by Jon E. Lewis
The next day Mrs. Mason brought the geranium blooms of all the Americans for miles around in a washtub to put over the town-bought coffin.Yonak scarcely knew that, or heard the good words she made for him now. He stared straight ahead, gripping the gold dollar until it cut his palm.
III
That summer Yonak looked often toward the house across the river. Sometimes he sneaked through the brush to watch the American girl pick black currants or gather wood. She was growing straight and fine like the young cottonwood, and her hands were gentle as the night winds in the leaves. But he never spoke to her after her sick little brother died. There was nothing he could say to the American girl. And soon she was going to Union to high school, to work for her board, be a teacher.
Once she saw him there and stopped him outside of the trading store to ask how it was with them on the Niobrara. Two of her class-mates, scrawny in their dirty corduroys, saw them. “Migod! Look at the big Polander!”
The girl tried to laugh up at Yonak, to make it good. “They’re just sorry they’re such little runts.”
But the boy turned away and went down the middle of the dusty street to where the team was eating from the wagon. He hunched down on the tongue and kicked a hole in the ground. Town was no good. And the American girl had no business talking to him, not with a dress the color of wild-grape wine, her short black hair like wild geese flying before the wind.
IV
In the summer Yonak and Steve worked the fields and watched the wind-streaked sky. If rain came, like long blue brooms sweeping across the dusty flats, it was money in the bank. If not – chickens one year, feathers the next. Anyhow, the Polanders still had the river.
But to Yonak the Niobrara was not just water for grass and cabbages and sweet corn. It was something to see suddenly from under a fork of hay, to hear in the aloneness of the night. It brought a fine hurting to his arms when he looked down upon it in October, the cottonwoods lemon yellow, the ash trees slim golden flames against the gray of the bluffs: or when he came down the spring slope, walking behind the deep-breasted mares, the chain tugs rattling.
When Big Steve’s wife was dead three years he got a gallon jug for under his bed, sent for a new suit and a tie, shaved his moustache, greased his shoes, and started to Mass again. Several times he drove to the Polish settlement on Snake River, to come back smelling of bad alcohol and cursing the American Poles as pigs.
Yonak, eighteen now, looked on in silence. At night, lying where the mother had died, he had to hear the heavy breathing of Big Steve beside him. Dark thoughts came to the boy, partly because his father breathed so, like the boar pig in the pen, but mostly because he was writing to a countryman in Chicago for a mail-order wife.
It was said that the matchmaker was a good one. For forty dollars he got a wife for Ignaz Kodis, not too old and only a little lame. She worked well and gave him strong children, one a year.
In a few weeks Steve was talking big of the wife he too would get, with the good name of Jadwiga Hajek, only thirty; and if a little older, what matter? Sixty dollars down for the match and one hundred for the wedding garments.
She met Steve at the depot in a pink silk dress like a costly American woman. Her kiss brought another red than that of the wind and the jug to the Polander’s face. But she would not marry yet. “Be better to wait and see if we fit together,” she told him in awkward Polish.
“Na, it gives bad talk sol” he protested, which was enough.
But it was not enough for the woman from Chicago. She laughed with open mouth, her gold teeth and the black stuff on her round parrot eyes shining, free for all the loafers to see.
She did not laugh when she saw Steve’s place. Did rich farmers here live in dumps like that, she asked, pointing a red-nailed finger at the two-room soddy with its dugout lean-to. Seeing the man’s flush of anger, she kissed him on the mouth, her round eyes already seeking the son.
Not until dark did Yonak come to the house, and slowly then, seeing a woman with hair that was burnt cornsilk, and a mouth like blood, on his father’s knee. He stopped in the doorway, the light from the high lamp spilling over his hair, over the smooth tan of his face and the faded blue of his overalls. The woman sucked in her breath. She went to him, close to him, and looking up under greasy lids, she asked, “You are Yonak?”
Standing on tiptoe, she mussed his blond hair and ran her fingers down his cheek line to his lips. They smelled like flowers in the late spring, flowers wilting.
