At breakfast they looked out at the ridges to the north; the flats below drifted with an early haze like thin smoke. Mingus bluffs rose behind them topped out with oak and cedar and the smoke of the breakfast fire climbed straight into the sky. Everything they said came back to them in a hollow repetition. “Hey!” shouted the boy. The bluffs said hey.
“Hush,” said Everett. He blew smoke away from himself and listened. Then he spit on the end of his cigarette and dropped it.
“Any of them you want particular, Ross?” said Homer.
Ross said, “Yes. She’s a red mare. All red. I want her. She must have got loose from somewhere.”
“Could have,” said Nolan. “Up at Lubbock the dust is drifted so high the stock is walking right over the fences.”
“Try not to hit her,” said Ross.
“All right.”
“I hear them,” Ross said. “Let’s get along.”
The pasture was two thousand acres. It had been recently fenced off with four strands of good wire, cedar posts nine strides apart. The band of feral horses had been there for two years and he had tolerated them but there had been no rain and they had increased more than the grass could bear and the hooves of horses were bad for the soil, tamping and compacting it. They had been joined by loose stock that wandered in from other places. Some of them had the weight and the appearance of Percherons or army remount Thoroughbreds. The April landscape was deceptively green along the slopes because of the cedar and live oak but in the valleys the grass stood in stiff clumps spaced farther and farther apart with every month, with hard dirt in between. The live oaks along the creek banks had lost limbs from drought. They shattered when they struck the ground. The same with the pecans. Another high wind and he would lose half the trees in the pecan flats.
The tips of Spanish dagger and the sotol held up their needled tips in blazing points of light. The sudden sunrise heat made the land smoke, a haze of thin evaporation lifted and moved slightly. To the north another battleship of red dust was building. They came down one of the long rolling ridges of Comanche County. It was a country of vastly separated ridges of limestone, and the country in between them held in place by a drying cover of grass that was not going to be there much longer if the horses grazed it out. They figured on being able to shoot about thirty head of horses that morning. They had run them away from the water for three days now.
Ross Everett and three of his neighbors rode to a bluff overlooking Upshaw’s Creek. There was one pool of water left in it. Wave after wave of scaled quail flushed up and flew, singing their high one-note song, and settled again and then flew again as they rode through the coveys once more.
The pool was twenty feet long, an eye drinking in light, the first light of the morning. The smell of dust and the peppery smell of cedar lay close to the ground. Everett sat his horse with ease, loose at the waist, his canvas jacket hung open from his shoulders. The lines of his face were graven deep, and he seemed ten years older than he was. The small rain had passed and the weather turned the world back over to the drought. Low, nebulous clouds bowled past at a low altitude, loose, glowing banks of traveling mist.
Nolan Simms and his two sons moved away to another angle. They tied up in a cramped stand of live oaks that were no more than ten feet tall and all twisted into one another, and got out their rifles and lay down on the ground and sighted on the pool. Everett and Innis tied up and lay down as well. Ross took a box of 30-30 shells and opened it and placed it on the ground between himself and his son. Homer Fletcher and the two men who worked for him moved away to the right. Everett didn’t like the two men who worked for old man Fletcher but what could you do.
“I want you to think and shoot carefully,” Everett said. His son slipped in one shell after another. He was being asked to do a man’s job with a man’s rifle and it made his hands slick with sweat.
“Yes, sir,” he said. He wiped his hands on his shirt.
“I don’t want to see any wounded animals thrashing around suffering.”
“No, sir.”
They came in with an old mare leading them. The oldest mare always led the herd. The boss stallion came behind and some younger stallions darted around the outer edges of the herd, desperate for water and afraid of the boss stallion. They were all thin; it was painful to look at them. They seemed to be nothing more than bones moving inside horsehide and eaten by internal worms and wounded by the larvae of the insatiable screw fly that ripped at tissue and feasted on fresh blood. They knew there were men above them on the ridge and hidden in the stiffened dry brush but they could no longer go without water. Suddenly Simms’s boy stood up in his excitement and fired. Then Nolan Simms and his other boy started firing.
Everett sighted on the old mare and brought her down. She seized up and stiffened as if she had suddenly been fired in pottery and then dropped with her head and flying mane falling last. She lay there and other horses ran over her. He shot and worked the lever and shot again. The red mare ran, low and graceful, in a panicked circle around and around the pool. She couldn’t keep on much longer. There was a festering, ragged wound on the inside of her right foreleg. One of the young stallions slammed into her and knocked her onto her side, but she fought to get on her feet again. Everett’s rifle barrel followed the young stallion for a few seconds and then he shot. It was a little bay stallion so thin a person would think it couldn’t still be alive and when he collapsed he looked like he had been dead for a month.
