by Aaron Latham
BOOKS BY AARON LATHAM
Code of the West
The Ballad of Gussie and Clyde
The Frozen Leopard: Hunting My Dark Heart in Africa
Perfect Pieces
Urban Cowboy
Orchids for Mother
Crazy Sunday: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood
SIMON & SCHUSTER
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2001 by Aaron Latham
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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ISBN 0-7432-1729-2
To Lesley—my Revelie,my Lifts Something,my Guinevere
NOTE
The Age of the Cowboy is part history and part mythology. In this respect, it resembles the Age of Arthur, where fact and fiction ruled on twin thrones. In the Arthurian legend, historic names are mixed with mythical stories and impossible adventures. Invoking this license, I chose as my heroes a man named Goodnight and another called Loving. Of course, history knows a real Charles Goodnight and an actual Oliver Loving who really founded the Home Ranch in Palo Duro Canyon, but much of what I have written about them is made up. I tried to signal their dual real and unreal natures by giving them last names from history but first names out of my imagination. My Jimmy Goodnight is as real as Arthur and my Jack Loving is as unreal as Lancelot du Lac. Another name—an especially unlikely one—is also out of the history books: the outlaw Gudanuf. And there was a real cowboy strike.
BOOK ONE
QUEST FOR LOVE
1
Late 1860s
Jimmy was seventeen years old and nervous before the dance. He was tall, skinny, and awkward. Looking out at the world through a single knothole, he saw an ugly sight in the mirror: his eye patch. He asked himself: If I was some girl, would I wanna dance with a patch like that there? His scowling reflection shook its head. But then he saw himself smile as he remembered how hard his cousin Rhoda had worked giving him dancing lessons. She had only come up to his waist. He had felt like a big old clumsy buffalo dancing with a graceful deer. After all that effort trying to learn to polka, he wondered if he would actually work up the nerve to ask a girl to polka with him. Maybe he should just ask Rhoda. But it might embarrass her, and who wants to be embarrassed? Besides, she might turn him down. He told his mind: Just shut up!
When everybody was ready, all dressed up in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes even though it wasn’t Sunday, the whole family climbed aboard a wagon dragged along by two plodding plow horses. Aunt Orlena was dressed in a long grey dress and grey bonnet. Uncle Isaac wore his baggy black suit, which was beginning to turn brown, and a black string tie. Cousin Jeff had on a black suit, too, newer than his father’s, but even baggier, bought with the expectation that he would grow into it someday. Little Rhoda and littler Naomi looked pretty in blue flour-sack dresses and pigtails. Jimmy, who didn’t have a suit, was ashamed of his butternut homespun pants and shirt, but he was proud of his new bandanna, which was fire red.
Jimmy wished the team would pull faster and stir up a little breeze. It was hot on this July night in the middle of Texas. Everybody said this summer was shaping up to be the hottest and driest in memory. Even at this slow pace, the horses were lathered. They had worked hard all day in the field and must be tired. Now that he thought about it, Jimmy figured they had earned the right to plod slowly.
The wagon followed the road that led to the dreaded Weatherford schoolhouse, but Jimmy didn’t mind because school was out for the summer. The closer they got, the more crowded the road grew, the more the little girls giggled, and the more nervous Jimmy became. When the wagon reached the school, the playground, which tonight would double as the dance floor, was already busy and noisy. Children were shouting and laughing, and the fiddles were tuning up. The sun was just setting, making even butternut look almost golden.
When Jimmy was getting out of the wagon, he tripped on something and almost fell on his face. He hated his own clumsiness. He hated the heavy clodhopper farmer’s boots that weighed him down and made his feet feel like heavy hooves. How was he going to be able to dance? He longed for the lightness of his moccasins with the long fringe trailing out behind like a kite’s tail. He could dance inthose. But they were long—
No, Jimmy told himself, don’t think about the past. It was too painful. Recalling his lost moccasins would just lead to remembering other losses, unbearable losses. Just think about here and now. But here and now was troubling, too. He couldn’t dance. Not really. Not these dances.
Rhoda and Naomi ran off to be with other little girls. Cousin Jeff slouched off to look for his friends. Aunt Orlena and Uncle Isaac moved off to join the other adults who were busy talking about rainfall and crops. Jimmy kept the plow horses company. He didn’t really fit with any group. He wasn’t quite a member of the family, wasn’t quite white in the eyes of many, wasn’t quite right either, was too big for grade school and too dumb for high school. So he talked to the plow horses.
“O Great Goddogs, thank you for pulling the wagon,” Jimmy said softly in the Comanche tongue. “I’m sorry you have to stand here. I know it must be boring, but at least there are two of you. You can keep each other company. There’s just one of me.”
Then Jimmy realized that several of the kids had noticed him talking to the horses. They were looking at him funny. Now they really thought he was crazy. He nervously started to put his hands in his pockets, but discovered that they were already there.
As the air darkened and cooled, Jimmy noticed individuals melting together into dark clumps. He saw girl clumps and boy clumps, bigkid clumps and little-kid clumps, farmer clumps and farmers’ wives clumps. Then a clump of musicians started playing a tune, and the other clumps started breaking apart and reforming.
