Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories (17 page)

Chris, following the direction of the look,
realized at once what was behind him, and turned around to look up
at Gloria with a sheepish expression but no abatement of good
nature. He took off his hat. “I’ve got a knack for putting my foot
in it, haven’t I,” he said.

Ray laughed aloud. “Glorie, this is Chris
Borden. You’ve heard me talk about him before. We punched cows
together on the Rosebud for two years. He used to be the best
friend I’d got.”

Chris ejaculated, “Used to be! Who’s gone me
one better?”

“You’re looking at her,” said Ray,
grinning.

“I can’t argue and I won’t,” said Chris,
replacing his hat. Gloria laughed too. She had not seen Ray smile
like that in a long time—at this moment there was no shadow of
trouble in his eyes; he looked almost as confident and carefree as
he had been a year ago. She was glad of the friend whose
reappearance could do this; she liked him even better for that.

“I’m glad to meet you, Mrs. Collins,” said
Chris, “though I’m afraid I haven’t—given a very good account of
myself anytime we’ve met.”

“That’s all right,” said Gloria, knowing to
what he was referring. “I hope you’ll come and see us sometime, if
you’re going to be around here. We’d be happy to have you.”

“Now that’s
real
generosity,” said
Chris, thanking her with a glance. “I’ll be glad to. And I’ll tell
you some stories I’ll bet you’ve never heard about Ray, too. There
was this horse once, that put him—But right now I’d better be going
before he gives me a kick to help me along. He’s got that look in
his eye that always comes before a kick.”

“I’ll remember that,” said Gloria.

“A kick now and then is good for his
health,” said Ray. “So long, Chris; and listen, don’t forget about
that. Come out and see us whenever you get a chance.”

“I will. So long.”

Ray climbed to the wagon seat beside Gloria,
gathered up the reins and turned the team out in a half-circle to
go back down the street. A little ways on they passed Chris Borden
walking in the same direction, and he waved a hand to them.

“I like him,” said Gloria.

“He’s all right,” said Ray with simplicity.
“Butts into things headfirst sometimes, but he’ll stick by you to
the death. Not that I ever had to try him that far,” added Ray, and
Gloria found a laugh irresistible—it was so unlike the Ray of these
late hard times to make a joke like that. “But he’s a good friend
to have. I remember once on a roundup he stood by me when a rep
from another wagon said I’d shot one of their steers…” Ray’s voice
trailed off as he lost himself in remembrance.

“And I suppose he will tell me a lot of
terribly embarrassing stories about you?” said Gloria. She
rearranged the parcels in her lap, and let her hand drop to rest
lightly on his knee.

“He’ll tell you about a jug-headed horse
that made a fool out of me once—but he won’t tell you it did the
same thing to him the week before, and he didn’t tell me,” said
Ray. “Nothing more scandalous than that.”

They were out of Baxter by this time, and a
warm dry wind blew across them. Ahead, a grayish smudge of brush
along the horizon marked the course of Wanderlust Creek across the
prairie.

“We had some good times together,” said Ray
reflectively. “Winters were always rough, of course. But that
spring…we had a good boss and a good cook, and the finest weather I
can remember, that second year. Camping within sound of the river
at night, with about a million stars overhead—nights so warm you
didn’t need a blanket. I remember saying to Chris, when we
collected our pay that—May, was it?—or June—that it felt more like
a gift from a rich old uncle than wages for the kind of living we’d
been having.”

He was silent for a little while after that.
Gloria, who had been listening with a slightly sober face, stole a
sideways look at him. An idea that had never occurred to her before
had crept into her heart. Did Ray ever regret, she wondered, that
he had left that life and settled down? A cowboy’s life was hard
enough, but the only responsibility you carried was to do the job
you were given and collect your pay at the end of the month. And a
man could quit a job he didn’t like at any time, pack up his life
in a war sack and move on to find a better country.

She wondered if Ray was thinking this—if
seeing Chris again had made him remember those days, and wish that
he had not left them behind.

“Did—you see who you wanted to in town?” she
said, feeling a sudden need for conversation.

