Winged Colt of Casa Mia

by Betsy Byars

  “I can see that.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  I sighed, and even that hurt my shoulders. “What I’ll do is ride out this morning and find them.” I made it sound easier than it was. In my condition even lifting the saddle wasn’t going to be a cinch.

  “I’ll go too,” Charles said.

  “Charles, look, I think you’d be better off staying here.”

  “But I want to go. I want to help.”

  “I know that.” The plain truth was that Charles hadn’t caught on to riding. He’d tried—I’ll give him that—but he just hadn’t gotten the hang of it. He was always yelling proudly, “Look at me, Uncle Coot,” and I’d look just in time to see him bounce out of the saddle or something.

  I said, “Well, Charles, I’d like your company, but there’s only one horse and that’s Stump, and—”

  “I could ride behind you.”

  “—and I’d make better time alone.”

  He ducked his head and said, “Oh, well sure. I should have thought of that.”

  “Let’s get some breakfast.”

  I went into the house, changed my clothes, and scrambled some eggs. We ate without saying anything. Charles kept getting up from the table and going to the window to see if the horses had come back. I don’t think a bite of food went into his mouth the whole meal.

  After breakfast I saddled Stump, mounted, and sat there. For the first time I knew how that horse felt, because right then I could have sat in the saddle looking down at the ground for about ten hours, not moving once.

  “Good luck, Uncle Coot,” Charles called. He was on the porch, watching us with one arm wrapped around the post.

  “Right.” I finally got Stump to take a few steps.

  “Good luck!”

  I nodded to him—I would have waved if I could have—and very slowly Stump and I set off.

  There’s something about this land that always stays the same. I thought about that as I rode. A lot has happened here. A lot of people have come and gone—Mexicans, traders, Comanches, ranchers, outlaws—but they didn’t change the land. It’s just too big, I guess, too hard. It’s the kind of land, though, where a colt could disappear without leaving any more of a trace than the people.

  It was a long morning. I came back to the ranch about noon with Clay and two other horses, and Charles was waiting right there on the porch where I’d left him. His face, when he saw I didn’t have the colt, got a little tighter-looking.

  “Didn’t you even see Alado?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He paused, swinging one foot out over the steps. “Would you tell me if you had?”

  He looked at me, and I knew he wanted to know if I had found the colt dead. I said, “When I find him, dead or alive, you’ll know about it.” And I saddled Clay and rode off again.

  “Good luck, Uncle Coot,” he called.

  “Right.”

  By the end of the week he was still calling “Good luck” as I rode off, but luck was running out. I had gone over my ranch and most of the land beyond, and I had found every horse and colt but Alado.

  I was keeping my eye on the sky now, watching for vultures more than anything else. I found myself thinking about a scene in an old movie called The Red Pony. In this scene vultures flew down and ate the dead pony. The way they did that was to tie strips of raw meat onto a dummy pony. Then they got some real hungry vultures and let them loose, and the vultures flew right down in front of the cameras and began to tear off pieces of flesh. It was a real-looking scene, and it kept flashing in and out of my mind as I rode.

  By now I knew I wasn’t going to find Alado. I figured he had died somewhere up in the mountains or drowned in one of the swift streams that form in the arroyos after a heavy rain. The only good thing about the situation was that Alado had been weaned, so he might not starve to death; that is, if he was still alive.

  I kept looking long after I knew there was no hope, because in my own way I felt as bad about losing the colt as Charles did. Alado hadn’t been my whole life, of course, the way he’d been with Charles, but I sure hated it that he was gone.

  There was one other thing too. Charles had a lot of confidence in me, in the fact that I would find the colt. He kept saying over and over, “You’ll find him. I know you will,” and I could see he believed it. A couple of times I said, “Look, maybe I can find him, but more likely I can’t, Charles.”

  He would always answer, “You can. Uncle Coot, you can do anything.”

  Finally, though, I had to give up. I didn’t say anything, but one morning at the time I usually saddled Clay and went off, I started fixing the fence instead.

  Charles came running out and cried, “Uncle Coot!”

  I said, “What?” I looked at him but I didn’t stop working.

  “Aren’t you going out to look for Alado?” He paused, and I couldn’t see his eyes because the sun was shining on his glasses. To tell you the truth I was glad of it.

  I stopped what I was doing and said, “Charles, look, I want to explain something to you.”

  “Aren’t you going?”

  I thought suddenly how I must have looked standing there—not a big man, dusty, scarred face, leaning to favor my bum hip. I wondered why he couldn’t see me like I was. He had told me once the first time he ever saw me was in the movies, and I was leaping a forty-foot canyon. I reckon an impression like that stays with a boy.

  I rubbed the scar on my cheek. “Now, listen to me, Charles,” I said.

  “Are you going or not?”

  I paused and let my breath out in a low sigh. Then I said, “No.”

  He shifted and the glare left his glasses, and I could see his eyes then. They had a blank look as if he hurt too bad to understand what was happening.

  “Charles, I’m not giving up because I don’t want to find the colt. Don’t think that. It’s just no use. I’ve gone over every mile of ground ten times and—”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “If I thought there was any way in the world to get Alado back I would be out there every day. It’s been over two weeks, though, and no trace of him. You’re smart enough to know what that means.”

