As a boy I yearned
to sing
and dance
and make love.

Grownups said,
“Be silent,
be still,
be chaste.”

So I
squelched my song,
fought my body,
hid my passion.

Now a man I yearn
to sing
and dance
and make love.

We have too much stuff.   I avoid the word “stuff.”  It’s lazy thinking.  Doesn’t say anything.  “Stuff” comes from stuffing stuff into garbage bags and cardboard boxes, then hiding them in attics, basements, and crawlspaces.  Places where they won’t see daylight again ’til the house burns or we die and the kids are stuck with it.  That’s what I’m talking about, stuff!

The winter after we bought our house the crawlspace flooded.  Now it’s a dark and evil place.  Forty five years later a trunk, suitcase, and slide projector are still there, like desiccated corpses.  I only go down under duress.  As when carpenter ants and a leaky dishwasher rotted parts of the floor.  Fearing that a “pop,” “crunch,” and “crash” underfoot would leave her standing eye-to-eye with a startled housecat, Karen threatened to leave me if we didn’t go down and fix it.  I stress we.  Besides being a better fly-fisher, she’s a better carpenter and mechanic than I am.

My Sweetheart doesn’t really like problems but she loves finding and fixing them.  Karen actually likes measuring, sawing, hammering, turning a screwdriver or socket wrench, triggering a power drill–go figure?  You should see what My Girl does with her Jig Saw!

Decades back, after visiting The Mall of America an older gentleman observed, “There’s sure a lot of things we don’t need.”  I heard or read, over the entrance to every Mall a sign should read, “You can never have enough of that you don’t really want.”  Harvey said, “They sure have a lot of ways to get the boys’ money.”  More important than dollars and cents, what does a consumer-driven lifestyle cost?

My teacher, Dr. Frank Wesley, pointed out, until around the end of the nineteenth century it took ninety percent of America’s people to feed us; now ten percent can.  The rest, “Do each other’s laundry.”  To survive after food, shelter and clothing, a market economy generates an enormous basket of laundry and needs battalions of scrub women and men to wash it.  That laundry and washing concern me.

To see what I’m talking about stroll thought Fred Meyers.  To the right in “Entertainment” a forty by eight foot glass case offers hundreds of music, game, movie, and TV show videos.  For $9.95 to $39.95 and more shoppers buy CDs and DVDs to fill Entertainment Center shelves left empty when they lugged the VHS player and plastic tub of tapes to Goodwill–remember VHS?  Will Goodwill still take VHS?  Before that it was 8 tracks.  Further back cassettes, remember?  Remember 78 and 45 RPM?  Before the memory of ninety percent of Americans there was radio and a picture show on an six foot screen in the church house Friday night.

A second wall displays twelve to sixty-five inch TVs, all on the same channel.  Why the same channel?  Maybe, seeing thirty TVs on different channels potential purchasers would panic from sensory overload .  Freddy might never sell another television.

At Freddy’s main intersection across from Customer Service, in a celestially lit corner, behind gleaming cases of diamond rings, gold necklaces, emerald earrings, silver bracelets, and Rolex watches, a matron with a turquoise scarf and eyelashes like small Japanese fans waits, still as a mannequin, wondering if her shift will ever end.

I see youngsters in “R5” and “One Direction” t-shirts, holey Levis, shorts, and flip-flops.  I see parents pushing carts with Franz bread, Willamette Farms AA eggs, a ten pound bag of #1 Idaho Russet potatoes, five pounds of hamburger, half-a-case of Dennison’s chili,  gallons of Dairygold whole milk, and a thirty pound bag of Alpo underneath.  I see folks with blue-gray hair and bald heads adjust their trifocals, comparing Attends and Depend.  Do shoppers ever go in Fred Meyer Jewelers?

