Centennial

by James A. Michener

  He said no more. There was an acceptable way for men to behave if they presumed to run cattle, and he had failed. All heart was gone out of him and much of his strength. He longed for the cleanliness of the great ranch he had put together, but when they returned to the preposterous castle which had diverted so much of his energy, he brooded, barely hearing Charlotte’s efforts to cheer him up, avoiding the staff, snapping at Skimmerhorn, drinking each day more heavily and far into the night hours.

  Then one day in April, when the sun gave signal that winter was ended, he seemed rejuvenated and moved about the mansion as if he had reached a significant decision. When he came down from his tower he told Charlotte, “I’d like to see how the grass is doing,” and he walked far to the east, where he could see the limitless plains of the empire he had created.

  It was Jim Lloyd who heard the shot echoing in the thin spring air. He could not imagine rustlers so close to the main buildings, but he saddled his horse and rode over the rim of the hill, where he found a white-haired man lying on the prairie, his face against the earth. After a while he rode back to the castle, calling in a soft voice so as to cause no panic, “Mrs. Seccombe! Mrs. Seccombe! I think you’d better come.”

  Levi Zendt received one more letter from his family in Lancaster. It was written in brother Mahlon’s cramped, ungenerous script:

  Brother Levi,

  We have just heard the most exciting news. The United States government is passing a law which permits any white man who married an Indian woman under pressure I mean when he married her to help keep the peace before there were soldiers to shoot the Indians, why he is free to divorce her. All you have to do is go to the postoffice and tell them that you had to marry the Indian and they will tell you how you can get divorced and it wont cost you nothing.

  This is a fine chance Levi to correct a bad thing because as you know your brothers and me have been mighty ashamed of you being married to that Indian, and she being sister to the Paskinel murderers, and we have kept it very quiet unless the people in Lancaster heard about it. Now you can make everything right. Just go to the postoffice.

  Your brother,

  Mahlon

  Levi was so appalled by the letter that he threw it down, then stared at it, unable to believe that another human being could write in such manner of a woman he had never seen and about whom he knew nothing, except that she was an Indian. He shook his head in disgust, then lifted the sheet of paper by one unsavory corner and with his left hand applied a match to it. He did not want it about where Lucinda might stumble across it, but as it was burning close to his fingers his wife passed, tall and graceful, and she saw the fire and asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Burning an old bill,” he said.

  “I hope it’s paid.”

  “Long ago,” he replied, and the ashes fell to the floor.

  But he could not protect her from the indignity of the new law. One morning as he was sweeping out the store he heard her laughing, and when he turned to see her standing in sunlight, she was holding a printed broadside. It explained things pretty much as Mahlon had reported, except that the husband who wished to be free should go to the courthouse, not the post office. She thrust the handbill at him, and after reading only a few lines he crumpled it, uttering several Mennonite obscenities.

  “I’m sorry you saw it,” he said.

  “You knew about it?”

  “Trust Mahlon. That bill I said I was burning, it was Mahlon telling me of my wonderful opportunity.” He put his arm about her and said softly, “This is a disgraceful thing for the government to do. The last in a long line ...”

  “They’re confused,” Lucinda said, feeling very Indian in her resentment. But as a woman, she could not resist testing the man with whom she had lived for so long, through so many divergencies and trials. “You can get rid of me,” she whispered.

  He had led her to a chair, and as she sat he stood before her, a heavy-set Dutchman nearing seventy, a man who had wanted her more than anything else in life. “Get rid of you!” he repeated. “If you were back in St. Louis again, I’d crawl on my knees to fetch you.”

  She looked up at him and smiled, and reached out her hand.

  As soon as Finlay Perkin returned safely to Bristol, he drafted one of the sagest documents ever to come from the cattle country. It was addressed to the Venneford directors, but with his customary prudence he saw fit to send copies to Skimmerhorn and Lloyd. After a brilliant analysis of the industry as it would have to operate following the blizzard, he gave these instructions:

  We must get rid of the stupid idea that we can supervise a ranch of four million acres. Sell off all land east of Line Camp Two. Sell off all land north of the Colorado-Wyoming border.

  Hold back Line Camp Four, with the short trees, and sell it as a separate parcel to some rich industrialist in Cheyenne.

  When our holdings are compact, fence them in.

  Settlers who want to erect towns on our property should be given every opportunity to buy personal holdings, and we should contribute free land for the town hall, the churches, the school and a small business district.

  Sheep are an abomination. Keep them out.

  Grow more hay.

  John Skimmerhorn is to be manager. Jim Lloyd is to be his assistant. The young cowboy known as Texas Red is to take Lloyd’s old job. These are tested men, of proven loyalty. We should rely upon their guidance for many years.

  And then he added, out of the blue as it were, an eighth directive which would in the long run be more determinative than any of the others, making Crown Vee the famous ranch of the next forty years:

  I believe our ranch will best prosper if we speedily submerge our longhorns and Shorthorns and change over completely to Herefords. From what I saw of our range, and its climate, the Hereford will thrive and we will prosper therefrom. I am sending by Cunard liner and Union Pacific a fine Hereford bull I saw at Leominster and six of the best Hereford cows. Skimmerhorn is to consult with T. L. Miller, of Beecher, Illinois, and acquire others.

