Leaving Cheyenne Read online

  “I can’t figure you out,” I said. “As much money as you got, and you’re still fighting a goddamn windmill. Why do you do it, Gid?”

  “Sometimes I wonder myself,” he said.

  We got up and went back to work. The sun was just a blur in the sky it was so hot, and the new pipes would fry an egg. It was all we could do to keep ahold of them, gloves or no gloves, and we had to cut threads in three or four joints. That took half the afternoon. Then Gid got back up in the mill and we raised the pipe and let it down in the well, a foot at a time. Once Gid lost his grip and I thought the whole shebang would go to the bottom, but I managed to slow it with my pipe wrench till he could get another hold. Finally we got the pipe run and he came down to rest. We were both wringing wet.

  “Well, we’re nearly done,” I said. “It’ll be cool in another hour. I’m kinda glad we done her, now.”

  “Me too,” he said, mopping his face. “One thing about it, when we get this bastard fixed this time, me and you oughtn’t to have to ever lay a hand on it agin. It ought to last at least twenty-five years.”

  “So ought we,” I said. “We might get to fix it agin. We’re better windmillers than I thought we were.”

  “A man has to be experienced like us before he has enough know-how to fix one of these things.”

  “Watch out now,” I said. “I fixed a lot of them while I was getting the experience, and you did too. Besides, it wasn’t the know-how I was worried about, it was the do-how. Two weeks ago you were flat of your back eating soup.”

  “Laying around in bed’s what like to ruined me,” he said.

  We put the sucker rod in, but it liked about a foot coming up to where it was supposed to connect. So we had to go down to the barn and get another piece and replace it. The barn was beginning to make a shadow and the big heat was over for the day. Gid went up and made the connection and came back.

  “Turn her on,” he said. “I want to see the water run.”

  I turned the mill loose and a little south breeze caught the wheel. Pretty soon the old rusty water began to pour out of the hydrant, and we stood there waiting for the stream to get clear. It was still an hour to sundown, but we were two tired cowboys, I don’t mind to admit. Gid was squatted down watching the water run, and I was propped up against a standard with my shirttail out, letting my belly cool. Pretty soon the rusty water washed out and the water came out of the faucet good and cold and clear. Gid stuck his mouth to the faucet and drank awhile, and then caught his breath and drank some more.

  “Be careful you don’t founder,” I said, “drinking so much cold water.”

  “Sure good water,” he said, leaning back on his heels. “I remember when me and Dad had that well dug. It sure has been a good well.”

  Then we heard water splashing behind us. We looked up and seen it was the overhead pipe, the one that went to the storage tank. We had forgot to connect it.

  “I’ll get it,” I said. “Just take a second.”

  “No, go on and get you a drink,” he said. “I left my pliers up there anyway.”

  “You’re the derrick hand,” I said, and went to drinking. I took about three good cool swallows and heard him yell: he had just hit the ground. I guess he lost his grip, or else his foot slipped, but he couldn’t have been over three or four feet up the ladder when it happened. It didn’t look like he hit very hard, either, and I seen him start to get right up, he even got his hand on a rung. Then he hesitated, and I thought one of his legs might be broke.

  “Wait, Gid,” I said.

  I got to him and eased him down on one elbow and he never acted the least bit hurt or wild, but I don’t believe he recognized me at all.

  “Well, boys, he threw me agin,” he said. “I’ll ride him yet.”

  It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck for a minute. But I wasn’t really worried. I thought he was just out of his senses for a minute. He had gone out of his head that way several times. He tried to get up but I held him.

  “Let me up, boys,” he said. “I ain’t hurt.”

  “Okay, now, Gid,” I said. “Just lay a minute and get your breath.”

  He minded me. “That bastard threw me, Johnny,” he said. He had quit fighting to get up and lay there, looking real weak. I think that scared me the most.

  “Here,” I said. “Where do you think you are? You just fell off the ladder a couple of feet. That you’re talking about was a long time ago.”

