by Edward Abbey
“Goodnight, sir.”
He went out, closing the door. Alone in the silence and darkness, aware of the strangeness of the room and the land I was in, I felt the first pang of homesickness. But instead of brooding over it I undressed, setting my new straw hat carefully on the bureau and lining up my new boots on the floor at the foot of the bed. Tired but unable to sleep, I opened a window and watched the sickle of the new moon floating in the west, and listened to the bullfrogs croak—to my ears a song sweeter than that of any nightingale.
Eventually I crawled into bed and lay there with my hands under my head, looking up at the dim ceiling. Another spasm of loneliness struck through me as I remembered home and my mother, who by this time would be tucking the covers around me and kissing me on nose, forehead and mouth before going downstairs. I found that I missed that familiar ceremony, missed it painfully, and when I felt something wet slide over my cheekbone I knew I was crying. For a while the shame of my tears overcame my nostalgia and I fell asleep. Fragments of dreams floated through my brain—the head of my horse plunging up and down as we climbed into the foothills, a black man grabbing my shoulder as I loitered in the vestibule of the roaring train, the clash of human voices in argument.
Waking again, I remembered hearing a car or truck drive up to the ranch-house. My grandfather’s voice, solemn and bitter, brought me wide awake. I sat up in bed, listening. The sky through the window was brilliant with stars.
The old man stopped. I heard the tinkle of glass and ice and the distinct gurgle of liquid poured from a bottle with a narrow neck, then the quiet voice of another man, also familiar—the voice of Lee Mackie.
Spurred by a sudden excitement, I slid out of bed and listened hard but could not make out what was being said. Putting on my underwear I stepped to the door and opened it, quietly, and peeked down the hallway toward the living-room. The glass eyeballs of a stuffed antelope reflected the glow from a lamp; light wavered softly over the octagon barrel and silvery breech of the old .45 carbine cradled in the antelope’s horns. From where I stood I could see neither my grandfather nor Lee. But I could hear them clearly and what I heard quelled my original impulse to rush down the hall to greet my friend.
“Now listen carefully, old horse,” Lee was saying. “You know it won’t do any good at all to get fired up about this and declare war on the Benighted States of America. They got you where the hair is short and that’s all there is to it and you might as well make the best of it—I mean, take the sixty-five thousand.”
“The Box V is not for sale!” Grandfather thundered. A pause: I heard the old man’s sigh and a bang as he brought the glass down hard on the table, before bursting out again. “The Box V is not for sale. The Box V never was for sale. The Box V never will be for sale. And by God no pack of brass hats and soldier boys and astro—astronauts or whatever you call ’em is gonna take it away from me. I’ll die first. No—they’ll die first. Why I never heard of such a thing. Every citizen of Guadalupe County, every mother’s son in New Mexico, should be loading his guns right now.”
“Don’t talk foolish, John.”
“I mean it.”
“Don’t yell at me.”
“I’m not yelling. You’re yelling.”
“You’re hollering like a bull. You’ll wake the kid.” A brief spell of quiet followed that remark. Lee spoke again, so gently that I had to step a few paces down the hall to hear. “You think any of these scum around here will stand with you, John? Do you? Don’t believe it.”
“Reese’ll go along with me. And Haggard maybe. You’ll go with me.”
“Me? What can I do, John? Listen, you know what the men in town think about this? You know what the Chamber of Commerce thinks about this?”
“I know, I know. They think—”
“They think this business’ll make ’em all rich. Richer. And they think you are loco. Senile, that’s the word, they think you’re just a crazy old man in his second childhood. And they’ll think worse than that too, if you know what I mean. Obstructing national defense. You against one hundred and eighty million Americans.”
“There ain’t that many. There can’t be.”
“Well there is. And they’re busy making more right now.”
“Well—they’re all back East somewheres. No kin of mine.”
“They’re all against you. At least they’re not with you. That goes for Reese and Haggard too; they’ll sell out without any trouble, you wait and see.”
“You’re with me.”
“I’m with you. But—”
“The boy is with me.”
“Billy is with you. But that’s—”
“Three men can stand off about a million of these—what do you call ’em—astro, astronauts.”