“Big, strong man,” she said. Turning the lamp down, she pulled him to the bench beside her. “Now you are not Yonak, Polak, but Jack, American,” she told him.
Afterward Yonak tried to forget the violence of that week between his father and Dolly Hall, as Jadwiga Hajek would be called. She was no greenhorn Polander, she told Big Steve, standing up to his anger. But always her eyes, her hands, were for the young Yonak, so tall and fine, even with the dirt of the milking pen on his shoes.
It was the son she would marry.
Steve threw his head back and opened his mouth wide: A good joke, good Polish joke.
But already the son was gone, out into the night. The woman was after him, holding to the doorknob, looking into the darkness. The father stopped his laughing and his anger broke like the gray floodwaters of the Niobrara, but the woman stood against him like the pilings of the good-built bridge. Yes, it was the son she would have. The son. The son.
And then it came over Steve that he could not let her go. So he became sly. Yes, yes, the son. Ah, he was a young fool, this Yonak, but if she would have him, phutt, so it should stand. Let them talk of it tomorrow.
No. Tonight. Now.
But Yonak did not come when Steve called from the doorway, not the next morning or all the next day. Steve cursed; the cows bawled. At last, when the woman went to call from the hill that it was only a joke, American joke, Yonak crawled out of the buffalo-berry brush, his face gaunt, his eyes light and hard. He came in for the milk pails and went out again. In the morning he looked down upon Steve, still in a sour, drunken stupor, and then he went away to the field.
And when the son returned in the evening the woman met him at the door in a fresh house dress, with a nice red drink for him. It was cool to the dusty throat and he had another, many more, until the woman’s words were gentle upon his ear, her hair sweet to his lips.
The next morning Yonak roused himself as from the muck of a river flood. When his eyes cleared a little he ran out across the bottom land that smelled of dew, the boggier portions blue-tinged with violets. A coyote slunk away from a handful of feathers, all that was left of a Leghorn rooster out too early because Yonak had forgotten to close the henhouse. He kicked the wet feathers sadly and went to stand at the old cottonwood over the river, his head against the rough bark, his face shiny as wet, gray clay. This time Eckie would not come. Last week she had finished the high school. In the fall she would be a teacher.
After a while Yonak fell to cutting into the old tree with his knife, far back under the bark. He let the sun play on the bright disk that was Eckie’s gold dollar before he pushed it out of sight under the bark and painted the spot with mud.
Then he tried to look over into tomorrow, but it was dark as the smoke of a prairie fire. And so he washed his head at the river and was surprised that the water could still be cool to him.
V
It took Dolly Hall just one day to spread the news, laughing at the Polish women who stood away from her when they spoke of their part in the wedding feast. The next day she got Steve to take her to town. They came home singing through the dusk, in a new car that the woman drove. Yonak plodded up from the milking pen between two brimming pails to the house. Ah, but there was news, Dolly cried to him. They were sold out – land, cattle, horses, everything. They were all going to Detroit in the morning, to Dolly’s brother working in the automobile factory. He would make the wedding feast. Yonak set the milk pails among the cats and walked away, up the hill and through the corn, his b
oots bruising a fragrance from the young, green leaves. It still smelled the same, like his field, his home. He belonged here, with the river and the plowed land under his feet, deep-rooted in good soil.
Tonight he did not go to the cottonwood, although he knew the little winds were in its leaves. Instead he went to the bridge, so white in the moonlight, and sat on the willow-grown approach where he could see the light in the Americans’ kitchen.
After a long time someone came along the railing toward him. Suddenly it was Eckie, there before him, in a light dress like river mist. She turned away when she saw him.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” Yonak said bitterly through his fingers.
“Oh, no,” she answered quickly, but without returning.
“We go away.”
The light oval of the girl’s face moved, indicating knowledge. She wished them luck. It would be fine in the great city.
“It will be bad – bad like a sickness and a dying!” the young Polander cried, and stumbled away into the brush.
And when he did not return to the Smolka grove that night or the next morning there was much talk. So! – like his sister. But they could not find him hanging from a tree anywhere.
