Hard Winter Page 6

  “All right, Hawkins. Get back to school. We shall see how good a cowhand you are after school.”

  Let me tell you, I hadn’t calmed down none. My ears was still aflame, and I’d never had the good sense not to jump into a fight, even when there was no way I’d ever win. So I told Major MacDunn that there was no way I was going back into that stupid white building with that teacher. Only I didn’t call her a teacher. Still seeing red and feeling nothing but hate, I called her a vile, savage name. Next thing I knew, the major had knocked me to the ground, loosened a tooth, split both lips, and busted my nose. He done all that with just one, backhanded swing.

  “William!” his wife screamed.

  Spitting out blood, and rage, I scrambled to my feet, and ran as fast as I could for the barn.

  “Come back here!” the big man bellowed, and he started after me, for another pound of flesh, I warrant, and likely would have gotten it and then some, only Mrs. MacDunn could yell as loud as he could, and with just as much force. She barked out his name again, and the major stopped.

  I didn’t.

  * * * * *

  Quick as I could, I gathered up Crabtown in the corral, led him to the barn, found the tack. Had no intention of going to the bunkhouse to get my possibles. Didn’t amount to much, nohow. Give no thought to my bunky, Tommy O’Hallahan, either. He could find me if he wanted. I aimed to ride hard and fast, maybe to Miles City if I could find it, get me a job there. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why John Henry didn’t try to hire on there when we first got to Montana. Plenty of outfits that way. Plenty of Texicans. Wasn’t sure where I’d end up, but I was through with the Bar DD.

  Got the bridle on, blanket, then the saddle—didn’t even bother grooming the gelding first—that’s how riled I was—and had just started to tie off the latigo when this voice, quiet-like, said behind me: “You can’t do this.”

  “You just watch me,” I told Lainie MacDunn without so much as giving her a glance.

  “It isn’t your horse,” she said, and that give me pause.

  My saddle—same soap saddle I’d been riding for years—my blanket, my bridle, but she was right as rain. Mr. Gow had bought us those mounts, and I figured the price was included in that invoice he had left behind for Major MacDunn. Well, I muttered an oath, but, like I say, I was mad, so I told her, looking at her this time: “Your pa can come after me if he wants.” If I owned a six-shooter, I would have patted it—just like some villain today in one of them moving-picture shows.

  “You wouldn’t want that, Jim Hawkins,” she says. “Two years ago, my father and Granville Stuart met in Helena, and decided to put an end to horse thieves and cattle rustlers.” She traced a finger across her pretty throat. “They hanged so many, they became known as the Montana Stranglers.” She must have thought that was funny, because she let out a little giggle. “The Montana Stock Growers Association voted Granville Stuart president and my father vice president in appreciation of all their hard work. I should hate to see you stretched from a wagon tongue, Jim Hawkins.”

  I started to lead Crabtown out of the barn, but Lainie MacDunn stood in front of me.

  “Listen,” she said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I called you an oaf yesterday. I’m sorry my father hit you. A violent temper he has.” She handed me a calico rag, and my hand reached out and took it, because I couldn’t control my own limbs, and wiped the blood off my face.

  “What brought you to Montana?” she asked.

  “A string of horses,” I snapped back, then felt bad about it. “I don’t know,” I heard myself saying softly. “John Henry said we’re going to Montana, so we went, me and Tommy. Things was bad in Texas. Was a hard winter.”

  “It’s been mild here,” she said. “Just perfect.”

  “You need some rain.” I kept telling myself to get out of there, mount up, kick my horse into a high lope, but there I was, bloody rag in one hand, reins in another, and I was asking Lainie: “Why’d you settle here?”

  “Like Mother said . . . a book. A book about how wonderful cattle ranching is in the United States territories. When the Dee and Don bought out the Donovan and Marshall Ranches, Father was appointed the overseer. He knew cattle, especially his Angus, and he had served in the army with several men on the board. So we set sail for America. I was sick of Scotland anyway. That’s part of it. The other . . .” Her eyes started to tear, but she forced shook her head, smiling again. “But . . . we wouldn’t be here if not for Brisbin’s book.”

  I could hear folks outside, knew I had blown my chance of escaping.

  Lainie held a book in her left hand.

  “Is that the book?” I asked.

