Collected Stories, page 44
“Telling her why?”
“No, of course not.”
“But to take such a risk!” Burns burst out. “Good heavens, suppose she hadn’t come?”
“Then I would have lost,” Pacita said, and turned her stiff, unfriendly face to look across the bayside lawns dotted with strollers. Burns felt that erratic winds were plucking at his feelings as the gusts plucked at the dresses of women out there. After a thoughtful moment he opened the door and stepped out, just as Avellanos burst from the entrance with an enormous cigar at an angle in his mouth. When he removed the cigar to smile at them he took it in his whole fist, the way he might have held a cold chisel. “Changed your mind?”
Surer than ever now, Burns said, “I’m afraid I’d better not.”
Avellanos climbed in and slammed the door. “Well, you will miss something. Pacita knows, she is a gambler like these chicken people. Eh?” He laid a hand on her knee, filling the car with laughter. “Pacita knows all about these dramatic gestures,” he said. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow and you will make a speech.” He raised his fist in farewell and stamped on the starter. Pacita’s head turned, and her eyes touched those of Burns. She smiled slightly.
He stood with his hand raised and watched them shoot off in an explosion of small gravel toward the boulevard.
It was nearly eleven. Gloomily, upset by his own gaucherie and ruffled by the girl’s show of temper, however justified, Burns went across to the club and worked dutifully on the weights a little and tried a few push-ups that instantly drained him of strength. He swam two lengths of the pool, struggling to keep his fleshless bones from sinking like lead. At eleven-thirty he gave up and went into the bar.
There was one other person there, the sort of Army-wife, foreign-colony woman he had seen plenty of times: a little ravaged, the figure better than the face, the hair blonded. As Burns entered, she was just sitting down from having put a record on the player, and now the music began to throb through the room with a deep sad booming of the double bass. A lugubrious contralto mourned that she was dancing with her sweetheart to the Tennessee Waltz when an old friend she happened to see. A little later her friend stole her sweetheart from her. She remembered the night and the Tennessee Waltz.
Burns sat consulting his drink. The record ended and the woman rose and started it over. Across the space of thirty feet her eyes brushed his, with what expression? Indifference? Dislike? Petulance? Apathy? Hatred? Self-pity? While the homesick music mourned, she brooded, holding her cigarette like a conductor’s baton, and her forefinger tapped, and tapped, and tapped, shaking off ashes that were not there. Her mouth was fixed on bitterness. With quick impatience she tinkled her rings against the glass to summon the steward. She seemed to Burns the epitome of every weak nostalgia, every self-pitying and spiteful yearning, every failure of contact. She offended him with her half-obscured resemblances to himself, and though he knew that the comparison was unfair, he rose abruptly and called for his chit. It occurred to him that those who feared getting wet should not walk in the rain.
As he crossed the lawn toward the hotel he saw the pearl man coming in his transparent shirt. The worst thing about him was that he made Burns feel so much like a tourist, a boob whom persistence would sooner or later fetch. Before he could speak, Burns leveled a finger at him. “Now look. I don’t want your pearls. I wouldn’t want them even if they were real. But I do want to be left alone. I’ll give you five pesos to disappear.”
The mouthful of white uneven teeth gleamed, incredulous. “You want buy eighty peso pearls for five pesos?”
“No pearls. Just to be left alone.”
A gust struck them. Burns staggered; the flimsy shirt was plastered against the pearl man’s chest so that his ribs, his hard pectoral muscles, his rigid nipples, stood out through it. Along shore the palms clashed with a noise like surf, the water was heavily uneasy. The edge of a typhoon, according to the papers, was due to strike Luzon in the next few hours. For a second they stood braced and squinting. Then the peddler shrugged. “Okay.”
Smiling broadly, seeming to search Burns’ face for some corroboration, he took the five pesos. The wind flapped his shirt tails. “Well, what the hell,” he said, and emptied into Burns’ palm the four polished bits of shell. Moving away, he threw his open hand into the air in cheerful, perhaps mocking, salute.
