Return to Red River

by Johnny D. Boggs

  “Boys, I tell you what it means,” Groot went on. “It means . . .”

  “It means,” Lightning’s father interjected, “we’re burning daylight.”

  Lightning never quite grasped that concept. Groot would start ringing that triangle bell at the chuck wagon, screaming the same thing: “We’re burning daylight.”

  By thunder, when that loud bell started clanging, jerking Lightning awake when he felt as if he had just closed his eyes after seventeen or eighteen hours in the saddle, the sun hadn’t even peeked above the horizon. A body would be hard put to detect even a hint of gray in the sky. Yet every morning—if you’d call it morning—the cowboys would drag themselves out of their soogans, stumble in the dark to the fire and the coffee and biscuits. There they would eat and drink and hardly even talk—till it was light enough for Joey Corinth to rope horses from the remuda, and the cowboys could see enough to saddle their mounts.

  * * *

  “What the Sam Hill are you doing?” Lightning asked.

  The red of the morning had faded by then, and Lightning saw no hint of the bad weather that Groot and his glowing morning sky were predicting. What Lightning saw was one of the Mexican cowhands doing the damnedest thing.

  Alvaro Cuevas looked up. He had been moving his bedroll from the cantle and lashing it instead to just in front of the horn. The vaquero grinned and replied in rapid Spanish, making a few gestures toward the blue roan Joey Corinth had brought out from the remuda, to his own head, and finally at his groin.

  Lightning just blinked. “Huh?”

  A couple of rods away, saddling his bay gelding, Yago Noguerra tossed a stirrup over the seat of his swell-forked saddle, and answered: “Alvaro says the horse Joey has cut out for him this morning is . . . eh . . . grosero? Verde. Bucks mucho. A . . . a . . . hijo de la puta?”

  “I know what that means,” Lightning says. “But I still don’t get . . .”

  “Alvaro wants to have children someday.”

  Lightning turned to see his father, busy saddling his own horse, the black he usually rode.

  “I . . . ohhhhh.”

  The cowboys chuckled as they continued saddling and bridling their horses for the day’s drive.

  “Much time as you spend at Gloria’s Palace,” Joe Nambel said, “I figured you’d know ’bout things like that.”

  Teeler Lacey had an even more obscene comment that made Lightning’s face flush, yet he quickly found himself chuckling with everybody else nearby. He felt relieved, however, knowing that his mother was not in earshot.

  “Watch your manners, gents,” Mathew said, and the joking ceased—but not for long—for even Lightning’s father could not hide his own grin.

  For the life of him, Lightning Garth could not understand why everyone felt happy. Certainly, no one could blame the change in mood on whiskey. His father, damn it, had not broken down and allowed each hand a few jiggers of whiskey. The only bottle in camp was the one Groot kept in a drawer in the chuck wagon, and he said it would be used only for medicinal purposes. Cuts, bruised, and raw backsides did not count. Nobody had broken a bone, been bitten by a rattlesnake, or shot in the shoulder.

  “Let’s get moving,” his father said as he swung into the saddle. “We’re burning daylight.”

  * * *

  For more than five weeks, they had been wet, and they had been dry. Baking underneath a broiling sun or freezing in their soaking clothes after a cold rain. Mostly, they had been bone tired, aching, miserable. Awake before sunrise, then in a saddle till noon, a quick bite of food washed down with coffee, a fresh horse, and back in the saddle. Till dark. Eat what Groot called food. Maybe sleep. More than likely spend at least two or three more hours circling the herd of longhorns.

  As they followed along the western banks of Salt Creek, the air turned thick, heavy, humid, and the skies darkened.

  “Reckon Groot might’ve been right ’bout ’em skies,” John Meeker Jr. said.

  Too exhausted, too miserable to respond, neither Tom Garth nor his brother commented.

  “Damn this heat,” Meeker said maybe two miles later.

  You hated the heat. Then you complained about the rain. You dreaded the night. You despised the day. Especially this day.

  It stretched on like all of eternity in hell.

  Nothing changed. Clouds of dust, and beyond that, darkening skies. Once, when Lightning dismounted to answer nature’s call, he looked west, then east, then south. Blue skies everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except north, the direction the cattle were going. Tom’s father appeared to be leading them straight into a black void that spit out brief flashes of white. Too far away to hear thunder, though.

