Hard Winter Read online

  I was breathing heavily, waiting to see if the nausea had passed. Hoped so. Didn’t have nothing left in my belly to lose.

  The way I recollect, I hadn’t thrown up since that September, back when John Henry Kenton had passed out at The Equity Bar in Tascosa, leaving behind three-quarters of a bottle of Chicken Cock & Rye. At least, that’s what the label on the bottle said, or so Tommy had told me. Us two kids had dragged our pard to McCormick’s livery, then sampled the whiskey ourselves. Next thing I knew, I was dreaming that I was vomiting up my supper in my sougans. Only when I woke up, I realized it hadn’t been no dream. Couldn’t hold down a meal for two more days, but I had learned a mighty important lesson. Swore I’d never touch another bottle of Chicken Cock & Rye. Tommy, of course, hadn’t made no such a promise, but Tommy hadn’t been airing his paunch that time. And John Henry? Boy howdy, how he laughed, till he realized he had paid for that rye and hadn’t gotten to enjoy much of it himself, forgetting that he had killed one bottle already. John Henry was fifteen, maybe twenty years older than us. Maybe even older. Wouldn’t swear that he was any smarter, though. Smarter than me, I suppose, but not Tommy. No, sir. Tommy was smart enough to be a schoolmaster. He’d read more books than I’d ever seen, which is why the boys at the 7K called him Professor when we was riding for that brand.

  That reminds me. The hands at the 7K had dubbed me Rye the rest of the season, and eventually I had learned to laugh with them. Having Rye for a handle sure beat Suds, which was what the older cowboys had called me on the first outfit I had worked for, and Soapy, which is what John Henry Kenton took to calling me when we’d first started riding together. On account of my saddle bought with soap coupons.

  Good times, back then. Before that spring.

  Things was different after ’86. This was work. Sickening, gruesome work. Me and Tommy wasn’t the only boys who couldn’t hold down his breakfast. Older hands also gagged, vomited. Bitter as bile what we was doing.

  Still dizzy, I managed to pick up my hat, set it back on my head, and slowly rose, wiping my forehead with a mud-caked right hand, cleaning up my mouth and chin with that raggedy old bandanna, which I then pulled back over my nose and mouth. I moved back to the barbed wire fence, and the dead cattle. I was drawing time, and always figured a good cowhand put in a good day’s work for a good day’s wages. Not that $1 a day and found was what anybody in his right mind would consider good wages. But we was cowboys on the open range. That’s all that mattered.

  “Feel better?” Tommy asked once I had fetched the knife and went back to work skinning the bloated carcass of a long-dead steer whose brand no one recognized.

  For two days we’d been at it, Tommy, me, and John Henry Kenton, and just about every other cowboy from Tascosa to Mobeetie, south nigh down to Memphis, and west thirty-five miles past the New Mexico Territory line. Riders from the T Anchor and the Turkey Track, the LE, LIT, Ladder 3E, 7K, Box T, even Mr. Charles Goodnight’s JA.

  “Devil’s rope,” John Henry said a few rods down the fence, working on another longhorn, his leather gloves soaked with blood and mud. That’s what we called the wire. That’s what it was. That’s how I saw it back then. Ofttimes, I still do. “Ought to use it to hang every. . . .” John Henry lifted his bandanna to spit, then shook his head, and went back to work.

  Well, I looked up at Tommy, who swallowed, ’cause we hadn’t forgotten. We’d helped put up part of that drift fence the summer before, using barbed wire. And John Henry Kenton had dug his share of post holes, and stretched miles upon miles of those two-twisted strands with the H-shaped barb patented by Mr. Hiram B. Scutt. I ain’t never forgotten that wire. Don’t see how I could, as much of it as I saw down in Texas. Yeah, John Henry had done his share of sweating and cursing alongside us boys stringing that devil’s rope.

  I’d best backtrack some, let you know how things got to be the way they was in Texas in the spring of ’86. Let you know how we come to be skinning dead cattle.

