The Haymeadow

by Gary Paulsen

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  THE BOY WHO OWNED THE SCHOOL

  DANGER ON MIDNIGHT RIVER

  Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York

  Text copyright © 1992 by Gary Paulsen

  Illustrations copyright © 1992 by Ruth Wright Paulsen

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-80394-8

  Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press

  v3.1

  To the Burks,

  Lynn, Tami, Alex, Justin, and Brian

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter One

  JOHN BARRON was fourteen years old.

  Just.

  Yesterday, he thought—I was fourteen yesterday and nothing changed. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to change, or how it should change, or even why it should change but he wanted something to change and nothing had and he felt cheated.

  He stopped halfway between the house and horse barn and smelled the air, looked at the mountains to the west. It was early summer and summers in Wyoming were hot but it hadn’t been hot yet and he wondered if rain would break the cool spell and bring hot weather.

  They said weather came from the mountains and it smelled of rain and maybe it would change things.

  There it was again, he thought—change. Why did he want it to change? Heat made the sheep stink more and die more and get sick more and they weren’t up in the mountains yet—why hope for heat? Four dogs, drawn by the sound of the screen door slamming, came running from in back of the barn. They were border collies—named Pete, Billy, Jenny, and Peg—for working the sheep. They climbed on John and he petted them and ruffled their hair.

  He scratched where something had bitten the back of Peg’s neck—blackfly, mosquito, tick, or all of them. Once petted the dogs swirled around him, made dust, and were gone.

  John was wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a denim shirt and a straw summer western hat and when he lifted the hat there was a white line where the hat kept the sun from burning. The rest of his face was past burned, past tanned—looked like brown leather. He had wide blue eyes and a straight mouth.

  He looked exactly like his father. Who was also named John Barron. Who looked like his father had looked when he was young and his father who had started the ranch where they still lived.

  The Barron spread, they called it.

  They said the old man, dead for thirty years, had come west with a gun and two horses.

  “He was mean,” John’s father had told him on one of the rare occasions when they talked. “Meaner than nine hells. He just said, this is mine, and nobody dared argue.…”

  He had claimed nine hundred and sixty thousand acres of Wyoming with nothing but that gun and two horses and a half-broken saddle and made the claim stick, made the Barron spread his and all his.

  Then he sent back east for a mail-order bride. Her name was Emma and she tamed him some and then turned as tough as him. She had John’s grandfather in the back of the chuckwagon during roundup, was out one day having the baby, and then went back to cooking for the hands and kept John’s grandfather in an old dynamite box next to the stove.

  The wagon was still there, next to the barn, dried and weathered and not used but sitting there.

  All of this John knew. All of this he’d been told and told again, to be proud of it, to know it and take pride in it because it was family pride and that was the only kind of pride to have.

  Even though it was all gone.

  The ranch was called the Three Bar S now and had all sheep and was owned lock, stock, and barrel by eastern corporations who had taken it over when banks had foreclosed during the Great Depression because John’s grandfather had made bad loans and didn’t understand how to save money and be mean the way his father had been.

  The family was still there. They had never left. The corporations hired them to run the ranch, paid the family to stay and take care of things—be caretakers on their own place. But they owned nothing, the Barrons.

  And we’re supposed to be proud, John thought, looking at the old wagon where his grandfather had been born.

  Proud.

  Of nothing. Of being fourteen. Of nothing.

  “Hey kid, where’s your old man?”

  John looked to the corral in back of the barn where Cawley was working with a horse. Cawley was one of two permanent hired hands—the other was an old man named Tinckner. Horace Cawley—always called just Cawley—had been with the ranch since before John was born, was probably about thirty-five, skinny with sloping shoulders and almost a perfect half-circle bitten out of the top of his right ear from a bar fight at a rodeo in Cheyenne years before.

  “Town,” John said. “He’s gone to town until evening—left early this morning with Tink.”

  “Damn.” Cawley was leaning against the corral fence—three-inch steel pipes welded to uprights to make a steel circle eighty feet across. He spit tobacco juice in the dust.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I was going to work on that truck today but I need plugs and a new fan belt. I should have told him to get the stuff in town.”

  “Did he know about the truck?”

  “Yeah. We talked about it last night.”

  “Then he’ll probably remember to get plugs and stuff on his own.”

