ReadWest

by Elmer Kelton

  Now he sat there, the old corn knife blade in his hand, ready and waiting for the moment when Rutherford walked back into the barn. Ben was sure he’d be there all night, as he usually was now that he was older, so he was surprised when a few hours later he heard the barn door open. He saw the dull light of the lantern on the rafters above him, and then the sound of the lantern being hung on a hook. It must have been close to midnight, and that worried Ben that Rutherford had some sort of a vile game in his head.

  Ben stood, his back to the stall door, the blade gripped firmly in his hands, ready for the final play.

  He listened to the light foot steps, making Ben think that Rutherford figured he was sneaking up on him while he slept. It made Ben feel good about his plan, that the bastard wouldn’t be expecting what was in store for him. Then he heard the key enter the lock and turn, and then it was opened. Ben clenched his teeth, raised his arms, and when the stall door opened he started his lunge but held back when the image before him screamed and backed away.

  “Ben, no!”

  Ben caught himself just in time to stop his swing, but it didn’t stop his mother from falling backward to the barn floor. He stood there for a moment in bewilderment, studying the fear in her eyes, the wool coat draped over her arm, and the cotton sack that lay on the floor next to her, tied in a knot on the top.

  He dropped the knife blade then leaned forward and gave her a hand and pulled her up.

  She looked at him gravely. “I knew it would eventually come to this. And I knew after you got up from the table that tonight was the night.”

  “Ma, you have to get out of here… before he finds us.”

  “No, you have to go. You have to leave.”

  “I can’t leave without you.”

  “No, Ben. You are not my only son. You don’t know what it’s like to be a mother. I can’t leave them. But I love you more than you know. I have to protect you, too, and this is the only way I know how.” She handed him his coat and the cotton sack. “There is another shirt and trousers in there, a pair of socks, and some leftover biscuits and ham. Enough to get you to Kansas City. There’s also a leather pouch in there with five dollars in it. It’s all I had, but it’s enough to get you started.”

  He accepted it slowly.

  “Go, Ben. Go now.”

  He quickly put his arms around his mother and held her tight. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I fear I’ll never see you again.”

  She pulled back and looked tenderly into his eyes. “I fear you dying more. At least out there you’ll have a chance—a chance to live your own life.”

  Ben looked out the barn door and into the night. “But I can never use his name.”

  “You don’t have to. You go out in this world as Benjamin Ruby. That’s who you are and who you’ll always be.”

  He put his hand gently on the back of her head and pulled it to his chest. He kissed the top of her head, and with more strength and courage than it took to charge Rutherford in the doorway, he grabbed the sack and his coat and walked out of the barn, not one time looking back.

  D. B. Jackson is the author of Unbroke Horses (Goldminds 2012) and They Rode Good Horses (Goldminds 2010). Unbroke Horses is Jackson’s most powerful work to date, and when his work was discovered, his editor proclaimed that they had found the “heir to Elmer Kelton’s audience.” A previous resident of the Big Sky country of Montana, he and his wife Mary reside on their ranch near Oakdale, California, where he is in the Angus cattle business and a full-time writer. www.dalebjackson.com.

  LAST OF THE COWBOYS

  The old man, his arthritic fingers twisted and knotted by the years and hard miles, fumbled with the drawstring on the small cotton sack of tobacco he held in his left hand. When he got it open, both hands shook and he scattered the tobacco, and the paper rattled in his grasp. He cursed the circumstances of age that stole the simple pleasures he once took for granted.

  He sat on the open tailgate of the Dodge pickup truck with his horse tied to the door handle and a half-grown boy standing at his side.

  “Need some help rollin' that, Clayton?”

  “Do I look like I need help?”

  “Yessir.”

  “What do you know about rolling a cigarette?”

  “I rolled my share.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen—be sixteen come the fourth of December.”

  “Do you smoke?”

  The boy shook his head and patted the bulge in the back pocket of his frayed and faded jeans.

  “Redman—I chew now and again.”

  The old man looked at the boy in the manner of one generation looking upon the next, bound for hell in a hand basket. He looked the boy over and then handed him the makings.

  “Here, give it a try—don't slobber the paper.”

  The kid tapped out a line of tobacco perfectly centered across the paper. He pulled the drawstring tight with his teeth and used only his left hand to fold the paper around the tobacco and spin off a tightly rolled cigarette he sealed with a light touch of his tongue. He pinched and twisted one end and handed the finished product back to the old man.

  When the old cowboy looked the cigarette over and gave it a nod of approval, the boy took a wooden match from his shirt pocket and drew it up the leg of his jeans. A flame blossomed at the end of the match as the kid held it up for the old man, and the old man looked upon it with no particular sign of gratitude or resentment.

  The old man nodded and took a long drag as he held the cigarette between his nicotine-stained finger and thumb. He exhaled the smoke through his nose, turned to look back at the small town behind them and then gazed out at the rise of mountains on the horizon to the west.

  He started to speak, then shook his head and took another drag from the cigarette.

