by Jon E. Lewis
“What year did they abandon the stage route?” I asked.
“Later,” said Henry. “We had the mail here till the Burlington road got to Sheridan.”
“See here,” said the man at the back of the room. “Here’s something.”
“Well, I hope it beats Elephant and Castle,” said Henry.
“It’s not a sign-board, it’s an old custom,” said the man.
“Well, let’s have your old custom.”
The man referred to his magazine. “It says,” he continued, “that many a flourishing inn which had been prosperous for two or three hundred years would go down for one reason or another, till no travelers patronized it any more. It says this happened to the old places where the coaches changed horses or stopped for meals going north and south every day, and along other important routes as well. Those routes were given up after the railroads began to spread.
“The railroad finally killed the coaches. So unless an inn was in some place that continued to be important, like a town where the railroads brought strangers same as the coaches used to, why, the inn’s business would dry up. And that’s where the custom comes in. When some inn had outlived its time and it was known that trade had left it for good, they would take down the sign of that inn and bury it. It says that right here.” He touched the page.
The quiet music of Jed Goodland ceased. He laid his fiddle in his lap. One by one, each player laid down his cards. Henry from habit turned to see the clock. The bullet holes were there, and the empty shelves. Henry looked at his watch.
“Quittin’ so early?” asked Old Man Clarke. “What’s your hurry?”
“Five minutes of twelve,” said Henry. He went to the door and looked up at the sky.
“Cold,” said Old Man Clarke. “Stars small and bright. Winter’s a’coming, I tell you.”
Standing at the open door, Henry looked out at the night for a while and then turned and faced his friends in their chairs round the table.
“What do you say, boys?”
Without a word they rose. The man at the back of the room had risen. Jed Goodland was standing. Still in his chair, remote and busy with his own half-dim thoughts, Old Man Clarke sat watching us almost without interest.
“Gilbert,” said Henry to the man at the back of the room, “there’s a ladder in the corner by the stairs. Jed, you’ll find a spade in the shed outside the kitchen door.”
“What’s your hurry, boys?” asked Old Man Clarke. “Tomorro’ I’ll get ye a big elk.”
But as they all passed him in silence he rose and joined them without curiosity, and followed without understanding.
The ladder was set up, and Henry mounted it and laid his hands upon the sign-board. Presently it came loose, and he handed it down to James Work who stood ready for it. It was a little large for one man to carry without awkwardness, and Marshal stepped forward and took two corners of it while Work held the others.
“You boys go first with it,” said Henry. “Over there by the side of the creek. I’ll walk next. Stirling, you take the spade.”
Their conjured youth had fled from their faces, vanished from their voices.
“I’ve got the spade, Henry.”
“Give it to Stirling, Jed. I’ll want your fiddle along.”
Moving very quietly, we followed Henry in silence, Old Man Clarke last of us, Work and Marshal dealing with the sign-board between them. And presently we reached the banks of Willow Creek.
“About here,” said Henry.
They laid the sign-board down, and we stood round it, while Stirling struck his spade into the earth. It did not take long.
“Jed,” said Henry, “you might play now. Nothing will be said. Give us ‘Sound the dead march as ye bear me along’.”
In the night, the strains of that somber melody rose and fell, always quietly, as if Jed were whispering memories with his bow.
How they must have thanked the darkness that hid their faces from each other! But the darkness could not hide sound. None of us had been prepared for what the music would instantly do to us.
Somewhere near me I heard a man struggling to keep command of himself; then he walked away with his grief alone. A neighbor followed him, shaken with emotions out of control. And so, within a brief time, before the melody had reached its first cadence, none was left by the grave except Stirling with his spade and Jed with his fiddle, each now and again sweeping a hand over his eyes quickly, in furtive shame at himself. Only one of us withstood it. Old Man Clarke, puzzled, went wandering from one neighbor to the next, saying, “Boys, what’s up with ye? Who’s dead?”
Although it was to the days of their youth, not mine, that they were bidding this farewell, and I had only looked on when the beards were golden and the betting was high, they counted me as one of them tonight. I felt it – and I knew it when Henry moved nearer to me and touched me lightly with his elbow.