  He kept looking at me for a moment, and then he turned away. “Wait a minute, Charles, I’m not through.” He stopped, but now he was looking at the mountains instead of me. I said, “If there was any way to get the colt back I would. Now that’s the truth.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  I said, “I know what the colt meant to you, but you’re too bright a boy to hope for the impossible.”

  “It’s not impossible for you,” he said in a low voice. He looked at me. His voice rose. “Anyway, you don’t have any idea what the colt means to me.”

  I looked into his eyes. I thought of myself when I was ten years old, and my grandad, who I was living with, led my horse Sandy away and sold him. I ran after my grandad that day and struck him and tried to pull the rope out of his hands, and finally they had to lock me in the corncrib. I can still remember yelling and throwing corncobs at that locked door.

  Charles said, “Can I go now?” He started digging up dust with one foot. “I’ve got something to do.”

  Without waiting for me to nod, he started walking toward the house. I let him go. When I went in for lunch the first thing I saw was that all his notebooks and papers about Alado had been put away. The table where he kept them was cleared and pushed against the wall. The Polaroid pictures of me and him and Alado had been taken from the mantel.

  I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t find the right words. We sat down, ate, and I went back to work. Neither of us said much of anything for the rest of the week. And when we did start talking we just said things that needed saying like, “Pass the beans,” or, “I need some help with the pump.” Neither of us mentioned the colt.

  Time kept passing and I kept thinking that things would get back to normal before long. But it didn’t happen. I think Charles wrote
his mom the first of September and asked if he could leave the ranch and go back East to school. I don’t know for sure he did that—he wouldn’t have told me about it anyway—but one day he got a letter from his mom that made him look like he didn’t feel good.

  I said, “Any news from your mom?”

  “Nothing special,” he said.

  “How’s her shoulder?”

  “Fine. She’ll probably be sending for me before long.”

  “Sure.”

  Without looking at me he added, “But I guess I’d better go ahead and start school here, just in case.”

  “Sure.”

  The canyon between us was wider than anything I ever jumped in the movies, and it would have taken a better stunt man than I ever was to get over it.

  Something Wrong at the Minneys’ Again

  IT WAS THE LAST of September and Charles was in school. This left me on the ranch alone now during the day, which was what I had wanted when Charles first came. But for some reason being by myself didn’t make me feel as good as I had thought it would.

  I was saddling Clay one morning when I looked up and saw Mrs. Minney’s truck coming up the road.

  It was about nine o’clock in the morning, and she was moving like a freight express. The cloud of dust behind her shot straight up in the air and stayed there.

  The truck made a half turn in front of the house, skidded in the dust, and came to a stop. I could see that Mrs. Minney was really upset this time, because it took her four tries to get the door open.

  I hurried over and said, “Let me do that for you, Mrs. Minney.” I put out my hand and she struck at it through the open window.

  “Don’t you touch my door!”

  I drew back and waited. She tugged the handle around and finally kicked the door open with her foot. Then she got out of the truck and stood looking at me without saying a word. Her face didn’t have any more give to it than hardened dough.

  I thought about this black steer my grandad used to have that got bogged down in a quicksand stream once. My grandad and me tried to pull him out, but we couldn’t. He was stuck too deep. There wasn’t any danger of him sinking lower and drowning though, so we left him overnight and came back the next morning with the mules. We knew in advance he was going to be mad because he was always bad-tempered, and standing overnight in quicksand wasn’t going to improve him any. We roped him, pulled him out with the mules, and cut him loose. When he got to his feet he stood there glaring. Right before he started after us his eyes were as savage as anything you ever saw in your life. They looked a lot like Mrs. Minney’s eyes right now.

  Mrs. Minney reached out her finger and poked me in the chest. “You ought to be whipped,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Whipped!” she shouted. “You ought to be whipped and run out of town.”

  “What are you talking about, Mrs. Minney?”

  “You think you can get away with anything, treat people and animals any way.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Huh!”

  “No, I really don’t.”

  “Ho!”

  “Mrs. Minney, if you’d just calm down and explain.”

  “Ha!” By this time she had me backed up against the side of the house, and her finger had almost poked a hole in my chest. I never saw such a mad woman. “You don’t fool me,” she said.

  “But Mrs. Minney, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I really don’t. You probably won’t believe me, but I’m as dumb as that old horse over there.” I pointed to Stump.

  She looked from Stump to me. “At least,” she said coldly.

  I sighed. “Now just start at the beginning, Mrs. Minney, please.”

  She folded her arms and looked at me. Her eyes were real narrow. “Well,” she said, “last night Frank and I went to bed early. He had been painting all day and I had been getting soil samples from caves and we were tired. It was about twelve o’clock and we were lying in bed, listening to the wind—did you ever hear such a wind? And then, just when the wind reached a peak, there was a terrible, ear-splitting crash on our tin roof.”

  “A crash?”

