by Judy Alter
There'd be a catastrophe of some kind so that one of their riders was out of the show, and Papa would volunteer me. Buffalo Bill would say, "Oh, yes, I've heard the president speak of her," and I'd ride in the grand parade, rope a wild steer, bow to the audience. Other times Annie Oakley would seek me out to tell me how wonderful life was in the show arena. "But you're married," I would always say, and she'd reply, "Sometimes I wish I weren't. There are so many handsome men in the show." And then, at her urging, I'd see Buffalo Bill about a job, and soon I'd be riding in the show, with handsome laughing men beside me, all of them looking like Walt Denison.
And then reality would set in, and I'd find myself sitting on a hillside, staring at the prairie, and I'd hear the bell clanging, which meant that Mama wanted me to help start supper, or Papa wanted me for some chore in the barn.
The sameness of my days stretched before me unbearably, and I longed for excitement.
Chapter 3
Papa hired a new hand. His name was Billy Rogers, he was part Cherokee, nineteen years old, with a big bashful grin and a shock of hair that fell into his eyes no matter what he did.
I discovered him on one of those evenings after supper when I'd gone to sit on the corral fence and watch the horses while I thought about the world and my place in it. I'd spent the summer reading all of Mama's books—Tale of Two Cities, which I thought bloody and awful and could barely finish, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, which made me furious, and Stendahl's Red and the Black, which I loved. I'd heard there was a new novel about the West—-The Virginian—and I pestered Papa to get it for me, but he hadn't yet, and anyway, I was about read out for a while.
I sat on the top rail and hooked my feet over the next rail down, even though I was wearing a calico skirt and white shirtwaist—Mama insisted I get out of my split skirt and into a proper dress for dinner every night, though Papa didn't give a hoot'n a holler what I wore. Anyway, I folded the skirt around my knees and sat, my back to the corral, looking out over the prairie.
Suddenly I heard a shout: "Bring 'er on!"
A galloping horse appeared, headed toward Billy, who stood at the far end of the corral, out from the fence a bit. When the horse was almost up to him, he threw a huge loop. The rider spurred his horse on, through the loop, before it settled gently around both horse and man. I'd never even imagined that anything like that was possible.
"Wow!" I said, not even realizing I was talking aloud.
Billy whirled to look at me, the rope now slack in his hand. "I didn't know you were watching," he said, walking toward me with the most bowl egged gait I'd ever seen. His legs made Papa's look stick straight. Up close, I could see that he wasn't really handsome, not like Walt Denison, but there was something warm and wonderful about his face.
"I didn't mean to bother you. I just came out to sit."
He looked at me a minute, and then said softly, "Good place for that. Jake and me, we were practicin'." He nodded his head toward the mounted cowboy, whose horse now stood quietly a few feet away.
"How'd you learn to do that?" I asked.
"Practice," he said. "Lots of practice."
I wondered what Sam would do if I tried to make him run through a loop. "Did you have to train the horse?"
He grinned again. "It's my horse. But no, a horse will just generally keep going if you spur him." He turned away, then looked back at me. "Come on," he said.
Without a moment's hesitation, I jumped down from the fence and stood watching while he built his loop again and then laid it out behind him in a great circle. When he threw it, I could see from the motion of his arm that the rope was very heavy. But it sailed through the air to form an up-and-down loop a few feet in front of me.
"Go on. Walk through it."
I hesitated, looked at the rope, then at him again.
"The horse did it," he laughed. "You can, too."
Well, I wasn't about to be outdone by a horse! Head up, I marched toward the loop—afterward I thought I must have looked like someone marching to an execution, but I wasn't sure that old rope wouldn't whack into me. It didn't. I walked through it just like I was out for a Sunday stroll. In fact, I liked the idea so much, I walked through it again.
"You should be in the show ring," I told him.
"I aim to," he answered, and let his rope fall.
It was pure dark now, and I could barely see him. Still, I was awkwardly aware that I was standing in front of him, and that he was still holding the rope but looking at me.