Past “Self Checkout” on the right is “Family Planning.”  Do-it-yourself pregnancy tests, prurient potions unheard of in my time, and condoms.  When I was a teen they were Trojans, “rubbers,” “head gaskets for your hotrod.”  Sexy little numbers, rolled up with paper bands like bowties for squirrels.  I’m surprised to see Trojans still “covering” the market.

With one-size-fits-all, do we really need a dozen styles of rubbers in individual paper, plastic, and foil pouches?  When bedroom business gets serious do fluorescent, lubricated, scented, and invisible matter?  Imagine a Millenial couple, male and female–an distinction unnecessary a couple of decades back–a lawyer and thoracic surgeon who lay out two bucks for one condom.  As things heat up, picture a naked sweating man tugging desperately at a gold-foil packet grasped in his teeth.  Someone should invent a condom dispenser, like for Pez candies.  Slide a button, out pops a fresh rubber, unwrapped, ready to use.

Before Will K. Kellogg invented it, breakfast was bacon and eggs, toast and coffee.  Freddy has five shelves, as long as a semi-trailer and taller than LeBron James, with over fifty varieties of Breakfast Cereal.  Since Corn Flakes in 1894, reputedly concocted by accident, Kellogg, Post, General Mill and the rest have rolled, ground, shredded and otherwise mutilated uncounted silos of assorted grass seed, packed their products in paperboard boxes, and enlisted Olympic champions, cartoon Rabbits, Tigers, and Tucans to convince us Wheaties, Coco Puffs, Fruit Loops, Cheerios, and Frosted Flakes are a healthy Breakfast.  Why “breakfast”?  Why not lunch, dinner, a snack?  Because Will K. and the boys say so.

Generating $50 billion in annual sales and 40 to 45% profit, the high-jacking of breakfast must rank among the most astonishing marketing achievements of all time!  Corn Flakes to today, Wikipedia’s “list of notable breakfast cereals” (my emphasis) runs to fourteen printed pages!  Nutritional claims aside, it’s safe to say that from the meanest ghetto to Trump Tower, from the Congressional Dining Room to the White House, every kitchen or pantry in America has a shelf or cabinet with boxes and bags of Corn Flakes, Wheaties, Kixx, Fruit Loops, Coco Puffs, Special K, Quaker Oats, Granola and the rest.

Around the corner, with $132 billion in annual sales beer and wine put Breakfast to shame.  One hundred-foot cooler devoted to beer!  On five shelves as long as two school busses, Chardonnay, Shiraz, Cabernet, Merlow, Moscato, Muskatel, Port and a dozen other are cleverly bottled, canned, and boxed to get the boy’s and girl’s money.  If every container broke shoppers would wade ankle deep in fermented fruit juice.

For a culture deeply troubled by “drugs” America’s obsession with alcohol seems hypocrisy.  Youngsters with fake IDs troll the pubs.  While teenage frat-house pledges guzzle beer through a funnel and hose, their parents convene at the Clubhouse to boast about birdies, eagles, and holes-in-one, to rationalize curves, hooks, and bogies.  After eight hours on the line, mounting bumpers on Ford pickup, blue-collar Harry stops by Johnny’s Pit Stop for Happy Hour.  Following days setting fractures and filing briefs, Millenials retreat to Beef and Brew for Martinis and Michelob.  Exhausted after a day drafting anti-drug legislation, Senators and Representative adjourn to a bi-partisan Lounge for Wild Turkey and Heinekens.  Middle class folks join wine clubs and tour vineyards to “taste” and hold forth on the flowery bouquets, the fruity flavor of this year’s Pinot, Cabernet, and Merlot.  Fruity flavor?  Drrrrr,  it’s grape juice!  With Schlitz or Carlo Rossi at their elbow Boomers in recliners doze through the News, The Brady Bunch, and Lucy reruns.

