by Alaya » Sun Nov 15, 2009 5:50 pm
Moan.
For those of you who may have read this story.......here is the revised version where everything is cutted and pasted correctly.
What can I say? I feel like a jerk. On rereading, after seeing Hugo's kind words.....so I ain't cooking on all fours right now.
Thank you, Hugo. I will pass it on.
THERE ARE SUCH PEOPLE
When Nance first laid eyes on my cousin Charlotte at the university in Laramie Albert Stillburn had been married to Clara Jean for some few years. Albert felt lucky in the match, for Clara Jean was bright and sassy, a real show stopper in sleepy Ardmore, Oklahoma, with her taffy hair in a pony tail, swinging in cadence with her hips. She loved to dance and raise hell and starting from about age fourteen her development had been arrested by several of the boys and men in Ardmore. Her mama breathed a sigh of relief after their marriage ceremony. “Here’s hoping,” she said, “that Clara Jean has backslid for the last time.”
Albert moved in kind of a slouch and would have been good to read meters or drive a truck, take a little moon on Saturday and mind a trot line for his fun but Clara Jean had something inside of her that was always saying more, a blossom of ambition or maybe longing that she couldn’t quite recognize or curtail. When she goaded him into a job with big oil she thought they were on their way.
My cousin Charlotte had grey eyes and she was pensive. She knew our tribe was a cut above everyone else in Wyoming and I think it made her a little sad. When it came time for her college she dreamed of going down south, maybe Alabama or Georgia. She liked the stories her mother told about Atlanta and Savannah, liked who she thought her mother might have been before the Wyoming cowboy gathered her up and plopped her down in the middle of the badlands, fifty five miles to Newcastle and seventy to Douglas and in those days you couldn’t even get to town if the Cheyenne River and Lance Creek were up. Not that there was much there when you did get out. If it hadn’t been for the airplane and that big old house she might have bailed out long ago. They’d fly into Casper or Rapid City and she’d shop or pick up stuff she’d ordered to redecorate that big old house. She’d been redecorating that house for twenty- seven years when Woodrow Stephens put his foot down and declared that no daughter of his was going to college anywhere but the University of Wyoming. She was a Wyoming gal, by God, and Wyoming was her destiny. She was uncertain about her destiny, and pensive, like I said, but she went.
My cousin Charlotte knew that as an only child of Woodrow Stephens she would end up running the Crown S and she’d made a good start of it, could cowboy up with the best of ‘em and she loved it all, it was like destiny was melded up with desire, for once.
Nance had seen her on campus of course, sized her up going straight as a soldier across the quad between classes. She was enrolled in animal husbandry and Nance was in engineering. Maybe she had spotted him too, but they didn’t speak until that night in the Cowboy Bar. The girls in the sorority had wanted to go, sort on a lark, sort of like slumming. My cousin Charlotte was no stranger to cowboy bars, having been hauled by old Woodrow to every joint in eastern Wyoming where cattlemen gathered to drink and scheme, trade cattle or buy horses, places like the Antlers in Newcastle or the LaBonte Hotel in Douglas. Places like the Cowboy Bar. She’s sit and listen and they treated her real nice because she was Woodrow’s next in line even if she was a little girl with grey eyes. They’d pull out their stubby pencils or heap pens and go to cooking up deals on cocktail napkins and she loved it all, knew they’d all be millionaires by midnight and broke again by closing time and she’d drive Woodrow home, sometimes drive till dawn and he’d tell where the men they’d been with were hard or weak, which ones were counterfeit and which true and they’d get a little sleep or no sleep and then saddle up and go.
She hadn’t expected to feel so uncomfortable in the bar or the rising distance she felt from her sorority sisters, girls she had grown genuinely of and the society they shared. The girls were giggling about the cowboy’s butts and the way they’d sort of swagger under a load of liquor and she felt like they’d taken her to a zoo where all the animals turned out to be old friends and she couldn’t tell her sorority sisters that and they wouldn’t understand anyway. She felt like she was a pin point in the universe and all the sides of her life were slipping away and she was without shelter. A couple of the old timers had howdeyed her in stiff surprise and that just made it worse.