"I can rope some," I said softly. "Papa taught me."
"Papa is Burns," he said matter-of-factly, as though wanting to be sure he had it right. "Not many gals rope." It was another statement of fact.
"No," I said, "not many." Then, though I don't know what possessed me to say it, I went on, "I roped a wolf for Theodore Roosevelt once."
"Roosevelt? The president?"
"Uh-huh. On a wolf hunt with Catch-'em-Alive Abernathy."
"Must've been some loop," he said, and a grin split his face.
"I was lucky, I guess." Why was I bragging to this hired hand who could rope circles around me, literally? "I have to go in now. But thanks for the demonstration." I turned to leave.
"Anytime," he called after me. "Maybe we can get us a contest or something. I might learn something from you."
"Sure," I called. "Anytime." I floated back to the house. Suddenly life on the ranch didn't seem near so hopeless or dull.
"Thomasina, what have you been doing outside so late? It's been dark thirty minutes, and I've worried about you." Mama stood at the door waiting, and I had the feeling she'd been pacing, maybe even pestering Papa to go look for me.
"It's all right, Mama. I've been talking to the new hand Papa hired."
"Rogers?" Papa asked. "Seems to be a good man. Works hard, always in good spirits. I like him."
"So do I," I said softly.
"Thomasina, don't be looking at cowboys," Mama said in a half-joking tone. "They'll break your heart." Then she looked at Papa, but he pretended not to see.
If Mama had already gone to bed, I probably would have told Papa about Billy and the loop he threw and how I'd stepped in and out of it. But I didn't—and when Papa found me stepping in and out of loops a couple of days later, it was almost a disaster.
* * *
I was standing a few feet from Sam, having just brushed him down after a long ride, when I heard a quiet command:
"Stand still."
"What?"
"Stand still," Billy repeated. He had come silently up just inches behind me, his rope whirling and whirling.
And then his loop settled down over both of us and danced in a circle. This was different from the up-and-down loop he'd thrown the other night. This time the rope went over our heads, more like it did when I roped a steer. But when I roped, the object was always to pull the rope taut around the animal, and for just a moment there I panicked—expecting a good rope burn when the loop tightened around me and, even more embarrassing, expecting to be pulled up tight next to Billy. But the loop stayed at least a foot from me. Circling and circling, it had a vitality that seemed to give it a life of its own. Sometimes it rose to shoulder height, and then again it dropped to our knees. Slowly I turned my head to look at him and saw that his arm, waving that loop, was barely moving so that it did indeed appear that the rope was circling of its own volition. The only giveaway about Billy was the grin on his face.
"I'll put it real low," he said, "and you can step out of it."
The rope fell to my ankles in a constant circle that never wavered, and I stepped over it. Billy kept it spinning and in a second asked, "Want to step back in?"
"Of course," I answered, and once again stepped over the spinning circle. "Billy, that's amazing. How do you do it?" And then the most important question: "Can you teach me to do it?"
"I reckon," he said.
We stood there a long minute, grinning at each other, the rope still doing its sensuous circle, and we might have stoo
d longer if the spell hadn't been broken by a command given much louder than Billy's "Stand still."
"Rogers! You let my daughter go!"
Like an animal that had been shot, the rope fell lifeless to the ground at my feet. I stepped over it, and Billy began to coil his rope as Papa stormed toward us.
"You had her prisoner!" Papa's face was red, his features contorted into a scowl, his fists clenched. Clearly, he wanted to hit Billy, but he was restraining himself. "Pack your gear. Your pay'll be waiting for you."
Without a word, Billy shook the stray lock from his forehead and turned to go. Later he told me he would have left the ranch without ever explaining, ever defending himself. "I won't plead for a job," he said.
"Papa," I cried, "wait a minute! Billy was showing me a trick. I stepped into that loop of my own free will."
"A trick?" Papa's voice was faint as he echoed my words. "That was a trick?" Then his voice grew a little firmer and he said suspiciously, "Where'd you learn to do that?"
