on.” Walter scraped his boots on the edge of the step at the kitchen door, in case he had set foot into something he hadn’t noticed. Eve would notice it; that was certain. Tommy grinned in anticipation of his mother’s happy reaction. Hewey wiped his feet with even more care than Walter had taken and rubbed the toes of his dusty boots on the backs of his legs, not removing any dust but moving it around. He wished he had taken longer in Tarpley’s water tank.
He heard Eve’s voice, tinged with concern. “You’re home early. Somethin’ wrong?”
“Nothin’ wrong,” Walter replied. “Everything’s right.”
“It’s still daylight. I haven’t got supper fixed yet. I didn’t figure on you-all till good dark.” Hewey imagined he could detect reproach, but he knew he was probably giving her the worst of it.
“We had good reason to quit. Come on in here, Hewey.”
Hewey took a slow, deep breath and pulled the kitchen screen open. He stopped just inside, letting it bump against his backside as the spring pulled it shut. He held his hat in both hands and was ready to hit the screen running if need be. Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, he finally managed, “Howdy, Eve.” Nothing else came out.
Eve Calloway was well into her thirties, no longer really young but not yet reconciled to pass over that one-way threshold into middle age. She was at a time in her life when with the right clothes and activated by the right mood she could still seem girl-like, years younger than her actual age. Or, if tired and irritable and taking no care for her appearance, she could look years older than she was. Hewey had seen her both ways so many times he never knew which to expect. At this moment, she seemed more inclined toward the latter.
She stared at him with wide eyes. Other than surprise, he could see no readily identifiable emotion in her face. He kept his back against the screen. Waiting vainly for a reaction, he finally blurted, “I ain’t stayin’ long, Eve.”
Walter watched his wife, waiting for her to give his brother a joyous welcome. When she didn’t, he became as nervous as Hewey. He walked to the wood-box and glanced perfunctorily inside. “Low on wood. I better chop some more before supper.”
Hewey quickly volunteered, but Walter cut him off. “You stay here and visit with Eve. She’s anxious to know where-all you’ve been.” He pushed past Hewey and went out the screen door, pausing to lift a milk bucket from its rack beside the steps. Outside, he was telling Tommy to get on with the milking.
Alone, Hewey and Eve stared at each other across the width of the little kitchen, neither moving.
“Well, Hewey…” she said at length, and let it drop there.
“Well, Eve…” he replied, and didn’t pick it up.
When the tension between them became too heavy for her, she turned to the Majestic iron cookstove, removed the round front lid from its place, did momentary violence to the red coals with an iron poker, then shoved in a couple of chunks of dry mesquite from the woodbox. Hewey suspected it was not a thing she especially needed to do; it was something to busy her hands. Not looking at him, she said, “You’d just as well sit down and stop blockin’ the door. And you’d better pitch that hat into a corner before you twist the brim plumb off of it.”
Hewey dropped his hat on the floor, took one step sideways and hunkered down campfire style, his back against the flower-papered wall. The paper helped keep the wind out; the box-and-strip siding—one-by-twelve planks and one-by-four strips nailed over the joints—did not seal.
Eve tentatively touched her fingers against the coffeepot, testing its warmth. She pulled the hand quickly away. Hewey remembered it was her habit to keep the coffee drinkably warm all day. Like most farm and ranch wives of her place and time, she had rather have faced the devil in her nightgown than to be caught smoking a cigarette or drinking whisky. But she drank more coffee than Walter did. She fetched a flat-bottomed gray enamel cup from a plain open-fronted cabinet nailed to the wall. She turned with the coffeepot in her hand. She stopped at the sight of Hewey sitting on his spurs. “You’re just like every cowboy I ever saw in my life,” she scolded. “If I had a dozen rockin’ chairs in the room, they’d still squat on the floor. You get up here and sit at the table and try to act like company! This is a house, not a cow camp!”
Hewey was quick to do what she told him. She spilled a little of the coffee in her nervousness. Instinctively Hewey rubbed his hand through it to wipe it up, then didn’t know what to do with the wet hand. He dried it on his trousers, under the table and out of sight.
Eve poured herself some coffee but didn’t sit at the table with him. She stared at him from her position in front of the stove. The mesquite wood was starting to crackle a little, though Hewey imagined the sound might be coming from Eve herself.
“Look, Eve,” he said finally, “I got a little homesick. The boys got to weighin’ on my mind. I just felt like I had to see them. A day or two, that’s all, and I’ll be gone.”