  The boy limped around the back end of the pickup and stood near the horse. The horse tipped its head and the boy scratched it between its ears as he looked out across the mesquite and cholla on the dry plain before them. From the south, the wind carried upon its shifting breeze the heat of the day and the oily scent of creosote where it came in across the high desert, as it had since the beginning of time, as the old man knew it.

  The old cowboy coughed and spat. The kid turned and looked at the frail old man with an expression of some concern.

  “You riding out?”

  “Just got back.”

  “I'd like to go with you sometime.”

  “I aim to ride tomorrow morning for them mountains yonder.”

  “If you could borrow me that sorrel horse of yours, I'd ride with you a ways.”

  The old man nodded, as though his agreement was neither an endorsement nor a concession to the idea. He crossed his boots and took a deep pull on the cigarette. He ignored the long ash growing at the end of it, but the boy watched the ash like it was an accident certain to happen.

  “What happened to your foot?”

  “It ain't the foot—it's the ankle.”

  “What happened to your ankle?”

  “My daddy backed over it with his car.”

  “How'd he come to do that?”

  “I was three. He didn't see me in the driveway.”

  “They couldn't fix it?”

  “They said they could—we didn't have the money for it.”

  “Could they still fix it?”

  “They could—but it's still too much money.”

  “Damn shame, Early. Young man like you already stove up and crippled.”

  “I ain't exactly crippled.”

  “You ain't exactly not crippled neither.”

  “What time you want me here in the morning?”

  “I'm leaving at first light.”

  The old man coughed again, this time it was deep and his eyes watered.

  “You sure you're okay?”

  The old man held his hand up in a dismissive gesture and nodded.

  ****

  An hour before dawn, the old man and the kid stood
in the cool of the itinerant night air that drifted through the breezeway of the old man's barn. They saddled the horses, and the ancient scent of wood, dust and leather stirred within the boy a primeval calling over which he had no control and no opinion one way or the other. To the boy, that which drew him to the smell of the horse and the feel of the saddle was greater than that which drew him to those his own age.

  He watched the old cowboy pull the cinch tight and tie the latigo off in a Texas T knot, and did the same on his horse.

  He bridled the horse and looked up at the hardwood timbers and notched trusses, all handmade and joined with mortise and tenon joints secured by wooden pegs.

  “They don't make them like that anymore,” the old cowboy said.

  “I reckon not.”

  The old man fussed with the back cinch, and then lifted the halter from the horse's head. When he slipped the bridle over the horse's ears and the horse took the bit, the old cowboy looked across at the kid.

  “I ain't coming back tonight,” the old man said.

  “Where you going to?”

  “I aim to keep riding until I get to the end.”

  “The end of what?”

  “Everything.”

  The kid laughed an awkward laugh.

  “You ain't turning into no old senile bastard on me now, are you Clayton?”

  They both laughed.

  “You said you was going to ride to the mountains, but you don't look like you got gear for overnight.”

  “I got all I need.”

  “Well, I just figured to ride with you 'til noon or so anyway.”

  When they had both horses saddled, the old man stepped up into the stirrup and swung his leg over in a slow, pained manner, then sat upright and took in a deep breath.

  Early took two canteens off the wall pegs upon which they hung, blew the dust from the caps, and filled them from a hose in the yard. He hung one on the saddle of the old man and one on his own, and then he swung easily up into the saddle and nodded off toward the thin, gray dawn. He looked over at the old man and nodded in the direction of the open desert.

  “Vamanos.”

  They rode a long time in silence, as cowboys do; the importance of one not measured by the importance of the other, but each given to his own actions and his own thoughts. In that half-light of dawn, the air from the cool night had not yet begun to take on the heat of the day and the horses stepped out accordingly, fresh and jigging with their heads high.

  The desert vegetation lay sparse and thin upon the dry ground. The two cowboys who navigated it did so with no regard for the reason some things grew there and some did not. Dust from the hooves of the horses hung in the air close to the ground long after the horses passed over it and, when the dust disappeared, the tracks the horses made disappeared with it.

  The old cowboy scanned the horizon with a slow turning of his head as he took in the vastness of it, shoulder to shoulder.

  “It takes forty acres to run a pair out here,” the old man said. “At that, it's a stretch because there ain't no water.”

  The old man nodded in the direction of a distant windmill, its fan turning slowly against the sky that burned with the colors of morning upon the flat line of the horizon.

  “We didn't have none of them when we started out.”

  “You been here a long time, Clayton?”

  The old man nodded.

  “A long damn time.”

  The sun came full up, and with it the heat that shimmered off the desert floor and slowed the horses to a lazy walk.

  “What time you got?”

  The boy looked at his watch.

  “Half past nine.”

  “I came to West Texas a year after I quit the Wild West show.”

  “What's the Wild West show?”

  “Buffalo Bill Cody—never heard of him?”

  “I heard of him. I just never heard of no Wild West show.”