  “We need the truck to pull the trailer up to the haymeadow.…”

  John nodded but said nothing
and Cawley went back to work.

  The truck was little more than a frame with a motor on it—an old 1951 GMC half-ton with the box gone and chains on the rear wheels. It only ran once a year, to pull the trailer up to the haymeadow.

  The haymeadow.

  John smiled when he thought of it. The haymeadow was in a valley up in the mountains where the Barrons had always summered their cattle. It was four sections—four square miles—of sweet grass between two ridges of peaks, all at and above timberline. With the cattle gone and the ranch in sheep every summer they took the sheep up there and Tinckner would stay in the small shepherd’s trailer—something like a covered wagon with rubber wheels that the old truck pulled up every summer—until it was fall and time to bring them down before the winter storms hit.

  Almost three months the old man stayed alone with the sheep and the four dogs and once John had asked him if it wasn’t lonely up there, with just the sheep.

  “Got the dogs,” Tink said.

  “Well then, lonely with just the sheep and the dogs.”

  “Got the mountains.”

  And John knew that if he kept asking it would just keep going. Got the mountains. Got the trees. Got the rocks. Got the elk …

  John had quit asking. Tinckner didn’t like to talk much and sometimes went days without saying anything at all except to whistle at the dogs. Short whistles that meant go left, go right, take the sheep out or bring them in; all command whistles. John knew some of the whistles, or knew how to do them, but there were many of them he didn’t know. Tinckner could send two dogs out to bring in two sheep, open a gate, close a gate, then separate the two sheep and bring one in to shear—all with whistles.

  The dogs were part of him, almost knew what he was thinking.

  Chores, John thought—he couldn’t stand around and think all day. There were chores to do. He had to clean the barn, clip hooves on two horses, then start stocking the trailer for Tinckner.

  He smelled the air again. Rain.

  Maybe it would change things.

  Chapter Two

  JOHN BARELY remembered his mother. Long, dark hair and a smile. He was three when she died. She loved to ride and had a horse come over on her backward and she lived for a week and then was not alive anymore and he didn’t know much of her except pictures that his father kept and now John wasn’t sure if he remembered her at all or just thought he did from the pictures.

  He knew his father had loved her. No, that wasn’t right either. He still loved her. He had never remarried, though there had been several opportunities.

  “He beat the horse,” Cawley had said once, sitting drinking Canadian whiskey out of a small bottle next to the bunkhouse. “With his hands. I couldn’t stop him. He beat the horse to death. It broke his hands to do it and I couldn’t stop him.”

  Once a month John’s father went to her grave twenty-three miles away near the Sidown Baptist Church that wasn’t a church anymore but just a graveyard out in the middle of nowhere, on a bluff above a valley. She had loved mountains, his father said, and you could see the mountains from the grave site, spread out wide and beautiful, and he thought she would want to be there even though they weren’t Baptists or anything else, for that matter. Once a month he went there and cleaned the grave and put fresh plastic flowers in a small brass vase bolted to the granite stone.

  CYNTHIA BARRON

  Died in Full Beauty

  And the date. He would bring a thermos of coffee and sit and talk to her, tell her things that had happened and once he had brought John to spend the day. John tried to understand but it all seemed vague and after sitting staring at the stone trying to remember her, trying to separate the memories from the pictures he’d seen and the things his father had told him, his mind drifted and he didn’t hear.

  His father had not taken him again but still went, once a month, and everybody at the ranch was glad he did.

  “It calms him,” Cawley said. “You need that with him. They’ve all needed that, the Barrons—calming. There’s that wild blood, that wilding blood in you that needs taming now and again. You’ll need it too.”

  John worked all morning. It took him twenty minutes each to clip the hooves on the two horses—it reminded him of cutting fingernails whenever he did it. One was a mare named Speck and the other a large sorrel gelding named Spud. They were the same age—eleven—and had been his horses, the ones he usually rode, for at least six years. Altogether he didn’t know how many horses the ranch had. Sometimes the rich people from the corporation would bring in twenty or thirty—some of them plugs, some good—just to keep them. But the steady herd John thought must be over a hundred. Cawley took care of the horses—he wouldn’t work with sheep except to help in lambing and shearing and when they moved them to the high country.

  “I hate ’em,” he said, and John agreed with him.

