Barbed Wire Seminary©

 

Cypress Hills 

Barbed Wire Seminary©

George G. Epp

 

“Why do horses always snort like that when they’re walking?”

            “Like what. Pete?”

            Pete closed his mouth and made a noise through his nose that sounded about as much like a horse as a cowbell sounds like a violin. “You know what I . . . there! That sound.”

            “Oh, that. Well Trigger’s just blowin’ his nose. An’ they don’t do it just when they’re walkin’. They do it when they’re in their stall in the barn, too.”

            “I don’t think so. ‘Least I never heard it.” Pete slapped Trigger’s flank with a knee; the smallish palomino gelding had a hard time keeping up with Art’s long-legged black. “They whinny in the barn. ‘Specially when you give ‘em their oats.”

            “No, whinnies is different.”

            Trigger snorted again. “See, Art? Nothin’ came out. Shit, he didn’t even pull out a hanky!”

            Art and Pete had both signed on with the Bar Eleven Hereford Ranch in April, and since then had been riding the fences—of which there were at least 60 miles—replaced poles, spliced broken wires and before May rolled around, had exhausted every topic of conversation they could come up with. Because their horses were right under them, so to speak, Pete particularly could always find some obscure horsey trivia with which to break the silence . . . and the snorting. Under the open sky in a bedroll at night, he’d speculate on the stars, their relative distance from each other, what they might be made of if not electricity and how to locate the Little Bear.

            A good story teller would describe them here, but a good reader will easily put together what two cowpokes who haven’t washed, changed their clothes, shaved for a week-and-a-half would look like. And smell like, for that matter. And he’d be right. Mind you, Art was at least five inches taller and seventy pounds heavier that Pete. That’ll have to do.

            I said they’d been through every topic they could come up with. What I should have said was that they’d exhausted all the safe subjects, the subjects that were about things, stretching to animals, like the horse’s snorting habit. Some sage sometime said that there are three levels of conversation, the lowest being about things, the second about people and the loftiest about ideas. Neither Art nor Pete had spent a lot of time at lofty, so if a question of, say, the kinship of all living things ever came up, it would have to be by accident.

            And it did—come up . . . by accident—when they were at the farthest end of the Bar Eleven’s grazing allotment and their canned beef and canned corn and jerky had all been eaten. 15 cans divided by 15 days would equal 1 per day, but even if their math had been up to it, their appetites hadn’t been. Art put up a rabbit snare with a bootlace but all he caught was a skunk, which he proposed to dispatch with his rifle so he could have his bootlace back. 

            Hunger had made Pete testy. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? “Don’t shoot the skunk, Whaded he ever do to you?”

            Art lowered his rifle by about 6 inches. “What?”

            Pete put his thumbs behind his belt and stood with his feet about 18 inches apart, sort of like James Arness in a Gunsmoke poster. “He’ll chew his way out. He’s prob’ly got a wife and kids at home. God made skunks too, ya know.”

            Art lowered his rifle another 3½ inches. “What?”

            Pete shuffled in the dust. “Just don’t like to see animals killed for nothin’.”

            “So. I’ll tell ya what. You go and untie that polecat and bring me my bootlace and I won’t shoot it.” Art lowered his rifle all the way and smirked. “Jes remember. You wooden shoot a skunk, but he sure’s hell won’t hesitate to shoot you.”

            “Nah. he’ll get out on his own.”

            Art raised his rifle, pulled the trigger . . . and missed. The bang of the gun startled the skunk, who leaped back, tore the bootlace off the barbed wire to which Art had attached it and loped off, trailing 2½ feet of leather bootlace behind him. Art shot off another two bullets that missed, and as he was reloading, the skunk disappeared into the shrubbery around a slough.

            Art slid the rifle into the scabbard of his saddle. “Suppose yer gonna tell me now that God saved his little . . . stinky creature.” He untied his bedroll and spread it out under a tree. “Tomorra yer gonna ride like hell across the hills and get us some food and then yer gonna ride back an’ make me a supper like you’ve never rustled up bafore.”

            “C’mon Art. That’d take all day and the missus gonna be mad as hell at us.”

            “No, Pete. Not us . . . You!”

            “What’d I do?”

