When the last of the Indians were herded off their lands and sent packing to the reservation, the government no longer even pretended to believe in treaties. Land was now too valuable for bargains, and there was no reason now to fear violence from the Indians and every reason to fear the wrath of the white voters. Those last Indians in the valley that went straggling off in their broken buggies, riding swaybacked old ponies, were those Johnny Gordon saw from the high seat of his old Model-T motorcar, and his thoughts had gone with them to the sunbaked flats of southern Idaho, where in winter the wind howled and the ground cracked with the frost. Few trees grew in so arid, so sour a soil, and the drinking water in shallow wells stank of sulfur.
The Indian agent lived in a neat, white-painted frame house and was scrupulous about raising and lowering the American flag at the proper times. It pleased him to let his two clean, bright-eyed children assist him, and they had learned never to let the flag fly in a storm nor to allow it to touch the ground.
The agent was not a bad fellow, but against the arrival of the men from the Department of the Interior, he thought it expedient to sometimes enforce the rules of the reservation.
No liquor sold or consumed. All the world knows Indians do not drink so well as white people.
No leaving the reservation without a permit. The whites could not be bothered with wandering Indians. Permits were granted only for some pressing reason. As the Indians had no place to go and no friends to shelter them, the question seldom came up.
No firearms. There was no need for firearms. Once the Indians lived on the reservation, all meat was doled out to them at the government store.
But Edward Nappo had a gun, a twenty-two rifle that had belonged to his father and the last thing his father owned that had not been burned, as is the custom, at his father’s death. The small rifle leaned in a corner of the shed where the cow slept; not much of a gun, but it was an accurate little piece, and his father’s. His father, the chief.
Now Edward would have been chief, had they not come to the reservation, and even so, he sometimes thought of himself as chief, when he got to dreaming, and dreaming he told his son of the land he knew as a child, the land the boy had never seen, for Jennie, the mother, had been pregnant in the buggy as they straggled south.
She was a sensible woman, a tanner of the deer hides the white hunters left at the store, a maker of gloves and moccasins. When Edward told stories to the little boy, she would sometimes rise and leave them and go to the shed where the horse and the cow lived. ‘Why tell those tales?’ she’d ask angrily. ‘Why make him sad?’
But Edward knew the boy’s need for stories, food to grow on, thread for dreams, and sometimes Jennie herself listened, and didn’t go to the shed with the cow.
He told the little boy the truth, as his father had told him, that thunder was the pounding of buffalo hoofs in the sky and the lightning was the flash of their eyes.
‘Buffalo?’
‘You don’t remember, but your grandfather remembered. He knew, and I remember.’
‘I remember,’ the little boy said, eyes wide. Sometimes you don’t have to know, to remember.
‘Wild crazy stories,’ Jennie said.
‘But see how he sleeps, afterwards,’ Edward Nappo pointed out.
‘Sleep,’ Jennie whispered. ‘And dreams.’
When the boy was twelve the winter was long and terrible; blizzards bearing sharp dry snow swept down from the north and sometimes it was forty below. Some old Indians died who had been strong enough in the fall, and the nights were lurid with funeral fires, loud with the muffled dirges of chanting women; snow drifted against the tarpaper shack.
Then, alas, the cow got sick. Jennie made her a coat from an old blanket, and during the cow’s illness Edward and the boy tended a fire in the corner of the shed, their eyes weeping from the smoke that escaped little by little through a hole. As they waited and hoped and prayed, Edward told more stories of the land to the north, the land of summertime, the fields thick with purple lupine that waved and billowed in the breeze like water; he told of the watery cry of killdeers at twilight, of the dark gray thunderheads that reared high over the mountains and lumbered like grizzlies across the sky, heavy with water.
‘It was the Indians’ land then, and your grandfather was the chief.’
The boy rubbed the magic ring his father had given him, made of a horseshoe nail. ‘We could run away.’
Edward Nappo smiled, thinking of what Jennie would say to running away, that practical woman. You can’t run very fast or very far with a sick cow, she’d say. ‘That land, not the Indians’, now.’
‘We could look at it. They’d be good to the son of the chief.’
Edward put another stick of cottonwood on the fire. Turning, he said, ‘You’d think they’d be, wouldn’t you.’ He came back from the fire and squatted again, his shadow was large against the wall. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘If the cow lives …’
And the cow lived.
‘Crazy,’ Jennie said. ‘That land is gone.’
‘But the boy could see it. See where his grandfather was chief, see his grave.’
Jennie kept working the deerskins, kneaded them in her strong hands, made them pliable for gloves and moccasins. Her eyes were failing from the fussy work of sewing beads on buckskin; they smarted from the smoke, and the metal-rimmed glasses she’d got at the store didn’t help much. Oh, maybe some. ‘You’re crazy, and the boy is crazy.’