Dolly Hall was angry. Greenhorn Polak! But she did not wish to lose everything, and so she married Steve at Union – Steve and his three thousand dollars cash.
VI
Yonak, working in a packing plant in Chicago, knew nothing of the wedding, not until the three thousand cash had vanished and Old Steve, hearing of his son through a countryman, came to him. Na, it was bad. The American Polish woman was worse than two or ten of the English-speakers.
He brought word, too, of the Americans across the river, the Eckie and her people. The mother was dead and the girl she must come home to care for the sick father, sick from a horse kick in the back – not walk for a long time.
Yonak listened and then went out through the town, to the bridge over the river that did not smell like the Niobrara in the spring. A long time he looked into the oily water.
The next day they rented a little house and Steve cleared away the cans from the back. He would grow the cabbages and the onions for his Polish neighbors.
After a few months Dolly came too, for Steve still held a five-year mortgage for half his place. Greenhorns, she called the men when they would not move to an apartment. But she stayed, entertaining her drunken friends in sleazy satin pajamas. It was not good, Old Steve grumbled, but there was none to listen.
If Yonak hoped that the stench of the fertilizer dumps that was close as his skin would rid them of his father’s wife, he was mistaken. She complained about it and her friends made fun, but that was all.
Then, one night in late April, Yonak lay on his hot bed with the moonlight across him and thought how fine it would be to walk along a fence once more, making the barbed wire hum under a tapping stick while his shadow grew long on the evening grass. How fine to see the faded blue dress of the little American girl come running through the brush. And soon it would be time for the purple and yellow flowers he had once made into a wreath.
The next morning the heat was like a dirty featherbed to the face. At noon a wind grew up from the far land, cool, gentle, wet as the mists of the spring Niobrara. To Yonak it brought the smell of new ground, warm horseflesh, and slopes snowy with wild plum and chokecherry bloom. A joy ran through his dead arms like the first cracking of winter ice in the river. He sent his unopened lunch pail against the shed so the wood splintered and broke, the tin flattened, and the gray coffee splattered out. But Yonak did not stop to see. He ran like a wild animal, wild with spring.
Two days later the young Polander was headed across the Flats to the Niobrara and knew, from the curious look the mail carrier gave him, that in spite of soap and hot water and new clothes he was still a packing-house stinker. He looked away over the shaggy prairie moving past as slowly as the flow of earth into the valley. Everything was so small, so drab, the Flats like a palm dusty with the thin green of early spring. Many homes were gone, broad fields unworked, gray with weeds. Three years’ drouth, hand-running, the carrier said. That, with seven years’ hard times, just about cleaned up the farmer. Old Phipps closed out most everybody across the river.
Yonak nodded. He knew Phipps and bad times. Chicken one year and feathers the next. He was watching a curlew drop whistling to a knoll, pinkish-brown wings folded over the back like praying palms. There was still time to clean the rusty plowshare with sand and coal oil, put in corn. The rains would come.
“The whole damn country’s for rent,” the mail carrier told him. “There’s your old place, empty. The renters couldn’t raise the money and was put off. On relief up to Union now. Old-timer down that way too, crippled bad.”
He rambled on, but Yonak did not hear. He got off at the graying, deserted little church, the mail carrier shouting back that he’d be along again in a couple hours, glad to pick him up. When the truck weeds. And over the spot where the roads going in and out of the cemetery crossed, where Eckie had brought the wreath of bluebells to his sister, dead sunflowers rattled in the wind.
Heavily Yonak started through his old field, mangy with patches of spreading rye grass. Poor farming. It was not good to do the land so.
At the brow of the bluff he looked down upon the Niobrara and his sadness grew. This was not the river that had come to him on that rare, soft wind over the soiled city. This was little more than a creek, with a deep canyon of greening trees tucked against bare sandstone. And across from him was a bald knob, the Indian bluff where he had once made a wreath for an American girl.