Her blue eyes reminded him of a diamond, cutting glass. “You’re lookin’ thin, Hewey. Haven’t you eaten regular?”
“I’m all right. I been batchin’ all winter.”
“Batchin’? No wonder. There’s not many men can cook fit to feed a hound dog, and you’re sure not one of the few. It’ll take me a month to put some flesh on you.”
“I don’t figure to stay that long.”
Her eyes lost their cutting edge. Though he knew it was unlikely, he thought he saw the beginning of a smile start pulling at the corners of her mouth. If so, she quickly got the situation under control. “You’re here, Hewey, so you’ll stay.” It sounded like an order.
Hewey didn’t know what to say, so he kept his mouth shut.
She demanded, “Where in the world did you go, Hewey? Leavin’ like that, in the middle of the night? We just got up in the mornin’ and found you gone. The boys cried, both of them. Walter didn’t know what to think.”
“You know why I left.”
“You’ve made me live with a bad conscience. I knew you left because of what I said to you, and I couldn’t tell them.”
“What you told me was true, every bit of it. I didn’t have no part in what you and Walter was tryin’ to do here. Only thing for me to do was to leave and not come back.” He looked down at his coffee cup, lifted it partway, then set it on the table again. “I stayed away as long as I could.”
She took a couple of steps toward him. “Hewey Calloway, look at me!” He did. He had been watching her ever since he had come into the house. She said, “You helped us get this place. You helped us build this house and a lot of what else is here. You’ve got a right to stay as long as you want to.”
He blinked. “That’s not how you sounded when I left here.”
“I was mad.”
“I ain’t changed any. You’ll be mad again if I stay long.”
She took another step. “I know. You can be an exasperatin’ man, Hewey. I’ll bet there’s not three things in this whole world that we agree on, you and me. But the next time I get mad, you just go off out of my sight awhile and give me a little time. You don’t have to stay gone for two years.”
He sipped the coffee and found it bitter; it had been heating too long. But it was coffee, and that was the staff of life around most cow camps he had ever stayed in. He looked up at her. “I’ll try not to make you mad atall. I’ll try to keep my mouth shut.”
She shook her head, a smile breaking across her face. “I wouldn’t ask that much of Nature. I would as soon ask the snow to come in July and the sun to rise in the west.” She leaned across the table and reached toward him. He flinched, not knowing what to expect. She took hold of his chin and turned his head a little, looking at the wound on his jaw.
“Just got it from a bronc,” he lied before she could ask him. “It’s a long ways from the heart.”
“One of those broncs will kill you someday. It’s time you settled down to somethin’ steady and admitted your age.”
That was what had started the quarrel the last time, and most of the others he could remember. Eve was always lecturing him about settling down, about responsibility, respectability, always trying to change him. The way Hewey saw it, the Lord had purposely made every person different. He could not understand why so many people were determined to thwart the Lord’s work by making everyone the same.
He said, “I’ve never let a bronc kill me yet.”
“Yet.” She repeated the word firmly for emphasis. “Let me see your hand … your right hand.”
He extended it uncertainly. She took it, turned it over and looked at the palm, then gave his wrist a vigorous shake. “Well, it’s not broken after all.”
“What made you think it was?”
“You never did write a letter. For all anybody knew you could’ve been dead and buried somewhere.”
At last Hewey began to relax, and he felt the birth pangs of a grin. “If I ever die, you’ll know it right away. The Lord’ll lift a heavy weight off of your soul, and you’ll know I’ve flown.”
“Fell is more like it. You hungry?” She answered her own question. “Of course you’re hungry. You’re always hungry. Well, you’ll have to put up with stew tonight. Tomorrow’s Sunday. Maybe I can fill you up on chicken.”
“I’ll be obliged for anything. You know me … there ain’t much I won’t eat.”
“That,” she said, “is gospel fact.”
She started to turn away from him but stopped, looked intently at him, then leaned across the table and kissed him on the cheek. “Welcome home, Hewey.”
His jaw sagged. If he lived to be a hundred and six, he would never figure out his sister-in-law. She could change quicker than the wind.
Occasionally on a cold winter night when he was being honest with himself, Hewey knew that if he had been the marrying sort, and if Walter hadn’t seen Eve first, he might have married her. She had been pretty then, and sweeter than a fresh-stirred batch of wild-plum jelly. She still was, now and again, when she wasn’t being overly protective of home and brood. At such times, if he didn’t watch himself, his old feelings about her would rise up to confuse and discomfit him.
