Shaking the Nickel Bush (13 page)

It wasn't more than twenty minutes before we had that cow winched up against the side of Shiftless so tight that she couldn't wiggle. With the heel rope on her outside leg, she couldn't kick with the inside one, and her head was plastered tight against the front wheel. The only thing she could have done was to flop over onto me while I was milking her, but Lonnie took care of that by climbing on the back seat and hauling on her tail.

All the time we'd been trying to make the old cow listen to reason her calf had been standing back at the edge of the bushes, bawling us out for trying to swipe his dinner, but he must have done all right before we got there. I stripped right down to the last drop and didn't get over three pints, but it sloshed around so much in the dishpan that I couldn't have handled much more anyway.

That old cow acted as if her whole fight had been only to protect her honor. As soon as I'd finished milking her she stood as quietly as if she'd been barn-raised. And she didn't fight at all when we slipped the ropes off. She trotted away into the brush, then stopped just before she was out of sight and looked back over her shoulder, as if she were telling us, “I'll let my husband know about this.” I don't know whether or not she let him know, but he didn't give us any trouble when we drove back to the road. I couldn't watch where we were going very well, because I had to hold the dishpan high to keep the milk from slopping.

It didn't seem as if we'd spent very much time in getting that three pints of milk, but the sun was halfway down toward the mountains when we got back to camp. And, of course, the fire had gone out. While Lonnie built a new one—with lots of greasewood roots, so we'd have plenty of big coals for the roasting—I made the stuffing for the hens. It wasn't as good as Mother used to make, but it wasn't too bad either. I broke the stale bread into little chunks, moistened it with milk, tossed in a couple of egg yolks from one of the hens, sliced in plenty of onion and celery, and sprinkled it good and heavy with salt, pepper, and sage. I was pretty sure those hens were going to be awfully tough if I tried to roast them dry, so I jammed the biggest one into the Dutch oven, put in a little water, covered it tight, and hung it over the new fire where it could steam till the roasting coals were ready.

I'd made custard pies when I was baching with my grandfather, so I knew how to make the custard part, but I'd never tried to make a rice custard pudding. I knew Mother baked hers in the oven, but I didn't know whether she put the rice in raw, or boiled it first. It really didn't make much difference, because I was going to have to boil our rice anyway, since we had only one Dutch oven. And the only thing I had to boil it in was the dishpan, so we poured the milk into the quart jar Mrs. Larsen had put my stewed chicken in. There was just a little more than enough to fill it, and we drank that.

After I'd washed the pan I dumped in the pound of rice Lonnie had brought from town, explained to him that the raisins would be added later, and poured in enough water to cover the rice. Then Lonnie found some good-sized rocks, and we propped the pan up over the fire. Everything went fine at first, and we sat watching the grains of rice bubble up to the top as the water began to boil, but it drank that water as if it had been a herd of cattle. I had to keep adding more and more to keep it from sticking on the bottom of the pan and burning. We tried setting it off the fire to slow it down, but that didn't do any good. And it swelled even faster after we put the raisins in. By the time it was cooked soft we had nearly a dishpan full, and it was sort of sticky. “That's all right,” I told Lonnie. “Of course, I can't eat it, and you won't want this much pudding, but you can always eat the rest of it for breakfasts, like mush.”

Lonnie didn't like the idea of eating rice for mush, and he didn't think we had too much for pudding, but I was kind of licked for a way to make the custard—with the dishpan full of rice and the Dutch oven full of hen. We finally worked it out by pouring part of our milk into the coffee cups. Then I added what were left of the eggs out of the hens—some of them were as little as peas—poured in more or less sugar, and grated in some nutmeg by using a rough stone for a grater. The jar worked fine for mixing. All we had to do was to screw on the top and shake it. Then, of course, we had to keep pouring back and forth between the cups and the jar till we had the mixture all alike. Lonnie poured it over the rice while I stirred it in and grated more nutmeg on top. Even though we couldn't bake it, I think it would have been pretty good rice pudding if I'd stirred it a little harder and broken the sticky lumps up more than I did. The custard cooked fine, just set up close to the fire, and the nutmeg on top made it look almost as though it had been baked in an oven.