Dead horses lay unmoving around the glittering surface of the pool and at last you could hear the musical sound of falling water as it ran over a lip of rock and into a smaller pool. After that the water went underground. The only ones left standing were the red mare and a foal several months old that ran calling from one carcass to another.
“Anybody want him?” Everett yelled. He stood up. So did his son. The ammunition box was empty.
“I do.”
Everett turned and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “That’s what I get for taking you to see Bambi,” he said. “No more Walt Disney for you.”
“I want him,” the boy said.
Everett called out, “Leave the foal!”
They walked down to the gravel of Upshaw’s Creek. The red mare thrust her muzzle into the water and drank and drank. When Everett came toward her she stepped back with a dripping muzzle and nodded to him. She took one step toward him and then two. She was begging for her life. He had seen other horses do it. It was a strange thing. He turned his back to her and crossed his arms and stood very still. She came toward him and he could hear her sucking ragged breath. She touched his shoulder with her muzzle and stood there shaking.
Old man Fletcher walked among the dead horses. “We need that goddamned Gene Autry to come here and sing ‘Home on the Range’ for us,” he said. “Happy days are here again.”
On the way back home they passed by the tenants’ houses on Grape Creek. The fields had not been turned that winter. There was no point. The tenants loaded a buckboard with their possessions and children and went to chop cedar. They would trim them down to fence posts and make five cents a post. They had paid him what they owed him in cedar posts for the new pasture fence. Everett would cannibalize the houses, strip them of glass and shingles. Then probably the best thing to do would be to set them on fire.
Smoky Joe was galloping from one end of the horse barn lot to the other. His hair was all turned up, he galloped in wild short rushes and stared out over the top of the mesquite palings with his nostrils wide and white around his eyes. He was shod now and worked hard every morning on the bull’s-eye track behind the storage shed. It was strange how he could tell what had happened, miles away. But he knew. Then he called out to the red mare in a low murmur.
Everett turned her into the sick corral and watched her. She stood in the center of the half-acre lot, very still, her red tail blowing around her hocks. It was a solid pen made with sucker rod pipe and casing pipe for the uprights and it would hold her well enough. She carried a Rafter S brand and he did not know where it was from. Nolan would know, he had the brand registries for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers’ Association and it was possible an owner would claim her, but he hoped not because she was a handsome girl, even drawn down by parasites and her hooves split out by drought. He carried a feed pan made of an old tire out to her and hung it over one of the uprights and filled it with feed. He could smell the rotting flesh from screwworm larvae but they could get to that later.
The foal was turned into the lot with the whiteface and her bull calf. Innis stood and watched as both of them nursed from the cow and she was patient and chewed and ran her tongue up her nose holes. The foal sucked furiously and his short brush tail thrashed like a machine. Foam leaked out of the sides of his mouth.
Innis found the creosote paste in the bunkhouse. It was now used for saddle storage and medicines and number three cans of hominy and tomatoes, the anvil and horseshoes. They could no longer afford to pay help. Old pieces of latigo and wooden stirrups were thrown on the beds. They would have to tie the mare down to dig out the screwworms and pour creosote into the meaty wound. He wanted the red mare to be well, and take up with the stud foal and mother him. If he were mothered, then the foal would thrive. Innis poured out the creosote into an empty tin can and swirled a brush around in it.
Ross went into the house and climbed the stairs. From the window of Miriam’s room he could see Innis walking out to the sick corral with the creosote. He began to fold the possessions of the boy’s mother into boxes. The bedspread, the curtains, the doilies on the vanity and the things from the drawers. Outside, another relentless and bitterly clear day. The sky was blue from one horizon to the other and shaded only by a light marking of dust from the east, from Kansas, where topsoil lingered airborne in the lofting winds. Ross knew he had to do it sooner or later and the time had come because of Jeanine. He had made up his mind. He opened the closet and took out Miriam’s dresses. He folded those as well. They would go to the Baptist church and be sent somewhere. He would ask them to pack it all off to a Baptist church somewhere out of the area. Some woman headed for California, in a Model T with mattresses on top, with a washtub and blankets strapped to the back, would wear them.