The Pastures of Beyond (4 page)

At first the cowboys treated me like a chore they had been saddled with, but maybe they sensed my eagerness to learn, for they soon relaxed and even managed a grin or two at my blunders. One of the cowboys rolled a Bull Durham cigarette and handed it to me, but as I tried to light it, I sucked all the tobacco into my mouth and had such a fit of choking I scared my horse and almost landed on the ground. I grabbed the saddle horn with such a death grip that I was able to pull myself back on.

I glanced furtively at the cowboys, thinking they might be laughing at me, but their sunburned faces were cast in bronze. The cows at that moment chose to slip off into some jack-pine thickets, and we were busy for the next half hour trying to get them back on the trail.

Chapter Three

I
HAD GOTTEN ALONG PRETTY WELL
with Yellowstone and BK Heavy, considering that I was just a greenhorn or, in cowboy terms, a “button.” With more confidence than ability, I begged Ern Morgan to let me ride a huge bay horse named Sleepy. I didn't realize that no one else wanted to ride Sleepy because the horse had a habit of groaning and grumbling as he walked, which got pretty old by the end of a long day.

I might have suspected by the way Morgan's lips puckered in a grin around his cigarette that the cowboys were in for some fun. I had no sooner hit the saddle than Sleepy groaned, grumbled, and ducked his head, bucking me off in one jump. I lit face-first in the dirt with my mouth wide open and came up spitting sand and whatever else was in the corral. The horse continued to groan and buck with big slow jumps.

He looked so easy from the ground, I could have kicked myself for not hanging in there and riding. Along the fence I could see cowboys laughing at me. When Sleepy finally stopped at the end of the corral, I limped over to him and got on. My knees were shaking with pure fear, and my foot kept jumping back out of the stirrup. The old horse still had a hump in his back, but I eased him off and followed two cowboys out the gate, heading south toward the Wildhorse Meadow country to look for strays.

It was an easy ride through open pine timber, and the cowboys kept at a walk. We had gone about four miles when Sleepy balked at crossing a small stream. I kicked him in the ribs, and suddenly the horse was bucking again and there was lots of daylight between me and the saddle.

“Lean back, kid! Lean back!” one of the cowboys called to me. I leaned back and finally caught the rhythm. After three jumps, Sleepy probably thought his luck had run out, for he settled down with a groan, trotted across the stream, and never tried to buck with me again.

Something happens in a kid's head when he manages to ride a bronc and not fall off. Down deep, I knew that old Sleepy was no world-beater, but what I learned was that I didn't have to fall off on the first jump. The next time a horse bucked with me, I knew that I could at least try to hang in there and ride.

With that one brief success in riding Sleepy, my mental attitude changed, as did my relationship with the other cowboys. The cowboy who hollered at me to lean back was Jack Morgan, the foreman's brother. He had two gold teeth in front that flashed as he grinned, and his bronzed face was arrogantly handsome. Jack was a natural teacher, and when I managed to stay aboard Sleepy, he seemed to think I qualified for a little help.

Suddenly, there he was riding alongside, showing me how to hold my reins and how to make my body flow with the horse. He even shook down his rope, made a loop, and showed me how to catch an imaginary calf, jerk my slack, and take my dallies, or turns, around the saddle horn. In those few hours of riding with Jack, I learned things I couldn't have picked up in a year in the saddle.

Jack advised me to think positive thoughts on a bucking horse and ride. “Gettin' bucked off hurts,” he said, “an' most times it's a long way back to the home corral afoot.”

Jack was riding a fine black colt named Spade, who was just making the transition from a braided rawhide hackamore around his nose to a spade bit in his mouth. In a little meadow, Jack put the black through his paces. The colt made long, sliding stops, and could set back on his hindquarters and spin on a dime.

“You ride with me, kid,” Jack said, “an' I'll have you reining horses just like this one.”

That evening, after I had unsaddled Sleepy and turned him out to graze, I got up enough nerve to wander over to the bunkhouse and sit on the porch with the men. I felt out of place until Jack started telling the crew about my ride on old Sleepy and how tight I had choked the saddle horn. I didn't mind being teased, for I was the center of attention. It was the general opinion of those cowboys that Sleepy couldn't buck off a wet saddle blanket. But I didn't know that at the time, and I was some proud.