Fortunately he always got over them the first time her eyes snapped.
Eve opened one of the big warming ovens which extended forward over the cooking surface of the iron stove, taking their heat from the chimney that ran up through them. Inside, stacked on a tin plate, was leftover cornbread. “I can fix you some cornbread and sweetmilk right now if you’d like.”
He shook his head. “I’ll wait and eat with the rest of you. Wouldn’t want to cheat Walter and the boys. They been workin’.” He began to feel more at ease. He listened to the ax chopping wood and was glad Walter hadn’t let him take that quick and easy way out.
A fat old gray tomcat wandered into the kitchen from one of the tiny bedrooms, pausing to stretch himself in the doorway, then studied Hewey with a look that came near being disdain. He ambled over and examined Hewey’s hat lying on the floor, smelled around Hewey’s boots, found nothing of particular interest and wandered back toward the open doorway again, pausing for one long backward look which confirmed his earlier low appraisal.
“I see you’ve still got the same independent cat,” Hewey observed.
“Nothin’ changes around here. We just get a little older, is all.”
Hewey looked around the little kitchen, trying to find signs of anything new since he had left here. Everything seemed the same. Any improvements the family had made had been out on the place, not in the house they lived in. The table and chairs were plain and had already been old when Walter had bought them. The black iron stove had come out of a ranch’s cow camp after the state had terminated the lease and put the land up for homesteading. The pots and pans, the utensils, the cheap porcelain dishes were remnants of a well-used set Eve had brought with her into the marriage. So far as Hewey could see, the only thing new was Eve’s patent-medicine calendar advertising a remedy for woman’s complaint. He wondered about that; he had never seen a medicine that stopped a woman from complaining. He noted one date—he had lost track and didn’t know how long ago it was—pencil-marked with a small feminine X. He wondered idly what that was for.
Eve hadn’t gained a pound of weight. She worked too hard to get fat, he had always thought, ignoring the fact that he had seen other country women who worked just as hard and got to weigh two hundred pounds by middle age. She wore a plain cotton dress she had made for herself from a large bolt of blue and white tiny-checkered cloth. She had bartered for the cloth years ago, trading some eggs and old boiling hens. She had been sewing dresses off of this same bolt for six or seven years to Hewey’s certain knowledge. They always looked alike, differing only in age and extent of wear.
Wind and sun had been unkind to Eve’s complexion, though she wore a big slat bonnet to protect her face when she went outdoors. That faded bonnet, ribbed with long thin strips of cardboard and made from the same cloth as the dress, was hanging from a nail near the door. Despite the sun’s work on her skin, Eve’s features were still small and fine as they had been the day she and Walter had married.
He said, “That Tommy has growed like a weed. I thought he was Cotton when I first seen him. He looks finer than a Morgan colt.”
“He’s a good boy,” Eve replied, stoking the burning wood and putting in another chunk of mesquite. “I don’t say that just because he’s mine.”
Hewey looked out the window, hoping. “I can’t hardly wait for Cotton to get here. How’s he been?”
Eve didn’t answer for a minute. “Fine. Just fine.” When she turned he saw that her lips had tightened.
Uneasy, he demanded, “Somethin’ the matter with Cotton?”
“Nothin’,” she said, suddenly defensive. “He’s fine.” Hewey stared at her, unsatisfied, until she shrugged and sat down across the table from him, her shoulders pinched. “I don’t know. There’s probably nothin’ wrong with Cotton; it’s probably somethin’ wrong with me. I just don’t understand him anymore.”
She picked up her coffee cup, but she set it down again, the coffee untouched. It was probably cold anyway. “I thought all we had to do was to raise the boys in a good Christian home and they’d turn out just like us. But Cotton has gotten away from us somehow. He’s different.”
Hewey frowned. “You tryin’ to say he’s like me?”
Eve stared back at him. “He does have some of your ways. He’s restless and all … enough to scare me, rememberin’ you. But he’s got other ways that are his own. He’s not the same as us and not the same as you either. He’s Cotton.”
“He been in trouble?”
“No, nothin’ like that. He works hard, never troubles anybody but us, and he doesn’t intend to do even that. He did run off once for a couple of days … talked the freighter Blue Hannigan into givin’ him a ride to Midland … told him he was on an errand for us. He came back on his own. Never explained much … just said he wanted to go and see one of those automobiles he had read about. Said he didn’t ask us because he figured we’d say no.”
