Gabriel's Story Read online

  He drew up before them, reined the horse in, and studied Gabriel and Solomon for a moment. He was a tall man, wide-shouldered and strong, with a square jaw and pale blond highlights for eyebrows. An old Stetson was perched high on his brow, more worn around the rim and ragged than the rider’s years could have accomplished. He wore a bright red handkerchief tied loosely around his neck, and a holstered pistol rode his right thigh. The weapon sat quiet and innocuous there, and yet both Gabriel’s and Solomon’s eyes were quick to note it. Once stopped before them, the rider comfortably, with his whip coiled around the pommel of his saddle.

  “Sorry about the trespass,” he said, as if all introductions were unnecessary. “Had a stampede day before yesterday. They took us out this way, and now we’re just trying to work them back toward Crownsville.” He paused and followed the progress of the herd, his eyes seeking out the other drovers and confirming their position.

  Gabriel studied the man and horse from head to foot. The horse was long-legged and tall, a dun of stout body, quivering with muscle and energy and a deep-chested strength, a true equine specimen that made old Raleigh look an impostor, a shame to the race. The cowboy’s comfort in the saddle projected a complete confidence in himself, in the mount beneath him, in the coil of leather in his hand, and in the pistol at his side. Gabriel’s gaze focused on that weapon, his jaw dropping a little at the thought of the power contained therein, such a small thing and so deadly, so much discussed in the lore and legends of this place. Gabriel turned his eyes away when the man looked back at them.

  “Anyway, sorry about the inconvenience,” he said. “These cattle don’t mind property lines. We’ll leave you some chips for your troubles, keep your cookfires burning and that.” He smiled a half-toothed grin and waited for a response.

  Solomon seemed loath to speak to the cowboy. He watched the cattle and was slow in responding. “They stay over thataway and we’ve got no quarrel.”

  The man nodded. “Fair enough.” His gaze fell on the broken plow. He studied it with an interest that made him lean forward over the horse’s neck. The horse cocked its head and pawed the ground. “Shhh,” the cowboy whispered, calming it. He looked up as if to speak but paused, looked past them at the sod house and out over the newly tilled fields, as yet devoid of crops. A thought passed over his face, troubled his brow for a second, then vanished. “I guess I’ll be getting back at it. I wish you folks the best of luck.”

  Solomon accepted the wish with a nod but shrugged to question its power. “Thank you much, only it’s not luck. We find the Lord provides.”

  The cowboy found this amusing. “Yeah, that’s what they keep telling me. But I’ve not seen any sign of it yet.” Solomon looked up at him with a stony countenance Gabriel had not seen before. The cowboy, whether avoiding his gaze or for some other reason, looked at Gabriel and smiled. With that, he spun his horse and spurred him into a gallop.

  They watched him go. As he reached the herd, the man picked up his work where he’d left it, his whip once more snapping like gunfire. The cattle seemed endless in number, pouring over the hill from which they’d appeared and by now topping a distant rise and moving off toward Crownsville.

  “Can’t say I care for cowboys,” Solomon said. “They a rough bunch usually, no courtesy for decent folk. If we’d planted that field instead the othern, they’d have just trampled our crops to naught.” He paused, thought it over, and concluded, “Naw, I wouldn’t trade places with em for nothing.” He turned and walked back toward the house.

  Gabriel wasn’t so sure. He spoke quietly, so that Solomon wouldn’t hear him: “Don’t look so bad to me.” He watched the cowboy’s progress for as long as he could, something in the motion of it drawing him in, the freedom, the control and power of it all, man and horse and beast in a struggle of wills and muscle and horns and gun. Solomon called him to hitch the mule, and the boy turned reluctantly to the work.

  IT WENT JUST AS SMOOTHLY AS THEY’D PLANNED. The night before, the five men had camped beside a shallow river. They kept a small fire and ate quietly before it. A light rain fell, barely a mist, but enough to keep the men hidden beneath the brims of their hats, collars pulled up and heads cradled between shoulderblades.