Drawn by the music, Jimmy moved closer to the musicians: two fiddlers were seated in leaned-back wooden chairs with cowboy hats perched on the backs of their heads. They looked to be in their twenties. A young woman about the same age played an upright piano. Jimmy wondered how she had gotten it from her living room to the playground. An old man probably in his seventies was playing a harmonica.
Jimmy rocked back and forth to the music, trying to work up the courage to ask somebody to dance. By the light of a full moon— assisted by several lanterns hung from trees—he studied the couples on the dirt dance floor. There were teenage couples and middleage couples and old-age couples. And there were some mixed-age couples—fathers dancing with daughters, grandmas dancing with grandsons. He tried to comprehend the dance steps, but he just got more and more confused. The swaying couples weren’t dancing a polka—he could tell that much—but he didn’t know what they were dancing. They seemed to move their feet very fast, the same way they had seemed to talk back before he learned to understand them. The dancers were beginning to kick up a good bit of dust, which the orange moon turned into gold dust. It gilded the swaying bodies and made them look like dancing statues. Jimmy thought the dancers looked so pretty that he longed to join them, but longing was as far as he got. Frightened by the strange dance steps, he soon returned to the horses.
Still, Jimmy’s gaze kept reverting again and again to a brown-haired girl in a yellow calico dress which had some sort of design on it. He couldn’t quite make out the patte
rn in the darkness. He had seen her at school, had seen her at services at the Hard-Shell Baptist Church, had nodded to her and even said hello to her a couple of times. Like most of the girls, she was a farmer’s daughter, but he thought she was prettier than the others. He remembered that her name was Rachel.
“Should I ask her to dance?” he asked the horses in the “Human” tongue. “I mean if they ever play a polka.” There wasn’t a word for “polka” in the Human tongue so he said it in English. “What do you think?”
One of the horses flicked its tail and shifted its weight from one hind leg to the other.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
Jimmy told himself that he was not a “running-heart.” He reminded himself that he had been on the warpath and so should not be afraid of something as harmless as a young girl at a dance.
The band moved from one tune to another. Listening closely, Jimmy thought he heard a polka. Watching closely, he thought he recognized polka steps being performed on the packed earth. He saw his cousin Jeff dancing what appeared to be a polka with a horse-faced girl. He hated the idea of Jeff being braver than he was, so he started walking.
As he made his way across the playground, Jimmy tripped again. He blamed his big boots. He blamed his unhappiness. Whatever was to blame, he was not graceful on his feet. He would have to be crazy to ask a pretty girl to dance. But then everybody already thought he was crazy, so what did he have to lose? He just hoped he wouldn’t trip on the dance floor and fall on top of her. He reminded himself that he wasn’t just awkward but also ugly. His hand went up and touched the patch over his ruined eye.
And then there was that damn birthmark that made him look even uglier. He touched it, too. The mark was just a series of small purple dots arranged much like the stars in the Big Dipper, only it had a couple of extra stars in its handle. The pointer stars of the Dipper’s cup lined up not with the North Star but with his missing left eye, with his patch. The birthmark seemed to be pointing at the patch, making sure nobody missed it, not that many ever did. With his patch, with his birthmark, he would have to be crazy to think that any girl would—
“Scuse me,” Jimmy mumbled. “Wanna dance?”
Rachel, the pretty girl in the yellow dress, didn’t say anything. He couldn’t tell whether she was shy or just hadn’t heard.
“Wanna dance?” he asked louder.
She looked uncomfortable.
“No,” she said at last. “I’m sorry.”
Jimmy raced his running-heart back across the playground. He felt clumsier than ever and uglier than ever. And he even felt less white. He didn’t belong here with these people.
Standing with the horses once again, Jimmy couldn’t help thinking about Lifts Something. She hadn’t refused to dance with him. She had been willing to love him. But she was—
No, stoppit, Jimmy scolded himself. Don’t think her name. Don’t think about the past at all. How many times did he have to remind himself? Wouldn’t he ever learn?
Although he was discouraged, Jimmy felt he owed it to himself to pick out another girl, work up his courage, and ask her to dance. He wished he could see the girls better, not just whether they were pretty or not, but whether they looked sympathetic. He found his curiosity— or whatever it was—focusing more and more on a redhead with freckles. He really couldn’t see her spots or even the color of her hair in the dim light, but he had seen her at school and church and knew what she looked like. He told himself that she was much prettier than the first girl he had asked. He should have started with her. What had he been thinking of? He didn’t really know her, but everybody said she was nice. She wouldn’t hurt his feelings. This girl’s name was Sarah.
When the band played another polka, Jimmy gathered his courage and made another clumsy charge across the dusty dance floor. He didn’t trip this time, which he took to be a good omen.
“Scuse me,” he repeated the formula. “Wanna dance?”
Sarah looked embarrassed. Jimmy couldn’t think of anything else to say and didn’t know what to do. He just stood there.
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said at last.
Jimmy shook his head. He couldn’t believe it. What had happened to all her niceness? His expression asked: Why not?
“I cain’t,” she said.
