got back home. They were going to make him an admiral for sure. He’d have ended up right at the top. In the Pentagon. He was the best potential battle commander I ever met. Everyone knows that. Scott always said he was just keeping the ole CNO’s chair warm for Captain Baldridge. And he didn’t mean me!”
“Ah, my darling, but he couldn’t ride a horse like you, could he?”
“No, ma’am, that he couldn’t. But he coulda taken on the Russian fleet. Coupla times I heard him say he’d a been real happy to do just that. Wasn’t he something?”
Bill knew he had to change the subject quickly. But there was something compulsive about the subject of Jack Baldridge. Bill gazed at his mother with profound affection, but he was too late. She was trying to tell him that Margaret and her two granddaughters were arriving from San Diego next week. But there were tears streaming down her face — hopeless, helpless, desolate tears for her lost, beloved second son, the only one of the three who looked just like his father. The one she had loved most of all.
“I’ll get him, Mom,” he blurted, incomprehensibly to her. “You can put the ranch on that. I’ll get him.”
But Emily Baldridge was too preoccupied regaining her own self-control to worry about Bill’s. She gratefully accepted the big white linen handkerchief he offered, and fled toward the door. “I’ll just go and rejoin civilization,” she called. “Go and have a rest. Let’s all meet on the veranda at seven.”
Bill stood and watched her go with huge sadness. She was such a handsome woman, still clinging to her starchy East Coast manners, still aware of the old taboo about showing emotion, still bearing the stamp of Wellesley College, plain as if someone had put a
Bill followed his mother up the long oak staircase, through the arch set with the big longhorns and Indian regalia. He wandered along to his old room, the heavy, brightly covered Sioux blanket slung over the bed, the crossed Comanche lances beside the mirror, the big framed sepia picture of Crazy Horse gazing sternly across the room. It was the headquarters of a schoolboy scout, a veteran of a hundred battles in this historic plains Indian country. At the bottom of the bed were two pairs of cowboy boots, one with spurs. Inside the big pine wardrobe there were four Stetsons, and a selection of cowboy shirts and trousers, befitting the youngest son of one of the big ranchers in the area.
Ten minutes later he strode out over the veranda, dressed now in the only clothes in which he felt truly at home, the lightweight white Stetson pushed back a bit, just enough to take the glare off his eyes. Tonight he would ride alone for a while, heading west into the gigantic Kansan sunset. Bill’s spurs clanked lightly as he headed out to the stables.
He lingered for a while talking to Freddie, the big bay horse, which only he and Ray ever rode. Then he hoisted the big Western saddle, with its Indian markings and wide saddle horn, up and across the horse’s back. He tightened the girths, moving easily around the quarters, gently smoothing Freddie’s tail, unafraid of the hind hooves which could launch a man with the wrong touch twenty yards through the air.
When Bill rode out past the cattle pens, tipping his hat toward a couple of ranch hands mending a fence, no one would have guessed he had ever left this place.
“Hey, Billy, welcome back…terrible ’bout Jack. Everyone’s very sad out here right now.”
Bill Baldridge rode slowly westward, out between the two rivers. Forty miles to the southwest lay Dodge City, their nearest sizable town — his mom was a trustee of the museum there. Dead ahead lay more or less nothing, mile after mile of prairie, the wind making patterns on the bluestem. In this late afternoon light, the pasture seemed greenish gold in color. But as the south wind gusted the grasses bent before its gentle force and bluestems showed in long patches like the ripples on water. Bill stared, watching the blue patterns as he once had as a boy, dreaming of an ocean he had never seen.
Freddie’s hooves were almost silent on the prairie, so deep and lush was the grassland. The only sounds were the occasional soft crushing of the taller stalks, and the endless chirping of the cicadas. Glancing down, Bill could see bare patches where all of the grass and wildflowers appeared to have been the victims of a giant lawn mower, and the wind blew no patterns here.
The great Baldridge herds had passed by very recently. So recently none of the wildflowers had shot new blooms. Bill knew the cattle must be close, but he had to get back to meet his mother and Ray. Another mile or so and he must turn around, maybe let Freddie have a gallop home, blow him out a little, keep him young.
They kept going for a bit, now at a light canter through this lonely American outback, which renders its natives lifetime prisoners of a vast and silent beauty.
Bill gazed out in front of him, to a bank of high cloud building on the horizon. He squinted his eyes into the lowering sun, which was already becoming the color of spent fire. He could not see the herds yet, and he turned his horse around and began the ride home, with the last of the day’s warmth now upon his back. A mile from the ranch, riding now close to the creek where the ground was a little softer, he spurred Freddie on, urging him to gallop.
Up ahead he could see two cowboys rounding up the last of a half-dozen stray steers, down by the water. They nearly had them bunched now, riding with one man to the rear and one out on the left. Two steers kept wheeling away back toward the river. Instinctively Bill Baldridge urged Freddie forward, drawing his long whip from the left side of his saddle. He came up on the right, on an easy stride, just outside the leading runaway. The famous Kansan brand,
Bill Baldridge let out a yell, cracked the whip high over his head, and drove Freddie into the steer’s right flank, and turned the brute away, back to his pals in the bunch. Bill grinned at the look of stark relief on its bovine white face.
He rode in to the group, guarding the right-hand escape route. “Hey, thanks, Bill,” said the older of the two men, another tall cowboy, with a big tobacco bulge in his left, nut-brown cheek. “Ain’t lost your touch any, have you?”
The two men had not spoken for a couple of years, but there are some places where time stands, more or less, still.
Bill grinned. “No problem, Skip. These hot days they can get real determined to stay near the water.”
“Sure can. Staying long?”
“Uh-uh. Leaving Sunday.”
“Miss havin’ you around. We was thinking you might come back now…Jack and everything.”
“Next year I’ll be back. For good.”
They rode in silence for a little way, before Skip McGaughey spoke again. “Know what I hate most about the Navy, Bill?”
“Lay it on me.”
“I hate the way there are no gravestones for most men who die in big warships. You know, my grandfather was killed in the Pacific in World War II. Never found him. And my grandma always said how she wished there was just somewhere she coulda seen his name.”
“Yeah. ’Course in the
“At least it was instant.”
“No doubt about that.”
“We gonna have a memorial stone for Jack?”
“Guess so. Hadn’t really thought about it much. Mom’s kinda upset right now.”
“Hell yeah. Still, I think there should be something. You know, ever since yer dad passed away, we’ve always called Jack, ‘the Boss’, even though we didn’t see that much of him.”
“Yeah. I know you all called him that. I called him that myself. You already know, I guess, he was serving as the Group Operations Officer on the carrier, the admiral’s right-hand man. They were gonna make him a rear admiral for sure.”
“Guess then we’d never have seen him.”
“Not for a few years anyway.”
“That’s even more reason to have a memorial, eh?”
“What kind of thing? It’d have to be pretty low-key. Jack hated anything showy.”
“Well, some of the boys were thinking. You know how Jack used to go fishing down by those rocks on the creek. ’Bout four hundred yards from the main house. One of them rocks is pretty big, twelve feet tall, pure granite, like that strata over in the Flint Hills. How ’bout a memorial tablet in bronze set right in that rock, by a stone-