So the sign of the Last Chance was laid in its last place, and Stirling covered it and smoothed the earth while we got hold of ourselves, and Jed Goodland played the melody more and more quietly until it sank to the lightest breath and died away.
“That’s all, I guess,” said Henry. “Thank you, Jed. Thank you, boys. I guess we can go home now.”
Yes, now we could go home. The requiem of the golden beards, their romance, their departed West, too good to live for ever, was finished.
As we returned slowly in the stillness of the cold starlight, the voice of Old Man Clarke, shrill and withered, disembodied as an echo, startled me by its sudden outbreak.
“None of you knowed her, boys. She was a buckskin son-of-a-bitch. All at the bottom of Lake Champlain!”
“Take him, boys,” said Henry. “Take Uncle Jerry to bed, please. I guess I’ll stroll around for a while out here by myself. Good night, boys.”
I found that I could not bid him good night, and the others seemed as little able to speak as I was. Old Man Clarke said nothing more. He followed along with us as he had come, more like some old dog, not aware of our errand nor seeming to care to know, merely contented, his dim understanding remote within himself. He needed no attention when we came to the deserted stage office where he slept. He sat down on the bed and began to pull off his boots cheerfully. As we were shutting his door, he said:
“Boys, tomorro’ I’ll get ye a fat bull elk.”
“Good night, Jed,” said Marshal.
“Good night, Gilbert,” said Stirling.
“Good night, all.” The company dispersed along the silent street.
As we re-entered the saloon – Work and I, who were both sleeping in the hotel – the deserted room seemed to be speaking to us, it halted us on the threshold. The cards lay on the table, the vacant chairs around it. There stood the empty bottles on the shelf. Above them were the bullet holes in the wall where the clock used to be. In the back of the room the magazine lay open on the table with a lamp burning. The other lamp stood on the bar, and one lamp hung over the card-table. Work extinguished this one, the lamp by the magazine he brought to light us to our rooms where we could see to light our bedroom lamps. We left the one on the bar for Henry.
“Jed was always handy with his fiddle,” said Work at the top of the stairs. “And his skill stays by him. Well, good night.”
A long while afterward I heard a door closing below and knew that Henry had come in from his stroll.
CONRAD RICHTER
Early Americana
CONRAD RICHTER (1890–1968) was born in Pennsylvania; he became a writer at the age of 24, after working as a teamster, farm labourer, bank clerk and journalist. Richter was not exclusively a Western writer, but most of his best fiction is set in the American West, including the novel for which he won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize, The Town. (The book is part of a trilogy – with The Trees, 1940, and The Fields, 1941 – set in the Ohio Valley.) Richter’s most famous Western novel, however, is probably The Sea of Grass (1937), a story about a bitter conflict between homesteaders and a cattle baron. Other Richte
r books set on the frontier are: Tracey Cromwell (1942), The Lady (1957), The Light in the Forest (1953), and A Country of Strangers (1966). Richter’s style is highly poetic, and his stories frequently draw on the oral reminiscences of those who lived on the American frontier.
“Early Americana” is from the collection Early Americana (1938).
IT HAS SLIPPED almost out of reality now, into the golden haze that covers Adobe Walls and the Alamo, so that today, behind speeding headlights or in the carpeted Pullman, it seems as if it might never have really been.
But if you are ever on the back of a horse at night far out on the wind-swept loneliness of the Staked Plains, with no light but the ancient horns of the Comanche moon and that milky band of star-dust stirred up by the passing of some celestial herd, a cloud may darken the face of the untamed earth, the wind in your face will suddenly bring you the smell of cattle, and there beyond you for a moment on the dim, unfenced, roadless prairie you can make out a fabulous dark herd rolling, stretching, reaching majestically farther than the eye can see, grazing on the wild, unplanted mats of the buffalo grass.