            “You pissed me off, made me miss the skunk. You cost me a bootlace!” Art was trying to roll a cigarette with the last shreds of tobacco shaken carefully out from the bottom of a pouch. The resulting cigarette was hardly thicker than a soda straw and the tobacco so dry that when he lit it, it flared up like a torch and he was lucky to get one flaming hot drag out of it.

            Pete laughed. He shouldn’t have. Art jumped up in a rage, grabbed Pete’s bedroll and hurled it up into the tree, where it probably has made some magpie couple a mighty fine nest for these past three years since Pete, Art and the Bar Eleven parted. 

 

Pete slept fitfully on the bare grass, his left forearm as a pillow, Trigger’s saddle-blanket covering his legs and the saddle over his shoulders and his free arm. He had plenty of time to think, to think about skunks and rabbits and ladybird beetles and elephants and the right to live to a ripe old age . . . and people, he thought, which led him to Art and when he thought about him as a living thing, he suddenly grew very sentimental about the fact that he would have to spend the next day or two or more with one boot unlaced and how awful that would be and it would be his (Pete’s) fault. What’s more, he (Pete) was wearing cowboy boots a lot like those worn by James Arness in Gunsmoke (only misshapen and soiled with much non-movie-set wear and tear) and so he didn’t even have a lace to give him (Art) if he’d wanted to.

            But he’d make it all up to Art.

            The first hint of daybreak, however, found him much more optimistic mentally and far, far stiffer and sorer physically. As he straightened his aching back and rubbed a painful hip, he looked over at Art cocooned in his soft, warm bedroll, then while contemplating the grueling 10 mile or more cross-country trip to the ranch, begging for more rations, scrounging a bedroll or a ladder (no, a ladder wouldn’t fit on Trigger), his convictions gradually moved to the stupidity of his colleague in putting up a snare with a bootlace, of the obvious imbecility of the skunk in getting caught in it and Art’s equally obvious ineptitude with a rifle. And then, the bedroll high up in the branches of a sprawling spruce tree, well.

            It was hunger, he told himself, not Art’s orders that drove him to make this trip to the ranch yard. Mrs. Perkins had obviously short-changed them on the groceries, probably to save a few dollars or (and this thought began to percolate at about the time the sun came up and he topped the first hill and began a precipitous descent into the coulee) or she thought of him and Art as nobodies to be exploited like slaves.

            As Trigger slowly and laboriously climbed the far side of the coulee with Pete leading the way, angry, aggressive thoughts assailed him (Pete, not the horse). (I realize here that I’m not very good at rendering Pete’s thoughts in the way Pete would have experienced them; he’d probably never used the words laboriously, aggressive, and especially not assailed in his life.) He imagined himself walking up to Boss Man Perkins and saying, “Now see here . . .” or “What the hell . . .” but he wasn’t able to finish any of the sentences and, anyway, having been on the seasonal work circuit for about 20 years now, any such conversation would undoubtedly go something like this:

            IRATE PETE: Now see . . .

            BOSS PERSON: You’re fired!

            Pete had a vague idea about at least one lofty thought, a thought he had nevertheless found words for. Justice. He would have said to Boss Man Perkins, “That’s not fair,” and it would have been exactly what he was thinking now after he’d resigned himself once again to the plaintive, subservient mewing that seasonal cowboys have to do to get a job, to keep a job, to get enough cash together to survive the droughts between jobs. Even the skunk experienced more justice; he got a bootlace for his folly.

            As it was, it went rather well. Boss Man Perkins and skinchy Mrs. Perkins weren’t home; Pete filled his saddlebags with cans of meat, peas, gravy, a bag of potatoes and even some tinned peaches. He nipped into the freezer and took out 4 T-Bones for supper, picked up a bedroll stored in the bunkhouse closet and was gone. In and out like a ghost. He could hardly believe his luck. He was leaving the bunkhouse when it occurred to him that filching a tin of tobacco for Art would be the icing on the cake. He went back; an unopened can of Navy Fine Cut wasn’t hard to find going through the regular ranch hand’s lockers (that were never locked, cowboys are completely trustworthy).

