Shortgrass Song Read online

  Buster was planting cottonwood saplings around the cabin one day. He had dug them up along Monument Creek and was setting them in perfect orchard rows, envisioning the day when they would stand high enough to shade the yard. He was gently tamping the soil around the roots of one when he saw two riders coming.

  He stood and whistled, and the boys rode in from the plains—Matthew on Crazy, Pete and Caleb riding double on Blue Eyes. They got to the cabin about the time their father arrived with a stranger and a herd of six horses. The stranger drove the horses into the corral as Ab rode to the cabin, pausing briefly at Ella’s grave. It gave him a sudden pang of dread to see his youngest son straddling the wild-looking blue-eyed mustang.

  “Caleb, get off that horse,” he said.

  Caleb slid down and looked at the ground. Matthew spit.

  “What’s that in your mouth?” Ab asked.

  “Chewin’ tobacco.”

  “Well, spit it out.”

  Matthew raked the chaw out of his cheek.

  “Hello, Papa,” Pete said.

  “Hello.” He nodded at Buster. “What are you doing?”

  “Puttin’ in some cottonwood trees for shade.”

  “You’re looking pretty far ahead if you can see shade under those sprouts. Are we going to have any wildflowers this spring?”

  “Yes, sir. They’re up, they just ain’t bloomin’ yet.”

  “Good.”

  When he stepped down from the saddle, the peg leg landed right in front of Caleb. No one had seen it on the off side of the horse, but now it stood like a skeleton’s leg in front of the boy. It was skinny as the neck of Buster’s banjo. As if to show it off, Ab opened his coat and held the tails back, placing his hands on his hips.

  His knee fit into a rawhide-lined socket at the top of the artificial limb, and an ungainly network of straps held it to what was left of his leg and attached to his belt. He had to cinch the belt tight around his waist to get it to hold the leg on. The waistband of his trousers slanted to the right, as if the peg leg were trying to pull his pants down.

  Ab had been a suspender man before Apache Canyon. Caleb had never even seen him wear a belt before, let alone strap a banjo neck to one and use it for a leg.

  “Damn, where’d your leg go, Papa?” Matthew said with a look of astonishment on his face.

  “The Texans shot it off at … What did you say?”

  “I meant to say ‘dang,’ but … How’d it happen?”

  “I’ll tell you about it later. And if I hear you swear again, I’ll take this leg off and use it on your rear end.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ab’s companion rode toward the cabin, having closed the corral gate on the six horses. So unusual was his appearance that he drew even Caleb’s attention away from the peg leg.

  “This is Javier Maldonado,” Ab said. “He’s from New Mexico.”

  Javier swept the sombrero from his head and bowed from the saddle as if his own feet stood under him instead of his mount’s. Rings of hair were plastered with sweat against his head. His skin was brown and olive and red, depending on the light it caught, and his beard, though shaven that morning, appeared drawn in charcoal. He had a crease in the middle of his chin that he seemed to flaunt. “Buenos días,” he said.

  “Does he speak English?” Matthew asked.

  Javier’s eyes glinted with mirth. “Yes, I know English very well. I even know the cuss words! I learned in Texas.”

  “Probably learned the cuss words first,” Ab grumbled. One of the Holcomb dogs was sniffing the wooden leg. He rapped it once across the nose.

  Javier dismounted and became another person. Out of the saddle he looked rather comical. He was bowlegged, potbellied, and swaybacked. His legs, which had seemed proportionate in the stirrups, were too short for the rest of him on the ground.

  “Glad to meet you,” Buster said, shaking Javier’s hand. He saw the thick coil of rawhide next to the saddle horn. “I guess you’re gonna teach the boys how to rope.”

  “That’s right,” Ab said. “I brought him back to show Matthew and Pete how to work those cows. There’s more to it than just roping.”

  “What about me?” Caleb asked.

  Ab looked down at him and put his hand on the boy’s head. “You, too. Whenever you get a little bigger. And learn to ride better.”

  “He’s done a bit of ridin’,” Buster said.