Burns walked on, rubbing between his fingers the satiny pebbles: something spurious from the Mindanao Deep, something to put with the ivory image of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, aged in soy sauce. He rather liked having the pearls; they were a commitment, of a sort. And yet it seemed to him that the mementos of his mission, like his relations with the people he met, too often turned out to be spurious or ambiguous, or forced upon him. The real thing eluded him, or he evaded it. But why, when he took this journey seriously, believed in one world and (on the hardest sort of practical ground) in the brotherhood of men and nations? Why, when what he tried hardest for was sympathetic contact? Too much sickness? Timidity? Not enough vitality? A real temperamental revulsion against life itself, that betrayed him when he least expected betrayal? Or simply good sense, a habit of forethought and sanity, a perception that it was better to be a live ambassador than a difficult foreign corpse?
Nevertheless he wished he had gone to the cockfight, however hot and uncomfortable and swarming with xenophobic germs. He would have liked to find a way of telling Pacita Delgado that he admired her spirit, the way she risked everything on a throw and posted a life for a forfeit.
Walking through the noon crowd in the lobby, he wondered what they did when a cock would not fight. Step in and wring its neck like a yard chicken’s, probably. Among plungers, combatants, the vital and the reckless, the reaction to weakness or fear could only be contempt or shame. It was a sort of rebellious, wistful shame, as he discovered without surprise, that he had been feeling for the past hour. Even if you didn’t approve—and he didn’t—of recklessness, even if you could cite the ten thousand ills that living dangerously brought into human affairs, even though you had always been on the side of those who lived by reason against those who lived by passion, with what a glitter the reckless ones recommended themselves, how that kind of temperament strutted high-toed around the chicken yard among the drab feathers and the submissive envy of the chickens dedicated to eggs and arroz con pollo! It was not a pleasant thought that that pair of gamblers, if they were thinking of him at all, which was improbable, were thinking of him only to feel sorry for him.
For the way he was feeling now there was a solution, rational but temporary. At the hat-check stand he looked up at the sign suggesting that firearms be checked at the door. Phony? Maybe. But as Avellanos said, there were all sorts of possibilities. He ordered a gimlet and sat at a table by a window. Ironically he reflected that if there were a jukebox he could put on the “Tennessee Waltz.” When the gimlet was on the table before him and its penetrating lime odor was rising to his nostrils as clean as the sniff of Benzedrine from an inhaler, he fished from his shirt pocket the envelope he carried there, and out of its assortment of pills and capsules selected an iron pill, a multi-vitamin capsule, and a concentrated capsule of vitamin C.
Genesis
The summer of 1906 was very wet. It seemed to rain for weeks and the coulees ran knee deep and the Frenchman River was as high as a spring flood. The dirt roofs of the log houses of that day became so sodden that water dripped from them whether it rained or not. It stayed so wet that we had difficulty getting the hay in. The winter started early with a light snow on the 5th of November, followed by a terrific three-day blizzard that started on the 11th. From then till Christmas was a succession of bad storms. The range cattle were dying in December.
CORKY JONES AS AN OLD MAN
It seemed to the young Englishman that if anyone had been watching from the bench he would have seen them like a print of Life on the Western Plains, or like a medieval procession. The sun was just rising, its dazzle not yet quite clear of the horizon, and flooding down the river valley whitened with the dust of snow, it gilded the yellow leaves that still clung to the willows, stretched the shadow of every bush and post, glazed the eastern faces of the log ranch buildings whose other side was braced with long blue shadows. And moving now, starting to roll, the outfit was strung out along the Mounted Police patrol trail. He was enclosed in it, moving with it, but in his excitement he saw it as it would look from outside and above, and it made him want to stand up in his stirrups and yell.
Leading the lithograph procession went the five hounds—the four Russian wolfhounds and the thing its owner called a staghound, a dog as big as a calf and with a head like a lioness. Across the bottoms in the morning cold they cut loose and ran for the love of running; within seconds they were out of sight among the willows by the ford. Behind them rode Schulz, the wolfer, as new to the outfit as the Englishman himself; and after him his fifteen-year-old son driving a packhorse; and after them old Jesse in the wagon pulled by a team of hairy-footed Clydesdale stallions. Then the horse herd, seventy or eighty saddle horses in a flow of dark tossing motion across the flat, and then the riders, two and two.