“Astronauts. Yeah. But they have the papers and the law. They have Acts of Congress, national emergency, eminent domain, right of condemnation, declaration of taking. What do you have?”
“What do I have?” My grandfather’s voice soared up again. “I have the land. My ranch. No government in the world is going to take it from me.”
A moment of silence. “I really ought to go home,” Lee said. “Poor Annie waited up for me till twelve last night.”
“You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying right here tonight. I told the boy you’d be going with us tomorrow. How do you think he’d feel if you …”
“I know, John. I was only talking. I didn’t haul that horse fifty miles just for the ride, did I?”
I stood awkwardly against the wall of the hallway, half-naked and shivering, one foot going numb and my knee aching. I wanted very much to see Lee before I went back to bed. On the other hand I did not want them to know I had been overhearing their talk. Though what I’d heard seemed unbelievable anyway. Unable to decide, I shifted my position a little to relieve my stiffened limb. In the night silence the old man heard the movement.
“Billy?” he said. I gulped, unable to reply. “That you, Billy?” I heard the creak of a chair and Grandfather appeared in the doorway at the end of the hall, his glasses shining and his white mane aglow with the soft yellow night from the lamp. “Why aren’t you in bed?”
“I wanted—I wanted to say hello to Lee,” I mumbled.
And all at once there he was, looming up behind the old man and smiling at me. Lee Mackie, tall and slim and dark-eyed, a brave and gallant man. “Hello, Billy,” he said. He held out his right hand. “It’s good to have you back, Billy. You come down here and say hello.”
2
Wake up!
Hey, dude, wake up!
Dreams evaporating, I felt a rough hand shaking the bed, opened my eyes and saw in the starlight the laughing face of Lee Mackie. I sat up at once, charged suddenly with excitement and a wild delight.
His eyes gleamed in the darkness. “You awake?”
“Yes. Yes,” I said.
“Get dressed. Come and eat. We’re taking off for the mountain in ten minutes.”
I slid out of bed and stood up shakily, rubbing my eyes. Through the window I could see the stars in unfamiliar constellations glittering like diamonds on the deep-velvet sky, a spray of stars so clear and bright they seemed no farther away than the leaves of the trees.
“Here, I’ll light the lamp for you.” Lee felt for matches in his pocket, found them, struck fire and lit the wick of the kerosene lamp on the dresser. “How many eggs, Billy? Three or four?”
“Four.” I looked for my suitcase. The clothes I wanted were inside it.
“Hurry up. We’ll give you one minute to get dressed.” Lee backed off through the doorway and tramped away down the hall, whistling like a mockingbird.
I opened the suitcase and pulled out my blue jeans and the tight cowboy shirt with the diamond-shaped imitation-pearl buttons—a great shirt. The air was chill; I dressed quickly, tugged on my boots, grabbed my new hat and hobbled out and down the hallway toward the warm glow of the kitchen.
Lee stood bent over the rumble of fire in the cookstove,
stirring a mess of eggs and potatoes in an oversize iron skillet. Flame and smoke leaked out around the edge of the skillet—the stovelid had been shoved aside. The redolence of burning juniper graced the air. Lee heard me approach and greeted me with his white grin, nodding toward the table, where three places had been set. I went first to the sink, turned the tap, and splashed cool water over my face. I dried my face with the fresh towel that hung on a handy nail, combed my hair with my fingers, and was ready.
“Get your grampaw in here,” Lee said. “We’re ready to eat.”
I went to the screen door and called the old man. He stood outside on the bare ground below the verandah, talking with Eloy Peralta, two dim figures in the morning dusk. Grandfather dismissed Eloy with a clap on the shoulder and came into the kitchen. We three sat down at the table and ate, by the light of the lamp, the hot and hearty breakfast Lee had made. I was hungry, beautifully hungry, with an appetite I’d almost forgotten I’d ever had.
“That’s the way to shovel it down,” Lee said, grinning at me enthusiastically. “Look at this boy eat, John. You can always tell a cowboy by the way he eats. If he don’t eat like a wolf there’s something wrong with him.”
