The City of Lovely Brothers (4 page)

Then he stormed out of the shed, bolting the door behind him.

Calhoun was terrified. He had never heard his

brother swear, and could not imagine what awful

punishment Calvin had thought up for him.

Calvin strode to the house, his face frozen in grim determination. Darcie and Julia had been standing on the porch, listening to Calhoun's screams. Darcie knew her husband's puritan views, but his brutality surprised her.

"What got into you?" she asked. "What'd you do to him? I thank God Caliban's off playing somewhere and didn't hear."

"I gave him the whipping he deserved," Calvin said.

Then he turned on Julia. "Well, I hope you're satisfied. You got what you wanted. You'd just better be a faithful wife to him, or so help me, I'll have you horsewhipped and thrown in jail like the common whore you are!"

"And just what is it you think she wan—" Darcie began. Then what he had said hit home, and her mouth fell open in shock. "You're making 'em get married? But he's only fifteen!"

"If he's old enough to get a girl pregnant, he's old 4enough to take the consequences. I know what's right, and nobody ain't gonna stop me from doing it."

Julia finally found her voice. "I never meant—"

"Meant it or not, you done it. You got anything against marrying my brother? I thought not. You go tell him, Darcie. I don't even wanna look at him just now."

Darcie found Calhoun cowering on the floor of the woodshed. He was ashamed she could see he had been crying, and tried to compose himself. "What's Calvin gonna do to me?" he asked, sniffling and wiping the tears from his face.

"Nothing. It's all done with now. C'mon back to the house."

She put her arm around his back, and he yelped.

"Jesus! What'd that man do to you? Pull up your shirt and lemme see." His back was covered with welts. "We better get you cleaned up."

Calvin and Julia had gone into the kitchen. Darcie, seething, ignored her husband. "Get me some hot water and a rag," she told Julia. "Calhoun, take off your shirt."

"If you think his back is a mess, you should see his backside," Calvin said. "I gave it to him good there. I bet it's bleeding."

Darcie glared at him, then turned away. "You better take off them pants, too, Calhoun." "No you don't. No wife of mine's gonna look at my brother's bare bottom. It ain't proper. Take him to his room, Julia, and you take care of it. You seen it already, and you'll be seeing alot more of it in the years to come."

"I promised I wasn't gonna do it again," Calhoun protested.

"You'll do it all right, but not until you've married her. Now get. And remember, just doctoring, none of that dirty stuff."

Caleb was sitting on his bed in their room, dealing out poker hands to himself. "What's with you, Calhoun?

Your eyes're all red and puffy. You been crying or something? Hi, Julia."

"Yeah, I been crying. What's it to you?" Calhoun took off his shirt and started unbuckling his pants.

"Hey, you two ain't… You want me to leave?"

Calhoun answered by turning his back to him.

Caleb let out a long whistle. "Calvin do that to you?"

"That and more," Calhoun sulked, and dropped his pants. His buttocks were crisscrossed with cuts and looked like raw meat.

"Oh, baby, I'm so, so sorry," Julia said. "It's all my fault."

"Ain't nobody's fault but Calvin's," Caleb growled.

"His own brother, for God's sake! I'm gonna give him a 4piece o' my mind."

Calhoun stopped him. "Don't. It's done with now, and he won't be doing it again. Not to a married man, he won't."

Caleb broke into a broad grin. "You lucky bastard!

If you weren't all banged up, I'd give you a big hug."

"Better not let Calvin hear you saying words like bastard. You seen what he can do." Then he started giggling. "He said shit, though. He was that angry." Then, serious again, he added, "But I ain't having nothing to do with him till he apologizes."

A couple of days later, Calvin did apologize. He called Calhoun aside and said, "I'm sorry I roughed you up that bad, kid. I didn't mean to. I guess I just sorta lost my temper. I promise I won't never raise my hand to you again."

"You coulda killed me."

"I felt like it, but you know I wouldn't a. You gotta understand, Calhoun, it ain't been easy on me being responsible for all of us, making sure everybody does what they're supposed to and don't get into no trouble. So when I found out you been messing around and not taking no precautions, I felt like it reflected bad on me, and I wasn't up to the job. I guess I was mad at myself, too."