But when summer came, he pointed out again the bargain he had made with himself and the boy if the cow lived, and she put up food for them, canned beans and canned corned beef from Argentina and big hard soda crackers to soak up the juice. As the son of the chief, Edward Nappo did not feel bound to report his plans to the Indian agent; anyway, the man might have made trouble; therefore, they left one morning before daybreak. They heard a nighthawk zoom in the darkness; a thin dog barked heartlessly.
Because the horse was old, they walked unless dust in the distance said an automobile approached; then Edward thought it fitting to ride in the cart, no matter how crazy the wheels on the worn axles. The boy tossed the shoes he wore at school into the box of the cart; his bib overalls were bleached from many hard washings and hung loose from his thin frame and his big cap, though cleverly padded inside with newspaper, slid down over his eyes.
Edward was grand in his checked shirt; he wore his black cowboy hat, uncreased so the crown rode high.
The country, as they approached the north, looked strange, but Edward thought maybe he’d never looked closely at it before. On the way down, he hadn’t cared to look at it. When the boy had been silent for a long time, he said, ‘Don’t worry about your mother. She’ll be busy, and she’s got the cow to care for.’
The boy trudged along, his eyes straight ahead. ‘I wasn’t thinking about her,’ the boy said. ‘I was thinking about the mountains.’
Edward was thinking about them, too, those he had described for so long, the black timber crawling up the sides, then timberline and snow that remained all summer; he had told of cloud shadows that drifted over, drowning the rocks and ravines in shade, and of the springs that leaped out of rocks. The boy loved to hear that the water was sweet, all fit to drink. Edward told of the silence in the pine trees, and the saucy cries of the camp-robbers, known only in those blessed mountains.
And he was thinking. Suppose the Indian agent got somebody after them? But he hoped to get far enough so they’d see the mountains. Each night they made camp off the road — in draws, in hollows, in parks in the willows near a stream. They chose grassy places where the horse could eat. If just once they saw those mountains! Saw them together!
Once they used the rifle. Edward was proud when the boy brought down a woodchuck, and they feasted on stew flavored with onions. ‘We can’t waste shells,’ Edward warned. They had only a box, and the canned meat was getting low. How that boy ate! They had a little cash in a Bull Durham sack, and at the last minute Jennie had brought out a shoebox with five pairs of gloves she had made. Edward had smiled at her. He saw through her. She intended to justify the trip as a business venture.
‘Three bucks for the gloves,’ she said sternly. ‘Five bucks for the ones with beads and gauntlets.’ He had never before known what she got for the gloves. It sounded like a good deal of money to him, and it crossed his mind that she must be putting money aside for the boy. She was a strangely ambitious woman.
He doubted that he’d have the courage to offer the gloves for sale. He had never sold anything, the thought of selling brought blood like a hot hand to his face. It was women, who have little pride and no need of it, who sell and profit.
But give her credit. The gloves in the box were a kind of security, and made it possible for a man to sit straight when automobiles swept by.
In the Indian School they had taught the boy to address his father as Papa. ‘Papa,’ the boy said. ‘The sagebrush smells different.’
‘Of course. There’s water under the ground, and it can drink.’ The gray alkali flats of the reservation had given way to green fields where white men’s white-faced cattle grazed, tame as the cow at home, but a good deal fatter. ‘But wait,’ he said, smiling as he looked into the distance, ‘wait till you smell the sagebrush near the mountains.’ And he spoke the Shoshone word for beautiful.
‘Papa, what’s ahead there?’
‘Ahead?’ They were walking to spare the horse, and when you walk your eyes are so often on the ground. ‘Why, those are clouds.’
‘They haven’t moved, Papa.’
‘No wind, because there’s no wind.’ A shape lay on the horizon, shimmering through the waves of heat that rose like flame from the dusty road; it might have been a thunderhead of the very kind he had described to the boy, those that towered up and toppled of their weight.
It was his eyes, of course. His eyes, like Jennie’s, had been damaged by the smoke that filled their shack in winter. And after his first twinge of disappointment that the boy had seen the mountains first, he was glad. How fitting that a boy should have seen that fresh beauty first, he’d always known it was the young who saw things, and the old who did all the talking. Edward smiled. No, the Indian agent had not caught up with them, and since he hadn’t it was not likely he would. Doubtless Jennie had some plausible story to explain their absence. She was good at that. It was astounding the stories she could weave, scarcely looking up from her work, and people believed them. Her old woman had been good at the same thing. In her way, that old woman was a good old woman.
Feeling safe, he made plans.
And once they got into the mountains, the Indian agent couldn’t find them, anyway.
