Rhizomania, Part 2

“Hit him!” hissed a deep voice, and a higher, more nasal one answered, “What do you think I’m trying to do?  He moved!”

The left leg of Doran’s trousers had caught on an S-barb of the wire fence, and his shoulder ached from the first blow, though the force of it had slid across his scapula and away.  He turned his head, trying to see the men behind and above him, but the full face of the moon now shone and the men were just a confusing blur of connected silhouettes. He heard the men struggling over possession of the axe-handle, with the deeper voice cursing and commanding, “Let go!  I’ll get him this time!”

Doran ripped his pant leg free from the fence barb, tearing a large L-shaped gash in the denim cloth, and he rolled to his left side so that he could pull the right pocket of his coat from under his body. With a trembling hand, he tore the pocket flap open, the button flying loose and pinging against a fence post.  Doran jumped to his feet and, crouching,  began to stumble and skid down the dark pathway, his shaking hand pulling the gun in its oiled-canvas case from his coat pocket.

Behind him the man with the axe-handle pounded along the fence line, and with a whoosh the weapon swung down mightily. Only its tip brushed along Doran’s lower back and then the back of his leg.  The man lost his balance and Doran had to jump sideways into the raspberry thicket so he wouldn’t be bowled over.  As the stickers on the long snaky canes scratched his neck and his arms, Doran pulled the cavalry gun from its oiled-canvas cover, dropped the case among the tangled vines, and stepped toward the man on the ground, who scrambled toward the fallen handle.  His way was blocked by the other man, who also reached for the heavy oak stick, entangled in weeds and raspberry canes.

“Leave it,” commanded Doran, gripping the walnut butt of the gun with both shaking hands.  He set his feet and pulled back the hammer with a click which was very loud in the quiet dark.  The crickets had paused in their chirping and only a whisper of wind moved through the prairie grass.

The axe-handle lay in  sandy tufts of grass growing at the margin of the raspberry patch, and  One of the two bulky figures had his hand on the business end of it.  While he didn’t pick up the weapon, he didn’t move away from it either. The second man suddenly broke from the scene, and ran up the hill, deserting his comrade.  After a dozen steps, the runner found a way to slip easily through the strands of the barbed-wire fence.  He thudded across the untilled open ground of the neighboring homestead.  Doran heard the fleeing accomplice’s raspy breath as he ran toward a scruffy patch of cottonwoods along the hillside.

Doran looked at the man on the ground, whose hand still touched the axe handle. “Pick it up if you want,” he said, pointing the seven-inch barrel of the cavalry gun at his attacker’s right eye. “Then the law won’t fault me a bit.”  He stepped toward the crouched man.

The man sprang, axe-handle in.hand, but Doran had pivoted his heavy weapon and as he swung down hard, the pistol’s walnut grip smashed into the man’s unshaven jaw, jarring it sideways like the carriage of a typewriter. The axe handle fell heavily to the ground, forcing a puff of sandy soil into the moonlit air over the path, and Doran lifted one mulehide boot over the bridge of the man’s nose, hesitating.  He relented and brought his foot back instead, delivering two hard kicks to the man’s hip and right thigh.

“Let me up!” screamed the man.  “I ain’t going to do nothing!  I ain’t going to do nothing!”

Doran reached down and took the axe handle, then stepped over the man and retrieved his fiddle-box from among the raspberry canes. “I got to take your axe-handle,” he said.  “When you find your buddy, you’ll have to beat him with something else.  Hard luck, friend.  Wood’s hard to find in Nebraska.”

******

“What’d you do, fall down the hill?” asked Shorty, regarding Doran's torn, dirty clothing. He sat astride a short wooden bench and he ran a spoke-shave over the outer surface of a pine bucket.  Over his head, many pairs of boots, new and old, of different sizes, hung upside-down from the rafters.  “Don’t you know enough to take the edge of your knife and rough up the bottom of a pair of new boots?” Shorty stopped work, noting Doran’s scratched face and neck and the cavalry gun clutched in his right hand. Shorty put down the bucket and rose. “Lord, son, you look bad.  Somebody get after you?”