Having done my bit to “Drink Canada Dry,” Canadian Club and Coke, plus bathtubs of assorted inebriants, I’m in no position to preach Temperance.  But let’s be clear, like marijuana, cocaine, and heroine, alcohol is a mood altering drug.  Legal and illegal, their sole purpose is to get us high.  Through aging, flavoring, or watering down, the vintners’, distillers’ and brewers’ challenge is making alcoholic drinks not taste like alcohol.  If you doubt it, just a swig two fingers of Moonshine or hundred and eighty proof Everclear and catch your breath.  If alcohol were magically eliminated from their merchandise, without effecting taste in any way,  the alcoholic beverage industry would go keel-up as fast and with incalculably larger loss of life than the Titanic.

Despite needing to move on, I’m compelled to comment on Bottled Water.  With the most abundant, clean, safe municipal water on Earth why do Americans pay fifty cents to two bucks for a bottle of water?  In plastic!  We buy because Freddy’s, Albertsons, Safeway, and every Qick-Stop and Get-n-Go in America sell it!  My hunch, in many water bottlers basement rows of minions fill plastic bottles from Municipal Water spigots.

Next in my inventory of overabundance: cheese.  Back on the farm there were two: Limburger was kept in a sealed jar because it smelled like a dead rat, and sharp cheddar that tasted like a dead rat–which goes toward my early distaste for cheese.  After leaving home I discover mild and medium cheddar and Mozzarella.  The sweet taste of Swiss took getting used to.  Passing Fred Meyer’s cheese section today I’m amazed and bewildered by the variety and names I can’t pronounce.  When I told Karen I’d like to start with Abondance and eat my way to Valencay, we decided to “give ‘re a go.”  The following week she brought home Brie and twenty-nine dollars a pound goat cheese wrapped in a smoked maple leaf.  Loved ’em.  Today, except for Limburger, sharp cheddar, and perhaps some I haven’t tasted, I love cheese.

What about too many and too much?  I’ve talked–or eaten–myself into a corner.  Do I contradict myself?  Okay, I contradict myself.  Contradicting, repeating, and forgetting are prerogatives of senility.  Our President for example.  Cheese notwithstanding and despite being just another disgruntled old man, I like thinking my concern has merit.

I pick on poor Freddy because he’s close to home and emblematic.  An inventory of Wal-Mart, Costco, Home Depot, Lowes, Ikea, Sears, Penneys, Macy’s, not to mention Amazon, is a task too daunting to contemplate.  Suffice to say, my Little Freddy is the Big Boys writ small.

When we get our stuff, what then?  Over time, to greater of lesser degrees, much gets consumed or used.  But much doesn’t.

When attics, closets, and crawl spaces are stuffed we donate to Goodwill, The Salvation Army or recycle. At garage and yard sales we virtually give away lamps, TV’s, books, pictures, tools, tires, rugs, a sombrero from Mexico, a snow globe from Yellowstone, and clothes–Lord the clothes!  We rent PODS (Portable On Demand Storage) and PackRat vans.  We pay $25 to over $100 a month for space at E-Z Store, U-Store, and Public Storage.  A cottage industry grew up around auctioning off contents of abandoned storage units.  Last resort?  The dump.

A dozen Christmases back, before she died, Aggie, Paul’s mother, re-gifted Florence and Paul an avocado-green, crockpot she got from sister Jan and never used.  After one pork roast, the pot sat on a basement shelf beside a popcorn popper unused since the kids left home.  The following spring, after a Channel 8 piece on “Downsizing,” Florence loaded pot, popper, two pair of roller skates, Paul’s old bowling ball, and the pink, eight-piece Melmac dinner set from Paul’s bachelor days in the Outback.  As the kid at Goodwill moved her donations into his cart the box came open dropping the crockpot’s lid against a roller skate leaving a dime-size triangular dent in one corner!  Last fall at a yard sale, for a buck Florence picked up an almost-new, avocado-green crockpot.  When she took it from the box on the kitchen counter, her gaze caught a dime-size triangular dent in a corner of the lid.

Back to too much stuff, what if anything is wrong with the status quo, “business as usual”?  Issues that trouble me include advertising, credit, service, inequity, waste and entitlement.