  “No.” She smiled. “This is a much better book. That’s why I asked you how you spell your name, Jim Hawkins. And it’s i-n, just like this book.” She held it out to me. I didn’t give a fip about no book, but I did like hearing her talk, watching her eyes shine. I didn’t feel so angry any more.

  “I first read it in Aberdeen . . . oh my goodness, four or five years ago, I imagine. It appeared in Young Folks magazine, and later was printed as a book. It’s about pirates and mutiny and buried gold. It’s a corker of a story by Robert Louis Stevenson . . . Treasure Island. And the hero of the tale is a young lad named Jim Hawkins.”

  “Well. . . .” I had nothing else to say.

  “Well,” she finished for me, “Mother thinks we’re foolish kids, but we’re practically grown up. Still, we cannot revolt. At least, I cannot. Mother needs to teach, and boys . . .” There were those tears again, but just like that they vanished, on account of Lainie wouldn’t let herself turn sad. “Were I a schoolteacher,” she said, “I’d teach my students something they’d enjoy. Not books about ranching. Not that foolishness in a McGuffey’s Reader. Not Byron.”

  “Oh, Tommy likes Lord Byron.” I heard myself saying it, calling Tommy by his name, and just couldn’t stop myself. “Recites his poems a lot.”

  “Does he?” She looked over her shoulder, then back at me. “Where is Tommy?”

  “He knows better than get in my way,” I said, and didn’t quite have the guts to tell her: “Unlike you.”

  “What’s he like?” she asked. My stomach knotted, but, just as quick, she was shaking her head hard, saying: “No, no, no, I should not have asked that. What . . . well, I can help you learn to read, Tommy.”

  I didn’t correct her, tell her my name was Jim, not Tommy. I just handed her the bloody rag, thanked her, and started to go, but now somebody else blocked my path, and I knew I couldn’t run over Major MacDunn.

  “Lainie,” he said, kind of quiet for him, “go back to school. I shall attend to Master Hawkins.”

  Well, she knew better than to argue. She mouthed the words: “Please stay, Jim,”—not Jim Hawkins, just Jim—and turned and walked past her father.

  I got ready for another thrashing, but I aimed to whip him of the habit of whipping me.

  “Fine-looking gelding you have there,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, and knew to add, “sir.”

  “You have a bill of sale?”

  “Just wanted to see how my saddle fit his back,” I told him, and turned to take off the saddle. I’d carry my gear with me all the way to Miles City, all the way to Texas if need be. I didn’t need a horse. It wasn’t the way a real cowboy would think. A real cowboy wouldn’t walk across the street. But . . . I was mad.

  Major MacDunn did something then that I never would have expected him to do in ten thousand years. He laughed. Laughed hard and loud, slapped his thigh, and come to me, helped me get that saddle off, and then he slapped Crabtown’s rear, let the horse run into the yard.

  “You and I got off on the wrong foot, Jim,” he said. “There’s a job here, but school is part of that job. I expect all of my hands to read and write. Educated men are better men. So you will attend school. But not today.”

  I give him an inquisitive look.

  “There are horses in the corral,” he said, “that nee
d the rough ridden off them. I understand from your saddle pal that you’re the best bronc’ rider he has ever known. Better even than this John Henry Kenton he talks so much about.”

  Him and Tommy must have had quite the conversation before he come to the barn.

  “So you’ll break horses the rest of today,” he said. “You’ll follow Eugene Hardee’s orders without fail. He’s my foreman. But school starts again in the morning, and you will follow Missus MacDunn’s orders. Without fail.” He held out a big right hand, practically swallowing mine when I took it.

  “There is another thing,” he told me. “You will apologize to Missus MacDunn at supper tonight. You will never use profane language in front of her again, and certainly will never call her anything disrespectful. For if you do, I will ignore your youth, and kill you.”

  Chapter Ten

  So I stayed.

  I should tell you a thing or two about Gene Hardee and Ish Fishtorn. For the first week or so I spent at the Bar DD, working with them two waddies gave me the gumption to stick with that school. Good cowhands, the both of them, and good horsemen. Ish’s real name was Lyman. Folks called him Ish, I guess, because he didn’t want to be called Lyman.