  “They’re stupid and all they do is blow snot all over your legs when you walk through them and stink and die for no damn reason. Cattle maybe ain’t much, but they beat sheep solid when it comes to brains.…”

  Cutting their hooves was just a matter of getting the clippers and bringing Spud and Speck into the stall. They’d done it so many times they would practically lean against the wall and raise each hoof to be clipped.

  He trimmed them evenly, mostly so he wouldn’t be embarrassed when Al Spencer came to shoe them. Al came every year in late spring or early summer to shoe the horses they were going to use. They let the horses run shoeless all winter in the low country but the ones they used to drive the sheep into the high country—to the haymeadow—had to have shoes to be able to take the rocks. If the hooves were ragged when Al came to shoe them—he was due tomorrow—he would chew on John for it and John would rather avoid the chewing.

  Like black butter, the hooves cut. They trimmed in neat little snicks, then he used a rasp to even them off—even though Al would do it again when he came, even them around the shoes so they fit well.

  When he was done John gave each of the horses a small handful of oats—they would get their regular ration later in the day—and turned them in back of the barn with the other horses pulled in for the drive into the high country.

  He loved the drive into the mountains. The sheep were slow and they went down roads only with persistent coaxing and pushing. It took a week to make the drive, riding in the smell of them—ammonia from their urine, oily lanolin that made everything taste bitter from their skin and the short wool, not grown much after spring shearing. Then there were the flies, hordes of them biting and stinging, swarming on the sheep and horses and dogs and him. Still, it always reminded John of what it must have been like to drive cattle in the old days. He had never done it—his whole life the ranch had been in sheep and he had only been on five drives. But driving cattle, just the words—cattle drive—seemed to draw him.

  He had read about it—everything he could get his hands on. And watched old movies. They had a satellite dish and received close to two hundred channels. And he’d learned some from the movies and much more from books but he still could only imagine it. Living in the saddle that way.

  His great-grandfather, it was said, kept a horse saddled by the house all the time—even at night while he was sleeping—and wouldn’t walk even to the outhouse to go to the bathroom. There were many legends about him—some of them true. He’d ridden out the front of a stampede, ridden them out and turned them when another man would have run for his life or died, stomped into mush.

  The barn needed only minor cleaning and he did it with the wheelbarrow and shovel and the thought came while he was scooping up horse manure. A nudge thought.

  His great-grandfather wouldn’t have cleaned the barn, wouldn’t have gone to sheep, wouldn’t have—wouldn’t have been too busy for his son.

  There.

  The thought had come before. Not so much a year or two ago, but more often now, and not always when he really expected it except that it sometimes came when he was doing something he didn’t like.


  When he was studying. He hated studying and had to work at it and his father made him do it and his grades were all right but he didn’t like it and sometimes the thought came then: The old man would have spent more time with his son.

  Or during lambing. They had to be ready twenty-four hours a day when the lambs came and it took about a week and a half and the whole world seemed to be made of stink and afterbirth and dead lambs and dead sheep and that led right into shearing, so that everybody worked until he dropped every night and John hated it and the thought would come then: He wouldn’t have kept so much to himself, would have talked more to his son, his blood.

  The problem was, he didn’t really know one way or the other what his great-grandfather would have done.

  He didn’t know that much about him.

  Chapter Three

  AT NOON John went into the kitchen and made a sandwich with peanut butter, lunch meat, grape jelly, and a sliced pickle—he’d learned it from Jimmy Cranney, a friend in school. Jimmy went to the same school but lived nearly forty-five miles away, so during the school year they were best friends and come summer they just about didn’t see each other. Jimmy’s place was small—about six hundred acres—and they raised Appaloosa horses to sell. Which wasn’t cattle either, John thought, but then again it wasn’t sheep.

  They did all their own cooking at the ranch—which meant they ate mostly out of cans because usually there was too much work going to come in and cook—and John took the sandwich and a glass of milk up to his room.

  His room was the top, back room in the two-story ranch house. It was not the original Barron house—that had been a log house and burned down under mysterious circumstances before even John’s grandfather was born—but had been built around 1900. It was frame construction with white-painted wood boards for the walls and the only thing John liked about it was the view. He could sit in his room and look out the window and see the mountains. He had a small desk there—an old wooden table, really—and he sat at the desk and ate the sandwich and looked at the mountains while he chewed.