"Just learned," Billy said. "Fooled with a rope since I was knee-high to a grasshopper." As he talked, he uncoiled a small rope from his belt and built it into a tiny loop that twirled and danced in front of him.
Papa watched mesmerized. "You really are good!" he finally said.
"Thanks." Billy never looked up, his eyes intent on that circle in front of him, though I knew he looked down not from a need to watch the rope but from shyness.
"Billy's going to teach me," I said.
"Fine, fine," Papa blustered. Then, with words that came hard for him, "Sorry about the misunderstanding. You understand... my daughter and all."
"Sure," Billy replied. "I understand."
And I think he did.
My lessons began that day and lasted all winter, whenever the weather was good enough to be out in the corral.
Spinning a loop took a different kind of a rope than we used just catching an old steer out on the prairie.
Billy showed me a cotton rope, about a half inch in diameter, with a whipped end. "The other end is the eye, the honda," he said. "And what goes from the hand to the honda is the spoke."
Hand, honda, spoke—the new terms danced in my brain. I learned that you could spin a rope clockwise or counterclockwise, and that tricks came from combining flat and vertical loops at various angles. I liked being the object of Billy's spinning tricks as much as I did building my own loops.
My first attempts were pitiful. I began with a short rope for a small loop that I could whirl in front of me, like the ones Billy always spun while he talked to someone. I accused Billy of giving me different ropes, because my loops had none of the life his did. They hung in the air a minute and then fell limp.
"It's in the wrist," he said, but he could explain no further. Spinning a rope was instinct for him—and hard work for me. But gradually my loops stayed alive longer and longer, and before I knew it, I was spinning and talking at the same time.
Mama didn't take kindly to my practice, for I had a rope in my hands almost every minute—even sitting around the stove on a winter night. "I don't see you read much," she said. "You're consumed by this roping business." There was a frown, ever so slight, on her brow, and it came from more than concentrating to see her needlework.
Papa looked up from the St. Louis paper. "Leave her be, Jess. She's learning something I bet no other girl can do."
"I see," Mama muttered, and I knew that unlike Papa, she didn't think much of this distinction. But I was determined.
I graduated to spinning a loop around the snubbing post in the corral—or trying.
"You have to throw it wider," Billy said. He rarely wasted words, and I was getting used to his taciturn ways, but I wanted to shout, "How wide? How do I throw it wider?" I threw and threw, and one day, my rope danced around the post for just a minute before it dropped. And the next day it danced longer, and pretty soon I could keep it up for a minute, even while shouting to Billy, "Look! Look! It's doing it!"
"Yeah," he said.
When I really could spin a loop around me and the post, Billy volunteered to let me throw one around him, but he cautioned that it had to be still wider. The first time I tried, the rope whacked him hard on the head, but all he said was, "Wider."
Papa was watching one day when the rope really did circle Billy for more than a minute, putting us both inside that magic circle. Trying to make a joke out of his earlier mistake, he shouted, "Tommy Jo! You let Rogers go!" We all laughed, at which point my loop fell apart.
"What," Mama asked, "good will it do you to know all this rope business?"
I knew she was thinking that spinning a rope was hardly one of the talents a man looked for in a wife, but I just said, "I like to do it, Mama. I really like to do it."
Trick roping, Billy taught me, was different from spinning. For one thing, you had to have something to rope, not just spin it around yourself. And it took a different rope, a rope made from the maguey plant. It was a stiff, hard brown rope, not at all like the soft cotton we used for spinning. The first time Billy gave me a trick rope, I felt like I had a reluctant snake in my hands. "It won't give," I complained. "I can't throw it."
"Real trick ropes are expensive, twenty dollars or so," he said, "'cause they're made by hand under water." Billy had a good trick rope that I was forbidden to touch, and one he was less special about that he allowed as how he could use to teach me some things.
The first thing he taught me was care. "Never plunge a good rope into water. You'll ruin it. Need to bring it back to life, you spray a little water on it, real light, just kind of shake it on."
The life of a rope was becoming very real to me. There was a vitality about a rope that went beyond its inanimate nature, even maybe beyond the relationship between rope and roper.