  “He rode all the way to the Indian Territory,” Pete added. “He stole Blue Eyes from some Comanche.” He parted the grullo pony on the neck.

  Ab gave Pete a stern look for telling such fabrications.

  “He rides good,” Buster said.

  Caleb nodded.

  “I didn’t say he couldn’t ride. I said he had to learn to ride better. Maybe you can practice a little on Sundays for fun, as long as you don’t run too fast. But you better wait till you get big as Pete to start. Buster needs you to help him farming anyway. Right, Buster? Now, where did that blue-eyed horse really come from? And where’s the Snake Woman?”

  * * *

  Caleb’s adventure among the Comanche was never more than a story to Ab. Ab knew Buster didn’t lie, but the man must have miscalculated the distances or something. He had probably gotten lost out on the treeless plains and ridden four times farther than he really had to to retrieve the boy. They had probably spent a few days with a band of starving Cheyenne on Squirrel Creek or something. But a whole winter among Comanche? A boy as frail as Caleb couldn’t have survived it. He had to admit that Caleb wasn’t sickly anymore. But he was still frail. Always would be. Ella had pointed it out many times, and she knew about things like that. Riding and roping were not the kinds of work for Caleb.

  One evening after Javier had been at the ranch a while, Buster and Caleb broke out their instruments and began to run through their repertoire. After listening to a few songs, Javier asked if he might play the guitar. He raked the strings over the sound hole with his fingernails, drew a deep breath, and filled the entire prairie with a voice so clear and loud and perfectly pitched that it sounded like a human pipe organ. Caleb reeled back in the face of it. The singer bit off the words, rolled them in his r’s, and sent fits of falsetto to chase them through the air. It didn’t matter that he sang in Spanish. By the end of the song, the boys were laughing and hooting with him like a den of coyotes.

  Buster smiled politely, but he didn’t enjoy being outdone. Before Javier could launch another Mexican song, he reached for his fiddle and tore into “Rosin the Bow” as if his grubstake depended on it. Javier countered with “Rancho Grande,” and a contest of music began.

  Caleb had never known Buster to play anything on the guitar the way Javier played it. The New Mexican made it sound like a completely new instrument. As Javier’s fingers pounced on the strings, Caleb tried to watch them to figure out what they were doing. But they moved so fast, it seemed as if there were not enough of them on Javier’s right hand to make all the noise that came out of the sound hole. And in fact, when “Rancho Grande” ended, Caleb saw that the little finger of Javier’s right hand was missing!

  “What happened to your finger?” he asked, as if he thought the vaquero had sawed it off with the furious strumming.

  Javier held his hand in front of his face, turned it to show both sides, and grinned at it. “El Bronco got it,” he said.

  “A horse bit it off?” Matthew asked.

  “No. El Bronco, the Wild One. It was the name of a big black creature in Mexico. A bull that lived on the ranch of my uncle in Zacatecas.”

  “A bull bit it off?” Pete asked.

  “No, no!” Javier handed the guitar to Caleb and pulled himself forward on his bench. “Listen, and I will tell you how it happened. Have you heard about the bullfights in Mexico? Well, why do you think the bull fights the torero?

  “To kill him,” Matthew said.

  “Yes, but why?”

  “Because he hates him.”

  “No, not because he hates him.”

>   “Because he’s just mean,” Pete said.

  “No, that bull is not so mean,” Javier replied. He looked at Caleb, who shrugged. “Because he is afraid of him, that is why he fights. And let me tell you why he is afraid.

  “In Mexico, the bulls grow up on the ranch, far away from the bullfight. Far away from people. My uncle has a ranch like that in Zacatecas, and he raises the big black bulls for fighting. The ones of Spanish blood, not like the longhorns from Texas; not like your American cattle either. Big black cattle, and the bulls have horns sharp like the bayoneta and curved like the side of this guitar.” He stroked his four-fingered hand along the curve of the guitar on Caleb’s knees.