  “We’re riding straight into a twister,” Tom said to himself as he buttoned his britches. “The newspapers in Dallas and Fort Worth will say, ‘Those fools deserved to die!’” He laughed and then looked around for a rock or a stump or some slight incline to make it easier to mount his horse.

  A lifetime ago—well, forty or fifty days earlier—he would have chastised any honest cowboy who needed to find some way to cheat to climb into the saddle. But no more. He groaned, tried to soothe his aching muscles, and gently eased himself into the saddle before spurring his horse into a trot and catching up with Lightning, John Meeker Jr., and all that dust and misery.

  The black void far to the north did not move. Maybe because those three thousand and more longhorns covered little ground. The country seemed endless, flat, maybe some timbers in the hills or along the creeks, but nothing to stop the wind. Although, on this day, the wind was nonexistent.

  Yet the grass was good. Maybe that’s why Mathew Garth and Laredo Downs kept the herd moving so god-awful slow. Or maybe no one wanted to get too close to that ominous black cauldron that lay ahead.

  They stopped at noon, if only briefly. The three drag riders eased their weary mounts to the remuda, picked out the horses they wanted for the rest of the day, and limped and dragged their legs through the thick grass to the chuck wagon. Sowbelly and beans. Warm, filling. Coffee. Hot, nourishing. Stale corn bread left over from last night’s supper and this morning’s breakfast.

  Janeen Yankowski had never served up anything that tasted so good.

  Well, Tom Garth couldn’t say that he actually tasted the food.

  If anyone had asked him, he would have sworn he had ridden fifty miles since dawn. Yet looking back at the country to the south, he wondered if they had made more than three.

  A horse pounded the already trampled grass and hard earth, and Tom watched his father ride straight to the chuck wagon. The horse, the liver chestnut named Dollar, looked pretty fresh, and Tom realized that his father had already swapped out his mount from that morning. Yet he did not dismount, just kicked his feet free of the stirrups and stretched his legs out in front of him.

  Groot filled a tin cup with black brew and handed it to him.

  Mathew Garth drank greedily. If the liquid was hot, he did not appear to notice. He turned his head off to the northeast.

  “There’s a herd—A. C. Thompson’s outfit—about two miles north.” Mathew Garth stopped for another swallow of black coffee.

  Tom had met A. C. Thompson once. In Fort Worth, if his memory had not failed him. In fact, Thompson lived in Fort Worth but worked from the southern edges of Texas to the cattle towns in Kansas. A professional drover, Thompson would buy cattle from ranchers, hire his own crew, horses, and wagons, and take a herd north. He had been doing that since ’67—after Thomas Dunson proved that things were possible—to Abilene and Dodge City and every cow town between. Some people compared Thompson to the great cattlemen like Shanghai Pierce and Charles Goodnight. A few said Thompson was richer than both of them, richer than God, but he dressed like a thirty-a-month cowhand, and his house in Fort Worth was just a shanty next door to the wild district known as Hell’s Half Acre. Not that it mattered. Most of the time, A. C. Thompson was sleeping in a bedroll underneath the stars, not in the one-room shack that collected spiders, r
oaches, snakes, and his mail.

  “Thompson’s stopping for the night,” Mathew said.

  “Plenty of daylight left,” Groot said.

  Mathew nodded. “Yeah. But Thompson doesn’t like the black clouds. I don’t, either.”

  “Then . . .” Groot took the cup that Mathew held out. “You reckon we should bed down, too.”

  “No.” The worn boots returned to the stirrups, and Mathew gathered the reins. “I don’t want Thompson and his eighteen hundred beeves ahead of us.”

  “Well . . .” Groot considered this.

  “If it’s raining north, then the Red will be swollen. I want to be across the river before Thompson or anyone else. River gets too high, we wait. If we’re in line, that’s an even longer wait.”

  “That makes sense,” Groot said, but added, “I reckon.”

  “Go wide around Thompson’s cattle. They’re half-wild, even compared to our three thousand. I mean a wide berth.” Mathew wiped his face. “We’ll move around them, get back on the trail, bed down three, four miles north. Let’s get those beeves moving.”

  Neck-reining the sorrel, Mathew Garth trotted out of camp and back toward the grazing sea of Texas beef.