“You cain’t?” he asked. His face said: Why would you hurt me?
“My daddy told me not to,” she whispered.
Jimmy turned and fled once again. So that was it. The girls’ parents had told them not to dance with the savage. They believed he was unclean. They thought he was half-heathen. They knew he was crazy because he was always talking about the biggest canyon in the world, the prettiest place in the world, the best ranching country in the world— which they figured was about as real as the Seven Cities of Gold. They didn’t want him touching their daughters. He would show them. Maybe.
Jimmy said goodbye to the horses and started walking home.
2
Fall was beautiful but hard. The leaves changed colors overhead, but on the ground the crops needed harvesting. The hay had to be mowed with hand scythes. Corn ears had to be gathered in. Worst of all, cotton, the cash crop, had to be picked, which was backbreaking work. And of course school started again. But at least the weather turned cooler in the fall and the fair came to town.
Jimmy, who had never been to a fair, wondered what it would be like. In his early years growing up in the family fort at the edge of the frontier, no fair dared to come around. Sideshow strongmen and twoheaded ladies were as scared of Indians as anybody else. Of course, there hadn’t been any country fairs in the big red canyon where the Humans lived. At fair time last year, the family hadn’t taken him because they could see that he was still more Crying Coyote than Jimmy Goodnight. They hadn’t known how he would respond to the crowds, or how the crowds would react to him. Maybe they had been a little ashamed of him. Anyway, everybody had gone to the fair but him. Back then, his aunt had stayed with him one day while his uncle took the rest of the family to the fair. The next day, his uncle guarded him while his aunt and the others went out for a good time. Crying Coyote hadn’t really understood what he was missing, but he knew he was missing something. This year, Jimmy would be going to the fair.
After church, the family changed out of their Sunday-go-to- meeting clothes and then piled into the grey wagon. Even the old plow horses seemed to be excited about going to the fair. They tossed their heads and pulled with a sense of purpose. The road got rougher and more crowded as it neared the fairground.
When Jimmy finally saw the fair from afar, he was amazed; it looked like a Human village. As he drew closer, he could see the differences: these tents were made of canvas rather than buffalo hides. Also, these canvas shelters were larger than Human tepees. But in spite of all the differences, Jimmy still felt more and more at home as he rolled nearer and nearer the tent village.
The spirit of this village on the outskirts of Weatherford didn’t seem so different from the spirit of the village in the deep canyon. This one, like that other one, was crowded with children and dogs, and rang with noisy good humor. This one, like that other one, churned up its own dust storm. Jimmy smelled the dust and the bodies of animals, the bodies of children, the bodies of adult men and women, and he smiled. Then he sneezed.
Jimmy’s Uncle Isaac passed out nickels to the children, including his adopted nephew. Each one got one. Then the kids were on their own. Rhoda and Naomi ran off hand in hand. Jeff had too much teenage dignity to run, but he shuffled away rapidly. Jimmy just stood for a while staring down at his nickel, turning it over and over, studying the shield on one side, then the big number 5 on the other. He felt rich.
Looking around for someplace to spend his new wealth, Jimmy saw that the canvas tents were arranged in a large, imperfect circle. At the center of the circle, the hub of the wheel, a crowd had gathered. From time to time, a cheer would go up from this mob.
“What’s that?” Jimmy asked, pointing
.
“Come see,” said Uncle Isaac.
Jimmy followed his uncle and aunt to the edge of the crowd at the center of the circle. Standing on tiptoe, he could see a blacksmith’s anvil in the middle of the mob. He recognized a big farmer. Well, he had seen him before, but he couldn’t remember his name. He recognized him by his size. He was a real giant. His back was bent. The muscles of his arms bulged out. His face turned red and then purple.
Jimmy heard what sounded like a gunshot, and he saw the giant stumble backward, lose his balance, and sit down hard on the ground, raising a great cloud of dust. He swore loudly, causing Aunt Orlena to put her fingers in her ears. Then Goliath started picking himself up off the ground. When he was upright, he swayed a little unsteadily on his feet and then hurled himself at the anvil again. He seemed to want to strangle the dead chunk of iron. But a skinny man wearing some sort of apron managed to get between the giant and the anvil.
“Hold your hosses,” Jimmy heard the skinny man yell. “You’ll git another turn. But first you gotta gimme another nickel. And then I gotta put in a new handle.”
“I don’t understand,” Jimmy said.
“What?” asked Aunt Orlena, who still had her fingers in her ears.
“I don’t understand,” Jimmy said a little louder. “What’s goin’ on?”
“He’s trying to pull the ax outa that there anvil,” Uncle Isaac said.
“What?” asked Aunt Orlena.
“There’s an ax stuck in that there anvil,” his uncle explained.
“Really? I wanna see.”
Jimmy worked his way through the crowd to get closer. Soon he saw the blade of an ax plunged into an anvil as if the chunk of iron were a wood stump. The ax’s handle was splintered. Jimmy scratched his head and wondered. He looked around and found his aunt and uncle standing right behind him. Aunt Orlena had taken her fingers out of her ears, but she still appeared uneasy.