Doran carried the soiled cloth-wrapped box to the plank table and set it down, then put the gun down next to it.  He undid the braided-leather strap and unwound the cloth.  The cedar box and holly inlays were undamaged, and Doran loosened the latch which fastened the lid.  “Couple of farmers with corn liquor in them, I guess,” he said.  “One of them had the handle off an axe. I carried it away with me and left it out in the dooryard.”

“An axe?” said Shorty, coming close to examine Doran’s face and to look into his eyes. “They hit you with an axe?”

“Just the handle, and he didn’t get me good with it,” said Doran.  He opened the fiddle-case and lifted the instrument, inspecting it for damage.

“What was they after?” said Shorty, looking at each of Doran’s hands. “They want your fiddle?”

“No, the box just slid down the hill when they started swinging at me,” said Doran.  “I was already on the ground when I let go of it, so it didn’t get too bad a thump.  The bridge slid a little bit but I can push it back.”  Doran replaced the fiddle and shut the lid of the cedar box.

“Looks like you slid down too,” said Shorty. “What’d you do, fall in the respberry stickers?”

“Kind of,” said Shorty. “I stayed in among the bushes for a bit so I could get the gun out of the case.  I left the case out there. I better wait to look till it’s light or I’ll never find it.”

“You put that cavalry gun on them?” said Shorty.  “Lord, son, didn’t they figure out it won’t shoot?”

“I hit one of ’em on the head with it before he could find out,” said Doran.  “The other one ran off.”

“Fought two men that jumped you,” said Shorty, going to a shelf over the wood stove and taking down a half-full bottle of Jim Beam, “and took an axe-handle off them, and scared them off with that old broke gun.”  Shorty poured whiskey into a coffee mug and a Mason jar, and handed the mug to Doran.  “They say you’re a man when you turn twenty-one, and I believe you’ve showed it’s true.”


******

When the morning light warmed Doran’s eyelids and woke him, he felt all right. But when he rolled onto his left side, he sucked in his breath when the burning pain shot through his shoulder and up his neck.  He remembered the glancing blow of the axe handle across his upper back, and knew that the blow had been harder than he’d realized. Ignoring the pain, he pulled off his nightshirt and went to the wash stand, where he dumped the contents of the pitcher into the fluted bowl.  He sloshed cold water into his face, feeling the sting of the criss-crossed scratches, and he noticed that the cool water dripping over his shoulder eased the pain. Pulling his washrag down from its nail, he soaked it in the washbasin, and then let the cold wet cloth hang over his injured shoulder while he pulled on his drawers and work pants.  He rinsed out the washrag, now slightly pink from dried blood, in the basin, then took the basin out the front door and dumped it into the bean patch where a few pole beans dangled among browning leaves.

It took Doran just a minute or two to bring the washbasin indoors, slip on his new mulehide boots, button up an old wool shirt that smelled like smoke, and stop at the cookstove to check for breakfast.  He uncovered the skillet Shorty had protected with a tin plate.  He took out two corncakes and a sausage patty sitting in a shallow puddle of opaque lard.  He put the piece of sausage on one corncake, put a smaller corncake on top, and held the stack together as he took it with him on his way out the front door.

Out in the dooryard where the wood was split, Doran found the axe-handle propped against the stump, where Shorty had left it for reasons of his own. He carried the handle over to the woodshed as he wolfed down bites of his sausage sandwich.

He leaned the axe handle against the inside wall of the open-front woodshed, and grasped the splitting maul, which he carried back to the stump by the woodpile.  Swallowing the last of his cold breakfast, he wiped his greasy hand on the leg of his work pants, then picked up a chunk of wood, settling it on the splitting stump.  He brought the maul high up over his head, flinching at the pain in his left shoulder, and focused his gaze on the middle of the pine chunk.  He swung down, and the yellow middles of the split pieces made two bright spots in mid-air as the splits flew to each side of the stump.  Doran thumped another chunk of wood on the stump and this time when he brought the maul over his head, the pain in his shoulder had eased a little.