“I didn’t see anybody but McDonough,” said
Ray. “He’s still after me to sell out. I told him it was no
good.”

He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees,
looking at the faintly-trodden wagon trail rolling ahead in the dry
grass. Then he added, unexpectedly, “He offered me a job.”

Gloria looked at him, not knowing quite what
to say. “What kind of a job? At his ranch?”

“Cowpuncher’s job. He told me I could run my
cattle in with his, and work for him till I’d saved enough to start
over somewhere else.” Ray said, slowly, “It would mean we could
keep the cattle…but it wouldn’t work for us. I told him that. I
couldn’t bring you out there; it’s rougher than what we’ve got now.
And I’m not going to leave you alone in town for the winter for a
cowpunching job. That was McDonough’s idea. I wouldn’t do that,
even though I want…I wanted…to keep the herd.”

Gloria looked quickly at him again. Ray’s
face had taken on the same set, resigned expression it had worn all
those weeks of drought and worry. McDonough’s offer—a cowboy’s job
again, the chance to keep the herd he had built…

She said, hesitantly, “Ray, if you thought
it was a better chance—”

Ray turned his head toward her abruptly and
she shifted her eyes to the parcels in her lap, without knowing why
she did it. “I told you, Gloria, it wouldn’t work. I wouldn’t do
that to you.”

They drove in silence for a few minutes. It
was, after all, what she would always have expected him to say. She
should have had her mind put at ease. But when Gloria lifted her
head to look once more at her husband’s face, she saw that Ray was
looking away across the prairie, his eyes following the line of
Wanderlust Creek; and the far-away look in them sent a strange
chill to her heart.

* * *

Near midday, one still, hot day, Gloria
dismounted from her horse by a shallow elbow of the creek, and
dropped the reins to let him drink. She sat down on the creek bank,
the stalks of dry, exhausted grass crackling under her and poking
at her corduroy skirt, and looked at the slow-moving brownish
water. The level of the creek was down, half what it should be.

The weather had continued hot and dry. The
bawling of the cattle as they searched for grass became pitiful,
and more than once Gloria feared the wilted garden was beyond
recovery. The garden was more important now that they depended on
every bit she could preserve to get them through the coming
winter.

The distress of the cattle was wearing on
Ray; she read it in his eyes and in his disinclination to talk
about it. At least that was what she told herself was the reason.
Ever since the day they had gone to Baxter there had been that
secret fear lurking in the back of her mind—the fear that Ray was
restless, that he was growing tired of being tied down—that he
wished he had been able to accept McDonough’s offer. It was only
because of her that he had refused, wasn’t it? If only he had not
had a wife to provide for, what a relief it would be to cut the
whole miserable drought-parched mess, pay off his debts and turn
over responsibility to a wagon boss again.

Gloria felt this with increasing conviction
with each passing day, and she herself was more often silent,
avoiding speaking to Ray on any subject of importance, because she
was afraid of seeing the proof of it in his every look and word.
Aside from the silences, which were easily attributed to their
weariness, nothing else had changed. They worked side by side,
trying to salvage the garden and alleviate the suffering of the
stock; they sat down together to the meals she prepared; and Gloria
still felt that sense of comfort when Ray took her in his arms, in
spite of the little ache in her heart.

Gloria rolled a bit of dry grass between her
fingers, and stretched out her hand to drop it on the surface of
the creek. She watched it carried slowly away, swinging from side
to side in the sluggish current. For the first few months after she
and Ray were married, before the well was dug, Wanderlust Creek had
been part of their housekeeping. They had hauled water from the
creek, led the stock to drink there; they had bathed in it and
Gloria had done their laundry in it. Now, in her memory, those
seemed like the happiest days—days that were as far off now as the
distant glimpse of the creek from the house.