"Except you didn't give yourself a whipping." "You can give me a few good whacks now, if it'll make you feel better. Wanna go with me to the woodshed and get even?"

"Nah, that's okay. Just don't you try doing it again."

"I promised I wouldn't, didn't I? Honest, Calhoun, I feel terrible about it. Can I give you a hug?"

"Nah, it still hurts too much, and I don't go round hugging guys. It just better feel alot better on my wedding night or I'll really have something to hold against you. We can shake hands, though, if you want."

"Then I'm forgiven?" There were tears in his eyes.

"Yeah, I forgive you. But I got a bone to pick you.

Julia's gonna be my wife. Now, them things you been saying about her, about her wanting to weasel her way into the family, they're mean, and they ain't true, neither. I want you to apologize to her."

Calvin apologized to Julia, but he still insisted that a woman who got herself in that kind of trouble did not deserve to get married in a church, so he brought a preacher to the ranch for the wedding. That he did not want people looking on when Calhoun tied the knot was another reason to perform the marriage out at the ranch. So what if everyone in the territory knew he had fathered a child?

They didn't need to be reminded that he was just a kid not even old enough to grow whiskers. The newlyweds took over the bedroom Calhoun,

Caleb and Caliban were sharing, and Caleb and Caliban moved into the room that had been built for Darcie's baby.

They reserved Callie's old room, the smallest, for Calhoun and Julia's baby. They had a son, and named him Clay after Calhoun's father. Seven people living in the house, including two married couples, was a tight squeeze, and with Darcie able to conceive, it was clear they would soon be adding more bedrooms.

Seven years later they had taken on ten permanent hired hands, and they had built three rooms onto the house and doubled the size of the kitchen to fit in the dining room table Calvin built, big enough for their rapidly growing family. He had built a lot of furniture. He was most proud of the porch swing, pieced together out of solid oak, with fancy-shaped back slats and a single plank seat five feet wide and three deep, all painted pink and grey and attached to the porch overhang by steel chains shiny as silver. It was supposed to be for the kids, but Julia had made it her spot.

Calvin had to admit she looked pretty sitting there in her pink dress with her feet curled up under her. Calhoun would come out and sit with her after the kids had been put to bed, and they would smooch.

Calhoun now had two sons, and Calvin and Darcie

two girls, with a third baby on the way. The children had two of the bedrooms. Caleb and Caliban shared the third because Calvin was saving Caliban's old room for the son he hoped Darcie would have. "It won't do to put 'im in with Calhoun's lot," he said. "Brothers is one thing; cousins is another. I don't want kids getting mixed up as to who's whose." Caleb, now going on twenty-six, did not mind

having to share a room with his thirteen-year-old brother.

He and Caliban had become best buddies. He did not feel a need for privacy. When he wanted to have sex, he went into town and got himself a whore. "Now don't you go telling Calvin where I'm going," he'd say to Caliban, and Caliban would answer, "You better not get in no fights and come back with your knuckles all bloody, or he'll know you been making the rounds of the saloons."

Caliban didn't have to tell; Calvin knew anyway, but he pretended not to. For the time being, Caleb showed no signs of wanting to get married, and Calvin did not want to press the issue. His moral convictions notwithstanding, he would rather that Caleb paid for his women. Getting married would mean more children, and more children, if they were boys, would mean parceling out the land when they grew up.

* * * *

The ranch had had a few setbacks and adventures. A month before Calhoun's second son, Jared, was born fifteen months after his brother, Caleb had returned in mid-afternoon after a night of watching the herd with the news that a steer had been killed, and from the look of it by a 4grizzly.

Keeping an eye on the cattle was not much of a

chore on the ranch. The hard work came at the spring and fall roundups, when you drove the herd into the coral one small group at a time, separated the calves from their mothers, and roped and branded them, and on the trail drive. Then you had to watch the herd carefully, with a thousand head or more, and two men stayed up all night in shifts to do the job. With the steer fenced in, you could let the herd break up into small groups and go off to graze where they felt like it. Rustlers posed less of a danger, the cattle were less likely to spook on familiar terrain, and small groups would not cause a major stampede if they did unless there was an electrical storm and they all went loco.