Splitting wood and then sheltering it under the roof of the woodshed was always Doran’s first work of the day.  Shorty believed that Doran was using the cool of the day for the hot tiresome work, and the damp misty fall mornings were a true pleasure, but Doran could have split wood in the late afternoon just as easily.  He preferred the rhythm of swing and thump, stoop and stack to start the day because he could settle his mind on whatever subject pleased him.

The first thing that came to mind this particular morning was of course the crazy men with the axe-handle.  They had to have been hunting trouble, but why with a stick instead of a gun?  Because they didn’t want to blast through the night silence with a gunshot and bring people after them.  But why had they come after him? They’d been waiting along the clay path, waiting for somebody in particular.

Doran’s mind turned over and over as he gathered another armload of split ponderosa pine and piled it up the way Shorty wanted it, in long skinny rows running east and west.

On his first day, Doran remembered, he had stacked the wood too high, in the wrong direction, and Shorty had been exasperated. 

“Don’t you know nothing?” he’d asked, pulling off armloads of split wood and rearranging them to his liking. “Your winter wind blows down from the north and your summer wind blows up from Mexico,” Shorty explained.  “You want the wind to come get the wood crosswise, and dry the sap out.”

Now, with considerably more experience, Doran cut and stacked enough wood to keep Shorty from complaining, and then he cut and stacked the same amount again. If he doubled up his chores, he never had to endure the look from Shorty that said without a word, “You’ll never make it in this world, if that’s how you do.”

The extra work with the axe kept his shoulder from stiffening up.  Thinking of his injury brought his mind back to the attack of the night before.

Who had those men been looking for?  Doran mulled it over as he put the last precious, sweet-smelling wedges of pine into the woodshed and put away the maul.  The prairie was too big a place to go wandering around in search of a victim. Frank and Shorty’s houses were a long walk apart, but Evie and Soldier lived four miles to the west and the family that ran the Spanish Store were farther than that.  The cattleman John Sayre owned the ranch to the east, as well as acreage north of Frank and Maybelle’s, a large ranch in Box Butte County, and considerable land down by Gering, across the Platte River.

Doran entered the gray stone house which Shorty had practically built by himself. The house was cool and the morning sun was already surprisingly hot for late September.  Though Doran longed to linger in the coolness, he only moved through the house, emerged from the back door and used the hand-pump in the yard to bring up a bucket of water. He lifted the ladle hanging from a piece of bent wire, and scooped a chilly drink from the bucket before letting it fall back into the well’s dark recess with a muffled splash.  Moving to the rear porch, Doran opened a rusted toolbox and took out a claw hammer.  From a corroded coffee can, he took a handful of ten-penny nails, some new and some thriftily straightened by Shorty.  Doran carried these to the smokehouse on the other side of the truck garden, where he’d left some wide half-inch boards leaning against the doorway.  As he circled the little structure, grayed by weather, looking for broken or loose boards, Doran thought of how easily the man who’d run away had gotten through the barbed-wire fence between Shorty and Frank’s homestead and John Sayre’s cattle ranch.  
The man had virtually disappeared through the fence line, vanishing like a ghost. The barbed-wire fence was triple-strand, and tightly strung; when Doran had fallen and rolled into it, his clothing had caught and torn. Little red and blue threads from his clothes were no doubt snagged all over the barbs, fluttering in the Nebraska breezes at this moment. How had the stranger gotten over into Sayre’s ranch so quickly?

Doran put the claw of his hammer around the upper nail holding a broken board and pulled. The board, which had rotted away at the bottom edge, came away with the nail. Doran carefully extracted the rusty, bent nail and dropped it into his pocket, to save for the coffee can where Shorty saved all nails and screws.

Doran finished with the east side of the smokehouse and came around the front of the smokehouse to find Shorty standing in the dooryard, with his Winchester .44-.40 in his arms.  Shorty’s mouth was pulled tight.  “Doran, we got to go. Hurry and get your gun.”

“It don’t shoot, Shorty,” said Doran.

“They don’t know that,” said Shorty.

Click here to go to Part 3