He would use the money in the Bull Durham sack for fishing tackle and barbs to make spears; it was now the salmon ran in the river. They would fish, and cure the fish with the smoke from sweet green willows. He might take back a gift of smoked fish to the agent; smoked fish was one of the few things the Indians liked that the whites liked, too.
‘Maybe three days to the mountains, now,’ he said, and spoke to the horse.
Three days exactly! And the boy complimented him!
But they came to a gate that he couldn’t remember.
Phil had no romantic ideas about Indians. He left that stuff to professors and dudes from back East with their fancy cameras. Children of nature, my foot. That crap. Actually, the Indians were lazy and thieving. They had tried hiring Indians to work in the fields during haying, but as far as machinery went, they didn’t have sense enough to pound sand in a rathole. And poor hands with horses. When they’d tried to bunk the Indians in with the other men, in the canvas tents pitched down in the fields, the men complained about the smell, and it was either them or the Indians. The Indians stole — everything from livestock to a pie right off the kitchen table. The Indians that used to camp outside of Herndon broke into the saloons at night and smashed things. No wonder the government finally got onto itself and sent the whole shebang off to the flats.
Phil had to laugh. When the dudes used to come out with those cameras and tried to get the Indians to pose, the Indians got coy, pretending they believed that each picture weakened them, or that the photograph was their own ghost. But believe you me, show them a little old cash money, and they posed.
Look at their handicraft, the dudes said. Handicraft! Handicraft, hell. Phil knew more about their handicraft than the professors did. His collection of arrow-and spearheads was as good as you could put your hand to, and for years they’d been trying to get ahold of it for the museum in the capitol, and one day he’d probably let them have it. When he was finished with a thing, he was finished with it. But that same collection contained ’heads he’d made himself, using the very tools the Indians used, with agate and flint he’d found himself, and they were superior in craft to what the Indians did. You can look at their handicraft all you want! Children of nature!
They always had their hand out, and when the Old Lady was on the ranch she used to collect old clothes and bedding and hand it out, but then all their relatives and friends started coming around with their hot hands out, and the Old Lady had to put her foot down. No telling what would have happened if the government hadn’t packed them off. They weren’t ranchers. Not farmers, and didn’t know corn from oats. The worst of it, they couldn’t face the fact that their day was over, over and done.
Phil had ridden up into the foothills to the cow camp, a neat cabin near a spring, pretty little place, fine little corral. They were trying out a new cowboy there, fellow to ride the range, and Phil had timed his arrival about mid-morning to see if the young fellow was out of his bedroll and off on the job, keeping the cattle from wandering over the state line. You take a lot of these young fellows, they get off where you can’t watch ’em and they get to reading magazines and lazing around and maybe having their buddies up with a bottle of booze, and first thing you know, you’ve got cows all over hell.
Phil rode up stealthily, out of sight of the cabin window, tied his horse in the timber, and then walked softly. No snapping twigs! He entered the cabin suddenly.
Calendar on the wall with a prettied-up girl on it, showing September of last fall. The rains had dripped down and stained the thing.
Hmmm.
Phil walked over and felt the cookstove. Wasn’t even warm. Cold. The dishes were all done up and put away, graniteware coffeepot washed and turned upside down on the back of the stove.
Hmmm.
Table cleared except for a pad of cheap paper, the cover turned back under it and a letter begun in dark pencil on the top sheet in the crabbed, uncertain writing of a child or moron, hard to say which.
Dere Ma,
I got me a lantarn here to rite this. I tell you, Ma, it shur is grate been a cowboy.
About the only word he could spell was what he was, a cowboy. You see, there it was. They didn’t look on ‘been a cowboy’ as a job anymore, a man’s job, like in the days of Bronco Henry. It was all playacting, like they saw in the moving pictures, and that accounted for the silver-mounted spurs and headstalls that kept them broke, for the records of cowboy songs they bought from Monkey Ward and played on their phonographs. They didn’t know what the hell they were anymore, didn’t know what was dream and what was life, and no wonder a man had to ride out and check up on them because once in the middle of the morning he’d come on one of these so-called cowboys up there in the cabin mooning and listening to phonograph records, and cattle all over hell. Maybe it was his sudden shadow across the sun behind him that had made the kid look up from his mooning about being a cowboy; for a few seconds the nasal voice out of the horn of the phonograph went moaning on about being a rolling stone or some such crap, and then the kid reached out a hand and shut the thing off.
He was sort of loose-lipped. ‘I was riding all night.’ They always had some excuse. If there’s one thing you can bank on, everybody’s got some sort of excuse.
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Phil said softly. ‘You get your duds, and you pack them in your little old grip, and you get started down the road.’
September of last year.
Now here was another year.
