by Jon E. Lewis
He glanced up as Laban came in and silently indicated an extra rifle lying across a sugar barrel, with several boxes of cartridges on the floor. Something unutterable passed through the boy as he saw it, but he walked over, lifted and sighted it in his cold hands, the newest in buffalo guns, with a coil-spring lever and a long, round barrel. His stiff fingers tried a cartridge in the chamber, then they filled the magazine.
And now he knew that nothing could keep him from looking at the women. They had refused to go to bed, and there they sat in the two high-backed chimney seats. The Mexican woman, Mrs Gonzales, was asleep, her chin forward on her breast, breathing into her tightly drawn rebozo. Beside her, the elderly Sadie Harrison’s eyes were tightly closed in their bony sockets, her grey hair awry, her long face a picture of aged and bitter resignment.
Only the girl Chatherine was erect and awake, sitting alone on the other bench, her back toward him, hidden behind a post, except for one shoulder and for her full red skirts flowing over the side of the bench to the floor. Once he felt that she was about to turn her head and glance back at him, and he dropped his eyes and began pushing cartridges from the new boxes into the empty loops of his belt.
The clock struck, and the long silence that followed rang louder than the gong. It was this waiting, waiting, Laban told himself, that was going to tell on him. He saw that the circuit rider had closed his Bible and was holding it tightly, like some golden talisman that would warm his cold hands. Seth Falk had shoved up the rows of his unfinished game and was stacking the cards on the box. Leaving one of his rifles against the door jamb, he stepped outside, and Laban could hear his boots clicking no more loudly than a cat’s claws up and down the adobe floor of the dark side of the gallery.
John Minor picked up one of his own rifles and started toward the kitchen.
“I’ll watch it out there, Mr Minor,” Laban said quickly.
He was glad to get out of this place, where, no matter which way he turned his head, he could feel a red woollen dress burning into his eyes. He stepped through the darkened kitchen and out of the kitchen door. Not a star shone in the blackness. No sound rose but the faint stamping of horses around to the front where they had been tied for the night to the gallery posts.
Once he heard the clock strike the half hour and afterwards the rumbling of a moved bench in the post, and then the circuit rider’s unmistakable ecclesiastical voice. It seemed to go on and on, and when Laban pushed in the kitchen door, it rang suddenly louder. Curiously he made his way in the dimness to the other door. The candles in the post had burned out and only a pale rosy glow from the dying embers in the fire-place faintly illumined the long, spectral room. In a little circle of shadows, everyone seemed to be standing, the gaunt shadow that was the circuit rider towering above them all, something upheld in one hand, the other dipping into it like the mysterious hand of God. And his voice rang out with powerful solemnity in this unaccustomed place:
“I baptise thee . . . Chatherine Lydia Minor . . . in the name of the Father . . . and the Son . . . and the Holy Ghost.”
Slowly the meaning of the baptism tonight came over the boy, and with his fingers biting deeply into his rifle, he slipped back to a kitchen bench. But all the time he grimly sat there he had the feeling that even in that faintest of fantastic light Chatherine Minor had marked his tall form standing and watching at the kitchen door. And when it was all over, he heard her step coming toward him in the kitchen and then her fingers lighting the stub of a candle on the table.
“Can I make some coffee for you, Laban?” she asked.
And now he knew that nothing on earth could keep him from raising his eyes and letting them fall rigidly and for the first time directly on this girl whom, before the sun was an hour high, he might have to turn suddenly and bleakly upon.
There she stood, her dark eyes calmly facing him, taller than he imagined, but already, at sixteen, a woman, her body sturdy as a young cedar in the river brakes. The strong cheek-bones in her face turned abruptly inward, giving a resolute cast to the mouth. But what held his eyes most was her long, black hair, parted in a clear white streak; lustrous hair that he knew a Kiowa or Comanche would sell his life for.
He shook his head. She did not go away abashed; only stood there looking at him.
“You look thin, Laban,” she reproved him. “You haven’t had anything to eat since morning.”