Billy let out one of his longest sentences. "In trick ropin', you got to have something to rope. You ain't quite ready for a horse, and I ain't volunteerin'."
Back to the snubbing post.
Papa was on one of his two-or three-day trips away from the ranch. "Business for Mr. Luckett," he always told us, while Mama turned away from him with a frozen look on her face. Mama was withdrawn when Papa was away, and once or twice I caught her crying into her pillow. But then when he came home, just when I would have thought her mood would improve greatly, she was usually angry with him, cross about everything from the mud he tracked into the house to the way he held his knife and fork. If she wanted him at home, why was she angry when she got what she wanted?
I wasn't too old before I figured it out, though I'm not sure how I first knew that Papa went to see another woman in Guthrie. Now that I look back on it, it must have been common knowledge, even among the cowboys, for Guthrie was small and close to home. And it must have embarrassed Mama even more than it angered her—for everyone knew that her husband wasn't satisfied with her alone.
"Mama," I asked once when I was about ten, "why does Papa go see that lady in Guthrie?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said without looking at me.
After that, I didn't ask for a long time, and Mama and I kept up the pretense that Papa was off doing business for Mr. Luckett.
Once when Billy and I were practicing our rope tricks, I said, "Papa's gone to Guthrie on business."
Billy just grinned and said, "Yeah."
"Billy Rogers, do you know where my papa went?"
"Everybody knows," he said, "but it ain't none of my business."
Suddenly angered, I retorted, "Well, it's my business!"
"I s'pose it is," he said. "I s'pose it is. But I doubt you can do much about it."
Papa came home two days later, bringing a silk scarf for Mama and a new white shirtwaist for me. "Fine trip," he said. "Made a deal to buy some Texas cattle for Luckett."
Papa, I wanted to shout, stop pretending! We know where you've been.
Mama said, "That's fine, James," as though she truly believed him. But she stared out the window as she said it. Late that night I hea
rd talk that made me know she didn't believe him.
"I will not stand for it," she said to him. They were in their bedroom with the door closed, but Mama's voice was angry enough to carry through the wall to my room next door—and that was unusual for Mama, who was always soft-spoken, usually more so in anger. "Thomasina is getting older, and—well, it's not a good thing for her to know about."
Papa chuckled, as though unconcerned about her anger. "Is that what really bothers you, Jess?"
"Yes, it is" came the frosty reply.
By now I was wide awake and straining to hear every word, though a pang of guilt assailed me for eavesdropping. It was one of the things that Papa said was not to be tolerated.
"I think you're jealous," Papa said, "and you know there's no need. What you and I have is special."
"Not special enough to keep you away from Guthrie," Mama said. Somehow I could imagine her sitting at her dressing table in her old faded wrapper, her hair let down, her hands busy applying a hundred brushstrokes.
"I have business in Guthrie," Papa said, and I could tell by his voice that he had risen from the bed and moved toward the dressing table, which was on the side of their bedroom closest to my room. "Jess, I'd rather be with you any day. You come first," he said more softly but still loud enough for me to hear.
With a gasp that startled me, Mama said, "Oh, James," and then there was silence.
I lay a long time and thought about it. I knew, at fifteen, why they had stopped talking. But I couldn't understand how Mama could be so angry at Papa—and with reason, I thought—and then forgive him so quickly. She couldn't have gotten over her anger—and she'd be just as angry the next time.
I fell asleep, every once in a while hearing a low sound from the room next door. But there was no more talking.
* * *
The Buffalo Bill Wild West Show was on what proved to be its last European tour that spring. I read in the St. Louis paper about a new scene, "The Great Train Hold-Up and Bandit Hunters of the Union Pacific." There was a locomotive—well, what looked like a locomotive—mounted on an automobile, but it had one bright headlight and it puffed black smoke, just like a real locomotive. And there were the standard acts—the attack on the wagon train, the Pony Express riders, an Indian dance. I read it and wept, I wanted so badly to be part of the show.
