Rhizomania Part 9

Shorty, riding ahead, turned in the saddle to regard the younger man. “Doran, you ought to go down and speak to Mr. Nemecek about that girl Barbara. If you had a wife, we could eat good.”

“If she knows how to cook,” said Doran. “Was Winnie a good cook?”

“Took blue ribbons at fair time every year,” said Shorty. “She’d take a ham and stick it all over with these little black things.“

“What were they?” said Doran.

“Some kind of spice,” said Shorty. “They smelled good. And she’d slather honey on the meat, and I don’t know what else. I tell you what, I miss that good ham.”

They rode in silence for a bit. Looking at the shrubs among the long prairie grass, Doran saw that the scarce bits of green and purple had almost disappeared, leaving the flat landscape greenish-brown. The cottonwood saplings, few and far-between, still had their heart-shaped leaves. Tiny bits of white and pink, showed where patches of asters and ironweed still thrived. But the loss of color meant that Nebraska’s landscape was being overtaken by winter.

“Here now,” aid Shorty, pulling back on the reins.  Ben came to a halt, swishing his white tail, which was stuck here and there with bits of burr.

“See something?” said Doran, bringing Redboy up short. Redboy shook his head, riffling the hairs of his shiny black mane so that some of the long strands fell across the natural center line. These renegade mane hairs were lifted now and then by the light breezes.

Feel something,” said Shorty, chuckling.  “I got to go look in the bushes for something I dropped a while back.” He dismounted and led Ben to a spot where a very old, chipped limestone pillar, trailing rusty strands of ancient S-bend wire, leaned to the left. Its neighbors had all vanished and this last stone fence post marked the boundary of an abandoned farm, now gone wild. 

Shorty looped Ben’s reins loosely around the weathered stone post. “Now, don’t you snag yourself on that wire,” he told the gold-colored horse, patting Ben’s shoulder for a moment before he disappeared into a little group of pine trees, beneath which grew a tangle of living brush mixed with withered stems and fallen branches.

Over the light rustle of the breezes stirring the leaves and branches, Doran could hear water. He knew it was the low gurgle and occasional splash of Winters Creek, well off the road to his left. The creek was a crowded place, for its connection to Minatar Lake brought in every migrating sandhill crane, every frog and turtle, and every furred, thirsty predator from the large area where Box Butte and Morill counties came together.

Over the faint murmur of the water, Doran also degan to detect the sound of dead branches and old vines rubbing, snapping, and cracking as someone pushed a rough path upward from the muddy creek bed. Who was it? Doran knew Shorty wouldn’t be back so quickly. Redboy’s nervousness indicated that the person responsible for the footsteps, now growing louder, was unfamiliar to the chestnut horse.

Doran tensed. Part of him wanted badly to simply ride away, away from trouble and out of shooting range. But he couldn’t leave Shorty, or patient Ben for that matter, to an unknown fate.

Noise interrupted Doran's thoughts. “Damn these burrs!” said Shorty loudly, as he clambered through a thicket of buffalograss, gray-eyed Susans, and ironweed.

Doran, finger to lips, tried to signal Shorty to keep quiet, holding out the palm of his other hand and lowering it.  The small tough man, oblivious, reached down to pull stickers from the legs of his worn denim trousers. “They get on my clothes and then they work down in Ben’s hair. Lot of trouble to get them out.”

Doran jerked his head toward the creek bed where he’d heard the sounds, but Shorty remained distracted and didn’t look up. A square-bodied, dark-skinned figure emerged from a gap in the pine trees near Redboy’s left flank. The person who climbed up the hill to the road wore an oversized homespun shirt, sleeves rolled up above the elbows, and army-issue trousers and boots.

“Hey, Soldier,” said Doran with relief, as he caught sight first of the Abbey and Imbrie fishing rod with the baitcasting reel which Soldier held in one hand, and then the string of freshly-caught fish --crappies and catfish -- hanging from the other hand.

Soldier nodded in a brisk but cordial way, and started up the road with a strong stride shadowed with the hint of a limp. Little spits of dust and grit sprayed up where Soldier’s right boot scraped the ground.

Shorty, pulling one last burr from his sleeve, looked up at Soldier’s back moving away. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Say, what’ll you take for a couple of them catfish?” he called. Dead cottonwood twigs crunched underfoot as he moved to lift Ben’s reins away from the weathered, tilted old fencepost.  “Two bits suit ya?”

Soldier turned and waited while Shorty, holding Ben’s reins, approached and dug a small leather pouch out of the front pocket of his denim trousers. Shorty opened the pouch and removed a twenty-five cent piece, which he held out. “If you can take your knife and cut the string loose, then Doran can hold “em as we ride back.”

