Lydia

by Tim Sandlin

  Come January, Bill located a whore not ten miles from the ranch. I have no idea how he found her. I think Bill could sniff out a willing woman like one of them French hogs on a mushroom. Saturday he rode off to the east, and Sunday he came back with a smile.

  He said, “She told me I’m the most forceful man in her experience.”

  Shadrach said, “They’re supposed to say that. It’s part of the job.”

  “But this fair flower is sincere,” Bill said. “I’ve been around, and I can tell when they lie.”

  Her name was Swamp Fox. At least, that is what the cowboys wound up calling her. She was of Kiowa-Crow mix, with maybe some Irish thrown in, and she lived in a sheep wagon up the head of Burnt Wagon Draw. Every cowboy in the bunkhouse took his turn at riding up the draw. Even Shad went the once. When he came back, I asked him how she was and he said about the way you’d expect for a woman named Swamp.

  But the others swore she was as capable a whore as any you could find in Cheyenne. They’d gather round the dining board and draw straws for the privilege of riding out there next. I guess poker only goes so far. Nowdays, whores in winter have been replaced by satellite TV.

  One evening, it came to Bill that I never took part in the straw drawing. Right there at the mess table, in front of everyone, he called my manhood into question.

  “Oly Pedersen, you are a virgin,” Bill said.

  I lied. “Like hell I am.” Had she heard, my words would have pierced Agatha to the heart.

  “We all know you’re a virgin,” Bill said. “We can tell by the way you pass water.” The six or so men around the table nodded knowingly, as if what Bill said made a lick of sense.

  He went on in this vein. “Real man’s water flows up in an arc like a rainbow. You piss straight down in the dirt.”

  “What are you doing, watching me pee?”

  “Proves you’re a virgin,” Bill said.

  The final throwdown of all this talk is I went to rut on some woman I had no desire to rut on. I know damn well I shouldn’t have. I knew at the time I was playing the fool. But it is a sad fact of human nature that an enemy’s scorn can cause you to betray those you love.

  ***

  The wind was whipping and popping, and the snow made that squeak sound under Molly Maguire’s hooves which is a sure sign of below zero. I rode the ten miles out to Swamp Fox’s sheep wagon, wondering what in hell I was doing. I mean, Billings had blocks of ill repute where naked women leaned out the windowsills of their cribs, calling to any male who went by. I’d even been in the Lucky Diamond one Christmas, for a drink. The Lucky Diamond was as palatial as any house in Egypt. It was so high class if the girls had been dressed, you’d think you was in an embassy, maybe, or a normal school back east. But I hadn’t gone upstairs. Not a once. I was saving my money and myself for Agatha. She was saving herself for me. It only seemed fair that I should approach our union as unblemished as herself.

  Besides, Agatha told me if I ever went upstairs she would cut off my tallywhacker with pinking shears. Say what you might about Agatha Ann Cox, she was spunky. She even showed me the shears.

  A quarter mile this side of the wagon, I met a young cowboy name of Wisconsin John coming my way.

  “Going in for leftovers?” he asked.

  “I’m just out for a ride,” I said.

  He slapped his thigh with his hat and whooped into the wind. The whoop was carried off almost before it left his mouth. He leaned toward me in the saddle. “Wear spurs when you mount her,” he shouted. “Without purchase, you’re liable to fall in.” Whisky John thought that was about the funniest thing he’d ever heard. I rode on.

  The sheep wagon set at the head of a long meadow in what appeared to be the loneliest place on Earth. There was no trees, no hills, no nothing but white snow, white sky, white canvas on the wagon with a black pipe drifting smoke the same color as the sky and snow. A mule was tied to the corral poles. Somebody had stacked hay underneath the wagon, but not enough to insulate proper. I’d of probably turned back if it wasn’t so cold and such a long ways home. I should have. I knew it at the time, but I didn’t. Instead I tied Molly next to the mule and knocked on the wagon door. There’s no one to blame but myself.

  Inside was warm from the firebox and a lantern there. Swamp Fox was propped on a shelf bed at the far end, eating a baked yam dribbled with honey. She licked her fingers and said, “Three dollars.”

