Falling From Horses (31 page)

Men moved aside to make room, and Barlow crouched down with us. He took off his high-crowned white Stetson and turned it a couple of times in his hands before he said, “Steve, what's this I hear about you busting a gut?” It was a pretty strange moment. I hadn't seen anybody who'd been badly hurt until now, and when Barlow spoke, it felt like we were all acting out a scene from a Wichita Carson movie.

Steve smiled slightly, a crooked movement of his mouth. “Ah shit, John, I'll be riding for you tomorrow.”

He went on lying there quietly smoking his cigarette, as the rest of us, even Barlow, started up again with ideas for staging an accident, mowing down Cab under a runaway wagon or a bunch of stampeding horses. I don't think Steve was in pain. What we heard afterward was that he had broken his back or maybe his neck and couldn't feel anything below his hips.

I went to see Steve just once when he was in the hospital. A week or so later they moved him to a nursing home on Melrose Street, half a mile or so from True's place. This was in the middle of a slow week, and I was sitting around with no work, but I put off going over there to see how he was getting along. A couple of days later True told me Steve had blown out his brains with a pistol stolen from a movie set, loaded with real bullets. Nobody knew how he had gotten the gun.

Steve didn't have a family that anybody knew about, and he sure didn't have any money. Lon Epps passed the hat for the funeral and a tombstone. I chipped in more than I could afford, but while the funeral was going on I was in a bar in North Hollywood, looking into a glass of beer.

 

 

 

 

1935–1938

 

 

 

 

SOME RANCH AND FARM WOMEN
living in remote parts of the county moved to town in the winter when their kids were in high school, but Martha never did—she still had horses to care for and Henry relying on her for help with the cattle. The high school in Burns was twenty miles by road from the Echol ranch. A school bus came out from town to pick up the farm and ranch kids at Foy, where they waited out of the weather in a building that had been part of the old rock quarry offices, but Henry or Martha had to drive their son from the ranch to the highway junction every morning on winter roads and make the trip again in the afternoon to bring him home.

Even in dry weather, getting up and down between the ranch and the bus stop, sixteen miles round trip, could take an hour or better. In some places they had to gear down and take it slow, the truck's thin tires bouncing heavily, and the ridge between the ruts sometimes scraping the axle. If the truck hit something hard enough to mash the oil pan, they had to stop and crawl under, take off the pan and beat out the dents with a hammer, put it back on, and add fresh oil. In spring, when the parkland flooded the road, they had to drive wide, veering off through the trees and willow brush, and even then sometimes the truck mired down, and they had to walk the rest of the way home and bring back the mules, hook a chain to the axle, and haul the rig out by brute force.

For Bud, the ride to Foy was only half the trip, as the bus made six or seven stops on the twelve miles of gravel highway between the quarry and the school. He left home in the dark and got home in the dark. And there were quite a few times that year when the snow was too deep to make it out to the highway. When he stayed back at the ranch, Martha, who was dead set on making sure her children got an education, pestered him to read aloud to her in the evenings from one of his schoolbooks, and she asked Henry, who kept the accounting ledgers for the ranch, to pose arithmetic problems that Bud had to solve in his head—a pointless exercise, since Bud had already moved on to algebra.

By midway through that first winter she had begun to fret over the number of days her son had missed school, and she and Henry both were pretty fed up with the long drive taxiing their son to and from the bus stop. So the next year they sent Bud over to Hart, eighty miles away, where there was a public boarding school that drew students from the far corners of Harney County and Malheur County.

The students lived in a dormitory building next door to the school, boys upstairs, girls downstairs. The dormitory was shut from Friday noon until Sunday evening, as most of the ranch kids went home for the weekend, so the handful of students who lived too far away to make it home were housed around town with the families of local students. Bud spent the weekends with a family named Dickerson, whose son, Dean, was in Bud's grade. Bud went home only in the summers and at Christmas, and for spring roundup.

 

Hart wasn't a city, but for a few years in the twenties it had been an up-and-coming community. Even now, with the drought and the Depression emptying out the countryside all around, the town still boasted three restaurants, a hotel and dance hall, a newspaper, a bank, a movie theater. Bud hadn't liked the long commutes to Burns on the school bus, but at the Hart school he was homesick for the ranch. The countryside around Hart was flat and dry, and the town noisy with car traffic and the rumble of grain cars and cattle cars switching back and forth in the rail yard behind the school. He hadn't ever spent a night away from his family: it took a while to get used to living in a dormitory with a bunch of other boys. And he was uneasy and self-conscious about spending his weekends in the Dickerson house.

He had grown up without indoor plumbing or electricity, in a house without a foundation, a house with worn-out linoleum covering all the sloping floors. The Dickerson house was of another order altogether. No one in that family had to put a pot under the bed or hike through the snow to the outhouse or heat water on the stove to take a bath—there was a bathroom down the hall from the bedrooms, with a flush toilet and a deep porcelain tub with taps that ran hot water. The living room and dining room had chandeliers that could operate on gas or electricity—Mr. Dickerson had ordered them from a store in Chicago to light his house reliably in those days and weeks of winter when the lines sometimes went down and the whole town was without power.

Dean Dickerson's father was a bank executive who had moved the family west from Philadelphia just the summer before, and what Dean knew about ranching, horses, and cattle had come mostly from the movies. He had the romantic idea that Bud's life on the Echol ranch must be something close to the cowboy life in westerns. An outhouse, to his way of thinking, was a thing to envy. So when it became clear to Bud that Dean put him in the same class as Tom Mix, it had the effect of easing his awkwardness and raising his opinion of himself.