I tell you, Ma, it shur is grate been a cowboy …
Phil would see about that. But the kid was off and about, the stove cold, and maybe this kid just needed a little time, because for Christ sake, everybody today couldn’t be trashy! Phil stretched and stood framed in the low doorway and gazed off across the valley, and listened to the spring play a merry tune on the rocks. Then he moved up into the timber to catch up his saddle horse, swung up and rode down to the new line-fence that separated state land from the forest. Farrest, as Phil called it. ‘The Farrest …’
He swung down to open the gate, a government gate, the end post set on a block of concrete, the whole shebang so heavy it’d take a four-horse team to budge it, more damn gate than you ever saw in your life, but that was the government for you, and it was you, chum, who was paying for it. A gate like that set in the opening of a simple barbed wire fence! He wondered how much paperwork some punk bureaucrat had gone through before they finally got out a requisition for the design of that gate, how much some two-bit engineer had wasted in time, money and materials before emerging with that monstrosity, that stockade! The gate was fastened by a more than adequate length of log chain, another government extravagance — small in itself, but multiplied a thousand times it played right into the sweaty hands of the Bolshies and wobblies and those nuts. And by God, do you know, Phil pinched his finger in that chain, but not enough to draw blood. Just a blood blister.
He turned alerted at a sound. Some strangeness. Saw far down the draw some sort of single-horse outfit, some sort of cart. He could make out a black hat, and so far as he knew, nobody wore black hats but Indians.
‘Sit nice and straight,’ Edward told the boy, but no need to say. He sat straight as you might expect of the grandson of a chief about to hold speech with a white man. The little boy’s spine was rigid. He pushed his cap up off his forehead. Edward knocked the dust off his black hat and stroked it with his palm, sort of polished it.
They’d been walking. When they saw the man standing by the big gate, they got up into the cart. They were under the stranger’s eyes for a good twenty minutes.
‘Why does he rest there?’ the little boy asked.
‘Well, maybe he wants to see who we are.’
‘You tell him about your father?’
‘Yes, I can tell him that.’
‘So he’d have to let us go on by.’
Edward no longer cared, for himself. When they take you off to a reservation and sell you moldy bread and you can’t keep a gun there’s not much more you can do. Now he hoped only to keep the boy believing that in this country their name was honored, a magic name to open gates. Or was Jennie right in cautioning him about telling stories?
In all truth there were some in that old land, some whites who championed the Indians, took Indians’ troubles as their own to the capital of the United States of America, far to the East, where no Indians that Edward had even known had been. There had been whites at his father’s funeral, whites in honored places watching the burning of his father’s blankets, moccasins, headdress, hackamore, wickiup.
Was this man one of those?
Edward drew up the old horse, smartly, as you might halt a Hambletonian. ‘How,’ he said, and grinned. He handed the boy the reins, and clambered stiffly down.
Phil said nothing.
Edward looked around at the country. ‘No rain yet,’ he said, and walked to the big gate.
Phil cleared his throat.
Edward got his hands on the log chain.
Phil spoke softly, ‘Where in hell you think you’re going?’
Phil now stepped between Edward and the gate.
Edward turned toward the little boy who sat stiff and straight, chin up, as much to keep his cap from sliding down as from pride. ‘My boy and I would camp out a little while. That’s my boy, there.’
Phil didn’t bother to look at the boy. He brought out a sack of tobacco and — as he always put it — ‘manufactured’ himself a cigarette with one hand.
‘… my boy,’ Edward finished.
The boy’s voice was high and clear. ‘My grandfather was the chief.’
Phil lighted his smoke, blew out the match, broke it in two, and pinched the charred end cool with his fingers. He inhaled smoke.
‘He’s right about that,’ Edward said.
Phil still stood between Edward and the gate. ‘Right? Right about what?’
‘My father,’ Edward Nappo said, ‘was the chief.’
‘Is that right?’ Phil asked. ‘Well let me tell you. I don’t care who in hell he was. You, now. You get yourself back in that contraption of yours, and you and your kid hightail it out of here as fast as that old nag can go.’
Edward’s face was so fixed in a smile he couldn’t change it. ‘We’d only stay a coupla days,’ he said. ‘Long enough for the horse, for the horse to rest. It’s a real old horse.’
‘Nothing doing,’ Phil said.
So Edward turned, then, and went back to the cart, afraid of the boy’s eyes. The boy watched Edward reach down under the seat and then he looked away. But then, what could the father do, but shoot the man? Then they would go into the mountains and live forever, the two, the two hunted ones. But free, free as never before!
Edward turned on the man with the thing he’d brought out from under the seat, but it wasn’t the gun. He offered the box with the gloves. The man facing Edward was poorly dressed, and he had no gloves. Edward smiled, removed the cover of the box, and held out the box.
‘Just one or two days?’ What he would tell Jennie, he couldn’t imagine. Maybe thirty dollars’ worth of gloves. Edward lifted out the gauntlet gloves rich with beadwork. ‘One or two days, mister.’