  Groot dropped the empty cup into the basin, shook his head, spit out tobacco juice, and told Joey Corinth, “You heard the boss, sonny. Best get out of here so we can have the boys somethin’ to et when they’s done for the day.” He spun around to study the sky. “If we ain’t loadin’ two of each type of critter onto some boat by nightfall.”

  Tom glanced at Lightning, who swore. John Meeker Jr. joined the melody of curses, too.

  Groot sang out, “You heard the boss, gents. Back to work, you malcontents. We’s burnin’ daylight.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Tess had expected to be soaked by the time she had helped Groot set up camp and get the fire going, but she caught not even a scent of rain in the wind that had picked up, blowing in from the north. Even the clouds, still black, did not appear to have moved much.

  “Maybe that storm’ll miss us.”

  Turning, she saw Groot holding a cup of coffee for her, which she took with a smile.

  “You think so?”

  “Hope so.” Groot pulled a plug of tobacco from his pants pocket. He did not use a pocketknife to cut off his chaw, merely bit into it and pulled off a sizable portion with the teeth he had left. As he worked the cud into a comfortable spot, he tilted his head off to the north. “Big storm, though. Dumpin’ buckets. River’ll be high.”

  She looked back. “How far are we to the Red River?”

  “Two days,” Groot answered. “If the weather holds. Three, maybe, if she don’t. There’s a little burg where we can load up on any extry supplies we might need. Cross the river the next day.”

  He began poking the burning wood, spreading out the coals. Tess set her cup on the ground without taking a sip and helped the old cook set a Dutch oven onto some coals he had shoveled out of the fire. He then shoveled out another load of coals and dumped them onto the oven’s lid, spreading them out evenly with the shovel.

  As Groot straightened, his knee joints popping, he spit tobacco juice into the edge of the fire.

  “You might want to ride into Spanish Fort, I reckon, and get yourself another bath.” Groot wiped the juice from his lips with his dirty shirtsleeve.

  Tess found her cup, took a sip, and smiled.

  “Why bother till Dodge City?”

  He shrugged. “I just figured . . .” But did not finish.

  “Oh.”

  Tess had not really done much contemplating since she had joined the herd at Dunson’s Corner. You did not do much thinking on a trail drive. Up before light, eating what passed for breakfast, hitching the team, then following Groot’s chuck wagon to the noon camp. More work. Some food. Back into the wagon and rolling across this flat patch of earth till the night camp. She was close to Mathew. Maybe that’s why she had decided to drive the hoodlum wagon. To be close to her husband and close to her sons. She was close, but they were all distant. Especially Mathew.

  And now she wondered. This close to the Red River. This close to . . .

  “How many years has it been?” she heard herself ask.

  Groot studied her a bit. “Since . . . Dunson?”

  Tess shook her head. “Since his last drive with you?”

  He shrugged. “Five, six years. Thereabouts. Somethin’ like that.”

  Tess smiled. “Six. That’s right. I remember. Caldwell.”

  “Sounds right.”

  “Did he . . . did Mathew . . . did he . . . ?”

  The old cook understood. “Ever’ time.” He spit again. “We’d come to Spanish Fort. Usually, he’d ride out then. Send the boys to town for a whiskey or somethin’, and he’d go yonder way.” He motioned toward the east. “Or we’d have to wait on account the Red was floodin’, or there’d be another herd or two ahead of us, so we’d have to wait to cross the river. He’d just ride out that way alone. Never said nothin’. But me and Laredo and Joe . . . we always knowed. Never been there myself. But . . . well . . .”

  He busied himself with the cookware for a moment, then straightened and looked at Tess.

  “He ever talk to you ’bout it?”

  “No,” she said.

  “You reckon he talks to Dunson?”

  Her head shook, and she shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  He checked the Dutch oven, but did not open the lid nor add more coals. “Never saw much reasonin’ to it my ownself. Visitin’ a grave’s one thing, I reckon, but talkin’ to the dead, tellin’ some person long gone what you been doin’, askin’ ’em how they’s doin’, just don’t see no sense to that at all. The dead don’t care what you been a-doin’ with yourselves. You reckon?”