He could see now that her eyes were not black and brazen, as he had thought. They were steady and slaty grey. But what made him steel himself, sitting there with a rifle across his lap, was where her left breast, swelling gently in the folds of her tight red basque, marked the target of her heart.
“I’m not hungry,” he said harshly.
She turned quietly away, and he thought she would go, but he could hear her hand on stove and water-bucket and kitchen utensils, and the heel of her firm foot on the adobe floor, and finally there was the fragrance of coffee through the kitchen, almost choking him, and he tried not to look at the picture she made, straight and with a disturbing womanly serenity, handing him a heavy, steaming, white cup and saucer and then bearing one in each hand into the post.
She set a plate of cold roast buffalo hump on the bench beside him and quietly washed the cups and saucers in the wash-tin and put them away on the calico-hung shelves as if she would surely find them there in the morning. Then her competent hands filled the stove, and with a dour mouth he watched her throw her skirts forward to seat herself, sturdy and erect, on the other kitchen bench.
“Papa wants me to stay out here,” she said quietly, as if it were the most common thing in the world.
He said nothing. His face, framed in his long, rawhide-coloured hair, was deaf and wintry. He waited grimly for her woman’s chitchat, but she sat composed and silent as a man while the stub of a candle flickered out behind them, leaving the scent of burned wicking floating through the dark room.
For a long time they sat in utter silence while the clock struck and a faint grey began to drift like some thin, ghostly semblance of light through the dark window.
“It’s starting to get morning, Laban,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”
“I’m awake,” he told her.
“I think I heard something,” she said quietly.
His hands made sure of his rifles. Rising, he felt his way along the cool wall to where an iron bar, fashioned from an old wagon tyre, bolted the door. Minutes passed while he stood there listening, and the black eastern sky grew into a long, lonely stretch of grey, unbroken except for a single well of green that lay like a pool reflecting the evening on a dark lava plain. He had never heard it more preternaturally still. The post at their backs was like the grave. Even the stamping horses were still. He could fancy them in his mind, standing out there in the early light, curving their necks to snuff and listen.
“It isn’t anything,” he told her. “Just the blood in your ears.”
But now that he would deny it, he could hear it for the first time himself, very far away, like the wind in the grass, or the distant Carnuel River rushing down its cañon after a rain, nearer, always faintly nearer, and then evaporating into nothing more than the vast sweep of dark grey sky torn with ragged fissures like the chaos of creation morning.
“It wasn’t anything,” the girl agreed, whispering. “Just the blood in my ears.”
But Laban’s fingers were tightening again on the eight-sided barrel of his old Sharps. Something was surely out there, hidden from the post in the mists, like the abandoned hide wagons bleaching their bones on the Staked Plains. And now, far out on the prairie, he could see them breaking out of the fog rolling in from the river, a thin line of loping riders, the long-awaited crawling ants his eyes had strained for from the ridge that day so long ago that was only yesterday afternoon.
A bench was suddenly overturned in the post. Seth Falk’s iron grey nickered. And now they could hear the pleasantest sound in more than a week – the distant hallooing of rough, stentorian voices.
And presently the post was filled with bearded men twenty-four hours overdue for Nellie Hedd’s wedding, men who had ridden all night in wet chequered linsey shirts and soaked blue flannel shirts and steaming buckskin shirts that smelled of countless hides and buffalo-chip camp fires and black powder and Staked Plains’ rain. And all morning the thick tobacco smoke in the post drifted to the grave talk over Jack Shelby and the Hedds and the uprising of the Kiowas, who meant to sweep every white hunter from the buffalo country, and the lost hides, wagons, and hair of the men who had waited too long before raising dust for the big outfits corralled together on the Little Comanche.