Then he saw that Eckie’s house was gone, the gray stones of the foundation scattered like dirty chickens over the bare yard. Suddenly afraid, he ran down the hill toward his own home, the shadow of a hawk circling over the ground before him. Only a dozen cattle-rubbed ash and box-elder trees were left of the grove. The sod house stood vacant-eyed as an old woman, the windows gone, the floor covered with newspapers, not yet yellowed, and fresh chicken droppings.
VII
At last Yonak moved to plod past the sagging door of the henhouse and to the old cottonwood. It, too, was gone. Undermined by spring floods, it had crashed into the waters, the branches catching trash until the river turned its back and shifted the channel to the other side, leaving only a rain-dappled sand bar around the bleaching old trunk, with the lacy tracks of a turtle across it.
Slowly Yonak started away, along the river to the road that led over the bluffs and off toward the railroad. The water rippled past him over yellow sand wavy as a woman’s hair, but he did not see it. The tangled swamp grass caught at his shoes and he did not feel it.
Suddenly there was a high cackle at his feet, and a bunch of black and russet feathers rose from the water’s edge and fled squawking past him. It was a rooster, a brown Leghorn, the tail gone, probably lost to some coyote. But the fowl did not go far. Under a buffalo-berry clump he stopped to look back, scolding.
With a whoop Yonak was after him, his heart pounding with excitement as the rooster ran and flew toward the grove. He turned the corner of the henhouse in time to see the Leghorn flutter off the ground and scramble into a rusty oil barrel through the six-inch bung, just wide enough for the scrawny body. Yonak leaned against the rooty old sod wall, puffing, laughing. The little devil. He was tailless, bedraggled of feathers and with frozen comb, but he stayed on.
Inside the barrel the cackling had died. Yonak tried to look into the blackness and was met with a vigorous clatter of claws on metal and an alarmed squawk. He started to shake the barrel a little, and stopped. Under his hand, across the dirty metal of the top, was a name – E. C. Mason. It was the Americans. Eckie.
So that was how the rooster could race.
Then Yonak remembered what the mail carrier had said. Old-timer, crippled. And Phipps closing everybody out for his cattle. So it happened that the Smolka field was grass. She who was slim and fine as a young cottonwood trying to hold th
e plow.
Once more he began to laugh, harder this time, like a March wind that clears away the dead things of a long, long winter. To the cackling rooster he promised Eckie, the American, and her father back. “I make them come,” he said, “and once more it be good farming and fine racing, no?” Then he started toward the road again, walking very fast, to catch the mail truck for Union. And behind him the Niobrara flowed tranquilly on, making a soft, friendly little sound as it ran past the old grove of the Polanders.
THOMAS THOMPSON
Blood on the Sun
THOMAS THOMPSON (1913–1993) was born in Dixan, California, and graduated from Heald Business College, San Francisco, in 1933. In 1940 he turned to writing as a career, after a variety of jobs as diverse as nightclub entertainer and furniture salesman. Although Thompson published fourteen highly regarded Western novels (most of them published in Doubleday’s Double D series), his primary skill was as a short story writer and he won Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America for short stories in 1954 and 1955. His short story collections are: They Brought Their Guns (1954), and Moment of Glory (1961). In 1971, Thompson received a Levi Strauss Golden Saddleman Award. Thompson – whose Western fiction was strongly influenced by American hardboiled crime fiction – also wrote TV scripts for Wagon Train, Cimarron City and Gunsmoke. For ten years he was associate producer and writer for the Bonanza TV Western series.
The short story “Blood on the Sun” was first published in America magazine in 1954 and won a short story Spur Award from the Western Writers of America in 1955.
WE HADN’T EXPECTED him. He stood there in the doorway of Doc Isham’s store, his lips thin and tight. He looked more like the trouble man I had first figured him to be than like The Preacher we had come to know. He was built like a cowboy, tall and lean-hipped. He was about thirty-five years old, I’d judge. It was hard to tell, and he wasn’t a man to say. With all his gentleness, he had never quite lost the cold steadiness that had been in his eyes the night he first came to our valley with a bullet in his chest and more blood on his saddle than there was in his body. He had been a dead man that night, but Grace Beaumont had refused to let him die.