‘Hey,’ Phil said. ‘Those are pretty slick-looking gloves.’
‘Worth five bucks,’ Edward said. ‘Two or three days.’
Strange how the man made no move to touch the gloves, and no move, either, away from the gate. ‘You get your contraption turned around,’ he said. ‘I don’t take bribes, and I don’t wear gloves. You picked the wrong customer, old-timer.’
So Edward climbed back up into the seat with the box of gloves. He turned the old horse around, and they started back for the reservation, two hundred miles away. Edward wondered if the horse could make it. If the horse died, what about the cart? He couldn’t look at the boy but he said, ‘Anyway, we saw the mountains. We saw my father’s mountains.’
The boy’s cap had slipped down over his forehead.
‘I couldn’t do nothing,’ Edward said. ‘You saw, I couldn’t do nothing.’
Phil watched. In a way, he felt for the poor devils, and he untied his jacket from behind his saddle and took out the lunch wrapped in it. Mrs Lewis had thrown together a lunch of an apple and two thick roast beef sandwiches. Good, but Phil got so thirsty he thought he’d ride back to the spring and wet his whistle.
The Burbank ranch house was of huge logs; seen from a distance, it resembled one of those story-and-a-half bungalows that sprang up in California around the First World War; but it was a bungalow gone wild. The sensitive viewer paused, looking at it. One’s distance from the place could not make so small a house as a bungalow look so large. In fact, the ‘half-story’ contained a bathroom and six vast bedrooms off which ran closets with gradually sloping ceilings where Burbank junk collected. The roof sheltered a vast porch, and Peter often stood in the dormer windows of his room and looked over the roof at the blank face of the sagebrush hill where sometimes there was barely perceptible movement — the dart of a gray bird or the hop of a cottontail. Sharp-eyed hawks glided overhead, alert to the dead, the dying or the stupid. The hill was so high the sun was late striking the windows of the house, so steep that all sounds echoed against it. Peter heard the latch of the bunkhouse door, the cursing of a hired man, barking dogs, bawling cows, the pop of the exhaust of the electric light plant, and on Sundays the pistol shots in target practice, the bright sound of horseshoes ringing on steel.
Thunderheads reared up over the mountains to the west; their shapes changed but gradually in the faint breeze — the shapes of England, of animals, rabbits.
‘Will it rain, George?’ Peter heard his mother ask, her light voice floating up with embarrassing clarity from the porch below.
‘Smells like it,’ George’s voice. ‘But search me.’ Peter smiled. When George used that little phrase he’d shove his hands into his pants pockets and look at his feet.
‘I want to get those trees in,’ his mother was saying. ‘And more grass. Isn’t it funny your people didn’t do more about the yard.’
‘My mother tried. The soil’s so poor. Oh, she talked of the trees in New England. You’d think it was a country of trees. She had some little elm trees sent out. They came in sacks, but they died. She used to talk about something called bayberry, and how the fog looked on it, and the sound of the ocean. When she talked, you could hear the ocean. I used to wish, sometimes.’
‘Wish.’
‘Oh, to see it all.’
‘I never heard you talk like this.’
‘Why, I don’t suppose I ever did. Rose, there wasn’t anybody to listen.’ Peter imagined George’s smile.
Before the house, sick unto death, two cottonwoods languished, their thin leaves edged in a sort of soot, their little remaining strength sucked out by ravenous aphids; beyond them a patch of grass turned brown, and could be watered by diverting the ditch that ran beside the house; but if allowed to run long, the water found secret holes and flooded the cellar — drowning the mice down there, or a batch of new kittens.
‘Wouldn’t fertilizer help?’ Rose asked.
‘Might, at that. Rose, is Peter happy?’
‘Peter?’
‘A few days ago, I saw him watering the trees. I was thinking of him.’
‘I think he’s happy. He certainly likes his room, and it was good of you to give him that bookcase.’
‘I don’t forget I’m a stepfather. I imagine a stepfather’s got to try a little harder than a father. I’d imagine there’s no reason for a boy to like a stepfather unless a fellow tries. I know how I’d feel.’
‘And he’s always liked to explore. He explores around.’
Peter listened, expressionless. He had been exploring when he came upon Phil, naked. He still saw the white, hairless body. He said nothing of the incident to his mother — naturally — and he had a hunch Phil hadn’t mentioned it, either. In a way, he and Phil had a kind of bond — a bond of hatred, maybe, but Peter felt that one kind of bond could be just as useful as another. Peter had walked with his mother out on the hill, and they had found bluebells in the cool of sage, bitterroots and waxy cactus flowers with the baffling sheen of pearl. ‘Why, I walk out here a lot,’ his mother had said.