And so she sat at the bar and a neon tear was forming in her eye, about to tumble down her cheek when Nance sized up to her. Nance was affable and big, handsome as hell and confident in his ways.
“Funny place to be crying.” He said.
“I know.”
“Do you know how to dance?”
“I do.” She said.
And off they went. They were married the week after graduation at the First Presbyterian Church in Casper and it was standing room only, half the people in Wyoming were there and all the money. I was real little then, still given to squirming in my seat at public functions and I remember wondering how it must have felt to kiss someone with so many people watching.
Albert and Clara Jean stuck with big oil. They never really prospered but they did ok, did a little better during the boom years and managed to keep their heads above water during the busts when all the roughnecks were squandering their unemployment checks in the gin mills, waiting for crude to go back over $8 a barrel. Albert was known as a steady hand around the patch. Even made toolpusher for Exeter over on the Otero Mesa play in New Mexico. That didn’t work out for long, though. His passive nature and indecision allowed the roughnecks to run all over him.
The oil patch was changing. You could still come to work hungover, hell, they couldn’t change that, but nipping at a pint during your shift was out and the gorilla biscuits and left coast turnarounds that the crews fueled themselves with were beginning to make the bosses and their insurance carriers nervous. Drug testing wasn’t too far down the line. All the old wildcatters were dead or gumming their mashed potatoes at some high dollar home in Dallas or Houston and the oil patch wasn’t as exciting or as much fun as it used to be. None of that bothered Albert much, hell, he didn’t think about it much, but he couldn’t bring himself to run any of the rowdy ones off or establish much discipline so the toolpusher deal fell through.
Due to the occasional salary increases and the staying power of the uninspired they did manage to graduate from singlewide trailers to doublewides in the company towns or solitary outposts where they were stationed and that was a banner moment for them.
Clara Jean stuck with it too but she hardened some over the years. Little crows feet began to form in the suntanned skin around her eyes. She wore sleeveless shirts in the summertime and cheap bras and she kept trim doing most of the work on their second car herself and lugging their dirty clothes to the Laundromat. She always wanted a washer and dryer and she let Albert know it but he argued that they would be moving again soon and he couldn’t be moving much when they did. Her one luxury was earrings. Not those little rhinestone studs either, but ones that dangled and made a statement. She was partial to a set that Albert had got her in New Mexico when they were flush. Turquoise deals that hung down a couple of inches and sometimes when they’d enter a honkytonk of a Saturday night you’d spot those earrings before you’d spot her.
Albert developed a couple of habits of language that became indelible in his character. He referred to objects of adversity in the feminine. “She’s gonna be a cold one,” he’d say, stomping his feet on the frosty platform of the rig. Or, when urging his driver through a muddy stretch of road he’d holler, “Twist her tail, Jimbo! Twist her tail!” Things like that. And when he’d be compelled to comment any situation he’d say, “Ain’t that pitiful”. It was not his rejoinder of choice, it was the one he used to the exclusion of all others. It became a nickname. “Pitiful Stillburn” they’d call him. Or “Old pitiful”. When they’d move to a new place Clara Jean would uncharitably introduce the nickname to the new crowd even before they’d catch on.
In 1955, with big oil at six dollars a barrel and rigs stacked in every basin, Albert took a job driving a water truck for Sinclair in the Black Thunder Basin out of Douglas, Wyoming, and he and Clara Jean came into our lives.
(tbc)
Nance never made much of a hand on the Crown S. Oh, he was enthusiastic enough and would ride good horses into the ground showing us that he knew his stuff around cow camp, Just sorta pushy like he was with everything else, no cow sense to him at all. We’d have a bunch of cows nudged up along a fence line, just about to look at a gate but tentative and edgy the way those old range cows are and he’s hooray right into the middle of them and they’d spook and scatter like a mad woman’s shit and we’d spend half a day getting them gathered back up and like as not he’d do it again. He always wore a holstered pistol that he’d pull out and fire occasionally, usually managing to get somebody’s horse to pitching or spook the cows again.