  “And these bulls grow up far away from people and never look at them except, maybe once in a while, a man riding a horse. When they get big enough, the charros chase them into a pen made of rocks, very high so no one can look in. And on top of the rock wall are pieces of glass, so little muchachos like you three boys don’t climb up the wall to look at the bulls. That way, all their life they never see a man standing on his own two legs. So, when they see the torero in the bullfighting ring, they are afraid. They have never seen anything stand up that way except a bear. And there is no place to run away in the bullring, so that is why the bull fights the torero, because he is afraid.” Javier slapped his knees as if he had concluded, and leaned back against the log wall of the cabin.

  “But what about your finger?” Caleb asked.

  “Oh, yes, I forgot,” he said, leaning into his story again. “You want to hear about El Bronco. Well, on my uncle’s rancho there was one bull, five years old already, and no one could chase him into the rock pens. He was too wild. Oh, he ran like an antelope and jumped over the rock fences like a deer, and I saw him one time climb the side of a canyon like a mountain sheep.

  “Well, there was a señorita on my uncle’s ranch, and I wanted her to marry me, so I was going to show her how I was the best caballero around there and get El Bronco in the pens.”

  “How were you gonna do that?” Pete asked.

  “I thought I could rope that bull and tie him to a tree and leave him there until he was almost dead from thirst and then I could chase him into the pens pretty easy. So, I got my best roping horse, a big mare called La Cruz because of a cross on her face, and I went out to find El Bronco.

  “I looked around for many weeks and finally saw him across a valley, up in the high country. He was the biggest bull you ever did see. Big like a buffalo but much smarter. He was always watching out for danger, like a deer. I followed him, about a mile away, for three days, trying to think of a way to get close to him.

  “On the third day he went down into a canyon to eat grass and I got an idea. I had a sling that I always carried with me, and I used it to throw rocks into the canyons to scare deer out so I could shoot at them. I thought maybe I could sling a rock all the way across the canyon that El Bronco was in and make him run up to me on my side of the canyon and then I would rope him.”

  “You mean a sling like David beat Goliath with?” Pete asked.

  “Yes, exactly the same kind. So I got a bunch of rocks just right for the sling and I rode La Cruz very quietly to the edge of that canyon and—one, two, three—I made those rocks go far across the canyon to the other side!”

  Caleb could see the sling in Javier’s hand as he made the motions that sailed the rocks across the canyon. Then the vaquero reached for another imaginary prop, and Caleb knew it was his lariat.

  “Right away I heard El Bronco coming up the side of the canyon, so I hid behind a big boulder on La Cruz and waited for him. He came out of the canyon not too far away, and La Cruz started to chase him. She was a very fast mare, but it took three miles to get close to that big black bull. Oh, he had a hump like a buffalo and, on his horns, do you know what I saw?”

  “What?” Matthew demanded.

  “Blood. That bull had killed something. I don’t know what. Probably a jaguar.

  “After four miles I was swinging the rope and I had to catch him quick because he was getting close to the next canyon, and I couldn’t run as fast as he could down into those canyons. So I spurred La Cruz and said, “¡Pronto, yegua!” and she ran as fast as she could, and got right behind El Bronco. Well, I made a big loop, and I threw it right over the bloody horns just before that black bull got to the next canyon!”

  Javier’s Mexican saddle was hanging on the porch rail, and he suddenly leaped onto it and wrapped his imaginary lariat around the rawhide-covered pommel, as broad across the top as the span of his hand.

  “I made a turn around the saddle horn, and La Cruz stiffened her legs and stopped with dirt flying everywhere around her. The reata went slipping around the horn like a snake, so fast that it started smoking, and I thought the saddle tree was going to catch on fire and burn me up. El Bronco ran like he had nothing on his horns but a spiderweb; he was just about to jump down into the canyon. I held the rope tighter to make him slow down, but he made a leap and pulled my hand into the twist of rope smoking around the horn. I tried to let go, but this little finger—the one that is no longer there—it got pulled into the coil.

  “¡Ay de mí! It went around so fast that the rope just cut that finger off when El Bronco jumped over the edge into the canyon. It cut right through the glove and the blood shot all over the rope as it went smoking around the horn, and then it sprayed everywhere like a mist until the rope was gone after the bull into the canyon.