  The 7K had let us three go in November. Not enough work in the winter, so we’d been riding the grubline through Christmas, before Mickey McCormick had hired Tommy to work at the livery till spring, and John Henry had talked Booger Pete into letting me swamp the saloon for the winter—me and Tommy later come to the conclusion that John Henry wanted to have friends in the right places, where he could get a few drinks and board his horse, or sleep off a drunk. John Henry, of course, would do no job he couldn’t do from a saddle, most times anyway, or so he said, so he spent the winter wandering from ranch to ranch, working for a meal. Me and Tommy wished we had been riding with him.

  At first.

  Things changed on Wednesday night, January 6. Some dates a man just never forgets, like his birthday, wedding day, things like that. Of course, I remember the morning your ma was born. Well, January 6, 1886, was one of those dates. Won’t never forget that one, either.

  Wasn’t supposed to get that cold in Texas, you see, and it never snowed that much. Even the winter of ’84–85 wasn’t this bad, and John Henry Kenton said it was as hard as they came. A soldier boy from Fort Elliott had staggered into Booger Pete’s when I was fixing coffee, saying the wind was roaring right under sixty miles an hour. Folks even said ice formed on Galveston Bay, although I ain’t rightly sure I believed that story. Texicans could tell some falsehoods. Yet it had been plenty cold, ten below zero at Mobeetie.

  Down in Tascosa, Tommy O’Hallahan later told me, the snow turned black. Black snow! I ain’t doubting it, not for a minute. The brutal wind picked up sand, mixing with snow, dark, ugly, stinging anyone who stepped outside. That’s what Tommy told me, and he wouldn’t lie to me, not back then. Mickey McCormick’s livery wasn’t the most comfortable place to wait out a blizzard, either, but Tommy, like me, had a roof over his head. We wasn’t sure about John Henry.

  I worried about our pard. Our mentor, really. Reckon Tommy did his share of worrying, too. John Henry was a forty-year-old cowhand, without a job, riding from bunkhouse to bunkhouse across the Panhandle, waiting for spring. A man caught out in this storm could die. I knew that plain enough even before Mr. Les Carter hauled them five corpses to town in the back of a wagon.

  Mr. Carter, a stove-up old belly-cheater who’d been let go and was also riding the grubline, said he found a covered wagon over along the Canadian River, a team of sorrels frozen in the harness, and inside a man, woman, and three children, dead. Somehow, Mr. Carter got the dead horses out of the frozen harness, hitched his buckskin gelding to the wagon, and brought the dead family to Mobeetie.

  Town undertaker had to wait till the ground was soft enough to bury that unlucky family. You know, I thought about those poor folks yesterday when we was in Augusta, and them poor sodbusters come to town in that wagon, with that little coffin in the back. Maybe that’s why I’m telling you all this. Maybe it’s because I just ain’t never told nobody, not even your grandmother, about all that happened, although Lainie knows a bunch of it, seen a bunch of it herself. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t that much older than you. Maybe it’s because it’s something I’ve been needing to get off my chest for better than thirty years.

  When the storm finally broke, I’d never seen so much snow, not even when I was a younker in Indiana. Three or four feet on the streets, and drifts climbed even higher. The roof on Luke Potter’s adobe house had collapsed under the weight. It took a month before the stagecoach from New Mexico Territory started running again.

  A bad winter.

  Spring was worse.

  John Henry rode into Mobeetie in February, with Tommy trotting along right behind him on a claybank. They stopped at Booger Pete’s for John Henry’s morning bracer and to pick me up. Winter might have been hard, but spring came early to Texas, and there was work to do.

  “Got us a job at the Ladder 3E,” John Henry announced.

  Me? I was more interested in the winter. “How’d you make out in that blizzard?”

  “Colder than a witch’s caress.” John Henry killed the shot of whisk
ey, and refilled his glass.

  “Thought you might have froze to death,” I said, still picturing those poor folks Mr. Carter had found.

  “Me, too,” Tommy added.

  John Henry had lifted the glass to his lips, but slowly lowered it, smiling. “You boys are still mighty green. A little snow ain’t gonna kill John Henry Kenton.” The shot glass raised again to be slammed on the cherry-wood bar, empty. “Let’s ride. Spring gather will commence soon.”

  Only, long before we reached the Ladder 3E headquarters, we was wondering if there would be any cattle to round up.

  * * * * *

  We found the remains in bogs, at the bottom of bluffs, in the Canadian River, but mostly piled up against the drift fence. The air had turned rancid, filled with flies and the stench of rot.