  I knew just exactly what he was thinking. When we was young there was a horse called Old Missouri, that everybody tried to ride. Dad owned him, God knows why. One day he threw Gid six times. He never threw me but once, because I never tried to ride him but one time. But there never was a horse that Gid couldn’t wear down eventually, and he finally got so he could stay on Old Missouri.

  “I’ve been throwed harder,” he said.

  He went on like that for a while, and I didn’t try to stop him. I figured he’d come out of it in a few minutes. But he looked weak as a fish, and I finally decided to take him on it—getting him in the car was a real job. I stretched him out on the back seat and went back and turned off the faucet at the windmill. Gid’s doctor was in Wichita, but I struck for Thalia, it was closer. I started out slow, trying to miss the bumps, but I finally let that go and concentrated on speed.

  When I come to the highway I stopped a minute and Gid opened his eyes and looked at me. He seemed perfectly sensible.

  “What you reckon Molly’s doing?” he said. “I must be slipping.” Then he went off agin. “Sounds like I hear a train,” he said. “Let’s me and you go to the Panhandle. I’m tired of this country.”

  It made me sad to hear him talk that way, when it was forty years too late and him out of his mind. I begin to let the hammer down on his old Chewy.

  And then, by god, he come completely out of it. “That goddamn old windmill,” he said. “Did you turn it off?”

  “Last thing I did,” I said.

  “Well, it won’t take long to make that connection,” he said. “My damn side hurts. I wish I’d woke up a little sooner, I’d had you take me over to Molly’s, I ain’t sick enough to go to town. Maybe this time I’d have sense enough to stay there where I belong. Why don’t you just take me back? I’d kinda like to see her.”

  “Aw, we better let a doc look at you first,” I said. “I can run you out there tonight or in the morning.”

  Then he looked out the window, I guess: he said what he always said when he looked at the country in that part of the summertime: “The country’s too dry, I sure do wish it would rain. My grass is just about gone.”

  I didn’t say nothing to that, but I was relieved he was back in his senses. I was trying to pass a Dutchman; he was pulling a load of hay.

  “Oh me, Johnny,” Gid said. “Ain’t this been a hell of a time?”

  “It sure has, Gid,” I said. The sun was near enough down to be right in my eyes, and I needed all my concentration just to drive. I thought Gid said something else, to me, to Molly, to somebody, and then he didn’t say no more and I was hoping he had dozed off to sleep. But when I caught the red light by the courthouse in Thalia, and had to stop, I looked back at him and knew right then that Gideon Fry was dead.

  eight

  At the clinic they said he couldn’t have been dead over ten minutes, or maybe fifteen. But I guess to Gid ten minutes was just as final as ten years. A bloodclot done it, they said. Some people blamed me for bumping him over them old roads. But I don’t think it would have made any difference. I couldn’t have gone off and left him there on the grass by the windmill, while I drove twenty-five miles in and the doctor drove twenty-five miles back. The doctor at the clinic said the fall had started internal bleeding.

  The meanest, hardest part of it all, for me, was going off that night and leaving Gid at the hospital. They wheeled him away somewhere on a stretcher, and when I asked the doctor what I could do, he said, “Nothing.” I called Buck, Gid’s son-in-law, and he told me which f
uneral home to have Gid sent to; I asked him if he knew where Mabel was, and he give me her hotel number in Colorado Springs. When I got her I said, “Well, Mabel, I’ve got some pretty bad news for you.” “What’s happened to him?” she said. “He fell off a windmill” I said. “The fall never hurt him but it caused a bloodclot and the bloodclot killed him, Mabel. He died about an hour ago.” “The Lord help us,” she said. “Are you sure? What am I going to do?” They said she got hysterical after she hung up.

  After that, things was kind of out of my hands; there wasn’t no reason for me to stay. But I couldn’t hardly go. It didn’t seem right to just go off and leave him there. I kept wondering which jobs around the ranch he wanted me to get done in the next day or two. But I finally seen there wasn’t nothing I could do but go. None of the hospital people paid any attention to me, and I hated the smell of the place.