‘You didn’t walk much in Beech,’ he said, glancing at her.
‘I forget. Didn’t I walk much there?’
‘It’s the brother, isn’t it. He makes you nervous.’
She paused and stooped to pick up a small stone. Everyone he knew winced at the truth. ‘Makes me nervous?’
‘He doesn’t speak when he comes into the room. He brings in the cold.’
‘Oh, Peter, he doesn’t speak to anybody.’
Now George was saying down on the porch, ‘… came here, I never had a nice afternoon like this, just loafing.’
‘Why shouldn’t you enjoy an afternoon? I shouldn’t call it loafing, bringing in those little trees from out back. Maybe we need a little fertilizer.’
‘Well, let me think.’
Peter thought, George is a good man. Then he went down and joined them on the porch. He surprised them, he came so quietly. Doors opened and closed softly for him. He thought of telling them how clear their voices were, and then tucked the information into a corner of his mind. His world required secrets, and he stored them away.
‘Peter, you walk so quietly. Is it those tennis shoes? Look at those little trees George brought. Would you help plant them? I think we might need a little fertilizer.’
‘Blood,’ Peter said. ‘Blood’s the best fertilizer.’
‘Why, how awful! Rose said.
‘I’ve heard he’s right,’ George said. ‘Think of those tall weeds out by the butcher pen. They’re as tall as a man.’
‘If you don’t mind, sir, I could take the wheelbarrow and bring soil in from the butcher pen. It must be mostly blood.’
‘Why, you just hop right to it. And thanks.’
They watched Peter move around the side of the house, his clean trousers and white shirt a strange outfit for loading up blood-drenched dirt, some of it not quite dry and heavy with the stench of recent death. Clouds drifted over the sun, moist and cool as water. ‘I wish sometimes he wouldn’t call me sir,’ George said.
‘It was his father’s habit,’ Rose said.
‘Blamed if I ever ran up against such a neat boy,’ George said. ‘Beats me he doesn’t mind going out to the pen and digging up — digging up fertilizer. Isn’t it a funny thing, to know about blood.’
‘Maybe not, if you only want to be a doctor. He’s …’
‘He’s what?’
‘Well, it’s a kind of coldness. You see, I love him, but I don’t know how to love him. I want love to do something for him, but he doesn’t seem to need anything. I think his father would have been more successful if he’d had more of that coldness.’ They watched the clouds sweep over. ‘Would you hand me my sweater? Thank you. I don’t suppose what I mean is coldness. Detachment? I don’t mean any criticism. Nor of John either. He was a good person.’
‘I’ve heard that said,’ George remarked. ‘I’ve heard he wouldn’t get after people about their bills. What a fine way to be.’
Now came a distant rumble of thunder. ‘Maybe rain, now,’ George said.
‘… when the lightning strikes close. You can even smell it, Rose said. The thunder came again, and before the rolling echo died, Rose said, ‘There’s that Indian cart again.’
‘… cart? What Indian cart?’
‘Why, this morning. It was so funny — I saw them up the road coming around the point of rocks, and George, they were talking, and leading the old horse. I watched, and they stopped, and got up into the cart, and drove by, not looking one way or another, and then at the top of the rise out there — see? — they got out and led the horse again.’
‘Some sort of pride, I’d say,’ George remarked.
‘But where do you suppose they were going — going this morning, I mean? Wherever, it seems they didn’t stay long. And where did they come from?’
‘I expect they came from the reservation. Wait till I get the binoculars.’ He got them.
‘That must be two hundred miles away.’
‘Anyway, I expect they wanted to camp up in the mountains. You know, they’re not supposed to be off the reservation.’
‘Whyever not?’
‘They’d get — oh, to bothering. If some of them got to coming back and bothering, they’d all get to coming back, and bothering.’
George kept watching them. The wind whispered in the hopvines that grew up the side of the porch. They sat, and George kept watching, and then he handed the glasses to Rose. ‘I didn’t realize one of them was a little boy,’ Rose whispered.
‘No? Eleven or twelve, I’d say. He wouldn’t have been born when the Indians lived around here. He wouldn’t remember what the country looked like.’
‘Then, the one in the black hat is the father? You think the father brought the boy back here to show him?’
‘I expect so.’
‘And they stayed so short a time in the mountains.’
‘They wouldn’t have got to the mountains at all, I expect.’ He coughed.
‘Why not? Because of the old horse?’ The Indians had passed the house now, and in a few minutes would disappear around the point of rocks.
‘Phil went out of here this morning to check on one of the riders. I expect he turned them back.’
‘Turned them back? After two hundred miles? Why would he do that?’
‘Well, like I say, if they get started coming back. And Phil never cottoned to Indians, no matter who they were.’
‘How do you mean, who they were?’