  Twice, we come to arroyos—that’s what they called them down in Texas; we call them coulées up this way—that was filled with so many dead cattle that a man could ride across and not even touch the dirt. If his horse would let him, though no horse would. Things was that bad.

  Dead cattle was everywhere.

  At a tent revival meeting in Clarendon, some sky pilot preached that this was all God’s will, and His sheep had to accept His wishes, but neither me nor Tommy could see why the Almighty would want to kill tens of thousands of poor dumb cows. Nor did John Henry, and he told that preacher man a thing or two. Well, Clarendon had never been real popular with cowboys, and us cowboys had never been popular with anybody who lived in that town. Some old Methodist had founded it as what they called a “sobriety settlement” that didn’t cater or cotton to cowhands. “Saints Roost” is what most of us cowboys called the place. Only reason we’d stopped there was to buy coffee and tobacco. You couldn’t get a drink of whiskey there.

  “Wasn’t God’s doing!” Kenton yelled at that Methodist. “It was our own!”

  He was right, I reckon. Partly anyhow. It was the wire. The wire we’d help string up.

  * * * * *

  “Cattle ain’t like all critters,” John Henry had told me and Tommy more times than either of us could remember. “They drift. Just turn their hindquarters to the wind and start walking.”

  During the winter of 1881–’82, back when I was still just a-wasting away on that farm in Indiana, cattle had drifted onto the Texas ranges down from the Arkansas River. Even as far as the Platte. Come spring, the beef that hadn’t died in the winter was chewing up Panhandle grass.

  I don’t have to tell you how much value a stock grower puts on grass. Can’t afford to have a bunch of cattle from someplace else eating grass growed for his beef. They was picking Texas grass clean. Now, all this here information is second-hand. Like I say, I was just a poor, dumb farm boy around then, but the story I’m relating here is true. John Henry told us about it. He wasn’t one to lie to me or Tommy, either. Not then.

  So cowboy crews had to come to Texas from Nebraska, Colorado, even a few from Wyoming, to gather up their cattle. And it wasn’t like the Texas cows hadn’t drifted. That year, John Henry was a floater, looking for strays for the brand he was riding for, and he spent much of that spring wandering down along the Blanco River. A right far piece from his range.

  Anyhow, when everything got sorted out, when the Wyoming cowhands took their beeves back to Wyoming, and so forth, when John Henry had come back to the Panhandle, a good deal of winter grass was ruined. That’s when the ranchers started putting up wire because the Panhandle Stock Raisers Association had met in Mobeetie and come to the conclusion to build a drift fence.

  They got the posts from the Canadian River breaks, or the Palo Duro. Cost them big ranchers $200 a mile, even more, to string that fence. But they kept putting up wire.

  Remember that time we all had to ride down to Helena, and your ma asked me to take you to see that 10¢ moving-picture show? The one with that fellow dressed up like a cowboy, only I don’t think he knew which end of a horse was what? You remember that? Figured you did. You seemed to like it. Remember that cowboy’s boss, the big rancher, and how he wanted to run off all those sodbusters because they was putting up barbed wire fences? He started preaching about the open range, and farmers was ruining the West. Well, it wasn’t always like that, boy. Yeah, farmers put up fences, but so did a bunch of cattlemen. And they done it for the same reason.

  To keep the cattle out.

  By the time I’d come down to Texas, and after I’d met up with Tommy, and then John Henry had took us on and started looking after us green peas, well, there was a lot of barbed wire running across the Panhandle. We kept putting up wire.

  I’d best explain one thing. It wasn’t just one long fence. No. Ranchers ain’t got the temperament to work like that, work together like that, I mean, so all those fences didn’t connect. Probably about the year I started cowboying, there was a law made that said you had to put in gates, and gateways had to be so wide and so forth. So this drift fence was really a series of long fences, and a cowboy on a good cow pony could find a way through that . . . guess you’d call it a maze. If it was a right sunny day. If the cowboy wasn’t too stupid. But the thing is this . . . cows are stupid. They couldn’t find a way through those fences. Come a hard winter, a bad blizzard, cows would just drift till they come to a fence, or a river, or a coulée, and they’d just stop. They’d just stop and stand there, till they died.