“Less help that a loose horse,” Woodrow would snort. He wasn’t partial to son-in-laws in general and this one in particular. My cousin Charlotte tried to educate him and cover up for him both but it was tough going for her, what with him tending to tromp more that he picked in all his endeavors. She tried not to let on that she was a top hand from the git-go but she had all the nuances of handling rude livestock in her DNA. Skeered of nothing. She’d step right up on broncy horses, could handle a rope and was just generally tougher than whang leather.
They’d go cowboying and Woodrow would threaten to leave Nance behind but he figured he was as lousy at airplane mechanizing as he was at cowboying. He proved that point when his engine seized up over Spearfish, South Dakota, and he crashed the plane, killing himself and his Georgia bride. My cousin Charlotte had two little kids by then and Woodrow checking out left them real shorthanded so they hired an old Indian named John Ghostbear off the Pine Ridge and I came up from the home ranch in Colorado to help. It was just the right kind of deal for me, just out of high school, itching to cowboy up and miles of rough country to figure out. Woodrow had left a good string of horses and I felt like I’d died and gone to heaven, doing a man’s work and getting credit for it.
We put up hay all summer, me running the buckrake and John Ghostbear pushing up stacks. Or work cattle. When we’d go out for two or three days they’d leave the kids with Edgar Canton’s wife down the river and John Ghostbear would tend the camp and cook. We made a good working unit with me and my cousin Charlotte heading or heeling and John Ghostbear coming along with the branding irons or footrot medicine that he carried. Nance notwithstanding. My cousin Charlotte set him to patching fence a lot when we were out in the country just to keep him out of our hair while we got something done as much as anything. He’d always show up for his supper, though, and boy was he a fast eating son-of-a-bitch. He’d be picking his teeth before we got our bread buttered and wouldn’t help around the camp, just finish up his food and go practice with his pistol or something till it got plumb dark.
Nance was hard on that Indian. I didn’t know whether it was because he didn’t like Indians or that John Ghostbear was just help or whether he was already trying to step into Woodrow’s boots or what but he treated him pretty rough, bossing him around all the time even when it was plain that John Ghostbear knew more about whatever it was than Nance ever would.
He didn’t treat me that way, me being family and all and the son of Woodrow’s little sister. Once we was up early, just before daybreak and fixing to head up into the Rochelle Hills to move some bulls. John Ghostbear had bucked a green colt into the side of the barn the day before and boogered up his foot and he came hobbling put of the bunkhouse late.
“I’d better catch him something to ride,” I said.
“Hell with that, kid,” Nance said. “We got to get moving. Let old war whoop catch his own horse.”
“Just take a minute,” I said, heading back to the big corral where the remuda was still milling around. When John Ghostbear would catch our horses up of a morning, which was most of the time, it was really something. He’d ask who we wanted to ride that day and ease into the big corral with his rope and some halters. He’d squat down a little and he could tell, just by seeing the ears of the circling horses against a little silhouette of daylight, which horse was which. He’d daub a horse loop on the ones we’d chosen and lead them up to the barn. It was a neat trick. I just caught the first slow horse I could and saddled him up for the old man while Nance fumed over by the gate.
That evening Nance was shooting his pistol at fence posts as we trailed down out of the hills.
“Why do you carry that gun all the time, Nance?” John Ghostbear asked.
“I don’t know,” Nance said, a little defensively. He liked carrying that gun on his hip but he knew it wasn’t something the real hands did. “There might be trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” John Ghostbear persisted.
“It could be a snake or something. I might have to signal for help.”
John Ghostbear twisted in his saddle and looked back at me and winked. “I guess we’d have to just throw our hats in the air till they come to git us,” he said.
He could kind of hold his own with Nance, bantering like that. I never felt sorry for him. It’s funny, though. I did feel a little sorry for Nance. He never did quite fit in and I think he knew it and that was partly why he was so pushy. It was like he was operating from behind a card board cutout of himself that was as big as he wanted to be. The next morning John Ghostbear was up before anyone and when we came down from our breakfast he had all the horses lined up in the barn, munching on their hay.