  “I was told two.”

  “Three.”

  “I ain’t got but two.”

  She pondered calling my bluff. Nobody who had three dollars was going to ride way out here in frozen hell, then turn around and go back without spending it.

  “Show me,” she said.

  I turned out my pockets—two dollars. I wasn’t lying.

  “Two, then, but don’t expect feed for the horse.”

  She wasn’t ugly by any means—a mite fat, and she smelled like you would expect a person would who’d been rutted on a few times between baths. But her hair was shiny black, and her posture wasn’t slovenly or nothing. I’ve seen lots worse in the Billings’ cribs.

  She had a wooden bench by a pull-down table where she must of fixed meals when it was too cold to go out. Sheep wagons look like nothing from outside, but once inside, you’d be impressed at how the herders use the room. Swamp Fox must have had twenty hinges affixed to things for swinging down and up and out. It’s like being in a closet, only a big closet. Ever’thing you’d expect to find in a shack twice the size is there. The bench even had a built-in bootjack, for the convenience of customers.

  As I bent to pull my right boot off the jack, I heard a rustle like a mouse in a paper poke, and I looked under the bed into a pair of brown eyes.

  “Somebody’s under there,” I said.

  Swamp Fox made a grunt sound. It was one of those guttural noises that can be taken for yes or no or so what. An all-purpose kind of huh.

  “It’s a little girl,” I said.

  “My daughter.”

  What I saw of the little girl was all eyes and cheekbones and scrawny neck. I don’t believe she was as full-blood as Swamp Fox. Her eyes never blinked a once.

  “What’s she doing down there?” I asked.

  “Sleeping, if she knows what’s good for her.”

  I leaned in to take a better look. She had on a potato-sack dress and was lying on a ratty blanket. She had an old book in there with her, but I couldn’t read the title or tell you what language it was.

  “If you and me together break the bed, we’ll crush her.”

  “Been a lot bigger men than you on this bed, and it’s not broke yet.”

  “But what if it breaks under us?”

  Swamp Fox gave it a moment’s thought. The girl drew back a bit, as if she was afraid I might reach in and touch her. Swamp Fox said, “Evie can sit on the bench till you’re through with me.”

  “I cain’t do it with her watching.”

  “Then she can stay where she is.”

  “I cain’t do it with her listening. How old is she, anyway? Ten? Twelve?”

  Swamp Fox spoke in Crow, and the girl scooted out from under the bad, past me, and to the door.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Where you going?”

  The girl looked from me to her mother and back to me. Swamp Fox made the Plains Indians sound for Go! The girl went.

  “Is she going over to the neighbor’s to wait?” I asked. Swamp Fox laid back on the bunk and dangled her hands over her head. I said, “I know she is not, ’cause there ain’t no neighbors. Not for five miles. You got her waiting outside in the cold, don’t you?”

  “You didn’t want her here.”

  “But I don’t want her freezing outside whilst I wallow in her mama.”

  “Be quick then.”

  I put my boot back on and left. The wind caught me
right off and took my hat twenty yards south. When I chased it down and went to my horse, the little girl was crawling out from under the sheep wagon. Turned out she could speak English after all.

  She grabbed hold of my sleeve and said, “Mother will blame me if you go. She’ll say she can’t make money with me underfoot.”

  “She can’t. Not with Christian customers, anyway.”

  “Please, Mister. She’ll get rid of me if she can’t work.”

  I looked down at the little girl, crying, barefoot, wearing nothing but a potato sack. The twin muscles that ran from her nostrils to her upper lip stood out farther than other people’s. I noticed that right off.

  I dug into my pocket. “Here. I’ll pay her for taking up her time. Then she won’t blame you for lost income.”

  The girl stayed next to my horse, trying to stand out of the wind. “Mama’s a whore. Whores don’t take money for not working.” I was to find later in France that this was a complete untruth. I sailed through the whole war paying whores for not working, then pretending that they had. Whores don’t care if you use them or not, so long as you pay the price. It was just my luck for my first whore to have pride in her profession.

