The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson
and took a great breath that swelled out his chest. “Well,” he said, “I reckon I better get out there and fix up that hole some son-of-a-gun left for me.” He gave her another moment to tell him what an astounding rescue he had made and to admit that hooking on to Kate’s tail was the only scheme that would have worked in time.
“Thank God you got her out,” Rachel said.
He dumped the last of his water into the wash basin and walked out. He began rolling the rocks into the well. He figured Kate had probably tromped it down pretty well, but a load of rocks was a good bet to cause it to collapse as much more as it was going to. He’d just have to leave it that way till the ground thawed out. Then he’d be able to tamp it down some more and fill it in properly. When he’d emptied the stoneboat he went down to check on Kate.
He was prepared to find that she was going to cast the foal, but even though he was prepared, it made him sick. After the first eight months had gone so well—to have her lose it with only three more months to go. It was queer how an animal as big and powerful as a horse was so hard to breed and so liable to abort at almost any time.
“Oh, Kate,” he said softly. “Now what do you want to go and do this for?”
Any mare he’d ever known wanted privacy at a time like this, so he went back to the cows’ end of the barn and sat on a milkstool. He thought of the stud fee he’d paid that deadbeat Otto, and felt sicker.
He sat down on a milk stool and rolled a cigarette. The match glimmered brightly in the gloom of the barn, and he watched it till the flame reached his fingers. Damn the son-of-a-bitch that would leave a hole like that. Didn’t a man have enough trouble from enemies he already knew about without being dealt a blow like this from some idiot whose name he would never even know?
He remembered how a schoolmate of his had fallen down an old well like this one. It was spring and the ground was wet. The well was so old that all the curbing had rotted away and the sides kept collapsing on the boy. They had got him out alive, but he grew up peculiar.
He could tell from the way Kate was stamping around that the foal wasn’t born yet. He wished she’d hurry up about it if she was going to do it. He wanted to get back to work. After this morning’s catastrophes, he felt more desperately far behind than ever. This last year he had got so far behind that he sometimes caught himself saying, “What’s the use?”
George Armstrong Custer saying, “What’s the use?”
He thought, as he so often did, of how things had changed so much faster than anybody had ever supposed they would. George had been born a mere twenty-three years after his namesake rode a high-stepping sorrel horse into ambush at the Little Big Horn. His grandfather had come from Illinois to homestead in the Dakota Territory just two years after General Custer was killed. The old man loved to tell about how he had been to Bismarck when it was nothing but a ferry landing on the Missouri River and a place for the soldiers from Fort Abraham Lincoln to get booze and women. And two years after the Boy General was dead, he was still, after booze and women, the main topic of conversation. Fort Abraham Lincoln—four miles from Bismarck—the westernmost fort in the north of the continent. And out of it had ridden the troops behind the fearless redheaded cavalryman—so nearly immortal while he was alive, so obviously mortal when they found his white, naked body lying along with all the others on the hillside.
George’s old granddaddy would not believe his eyes if he could see Bismarck now. Here the twenty-story white tower of the capitol rose up from the prairie—there a silver bridge spanned the Missouri, and beyond, Highway 10, the Red Trail, proceeded in a humdrum concrete strip through the country of Sitting Bull and on to the Pacific Ocean. Yet George himself had been born on the western frontier, and his grandfather had seen fit to bestow on him the name of a frontier hero. When he was a lad of six or seven, herding cows in the unfenced pastures, he would kick over a buffalo skull every time he went after a stray calf or ran a badger down a hillside. Some of the skulls even had patches of hide on them.
It was all over in Kate’s stall. He stood up and buttoned his sheepskin coat. He drew on his heavy leather gloves and pulled the flaps of his hunting cap down over his ears. He was a big man, nearly six feet three, and almost two hundred pounds. He could still spring up from a milk stool as light as a cat on his feet, but the job ahead of him at the moment did not cause him to move in such a manner.
He pushed the wheelbarrow down the aisle, hoping the fetus wouldn’t be too hard to look at. It was a light little thing, seemingly perfect. The afterbirth was normal. Kate was feverish, but that was to be expected. He made sure the blanket he’d put on her was securely fastened. After he got the foal out of her stall, he’d bring her some water.
He loaded it in the wheelbarrow and pushed it out of the barn. He’d wait till it dried off and then drag it out where the coyotes would take care of it. He might be able to shoot a couple when they came to the carcass and earn himself some bounty money.
He felt like going after bigger game than coyotes. He felt like shooting the bastard who’d left that hole. He felt like shooting the storekeeper whose lousy cash gobbled up land that other people had tamed for him. A man born on the frontier, dammit, had a right to own enough land to build himself a house on.
He looked across the pasture hills to the heavy noon sky. He wondered if it would be snowing by the time he would have to drive into town to get Lucy from school. When he was seven years old, nobody had toted him back and forth from school, but things were different nowadays. He couldn’t think when it was that he had last come across a buffalo skull.
Will Shepard braced himself against the eccentricities of the springs under the truck seat while he coasted over the thumping timbers that were laid between the railroad tracks as a concession to whatever traffic found itself at cross purposes with the Northern Pacific’s main line.
He glanced out to his right to see if old Millard Adams was watching for a wave from him, but he saw no one at all in the depot—just the boards of the building and the platform. Those of the building had once been painted and those of the platform had not, but for a long time they had all been the same color. Only the letters at either end of the building had been retouched. They said EUREKA.
Most of the town was either to Will’s right or straight ahead of him to the north. The tracks to his left stretched west, accompanied only by telegraph wires except for the faraway shapes of Clarence Egger’s farmyard.
In front of Will, at the corner across the street from the depot, was Herman Schlaht’s store, and on up the street were Gebhardt’s pool hall, the bank, and the café. It was the bank that Will was heading for first. He let the truck roll along past it, applying a minimum of pressure on the brake pedal so as to spare himself the awful squalling of the worn steel shoes slipping against the drums. He must get the truck down to Ray Vance for a new set of brakes before the busy season started. He turned the wheel so the tires rubbed into the low bank of snow piled along the wooden sidewalk, and the truck stopped. He opened the door and jumped out; he was in a hurry to get rid of the tobacco plug in his mouth because he hadn’t been able to spit since he crossed the tracks.
He sent it plopping into the snowbank, where it added its sprawling brown stain to the other offenses committed against that mound since the last snow. It was forty years since he had begun to chew to prove, when he was sixteen years old, that he was as tough as any other man in any threshing crew in the world. By the time he didn’t need the proof any more, he was stuck with the habit.
Except for that pile accumulated from the clearings of the road and the sidewalk, most of the snow had been taken away by the wind. The wind robbed them of the water in the snow. After fighting through ten-foot drifts for six months, they were likely to be told by the official measurers that a hard winter had left them perhaps three inches of water in the ground. So far this winter there had been half of three inches, but the heaviest snows of the season might still be on the way. He looked up at the early afternoon sky, thick and gray with the moisture that didn’t come down. It just stayed there, apparently