When the Legends Die (12 page)

After another little while the boy came back out of the shadows of the trees, walking alone. He walked with the weariness of one who sings the going-away song for the only other person in the world. But he sang no song.

Men and boys were standing beside the doorway, but he seemed not to see them. They stepped aside, made way for him, and later they said it was like seeing a strange man, a remote and terrible man, not a boy.

He walked past them and along the hallway and upstairs to his room.

The next day he went to his classes as though nothing had happened, but those who looked into his eyes saw something there that made them afraid to talk to him. Nobody spoke of what had happened in the moonlight.

T
HE AGENT SAID THEY
would make a farmer out of him yet, and that spring they tried. He learned, readily enough, to harness a team of work horses, and he learned how to hitch the team to a plow. They showed him how to hold the plow handles and turn a furrow. Then they took him to a field that was soon to be planted with corn and set him to work. They hoped to make a plowboy of him.

But plowing seemed stupid to him. Why should anyone rip up the grass, even if it was sparse grass, and make the earth grow something else? If left to itself, the earth would grow grass and many other good things. When you plowed up the grass you were making the earth into something it did not want to be.

And plowing one furrow after another, side by side, was like walking in a room if you walked only on one board, then on the next, and the next, and the next. You went nowhere. The world was a big place. Why should you stay in one little field and make all your footsteps side by side?

The horses knew what to do. They followed each furrow to the end, then turned and followed the next furrow back again, and all he had to do was to hold the plow handles and keep the plowshare in the ground at an even depth. But he kept thinking of how senseless it all was and he let the plowshare drift up and down and make a deep furrow here, a shallow furrow there, no furrow at all in many places.

Neil Swanson came and looked. “Maybe you could do a worse job if you tried,” he said, “but I doubt it.” He took the team and showed Thomas Black Bull how to hold the plow handles steady and turn a clean, uniform furrow. He plowed to the end of the field and back, Thomas walking beside him. “Nothing to it,” Neil said. “Now you do it.” And while Neil watched, Thomas turned a perfect furrow. Neil said, “That’s it. All you have to do is keep a steady hand and pay attention.” He went back to the barns, and Thomas plowed just as he had before, deep and shallow and no furrow at all.

After two weeks Neil said, “We can’t plant corn in a field like that.” He brought another boy and set him to plowing the field all over again, and he took Thomas back to the cow barn. “Since you won’t learn to plow,” he said, “you’ll have to clean the cow barn and learn to milk.”

Thomas knew this was punishment for not becoming a good plowboy. But punishment no longer mattered. The smell of the cow barn nauseated him, but he cleaned it. The smell of warm milk made him feel sick, but he learned to milk a cow. He had to work in the cow barn only a few hours a day, morning and evening. And in a few more weeks most of his classes ended for the summer and he became a herd boy. After the morning milking and the barn cleaning he took the cows to pasture on the grass two miles from the barns. He stayed with the cows, seeing that they did not wander too far, until late afternoon. Then he brought them back and helped with the evening milking.

For a herd horse he had a stringhalted old nag with a saw-toothed backbone. He hated the horse and its limping gait, which kept his bottom raw, but he learned to ride after a fashion. And the long hours in the open, even though it was a land of sagebrush, cactus and scattered grass, were a relief from the cow barn. The open country smelled clean, even when the wind blew and the dust rose with its acrid alkaline smell. There was sunshine, there was sky, there was distance and a degree of freedom. He didn’t mind being a herd boy.

Then it was June and the cornfields were green. The cows, with only sparse grass to eat, smelled the corn, and one afternoon when Thomas was watching a meadow lark’s nest the whole herd broke through a fence and got into a field of corn. It was an hour before he could get them out again, and that night three of the cows were sick from eating green corn. Neil Swanson found out what had happened, and as punishment he kept Thomas at die barns all day and put another boy out as cowherd.

When he had been punished in this way for two weeks, Neil Swanson said, “You should have learned your lesson by now. We’ll see if you can herd the horses.” So, though he still had to help clean the cow barns and milk the cows morning and night, he was sent out for the day with the horse herd. The horses were pastured five miles from the barns and well away from the cornfields.