We let the first hen sort of steam and stew along until we'd finished the pudding, then drained off what broth there was, drank it, and covered the Dutch oven over with coals for roasting. It was dark before that old biddy was cooked enough that the breast meat would break when I stuck a fork into it and twisted. But she was almost tender by the time Lonnie's sweet potato was done. We put what was left of the onions and celery right into the pot with her, and even if it was a little late when we had our Christmas dinner it was a durned good one. Lonnie wouldn't say the rice pudding was as good as his mother's, but he ate nearly a quart of it, so it couldn't have been too bad.

I didn't dare leave the second hen lying around raw, even though the nights were chilly, so we cooked her while we were eating and resoaping our saddles before we turned in. It gave us a lot of time to talk about what we were going to do after we got steady jobs, and we sang some of the old songs over again three or four times. Lonnie didn't know but a few of them—“Silent Night,” “Jingle Bells,” and ones like that. But even if we were nearly broke and out of jobs, it wasn't a bad Christmas.

11

Little Clay Horse

S
TARTING
the morning after Christmas we hunted jobs just as hard as we could. We followed every pair of wheel tracks that turned off the road anywhere between Fort Thomas and Safford, on both sides of the Gila River. But we found only one job—not too bad a one—but Lonnie wouldn't take it. The rancher passed me up like cold soup, but he let Lonnie show him that he was good with a rope, and offered him thirty a month—more when roundup time came. Lonnie tried to take us both in on the deal, but when the rancher shook his head he backed away. “Naw,” he said, “it's the both of us or none. My buddy here, he can't drive our automobile, and I wouldn't want to leave him stranded. We'll mosey along, but maybe we'll drop back and see you later.”

I tried to tell Lonnie that I could learn to drive Shiftless without much trouble, and that I thought he'd better take the job. I said I'd try to find one near by, and that if I didn't we'd keep in touch with each other during the winter. Then we could find jobs together when roundup time came. When Lonnie shook his head I thought it might be because he was afraid I wouldn't leave him his saddle and outfit, so I said, “You don't need to worry about the outfit, Lonnie. If you want to, you can send me a little out of your pay checks, but it's yours anyway. It has been right from the beginning.”

Lonnie shook his head again, climbed in behind the wheel, and said, “Twist her tail, buddy, and let's get a move on. We're wastin' time here.”

The day Lonnie turned that job down we had to drive to Safford, so I could go to a doctor and get a report card to mail. While I was waiting for the doctor to examine the specimen I wrote a short letter to Mother, telling her our boss was sending my partner and me over into New Mexico for some cattle, and that he was going to meet us in El Paso, Texas, so she could write me there. Then, when the doctor was too busy to notice, I took the last fifty-dollar bill out of the cuff of my Levi's and put it in the letter. I didn't dare not to, for fear I might be tempted to break it. Then too, if the doctor charged me two dollars I'd have only $1.85 left in my pocket, and I couldn't feel right about telling Lonnie we were dead broke while I still had the fifty.

During the first few days of January we worked our way back along the south side of the river, going to see every rancher between the highway and the mountains. The only thing that saved us from getting right down to our last penny was that I made a little clay horse every evening, and that Lonnie had pretty fair luck trading them in the towns for a few gallons of gas or some grub. But it was Shiftless that brought us our best luck. Her shimmying got so bad that we couldn't drive her over five miles an hour, and we'd put her over so many rough roads in the back country that we'd worn out her transmission bands.

The brake went first, but Lonnie was able to stop by using the reverse pedal. Then the driving band started slipping so badly that he had to ride the low pedal all the time. As we were pulling into a little town one evening it gave out entirely, so there was nothing we could do but stop and camp.

There wasn't any sense in trying to make clay horses enough to pay for new bands and bushings for the front wheels—or for the grub we'd need while we were making the repairs. Lonnie had already traded two horses in that town, one to the only store and one to the only garage. The market was already flooded, but that night I made a horse's head. It was about six inches high, with an arched neck and curly mane. I worked on it till way after midnight, and did the very best job I could. The next morning I told Lonnie to sleep in while I cleaned up our dishes and made my last gluten flour into bread. At ten o'clock he was still sleeping, and I had the bread all covered over in the coals to bake, so I took the horse's head and went into town.

I didn't go to the store or the garage, but to the bank. It was a little one, not much bigger than a bedroom. A girl about my age was in a cage at the front; beyond her I could see the bald head of a man who was writing at a desk, and behind him was the iron door of a vault. I was barely inside the door when the girl in the cage called, “Good morning.” Then she noticed the little clay head, and sort of squealed, “Oh, you must be the artist who sculped that cute little horse at the store.”