“Would you have?”
“Certainly. A boy has got no business runnin’ off to a big city like Midland by himself. Must be two … maybe three thousand people livin’ over there. No tellin’ what kind of sinful goin’s-on a boy might see.”
Hewey agreed. “Sure is a big town, all right.”
“He said you told him once you’d seen an automobile in Midland.”
“I did?” Hewey frowned again, looking for criticism but unable to read the thought behind her eyes.
She said, “I blamed you at first, fillin’ the boys’ heads with a bunch of foolishness. That was easier than to blame myself. I likely bore down on him too hard, too many times. It’s a thing I do too easy, and then I don’t know how to back away.” She looked intently at Hewey. “Maybe it’s good you came when you did. You always had a special touch with the boys. You could always reach them in a way that I couldn’t, or their daddy couldn’t.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“It’d be better if you got him to talk to you. Cotton doesn’t open up to us much anymore.”
The wood-chopping stopped. Walter came to the door, carrying an armload of dried mesquite cut to stove-burning length. He glanced in before opening the screen, then stopped again for a moment just inside before proceeding to the woodbox and dropping the wood carefully so that it lay lengthwise, not in a scrambled manner. He turned and studied his wife and Hewey with a little apprehension. When he saw no quarrel between them he began to smile.
“See there, Hewey? I told you she wouldn’t bite.”
Eve built up the fire. She pulled a pot of stew and another of beans out onto the stove’s flat top to warm for supper. The heat of the kitchen became oppressive. Hewey pushed the screen door open, walked down the steps and paused to stretch the kinks out of his arms and legs. He rolled and lighted a cigarette, his first since he had gotten here. Looking to the barn, and beyond, he saw that Tommy had turned the milk cow back into the pasture for the night. This late, she wouldn’t stray far before bedding down. She would be at the gate long before milking time in the morning, bawling plaintively for her recently born calf, kept separated from her in a small pen so it wouldn’t take all the milk. The work stock had also edged away into the pasture and were cropping the green spring grass they had missed all day in the field. Biscuit followed them but remained to one side, a little aloof, especially from the burro.
Hewey heard the rattle of trace chains and looked to the northwest. In the dusk he made out the shape of a wagon. The black dog heard too. He came out from under the house, gave Hewey another tentative check, for he hadn’t accepted him as belonging, then went trotting to meet the wagon, his tail busy. A country dog of any intelligence knew the sound of his own people’s wagons and could usually tell when a strange one was coming. The same was true for his people’s horses, the ones they rode most often. A dog was usually either wagging its tail or barking while humans still strained their eyes, trying to see who was coming.
It was too small for a freight wagon, so this had to be Cotton; he was the only one still out. Hewey strolled slowly to the barn, timing his pace to get there when the wagon did. He found it difficult to believe that tall boy on the wagon seat was his nephew. Lord, what a difference two years could make! Hewey exclaimed, “I’ll be damned!” Talking to oneself was a habit many a cowboy developed when he was alone a lot. The sound of a human voice was a reassurance of sorts, even one’s own.
Cotton didn’t see him at first; he was busy maneuvering the wagon under a brush arbor where it was kept for some protection from the elements. Hewey glanced up at the darkening but cloudless sky and saw no reason to expect any trouble from the elements tonight. Shedding the wagon was a good habit to instill in a boy, though; it taught him responsibility. If he shirked the chore when he saw no need in it, he might find it easy to shirk when the need arose.
The boy handled the two mules with firm hands, backing them carefully to put the wagon into place. They were young mules—green broncs, really—and required a lot of patience. Cotton talked to them, alternating between soft approval and sharp words of scorn that Hewey hadn’t heard him use before. Twice the wagon hubbed a post, and Cotton had to move the mules forward, then back again. They worked with much twitching of long ears, much chomping at the bits. Hewey guessed they belonged to Alvin Lawdermilk, and that Cotton was training them for pay or trade. He watched with satisfaction as the wagon at last rolled into its proper place. Cotton had always had a special aptitude at anything done with the hands, whether the tool be a wrench or a pair of leather reins. From the time he had been seven or eight, he could take a little lumber, a bucket of nails, a saw and hammer and build anything he set his mind to.
Hewey would not have admitted it to the Lord Jesus, should He come and ask, but Cotton had always been his favorite of the two boys by just a thin edge. Perhaps that was natural, Cotton being the first-born, the lone recipient of a bachelor uncle’s adoration and hopes for two full years before Tommy showed up. By virtue of his extra age, Cotton had been the first to try almost everything—the first to ride a horse, the first to pick up a rope, the first to fall off of the barn. By the time Tommy came along to do the same things, the new was gone.