Half the horses in the herd were still unbroken and, after the first week or so, Thomas wondered what it would be like to ride an unbroken horse. So he took a rope with him when he took the horses out to their pastureland, and that afternoon he roped a two-year-old colt and got on its back and tried to ride it. He was thrown after the first two jumps. He caught the colt and tried again. He was thrown, as before, and that time he landed in a bed of cactus. He spent the rest of the afternoon pulling out cactus thorns. But the next day he caught another colt and tried to ride again. It was a tamer colt. He rode it for several minutes before it bucked him off.

For two weeks he tried to ride the colts in the herd, and he found that he could stay on three of the tamer ones. He began to learn how to ride. Then one afternoon, trying to get the rope on a particularly wild buckskin, he drove it into a dry creek bed and there in loose sand hock deep on the horse he looped the rope around its nose, got on its back and rode it to a standstill. He had discovered something—no horse can be a vicious bucker in deep sand. After that, when he wanted to ride a horse that was too wild to ride on hard ground he drove it into the creek bed and rode it there in the sand.

He learned that each horse has its own rhythm, not only in its walk and trot and lope, but in the way it bucks and pitches. He found that if he rode the horse with its own rhythm, and if he gripped with his knees and thighs and kept his sense of balance, he could ride every horse in the herd in the sand.

When he had ridden them all, he looped a rope around a horse’s belly and made a kind of surcingle to which he could hold and help keep his balance. With the rope, he found that he could ride some of the unbroken horses out on the hard flats. He still was thrown from time to time, but he began to know a sense of mastery, something he hadn’t known since the day he stood in front of the burned lodge on Bald Mountain and knew that everything that had ever mattered to him was gone.

One afternoon toward the end of August he was riding a particularly mean two-year-old pinto when Benny Grayback rode out to the grazing ground. He was so intent on riding the pinto that he rode it to a standstill before he knew that Benny was there, watching. He slid off the exhausted horse, removed the surcingle and nose rein, and waited for Benny to speak.

Benny glared at him and asked, “How long has this been going on?”

Thomas didn’t know what to answer. He said, “ I rode till he stopped bucking. I don’t know how long.”

“How long have you been riding the colts?”

Thomas shrugged.

“You are supposed to let them graze, not ride them and make them thin. Neil Swanson says the horses are all too thin. I came to find out why.”

“The grass is poor,” Thomas said.

“You give them no time to eat what grass there is,” Benny said sharply.

“I was taming them to ride.”

“When they are needed, they will be tamed,” Benny said. “By those who know how to break horses.”

Which was true. Each year the horses were broken to harness or the saddle, usually in the spring. They were driven into the breaking pen, roped, choked and water-starved until they could be saddled or harnessed. If they still had the strength to fight, they were beaten and choked again, until there was no fight in them. In the old days the people had respected their horses, tamed them. But the old days were gone. Now they broke the horses, broke their spirit.

“Come,” Benny Grayback ordered. “Bring the horses.”

Thomas Black Bull caught his listless herd horse and gathered the herd, and he and Benny took them back to the agency. Thomas penned them and Benny went to the barn and talked to Neil Swanson. Then Thomas went to the barn, and Neil shook his head and said, “You never learn, do you? If there are a hundred ways to do a thing right and one way to do it wrong, you always find that one wrong way.” He shook his head. “Lickings do no good. Nothing does any good. Well, classes start next week. Then you’ll be out of my hair till it’s time to pick corn. Go on over to the cow barn and get to work.”

And that was the end of Thomas Black Bull’s horse herding.

Classes started again, and because he seemed useless at any other craft they sent him back to Ed Porter to plait rawhide and horsehair into quirts and riatas and bridles and reins. He still worked morning and evening in the cow barn, and when the corn was ripe he helped shuck corn.

Then it was winter, and when the winter began to thin away Neil Swanson said, “It’s almost lambing season,” and Benny Grayback said, “Albert Left Hand needs a helper.” Neil said, “Why not? That boy isn’t good for anything else. He might make a sheepherder.” The agent said, “It’s worth a try.”

T
HEY TOOK HIM TO
Albert Left Hand, who ran a little band of sheep on the sage flats at the northern edge of the reservation.