  I said, “Hell.” The girl was pleading with her eyes and quivering like a rabbit caught in a snare and about to be snuffed from life. “Come on back in,” I said. “It’s better to have you in there watching than out here freezing. If them’s the only choices.”

  I doubt if a young man ever lost his innocence under more unpleasant circumstances. The girl sat on the bench across from the firebox and drew pictures on the table top with a coal chunk while I mounted her mother. Swamp Fox spread her fat legs and grabbed hold of me and put me in. I tried to look away from the girl, to concentrate on the folds of Swamp Fox’s neck, but it could not be done. Not by me, anyway. Ever time I snuck glances at the girl, she was staring, unblinking, at me. If there was any blessing at all, it was that it soon ended.

  ***

  Four weeks later, I was cleaning ditches up on the Musselshell and had me a lunch of biscuits with cold gravy and coffee. There’d been a Chinook, and the aspens were going into a false bud like they sometimes do when it gets warm too soon. After my coffee, I went to water a juniper, and when the flow come, it brought a sharp pain like ground glass in my willy. I knew right then that I had been cursed.

  ***

  Shadrach said Meshach knew a cure he learned from the Crow chief White Man Runs Him. White Man Runs Him had been a scout with Custer in ’76 and gone on to elder statesman of his tribe. According to Shadrach, the old Indian’d had many cases brought on by his tastes in white women, and he’d worked out a surefire, failure-proof cure. So Shad rode up Medicine Mountain to find Meshach while the rest of us suffered in various levels of silence. There was seven of us had it, including Bill and Shad, and I only remember one who screamed when he made water. Name of Ernie; not a day over fourteen. Ernie cried himself to sleep and swore to God Almighty he would never stick his pecker in a hole again. Ever’body else just looked grim.

  Shad came back with a poultice made of ground thistles, alum, balsamroot, and a secret ingredient Meshach said would one day be the Crow’s revenge against the whites. When the entire male population of North America had a case, the Crow would cure themselves and let everyone else piss thorns.

  Whatever was the secret ingredient, it stunk to high heaven. Shad stirred the mix into a twenty-inch Dutch oven filled with spring water and horse urine, and he boiled the results on the woodstove for sixteen hours. Bill said he wasn’t about to drink horse piss, but Ernie said he’d do anything it took to put out the fire in his dick. I went along with the deal, on the theory that Meshach might be half coyote, but he wouldn’t poison his own brother. After an hour or so, Bill had to pass water, and when he came back inside, he allowed how he’d drink the stuff after all.

  Bill was reading a Police Gazette his father had sent down. The front page concerned the war between the Allies and Axis in Europe. I had more important things on my mind, but Bill read every article on the subject and pored over the photographs, some of which was gory. There was also maps and lists of which divisions were doing what.

  Bill said, “We’re missing all the fun.”

  I gave no response. Smelling the potion we were fixing to drink made Bill’s statement somewhat obvious.

  He went on as if somebody was listening. “Here we are, wasting our time on cows in Wyoming, when there’s thousands of boys no tougher than us fighting in Belgium.”

  “What’s Belgium?” asked Ernie. He was getting more and more nervous, pacing the wall like a trapped barn cat.

  “The stretch between France and Germany,” Bill said. “Men are dying there for the cause of freedom and justice for all. We should be in on it.”

  I said, “Not me. I’m not going clear to another continent to fight a war against people I don’t even know.”

  “Then you are a coward,” Bill said.

  I bristled up. “I don’t mind fighting people I do know, such as you if you don’t shut your trap.”

  “You can stay here and shovel horse manure if you want, but Shad and I are going to enlist.”

  An older cowboy named Joe spoke up. He was twenty-five and had more experience than the rest of us. “Enlist in what? The United States ain’t even in the war.”

  Bill shook his periodical. “Canada is. Says here they’ll take American boys in the Canadian army if we volunteer to fight the Jerries.”

  Shad came through the door, carrying a load of river rocks. “What’s a Jerry?” he asked.

