Disappearances (20 page)

No one seemed to be able to tell him anything about the lost herd, but with his affinity for discovering grotesqueries he quickly learned about a woman rancher named Yellow Rose who was said to know about longhorns and possibly own some. She lived a short two hundred miles from El Paso, and was also said to discourage visitors of all kinds by conspicuously displaying two forty-five pistols holstered in bandoleers crossed over her abundant bosom. Everyone advised my father against attempting to make her acquaintance, much less offer to buy one of her sacred longhorns. Of course he was all the more determined to meet this flower of the desert, and set out for her ranch by rented car. The driver refused to go beyond the ranch gate, so he and Uncle Henry had to walk the last twenty miles to the house, where Yellow Rose was busy barbecuing a beef in celebration of their arrival, which she had been anticipating for several hours. “That cowardly El Paso driver dropped you off at the wrong gate,” she roared. “I've had a car waiting for you by the main entrance since sunup. Break out the whiskey, boys. The Varmintors have arrove at last.”

My father was a great success on Yellow Rose's ranch. He fiddled all night and rode with the hands all day. Uncle Henry said they were amazed at his ability with a lariat, which he had picked up during his year in Montana and never forgotten. He challenged a Mexican knife thrower to a contest and won easily. He won a free-style wrestling contest. The second day on the ranch he found three new oil wells with his divining rod. Yellow Rose offered him a thousand dollars a well, but he turned it down, telling Uncle Henry that he would lose the gift to divine if he accepted money for it. She offered him a salary of five hundred dollars a week to bring my mother and me to Texas and stay on the ranch as foreman. This offer, too, he turned down. He wanted only to get his longhorns and get them back to Vermont.

Yellow Rose finally admitted that she had only one true longhorn, an old bull that ran wild on her rangelands impregnating her whiteface heifers and goring her other bulls and any horse that he could run down. She did not want to do away with this obstreperous animal, but was more than willing for my father to take him home to Vermont if he could catch him. Meanwhile, Yellow Rose was doing her best to catch Uncle Henry. Although she did not wear two pistols, or even one, she was a giant of a woman, as tall as my uncle and fifty pounds heavier, with long golden hair and a face the color of the half-raw beefsteaks she devoured three or four times a day. She was good-natured if she liked you, and a millionaire many times over, but Uncle Henry was not about to relinquish his bachelorhood.

Later Uncle Henry told me that on one occasion during the visit he was actually afraid for his reputation as a man. It was late at night. Yellow Rose was eating a three-pound uncooked steak alone in the kitchen for a bedtime snack. Uncle Henry saw the light and wandered out, unable to sleep in the heat. “It's you, is it?” Yellow Rose said, tearing off a large chunk of meat with her teeth and offering it to him. He stood with his back to the kitchen table, holding the raw slab of steak, his face no doubt expressionless and inscrutable. That is the time Yellow Rose chose to make her declaration. “I've took a strong liking to you, Henry Coville,” she said. “I don't care if you don't have but one lung. You've got a great big red heart and that's what counts.”

Uncle Henry was still wondering what to do with the beefsteak when she grabbed him. “She taken me completely off guard,” he said. “So when she throwed that bear hug on me I was pretty helpless. My arms was pinned right to my sides, and it warn't that hard for her to bend me back over that round kitchen table and begin kissing me. It was like being kissed by a lively side of beef. Mister man, I was overpowered. The table was on casters and presently we begun to roll along across the kitchen floor. We come up short against the cast-iron stove. I give a lurch and by Jesus if we didn't start back the other way, table and all. I guess by that time Rose believed I was being affectionate. The more I thrashed about and struggled to get loose the harder she squoze. She was right up on top of me on that rolling table. They was a great wide entranceway from the kitchen into the dining room, and a downhill ramp, and we sailed right on through. We got by the end of the long eating table and from there on it was clear coasting, out the archway onto the patio, where the table finally tipped over. I got free in the crackup, and a good thing for me I did. ‘That's the best ride this old gal ever had,' Rose shouts. ‘Let's lug this old wooden rolycoaster back in the kitchen and go again nekkid.' Well, sir, she commenced to peeling off her clothes. I don't know what all would have happened if just then we hadn't heard a commotion from out toward the corral. ‘What's that?' says I. ‘What's what?' Rose says, ripping at her shirt. My, Bill, warn't she double-breasted under that Texas moon. I was almost tempted to make another run with her. But not quite. ‘Out by the corral,' I says.