For two days and nights Laban Oldham sat cross-legged or lay in his blankets beside the camp fire of Frankie Murphy’s men. But all the time while he heard how his mother had ridden into a buffalo camp with her black hair streaming into little Cass’s face, and while he listened for the long train of freighters coming with the women and hides, Laban couldn’t feel anything half so clearly as Chatherine Minor’s snug, warm kitchen, and Chatherine Minor handing him a cup of coffee, with the steam curling over her raven hair, and Chatherine Minor sitting up with him most of the night in the darkened kitchen and whispering to him in the morning if he were awake.
Tall and stiff, the third evening, his long, rawhide-coloured hair gravely swinging, he walked through the post into the now familiar kitchen doorway and beyond, where a girl with her sleeves rolled high stood stirring sour-dough leaven into flour that was not so white as her arms. She did not look around at his step, but her bare upper arms brushed, with quick womanly gestures, stray hairs from his face.
“It’s a warm evenin’,” he greeted.
“Good evening, Laban.” She bent over her work, and her hands made the mixing-pan sing on the table.
“Did you hear the freighters are campin’ tonight at Antelope Water?” he went on awkwardly. “Bob Hollister just rode in.”
“I reckon you’ll be glad to see your folks,” she answered, but he thought her deft white hands kneaded more slowly after that.
He sat on the familiar bench and waited unhurriedly for her to be through. The kitchen felt snug and pleasant as the dugout at home – the blur of the red-chequered cloth folded back from the table and the sputter of river cotton-wood in the stove and the homely scent of the sour-dough crock. He could close his eyes and know that either his mother or Chatherine Minor must be here. And when the tins were set to rise on the lid of the red flour-bin, she washed her hands and seated herself on the other bench, throwing her full skirts skilfully forward, as she had that sterner evening a day or two ago, until they rustled into their rightful place.
For a long time they sat there looking at the wall, that held no rifles now, and at the harmless black window, and at each other. And he told himself that he had never thought she would be a woman like this, with her flesh white as snow where it came out of the homespun at her throat, and the soft strength of her young mouth.
“I’m followin’ the herd north when it moves, Chatherine,” he stammered at length. “But I’m comin’ back.”
She answered nothing to that.
“I reckoned,” he went on rigidly, “maybe you’d wait for me till I got back?”
She looked at him now, and her glance was firm and steady as the prairie itself. “ I couldn’t promise to wait for a single man, Laban,” she said. “Where you’re going is a long ways off. And a buffalo hunter can easy forget the way back.”
The warm colour stung his cheeks at that, and he stood on his feet very tall, and stepped across the floor and sat down on the bench, and laid his linsey-clad arm rudely around her shoulders.
“The circuit rider isn’t gone back to Dodge with the freighters yet,” he reminded. “You can make it that he didn’t come to Carnuel for nothin’, if you want to, Chatherine. Then you won’t have to do your waitin’ for a single man.”
She didn’t say anything, but neither did she shake him off, and they sat quiet again while the talk in the post receded to a mere far-away drone and the kitchen candle burned out again, leaving its fragrance and all the room in darkness, except where a dim rectangle of post light fell across the floor. And suddenly he noticed that her breath caught up to his, chimed with it, and passed it, for all the world like the breathing of his father and mother in the beautiful red-cherry bed that had come from Kentucky in the wagons.
And everything, he thought, was well, when of a sudden she buried her face in his shirt and cried, and what she said after that, he thought, was very strange.
“Oh, Laban,” her voice came muffled, “she had such beautiful hair!”
Before the week was out, the circuit rider scratched out the names of John McAllister Shelby and Nellie Hedd from an official paper and firmly wrote: “Laban Oldham and Chatherine Lydia Minor.” And the settlement had its wedding with four women on the pole-backed chimney seats, and with Mrs Oldham, her dark hair combed back tightly from her forehead, sitting on the chair of honour, and with Jesse Oldham, his back like a bull and his imperturbable moustache, standing with John Minor, and with buffalo hunters along the counter, and the freighters in a reticent knot by the door.