America’s consumer driven freight train, the Free Enterprise Flyer, is powered by two locomotives.  Up front Advertising pulls.  In the rear Credit pushes.  The lead engineer calls back, “Ya gotta have it!”  Behind, his partner shouts, “Ya can have it!”  I feel like the Flyer’s on a downgrade, picking up speed, jury rigged with no brakes.  In the Dining Car First Class passengers enjoy caviar, lobster, filets and sip champagne.  We in Coach jostle and jounce, oblivious to the probability that a sharp curve or washout could send us tumbling into a canyon.  It’s happened before!

Taking on Advertising could double the already-too-long size of this thing.  I’ll save it for future dissertation.

As for credit, without “Nothing Down!  Zero Interest!  No payments For A Year,” without ridiculously easy credit, America’s–the World’s?–economy, again like the Titanic, would go keel-up.

Hearing that Wells Fargo opened accounts for unsuspecting customers, I was puzzled.  Now I understand.  Of course, loaning money makes money.  Apart from the Trump Group, casinos, insurance companies, and banks can’t lose money.  Profit is built-in.  Loaning money is Very Big, maybe the Biggest Business of all.  And it doesn’t matter who they loan to.  Banks hand out credit cards to folks on food stamps, Welfare, and Section 8.  Interest and penalties cover most losses.  The rest is passed to we who pay.

Pardon an old man for recalling “the good old day,” but a vignette from one who was there could prove interesting if not instructive to some who were not.  When gas was fifteen cents a gallon at “Slim Olsen’s” in North Salt Lake, before your wheels stopped rolling, like Beagles on a cottontail, three kids were popping the hood, checking the oil, water, and tires, pumping gas, washing windows.  As one removed the nozzle a second sprinted inside for your change and a free map of any state you wanted.  Today, except for New Jersey and Oregon, for three dollars a gallon eighty-year-old ladies pump their gas and wash their windows.  Without a credit card they “pay inside.”

When Exxon, Mobile, Texaco, and Chevron number crunchers figured out there’s no profit in checking oil and washing windows “Service Stations” were an artifact.  The only profit “outside” comes from a nozzle.  The rest from coffee, donuts, sandwiches, Coke, Pepsi, Budweiser, Coors, chips, dips, Planter’s salted nuts, Baby Ruth and Snickers.

With America’s population exploding some loss of service seems inevitable.  As battalions of buyers amass, service becomes, you might say, Institutional.  Today most retailers do alright by customers.  Smaller ones can be more personal.  Founded by a man who grew up in Slim Olsen ‘s era, Less Schwab Tires provides Slim Olsen type service.

Three remaining issues trouble me: inequity, waste, and entitlement.

With something like five percent of Earth’s population–Think about it, only five percent!–Americans consume something like twenty-five percent of its energy and resources!  Our failure to, if not appreciate, at least know how incredibly lucky and blessed we are–and I am one–troubles me.  While not finishing breakfast will not feed a baby in Somalia, few of us give any thought to the enormous investment in energy, technology and resources spent to put the bowl, spoon, Corn Flakes, 1% milk, sugar, orange juice, and a banana on the table.

Spaceship Earth’s atmosphere is thinner and fragile as an apple’s skin.  Despite her resilience she can’t give and take forever.  Big Energy, Trump and cohorts to the contrary, the verdict’s in.  Burning fossil fuel is killing us.  Americans frantically produce, buy, get rid of, and waste energy, soil, minerals, water, air, flora and fauna, while at home and abroad, shameful numbers suffer and die from disease and malnutrition.  It may be too late.  Correcting this human created disaster may not happen.  Without vigorous action to control global warming there’s no hope.