On the bunkhouse porch was a hook-nosed, roundshouldered cowboy named Buster Griffin, who was generally accepted to be the best ladies' man and bronc rider in the lot. Talk got around to a BarY horse named Whingding, who just happened to have come over in a load of fresh horses from my uncle's hay ranch, the BK. Some of the cowboys admitted that they had met their match trying to ride that horse and would be willing to put a little money into the hat to see Buster try to ride him.

Whingding was hard to catch and left the herd to stand alone at the end of the corral. He was a stocky dark bay horse with a jagged lightning streak of a blaze down his face, a heavy mane that hung on both sides of his neck, little gimlet eyes, and a snort that sounded like the report of a buffalo gun. According to Jack Morgan, Whingding never bucked more than six inches off the ground, but hit so hard he could make blood run from a cowboy's ears.

While Buster was getting his rigging from the big A-frame barn, the rest of us ambled over to the corral to watch the fun. Jack Morgan roped Whingding around the neck with a backward horse loop he called a “hoolihan,” and the big horse settled down and followed Jack over to the fence. There were a couple of white saddle marks on his back, indicating that the horse had had some hard rides. Other than squatting when the saddle dropped on his back, and blasting our eardrums with a snort, the animal acted like any other seasoned cowhorse.

Buster had managed to get one foot in the left stirrup when Whingding whirled away from him and dropped his head to buck. For two jumps Buster stood in one stirrup, and then managed to gain the saddle and find the off stirrup with his toe. Our war whoops only seemed to turn the horse on. He bucked across the corral, turned at the fence, and started back. We could see a little daylight now between Buster and his saddle. Suddenly, Whingding sucked back underneath himself and whirled, sending Buster flying headfirst into the heavy logs of the corral. There was a loud crack as a lodgepole pine log broke in two, showering the ground with splinters. For a moment Buster lay quiet, then wiped his bleeding nose on the back of his buckskin glove. He stared in fascination at the blood for a moment, then grinned sheepishly at the crowd.

“Sure is lucky,” Jack Morgan chuckled. “Sure is lucky Buster hit that log with his head. Otherwise he might have hurt something.”

“One big goose egg for Buster!” someone said, laughing, as we trailed back to the bunkhouse. The cowboys who had lost money on the ride didn't seem very happy.

I looked back over my shoulder at Whingding, who was standing quietly, waiting to be unsaddled. I was already daydreaming about taking a setting on that horse while Rose watched and making one helluva ride.

I had been at the ranch about a week when Ern Morgan told me to saddle Yellowstone and ride over to the willows in front of the ranch house to make sure there were no cattle grazing in the garden. Ern had a silly grin on his face that made me suspect I was being had, but I went anyway. I rode out of the willows, and there, sunning herself on the great gray rocks in front of the house, was a naked woman. Her long white hair was spread out on the rocks like clothing hung out to dry. Yellowstone snorted and almost lost me as she moved and sat up, looking at me. Calmly, she reached for her robe and pulled it on. Unruffled, she called to me as I tried to back my horse through the willows.

“Come back,” she said. “I'm Margaret Biddle. Your uncle told me you'd be here.”

She was a little China doll of a woman. When she stood up, her hair dangled below her waist. She had blue eyes that seemed to pierce my shyness and lack of experience. Her skin was wrinkled ivory, but there was a suppleness to her leap down from the rocks that made me misjudge her age by twenty years.

I could hear cowboys whooping and laughing over by the barn, and I wanted to run for it, but she made me tie Yellowstone to the fence and come in for lunch. It was to be my first of many awful meals. In the kitchen, a roaring fire burned in the stove and the heat blistered the painted wall behind. She opened a can of vegetable soup, slopped it into a pot, placed it on the cherry-red stove, then proceeded to forget it as she showed me how to make sandwiches. The butter and jam had to be spread just so, right to the edges of the bread, and by the time she had stood over me until I got it right, the soup had boiled dry and the kitchen was full of acrid smoke.

She added water in a cloud of steam and we ate the soup anyway, along with the sandwiches, which tasted no better than other sandwiches despite her lecture on how to make them. Clearly, she had had servants all her life or she would have starved.