There was a little tenant house on the Crown S, set at the end of the lane behind the hay stacks. They had run a water line from the big tank in the horse corral and plumbed it out in the ‘40s and married cowboys had lived off and on over the years. In the summer of 1955 Nance had struck a deal with Sinclair to rent it for their water truck driver and general roustabout, Albert “Pitiful” Stillburn. Nance was plumb tickled about the arrangement. He could strut around and toss out stuff like “property management” and “asset enhancement” and such and in a way it kinda made up for him being so lame as a cowboy and all and those lingering reservations about his aircraft mechanicing skills prior to old Woodrow’s last flight. Seventy five bucks a month. Hell, they juggled millions every year with the Federal Land Bank and the Production Credit Association so it was small change but it gave him some bragging rights and he milked ‘em for all they were worth.
Clara Jean and Albert moved right in and my cousin Charlotte went down to greet them, cordial and cool to start with. She had never met any okies but you can bet Woodrow had told her about them on those those long trips back to the ranch and she established her bonafides first like she always did. It worked out all right, though, and they’d visit once a week or so when my cousin wasn’t occupied with running the ranch. When my cousin Charlotte was out and around she’d just stop by but Clara Jean always called first when she’d plan a visit to the big house, using the crank wall phone, two longs and a short, to see if my cousin was busy. They’d trade recipes and patterns and just gab and I think it softened some of the edges that were commencing to harden along the angles of my cousin’s personality. Along about the third or fourth visit Clara Jean confided in my cousin Charlette that they had taken to calling Albert “Old Pitiful” down in Oklahoma and darned if that wasn’t apt, wasn’t it. Didn’t take us long to start calling him Old Pitiful behind his back.
Albert was gone a lot of the time. In addition to the water truck he drove on his rounds to the rigs in the basin he had a pickup Sinclair had furnished him with to troubleshoot situations in. You could tell that he felt more like a boss for big oil when he’d pull up to a rig in the pickup than in the water truck. He had the pickup outfitted with a gun rack against the back window and he had a lever action Marlin 30-30 mounted in it and occasionally he’d shoot at coyotes or jackrabbits from the road. Coyotes were twenty-five dollars a pelt in Converse County in those days and jackrabbits were fifty cents each and we all augmented our wages when we could. Old Pitiful wasn’t much of a shot, though, and he didn’t augment much.
Sinclair also furnished us with bunch of cattle guards to improve Old Pitiful’s efficiency when he made his rounds and he and Nance installed them in the fence lines, Nance doing most of the engineering and Old Pitiful doing most of the digging. There were forty three gates on the Crown S and they set in a couple of dozen cattle guards that summer. It made things a lot easier if you were driving in a vehicle but John Ghostbear and I didn’t think too much of them since we were always horseback and had to get off anyway to open the wire gates that set along side of the cattle guards. And we did lose a few cows and one horse when they got stuck in the damn things and broke their legs.
Summer rolled into fall and then winter and when the snow hit we started feeding out all the hay we put up. We’d gathered and shipped a good set of calves and the cow herd was clustered on the hay meadows strung out along the river bottoms. We had a team of Percherons and me and John Ghostbear would harness then up in the morning and skid hay to the cows. If we didn’t get a tally we’d saddle up when we got back and ride the coulees till we’d find the strays and punch them back to the river. When weather threatened or we were in a blizzard Nance or my cousin Charlotte would help but mostly we’d get done early and sit around the bunkhouse and John Ghostbear would teach me how to mend saddles or harness or talk about his old days back on the Pine Ridge. The only thing that was tough was the cold, twenty or thirty below some mornings. Lucky for us they hadn’t invented hypothermia or the wind chill factor yet or we’d probably have froze to death.
The couples fell into a pattern that winter. They’d have dinner at the big house on Saturday and when the dessert was eaten and the dishes stacked, they’d play cards. Clara Jean would always kind of dress up, I guess just to stay in practice, and along about dark she’d warm up the pickup and with Albert in tow she’d head for the big house, always with a set of those earrings floating above her shoulders. She went a little heavy on the lipstick and it was like she had two mouths, her lipstick mouth and her real one. The lipstick mouth would be sassy and grinning but her real mouth would have a set of determination to it.