They carried no lances or pennons, the sun found no armor from which to strike light, but in the incandescence of being nineteen, and full of health, and assaulted in all his senses by the realization of everything splendid he had ever imagined, the English boy knew that no more romantic procession had ever set forth. The Crusades could not have thrilled him more. Though they went, and he with them, like an illumination in an old manuscript, they had their own authentic color. Among the bays and blacks and browns and buckskins and roans of the horse herd was one bright piebald; in substitution for slashed doublets and shining silks they offered two pairs of woolly goatskin chaps and Ed Spurlock’s red mackinaw.
Only a week in that country, the Englishman with practically no urging would have started running with the dogs. It rattled the brains in his head like seeds in a pod to think where he was—here, in Saskatchewan, not merely on the way to the great lone land, or on its edge, but in it, and going deeper. He had lived a dream in which everything went right. Within an hour of the time he stepped off the train in Maple Creek, hesitant and a little scared, he had learned that all the big cattle outfits using the open range east of the Cypress Hills were shorthanded. Within two hours, he had found a ride with Joe Renaud, the mail driver. Within twelve, he was sleeping in the T-Down bunkhouse, an authentic cowboy. Within a week here he went, part of a company bound for adventure, on the late fall roundup to gather and bring in to feeding stations the calves that could not be expected to winter on the range.
He was face to shining face with everything new. Names he had heard here knocked and clanged in his mind—places where anything could happen, and from the sound of them, had happened—Jumbo’s Butte, Fifty-Mile, Pinto Horse Butte, Horse Camp Coulee, the War Holes. He blew his exultant breath out between his pony’s ears, and when he breathed in again he felt the cold at the root of every bared tooth. He noticed that the horses felt as he did: though they had been on the roundup and then on the long drive to Montana and then on the long drive back, and had been worked steadily since May, they were full of run; they joined him in snorting smoke.
The column turned down toward the river, and looking back, the Englishman saw Molly Henry, the foreman’s wife, hugging her elbows by the ranch-house door. He waved; her hand lifted. He and Ed Spurlock were the last in the line, and he saw how they would look to her, his new sheepskin and Spurlock’s red mackinaw just disappearing into the willows. He thought it a lonesome piece of luck for a girl married only three weeks to be left now, with no help except a crippled handy man and no company except the Mountie on his weekly patrol from Eastend, and no woman nearer than twenty-five miles. To Spurlock, jogging beside him with his mittened hands stacked on the horn, he said with feeling, “I’m certainly glad it’s not me being left behind!”
Spurlock glanced sideward with restless brown eyes; he said nothing; his expression did not change.
The Englishman grew aware, under Spurlock’s glance, that he was posting to his pony’s jogtrot. As if stretching muscles he pushed down hard into the unfamiliarly long stirrups, shoved back against the cantle, leaned a little, and stacked his hands casually on the horn in imitation of Spurlock’s. As soon as he had them there he felt that he seemed to be hanging on to ease the jolt of sitting the trot, and he took his hands away again. With a complex sense of being green, young, red-headed, and British—all potentially shameful—but at the same time strong, bold, high-spirited, and ready for anything, he appraised Spurlock’s taciturnity and adjusted his seat in the big strange saddle and threw at random into the air a look that was cocky, self-conscious, and ingratiating all at once.
The wagon had crushed through the thin ice at the ford, and the horses waded into the broken wake and stood knee deep, bobbing away ice-pans with their noses, plunging their muzzles to suck strongly. Here and there one pulled its nose out and stood with a thoughtful, puckered, tasting expression at the corners of its dripping lips; they looked as if the water had made their teeth ache.
Then Slippers and Little Horn and Ray Henry rode in and hazed them across, and Buck and Panguingue and Spurlock and the Englishman picked up the stragglers. The cold sound of splashing became a drumming and thudding on the bank. Above and ahead, the wagon was just tilting out of sight over the dugway edge. They took the herd up after it in a rush, and burst out onto the great glittering plain.