You only had to ride around the grasslands to check up on them during the day, camp out in a hollow at night, and check on them again the first thing in the morning. The biggest risk was coyotes.

The night before, Caleb and one of the hired men had camped out near one of the larger groups and gone to sleep at about midnight. Shortly before dawn the animals became skittish and woke them up. A few minutes later another large group of cattle came stampeding toward them and set the one near them stampeding off in all directions.

They were lucky not to be trampled. They jumped in the 5saddle and did what they could to rein in the frenzied cattle and get them back under control, but the sun was high before the herd was all together and calm again. Then they rode around the pastureland to find out what had spooked them. They came across the mangled corpse of a full-grown steer a few miles from where they had camped. The damage looked worse than something a wolf would have done.

Calvin and Calhoun rode back with him to have a

look at the steer. "Sure looks like a bear done it," Calhoun said.

"Oh, it was a bear alright," said the ranch hand who had stayed behind. "I nosed around some after Caleb left and found its tracks."

"A bear'll come back alot o' the time," Calvin said.

"I want the herd to stay together at night, all o' them, and I want four men out there with 'em with Caleb, every night and two of 'em awake, till we kill it or we're sure it's gone."

"I'm going too," Calhoun said.

Julia opposed Calhoun's going. "You ever shoot a grizzly?" she asked.

"I shot a wolf, and plenty o' coyotes."

"A wolf's one thing; a grizzly's another. One shot ain't gonna bring it down, unless you get it between the eyes, and you're only seventeen. That you're the best 5cowboy in the territory don't count for nothing when it comes to grizzlies."

"If he can father two kids, he can go after a grizzly,"

Calvin said.

"It's them kids he fathered I'm thinking of."

"Don't you go fretting yourself into a state, Julia,"

Calhoun said. "There'll be six of us."

"I just wanna be sure that none o' you ain't never by himself at night."

"We ain't gonna be that stupid."

There was some justification for calling seventeen-year-old Calhoun the best cowboy in the territory. He was generally acknowledged to be one of the best, better than men twice his age and with five times the experience. At five years old, he could toss a lasso at a post and never miss. At ten he could lasso a running steer from horseback; and four times out of five, he would get it, which is a lot more than most cowboys can do. He did not have the strength to hold on to it, but he could wind the rope around his saddle horn, and he could control his horse with the bucking steer standing right next to it. He had roped and branded his first calf before he was twelve, and after branding two or three of them had become as quick at it as a grown man. He had a way with horses, too. They adored him. They saw no sign of the bear until the fifth night.

Calhoun and one of the hired men were on watch, one on each side of the herd.

Calhoun noticed the herd seemed restless. He did not call out to the other herder. If he did, he might scare the bear away, if it was a bear, and if it was, he wanted to see it killed and be done with it. He rode around the herd and whispered his suspicions to the ranch hand, who had become aware of it already and was on the alert. Calhoun told him to wake the others in case the cattle tried to stampede. He would go back to his side of the herd, where whatever danger they sensed was coming from.

"Some o' them're already up," the hand said.

"Good. Tell 'em to be ready."

The cattle broke and ran before Calhoun reached his side, but it only became a stampede after they had cleared the spot where the men were camped. All but one of the men went after them. Calhoun kept his eye ahead of him to make out what had spooked them. It was a grizzly, an enormous boar.

Calhoun raised his rifle, but his horse was neighing wildly and too panicked for him to aim. He jumped out of the saddle, hit the grizzly in the shoulder, and the grizzly charged, its jowls open and slavering. Calhoun rammed the butt of his rifle into the animal's maw to hold it off, but the 5bear swung its powerful paw and slashed through his shoulder and upper arm with its claws. Then a shot rang out. The grizzly roared angrily, turned, and, still roaring, staggered a few steps. The hand who had stayed behind had shot it in the eye. The next shot killed it.

"How bad you hurt?" the cowboy asked.

"I'm bleeding bad, but I'll keep the arm. You go help the others with the herd. I better get back to the house, and quick!"