I feel, like me, Americans have an unconscious sense of entitlement.  Being born in this country entitles me to have, use, and waste whatever I have the wits and resources to get.  My and your parents and grandparents worked very hard, sacrificed, and suffered to make life better for themselves and us.  But the resulting overabundance by no means entitles me to take and waste as I please.  To the contrary, I am obligated to pass it on, not to sully my inheritance.  Three words come to mind, re-spect: to see again; re-cognize: to know again; re-member: to bring to memory.  My unconscious sense of entitlement, of failing to see, to know, to remember and to appreciate how very privileged I am underlies my concern about having too much stuff!

In The Four-fold Way: Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Teacher, Healer, and Visionary cultural anthropologist, Angeles Arrien, Ph. D., explores four archetypal principles from indigenous cultures:

Show Up
Pay Attention
Tell the Truth
Don’t be Attached to Outcome

They are framed on my den wall.

As I understand,
Show Up: If I’m not here I can’t play.
Pay Attention: If I don’t, show up doesn’t matter.
Tell the Truth: My story may help us better understand life’s struggle and joy.
Don’t be Attached to Outcome: What will be will be.  It’s okay.

These are only my “Truth.”  Read The Four-fold Way, go to http://www.angelesarrien.com, or view Dr. Arrien on You Tube Ted Talks.

Karen re-reads J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings Trilogy.  One, like me, who cringes at the sight of Donald Trump, this is clipped on her refrigerator.

“It’s all wrong.  By right we shouldn’t even be here.  But we are.  It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo.  The ones that really mattered.  Full of darkness and danger they were…But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow.  Even darkness must pass.”
–Samwise “Sam” Gamgee
The Two Towers
J.R.R. Tolkien

Happiness is my natural state.  Unhappiness, suffering is a choice.  It’s common horse sense.  Whatever happens “out there” or “in here,” I–only I!–choose how I am emotionally in here.

I refuse to believe some Cosmic Puppet Master pulls my emotional strings.  Impossible as it may seem, despite physical pain, from a stubbed toe to terminal pancreatic cancer, when someone insults me, punches me in the nose, stabs me in the back, I choose to suffer or not!  Understanding there is no necessary, automatic link from internal or environmental insult to mental and emotional pain frees me to be happy.

I posted this in May.  Given this ICE business, separating illegal emigrant families, which is obviously cruel and unnecessary, and being loathe to side with Trump on anything, I have to be missing something regarding the legal status of illegal immigrants! Would someone out there please rescue me? Please show me where I’m wrong!

———————————————————————————

Having expressed my disdain for President Trump’s wall, I should confess that despite being a longtime, hardcore Liberal I’m troubled and confused that millions of folks enter America illegally and remain here openly and notoriously–often for decades!  Some even thumb their nose at American, “Yada!  Yada!  Yada!  Can’t catch meee!”  On TV one actually flipped us the middle finger.

My position is simple: The Rule of Law.  Do the crime, do the time.  Fish without a license, don’t feed the parking meter, exceed the speed limit, you pay a fine.  If I break into your home and steal your laptop to sell to feed my kids and get arrested the judge says, “Go to jail.”  For armed robbery or murder it’s is prison or worse.  But sneak into American?  It’s just go home.  No hard feelings.  Just go back to your home.
What’s this with “Sanctuary” nonsense?  Cities and sates where do-gooders frustrate Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) agents, making our law officers, American citizens, not the lawbreakers the bad guys?  Is this crazy or what?

Kids illegally brought to America by parents (DACA) are victims.  Let ’em stay.  It pains me to say, but being fair to adults without children who crawled under the fence, their parents should be sent home.

Hundreds of millions, the “troubled masses yeaning to be free,” would love to be Americans but respect our borders and laws, and play by the rules.  They jump through the hoops: They fill out papers, wait–sometimes years–study our Constitution, laws, and history, are interviewed, pass a test, and pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America.  As we coddle a handful of criminals, what do you say to these folks?

A word to non-Mexicans who refuse to do it right: Scrape up airfare to Juarez or Nogales, crawl under the fence, lay low.  As things are, you may well enjoy the rights and privileges of real Americans the rest of your life.