  She drew in a deep breath and slowly let it out. “I don’t see Mathew telling Thomas Dunson how he has been spending the past year, Groot. Do you?”

  “No, ma’am. What you reckon he goes there for?”

  She sighed. “To remember.”

  Groot grunted, continued with his work.

  Another sip, and she started to ask Groot Nadine a question, but the sound of a horse’s snort and the squeaking of leather turned their attention to Mathew Garth as he rode the bay into the camp. He swore underneath his breath as he dismounted, wrapped the reins around a rope that had been strung up between the two wagons.

  “Want some coffee, Mathew?” Groot asked.

  “Where’s supper?” Mathew demanded.

  “Criminy, Mathew, we just set up camp. It’ll be ready directly.”

  “You two get to it.” He helped himself to a cup from the back of Groot’s wagon and walked to the fire, where the big pot rested on a tripod.

  “I got ’em peaches,” Groot said as he tipped the pot to fill Mathew’s cup.

  “Thought I’d fix the boys a cobbler. For Tom, mostly. Figured it was right about his birthday an’ all. Might’ve missed it, though. And the boys. And you . . . well . . . you think they’d like that, Mathew? I know—”

  “I don’t give a damn, Groot. Just get some food in their bellies in a hurry.”

  He swallowed some coffee, swore, dumped the rest of the liquid onto the dirt, pitched the cup into the dirt, and stormed back to his horse as Laredo Downs rode in.

  “Four men night-herding,” Mathew told Laredo as he tightened the cinch on his saddle. “Four-hour shifts.” Staring, Laredo did not dismount until Mathew had mounted his horse and trotted off toward the herd.

  Tess frowned. She could see the hurt in the old cook’s face.

  “Coffee ain’t had time to cook hardly, so that’s why it ain’t so strong. But . . . I swan . . . Mathew . . . he was always partial to peaches. And Tom . . . I figured . . . You reckon . . . must be nigh abouts Tom’s birthday. Don’t you reckon?”

  “I don’t know what day it is, Groot,” she said. That much was true, but she had to think Tom’s birthday had come and gone weeks ago, back down the trail. She hadn’t
even thought about it.

  “I swan . . .” Groot sighed.

  She wanted to reach over and pat his hand, but knew better. Groot had his pride. So did Tess’s husband. So did Tess.

  “He’s changed,” Laredo said as he found a cup.

  “No . . .” Groot picked up the cup Mathew had dropped and put it in the basin. “It’s just . . . well, there’s just a lot of pressure . . . to get this herd in . . . to . . .”

  “Hell, Groot.” Laredo walked to the coffeepot. “Wasn’t there pressure the year after that first drive, when he had to do it himself? Or in ’72, after that bad winter? Or the year later, when the banks and railroads and practically everybody was goin’ bust? Or durin’ the bad drought that time a few years back? Wasn’t it you and him himself who now thinks he’s God A’mighty . . . wasn’t it both of you who said that any cattle drive’s a gamble? He’s changed, I tell you.”

  Groot Nadine had no answer.

  “Come on, Groot.” Tess forced a smile. “Let’s get supper started.”

  * * *

  She made a point of telling Groot that the peach cobbler was delicious. It was no lie, either. She kept waiting for Mathew to ride back into camp, but he had stayed out, taking the first shift riding around the herd. She overheard Joe Nambel tell John Meeker Jr. that, knowing Mathew Garth, and as crazy as he was getting, the boss man might stay out all night.

  “Be fine with me,” Lightning said. “He’s crazier than a loon.”

  Tess gave Lightning a hard look. He saw it, but ignored it.

  Tom, drinking his third cup of Groot’s coffee, rose quickly.

  “Why don’t you just shut that big mouth of yours, brother?”

  “Why don’t you make me?”

  Now Tess stood. “Stop it. Stop it, both of you. All of you. Your father . . .” She glanced at the others eating. “Your boss. He’s not mad. But you’re all about to drive me . . . to Bedlam!”

  * * *

  Darkness came. She helped Groot and Joey Corinth with the dishes, got the coffee ready for tomorrow’s breakfast, and looked at the cup and plate Groot had fixed for Mathew—for whenever, if ever, he rode back to eat and sleep. Tess pulled the scarf from around her neck and used it to cover the food. Night had not cooled the air, and flies still buzzed around camp.