  The next morning was clear, and the men broke camp and rode out before first light. The horses were just where they’d been told they would be. They spent the morning hours rounding them up, pulling them in from the great basin they occupied, unguarded. They worked fast, as men will whose actions can be viewed by an eye ten miles in the distance. The Scot went at it particularly well, ranging out in a wide periphery of the herd and bringing in the stragglers, sparring with them, taunting them, and then tricking them each time into his chosen direction.

  By mid-morning they’d grouped a handsome herd, some thirty head of every description: paints and bays, sorrels and roans. Few of them were branded, and those that were bore brands as varied as their number. By early afternoon, the five men were driving the horses before them at a trot, dead north. The vanguard ate up the miles of grassland as if they were hungry for the motion, in love with it, as if they felt this forced march to be their own dash for freedom and cared little about the ridden beasts that followed them.

  The Scot rode up close to the black man and offered a joke about the ease of this venture. If the black man found it amusing, he didn’t show. He kicked his horse up and pressed the herd harder.

  They were three weeks on the drive north. They passed within sight of Fort Concho, made good time across the flats to Doan’s Store, crossed the Red River, and moved on up the Western Trail. They passed more than one herd of cattle along the way, were once blamed for a stampede and nearly shot at, twice lost portions of the herd in the night and had to hunt them, and through the Indian territory they lost five head to ambitious thieves.

  But through it all they kept to schedule. They met up with the white man on the outskirts of Crownsville, where he’d arrived a few days earlier with a thousand head of cattle. He walked out to greet them with a smile from ear to ear, shaking his head and pointing his finger from one man to the next. They penned the horses in a corral he’d reserved for them, and then he sat them down in the nearest saloon and plied them with whiskey and asked them their tale. He laughed often as he listened, finding humor in the story that the tellers hadn’t intended. He praised them each and all, clapping the black man on the back and tugging the Scot’s hat and punching another in the shoulder. And what with the market this weekend . . . Boys, this pig’s in heaven.

  THE HORSE AND CATTLE MARKETS were at the southern edge of Crownsville, set away from the houses, down a broad slope and in an enormous, shallow bowl. From a distance, one could see a motley conglomeration of fenced-off areas, buildings and parts of buildings, wood structures that jutted up like abandoned scaffolding. What these were or would be was hard to say, but undoubtedly they were the work of some entrepreneurial dreamer, strapped for the moment in want of wood or money.

  It was in and about these works that the market in flesh plied its wares. As Gabriel and James walked toward it, they marveled at the mass of life before them. It may have been only a tiny fraction of the great herds of this land’s near past, but to their eyes the animals seemed beyond calculation. The herds were such, in fact, that the boys had to choose their way carefully for danger of finding themselves deep within a moaning body of cattle. They twice had to break into a fast jog to avoid such a fate, and they were once shouted at by a cowboy on a sorrel horse, who waved at them with his whip, a gesture directional and threatening at once. They followed his command as best as they could understand it, and before long they had made it through that gauntlet and blended in among human herds of considerably smaller yet no less confusing numbers. It wasn’t until they attached themselves to a stationary object, a fence of wood surrounding a ring of some fifty yards squared, that they could again breathe easily.

  A bull stood in the center of the ring, eyeing the crowd with belligerent mistrust. It was an
enormous thing of solid white, built of muscles. Its horns were adorned with silver caps that caught the sun in blinding flashes. The shaft that hid its member dangled serenely beneath it, conspicuous in its life-giving power. The bull seemed to stand there for no particular purpose that it or the boys could make out, except as a spectacle reminiscent of some pagan culture.