And now with sudden emotion you know that the faint, twinkling light you see on the horizon is a distant window of that rude, vanished, half-mystical buffalo settlement, Carnuel, as it stood that night sixty-five years ago, the only fixed human habitation on a thousand square miles of unfriendly prairie, with great ricks of buffalo hides looming up like bales of swarthy cotton on a Mississippi levee, and with John Minor standing silently on the gallery of his buffalo post, looking with unreadable eyes on the rude rutted trail running out of sight in the moonlight on its three hundred miles to the railroad, and thinking how many days it had been that no one, east or west, north or south, had come to Carnuel but the rugged old Kansas circuit rider for the settlement’s first wedding.
As a rule, there were three hide-buyers in hired buggies rattling in the protection of a wagon train coming back from Dodge; and across the prairie, hunters fresh from the big herds, yelling wildly as they rode up to Seery’s saloon, the only place of refreshment in a dozen future counties; and clattering in from every direction, small freighters, their wagons piled high with hides, which lapped over the wheels to the ground so that they looked like huge hayricks bumping over the plain, swaying at every grass clump and threatening to crack the boom pole and spill the wagon. And at night the settlement would be full of bearded men stumbling over wagon tongues, roaring out lusty songs from Seery’s bar, and in the smoky light of the post hefting the new rifles and buying cartridges and coffee.
But tonight the only sound from the gallery was the monotonous wind of the Staked Plains blowing soft and treacherous from the south, flapping the loose ends of five thousand buffalo hides, and bringing in from the prairie, now faint, now strong, the yelping of wolves from where cheery camp fires of buffalo chips usually glowed.
In the adobe saloon, its walls marked with notorious names and ribald verses, Dan Seery and a single customer played euchre, the whisky-stained cards rattling on the drum-like hardness of a flint-dry buffalo-hide table.
In his little adobe house the bridegroom, Jack Shelby, took a last look at the room Nellie Hedd had put firmly in place for their wedding tomorrow, from the stove ready to be lighted by the bride’s hand to the starched pillow shams on the bed, and then carefully stretched his own bed roll on the kitchen floor.
And in the living-quarters behind John Minor’s buffalo post, Chatherine Minor, aged sixteen, tried not to listen to the voices of her father and the circuit rider coming low and grave from the store-room as she brushed her black hair for bed by the light of a square buffalo-tallow candle, and thought of Laban Oldham, who had seldom spoken to her and never even looked at her, and wondered whether he might ask her for a square dance tomorrow night when they celebrated the wedding.
But ten miles out at Oldham Springs, in his father’s dugout high and dry in the cañada bank, Laban Oldham wasn’t thinking of Chatherine Minor. Straight and untalkative, for all his boyish cheeks, his eyes a deep crockery blue, the long rawhide-coloured hair spilling violently over his linsey collar, he sat with his true love across his knees, polishing the octagon barrel, swabbing out the gleaming bore with bear oil, and rubbing the stock with tallow until it threw back a golden reflection of the candle.
For nearly four years he had done a man’s work in the saddle. Tomorrow he would really be a man and his own boss at eighteen, and could ride out of Carnuel, a buffalo hunter on the Staked Plains at last, leaving chores and drudgery for ever behind him, his Sharps rifle hard in its scabbard under his leg, and his voice joining Frankie Murphy’s in a kind of shouted and unrhymed singing:
I left my old wife in the county of Tyron.
I’ll never go back till they take me in irons.
While I live let me ride where the buffalo graze.
When I die, set a bottle to the head of my grave.
His mother, a small, dark woman, bent her face over her needle as if to blot the rifle from her eyes. His father, with a full, tawny moustache and a back like a bull, sat almost invisible in the shadows, silently smoking his pipe. And all evening there was no mention of missing freighters or buffalo hunters, or that it was the boy’s last night in the dugout, only that the rotting tow sacks over the ceiling poles were letting the dirt sift through and that what they should do was go away for a night and leave the door open, so a polecat could come in and rid the place of mice.
“The wind’s kind of bad from the south tonight,” Jesse Oldham once remarked.
The others listened, but you couldn’t hear the wind in a dugout.