Albert Left Hand was a short, fat man who smelled of rancid mutton tallow. He had a rib-thin team of horses, a rickety wagon, a tent, and range rights. He seemed to eat nothing but prairie dog stew. His range was pock-marked with prairie dog towns and when he was not napping or sitting in sullen silence beside his tent he hunted prairie dogs with a single-shot .22 rifle. He had been without a helper for more than a month, so for the first few days he was grudgingly grateful to have a boy to tend the sheep.

He was a surly old man of few words, and those words usually were abusive. But for those first few days, hungry for company, he complained to Thomas Black Bull about his wife’s death two years ago and about the way all eight of his children had grown up and left him. Then he relapsed into his usual silence except when he was berating Thomas for being lazy.

Despite Albert Left Hand, Thomas found a degree of peace and contentment. Spring was at hand, and even the arid sage flats soon came to life. Only a few of the flowers were old friends, from his life at Bald Mountain, but the desert plants were soon familiar. Ground plum came to purple flower, then bore fleshy, grapelike pods. Prairie onions sent up green shoots from their pungent bulbs and bloomed in white and rosy heads. Bird’s-next cactus, prickly balls the size of his fist, put forth intricate starry purple blossoms. The white stars of sand lilies, the white spikes of larkspur, the snowy balls of sand verbena delighted his eye. In the evening there was the gold of pucker-petaled sundrops and the fragrant moon glow of golden primroses.

Meadow larks greeted the sunrise and cheered the evening. Horned larks spilled song all day in their spiraling flight. In the prairie dog towns grotesque burrowing owls tilted on their long, slim legs and hissed and screeched. Prairie falcons with wings like curved knives coursed the flats, hunting ground squirrels and young prairie dogs. Long-tailed magpies jeered among the cottonwoods in dry watercourses, and bull-bats boomed in the dusk and peeped plaintively as they winged the sky.

For a little time he sensed a kinship with all these. Then the ewes began to drop their lambs. Albert Left Hand stirred himself away from his tent and showed Thomas how to help a ewe struggling in the throes of birth, how to get a lamb on its feet and sucking at its mother’s teats. For two weeks they worked together. They saved almost sixty of the seventy-odd lambs dropped. When a lamb failed to survive, Albert Left Hand skinned it, pegged out the pelt to dry. “Worth a quarter,” he said.

Then the lambs were born and Albert Left Hand went back to hunting prairie dogs and sitting beside his tent. Thomas was busier than ever, for the lambs had even less sense than their foolish mothers. They strayed, they fell off cutbanks and into canyons, they thrust stupid noses at buzzing rattlesnakes. And, especially at dusk, the coyotes got one now and then.

June came, and they had saved forty-five lambs, which were growing swiftly. The ewes, recovered from their lambing, had begun to put on fat and show prime fleeces. Albert Left Hand had a pile of dry, stinking pelts, not only of the dead lambs but also of those ewes that had died in lambing or in the difficult weeks soon after.

Then it was July, and one morning Albert Left Hand said, “Come. Now we will take them to the shear pens.” He caught up his horses, patched his makeshift harness and hitched them to his paintless lumber wagon. He and Thomas loaded in the pelts, the tent, the dirty blankets from their beds, and Albert Left Hand got in and led the way across the flats. Thomas gathered the flock and herded them behind the wagon.

They went to the shearing pens near the agency. While Thomas penned the sheep, Albert Left Hand talked to the man in charge. Then he called Thomas. “Now we will go to Bayfield. I will sell the skins. I will buy you a bottle of pop.”

Thomas got into the wagon and Albert Left Hand drove up the road to Bayfield.

D
ROWSY
B
AYFIELD HAD ITS
Saturday afternoon crowd. A dozen saddle horses were hitched at the long rack in front of the general store, and wagon teams and a few saddle horses were in the cottonwood grove at the end of the street. The two saloons spilled loud talk and laughter onto the board sidewalk. Cowhands loafed in doorways and at the edge of the walk. They glanced up as Albert Left Hand drove up the dusty street and stopped his team in front of the big store. Thomas sat in the wagon, holding the reins, while Albert went in and talked with the trader. He made his deal, then came out and ordered, “Go around back and unload.”