  “Well, Early, you should pay more attention in school.”

  They rode a long time, rocking easily in the saddle with no hurry about them. In the distant sky to the east, half a dozen buzzards circled high on the thermal columns that seemed to hold them suspended there, awaiting whatever it was the earth had in mind to offer them.

  “It was in 1890. I was seventeen years of age at the time. I met Bill—his real name was William Frederick Cody. I'd been cowboying for a while and made a pretty good hand. He offered me a job wrangling horses and I took it.”

  “How much did he pay you?”

  “I don't recollect—it wasn't much, but it was more than I was making stringing bob wire for the association.”

  “How long did you work for him?”

  “Well, after I'd been there a couple of months...” the old man coughed long and hard and spat, and then sat there trying to catch his breath. When he did, he continued.

  “...he offered me a job riding in the Grand Entry—now that was the top of the heap. It didn't pay no more money, but I rode in right behind Sitting Bull and a bunch of his Indians.”

  “No you didn't! I heard of Sitting Bull—I seen him in a Movietone Newsreel once at the show.”

  They rode awhile and the old man looked up at the sun that now sat a little higher in the sky, and then motioned toward the boy's watch.

  “What time you got now?”

  “Half past nine.”

  The old man looked up at him.

  “You said it was half past nine an hour and a half ago.”

  “Yessir. My watch don't run.”

  “What the hell you wearing it for then?”

  “My momma got it for me for my birthday with Green Stamps—it stopped running a week later and I didn't have it in me to say anything to her about it.”

  The old cowboy laughed, took a coughing fit and had to step down from his horse. The boy stepped down with him, took the reins of the old man's horse and watched him as he coughed and spat, and this time the spittle ran red with blood.

  “Come on, Clayton—we need to get you back.”

  The boy's voice shook and he watched wide-eyed and fearful as the old man leaned against the side of the horse with his head resting against the stirrup leather and his bony chest heaving as he hacked. The old man began to breathe easier and he turned to the boy and smiled.

  “It's hell getting old.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I'm okay. I worked the coal mines some and my lungs ain't been right since—that was forty years ago, but I'm still kicking.”

  He stood back, took the reins and gestured for the boy to come to him.

  “Take a hold of my leg and help me get back up on this horse.”

  Early stood at the shoulder of the horse and, when he took the thin leg in his hands and lifted the old cowboy into the saddle, the weight of him surprised the boy.

  “There ain't much to you, Clayton.”

  “There used to be.”

  Early stepped back up into his own saddle, and Clayton handed the boy his Bull Durham and papers.

  “Roll me another.”

  The boy did and handed him the makings while he put the cigarette into his own mouth and lit it before he handed it to the old cowboy.

  “You didn't slobber on it, did you?”

  “No sir—it's good.”

  The tobacco seemed to settle the old man and he continued talking as though there had been no interruption at all.

  “Well then, I met Annie Oakley.”

  “No sir, you did not.”

  “She took a bit of a fancy to me, me being young and all.”

  “You talking about the one that was the shooter?”

  “The same one.”

  He reached deep into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out a .44-40 casing worn thin by the years. He held it carefully in the palm of his hand for the boy to see.

  “She shot the ash off a cigarette I held in my mouth. We did it two times in the show and she gave me the casings from both shots for souvenirs. I carried this one
in my pocket ever since—it's been my good luck charm. I have another at the house just like it.”

  They rode in silence and the boy wondered exactly where along the way things that were true and those that were not became confused in the old man's mind. The old man looked up and pointed to the sky along the horizon.

  “See them clouds?”

  The boy nodded.

  “They call those cirrus clouds—they're thin and high and move across the sky on the air currents. They're a sign of good weather.”

  The boy regarded the old man with grave concern as the old man's talk skipped from subject to subject, as a flat rock cast upon the smooth waters of his mind.

  ****

  Bobby Earl Lee, not by nature given to deep thinking, questioned the purpose for this ride and his reason for being a part of it. He invited himself and that fact alone dispelled any notion he had that his presence had any significance to it at all.

  The old cowboy lifted his boot up from the stirrup and snuffed out his cigarette on the sole, and then he flipped the butt into the air.

  “You given any thought to getting that foot fixed?”

  “Yessir. When I get me a job and earn money enough, it's the first thing I aim to do.”

  “Did they give you a hard time about it in school?”

  “They still do. I can't go in for sports—they think I'm crippled. But, I ain't—I just can't move my foot right.”

  “That bother you some?”

  “No, it don't bother me none.”

  The old man looked at the kid, but said nothing. The boy looked back at him. The old man's eyes were the eyes of understanding and in them, the boy sensed they saw more than what was on the outside and he shifted uncomfortably in his saddle.

  “Well, it does bother me some, I reckon.”

  The boy leaned forward and rested his arms on the horn of the saddle as he rocked back and forth with the slow rhythm of the horse's footfalls.

  “If it did work right, I'd have a mind to ask Sue Watkins to go with me for a RC Cola sometime.”