If you don’t have borders and laws, laws you enforce, you don’t have a country.

What I’m missing here?  Seriously, someone please explain!

*  *  *  *  *

After I wrote this Raelene and Karen had their front yards landscaped.  For the better part of a week, three or four Hispanics never stopped chopping, digging, cutting, hauling, carrying and planting.

While a majority of Americans bust our butts “earning a living,” my sense is, wither gainfully employed, on the dole, or sleeping under a tarp, very few Americas are willing to pick the oranges, pluck the chickens, gather the eggs, slaughter the hogs, dig the trenches, scrub the toilets, wash the windows, make the beds, flip the burgers, wash the dishes, cut the lawns, trim the shrubs, do the “back-breaking” tedious work crucial to our lifestyle.  Not to sell American workers in any way short, but without dirt-cheap and slave labor, within and without our borders, this country, corporate and consumer alike, would go belly-up like a carp in a dry streambed.

Read Parts I and II before Part III

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The narrator looks to his audience.  “Some said—them as weren’t there—we didn’t recognize ‘im, didn’t know who the fella was.  When I seen that big buckskin Ed Oliver dragged out’a the Kieger a couple a years back, I knew.  And I knew we got trouble!”

Buck’s gaze turn to the boy.  His pupils reflect the firelight like obsidian disks.  “Ed was a squatter, always mad.  Buttin’ heads with Peter to push a road across Pete’s spread to that patch a rocks Ed pretended to farm.  Ol’ man diggin’ in his heels in, puttin’ Ed off.”

The stove sputters.  Buck’s gaze drops to the cinch, then up to the boy.  “Oliver come on like a one-man cavalry.  Cursin’.  When they met that mustang run right over ol’ Pedro.  Knocked ‘im to his knees.”

The old Mexican’s look seems to pierce the darkness.  “Peter shouts, ‘I’ll drive ya off!’  I heard ‘im.”  On cue the fire pops.  He points to the stove, “That plain.”

The voice has an urgency the boy had never before heard. “Ol’ Peter starts whailin’ away with the butt of his bullwhip across that buckskin’s snout.”

Aging fingers grip the edge of the cinch.  “When Pedro gets his legs back they weren’t a arm’s length apart.  Oliver ain’t done; digs in his spurs for another run.  “Peter turns his bullwhip around, swings, catches Oliver right across the snout.  Could a took a eye out.  Must a smarted like all hell.”

The storyteller looks back to the wall.  “Stopped Ed too.  Long enough fer Peter to back off.”

Again to the boy, “Dozen paces away French wheels ‘ol Pedro around.  Figured fightin’s over I think.

“Before any of us seen it, Oliver pulls out a pistol and fires,” a finger snap,” that quick!”

The man’s gaze drops to the base of the oat bin.  A pause.

Matter of fact.  “Forty caliber slug caught Peter French below his right eye.  Blew a hole the size of a biscuit out the back a his skull.  Never knew what hit ‘im.  I seen it.”

The stove sputters; again the shelves and workbench quaver.

At last the boy speaks, “What did they do?”

His friend looks up.

“Oliver?  Did they catch ‘im?”

The old Mexican releases a sigh.  “Run off.  Figured we’d chase ‘im I guess.  Weren’t nobody heeled.  Only gun on the ranch was an ol’ Sharp’s repeater Felix, the cook, carried fer camp meat and coyotes.”

Buck reaches to stroke his knee.  “Sheriff took Ed in.  Lots of excitement around Burns.  Newspapers.  People all worked up.  Sod-busters said French had it comin’.  Cowmen said, ‘Take Oliver out in the sagebrush; shoot ‘im like a mad dog.’

“They was a trial, a jury, mostly farmers, sodbusters, squatters.  We said our piece, then as seen it.”

Aged hands stroke the cinch.  He leans back, looks to the boy.  “They how do they say?  ‘Quit ‘im?’  Let ‘im go?  Said Oliver never done it?