“‘Rustlers, is it?' she shouts, and tears off across the dooryard without even stopping to button her shirt back up.

“Well, much to Rose's disappointment it warn't rustlers. It was your father and the knife thrower and two, three others your father had roped into helping him round up that bull. Your father was riding the bull into the corral. It was tame as a cow pony. He had evidently let the bull chase him into a box canyon, and once they was inside he jumped on its back and rode it until it fell down or rammed into the canyon wall or just give up. He never said, and them other boys was afraid to go inside and see. The knife thrower says it was a case of pure sorcery. Which for all I know it may have been.”

I was only twelve when Uncle Henry told me this story the first time, and probably would have believed him if he said my father whistled once to the wild bull and it followed him home. I had seen him climb up into the massive antlers of the bull moose that grazed with our cows one summer and ride it all over our farm. He could call birds out of the woods to eat from his hands like St. Francis; converse for hours with owls; pick up a baby wildcat while the mother watched purring. Later Uncle Henry and I would both see him ride the bull bareback from Lord Hollow to the Common. So I believed the story and still do, but I don't know how my father caught the bull.

By the time he did he had apparently given up hope of locating the entire lost herd, and was ready to start home. Uncle Henry was ready to go anywhere at all to escape the powerful blandishments of Yellow Rose, but he was not enthusiastic about my father's plan to accompany the longhorn back to Vermont in a cattle car. The only compromise my father would make was to substitute a boxcar for the slatted cattle car he had picked out. They left El Paso late in January, with Yellow Rose crying on the patform and the bull placidly munching hay in a corner of the boxcar.

The next two weeks, Uncle Henry said, were among the very worst in his life, almost as bad as the trenches and worse than the army hospital. The bull was docile enough, though he made it plain that he preferred my father to Uncle Henry, but the ride itself was hellish. They were stranded for three days on a siding in Kansas City. Two yard detectives mistook them for hoboes and my father, impatient of explanations, carried the misunderstanding to a violent conclusion. There was a routing mistake in Chicago that my father, with his built-in compass, detected as soon as the train was out of the city limits but could do nothing about until they arrived in Milwaukee. Between Cleveland and Buffalo they were delayed thirty hours by a blizzard bringing three feet of snow and gale winds in off Lake Erie. Uncle Henry said the one advantage of the storm was that their hands were too cold to play High, Low, Jack and the Game. He said they must have played a thousand hands between El Paso and Cleveland. It wouldn't have been quite so bad if the bull could have sat in, but he was content to watch with his chin on my father's shoulder. I never saw my uncle play a single hand of cards again. Until it got too cold, he told me, my father would climb up on the roof and run along on top of the moving cars for exercise, leaping from one car to the next while the train swayed across the deserts and prairies at sixty and seventy and eighty miles an hour. Occasionally he would go all the way up to visit the engineer.

They arrived in the Common on February 12 at a little after midnight. Uncle Henry wanted only to take the bull over to the commission sales barn and fall asleep in a bed again. My father had other ideas. He looked up at the sky, which was perfectly clear, and said he wanted to see how his longhorn stood up under brisk weather, and so would ride him home. It was about forty below zero, and Uncle Henry said that while he had no doubts about the longhorn's endurance he himself had stood up under all the brisk weather he intended to. But of course he couldn't let my father ride out the county road and up the hollow alone; he might fall off and freeze to death, and he supposed that having seen things through this far he could see them the rest of the way. They hitched the bull to the statue of Ethan Allen and woke up Armand St. Onge, who loaned Uncle Henry a big woods horse to ride. My father grasped the bull by his horns and somersaulted over onto his back. “Giddap,” he said, and the bull trotted up the Common and on out the county road as though he knew exactly where he was going. Uncle Henry said the bull knew that there was only one place in all New England outlandish enough to accommodate him and that place was our hilltop.