The boys had no grandparents to spoil them, so Uncle Hewey had served that function. Riding in at intervals, doing his mischief, telling them stories that would never have stood the scrutiny of a court, playing hell with family discipline, he would then ride cheerfully away to greener pastures without having to assume any responsibility for the chaos he had wrought. He had all the privileges of a grandparent but was saddled with only half the age.
Hewey spoke as the boy hopped down. “Howdy, Cotton.”
He expected Cotton to come running with open arms, as Tommy had done, and he braced himself for the jolt. He saw the surprise, the quick flash of an unguarded smile. But suddenly, unaccountably, the smile was gone. Cotton stood by the front wheel, holding the lines uncertainly. His face was sober and reserved.
“I see you finally got home.”
Hewey had always found it easy to talk to the boys. It had always seemed to him that their thoughts and his ran along the same trail, possibly because they hadn’t had time to grow up and he hadn’t had the inclination. He stared nonplused at his nephew and could not bring up an intelligent word to say. “I’m home,” he replied, like an echo. He waited in vain for Cotton to come to him.
Always before, Cotton had come running, joyously, unrestrained, with laughter and shouting and love. Now it was Hewey, finally, who went to Cotton. He was unexpectedly nervous, as ill at ease as he had been with Eve. He wanted to put his arms around Cotton and hug him as in other times. He held back, watching for some sign in the boy’s eyes.
All he got was that stare, not hostile but not warm. Hewey awkwardly thrust out his hand, as he might do in meeting a stranger. “It’s good to see you, button.”
Cotton took his hand. His grip was strong, and hard, but it was also polite and somehow formal.
“I’d better unharness the mules, Uncle Hewey.”
Hewey watched him in uncertain silence, wishing to help but not sure his help was wanted. He leaned his back against the wagon wheel. For a moment or two he felt cold, like in that lonesome shack high up in the snows of the Sangre de Cristos.
Walter came to the barn as Cotton was pouring out oats for the mules. “Daddy,” Cotton said, “I didn’t finish. Those mules kept runnin’ away. I thought sure they’d wreck the old wagon.”
Walter frowned. “I’d hoped … well, we can’t help it now. We’ll need everything to be ready for them folks when they come tomorrow afternoon. Your mother won’t like it, but I reckon you’d best stay home from church and finish the job in the mornin’. You ain’t so sinful that missin’ church one Sunday will condemn you to the fires.”
Hewey spoke up. “I’ll stay and help Cotton. I don’t think the Lord will miss me.”
A smile tugged at Walter’s mouth. “Miss you? If you showed up in church the Lord would probably wonder who in hell you are.”
Cotton said, “I can handle it myself. I’d be through already, only those mules…”
Walter replied, “I know you could do the job alone. But let Uncle Hewey help you; it won’t take you much longer. It’ll give you-all a chance to visit.”
Hewey nodded eagerly. “We got a lot to talk about.”
Cotton said nothing, but his eyes indicated that he doubted it.
* * *
A month earlier it would have been too cold to sit in the front yard and talk in the full moon’s light. But the slight nip of the May night was invigorating after the heat of the afternoon. They had carried chairs out from the kitchen and set them on the ground because there was no porch. A porch was often a luxury, added to a utilitarian frame house in this part of the country only when the family reached a modicum of financial security and the wolf no longer howled by the door. The breeze was light, barely enough to rustle the new leaves of the big chinaberry trees under which Hewey rocked the straight-legged chair, flirting with a backward fall.
Walter asked Hewey about various people they had known in years past, people he hoped Hewey might have seen. Hewey told him of those he had encountered, repeating and embellishing a little on any wild gossip he had heard. Tommy asked question after question about the towns Hewey had visited, the wild cattle he had chased, the wild horses he had ridden. Hewey’s answers were patterned to fit what he thought Tommy wanted to hear. The cows ran faster and the horses pitched harder than had ever been known by most mortal men.
Eve asked him about the clothes the women were wearing in the towns, and Hewey was stumped. “They was wearin’ dresses,” he acknowledged. “If they hadn’t been, I reckon I’d of noticed.”
“But what kind of dresses? What did they look like?”
“Well, they was of all colors, and long enough to cover. That’s about all I can tell you.”
“What about the hats?”