The old man smiled at me. “We’ll keep him.” His huge left hand was clamped around a mug of steaming coffee; I could see the freckles and the red hair on his knuckles.
“Have some more, Billy.” Lee scraped more of the scrambled eggs and fried potatoes out of the skillet onto my plate. I added a few extra slices of bacon from the second frypan and buttered another slab of bread. “That’s the idea,” Lee said. “Man, if we find that lion today, I sure feel sorry for the lion.”
“Or suppose he finds the horse before we do,” Grandfather said. “That’s a valuable horse.”
“Nature’s plan,” I said through a mouthful of food. They watched me eat.
“Let’s go,” Lee said, as I finished. “I can feel the sun coming up over Texas.” He gulped down the last of his coffee, pushed back his chair and stood up, reaching for his hat. I stood up and reached for my hat and when Lee put his on I put mine on.
Grandfather unwrapped a cigar. “Be right with you boys. Don’t wait for me.”
Lee strode outside and I followed. Parked near the verandah was Lee’s enormous custard-colored automobile, gleaming with chrome and glass. He stroked its sleek enamel as we passed. “Some piece of iron, huh Billy?”
“It’s a nice car, Lee,” I didn’t really pay it much attention; where I came from the streets were more or less solidly paved with these metallic objects and a man on foot could walk across a street only when the machines permitted him to. They were as familiar to me as the feel of soot on cement and the smell of sewer gas. My father leased two new ones every year.
We walked quietly through the gloom under the shivering leaves of the cottonwoods toward the barn and corral. I saw the green ribbons of dawn stretched out above the purple mesa eastward. A horned owl hooted from the willow thickets. Meadow larks and canyon wrens, invisible but present, sang out clear as angels in the pasture beyond the corral and in the alfalfa field along the wash.
“Lee,” I said.
He gripped my arm for a moment. “Let’s not talk about it today, Billy. It’ll be all right. Don’t let it worry you.”
The screen door clapped shut behind us, a loud noise in the stillness, and glancing back I saw the red coal of the old man’s cigar as he came down the steps of the porch.
Lee and I entered the barn, felt our way into the tackroom and loaded ourselves with gear. Lee filled a feedbag with grain and we stepped out of the barn into the corral. Holding a bridle behind my back, I looked at the group of horses stamping and snorting in the far corner of the corral, hungry but worried. To me, in that half light, they looked big as mastodons, their eyeballs flaming with red menace, their hooves pounding like sledges on the hard earth.
Lee handed me the feedbag. “Choose your mount.”
I advanced slowly toward the huddled animals, feeling scared and made even more scared by my effort not to show it. I looked for my favorite, a small buckskin gelding with black mane, broomtail, long legs. This was the horse I had most often ridden the year before. I couldn’t make him out in the shifting mass of horses.
“Where’s Rascal?” I asked.
“Rascal?” Lee said. “Why Billy, that’s the one we’re hunting for today. He’s been missing for a week.”
My grandfather came out of the barn with a saddle on his shoulder. “Take old Blue there, Billy. He’s the one you want now.”
I stepped forward again, holding out the bag of grain, and now the horses came to meet me and crowded close, thrusting their muzzles at the feedbag, shoving me toward the fence and stepping carelessly on my new boots. I offered the bag to Blue, a big gray, draped the reins around his neck and led him out of the mob and back to the corral fence. While the horse ate his breakfast I climbed part way up the fence and laid the saddle pad and the saddle over his broad back.
I no longer felt any fear. The massive bulk of the animal, his powerful jaws crunching bran and barley into gruel, his docile indifference to my activity, inspired me with confidence and affection. I was foolishly proud of the fact that such a great strong beast would submit to my purpose—at least when bribed. I cinched the saddle as tight as I could and climbed aboard to test the stirrup lengths. Too long: I had to dismount and readjust them. By this time Lee and the old man, pretending not to observe my efforts, had their own mounts saddled, bridled, fed and ready to go.
Blue was nearly finished. I tried to take the feedbag away from him so that I could get the bit in his mouth. He shook his head, hurling me to the ground. I got up, waited respectfully until he was satisfied there was nothing more in the bag, then bridled him successfully and climbed up into the saddle.