  I drove out to Molly’s then, and broke it to her. She came out in the yard to meet me, it was done way after dark, and I told her about it and she cried, there by the yard gate. She was awful broke up. After a while we went over to the ranch and she drove Gid’s car back to town for me and I followed in the pickup. We left it at Buck’s. When we got back to Molly’s she had quit crying for a little while.

  “Well, come on in, let’s make some coffee,” she said. “You’ll stay here with me tonight, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  It was a sure sad night for us, but we didn’t say fifteen words. We drank a good bit of coffee.

  “You know, the night we got the word about Jimmy, me and Gid played dominos,” she said.

  “You want to play some tonight?” I said.

  “Oh lord no,” she said. “I’d rather not.”

  It was the first time I’d spent a whole night with Molly in three or four years, maybe longer than that. She went in the bathroom and put on her white nightgown and I got in bed. I held her hand and we both lay there awake for an hour and a half, on our backs. Once in a while Molly sniffled, but she wasn’t crying much.

  “Well, he was some feller,” I said. “I don’t expect to ever see another like him. You know that saddle he gave me? That’s the most expensive saddle ever made in the Thalia saddle shop. Me and him had a big fight the day he give it to me. Over you, I guess.”

  I guess it was worse for Molly. Him and her had associated so much there, in the house, right there in that same bedroom we was in, there was no telling what all she was remembering. I guess he was all over the room, for her.

  “Gid was my favorite,” she said. I finally went to sleep, I don’t know whether she did or not.

  In the morning, when I woke up, an unusual thing happened. I had turned over during the night and I had my arm across Molly’s middle and my face was in her hair. When I got my eyes open she was looking right square at me. There were dark circles under her eyes, but she had just the trace of a grin on her face. For a minute I didn’t know why, and then I noticed myself. As old as I was, too, and on a morning like that. And Molly had done noticed, that’s why she was watching me. At first I was plumb embarrassed.

  “Well, I swear,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

  But she grinned, and squeezed my hand. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen you embarrassed,” she said. “I’ve had to wait sixty-two years.”

  “Well, it ain’t because of that,” I said. “You’ve caused that many a time. You’ve stayed too pretty. It’s because of Gid I’m embarrassed.”

  “I don’t want you to be,” she said. “That’s nature, she ain’t no respecter. I don’t want you to be embarrassed even if we’re a hundred years old.” Then she grinned a sad grin; for a minute she reminded me of herself when she was twenty years old. “And you better not waste it, either,” she said.

  “You’re an unusual woman,” I said, rubbing her side. “Only it ain’t much to waste. If old Gid can’t, then by god I won’t neither, how’s that?”

  “About as foolish as something he’d say,” she said. “Only thank god you won’t stick to it like he did.” And she rolled over and hugged me and cried for an hour, at least. I had to get up and hunt a box of Kleenex.

  nine

  A week after the funeral I stopped by Molly’s house; she never heard the car come up. She was out in the garden, and I walked around the house and stood by the gate a minute, watching her. The garden was just about gone. When I walked out she was down on her knees, pulling onions and putting them in her apron.

  “You’re getting a little deaf,” I said. “A person could sneak up on you.”

  She grinned, happy and jolly as could be. “Hold these onions for me,” she said.

  “Let’s go sit in the kitchen, where it’s cool and there’s something to eat,” I said.

  But she took me to the porch, instead. “You can eat here, what there is,” she said. “Cold potato pie is all there is, and you don’t like it. I didn’t figure you’d come tonight.”

  “I just like two kinds of pie,” I said. “Hot and cold. Go get me some.”

  We ate a little pie and rocked awhile and she brought out some coffee.

  “Well, I’m all packed,” I said. “I guess I’ll move tomorrow.” They had fired me, of course—I was going back to the old McCloud place, three mile off. It wasn’t a very long move.

  “They didn’t allow you much time,” she said.

  “Aw yeah,” I said. “They said no hurry. But it don’t take much time to move what little I got.”