Dean was skinny and small, a well-dressed newcomer and a town kid, which made him an object of ridicule among the boarding students at the Hart school. It fell to Bud, living in the Dickerson house every weekend, to educate him in the rough values of the other boys, who were almost all from second- and third-generation ranch families. If Dean couldn't ride or rope or shoot, he could at least fight, and when his nose was bloodied he could smile grimly and take his beating without crying. Dean and Bud weren't much alike to start with, but they grew to be friends.

 

In December Henry drove over to Hart and brought Bud home for the Christmas recess. Mary Claudine had been waiting on the porch since shortly after breakfast, anxiously standing on tiptoe and peering down the lane to spot the first sign of the truck. Her dog waited with her, excited by her eager jitters. But when she saw the truck coming through the gate at the bottom of the slough she was suddenly shy. She sat down on the front steps, took hold of her dog by the loose skin of his neck, and pulled him against her chest. He squirmed and squirmed and whimpered to be let go. The truck pulled up alongside the barn, and finally she let the dog wriggle free. He ran right up to Bud, waving his tail and barking, and Bud bent down and scratched him around his bony head.

“Are you teaching him to work cattle?” Bud asked his dad, above the dog's high barks.

On the long drive from Hart, Henry hadn't said anything about the dog—that he had brought a pup home for Mary Claudine because she'd been lonesome without her brother. Now he said only, “Well, he's your sister's dog. She'll have to teach him to be quiet and mind first.”

Bud looked over at Mary Claudine. “I hope you're teaching him not to sleep in my bed.”

She ducked her chin and studied her shoes. “He doesn't come in the house,” she said.

Dean Dickerson had two younger sisters, one of them about Mary Claudine's age. Bud and Mary Claudine, without other children nearby, had each been the other's chief companion, and it had struck him as odd that Dean had few dealings with his sisters. In the evenings, while Dean was finishing his homework, Bud sometimes went down to the dining room and played charades or pinochle with the little girls. Now it seemed to him that he had been gone from home a long time, and he had expected his sister to come flying off the porch and jump onto his back with a wild cry. He didn't know why she acted shy to see him, as if he had become someone else, a stranger.

Martha came out of the house and went to her son in the yard. She smiled and said, “Your hair is long, Bud.” She pushed it back from his forehead, and as she brought her hand away she let the tips of her fingers brush his ear and his cold cheek.

He reached up and smoothed his forelock where his mother had ruffled it. “I don't like how that town barber cuts it. I'm used to you cutting it.”

“Well, I'll cut it while you're home.”

In the house, everything looked exactly the same, which was in some vague way a surprise and a relief to Bud. “That smells good,” he said, for something to say.

Martha laughed and said, “Well, you shouldn't have to cook the first night you're home,” which was not quite a joke. She and Mary Claudine had pored over Bud's
Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook
looking for a meal to mark the homecoming, something they could make with foodstuffs they had on hand. They had cooked a pot roast in canned tomatoes.

Bud went through to the bedroom he shared with Mary Claudine at the back of the house. His sister followed him and sat on her bed, watching him empty his duffle and put away his things in a drawer.

“What did you name the dog?” he asked her.

“Quinn.” This was the dog's name in a story they had both read, about a heroic dog who carried messages back and forth in the trenches during the Great War.

He nodded. “Good.”

After a moment she said, “He already minds me. He just barks and gets excited when somebody comes that he doesn't know.”

“Well, he'll get over that.”

“That's what Mom said.”

He looked around the room. The two beds were neatly made. Mary Claudine's collection of snake skins, bones, and birds' eggs still covered the windowsill and the top of the dresser, and now a dozen or more of his drawings, the ones he had sent home from boarding school these past three months, were pinned to the wood walls.

When he looked at his sister, the light coming in through the one window outlined every stray hair on her head. Her braids were tied off with bows of colored ribbon. He had an impulse to get out a pad of paper and sketch her, right that minute, posed just that way, sitting on her hands watching him.

He hadn't taken off his coat—he wanted to go out to the pasture to see Tony and Dolly and the other horses. He said, “I thought I'd go out and see the horses. You want to come?”

The young dog was waiting on the porch. He didn't bark but made a low whining noise in his throat as he pushed and wriggled his way between the two of them.

There wasn't any snow on the ground, but the grass was brittle with frost. They walked out to the pasture, the dog trotting with them, and at the fence Bud called to Tony, grazing alone at the far edge of the field. The horse lifted his head and came partway toward them but then got interested in the grass again, so they climbed through the fence and walked the rest of the way out to him.

Bud had brought a couple of windfall apples with him, apples he'd picked up from the Dickerson yard and saved for his horse. He brought one out of his coat pocket, and when he was still a few yards off he held it out and waited until the horse moved up to him and examined the apple with his whiskery, soft lips.

Tony, in his winter coat, was shaggy and muddy, but when the apple was gone Bud rubbed the horse on his poll and behind his ears and then climbed onto his muddy back and took a handful of tangled mane. “Let's go over there and see Dolly,” he said. He reached down to Mary Claudine and swung her up behind him, then started the horse ambling toward his mother's old mare, who was standing with one of the mules in another part of the pasture. Mary Claudine's dog trotted ahead of them, calm and assured now.

“Do you like that school?”

“It's all right. I'm used to it now.”