“Well, all the hats I seen were on top of their heads. Had feathers, some of them. Bird feathers.”
Every so often Hewey glanced at the yellow glow of lamplight in the kitchen window. Cotton sat in there by himself, reading a book at the table. Hewey kept thinking he would eventually come out in curiosity to hear the stories, but he didn’t.
Walter said, “I didn’t think to tell you, Hewey, but old Snort Yarnell came by last summer, hopin’ to find you here.”
Hewey sat the chair down abruptly, smiling as a hundred pleasant memories came flooding over him. “Old Snort! I wisht I’d seen him. How’d he look?”
“Same as ever. He gets a little older along, and that’s the only change.”
“Still wilder’n a peach-orchard boar, I expect. He sure is a good old boy.”
Eve put in sharply, “Good for nothin’ old boy. A tramp, a chuckline rider. I’ll bet in his whole life he never did three honest days’ work hand-runnin’.”
“But he knows how to enjoy life. That’s more than most people do. Old Grady Welch used to run with him a lot. Was Grady with him?”
Walter looked at the ground. “I don’t reckon you’ve heard. Grady Welch is dead. Horse throwed him off and stepped on him.”
The moment of happy memories passed. Sadness pressed down on Hewey. “You sure about that, Walter?”
Walter nodded. “Snort was with him when it happened, out in the Davis Mountains. He helped bury him.”
Hewey shook his head. “Damn, but I hate to hear it.”
Eve said, “It gets them all if they stay out there and court it long enough. That’s why I wish you’d find a place and settle down, Hewey.”
Hewey didn’t answer. At length he asked, “Eve, you still got some coffee on the stove?”
“Yes, I’ll go get you a cup.”
“No, you stay where you’re at. I’ll fetch it.”
He walked into the kitchen and stopped to look at Cotton, sitting at the plain pine table, the lamplight falling on an open book. Cotton nodded but said nothing. Hewey ventured, “I’ve done a right smart of readin’ myself. You get lots of time for it in a batchin’ camp. Have you read Ivanhoe yet?”
Cotton shook his head.
Hewey said, “It’s got lots of good fightin’ and killin’ in it. You’d enjoy it.”
He received no response. He stepped closer, trying to read over Cotton’s shoulder. “What’s that you’re so interested in?”
“The theory of internal combustion.”
Hewey blinked. “What you goin’ to bust?”
“Internal combustion is what makes automobiles run.”
Hewey blinked again. “Do you understand that stuff?”
Cotton didn’t look up from the book. “No, but I’d like to.”
Hewey poured an enameled cup full of coffee. He stalled a little, hoping Cotton would volunteer to say something. But Cotton kept reading. Hewey went back outside and sat down in his chair again, rocking it faster than before.
Walter said, “I been thinkin’ about old Homer Ganss, up in the Territory, and some of the wild stunts he used to pull. He was a lot like Snort and Grady … and you. I don’t reckon you came across him by some accident?”
Hewey slowed the chair and warmed to the conversation. “Not by accident. I made it a point to go and stay with him a couple of weeks last year. Salty as he ever was; ain’t changed a particle, only his hair is thinner, and he’s short a couple of front teeth, and he’s got a stiff leg where a horse rolled on him. Gettin’ a shade fat, too. Ain’t changed a bit. You’d know him a mile off.” Hewey launched into a story, only modestly exaggerated, about their riding into a Territory town with a string of Homer’s green-broken ponies to trade to the Indians. They had gotten into a horse-race bet and lost all the ponies but had such an uproarious celebration with the Indians that it had seemed cheap at the price.
Eve was incredulous. She had heard plenty of Hewey’s stories, but this one was outrageous enough to be true. “You’re tellin’ us that he threw away a whole year’s work, just like that, on one horse race?”
“He didn’t throw it away, he bet it. He’ll have another string of ponies to sell this year. And you ought to’ve seen that horse race!” He began to describe it in all its thrills and spills, adding two or three to bring them up to even measure.
Walter laughed and slapped his knee. “I swear, Hewey, that sounds just like you and old Homer. I wisht I could’ve been there.”
“I wisht you had been too. I tell you, Walter, you’re goin’ to have to take yourself a vacation off of this place and go on a trip with me one of these days. It’ll do you a world of good.”
“I know it would, and I’m just liable to do it.”
Eve cut a sharp glance at her husband, then back at Hewey. “Walter,” she said firmly, “we’ve got a long day ahead of us. I think it’s high time we all went to bed.”