With what I had in mind I couldn't tell her that I wasn't an artist; only a cowhand out of a job. So I went to the window, passed the little model in to her, and said, “It's an American Saddlebred horse. I saw him at a horse show in Boston.”

The girl was a pretty one, and her eyes sparkled as she turned the head in her hands, oo-ing and ah-ing over it. I was so busy watching her that I didn't notice the bald-headed man until he bent over her shoulder, looked at the model, then up at me, and asked, “You do that yourself?”

On the way in from camp I'd rehearsed what I was going to say to that banker, but with the girl having said what she did when I came in, and with our being so hard up right then, it didn't come out the way I'd planned. “Yes, sir,” I told him. “I'm the cowboy artist . . . just passing through this way. Had to come west for my health. This is just a little toy I knocked out last night by the campfire.”

Then to make things sound sort of offhand I said to the girl, “You may have him if you'd like to. I just make them as a pastime. My regular line is portrait sculpture . . . you know, making likenesses of people's faces.”

Quicker than a wink the banker asked, “What do you charge?”

“Well, that depends,” I told him. “If I make several in a town—just out of clay like this—I charge ten dollars apiece. But if it's an exclusive commission . . . if I agree to make only one in the town . . . for the leading citizen, or the banker, or someone like that, then I charge twenty-five . . . in advance . . . but when I make a deal of that kind I cast them in plaster . . . so they look like marble, you know. If they're only clay they warp out of shape as soon as they dry.”

The old gentleman peered at me over the top of his glasses and said, “You don't say!”

I knew right then I had him hooked, but I was scared. Anyone could have seen that he'd been a range man before he became a banker. His face was craggy and weatherbeaten, there were deep sun wrinkles flaring out from the corners of his eyes, deep clefts in his cheeks, and if he had false teeth he wasn't wearing them. When I'd lived with Ivon I'd modeled several busts of young fellows we worked with, and some of them had come out fairly good, but I'd never tackled anything so tough as a face like that banker's. My mouth was so dry my tongue clucked when I said, “Yes, sir. They'll warp till you'd hardly recognize them if they're left in clay.”

“Hm,” he said, “you ought to have come along forty years ago. I might have gone for that marble deal, but I'm not just what a man might call an artist's model any more.”

I thought I saw my way out; the juice ran back into my mouth, and I said, “Oh, that doesn't make any difference. All I'd need would be an old picture or a tintype. If you've got something like that it would be easy enough to use it as a model . . . I could make you look any age you wanted me to.”

“Hm,” he said again. “Hm, there might be an old tintype or two around the house at that. Tell you what you do; you visit with Mabel here a few minutes, and I'll go take a look.”

I did visit with Mabel, and it was the best part of my selling job. After I'd told her I'd cast the horse's head in plaster for her, I mentioned that I was pretty busy and didn't know just how long I could stay in that part of the country. But I said that if she wanted to call some of the other bankers in the nearby towns, I'd be glad to stay around till I'd finished their busts. She wanted to start telephoning right away, but I told her she'd better wait till we saw how her boss liked the one I was going to do of him.

The tintype that banker brought back must have been fifty years old. It was so badly faded that I couldn't have copied it, even if I'd had the ability. About all I could make out was that he'd had a heavy head of hair and a good big mustache, both parted in the middle and twisted into spit curls at the sides of his face.

“Don't know as you can make much out of it,” he told me as he held the tintype up by the window, “but that's the way I used to look. Let's see . . . That was at the time of my first marriage.”

I took the tintype, turned it back and forth a little so the light would strike it in different ways, and peered at it closely. “Believe I could do a pretty good job with this one,” I told him. “Some of them are faded a lot worse than this. I'll tell you what we'll do: I'll take this along with me, and you pay just ten dollars down. Then, if you like the clay model when I bring it in tomorrow, you can pay the balance, and I'll make up the marblelike casting. If you don't like the model we'll just call the deal closed. Is that fair enough?”

He thought it was and gave me the ten.

If I hadn't been the cowboy artist, I'd have run all the way back to camp with that ten dollars, but it wouldn't have seemed very dignified so I walked as slowly as I could make myself.