They played a kind of auction bridge that Albert was familiar with from down home, contract being too complicated for him. He played like an anchor and when he’d screw up the bidding or miss a trick he’d say, “Ain’t that pitiful,” at himself. They’d partner him around the table to keep the competition level. My cousin Charlotte played efficiently and kept the conversation going and her tricks were always crisp and even in a crosshatch pattern square in front of her. Nance was an enthusiastic bidder and when he’d spot some transportation or a finesse he’d talk it up, setting his spurs to the town hole and slapping his cards down and raking in his tricks with an air of triumph. Clara Jean was good at any game and played like she knew it.
John Ghostbear was never invited to these card and supper deals and mostly when they started to shuffle up I’d drift down to the bunkhouse and he’d show me how to tie knots or rope tricks or story on about growing up on the Pine Ridge in the old days. When it was snowing and blowing I’d hang around and watch them play or read a book or turn in early.
One such Saturday, with the wind howling outside and snow in the air I was laying in front of the fireplace reading a book while they played. I had a good ground level view of their legs under the table. I glanced up as I turned a page and I saw the damndest thing. Clara Jean had her shoes off and she was snaking one stocking foot up Nance’s pant leg. Her toes just purred up and down his shinbone for a moment and withdrew. It was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. Perhaps it still is. I blushed furiously and stuck my nose back in the book but I couldn’t focus on the words. I couldn’t have felt guiltier or more confused if I’d been caught outside a window watching someone take her clothes off. I peeped up and Nance was giving nothing away, just a secret little smile on his lips, like a fingernail of moonlight, could have meant anything. I faked a yawn and got out of there and it’s been fifty years and I can still close my eyes and still see it, still see the seam of her stockinged leg, still see her toes ascending.
As winter wore itself out and the river valley began to green up a little the Saturday night card parties kinda dwindled off. It wasn’t any one thing. My cousin Charlotte had bought a nice set of first calf black baldie heifers and it was the very devil calving them out. I bet we had to pull half those calves. We’d put them up on straw in the horsebarn when they started showing and check them two or three times a night by lantern light and there weren’t a lot of Saturday nights to it where everybody was around and not just too tired to stay up. We’d hired another couple of cowboys so the bunkhouse was full up and every two or three weeks we’d brand up a bunch of calves and drive them up into the Rochelle Hills to get them settled on their summer range.
Uncharacteristically, Nance and my cousin Charlette had started taking some time off, just a day or two here and there, go over to Rapid or Casper and spend the night. It didn’t seem like they were having a helluva lot of fun coming or going, more like they needed time alone together. Nance was trying to be more of a ramrod around the place and like as not when he was around he’d be fussing with the cowboys or arguing with Old Pitiful about some imaginary conflict between the ranching life and big oil. By the time we were getting ready for the first cutting of hay we were all so busy we almost didn’t notice the thin, thread-tiny trickle of tension that was circling the ranch, didn’t notice when the socializing stopped. And then by the time we started cutting hay the feud was on.
I only saw Nance and Clara Jean together one other time. We had just made our first cutting of hay and I was punching the last of the calvey black baldies down out of the hills to put them up by the barn till they’d deliver. It was getting on toward evening and I paused on a little bench overlooking the hay meadows along the river. I could see Nance’s pickup down in the meadow but I couldn’t tell if he was in it. As I puzzled on the situation Clara Jean’s old car came plugging into the meadow. She stopped some little distance from him and got out just as Nance emerged from his pickup. She ran toward him and I could hardly tell it was her, all youthful and expectant, just dancing like a colt on its new legs and on her last step she lifted herself into his outstretched arms. I just sat there on my tired horse, dumbfounded at humans and their joined behavior. I didn’t know that everything they were capable of was ordained, didn’t understand the imperative of infidelity or the force necessary to budge open the gates of desire. I did know that no man in his right mind, given a choice between Clara Jean and my cousin Charlotte, would choose Clara Jean Stillburn. No one. And yet, there on the sawn stems of the grass hay, between the green and twisted windrows, my cousin Charlotte was the one not chosen.