‘Unless I miss my guess — hand me the glasses — that old Indian is the son of the chief.’
‘The son of the chief!’
‘He died up there a little time before they sent the Indians away. They buried him up there under the slide rock. We could see the grave sometime. Go up with a picnic.’
‘I suppose they meant to see the grave.’ Rose stood up suddenly. ‘George, can’t you imagine how that little boy feels?’
‘Feels, Rose?’
‘A white man able to turn back his father, the son of the chief. Imagine that. He’ll never forget that all his life.’
‘Well, I expect you’re right. But strictly …’
Strictly what, she never heard, for she was hurrying down the steps. One of the hired hands, riding in from out back, saw her running as if she’d lost her mind, and calling out something.
Her shoes were not walking shoes. Stumbling in her high heels, running and pitching, she cried out to the Indians. ‘Stop, please stop.’ She was breathless when she caught them, and leaned for support against the side of the cart. She smiled up at the old Indian, and at last she had breath to speak. ‘I saw you this morning,’ she said. The old Indian removed his hat, but the boy sat looking through the old nag’s ears. ‘I would have come out to see you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were the son of the chief.’
Edward Nappo spoke. ‘Did you know my father?’
‘My husband did. You see, we would be proud if you would camp with us. My, but that would make us proud.’
Edward Nappo looked down at her, a tiny, lovely little woman who could not have been much help to a man with a cow, or for cooking, or for making gloves. You might have said, looking into her face, that she wouldn’t last many winters, if the winters were hard at all. ‘Thank you,’ Edward said. ‘My son and I, we will be proud to camp with you.’ And as Edward turned the old horse around, the little boy looked at his father with haughty pride, and he fixed his cap.
When a horse trots, his legs move in diagonal pairs — the left front and right hind leg go forward at the same time, and so forth. It’s a rough gait, and you have to post, have to rise in your stirrups and take the jolt in the flex of your knees, and no matter how you do it, it’s bobbing up and down like a fool jack-in-the-box.
But when a horse paces, his legs move laterally in pairs — the right front and right hind legs move forward at once, an easy gait, a swift, rolling gait you can sit out in the saddle by letting your body twist easily with the movements of your horse. Any damned horse can trot: few can pace. Phil’s sorrel was a fine, smooth pacer, with a controlled power behind each thrust of leg that reminded Phil of pistons. He rode swiftly down the canyon, tall and straight in the saddle, occasionally relaxing by standing in the stirrups and sniffing the odor of approaching evening, the cooling off of rock and soil. It had showered in the mountains; the tail end of the small downpour had caught Phil, but he fancied getting a little wet, and the damp caught and held the odor of the new sagebrush and the wild roses that bloomed beside the road. Phil had always enjoyed certain odors. Beside the road the creek splashed over the rocks; wild chokecherry had flowered in white and a deer bounded back up into the timber and cowered, foolishly believing it had hid itself.
The young fellow at the cow camp had not come back while Phil waited there after quenching his thirst at the spring, so maybe the young geezer was going to pan out, after all. Phil had been careful not to touch anything in the cabin that might reveal he had been there, and the path leading up to the cabin was so packed and hard you couldn’t see a fresh footprint. Phil would check again soon, perhaps uselessly. But the letter the punk had started there hinted that he might take his work lightly, look on it as a lark.
Phil felt good; he took the shortcut to the ranch — from the rear, through the horse pasture, and it meant getting off his horse four times to open the crude ‘Mormon’ gates constructed of barbed wire that drylanders had strung up obstructing the wagon road that was old when Phil was a child, but so little used — now that four gates blocked it — it was growing up in bunchgrass. Sometimes Phil left the gates open, to show what he thought of them and the nuts who had fallen for the pamphlets the railroads had broadcast, promising big things to Swedes and Finns and God knew who. Take up land! Grow wheat! Well, plenty had took the bait. They took up a section or half-section from the government, bought their seed, plowed, planted and waited for rains that seldom came. Few remained now. They had crawled back to the mines and factories they’d come from. All over that country you saw their shacks, open to the winds, a bed rusting where once a man and woman had slept and loved. The print on the newspapers they’d used for wallpaper had faded. You’d see a kid’s doll pitched into the corner. It honestly made you think. In a way, you had to feel sorry for the poor devils, they were human beings, too. But what Phil, for one, couldn’t forgive, is that they hadn’t used their noodles in the first place, and looked into things.
He scratched the back of his hand a bit on the last gate, barely enough to draw blood, but it warned him to expect some other small unpleasantness; he had noticed in his life that one such thing led to another. And it came. Crouching low over the pommel of his saddle to avoid some willows that arched over his head, one slapped him smartly across the bridge of his nose. He seized it and broke it.