It was tremendous, it was like a plunge over a cliff. The sun looked them straight in the eyes, the earth dazzled them. Over and under and around, above, below, behind, before, the Englishman felt the unfamiliar element, a cleanness like the blade of a knife, a distance without limits, a horizon that did not bound the world but only suggested endless space beyond. Shading his eyes with his hand while his pony rocked into a lope, he saw all ahead of him the disk of the white and yellow world, the bowl of the colorless sky unbearable with light. Squatting on the horizon right under the searchlight sun were a pair of low mounds, one far off, one nearer. The closer one must be Jumbo’s Butte, the far one Stonepile. They were the only breaks he saw in the plains except when, twisting backward, he found the Cypress Hills arched across the west, showing in coulees and ravines the faded white and gold of aspen, the black of jackpines. By the time they had ridden five minutes the river valley out of which they had risen was almost invisible, sunk below the level of sight.
The wolfer and his son were already far ahead, the dogs only running specks out on the shining plain. Jesse and the pilot wagon were leading the rest of them on a beeline toward Jumbo’s Butte, and as the Englishman settled down and breathed out his excitement and relaxed to the shuffle of his pony he watched the broad wheels drop and jolt into holes and burnouts and old Jesse lurch and sway on the high seat, and he let his back ache with sympathy. Then he saw Jesse’s teeth flash in his face as he turned to shout something at Ray Henry riding beside the wagon, and he decided that sympathy was wasted. Jesse had been a bullwhacker with supply trains between Fort Benton and the Montana mining camps in the early days, he had known these plains when the buffalo were still shaking them, he had been jolting his kidneys loose across country like this for thirty years. If he had wanted another kind of job he could have had it. The Englishman admired him as a man who did well what he was hired to do. He believed old Jesse to be skilled, resourceful, humorous, close-mouthed, a character. Briefly he contemplated growing a mustache and trying to train it like Jesse’s into a silky oxbow.
The saddle horses followed along smartly after the pilot wagon, and there was hardly any need to herd them, but the boys were fanned out in a wide semicircle, riding, as if by preference, each by himself. And among them—this was the wonder, this was what made him want to raise his face and ki-yi in pure happiness—rode Lionel Cullen, by now known as Rusty, the least of eight (as he admitted without real humility) but willing, and never more pleased with himself. That morning in early November, 1906, he would not have traded places with Sir Wilfrid Laurier.
He wanted to see everything, miss nothing, forget nothing. To make sure that he would not forget what happened to him and what he saw, he had begun a journal on the train coming west from Montreal, and every evening since then he had written in it seriously with posterity looking over his shoulder. He watched every minute of every day for the vivid and the wonderful, and he kept an alert eye on himself for the changes that were certain to occur. He had the feeling that there would be a test of some sort, that he would enter manhood—or cowboyhood, manhood in Saskatchewan terms—as one would enter a house. For the moment he was a tenderfoot, a greenhorn, on probation, under scrutiny. But at some moment there would be a door to open, or to force, and inside would be the self-assurance that he respected and envied in Jesse, Slippers, or Little Horn, the calm confidence of a top hand.
As they moved like the scattered shadow of a cloud across the face of the plain he knew practically nothing except how to sit a horse, and even that he knew in a fashion to get him laughed at. But he was prepared to serve an apprenticeship, he would prove himself as and when he must. And in the pocket of his flannel shirt he had a notebook and two pencils, ready for anything.
At noon, a little to the east of Jumbo’s Butte, they stopped to boil coffee and heat a kettle of beans. The thin snow did not cover the grass; the crust that had blazed in their eyes all morning was thawing in drops that clung to the curly prairie wool. On a tarpaulin spread by the wagon they sprawled and ate the beans that Jesse might just as well not have heated, for the cold tin plates congealed them again within seconds. But the coffee burned their mouths, and the tin cups were so hot to hold that they drank with their mittens on. The steam of their coffee-heated breath was a satisfaction; Rusty tried to blow rings with it.