I shook my head, feeling somehow like a henchman, and tickled up the horse with a spur and trailed those baldies back to the barn.
Those cattle guards, imagined by Sinclair to induce efficiency and increase job performance, were the perfect gift of contention for Nance and Old Pitiful. Naturally it started out good. Nance saw them as a freebie, make his life a little easier and cost nothing. They’d joke about cheating the weather, avoiding getting out in the rain and mud to open a gate and then getting out again to close it, just sailing over them cattle guards high and dry above the slop. Because there weren’t enough to go around, Old Pitiful had to choose the locations and he took the job with grave earnestness, poring over routes, distances and travel frequencies. Once they got them installed everyone was tickled at the convenience and comfort they represented. They even put one right at the headquarters between the machine yard and the hay meadow, which wasn’t, strictly speaking, on Albert’s route to anywhere but his Saturday night supper and card game.
Then something began to roll over in Nance’s brain, like tumblers in a lock about to open. He started thinking maybe, just maybe, those cattle guards were the ranch’s and by extension, his. He started thinking a cattle guard would serve a better purpose if it were located, say, on the road to Cottonwood Dam where he went frequently to check on pairs than on the road to the Black Thunder Basin, a route used almost exclusively by Old Pitiful. Their talks around the issue moved from conversation to discussion to argument. Usually when two old boys say they’re gonna fight over some girl, it’s the fight they want, not the girl, and that’s the way it was between Nance and Old Pitiful. When they started referring to those cattle guards respectively as “fixtures” and “corporate assets” I knew we were headed for trouble. First Nance announced his intention to move the cattle guard up to Cottonwood. Then Old Pitiful made a flurry of calls to corporate in Casper to get a bigshot down to help him. Then Nance cut the phone line to the tenant house and Old Pitiful drove over to the basin to flag his super into the ruckus. It was his last trip over the cattle guard.
The day of the incident Nance went out after breakfast and cranked up the winch truck. Old Pitiful was still off somewhere over in the basin. The winch truck was an old military deal, a Dodge Power Wagon with a spool of cable bolted to the bed and gin poles that raised up to fit into a headache rack mounted behind the cab. He drove it out to the cattle guard on the Thunder Basin Road. It took him a while to get the rails unbolted from the crossties they were anchored to in the trench. Then he set the gin poles, lowered the cable and hooked it into the cattle guard and slowly lifted it out of the trench. Just as he got it up out of the hole Old Pitiful’s pickup rounded the curve on the road from Thunder Basin. Old Pitiful’s search for backup had been futile and he was sleepless and in a quandary as to what to do. They both jumped out and went to hollering. Words like “private property” and “legal rights” spun in the air between them.
Finally Old Pitiful took a position. “Put her back, Nance.” He said. “She don’t belong to you.” The words were like a line in the sand. He didn’t feel like Old Pitiful anymore.
“Back off, you son-of-a-bitch.” Nance said, the anger rising through his voice. “I’ll do as I damn well please.” He pulled his pistol out of its holster to emphasize his authority and pointed it in Albert’s general direction.
Albert didn’t even hesitate. In the one true and untarnished moment of his lifetime he took a step back to the truck, pulled the Marlin from the rack and levering a shell into the chamber, took modest aim and shot Nance stone dead through the chest. He felt for an instant that he was unequivocal and pure and vindicated. He stepped around the trench and touched Nance with a toe. He saw the blossom of blood beginning to spread in the dirt beneath the body and he began to tremble. He walked back to the truck, replaced the rifle in the rack and drove himself to Douglas and turned himself in to the high sheriff of Converse County.
My cousin Charlotte didn’t talk about it. She’d take care of the kids or stand in the kitchen corner, her grey gaze taking in the barns and the meadow and the river. After they cleaned up the mess out there she asked me to bring the winch truck back. John Ghostbear and I rode out to where the truck sat in the road, the cattle guard still dangling from the gin poles. We didn’t know what else to do so we lowered it into the trench and reset the anchor bolts to the crossties. I’ll admit it felt a little disloyal to do it. I drove the winch truck back to the ranch and John Ghostbear trailed the horses in behind.