Now he rode through the willows in the horse pasture, not a hundred yards from where he went to bathe. In the open again, where the timothy and redtop was growing good and thick, he suddenly pulled up the sorrel.
He couldn’t believe his eyes.
Alone, apart from the rest of the bunch of horses, was a strange Cayuse. Well, if Phil didn’t see red! Every muscle in his long body stiffened. He sniffed. He turned his head, and there in a bend in the line of willows near the creek he saw where the Indians had pitched their tent, had built a fire. The thin smoke drifted over the willows in wisps.
Well, Phil rode there pronto. From up there on his horse he looked down. The young Indian was nowhere in sight, maybe inside the tent or snooping in the brush. The old buck had his back to Phil, and he didn’t turn at once, although he must have heard Phil’s approach. The old buck was maybe putting off the inevitable until the last minute, as some do. The old buck was leaning over the new fire. On either side of the mounting flames the old buck had pushed in a forked willow; these sticks supported a third, a crossbar, and from the bar hung a battered pail of the kind you buy axle grease in. In the pail was what looked and smelled to Phil like fresh meat, fresh beef.
Well, the old buck looked pretty sheepish.
Phil spoke. ‘I thought I told you to get on your way.’
‘But the lady,’ the old buck said.
‘But the lady what?’ asked Phil.
‘The lady to the big house. Said, camp here.’
Phil had to snort. ‘So that’s what the lady to the big house said, is it? Well, you start folding your tent.’
Phil wheeled his sorrel around and paced to the back door of the barn.
It was a long log barn, huge doors at either end, and damp. The cool, sudden gloom blinded Phil a moment as he led the sorrel up to the stall. He unsaddled, hung the saddle from a peg; as he started to lead the sorrel to the back door, the horse hung back before obeying the reins, and Phil had to jerk him. The sorrel loose and rolling in the dust behind the barn, Phil marched himself right back through the dark barn and, still a little blind in the gloom, almost collided with George.
George was a dedicated user of binoculars. A good pair of Bausch & Lomb, properly in their case, had since memory began rested on top of the bookcase in the living room. Pair after pair of the same make had disappeared — perhaps into the cardboard suitcases of departing hired girls or cooks, for field glasses are both valuable and portable. But still the glasses remained in plain sight up there on the bookcase, for to hide them was to suspect someone of a crime incomprehensible to George, and rather than entertain the painful thought, it was easier to buy new glasses. He would sometimes spend an hour at the window watching the movement of cattle or horses, judging the far retreat of snowdrifts, watching for forest fires. He had this day watched Phil’s rapid progress from an upstairs window, and once Phil had stopped to parley with the Indians, George had come right downstairs, picked up his hat and gloves, and gone to the barn where he waited beside Phil’s stall. Phil, when angry, would speak his mind no matter who was present, hired men, cooks, family, guests, friends, and in a way George supposed Phil was right — speaking up and not bottling up everything. But the lack of reticence gave Phil a towering advantage, for people thought twice before crossing him, dreading the fireworks and the terrible truths he spoke — even to the Old Gent and the Old Lady.
So if there was to be an explosion over the Indians it had better spend itself in the dark of the barn.
‘What in the good holy hell,’ Phil began, colliding with George. As always when disturbed or angry, Phil chose bad grammar. ‘What in the good holy hell are them Indians doing out back?’
‘Take it a little easy,’ George said quietly. ‘I told them,’ he said, ‘they could camp here a few days.’
‘You told them?’ Phil took a step back from George and looked him up and down. ‘Boy — are you out of your fugging mind?’
‘They won’t do harm,’ George said. ‘I expect in nineteen twenty-five we can hold our own against the Indians.’
‘Got a real tongue, haven’t you, Georgie boy? A real tongue for humor or sarcasm, what? But just start using your noodle.’
‘That’s all right, Phil. Take it a little easy. You got to think how people feel.’
‘People feel? Who feels? Just exactly who feels?’
‘How the Indians feel, for one. The young Indian.’
Phil measured George again with his day-blue eyes that missed nothing, and his lips curled in a smile. ‘What’s all this sudden love for Indians? That gives me a good fat laugh.’ And Phil laughed. ‘Sometimes it honestly gets my goat how blind a man can be, Georgie boy.’
George leaned against the stall. ‘Just what do you mean by that, Phil?’
Phil ducked his head as he finished laughing, a ripping, tearing, dry laugh, laughter not only at George but at the woman in the house who was going to have to go. ‘Take a good look at yourself sometime. Go take a look at yourself in the mirror, take a good hard gander at your fiz. Then you take and ask yourself why your missus married you.’
George blinked once, but he kept his eyes on Phil. ‘Think what you like, Phil,’ he said. ‘But the Indians stay.’ And George turned and left the barn. But oh, how Phil knew how to touch the sore place. Lord, how he knew how to lift a scab.