Through Darkest America

He looked at her, waiting, and she raised her head and smiled wearily. “Milo. It’s all right.”

“Damn it all, nothing happened, Ev. Nothin’s going to!” “I guess not, Milo.”

“All he done was ride by.”

“Yes.”

“He rode by and that’s all there was to it.”

“And looked,” she said. “You saw him look.”

“I seen him, all right,” Papa said fiercely. “Don’t guess I can stop him from doin’ that.”

“Don’t guess anyone can stop Jacob from doing what he takes a mind to.” She looked up quickly, pain on her face, clearly wishing she could call back the words. Howie saw his father’s big fists tighten until they turned white, and he knew they weren’t going to be seeing the pictures of Silver Island, or likely anything else at the fair.

Chapter Four

Just past poortown, near a mile out of Bluevale proper, the high bluff sloped down to the sandy flats of the river and the sprawling site of Ten Creek stockyards. It was a good spot, because the wind usually blew off the bluff and away from town. Also, stock could be brought in easily by barge and processed meat taken out the same way.

Howie and his father walked to the yards just after sunup, along with a rancher from the Territory staying at the inn. The stench was bad, even if you were used to working stock. Not near as bad as it would be, though, Papa pointed out, when the full heat of summer hit the river bed. Howie didn’t doubt it, but it was hard to see how something that awful could get worse.

To his left, pit-pens stretched out of sight around the bend of the river. Hundreds of separate hollows checkered the flats, under a network of narrow rampways. Every dozen rows or so, wider ramps had been built to serve the heavy feed carts.

There was a slow, constant motion within the pens— shuffling, incurious. And the sound was one Howie had heard before—an almost visible thing wherever stock gathered—like the dry hum of big, sad bees.

Papa said Bluevale was in a good position between the eastern and western roadways. The river was central to both and there was hardly a time in good weather when ten or twenty thousand head couldn’t been seen there. Howie was ready to believe there were a hundred times that many on hand now.

“Over there’s the fathering pens,” Papa pointed, “and the breed shacks and show barns. And past that—see where the smoke’s coming out? That’s the processing plant and the dryers and smokers on the other side.”

Howie nodded understanding. He was familiar with all these things, and what they were for. Here, of course, everything was on a much larger scale than at the farm. The maze of wooden buildings and sheds tumbling toward the river seemed a fairly big town in itself.

Down the roadway cut through the bluff, Papa led him past the sound and smell of the pit-pens and the noisy mechanical jangle of the cutting plant. They passed under the chute where non-edible organs and parts sluiced down in a tumble of color to four-man wagons, which workers hauled off to waiting barges. From there they floated twelve miles downriver to the fertilizer plant at Harrow Point. Now that, Papa grinned sourly, had to be the most God-awful smelling place on the face of the Earth! Even birds, he said, wouldn’t fly over Harrow unless they had to.

Though he didn’t say, Howie knew his father had gotten a good price for the trouble-making mare and the three geldings. He came out of the plant office with a spring in his step, and coins that rang sweeter than copper in his pocket.

There was a tavern lean-to set up right on the river under cottonwoods, where the sun brightened the water and sparkled off white gravel. Howie had cold cider while his father drank clear corn and talked to the other buyers and farmers. The reason meat prices were good, they told each other, was that the trouble with Lathan’s rebels in the west had gotten a lot more serious than folks figured on. Plenty of towns and ranches had been overrun. Stock west of Arkansas Territory and Missouri had been scattered, stolen, or just plain used up. The army, and the people living out there, needed all the meat they could get.

Howie didn’t understand all of it and wasn’t given to asking grownup questions. But he’d overheard enough since late winter to know Lathan was someone who’d been important in the army once—like Colonel Jacob—and was now fighting against the country in the west. That was a bad thing, he guessed. Still, if it brought Papa more money for stock, maybe it wasn’t real bad. He was holding a picture in his head of the bone knife in the window of the store in Bluevale. The one that fit his hand just right, like he’d squeezed it together in his fists out of river clay…

Howie finally asked Papa about stock when he was nine— but the questions had been in his head longer than that.

“No reason to get all solemn-like,” Papa told him. “Every child there is has to get the wonders out of him. Don’t figure you’re any different.”

He set Howie up on the board fence under the heavy oak that shaded the tool shed and looped his big stock whip on a weathered post.

“Now, just speak what’s on your mind,” said Papa. Howie bit his lip and looked down at his feet. “I… ain’t sure I can do the words right.”

Papa nodded understandingly. He’d seen the questions coming, long before Howie knew they were there. “I reckon I can nudge you along a little,” he said. “What you got to know, Howie, is lots of things in the world look the same, but that don’t mean they are. That’s kind of what’s in your head, ain’t it?”

Howie nodded. He didn’t want to tell his father what he’d been thinking. He was sure Papa would understand, all right, but the thoughts were real scary and he didn’t think he could ever say them out loud. Not to anybody. When it had started, his heart had stopped right where it was and he’d been too frightened to even sleep for three or four days. And after that came the terrible nightmares and he kept his eyes open as long as he could—until sleep caught up with him and he couldn’t hold back any longer.

What started it was looking down in the pit-pens one morning. Just watching stock mill about, like he’d done a thousand times before. One of the hands, was bringing some colts in for doctoring. He was working alone, because the stock was too young to give much trouble. He waved at Howie and said something, but Howie didn’t hear. Because just then one of the colts looked up and stared right at him—that was when Howie felt his heart stop and knew all the blood had gone from his face.

He ran as far as he could, away from the pens and out through the fields. He ran until his lungs quit and he stumbled and buried his face in sweet grass. He kept his eyes closed tight, but the pictures wouldn’t go away. He still saw the colt looking up at him, and the terrible thing he couldn’t tell anybody was that just then—at that moment—it was like being at the creek and looking down into silver water. And seeing your own face stare back.

Only, that couldn’t be.

A boy didn’t look in the water and see an animal. Howie had, though. For a quick second, it was the same— and no matter how much he told himself it couldn’t be that way, it was.

That was how the nightmares started, and for a while he didn’t think they’d ever stop.

“That’s how questions come to you, Howie,” his father went on. He reached up and pulled a sprig of oak leaves from the branch above. “Things that might seem the same is lots of times altogether different.”

He turned the sprig of leaves between big fingers and held them up to Howie. “Now suppose you was on that ridge up there,” he nodded to the west, “no more’n two hundred yards away. An’ I was standing right where I am and I yelled out and said ‘Howie, I’ll give you a copper if you can tell me what kind of leaf I’m holdin’ up here.’”

Howie grinned. “I’d sure do that!”

“And what kind of leaf is it?”

“It’s a oak.”

“What kind of oak, though?”

“It’s a live oak, for sure.”