  “And La Cruz, the smell of all that blood scared her, and she threw me into a tree with a lot of thorns and ran away, so it took me four days to walk back to the rancho. I never got another look at my rope, or my finger, or El Bronco again.”

  Javier looked sadly at the floor, swung his leg over the saddle, and went back to his place on the bench.

  “Did that girl marry you?” Matthew asked.

  “Oh, no,” Javier answered. “She said a very cruel thing to me. She said she would have married me before, but she wouldn’t do it after El Bronco, because she wanted to feel all ten fingers of the man who held her breasts.”

  Ab cleared his throat rather deliberately.

  Javier grinned. “It is a good lesson,” he explained.

  Caleb didn’t know what the lesson was, but the story made him tingle. It gave him escape from Holcomb Ranch. It took him to Mexico, away from the grave of his mother and the coldness of his father. It was like a song, a trip out of time and place, and he wanted to tell stories, too. He wanted people to look at him as a singer of songs and a teller of stories, instead of a boy who got his mother killed.

  NINETEEN

  Javier’s first act as manager of the Holcomb Ranch was to change Buster’s bull’s-eye brand to a simple H, for Holcomb. The bull’s-eye had caused problems. The hide inside the closed circles of the design tended to die and slough off, leaving large, round, raw wounds. Javier explained that the lines of a brand, unless it was a large flank brand, should never completely encircle a piece of hide.

  He taught Pete and Matthew how to rope and throw calves on foot first, then mounted the boys on his trained cow ponies. Each horse could run down calves like a hound after rabbits.

  Caleb felt terribly cheated to hear his brothers whistling and hollering at cattle while he harnessed oxen and watched Buster turn the grass upside down. One day when he and Buster were shocking wheat, Matthew rode by and threw a loop as big as a wagon wheel around the horns of a young bull.

  “How come Papa doesn’t like me as much as Pete and Matthew?” Caleb asked as he watched his brother drag the bull away behind his horse.

  Buster had to stop a moment and wipe the sweat from his face. “What makes you think he don’t like you?”

  “He won’t let me work with him like Pete and Matthew.”

  Buster sighed and fanned himself with his hat. “You were your mama’s favorite child. She wouldn’t never say so, because it might hurt your brothers’ feelin’s, but it was true. Your papa remembers that. He just wants to be car
eful with you so won’t nothin’ happen to you, because that’s what your mama wanted, and sometimes it looks like he don’t like you because of it. He’s just tryin’ to keep you from gettin’ hurt or somethin’.”

  “He’s hurtin’ me anyway,” Caleb said, speaking as if with the wisdom of a grown man. Then he just went back to shocking wheat.

  That evening the boy was trying to rope a sawhorse when his brothers rode in from the plains, their hands bloody from castrating bull calves. “You don’t know what you’re doin’,” Matthew said.

  Caleb threw the loop anyway, and missed.

  “See, I told you. Give me that rope.”

  “No,” Caleb said.

  “Leave him alone,” Pete said.

  Matthew grabbed the rope and tried to pull it away, but Caleb wouldn’t turn loose.

  “Papa said you ain’t supposed to rope nothin’,” Matthew claimed.

  “He can rope a sawhorse if he wants to,” Pete said.

  Matthew gave the rope a mighty yank. Caleb fell down but refused to turn loose the rope. Matthew kicked dirt in his face and dragged him across the ground beside the corral. Pete leapt from the saddle and tackled his big brother, and a three-way wrestling match commenced.

  Before the boys knew what had happened, their father came down on them from Pard’s saddle. He grabbed Matthew first, took one end of the rawhide lariat the boys were wrestling over, and popped the dust from the seat of his oldest son’s pants until Matthew danced in pain. He grabbed Pete next, and the boy took the spanking with his heels on the ground, though the stinging blows made him wince.

  Caleb saw his father come at him next. The peg leg landed in front of him, and the big hands reached down for him. He went limp with dread, saw his brothers rubbing their rear ends, and knew the rawhide was going to hurt.