  As far as Major MacDunn, he wasn’t so easy to get to know. Or like. Or understand. He’d be almost human one moment, then turn hard as granite the next, like that time in the barn, when just a few minutes after he had laughed at something I’d said, he threatened to kill me if I called his wife a foul name. Am fairly certain he meant it, too. Wasn’t some idle threat. Major MacDunn brings to mind one of those horses I broke, or tried to break, on that first week at the Bar DD. A little dapple gray gelding that became part of my string who I took to calling Gray Boy. Had the smoothest gait of any horse I ever rode, but Gray Boy would test you, yes, sir. Start to relax, and he’d start to bucking, like he knew when you wasn’t ready.

  Once, when I thought I’d ridden him to a standstill, then had him doing some turns, stops, backing up, got him going in a little trot, worked him till he was good and tired, I reined in, let him catch his wind, and I was taking off my hat to wipe the sweat off my brow. Next thing I know, I’m spread-eagled on the ground, fighting for my own breath, eyes blinded by the dust Gray Boy’s kicking up. Ish and Hardee had to drag me out of the corral before I got stomped to death.

  “That’s a mean horse,” Ish said. “I’d trade him for a busted watch.”

  “You don’t know him like I do,” I told Ish. “He’s a good horse . . . just. . . .” I watched Gray Boy stop at the far side of the corral, tossing his head like he was telling me that he was the boss of this outfit. “Just . . . notional.”

  See, that was the difference between the major and Gray Boy. The horse I could savvy, him being a free-spirited animal, kind of like me and John Henry. But Major MacDunn, him I didn’t ever know what he was thinking, or why.

  * * * * *

  Saturdays were my favorite. No surprise there, I reckon. No school. No church. I’d saddle up Gray Boy or Crabtown, maybe some shavetail mare, and get to do what I’d come to Montana to do.

  By then, the gather was all but done, but Hardee told me not to fret too much, that the fall gather would start up before too long, and I’d get my fill of working cattle.

  “Lot of cattle,” I said.

  “Too damn’ many,” Gene said.

  I picture that day, hot as blazes, the two of us atop a hill, just watching the dust, as Tommy and Ish rode around a mud hole that was rapidly losing its mud. Getting baked dry, I mean. Gene was right, too, about the cattle. Most of them were MacDunn’s Angus, but he had plenty of longhorns, too, a lot of them brought up the trail that summer, and looked about as skinny and weak as the cattle I’d seen in Miles City.

  Having hooked a leg over the horn, Hardee sat atop his big gelding while he softened a mouthful of tobacco, waiting for me to do some fixing on my stirrup. I still owned that soap saddle of mine, and it wasn’t the best-built slick fork a cowboy ever owned. Hardee spit, turned, and, watching me do some good rigging with latigo laces, he just shook his head, saying: “You’re a rawhide like all them other Texicans.”

  “Rather be a rawhide than a sagebrush man,” I answered, but looked up with a grin just so he’d know I didn’t really mean no insult.

  That’s what it was like, back then. Ask any Montana cowpuncher, and he’d tell you Texas cowboys were nothing but rawhides, misers who’d fix anything with leather. Put that question the other way around, and a Texican would let you know that Montanans didn’t know a thing about nothing except sagebrush.

  It was all in good fun. Most times.

  Ish and Tommy had ridden up just as Hardee was telling me: “Well, at least you ain’t no knock-kneed Oregonian sumbitch.”

  To which Ish Fishtorn said: “Watch it, Gene. I happen to be a knock-kneed Oregonian sumbitch.”

  We all chuckled at that, and I swung up into the saddle, which caused Hardee to clap with mocking approval, said he didn’t think my rigging would hold. I told him I was good at making things last, and, sighing, Ish said: “Wish you could make a water hole last.” He pointed at the mud.

  “Ain’t good,” Hardee said.

  “Gotta rain sometime,” Tommy said.

  “Ain’t gotta do nothin’.” Hardee spit again, put his boots back in the stirrups, and eased his horse toward a battered old cottonwood tree—only shade there was for miles—at the edge of that dried-up mud hole. He leaned over, started feeling the bark, eventually even pulled out his pocket knife, and cut away at it. I thought he might be carving his name or something in the trunk, but he didn’t make any letters, and finally folded the blade, and slipped the knife back into his vest pocket.

  “You thinking about becoming a lumberjack?” Ish Fishtorn teased him.