  He ended with a clerk’s summary, a sensible conclusion to the disaster of 1886-1887:

  We have expunged from our books thirty thousand cattle, presumed to be dead in the snow. This represents a loss of three-quarters of a million dollars, but we are prepared to absorb it in the faith that from a proper second start we can quickly recover. I feel certain that Skimmerhorn and Lloyd must have their own private guesses as to how many cattle we actually have. For the moment we shall enter the figure as twenty thousand, but if that is too high or too low, Skimmerhorn must inform us immediately, for never again do we wish to rely upon book count.

  When the first carload of Herefords reached Centennial, Jim Lloyd’s life assumed a new direction. He was at the station, of course, when they arrived, and after the planks were carefully laid and the first two cows descended and he saw those handsome white faces and reddish bodies, the sturdy legs and the long, straight backs, he knew that real cattle were at last coming under his care.

  But when the bull came down, Jim and all those watching caught their breath, and you could hear sighs, for here was one of the finest animals England had so far produced, King Bristol, close to a ton in weight, with a flawless white face and ponderous red body. His horns sloped down at a sharp angle, ending well below his eyes. His forehead was ample, studded with bone and covered with white curly hair. His snout was a healthy pale pink and his mouth drooped as if he had a surly disposition, while down the back of his neck ran a heavy line of twisted white hair.

  What made him most memorable, during those first few minutes, so that people throughout Colorado would soon be talking of King Bristol, was the majestic way he walked, flexing the knees of his forelegs, pulling the hoofs far back, then plopping them down heavily, as if he owned the earth. The cows had come down the ramp tentatively, for to them this was a new, untested land; but the bull came clumping down as if to occupy an empire.

  He took possession of the ranch, siring calve
s from each of the six Hereford cows and from eighteen of the longhorns, too. From his pure Hereford offspring came four bulls, three of whom would be kept for the herd; the bulls from longhorn cows were castrated to be sold later as fat steers.

  But the half-longhorn, half-Hereford heifers were kept, and bred back to Hereford bulls, and their offspring were three parts Hereford, one part longhorn; and after five such crosses, Crown Vee had cows that were thirty-one parts Hereford, one part longhorn, and at that point, biologically speaking, the famous longhorns of Texas were extinct so far as Venneford Ranch was concerned.

  How beautiful the Herefords were! In the morning when Jim went out to check them in the distant pastures he would delight as a line of heifers turned to face him, their white countenances shining in the sun, their red flanks swollen with unborn calves. No domesticated cattle had ever had the capacity to generate love in a man’s heart the way a string of Herefords could. They were clean beasts, easy to handle, responsive to good treatment and astonishingly able to fend for themselves in unfavorable conditions.

  “Herefords will survive where others will perish” became the axiom of the unprotected range. The cows were good mothers too, but most of all, they were beautiful and well suited to range conditions in the west.

  “They stand on the range as if they had been carved there,” Jim told Skimmerhorn one morning as they surveyed the new calves. “A calf one day old looks ready to fight a wolf.”

  But the stunning animals were the great Hereford bulls. King Bristol became the most famous stud in the west, with other ranchers hauling cows long distances on the chance they might throw a bull his equal. He grew extremely heavy, walking like a mountain from one valley to the next, and Jim never tired of seeing him flex those massive knees, drawing his hoofs in, then throwing them forward to eat up the next reach of earth.

  His sons, too, were fine bulls, and some built distinguished reputations on other ranches, but none really compared with the massive progenitor. He was indeed a king, and other ranchers, buying his offspring, would stand for some minutes, just looking at the old fellow and admiring his perfect configuration, his massive head, the down-drooping horns and the heavy snout.

  “A child can lead him,” Jim assured the visitors, and sometimes he would allow Ellen Mercy, John Skimmerhorn’s granddaughter, to bring the great bull to the fence. But -the thing that pleased Jim most about the Herefords was, as he said, “they look so right on the land.” It was as if the clever breeders of Herefordshire, starting a hundred years earlier, had bred this unique animal from Old English strains for the specific purpose of filling the western ranges in America.

  The ranch made its income in two ways. It castrated nineteen-twentieths of its male calves, allowed them to wander over the range and sold them at age three to packers in Chicago, receiving cash in return. The heifers were kept on the ranch to breed, but each year ranch owners from all parts of the west visited Venneford to buy Crown Vee heifers for upgrading their own stock, and a few were released at good prices. Also, from time to time Venneford sold young bulls to start Hereford herds in other areas. Thanks largely to the pioneering efforts of the Venneford people, and Jim Lloyd’s scrupulous attenion to honest breeding, the Hereford became the noble animal of the west, and there were many like Jim whose hearts beat faster when they saw the range area populated by “white-faces.”

  Some people claimed afterward that the bishop in Chicago had done it on purpose, because, as they pointed out, his father had tried to ranch in Nebraska and had failed. But there seemed little likelihood that any churchman could have been so malicious.