  A boy not much older than themselves entered the ring. He wore the hat of a cowboy and walked with a wide-legged swagger, but in fact his arms were so thin as to be diminutive, his chest so narrow as to mark him a child. Gabriel and James watched him closely. The bull spun around when it caught sight of the boy, chucked its head in the air, and flared its nostrils. It hardly looked like a creature that would bow to the whims of man, and it appeared that the boy was about to offer the audience a share of gore at his own expense. But to Gabriel’s surprise, the boy just walked over to the beast, stroked it calmly on the nose, and led it away. It walked behind him like a misshapen, obedient sibling.

  Soon after, the ring filled with horses. They came in charged with energy, bustling into each corner of the enclosed space, measuring its dimensions. They wheeled and turned, neighed and spoke to each other, shared horse thoughts about this new space and this old event and about the people watching them. Brown was the most prominent color, but a few were black, one was reddish in hue, and many were paints. Some had about them the look of Indian horses, a certain wildness in the eyes and an energy hardly contained in such a small space.

  An auctioneer took his post, an elevated platform just high enough that he could see into the crowd, which grew considerably around and behind the boys as the morning’s market prepared to begin. He was a small man, long-nosed and balding. He spoke in quick staccato rhythms, his voice a bird that darted with his eyes, reaching back into the audience and catching bids, promoting bids, creating them. Gabriel watched his mouth but could make nothing of the words shaped there. He watched the horses that sold fastest or for the highest price, trying to formulate in his own mind the features that distinguished some from the rest. Several times he deigned to answer James’s questions, showing him with a frown the importance of his concentration. Before long, all but three horses were sold. These remainders looked no sorrier than the rest, but for some reason that escaped the boy, these were returned to their masters.

  “You got an eye for horses?” Gabriel asked his friend.

  James shook his head. “I know you’re supposed to check that they have good teeth, like they used to do slaves.”

  As a new set of horses entered the ring, Gabriel noticed a commotion on the platform. A man had climbed up there and was speaking in animated words with the auctioneer and his assistants. They seemed to know him, were half amused but also wished him to get down. He would not do so, and only grew more passionate in his entreaties. The auctioneer eventually shook his head and grabbed himself a seat, resigning his post for a moment.

  The new man smiled heartily at this and took himself out to the edge of the small podium and to the attention of the waiting crowd. He was a tall man, in stature and shape similar to Solomon, except that he stood straight-backed and moved with confidence in himself and his place in the world. He had long arms that stretched beyond the reach of his jacket’s sleeves, leaving his pale wrists exposed. His clothing was the usual muted browns, his face well tanned and weathered, but these colors sat strangely on him, as his hair was so blond as to approach white, his eyebrows even more so, and his smile likewise flashed bright in the sunlight.

  But it wasn’t until the man began speaking that Gabriel recognized him as the cowboy he’d seen the week before, with the herd of cattle back at the homestead. The man introduced himself as Marshall Alexander Hogg, the Marshall being a name only and in no way an indication of profession, the Alexander being his father’s notion of a warrior prototype, and Hogg being traditionally Scottish and in no way a suggestion of his character. He spoke in polite and eloquent language edged with humor and somehow slyly common, as if he liked to dazzle the crowd with a certain amount of lyricism but was careful to remind them that he came from the likes of them and was no more or less than a kinsman. He explained his need to speak on behalf of the fine horses the audience could clearly see being led into the corral. He was sure this need not be said, but nevertheless he wished to warn prospective buyers that these were the finest horses likely to be sold in the state in the course of this year. He knew so because he had driven them up from Texas for the express purpose of supplementing the quality of horses in the wonderful state of Kansas.

  He went on to say that because of the sad fact that the horses could not demonstrate their full range of abilities in so limited a pen with so limited an amount of time, he wanted to highlight a few of their less obvious qualities. He directed everyone’s attention to a certain young bay. This horse, he assured the audience, was smart enough to herd cattle without either rider or instruction. He had a habit of doing just that, managing the herd all day and only calling it quits when his replacement showed up. Another specific horse, he claimed, had mastered several Indian dialects and could happily serve as a translator if the need arose. Several others had skills in regards to cooking, fishing, and celestial navigation. And quite a few had things to say about animal husbandry.