  “The most terrible racket I ever heard. Mr. Minney and I sat up in bed and looked at each other. He said, ‘Something’s on our roof.’ My heart stopped. We listened a minute more and he said, ‘It’s a cougar. A cougar has jumped onto our roof from the mesa and—”

  “I have never seen cougar around here, Mrs. Minney,” I interrupted. “It couldn’t have been that. There are bobcats sometimes, but they wouldn’t make a hard sound like you’re describing.”

  “Don’t try to be smart with me, hear? Frank heard the noise and he thought it was a cougar and I heard it and it sounded like a cougar to me too. You, who didn’t hear a thing, are now becoming an expert on it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, if you don’t keep quiet, I’ll just go into town and find the sheriff. I imagine he’ll listen without giving me a lot of unnecessary talk about bobcats.”

  “I won’t say another word.”

  She gave me a hard look before she continued. “So Frank said he would go and see if he could get the cougar off the roof, but I said, ‘No, if anybody goes after the cougar, it had better be me,’ and finally he agreed.”

  “I imagine so.”

  “I got the broom and the rifle and the flashlight and went out the back door. All this time there was such a clattering on the roof you wouldn’t believe it.” She began to wring her hands. “I was shaking like a leaf. I couldn’t even push the button on the flashlight, Mr. Cutter.” She began to wring her hands harder than ever. “And then the moon came from behind a cloud and I looked up on the roof and I dropped the flashlight and the rifle and the broom.”

  “What was it, Mrs. Minney?”

  “Because there on my roof—” She broke off to get her breath.

  “Yes, Mrs. Minney?”

  “There on my roof—”

  “Mrs. Minney, what was on your roof?”

  She looked at me. “The winged colt.” And when she said that, she reached out and poked my chest so hard I thought there would be a place left in my skin for the rest of my life, like a hole I have in my leg where a steer horned me.

  “The winged colt?”

  She nodded.

  “But that couldn’t be. Mrs. Minney, the colt was lost in a storm in August and we haven’t seen him since.”

  “He was on my roof last night.”

  “But, Mrs. Minney—”

  “He was on my roof last night, and as soon as I saw him I called Frank, and Frank said that one of us was going to have to climb up and carry him down.”

  I was so stunned I couldn’t speak.

  “What appeared to have happened, Mr. Cutter,” she went on, “was that the colt was over on the mesa, and during the wind storm he got blown onto our roof. He was pathetic, scared as a rabbit. I said to Frank, ‘Well, if anybody’s going to climb up there it better be me since I’ve been climbing cliffs for two months now.’”

  “And he agreed.”

  She nodded. “So we got the ladder and I started up. A roof is not as pleasant a place as you’d think, I can tell you that. But I inched over to where the colt was and I grabbed. For some reason, Mr. Cutter, even though I slipped over easy as a snake, it scared him. And then—I tell you, Mr. Cutter, it makes my heart stop to think about it even now—and then those wings came out and the colt flew off the roof. It was awful. He flew to the ground and I, having no wings, just fell right off like a sack of grain and lay there for twenty minutes.”

  “And the colt?”

  “He was fine. He landed about twenty feet from the house.”

  “Where is he now?” I said quickly. “Do you know?”

  “By this time I was able to get up and go in the house,” she continued. “I got an apple and came back and held it out to the colt. He came over in the light and he was pitiful, Mr. Cutter, half starved. I could count hi
s ribs.”

  “But where is he now?”

  “Later I said to Frank, ‘I should think that man’—meaning you—‘would take better care of his animals than this. I should think he would look after his colts and not let them fly all over the countryside scaring people out of their beds!’”

  “Mrs. Minney, where is the colt now?” By this time I was ready to take her and shake an answer out of her, like my grandad did to me when I was a boy and got a nickel caught in my throat—just turned me up and shook until it plopped out in front of everybody in church. “Where is the colt?”

  She looked at me. “The colt is in my barn.” She held up one hand. “But before you come get him, I want some assurance that this sort of thing is not going to happen again. Frank and I need our sleep at night. We cannot be crawling up on roofs to get colts in the middle of the night and then have them flying around the yard like birds.”

  “Yes’m.” I wasn’t going to give her an argument about anything now.

  “And so I’m going to ask for your promise that this is not going to happen again.”

  “I promise.”

  She looked at me hard, and then she nodded. “I’m going to give you one more chance, Mr. Cutter. I just hope I won’t regret it.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Well, then, you can come get the colt this afternoon.” She started walking back to the truck.

  “Mrs. Minney, one thing before you go.” She turned and looked at me. “Just thank you, Mrs. Minney, that’s all.”

  “Huh!”

  “No, I mean it. Charles has had a bad time over this. He cared a lot about that colt.”

  “Too much, if you ask me.”

  “Yes’m, and he sort of blamed me for what happened.”

  “Well, I should think so.” She looked at me. “Of course it’s none of my business, but that boy’s mother ought to be taking care of him.”

  “I know that.”

  “An uncle is no substitute for a mother.”

  “Yes’m.”

  She looked at me again. I thought her eyes could see all the way through me. “Still,” she said, “I guess you’re better than nothing.”

  “Well, I’m trying to be.” She got into the truck and looked at me while she was turning the key. I said, “Thank you again, Mrs. Minney. I really mean it.”