Soldier produced a curved, horn-handled folding knife and deftly cut the stringer just above the last two catfish, and held the fish out to Shorty, exchanging them for the coin.

Doran, in the saddle, was annoyed by the news that he’d be the one holding the string of fish up as he handled Redboy’s reins, especially since Redboy was easily spooked anyway. Then he remembered how good Shorty’s cornmeal hushpuppies were, especially with a big piece of pan-fried catfish, and maybe with a slice of tomato if he could hunt one up in the weedy, mostly-wilted garden. Shorty came close and held up the string of fish. Doran got a good left-hand grip on Redboy’s reins and accepted the string of catfish, which were plump and heavy. As soon as he had the fish, the weight instantly put a strain on the tendons of his right arm, and his pants and shirt were speckled with with wet, semi-transparent fish scales. But he thought about what a good dinner it would be, and he rode on without complaint.

*****

Later, in the kitchen of the little stone house, Shorty’s face was cherry-red under his thatch of dark hair as he manipulated an iron skillet. Under the blackened bottom of the skillet, yellow peaks of flame jumped up through the round openings in the black stove top. The surface of the stove, an old Acme Wonder model, ordered long ago from the Sears Roebuck catalog, was at the level of Shorty’s belt buckle, while the tallest flames nearly touched his stubbled chin.  Only frequent swipes of a bandanna kept the frying catfish from extra seasoning from the rancher’s beaded forehead.

In a second skillet, pushed now to the back of the stove to keep warm, golden balls of cornbread dough, laced liberally with sweet onion and sprinkled with dark-brown crumbs, sizzled in a shallow pool of bubbling grease.

At the rough-plank table, Doran sorted through a sorry lot of late-season tomatoes, some greenish and hard, others cracked where the moist red flesh had frozen and contracted, parting the skin in narrow dark crevices.

“You was telling me before about the Chicago fair,” said Doran. “Had you and Winnie already got married by then?”

“Don’t you ever listen?” said Shorty. “I know I told you all this.  When Frank and me got back from helping out Uncle Sam, we had some pension money–“

“Like what Soldier got, I reckon,” said Doran, moving to the wash stand.  He poured water from a white ceramic pitcher into a washbowl decorated with faint remnants of wild roses. He used a sliver of lye soap to push the garden dirt out from under his nails, then rinsed his hands once more and carried the dishpan of water out into the dooryard, tossing the soapy water over the gritty soil at the side of the house. He returned with the dishpan, replaced it in its spot, and brought a knife to the table, where the best of the sorted tomatoes sat in a small greenish-red pile.

“I don’t believe Soldier ever got nothing off the government,” said Shorty.

“Even with a busted knee?” said Doran. He used the tip of the knife to probe a soft spot in a large, lumpy tomato, found the flesh too mushy for eating, and leaned back in his chair to toss the damaged tomato out the open door into the dooryard.  A brown speckled hen approached it and began to peck daintily at the red skin.  After a moment, more chickens hurried over to inspect the treasure.

“It ain’t busted, exactly,” said Shorty. “I think it’s got tuberculosis in it.  And they won’t pay because they said it might of come on after Soldier mustered out.”  Shorty pushed the skillet to the back of the stove to join its neighbor, then dropped the heavy round stove lid into place with a clang.  He wiped his red perspiring face with his soggy blue bandanna. “I come back from the Philippines with a little money jangling in my pocket but I wasn’t ready to marry. I couldn’t take Winnie away from her mama till I had a home place and I could stay there and work it.”

“Was Winnie’s mother sickly?” Doran asked, as he sliced a firm tomato.

“No, she was strong,” said Shorty. “A big strong woman. Winnie was already having spells where she felt so bad she couldn’t do nothing. She couldn’t move or help her mama with the work, but she couldn’t lie still and sleep, neither one. So I couldn’t take her away from home till I knew I could be around, you know, in case she had a bad spell.”

“Was it hard to take her to the fair?” asked Doran.

“Not the Columbian Exposition,” said Shorty.  “The fair in St. Louis was harder to get around in, and by then Winnie couldn’t walk at all. I had to carry her up the steps like a baby. But the Chicago fair, the one in ’93, was real good. There was a movable sidewalk out to the pier, Casino Pier. Only cost five cents and you didn’t even have to stand up on it.  Winnie and me could sit on a bench and the whole thing with all the people on it rolled right down to the pier.”

“It don’t sound real,” said Doran.

“When it broke down and the people had to get off, it was real enough,” said Shorty. “But the Lord must have been looking out for us, because it worked good every day we went.”

“You got to go more than one day?” said Doran, using the tip of his knife to remove a tomato stem.  He turned the knife over and used the back to scrape bits of stem and peel into the slop bucket.

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