“He done it alright.  I seen ‘im.  It was murder.”

Read Part I before Part II.

______________________________________________________

Calloused fingers guide the knife blade in a precise semicircle.  Holding the strap to the stove’s eye, the artisan studies his work.

“I seen Peter French get killed.”

The figure on the oat bin stiffens; shoulders square.

“December twenty-six, eighteen ninety-seven, twenty-five years today.”  The old man looked to the boy.  “Cold,” knife pointing to the window, “like now.”  Almost imperceptibly the head moved side to side.  Almost a whisper, “Too damn cold.”

Hidden in shadow his audience remains still as a fawn in sparse over.  The old vaquero goes a full day saying less than in the past minute.

Buck closes his knife, places it on the workbench.  From under his chair the old Mexican retrieves a braided wool cinch, steel rings at either end.

“Bunch of us left the ol’ Sod House Ranch,” smoothing the cinch across his thighs, “Comin’ on daylight.”

He reaches for a leather-punch on the workbench.  Folding an end of the strap over a steel cinch ring, the craftsman positions the punch, grips with both hands, squeezes.  An organic crunch; the leather yields.  An inch to the left the process repeats.  By firelight he inspects the holes in the leather.

The figure in darkness waits.

“Hay almost gone; a dry summer.”  With both hands the old cowboy eases his bum leg from its keg.  ”Peter decided to push a hundred head a them red cows and a half-dozen bulls down to the big sagebrush field by the marsh.”

As the storyteller moves to the end of his workbench, the boy’s gaze follows the familiar hitching gate.

Buck fishes copper rivets and washers from a paper box on the bench.  “Chino—Pete’s reg’lar trail boss—got hisself a Christmas bellyache.  Peter told ‘im,” glancing to the silhouette, “told Chino, take the buckboard to the bunkhouse, get a dose a salts, go to bed.  Pete’d ramrod hisself, ridin’ that little roan gelding Chino’d raised from a colt.  Spoiled ‘im.  Called ‘im Pedro.”

Calloused fingers pressed a rivet through matched holes in the leather strap.  “Peter was like that.  Just another hand.  Treated us that rode with ‘im straight.”

The storyteller paused, gaze resting on his work.  Slowly his head shifted, side to side.  “Sodbusters didn’t like ‘im.”

Placing a copper washer over the tip of a rivet, the artisan holds his leather strap on an anvil at the end of the workbench.  Using a ball-peen hammer with a jeweler’s touch, calloused hands flatten the rivet over the washer.

His audience waits, motionless.

The craftsman studies his work.  “Peter weren’t but a little fella.  Guess that’s why he liked a lot a animal under ‘im.”  He presses a second rivet through a matched hole in the leather, slips a washer over its tip, taps.

The stove sputters.  The isinglass eye flares, turns yellow, amber.

Right hand grasping the cinch, left on the workbench, as if bending an iron rod, a will long-since steeled to protest of muscle and joint forces the aging spine erect.

“The little gelding, Pedro, was kind-a sleepy, babied as he was.”  A bent thumb and forefinger toys with the hammer, places it on the bench.  “At the creek Peter got off, cut his-self a willow branch.”  Crevices beside the old man’s mouth and eyes deepen.  Corners of his lips raise.  He looks to the boy.  “To get ol’ Pedro’s attention.”

The shadow audience smiles.

Back in his chair, a callused forefinger lifts a coiled chrome handle to open the stove door.  From a wood-box—on its marred exterior, “Atlas Dynamite – Moves the Earth”, a palm-size giant with planet Earth on his shoulders—the old vaquero eases a bread-loaf-size piece of pinion onto the coals.  The door closes.   The isinglass eye winks.  The flame sputters, pops, turns buttercup yellow, the workbench and shelves quaver.

Using both hands the old vaquero hoists his bum leg to its keg.  “Cold,” glancing again to the frosted window, “too damn cold.”  He smoothes the cinch across his thighs.