I kept eyeing Yellowstone out the front window, wishing I could steal away and hide in the pine woods, but by now she considered me her personal servant, and after I had carried in a body ache of suitcases from her car, she issued me a little apron and made me sweep the house, hang curtains, mop the floors, then carry out rugs to beat for dust on the front rail fence. Yellowstone snorted at my activity, and I think the horse was laughing at me. It was dark before I finally slipped away and led him back to the corrals.

My uncle arrived late and wasn't at all glad to see Margaret. I felt better when I saw him take the batteries out of his earphones and lay them on the table for her to see. I was about to cut steaks for supper off the hindquarter of beef in the cooler when she came storming in and said that the meat hadn't hung long enough yet, and it was her policy to eat the cheap cuts first and save the steaks. The meat was already covered with green mold, and I wondered just how long she planned to wait before it was ready to cook.

She burned another can of soup and offered some to my uncle, but he said, “I'd rather starve!” and took off for town in his Chrysler. I hid out upstairs in my little bed until I heard her snoring in her corner bedroom, then crept downstairs and fried myself a big steak.

The next day, Buck sent a cook out from town. She was a big Irish lady with arms like tree trunks, who started immediately to make apple and cherry pies until a delicious fragrance filled the house. She gave me a piece, and, starved for someone to talk to, I regaled her with stories. I had consumed one whole pie when Mrs. Biddle came in from riding her horse and started treating the Irish lady like a servant. I could feel the tension building and stood powerless when the cook seized a butcher knife, ran Mrs. Biddle out of the room, and told her to stay the hell out of the kitchen. The cook stayed on another two hours until the old lady started talking to her through the dining room door, telling her what was wrong with the pies. That evening Ernie Morgan took the cook back to town, and I was treated to another meal of burned soup. But the pies I stole after bedtime were delicious.

Granted, Mrs. Biddle did have a hold on me. I was deathly afraid she would have me sent back to Michigan if I didn't humor her. When I put my first apron in the stove, she produced another frilly one and made me wear it. I hated dusting, but came to like doing windows because I could at least look out and see Morgan and the boys out riding the fields. Whenever there was a knock on the door I hid, since I didn't want any of the cowboys to catch me wearing that silly girl stuff.

To say something nice about the old lady, she was a great horsewoman. She had a beautiful Standardbred named Ginger, who was too snooty to mingle with the other horses and had to be wrangled separately. She would crowd Ginger up to a stump and pile on, riding straight in the saddle, and despite her seventy-some years, she put in enough miles on cattle drives to tire a young man. The cowboys would have preferred riding alone, but she was part owner, and try as they might, it was tough to start a ride without her.

The cowboys were bilingual. They had one language they spoke in her presence and another while chasing a wild cow out of the brush. They needn't have bothered. A year later, when I heard Margaret Biddle in an argument with my uncle, I knew why he took the batteries out of his earphones. She had a vocabulary that would have made the toughest cowhand blush.

I got to saddling my horse at dawn so she wouldn't put me to work, joining anyone leaving on an all-day ride. Some of the stories the cowboys told me as we rode were not for young ears, but I was so naive I didn't understand what they were talking about. “Years ago when I went to school in the town of Bly,” Jack Morgan told me, “they had a big outhouse behind the school with one side for boys and the other for girls. It wasn't long before the boys pushed out a knothole, that they used to spy on the girls. My brother decided he'd do the other boys one better. Someone dared him to stick himself through the knothole, and he took the dare. Trouble was, there was a girl in there who grabbed him and went round and round that knothole. She held on while the other girls hollered for the teacher. Turned out he was the only one in our family that ever got circumcised.”

For weeks I laid awake at night thinking about that story, wondering how the poor boy ever lived it down.

Chapter Four

I
LOVED THE EARLY MORNINGS
at the ranch. Blended with the fragrance of pines outside my window, I could smell clover blossoms from the hay meadows in the valley and hear a myriad of songs as birds awoke joyfully from a night's slumber. In the distance cows bawled plaintively for their calves, and sandhill cranes shouted angrily at any who dared a flight over their nesting territory in the marshes. Wilson snipe winnowed as they strafed the valley with their booming cries and rose high again. Horned larks tinkled earthward, singing their faint music as they plunged. Horses nickered for absent friends, and hooves thundered loud on the plank bridge as the wrangle boy galloped a herd of horses toward the corral for the day's work.