  We talked a little while, about Gid and the will and one thing and another. Gid had left me the old pickup and a thousand acres of land—he couldn’t stand for me not to increase my holdings by at least that much. So I was set pretty for my old age—I done had two sections I inherited from Dad. That thousand acres sure burned Mabel and Willy; they thought the pickup would have been enough. He just left Molly his dad’s old pocket watch. I guess he knew Mabel would have gone to court if he had left her anything more. Molly was plenty satisfied.

  After a while the new moon came up, about the size of a basketball, and the conversation petered out. I could see Molly’s face, and she looked tired. I was too. I gave her my pieplate to take in the house, and when she came back we walked around to the pickup together. The moon was so bright we could see the chickens roosting on the chickenhouse.

  I had something big on my mind and I didn’t know how to get it up. It just seemed like I better ask Molly to marry me, for the sake of all our old times, but I didn’t know whether she’d much want to, and I didn’t even know if I much wanted to, we got along so well like we were. Finally I came out with it; I was standing with my arm around her.

  “Well, Molly, what would you think about us marrying?” I said.

  “I’d think we ain’t the kind, honey,” she said, “but thank you a whole lot for asking.”

  It was kind of a sad relief. “It’s a damn strange time for me to do it,” I said. “I could have asked you forty years ago.”

  “We lived them pretty good,” she said. “It ain’t as important a question as a lot of people think.”

  “Don’t you miss Gid?” I said. “I never thought I’d miss such a contrary so-and-so so much.”

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  “Molly, just for curiosity,” I said. “Do you think you and him would have taken up together for good, if he had lived?”

  She put one of her hands in my hip pocket and pulled out my handkerchief to see if it was clean. She had to smell it. This one wasn’t, and she kept it so she could wash it.

  “We’d decided to,” she said. “I guess we decided about thirty times. And I think in about another year I would have got his conscience quiet enough and his nerve worked up so he could have come out and stayed.”

  We thought about it a minute.

  “You know I think he worried about you as much as he did Mabel,” she said. “He kept saying it wouldn’t be fair to you if he moved out here.” She gave me a long look. “I got sick of him wanting to be so fair
to you,” she said, “and I even got sick of you being around for him to worry about. You may have noticed.”

  “No,” I said. “But I imagine it’s true.”

  “Johnny, when it came to him, I just never cared to be fair,” she said.

  “I don’t blame you none.”

  When I got in the pickup she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll take you in to a ballgame one of these cool nights,” I said.

  “I wish you would,” she said. “I ain’t been to a half a dozen games since Joe quit playing.”

  I started to drive off, but she had ahold of my arm. “I’ll have a better supper tomorrow night,” she said. “Just because we ain’t marrying don’t mean you’re free to miss a night. You’re welcome here every night, all night, when you feel like putting up with me.”

  “I’ll be here in time to carve the beef,” I said, and drove off. I felt pretty blue driving down the hill, and kinda wished I had stayed that night. But sometimes you can’t get around being lonesome for a while.

  I took my time driving home on those old bumpy roads. When I got back to the house I put the pickup in the garage and shut the doors. I had me some Delaware Punches in the icebox and I got one and went out on the screened-in porch. Over at Molly’s I had been a little sleepy, but the drive had woke me up.

  The porch was cool, and the night was real quiet. I set my Punch bottle down and stepped out in the yard to take a leak. I could hear an oil rig working way over in the Dale, but except for that and a few crickets the night was perfectly still. When I got through I didn’t much want to go in, so I walked around the old Fry place for a while, watching that white moon circling out over Gid’s pastures. It was strange how I never knowed till Gid died just how used to him I was.

  “You old so-and-so,” I said. “You wouldn’t listen. I offered to go up and fix that thing, but no sir, you had to do it yourself.”

  “Aw, you couldn’t have fixed it if you’d a gone,” he said. “You never was no hand with pipe.”

  “Hell no, a cowboy ain’t supposed to be,” I said.