When she first came there as a bride, the
prairie and the brush country had seemed a little bleak, slightly
alarming companions to have for a day and a life long. But she had
grown to love their wild sort of beauty: the wide-openness, the
winds, the vivid sunsets that turned Wanderlust Creek into a
twisting thread of filigreed rose and gold. She had loved the task
of making the shanty into a home, of planting that garden; she
realized now that she had come to fiercely love every element of
the life they had built together. So that what she dreaded was the
chance of finding that this life, which had become her whole world,
did not mean as much to Ray as it did to her.

Gloria got up, and gathered the bay horse’s
reins, and mounted and rode up toward the house.

A quarter of an hour later, after pulling
the saddle off the bay and turning him into the barn, she stepped
through the doorway of the shanty. She stood and looked around. The
checked cloth on the table was wrinkled; the dishes and cans stood
at untidy angles on the shelves; there was soot mingled with the
dirt floor in front of the stove. Through the doorway of the
bedroom she could see the quilt on the bed was crooked and one of
Ray’s shirts lay on the floor. Gloria looked at the stove, and
thought of the work ahead of her in preparing even the barest kind
of a dinner—and for one miserable second she felt—what was the
use?

Her own thought frightened her. What was
happening to her? Only a little while ago she had been thinking
with love and protectiveness of this life, and now she wanted to
run from it. That only happened if you stopped caring. Gloria drew
a sharp breath and the words came from her lips in an involuntary
whisper: “God, please don’t ever let me not care.”

Then suddenly everything was normal again,
and she knew that she did care. She put her quirt and gloves on the
table, straightened the checked cloth, and went to the bedroom for
her apron. She fell to work with almost rebellious energy, tidying
the bedroom, straightening the shelves and sweeping the floor,
opened cans of beans and salt pork and kneaded flour into the
sourdough starter to make the biscuits for dinner.

When they were in the oven, Gloria went into
the bedroom and opened her trunk, brought pen and notepaper to the
table and sat down to write a letter to her mother. It was not a
long letter, and it was rather a colorless one, for her, because
there were more things left out than not. She did not write about
any of her worries and heartaches, nor about how the cattle and the
garden were flagging; she put in bits and pieces of less important
things and alluded only gently to the hard work busying them. Her
mother would understand—and she did not feel like talking about her
troubles. While tidying the house she had come to a sort of
resolution with herself: resolution if not peace. Ray might regret
that he had traded his freedom for hard responsibility, but he
should never have cause to regret he had chosen her for his wife.
He did love her; he would not still be here if he did not; and no
sacrifice that he made for her sake should ever go for nothing.

* * *

The sky was gray, but as yet refused to
release any rain. Ray leaned down from his saddle to gather the bay
gelding’s reins as Gloria dismounted, in the corner rutted by
wagons turning beside the blacksmith’s pole corral and shed. Ray’s
horse needed a new shoe, and Gloria had her letter to post, so they
had ridden into Baxter together as was often their custom. Gloria
much preferred the ride with Ray and a few minutes’ chat with the
postmistress to an afternoon alone in the shanty.

She went off across the way toward the old
trading-post, which housed the post-office, and Ray dismounted and
led the horses around into the blacksmith’s yard. Smoke drifted
from under the open shed, where the clang of metal upon metal
resounded. A handful of men lounged in the yard, smoking and
talking while they waited for repairs on a wagon wheel or horseshoe
or simply idling along with the others, and one of these was Chris
Borden. He was sitting on the top rail of the corral, and after
watching Ray from this vantage for a minute, he slid down and
followed him over into the corner where Ray was looping the reins
of Gloria’s horse over the fence.

Chris leaned his back against the fence.
“How’s things?” he said.

“Not so good,” said Ray. He looked at Chris
and added, “Well—you know. Same as everybody else, on a smaller
scale. At least I’ve still got enough water.”

“I’ve been hearing some talk that McDonough
wanted to buy you out,” said Chris. “Is that true?”

“It’s true,” said Ray shortly. “I’ve turned
him down more than once.”

“I heard that, too,” said Chris. “You always
were a pretty set fellow once you got an idea in your head.”

“I’m not talking about ideas, I’m talking
about land. Three hundred and twenty acres of land.”

“He’s offering you a fair deal.”