“I stopped at the Hedds’ today,” Jesse Oldham spoke again. “Nellie sure looks pretty for her weddin’.”
Another ten minutes passed while Jesse Oldham used the cotton-wood bootjack and made himself ready for bed.
“You’re staying in the settlement till after the wedding, Laban?” his mother begged him.
He nodded, but to himself he said that it was nothing to his liking. With his young eyes hard and pitying on Jack Shelby for giving in so weak to a woman, he would stand with the other men at the kitchen door and never go near the dancing. And at daybreak, when the celebration would be over and Jack Shelby would find himself tied for life to a house and a woman’s corset strings, he and Frankie Murphy would be riding free as air out of Carnuel toward the Little Comanche, where the prairie was alive and moving with a dark tide, and where for ten miles you could hear the endless grunting bellows of fighting bulls, a dull, unceasing mutter that rose to an unforgettable thunder by dawn.
Something came into his blood at the thought, so that he could scarcely sit still. He could see himself and Frankie riding all spring and autumn in the backwash of that shaggy tidal wave as it swept, eddied, and scattered over the far northern plains. They would sell their hides at Dodge and Hays City and perhaps Cheyenne. He would see strange tribes and people, the Arkansas River and the Platte, and the northern mountains that looked like blue clouds floating over the plain. It was a free life, a king’s life, with always a new camp and a new country just over the rise. And at night, rolled snug with his companions in their blankets, with the moon sailing high or the snow falling softly, with roast buffalo hump keeping him warm and tomorrow another adventure, he knew he should never come back to sleep again in a house at Carnuel.
Long after the dugout was in darkness, he lay awake in his sagging pole bed, with the familiar scent of earthen walls and rye straw in his nostrils, feeling the warmth of his young brother under the blue quilt beside him and listening to his father and mother breathing in the red-cherry bed that had come in the wagons from Kentucky. His mother’s breath was the faster. Rapidly it caught up to his father’s deeper breathing, chimed with it, passed it, for all the world like the hoof-beats of Ben and Fanny, his father’s and mother’s saddle horses, on their way to Nellie Hedd’s wedding tomorrow.
On his own speckled pony, Calico, he rode away in the morning, with no more fuss than Cass, his you
ng brother, running admiringly beside him in the other wheel track, as if they were not going to see each other in a few hours at Carnuel. Perched on the bleached skull of a buffalo, the young boy waited until horse and rider were high on the rise against the sky.
“Good-bye, Laban!” he shrilled.
Laban lifted his hand and rode down into his new world. If it hadn’t been for Cass he would have liked to turn his head for a last look at the place to carry with him into the country of the Cheyennes and the Sioux – the smoke lifting from his father’s dugout, almost invisible within the bank; his mother’s great black kettle, for which he had gathered wagon loads of buffalo chips; and swinging their long horns as they came in single file down over the cap rock, his father’s red Texas cattle that had grazed the night with antelope and stray buffalo.
Down in the deep prairie crack along the Carnuel River, he passed the Hedd place, busy with preparation for the wedding, the bridegroom’s saddled horse already tied to the cotton-wood, the bride drying her dark red hair in the sunshine, and her father’s pole buckboard waiting for horses by the door. And when he was up on the cap rock again, he could see rising behind the south ridge a cloud of dust that was surely a crowd of buffalo hunters riding in for Jack Shelby’s wedding.
With his long, rawhide-coloured hair leaping at every jump, he turned his pony south-east to meet them, but when he reached the top of the long grassy ridge, the dust had disappeared. And though he stayed there for hours, the wide plain below him remained empty of the crawling ants that would have numbered Frankie Murphy in his deerskin vest and Sam Thompson and Captain Jim Bailey bringing their wives home from their buffalo camps along the Little Comanche.
He had the strangest feeling when at last he turned his pony and rode slowly back to Carnuel. The tiny remote settlement lay in the westering sun like a handful of children’s blocks thrown and forgotten on the immensity of the prairie. Still several miles away, he could see a small cluster of persons standing on the gallery of the post, but neither his parents’ horses nor the Hedd buckboard had come up from the river.