            The summer sun was setting behind the verdant hills when Pete finally arrived back from his grocery shopping. Art was seated with his back against the ash, reading a tattered copy of Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey. He jumped up the second Trigger and Pete hove into earshot, reached into a saddlebag before they’d even stopped and pulled out the bag of potatoes. He tore the bag open, took out a potato and commenced feeding on it, dirt and all,

            “Is that all you brought? Spuds?”

            Pete pulled a near-dead Trigger to a stop, took off the saddlebags and dropped them onto the grass at Art’s feet. “Feast yer eyes on that. ‘N’ build a fire. We’re gonna eat steak tonight!”

            A rotting fence-post and a few dead branches from the ash would have to do. Pete piled them all together, shoved a few handfuls of dried grass under the lot and put a match to it. Art plopped the four steaks in the frying pan, added a couple of quartered potatoes in with them, opened a tin of gravy and poured it over the lot and set the pan over the smoky fire.

            The steaks turned out to be pork chops, the gravy burnt to the pan and the potatoes were decidedly underdone when the two hungry plainsmen agreed they could wait no longer.

            After supper, Art glued together two cigarette papers, wrapped them around enough tobacco so that the end product was about the thickness of a cigar. He puffed on that while he put together another which he lit off the first. He belched. He puffed. He farted. He belched again.

            Pete snorted. Lightning whinnied. Trigger snorted.

            “How’d you talk the missus into giving you all this good stuff?” Art said between puffs.

            “She did’n zactly give it me,”

            “Whatd’ya mean.”

            “She wasn’t home, so I took it.”

            “You what?”

            “I took it. Same stuff she’d ‘a’ given me . . . ‘cept for the tobaccy and the . . . the steaks, I guess.”

            “So you stole it.”

            “No, I never stole it. If you know somebody’s gonna give you something, and they ain’t home and you take it, that ain’t stealin.’”

            “Sure’z hell is! She’d never of give you the tobacco and the . . . the . . . pork chops!”

            “No, I just borrowed them, I guess.”

            “You hippo crate! Yer all holy, holy when it comes to . . . to not shootin’ skunks. But stealin’ stuff from yer boss, well that’s OK, is it?”

            Art took another long drag on his sausage-cigarette. “Anyway, you can’t borrow a pork chop. ‘Less you was fixin’ to return it someday.”

            Pete felt a chill creep up his back, lodge in his neck. It really hadn’t felt like stealing, except maybe for tobacco, and since he didn’t smoke and Art was right now consuming the goods, his part in it could, he now saw, be considered a moral failure, maybe even a sin. Hell . . . burning hell forever and ever, That’s where sinners went. And didn’t the fact that he did it (especially the tobacco) just to please Art carry any weight in his favour? 

            Pete watched the sun set over the aromatic sagebrush, a gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the Oak tree and in the distance, a coyote howled his love song and a smaller voice farther away answered. (I think I plagiarized this line from my memories of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, sorry.) Pete felt an ache beginning in his chest and rising up to constrict his throat and he thought of all the girls he would never know, their flaxen hair blowing in the breeze, their red lips, their smiles and their . . . their . . ..

            An orange, gibbous moon was rising in the east when Pete finally raised his head from crossed arms and went back to unroll his bedroll, pulled off dusty boots and crawled in, zipping up his cocoon in hopes of shutting out the thoughts of the evening.

            And he dreamt, but couldn’t remember what he dreamt when he woke up at dawn. (And if he had remembered, he wouldn’t have told me anyway.) Whatever it was had awakened him smiling.  He unzipped his pilfered bedroll, sat up, stretched and pulled on his boots. He walked over to where Art was snoring softly and gave him a kick in the place where he’d determined his butt to be.

            “Git up, horseface!”

            Art bolted upright. “What the hell?!”

            “Git up! I ain’t goin to hell and yer gonna help me!”

            “Go ta hell! Whaderya talkin about?”

            “So I stole the steaks and the tabaccy. OK, and maybe the rest of the food. So give me the tabaccy can and five bucks. I’m goin’ back to confess so’s I don’t go to hell when I die!”

            “Go ta heaven, ya mean? Who’re you kiddin.’ You and me ain’t goin’ to heaven . . . heaven’s for preachers an’ people who . . . who sing in . . . in the choir, an’. . . an’ such.”