  Bill said, “The bastards you and me are going to kill when we go to war.”

  Shad carried the rocks to the stove and dropped them into the pot of bile, or whatever it was. “Are they Indians?” he asked. “I ain’t killing Indians.”

  “They’re European.”

  I walked over to the stove and looked in at the bubbling glop. “You’re cooking rocks,” I said.

  “Heating them.”

  “Heating them for what?”

  Shad didn’t look too happy about his answer. “The cure has two parts. The medicine is only the first part.”

  “What’s the second part?”

  I’ll tell you what the second part was. The second part was clamping a scalding-hot rock up against your testicles. To this day, I have not decided if that was a legitimate piece of the Crow curing or if that Meshach was a vengeful bastard. I’ve asked doctors and all they do is laugh.

  Shad thickened the broth to about the consistency of heifer scat, and we drunk it, then we each of us used a pair of socks as oven mitts to lift a rock from the pot and hold it to our privates. Shad said if we didn’t press hard, the cure wouldn’t take and we’d be forced to run through it again.

  That bunkhouse was a picture Charlie Russell would have loved to paint—seven cowboys, sitting on their bunks, pushing red-hot rocks into their nut sacks. You may not believe me when I describe this occasion, but I have the scar for proof, and should you doubt my word, I will be happy to show you.

  Lydia said “No.”

  Oly smiled.

  Thirty minutes later, the potion kicked in and we stampeded for the outhouse. Let me tell you the truth, given a choice between Shad’s potion and a hot rock on my scrotum, I’ll take the hot rock.

  11

  No matter what you may have heard in the song, folks who live here do not swoon at springtime in the Rockies. It’s high water and mud. Rain for weeks at a time, snow into mid-June. The pretty part of spring with blue skies, green grass, and tolerable temperatures only lasts two or three days, and some years it don’t happen at all. The West is superior to ever’where else the rest of the year, but come spring, most natives take a vacation.

  I myself am different. I was never much bothered by muck. I do enjoy the rise of sap in willows and aspen. Calves and colts appear
all of a sudden like a magic show. Porcupines drop out of trees; you see birds with more color than ravens and sparrows. The yellow flowers bloom first, then the blue and violet. A man don’t have to get fully dressed to visit the tippy-toe. I began to think maybe I could sneak back up to Billings and rejoin my life with Agatha.

  Since its onset, our courtship had been conducted by the highest moral standards. We held hands; we kissed when no one was around to see. Regular kisses, not the spitty kind. She cooked me cakes and pies, biscuits and the like. Courtship in those days had more to do with food than sex.

  But then, as spring came to bear that year, Agatha’s letters took on a boldness she had not shown evidence of in the past. She discovered the worded simile as a way to express what we would be doing with each other soon as we were married, and she hinted it might not have to wait that long. Her poems changed from soul and blackness to passion and unbridled heat. She wrote me this long poem she called “I Sing the Body Electric” that consisted of a list of body parts.

  Lydia couldn’t stand it. “Wait a minute. Walt Whitman wrote that poem.”

  Oly stopped. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple rising and falling like a kiwi in his neck. He slowly turned to Lydia, as if he’d forgotten she was there behind the microphone.

  Lydia said, “Your true love stole the poem.”

  “I am relating the story of my life here.”

  “That may be true, or you might be making the whole thing up, but either way, ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ is by Walt Whitman.”

  “He must of lifted the words from Agatha.”

  “Whitman lived back in Civil War times.”

  Oly blinked real slow, the kind of blink that makes spectators hold their breath. “There wasn’t no electricity in Civil War times. That proves you are a fiend.”

  “Fiend?”

  “Now, turn the machine back on and don’t interrupt no more. I can’t remember when you’re interrupting.”

  The first day the ground cleared, Shadrach took his pallet and moved out of the bunkhouse. He said he needed to sleep where he could see stars, that all those cowboys made him feel clogged up. My belief is he wanted to get away from Bill a few hours at night. Bill had been taking advantage of the debt to the point where the others were wondering what was what. I heard a kid named Jimmy ask Shad about it once.