I was sleeping with my window open, and as they came up the lane below the barn my father's voice woke me up. His song rang out clearly on the cold night air.

 

Come a ti yi yay

Git along little doggies,

It's your good fortune and also my own.

Come a ti yi yay

Giddap my fine longhorns,

You know that Lord Hollow will be your new home.

 

“Wild Bill,” my father shouted. “Evangeline, Cordelia, Rat. Here's Quebec Bill Bonhomme home from Texas with the lost herd.”

I rushed downstairs and outside in my nightshirt. I jumped up to hug my father, who wrapped his sheep coat around me and rode me across the dooryard and back. Rat put his head out his lower chamber window. He was wearing his long nightcap. “Did you ride all the way from Texas?” he said.

“Yes, Rat my boy,” my father said. “Didn't we, Henry?”

“I feel as if we must have,” Uncle Henry said.

My mother was standing in the woodshed door. “Evangeline,” my father shouted, jumping off the bull and running to her, “I've brung you the lost herd, Evangeline.”

He set me down and stood up on his tiptoes to hug and kiss her. He was wearing riding boots with high heels. The crown of his ten-gallon hat came almost even with my mother's nose. He looked like a small boy in a cowboy suit running to kiss his mother. “I've named him Hercule,” he shouted. “In honor of your father.”

“He would be pleased,” my mother said. “Nothing would have pleased him more.”

That was the beginning of the great Vermont longhorn saga, which would end as absurdly as it began, but not before Hercule became famous beyond even my father's expectations. Before leaving for Texas my father had gotten Rat started on a cedar-pole lean-to in the upper pasture, into which he now drove Hercule and out of which Hercule immediately bolted, galloping back down the lane and across the lower pasture and frozen brook to a deer yard in the softwoods. There he spent the rest of the winter. It was as if our hill brought out in him the wildness of his Spanish progenitors. For the next three months we had to take his hay and grain down to the deer yard by hand sledge. When he and the deer smelled us coming they tore off through the woods, returning to eat only after we were gone. Except for his tracks we wouldn't have known he was there. When spring came he abandoned the deer and went berserk. He ran wild through the county, tearing up gardens, rampaging through hayfields and impregnating dozens of Jerseys and Holsteins and Guernseys and Ayrshires, so that in time a new breed of milking cows with long wickedly curved horns began to emerge in Kingdom County.

We spent all spring and summer hunting him. Sometimes at dawn we would start him out of a cedar brake deep in some swamp. For a moment he would stare at us with red malicious eyes before snorting furiously and charging off to wreak new havoc. Enraged farmers fired at him with rifles, shotguns, Civil War pistols. They filled him with buckshot and slugs and birdshot and even one musket ball, none of which penetrated beyond his hide. He never trampled or gored anyone or really did much damage, but there was no way farmers could secure the chastity of their heifers against his onslaughts. He was as devious and crafty as the conquistadors who had brought his ancestors to this hemisphere. When a direct assault was impracticable, and this was increasingly the case as farmers began confining their heifers, he bellowed to them at night from the woods until they broke down barn doors and joined him.

In the fall when the foliage was at its peak and the hills were solid banks of red and yellow my father convened more than one hundred farmers and organized the largest drive ever put on in Kingdom County. His strategy was to array beaters in an elliptical loop high on the ridges above Lord Hollow and at a prearranged signal have them move down toward the narrow valley, enclosing Hercule in a tightening ring of men. Equipped with his lariat, he stationed himself and Uncle Henry in the road just below Whiskeyjack Kinneson's and fired off his shotgun. The roundup was on. The farmers were armed with noisemakers of every kind. They beat sticks against dishpans and whaled triangular gongs with short metal rods. They rang dinner bells, honked on duck and goose calls, blasted cavalry charges on bugles handed down from ancestors who had participated in the wars against the Indians. Those without wind or percussion instruments augmented the clamor by hooting like bears, blatting like goats and roaring like rutting bull moose. My mother and Cordelia and I watched from our hilltop. Cordelia said there hadn't been such a devilish tumult since the convocation of fallen angels in
Paradise Lost.