            Art rolled over, pulled the blanket over his ear. Pete went scrabbling through his saddle bag, the one with the secret pocket where he kept whatever little money he hadn’t spent on whiskey and jujubes and since they’d been riding fences for almost a month, shopping days had been few and far between. Actually zero. There were two silver dollars, two quarters and a five dollar Abe Lincoln. Two silver dollars, two quarters and a five dollar Abe Lincoln. He thought as follows: “If’n I put a dollar in the tabaccy can, that should pay for what Art smoked last night, an if I give Mrs. Perkins a dollar fifty, I can keep the Abe Lincoln, and cancel my sins of thievin’.”

            Although Pete didn’t know it, he’d just stumbled into the existential question over which all the popes, career theologians and preachers had battered their heads since time immemorial. How much or how little self-sacrifice is required to tip the balance in favour of the plaintiff on judgment day? (Sorry, that’s really two existential questions.) Or if sins are forgiven, is it just the past ones or does that include the ones you expect to commit tomorrow? (Make it three; I’ve got to plan better.) Pay attention, Pope Pius, Martin Luther, Menno Simons, John Calvin; the answer may hinge on Pete’s hoarded Abe Lincoln and the measure of his penitence weighed against his self-worth as a vagrant, itinerant, cowboy person with nothing to his name but a decrepit horse, a couple of flannel shirts, a sweat & dirt impregnated hat, a worn saddle and halter, two leather saddle bags—and an Abe Lincoln!!

            Trigger wasn’t happy about repeating the long ride to the ranch. But when they got there, Pete was elated to discover that nobody was home, neither in the house, nor in the barn, nor in the bunkhouse. He’d confiscated the tin of tobacco from Art’s saddle bag; now he put one silver dollar inside and returned it to its rightful place in the third locker to the right of the stove. He loped over to the house –his worn boot heels exaggerating his bow-legged gate—and laid a dollar fifty on the kitchen counter. That should more than cover the pork chops that he’d mistaken for steaks. He led Trigger, then, to the cattle trough and while the poor nag was slurping up a bellyfull of brown water, Pete took a look around, returned to the house and pocketed one of the two quarters.

 

Soon after Art found his tobacco gone, he figured out that Pete hadn’t been kidding when he said he Was going to make things right. He swore a purple streak, kicked at a few tumbleweeds and generally exhibited all those withdrawal symptoms that every smoker who’d ever collected butts in the gutters would recognize. He saddled up Lightning and rode off in the direction of the ranch, then pulled up when common sense told him that with three hours head start, even Trigger would beat him to the can of Tobacco. Back under the Oak, he built as big a fire as the scanty supply of twigs would allow and fried up a pound of bacon, ate it standing up while waiting for the coffee pot to boil. (You may be wondering where he got the water for coffee; I know, I was. Look up Deus ex Machina on Google if this troubles you.)

            Art rode at least five miles of fence, fixed three broken wires and disentangled one bawling calf from a barbed wire snare before heading back to the Oak. Some people get a lot done when they’re raging. Pete was already there, cooking a pot of beef (or pork) stew and singing a butchered first verse of Strawberry Roan. Had Art not smelled the beef (or pork) stew, he would probably have ridden Lightning right over Pete. But he didn’t. He just swore a violet streak at Pete while he shoveled a plateful of beef (or pork) stew into his mouth. Pete just smiled as if he knew something Art didn’t know, which he did.

            “You could’ve just left a couple dollars and kept the tabaccy can.”

            “I asked you fer five bucks but you jest told me I was goin’ to hell anywise.”

            “I didden mean it, you moron.”

            Pete kept smiling, even through the “moron” bit.

            Pete got up, belched and whistled the Strawberry Roan part where the horse in question goes to horse heaven and . . . and they hang his saddle on the corral fence and a note on the grave that says, “Poor ole Strawberry Roan. All the names signed below he has thrown. His saddle hangs here, please leave it alone, this marks the fate of old strawberry roan.” This part always brought a tear to Pete’s eye, but not today. (If you click here, Wilf Carter will sing this sad ballad for you.) Today he reached into his saddlebag hanging over a tree branch, took out a tin of tobacco and tossed it in a perfect arc into Art’s lap.