  Our foreman wasn’t in the mood to be funning. He pointed at the tree. “Bark’s mighty thick,” he said.

  “Won’t be for long,” Ish said, “if we don’t get some rain.” With a sigh, Gene Hardee rode away from the cottonwood, and pointed at the cattle. “Let’s push them boys over toward the creek, see if they can find some better grass down that way.”

  We rode toward the Bar DD beef.

  * * * * *

  Saturdays were a lot funner, though, I imagine, for Tommy. He spent a lot of time, mostly of evenings after supper, walking about the ranch yard with Lainie. She spent some time with me, too.

  You ever read Treasure Island? Good book. I liked it a whole lot more than I did anything else Mrs. MacDunn had us read in school. I could picture myself as the Jim Hawkins in that story. Once she was done with her hand-holding, cooing, and grinning with Tommy, Lainie would venture back to the bunkhouse, where she’d sit with me a spell. She worked as my tutor, same as John Henry and ofttimes Tommy, and Hardee and Ish did, practicing with me, reading with me, things like that. Mostly, she read Treasure Island to me. Good book, like I said. Smelled nice, too. Lainie. Not the book.

  After a couple of weeks, I wasn’t so flabbergasted over Lainie MacDunn. Sometimes, when the reading and lessons were over, we’d sit out by the bunkhouse, talking a mite. Nice times, watching the horses in the corral snort and frolic, liking the wind as it cooled things off.

  “What was Aberdeen like?” I asked her one evening.

  “Old,” she said, and laughed.

  “What did it look like?”

  “Old.” She laughed again.

  “Well, what did folks do there?”

  “Fishing. Shipbuilding. The two Ds in our Father’s brand stand for the Dee and Don Rivers of Aberdeen.”

  “I knew that already,” I told her. Didn’t want her to think I was ignorant. Tommy had told me that before, and, if I knew anything, it was whose brand I was riding for. The Dee & Don Rivers Land and Cattle Company, Incorporated.

  “Old,” she said, “but not primitive. Like here. We had a sewer system and gas lights.”

  “A sewer system!” We looked at each other funny.

  “Yes.”

 
; “I ain’t talking to no girl about sewers, Lainie MacDunn,” I told her. “Even if she does wear pants.”

  She reached out, eyes twinkling—you’d think it was love, but it was her cussed mischievousness—and gently touched my hand. My instinct was to jerk back like her fingers were a rattler’s fangs, but I just gripped the handle of that rawhide rocker tighter, till I got comfortable with the notion.

  “And what is it you’d like to talk about, Jim Hawkins?”

  Didn’t have an answer for her. Too scared. I just stared out ahead, swallowed, and jutted my jaw out toward her mother. She stood at the top of the hill behind the house, wind just whipping her dress, practically blowing her down.

  “Well?” Lainie asked. She hadn’t noticed her ma, though she knew Mrs. MacDunn was up there. That lady was always up there, every evening. Reminded me of a coyote that used to hang out in front of the bunkhouse at the Ladder 3E back in Texas. Hung out there every night, staring, like he was wondering what we did in that place, almost like he was a pet. I started to get used to him being there. Till John Henry shot it dead with his Winchester.

  “What’s your ma doing there every night?” I asked.

  The smile blew asunder. No more twinkles in her eye, and her hand went to her waist, as she sat rigid. “Thinking,” she said stiffly.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “My brothers.”

  Then Lainie was gone. Nary a good bye. Nothing. She just up and left me sitting in front of the bunkhouse, made a beeline for her home.

  * * * * *

  “Her brothers died,” Tommy told me later that evening.

  “She told you that?” I asked.

  “Of course, she told me that,” he snapped. “I didn’t just make it up. She talks to me a lot more than she talks to you, and we’re not always talking about Long John Silver or what sounds a C makes.”

  That riled me considerable, but I bit my tongue, and shoved my clenched fists deep in my pockets.

  “How’d they die?” I asked.

  “They drowned.”

  We were getting ready for bed, Tommy sitting on his bunk, pulling off his boots, me just standing there with my hands in my pockets, and looking like that coyote after John Henry shot him the first time. Kind of surprised, unbelieving, hurt, all at the same time. Tommy grinned, because he knew something I didn’t.