“Them beeves weren’t interested in leavin’ that corral.  Fed ever’ day.  Hay wouldn’t last ‘til spring.  They was still some pickin’ at the edge of the marsh, Bunch grass.  They’d et worse.”

The storyteller leans back, strokes his cinch.  “Ol’ Pete was always in a hurry.  Borrowed a buckskin thong Carlos used to tie his bedroll.  Knotted it to the end a his willow branch.  Made ‘im a little bullwhip .  .  . to wake up them cows, like he done ol’ Pedro.”

Weathered fingers drum on the cinch.  “Comin’ to the fence at the marsh Peter loped ahead to open the gate.”

As if viewing a magic lantern show, the old man’s gaze rests on the wall over the workbench.  “I was  .  .  .  maybe a hundred paces back.”

Right hand stroking the stiff knee.  “I seen it” pointing, “plain as that wall.”

The voice trails off.  The stove sputters.

“Just as Peter gets to the gate, from a gully off to the west we see this hombre ridin’ like a wild man.  At first I figure he’s from the ranch; maybe there’s trouble.  Maybe Chino’s took bad.

“Fella digs in his spurs, comes straight at Peter.”

The narrator looks to his audience.  “Some said—them as weren’t there—we didn’t reco’nize ‘im, didn’t know who the fella was.  When I seen that buckskin Ed Oliver dragged out’a the Kieger a couple a years back, I knew.  And I knew we got trouble!”

This is a bit long.  I’ll post it in three parts.

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History

Spring of 1872, with a half-dozen vaqueros and Chinese cook, twenty-three-year-old Peter French pushed twelve-hundred shorthorns from Sacrament’s grassland to Oregon’s Malheur Valley.  Within two decades French’s “P” ranch ranked among top beef produces in America.

Drawn from Giles French’s Cattle Country of Peter French, “It Was Murder” is a minimally-fictionalized telling of a fated cowman’s final ride.

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Part I

A full moon.  Hoarfrost on the outhouse and pole fence.  A draft team, still as stone, vapor plumes over their muzzles.  Hung from a shed roof in silhouette, stiff as corpses from a gallows, saddles, halters, bridles, harnesses.

Two paces from the fence, in a board and batten wall, a single ten-inch glass pane.  Beside it a faded, palm-size, tin holder–“Dr. Geo. A. Palmer’s Stomach Bitters—ORIGINAL—NONE BETTER!”–a thermometer flirting with zero.  From the window sill, drifted snow peeks through frosted dendrites.

From the isinglass eye of a squat cast-iron stove an apricot tint plays about the room.  Above the workbench aged antique gray, nails in a board wall hold hammers, pliers, hoof nippers, wire cutters, turned to brass by the firelight.

From the stove, dividing light and dark, a quavering boundary crosses the floor, stair-steps a stool and horseshoe box, zigzags up wooden shelves, tapers to a point on the ceiling.

In the shadow below, Stetson pulled low, the boy, Hank, perched legs crossed on an oat bin.

By the stove, stiff leg propped on a nail keg, the aging Mexican, Buck, uses a pocket knife to trim a frayed end from a leather cinch strap.  Shadow plays at the angular jaw, the weathered crevices beside the eyes, the ominous dent in the nose, the cheekbones pressing under chestnut-brown skin, the eyes hidden in shadow, the collar-length hair black as obsidian.

Calloused fingers guide the knife blade in a precise semicircle.  Holding the strap to the stove’s eye, the artisan studies his work.

“I seen Peter French get killed.”

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Part II soon

The shoemaker in my home town was Leo Love.
Leo Love had a fat wife named Detta Fay.

Together,
they repaired shoes on an ancient hand-crank machine.
Leo would guide the shoe;
Detta Fay would turn the crank.

The Loves were very poor.
They had no children.
When Leo died
Detta Fay grew very thin.