  He had just begun to point out another horse when he called out, “What? Who put my horse in the ring?” His face took on a look of great consternation, lightened by a smile just behind it all. He ranted a few moments, confounded the help he had for their ineptitude or downright treachery, and finally spoke once more to the audience. “That horse, gentlemen, is my own sweet Sophia. She’s so smart she once tied up my shoelaces for me. She’s so strong she once sent a grizzly to the great beyond with one fell kick. She’s so fast she ran from the top to the bottom of a twister in six and half seconds flat. And she’s just about pretty enough to marry. But none of you’ll have her. She’s mine till the good Lord sees to tear us apart, which may happen eventually but surely won’t happen today and is likely not to happen in Kansas.”

  He went on for some time refusing offers that nobody had made as yet, and then he prepared to retire. He said goodbye to the auctioneer, bowed to the audience graciously, and hurried down to the ring with the utmost feigned urgency. Applause followed him from the podium. It turned to laughter when he whispered in his horse’s ear and patted her on the rump solicitously. Gabriel laughed with the rest and watched as most of the horses sold high and fast.

  GABRIEL WALKED BACK INTO TOWN ALONE, with a casual, loose-legged gait that still had something of the city in it. The hard labor of the past months had carved changes into the boy’s body. His hands were callused across the palms and bruised over the knuckles, making them puffed, rugged versions of their former selves. Cords of muscle fanned out across his back like wings growing beneath the skin, and the round curves that joined his chest and arms had twisted into solid balls. The drudgery of farm life, which warped many bodies, broke manmade tools, and took a toll of blood on both the land and its people, seemed only to strengthen this boy and speed his way to manhood. He grew with an intensity beyond that of anything planted in the ground—like a weed, some might say, and with much the same angry intent.

  He spotted the wagon from some distance away, parked on a main street near the store. The mule stood with its head hung low, in quiet contemplation of whatever it is that mules are likely to think about. Gabriel walked up to it and stroked the coarse hair of its forelock. He studied the creature for a few moments, then whispered in its ear, “You ever wish you were all horse?” The mule watched him with one rotund eyeball but gave no answer. “Ever think about that? You could have been all a horse or all a donkey, but instead somebody stuck you together a hinny.” The mule tossed its head at this and shied away a step, apparently not comfortable with being so characterized.

  Gabriel turned and looked at the store. It was a flat-faced wooden building built with a certain practicality of design that highlighted and yet economized on the
sturdy timbers transported a thousand miles into this treeless world. It stood out on the street, not in design or size but in the brightness of its fresh white paint, and by the raucous colors of its new sign: HOWE AND SONS GENERAL STORE, yellow letters on a vermilion background, with a border of dark green.

  The inside was lit only by the front windows. Gabriel stood for a moment near the door, letting his eyes adjust to the dusty light, trying to make some order of the rows and stacks of merchandise, food items, household wares, and building supplies. He eventually located Solomon. He went up behind him, stood for a moment, then cleared his throat. When this brought no motion from Solomon, Gabriel cleared his throat once more and scuffed his foot against a crate. The man turned around, roused out of his thoughts, and smiled at the boy.

  “Hey, Gabriel, I was wondering what you were up to. Just looking over some things here. Just dreaming, you know. Just dreaming. What do you think of this here?”

  He held out the new plowshare that he’d been contemplating. He ran his fingers over it and checked the blade from different angles in the light, divining a future in its contours. He held it with the delicate fingers of a glassblower as he explained that this blade was some new steel, harder than the old stuff, longer-lived. Perhaps with a blade such as this they could turn up the whole of that south-facing slope and double their tilled land in no time at all. He asked the boy his thoughts and got answers, such as they were, only in shrugs and nods, which seemed neither to confirm nor deny his hopes. Whether disheartened by this response or not, Solomon decided to make the purchase. He took the plowshare and his other supplies up to be tallied by the storekeeper.