The circuit rider’s voice rang in the pans and skillets hanging on the smoke-stained rafters. And when it was over, a huge shaggy hunter rode his horse half-way into the post’s open door-way and bellowed for Dan Seery to unlock the saloon. And when he saw the silent couple and the black book of the circuit rider, he stood in his stirrups and roared, shaking his long, grey mane and the blood-stained, weather-beaten fringe of his buck-skins till he looked like an old buffalo bull coming out of the wallow:
“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.”
WALTER VAN TILBURG CLARK
The Wind and the Snow of Winter
BORN IN MAINE, WALTER VAN TILBURG CLARK (1909–1971) was raised in Reno, where his father was president of the University of Nevada. Clark’s 1940 novel The Ox-Bow Incident marked a paradigm shift in Western writing with its realistic recreations of frontier life and its use of concepts from psychology and philosophy. A movie version, starring Henry Fonda, received an Oscar Best Picture nomination.
Clark published two other novels and in 1950 a collection of short pieces, The Watchful Gods and Other Stories. From then until his death his pen was silent.
“ The Wind and the Snow of Winter” is from 1944. It won Clark an O. Henry Prize for shorter fiction.
IT WAS NEAR sunset when Mike Braneen came onto the last pitch of the old wagon road which had led into Gold Rock from the east since the Comstock days. The road was just two ruts in the hard earth, with sagebrush growing between them, and was full of steep pitches and sharp turns. From the summit it descended even more steeply into Gold Rock, in a series of short switchbacks down the slope of the canyon. There was a paved highway on the other side of the pass now, but Mike never used that. Cars coming from behind made him uneasy, so that he couldn’t follow his own thoughts long, but had to keep turning around every few minutes, to see that his burro, Annie, was staying out on the shoulder of the road, where she would be safe. Mike didn’t like cars anyway, and on the old road he could forget about them, and feel more like himself. He could forget about Annie too, except when the light, quick tapping of her hoofs behind him stopped. Even then he didn’t really break his thoughts. It was more as if the tapping were another sound from his own inner machinery, and when it stopped, he stopped too, and turned around to see what she was doing. When he began to walk ahead again at the same slow, unpace, his arms scarcely swinging at all, his body bent a little forward from the waist, he would not be aware that there had been any interruption of the memory or the story that was going on in his head. Mike did not like to have his stories interrupted except by an idea of his own, something to do with his prospecting, or the arrival of his story at an
actual memory which warmed him to close recollection or led into a new and more attractive story.
An intense, golden light, almost liquid, fanned out from the peaks above him and reached eastward under the gray sky, and the snow which occasionally swarmed across this light was fine and dry. Such little squalls had been going on all day, and still there was nothing like real snow down, but only a fine powder which the wind swept along until it caught under the brush, leaving the ground bare. Yet Mike Braneen was not deceived. This was not just a flurrying day; it was the beginning of winter. If not tonight, then tomorrow, or the next day, the snow would begin which shut off the mountains, so that a man might as well be on a great plain for all he could see, perhaps even the snow which blinded a man at once and blanketed the desert in an hour. Fifty-two years in this country had made Mike Braneen sure about such things, although he didn’t give much thought to them, but only to what he had to do because of them. Three nights before, he had been awakened by a change in the wind. It was no longer a wind born in the near mountains, cold with night and altitude, but a wind from far places, full of a damp chill which got through his blankets and into his bones. The stars had still been clear and close above the dark humps of the varying mountains, and overhead the constellations had moved slowly in full panoply, unbroken by any invisible lower darkness, yet he had lain there half awake for a few minutes, hearing the new wind beat the brush around him, hearing Annie stirring restlessly and thumping in her hobble. He had thought drowsily, “Smells like winter this time,” and then, “It’s held off a long time this year, pretty near the end of December.” Then he had gone back to sleep, mildly happy because the change meant he would be going back to Gold Rock. Gold Rock was the other half of Mike Braneen’s life. When the smell of winter came, he always started back for Gold Rock. From March or April until the smell of winter, he wandered slowly about among the mountains, anywhere between the White Pines and the Virginias, with only his burro for company. Then there would come the change, and they would head back for Gold Rock.