  That’s what had happened with that terrible blizzard. That’s why me and Tommy and John Henry had lowered ourselves to skin dead cattle that spring.

  Maybe we would have stayed in Texas, kept right on skinning carcasses, but I reckon John Henry would have blowed his top before long, and up and quit. Which is pretty much what he did, what we all did, but it didn’t happen till I stepped on that cactus.

  Chapter Four

  Iwas wearing boots. Good boots, too, not like them Congress gaiters your ma thinks you need to wear to church and school. Lord, your ma never has quite come to grips with the fact that we live on a small ranch in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, I find it hard to believe that a girl like that was raised by your grandma and me. Good woman, now, don’t get me wrong, but she sure ain’t a ranch woman. Your pa, before he had to run off and join Pershing’s Doughboys and get himself killed, rest in peace, liked his boots, too. He’s probably turning over in his grave seeing you in those confounded shoes.

  Anyway, I was talking about my boots. Tall boots they was, the color of midnight, with blue crescent moons inlaid in the tops. Just like the ones John Henry wore, only he had stars instead of moons, and his stars was white. I’d spent $13 on them in Tascosa, and I had on a pair of thick wool socks. And the cactus was just a little old prickly pear that was growing alongside the drift fence, and I had finished skinning one dead steer and was moving to work on another, and just slipped.

  The only way I can figure it is that my right foot slid right into that prickly pear at just the right place, so those long old spines poked through that boot right where the foot meets the outsole. Had I stepped on the cactus, had I slid into that prickly pear any other way, nothing would have happened other than I would have cursed, Tommy would have laughed and called me clumsy, and I would have started cutting up the dead steer, waving away the flies, trying to keep the disgust from rising in my throat, probably thinking how that farm in Vigo County, Indiana wouldn’t look so bad along about now.

  Didn’t happen that way, though.

  The cactus spines stabbed me good and hard, and I let out a howl. Screamed like somebody had chopped off my right foot, which is about how it felt. Maybe it was on account of how tired I was.

  John Henry and Tommy, they was good pards. They was running to me through all that mud, leaping over the rotting remains of cattle, coming to my rescue.

  Well, I got the boot pulled off, seemed surprised to see my foot intact, but, thunderation, those cactus spines hurt. Tommy, he saw that I wasn’t hurt bad, and he had to start sniggering, saying that it wasn’t like I’d been bit by a rattlesnake, and how he wished I’d put my s
ock and boot back on because they stank worser than the dead cattle.

  “It ain’t funny!” I snapped right back at him. Pouting I was. Well, I was only fifteen years old. Just a fool kid, though I thought of myself as a man, just the way Tommy did.

  “How’d you do that?” Tommy asked. “I mean, get them spears through your boots?”

  “I don’t know.” I rubbed the side of my foot, then, still mad, pride hurting now more than my foot, pulled on my sock and boot. “You wouldn’t think it was so funny if you. . . .”

  Tommy headed me off. “I wouldn’t fall into a prickly pear.”

  I was on my feet now, feeling that blood rush to my head, knowing my ears must have been redder than a rose, and I suspect me and Tommy would have started trading blows. We’d do that from time to time, boys being boys, cowboys being cowboys. We could fight something awful. I’d bloody his nose, he’d bust my lip, and we’d later realize we had been trading punches over nothing. But if some worthless saddle tramp was to insult me, or start fighting me, well, Tommy would be the first one to join the fracas. I’d do the same for him. Had done the same, by grab, like that time at Doan’s Store.

  That was Tommy. A man to ride the river with.

  John Henry Kenton, he felt the same. That time at Doan’s that I just mentioned, when a couple of old peckerwoods had grabbed Tommy from behind and started punching him over something Tommy had said, well, I’d jumped in to help my pard, but them two peckerwoods were mighty strong, and I wasn’t having much effect on the outcome of that fight. But John Henry Kenton, he came out of the store, lariat in his hand, and he lit into those old boys and beat them senseless with that rope, whipping them, cutting their faces to their cheek bones. Beat them something ugly, and might could have killed them. It took two strong men to pull John Henry off those peckerwoods. Awful temper John Henry had. You never wanted to get him riled, but you sure wanted him on your side.