My cousin Charlotte still wasn’t talking much but she must have managed with the funeral home. We buried Nance in the family plot in Douglas and my cousin Charlotte had to have chosen where Nance would spend eternity—three spots over from old Woodrow and one row down. All the regulars were there, the old cowboys and supporters of the dynasty. It was as much a homage to Woodrow as anything. My cousin Charlotte did not treat them to any evidence of her grief and no tear formed behind her grey eyes. She was as formal in her black dress and veil as she had been in her wedding white at her marriage years ago. Bookends on a bad deal.
The newspapers had a field day over it. “Range War Erupts in Thunder Basin,” screamed the headlines. Or “Violence Strikes as Cattleman and Big Oil Square Off.” Hell, it wasn’t a range war. I’d read all about the Johnson County War and I knew guys who were in that trouble down in Tensleep. I even got drunk once in Denver with an old geezer who claimed he’d hanged Tom Horn. Range wars happen over grass or sheep or water or plowing. Not the accidental anger of two flawed men on the road to Thunder Basin. And women, if they figured into range wars at all, were minor qualifiers.
My cousin Charlotte didn’t attend the trial either and it was just as well. The charge was manslaughter and the company lawyer they sent over from Casper to defend Old Pitiful was kinda weaselly, didn’t even want to talk about the shooting and made up that it was all about legitimate corporate interests and fiduciary responsibility and diminution of assets and all the money big oil had put into the local economy. Stuff like that. The prosecutor went to great lengths to prove that Albert fired the fatal shot and that there were no other suspects and all, which we knew anyway. So it was a typical American justice deal, brought up on one set of charges, tried according to something else, with the real deal shifting beneath it all, murky, fallow and unsung.
No one mentioned Clara Jean but she was there all three days, sitting behind Albert in stiff support in kind of a business dress, blouses buttoned to the throat and only those New Mexican earrings, swaying from her lobes to hint at her true feelings in the matter.
The judge gave Old Pitiful two years in the state pen down in Rawlings, out in eighteen months if good behavior warranted, which it would, and he acted almost grateful as they led him out of there.
It was plenty of time for Clara Jean to get her divorce and get on back to Oklahoma. Some ladies from down the river helped her pack and get ready but my cousin Charlotte never saw her again or spoke to her. Always aloof to awkwardness in the manner of her tribe, she removed herself even further from our lives. We would come up to the big house for ranch orders and occasionally we would see her, standing pensively at the kitchen window.
That fall I took off to scrape some green off my horns. I figured by the time they caught me I’d be too old to train. John Ghostbear, after drinking all night at the Antlers in Newcastle, decided to take the wrong nap in the railyards behind the bar and got run over by one of those Burlington Northern coal trains out of Gilette.
Albert must have got out of prison but no one ever saw him again. I guess he became just another face in the nameless oil patch of the west with a story he wasn’t going to talk about. I heard that Clara Jean married well down in Oklahoma and I believe that to be true.
That all happened some fifty odd years ago. And me, I’m badgered up on a trickle of river called the Mimbres down in the bootheel of New Mexico. I guess I’m here for the duration. And I don’t know if those people were ever real the way I remember them, whether they lived and dreamed and loved the way I’m saying or whether I’m making them up with ink and memory. Could those brittle women have found themselves aching for someone like Nance? If there was rivalry, who were the antagonists? Were Nance and Albert false rivals merely, instruments used and dealt away like low cards in the deck? And did the true rivals declare their victory in separate silences, like haughty queens, and stay or quit the field in kind? And did justice itself, wheeling in tandem with the stars, pause in its course over Wyoming’s cold ground for some yahoo like Albert Stillburn to bubble up in agency and act, and then jerk onward? I don’t know. I do not know. I do know that the Cheyenne River still runs through the Crown S and that cattle still dot the flanks of the hills and hay meadows and that my cousin Charlotte is up there still and that is a well run place.
The end.
Last edited by
Alaya on Sat Nov 21, 2009 6:44 pm, edited 2 times in total.