The world looked different from up there—better. A primitive joy flowered in my heart as I guided the horse away from the rails and toward the gate. A touch of my heels and he walked forward; a slight tug on the reins and he stopped. I leaned forward and rubbed the mighty shoulders. “Good old Blue …” I felt about ten feet tall, a master of horses and men. The wild birds crying in the desert echoed the delight of my soul.
Lee and Grandfather came alongside, Lee on a dark quarter horse, Grandfather on his big sorrel stallion, Rocky. Grandfather said, “You ready, Billy?”
“Yes sir!”
“Tie this on your saddle.” He gave me a poncho, smiling at me. He faced the east; I saw reflections of the dawn on his glasses. I didn’t understand at first why he was smiling at me in so strange a way, until I felt the tears welling out of my eyes. “Do you feel all right?”
“Yes sir.” I looked away. “Grandfather, I—I’m so …”
“I know, Billy. I know how you feel.” He caressed my back. “Let’s go.”
Lee moved ahead and opened the corral gate, dismounting and remounting with his usual practiced ease. We rode through, leaving the gate open, and the remaining horses followed us. When we broke into a brisk trot down across the irrigated field toward the river of sand, they halted and watched us go, heads up in solemn curiosity. I felt sorry for them, left behind. At that moment I would have felt sorry for anyone in the world, man or beast, who was not going with us.
When we reached the west gate, Grandfather got down and opened it and we passed through; he closed the gate and drew up beside us as we rode through the willow and tamarisk bordering the wash. El Rio Salado. The salty river. We rode across the firm sand and gravel, coated with white alkali, to the narrow channel of water shining with motion on the far side. We stopped there for a few minutes, allowing the horses a final drink before heading into the desert and arid hills beyond.
I watched a pair of sandpipers scamper on twinkling legs beside the water, upstream, and became aware of the quiet rustle of multitudes of leaves overhead. I stared up at the boughs of the cottonwoods on the bank above us, their leaves caught in a fantastic silvery predawn light and fluttering continuously, thou
gh I could scarcely feel the breeze. Alive, the trees whispered in soft excitement, enjoying the best hour of the day. The sun when it rose would force them into somnolence through the withering heat of forenoon and afternoon. I knew how they felt and how they could feel.
“Kit fox,” Lee said.
I looked hurriedly around, searching the high ground for a glimpse of a fox.
“Down here,” he said, pointing to the mud near the water.
I looked hard and discerned the tiny doglike tracks coming down to the stream.
“I’m glad to know there’s still a few of them left,” Grandfather said. “They ain’t poisoned them all, yet.”
The horses raised their heads. We jogged them forward, splashed through the shallow current, climbed the bank where it was broken down by the passage of many cattle, and moved through the grove of trees and up the gravel mounds beyond the river bed to the open, range. Ahead of us lay a five-mile expanse of sand, stone and cactus, then the foothills dotted with juniper and pinyon pine which led up to the mountains and the bald summit of Thieves’ Peak.
The gramma grass, dried out to a tawney brown, grew in little circular clumps under the brush, among the boulders and sand dunes. There was no other grass. The cattle, who went everywhere, ate what they could find but did not and could not depend on this sparse growth for life. They browsed on the tough shrubbery of the desert—the black-brush, chamisa, cliffrose, ephedra, greasewood and mesquite. In hard times, in desperate times, the cattle would even eat the prickly-pear cactus, sometimes helped by the rancher who went before them with a flame-thrower and burnt off the thorns. If this was not enough the rancher would have to buy feed. If he went broke buying feed he could then sell his stock and wait for rain and a better year. If the rain delayed too long he sold his ranch or let the banks take it away. The smaller the ranch the greater the risk, and my Grandfather Vogelin was one of the few independent ranchers who somehow had survived the wheel of drouth and depression. He seldom broke even but he didn’t break.
We rode beneath a giant yucca in full bloom, a kind of monstrous lily with a base of leaves as big, rigid and sharp as bayonets, a stalk twelve feet tall and a panicle of fat white waxy flowers. Scattered across the desert in all directions stood more of these solitary, flowering scarecrows.