  The Union Church on Third Street required a new minister, and the bishop in Chicago sent a glowing report about a serious young man named Bluntworthy who had done a good job in rural Iowa. The bishop did not confide, however, his personal opinion that young Bluntworthy was one of the most gawky and naïve clergymen who had ever served under him. The congregation voted to invite him to preach a trial sermon, and a committee of six, including John Skimmerhorn, Jim Lloyd and three other ranchers, was directed to meet the train, take the reverend to his hotel room and produce him for the Sunday service.

  The more they talked with the tall shy man, the more they liked him. His theology seemed sound; he had a reassuring attitude toward pastoral work; and he loved farms “I was brought up on one and feel that towns like Centennial, representing as they do the best of urban and rural, will form the backbone of this nation.”

  “You couldn’t have ideas much better than that,” Skimmerhorn said approvingly, and at the church, even before Bluntworthy began to preach, committee members passed the word, “We’ve found our man,” and the banker’s wife elbowed her way into the group to insist that the new reverend dine with them. He accepted with a smile which avoided unctuousness.

  When he opened the service with prayer, his delivery was firm, and when the first hymn was sung, his voice could be heard, not too strong but right on key. Men who had been worried about their chance of finding the proper minister prepared to contribute with extra generosity to the collection plates, but then Bluntworthy spoiled everything when he began to preach.

  “My text stands close to the heart of every true Christian, for better than any other it epitomizes the spirit of our Lord. It comes, fittingly, from the last chapter of the last Gospel John 21.”

  A rancher in the front pew who knew his Bible muttered, “Oh, no!” but Reverend Bluntworthy in his firm, clear voice lined out the message: “ ‘Jesus saith to Simon Peter ... Feed my lambs.’ ” A whisper passed along the pews. “ ‘He saith to him the second time ... Feed my sheep.’ ” From this unfortunate beginning Bluntworthy launched into a perfervid oration about sheep as the symbol of humankind, Jesus as the shepherd, and the world as a great meadow in which right-thinking men took it upon themselves as a holy obligation to Feed my sheep. He must have used this exhortation fifteen times, increasing the volume of his voice until at the end of his sermon he implored every man in church to go forth and become a shepherd.

  The collection was one of the bleakest ever taken at Union Church, and in the closing hymn only the minister’s voice could be heard.

  It was a custom in Colorado churches for members of the committee to stand in the doorway with the minister as parishioners left, but three of the members refused. “The man must be a fool,” one said, and his neighbor muttered, “He’d have been smarter to use Exodus 22, verse 1 for his text. There God said that if one of His people stole an ox, he must give back five oxen. But if he stole a sheep, he had to give back only four. God understood.”

  The banker’s wife sent a boy to inform Skimmerhorn and Lloyd that her husband had been called to Denver and she could not therefore have the minister to dinner, and half the congregation left by a side door so they wouldn’t have to shake hands with the perplexed visitor, who was left standing alone.

  Finally Jim Lloyd took his place beside the clergyman, and some semblance of decency was maintained, but when the parishioners were gone, Jim was left with the bewildered minister. “Let’s have dinner at the hotel,” Jim said. “You can catch the evening train.”

  “I had hoped to meet ...”

  Jim felt he owed the man some kind of explanation, so as the meal was being served, with several ranch families staring balefully at Bluntworthy, he said, “The Lord may be partial to sheep, but this is Hereford country.”

  As these words were spoken, Reverend Bluntworthy was about to put a forkful of food into his mouth, but his right arm froze and over his face came first a look of puzzlement, then pained comprehension, and he put down his fork and said, “I don’t feel hungry. In fact, I may be sick, if you’ll excuse me.”

  “You can rest in your room,” Jim said. “The five thirty-eight will come in over there.”

  The Crown Vee Herefords suffered from one major weakness which afflicted all American Herefords: they. were cat-hammed, and whenever Hereford men met with other stockmen, especially Black Angus breeders, they had
to suffer the jibe: “Up front you have a good-looking animal, but it’s awful cat-hammed.” To this charge, there was no rebuttal, for whereas the forequarters were sturdy, they tapered off too quickly, producing a hindquarter much like a cat’s, lean and scrawny. This not only made the Hereford fore-heavy, but it also cut down on the steaks he could provide, and that’s where the money lay.

  “We’ve got to eliminate those cat-hams,” Jim told Skimmerhorn. “You ever seen a Hereford bull with real strong hindquarters?”

  “No, but they must exist.”

  So the two cattlemen began their search for the young bull that would correct the deficiency, but with no success. Exhausting local sources, Jim went as far as Indiana, where the Hereford was popular, but those bulls were as cat-hammed as his.

  “Looks as if we’re stuck with what we’ve got,” he reported when he reached home, but he continued looking, and one day he came up with a good idea: “Let’s write to Mrs. Seccombe, in Bristol. She could go right into the Hereford country and try to find us something.” So Jim wrote to the widow, and he and Skimmerhorn waited impatiently for her to reply.