            “What the . . . you stole it . . . agin?” But Pete could see that Art was as happy as any smoker would be to open his Christmas present and find it to be six cartons of tailor-mades. Art was assembling his papers and matches so fast his hands were shaking.

            “Do smokers go ta heaven, I wonder,” Pete said. And then, “Nope, didn’t steal it, no sir. I met good ole Abe Lincoln and he bought it for me . . . well, for you, akshally.”

            Abe was leaning against the Oak, smoking one fat rollie, blowing smoke rings out his nose and rolling another one. “Good beef (or pork) stew for supper and a long smoke (puff, puff) after ‘s enough heaven for me.”

            “You owe me five, don’t forget.”

            “Ya paid too much. Give ya two come payday.”

            Pete swelled with his new-found piety. “Yer prob’ly gonna roast in hell for all eternity, and when that’s over, you’ll . . . you’ll be lyin’ in yer own ashes and cryin’ for a cigarette. And . . . guess . . . what . . . I won’t be there to bail ya out.

            “Really? Where will you be?”

            “Figure it out, moron.”

 

“Where do horses go when they die?” Pete asked this at about the three-mile mark of their fence ride around Rattlesnake Ravine.

            “They don’t go nowhere. They jest lie there.”

            “No. I mean . . . well, ya know what I mean.”

            “Member that sorrel broke a leg last place we worked? Tommy Feister just put a bullet in ‘im, tied a leg to his pommel and dragged him inna the coulee for the coyotes.”

            Pete was silent for a time. “I think there’s a heaven for horses.” He slid off trigger, took a hammer from his saddlebag and re-stapled a wire to a willow pole. “Horses got souls. They oughta be berried proper.”

            “You tryin’ to tell me that sorry specimen of yers got a soul?”

            “When Trigger snorts, he’s prayin’.”

            “What?” It was Art’s turn to dismount and tie together the ends of a broken wire. “Do y’all even pray? I never seen ya.”

            Pete had tried, but all he could ever think of was the short prayer his Aunt Bess taught him to intone before crawling into bed. Jesus, Jesus make be good so I can go to heaven when I die. Pete had often wished that everything could be simpler, that everything that mattered wouldn’t be out of his mental reach, but then, how simple would it have to be? No point in asking Art; Art for whom the universe revolved around the lighted tip of a cigarette, around the amber of a great whiskey whisked about in the twirling of a crystal glass, under the swirling skirts of the dancer at the Mandijust Saloon in Scarf City.

            Art found a hollow on the edge of Rattlesnake Ravine that was perfect for an overnight bivouac. They had another supper of beef (or pork) stew, this time made much more palatable with the addition of a few wild onions. Art lighted up his first, then second, then third cigarette sitting cross-legged on his bedroll and Pete thought about writing in his journal, which still retained its virginal purity, and changed his mind. He had licked his pencil repeatedly a few times but could never bring himself to deface the pristine first page.

            Anyway, what actually was the point? Wasn’t his life like everyone else’s—including Trigger’s—little more than being born, doing stuff until you’re too old and too tired to do stuff anymore, and then dying? He had a vision of himself with a bullet through the brain, being dragged by one leg into Rattlesnake Ravine to feed the coyotes.

            As the darkness deepened, Pete got up, took a curry comb from his saddle bag and went over to where Trigger was placidly munching on a stand of juicy grass. He ran the curry comb, brush side, down Trigger’s back. Trigger raised his head, turned to Pete and said, “My God that’s good! A little lower would be nice,” and went back to tearing up mouthfuls of grass, enough to make Pete wonder if at that speed, he could be chewing it properly.

            He crawled into the sleeping bag, remembered that he’d pilfered that too and hadn’t paid for it. But somehow, it bothered him less than his earlier qualms about right/wrong and his chances at eternal bliss or the fire. Perhaps heaven really is a cigarette after a hearty beef (or pork) stew, or a back rub and fresh, green grass. And maybe sins forgiven and friends who call you moron on occasion but have your back. (I’m not sure Pete actually thought this last bit, but I just figured, if he didn’t, he should’ve.)

 

The end (finally!)