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.

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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.

 

 

To hear Old Ned go to https://www.dougy.org/grief-resources/podcast ep. 86.

It’s said when Warren Harding was campaigning for President his handlers were instructed, “Keep Warren away from people.  Someone will ask him a question and the dumb bastard will try to answer.”

 

Think of all the windows you’ve ever seen.

Funny things windows; they’re there but I seldom notice.  Windows let in light.  They keep out bugs and burglars–and the wind.

There are big picture windows that sit on hills and look out across meadows and creeks and oceans.  There are tiny widows with wood frames painted shut, windows that look up at brick walls, or down on rooftops with vent pipes and pigeon droppings.

Some skyscrapers are nothing but windows.  Other building have no windows at all.  There’s something wrong with a building that doesn’t have windows, something suffocating, even sinister.  I don’t trust buildings that don’t have windows.

Some windows have been painted over.  I wonder about that.  Why would you go to the trouble of installing a window and then paint it?  I suppose the fellow who installed it was not the one who painted it.  Then there was something to see, now there’s not–or there’s something to hide.

Whoever designed our house had no imagination at all–or didn’t care.  The big window faces the side of the neighbor’s house.  It’s a nice house but not something you sit and admire, like a Mount Hood sunrise or a Pacific City sunset.  The fireplace is where our picture window should be, looking at Karen’s garden.

I like windows.  They keep me in touch with the word.

I remember the old Moxim Hotel in Salt Lake City over seventy years ago.  The best windows were up front right above the street, great tall windows.  At night in summer Daddy would leave the windows  open and a soft carnival light from the hotel sign would fill the ten-foot ceiling.  I’d lie awake and listen to sounds of the street: car tires, horns, shoes on pavement, voices.  I’d eavesdrop.

Today I stay in much nicer, much more expensive motels with vinyl framed windows and air conditioning so you don’t have to open the windows and drapes because there’s nothing to see outside, except cars in a parking lot.

There was something special about lying awake at night with the windows open in the old Moxim Hotel in Salt Lake City over seventy years ago.  Something magic.  Something extremely important I’d lost.  Now, age eighty one, I remember what it was.

With the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre only five months back already a fading memory and the next mass shooting closing in–me, you, who?–we must keep the tragedy of  gun craziness alive.

If you hate gun violence check out http://everytown.org and join.  Some of their facts:

Every day 96 Americans, 13,000 a year, die by guns!
For every 1 killed by guns 2 are injured!
62% of suicides are by guns!
7 children and teens are killed every day by guns!
Every month 50 women are shot to death by a husband or partner!
Black males are 13 more times to be killed by guns than white males!
A gun in the home increases the chance of a woman being killed 5 times!
America’s gun homicide rate is 25 times that of the average high-income country,  7 times second place Canada, 361 times Japan and Korea!

Google “mass shooting statistics in the United States–Washington Post” for a June 29 update.

On the heels of Parkland, knowing this too will blow over, with NRA checkbooks out, Trump and Congress said, “Now is not the time to act.”  Pardon me that’s Bullshit!  Now is the time to act!

If you never have and never will again, please share this!

With Super Patriot Trump insulting and snubbing decades and centuries old allies while kissing up to Vladimir Putin  this bears revisiting.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

Putin’s Man

For invading and annexing Crimea Russia was kicked out of the “Group of Eight” leaving the “G8” the  “G7”: Canada, France, Germany,  Italy, Japan, The United Kingdom, and The United States, countries who account for two-thirds of net global financial worth.  In his latest instance of siding with Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump calls for Russia’s reinstatement into this body.

Intelligence agencies and Congress are convinced Putin worked to engineer Trump’s election.  Donald disagrees.  If Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is a “Witch Hunt” why waste time and energy obsessing and trying to kill it?  President Trump calls an American exercising his right peaceably to protest a “son of a bitch,” but says not a negative word, not a single negative word, against a leader who murders opponents, who rigs his own and meddles in American elections.

Amicable relations between individuals and nations are always good.  I wonder, however, at the motive behind President Trump’s repeatedly sucking-up to an off-again on-again adversary while sometimes rebuffing centuries-long allies?

Exotics of international finance and relations aside, could our President’s defense of Vladimir Putin have more prosaic roots?  Given Donald Trump’s financial wheeling-and-dealing, confessed and alleged sexual shenanigans, paying $130,000 to a porn star, visits to Russian, and given that Moscow bedrooms may have eyes, I wonder?  Does the Dictator in the Kremlin have the goods on Our Guy in the Whitehouse?

Of course Putin may have no leverage whatsoever with Trump.  Leverage or not, the fundamental questions is, in America’s 2016 Main Event why did Russia’s Heavyweight Champion choose to sit in Trump’s corner?  Simple.  Vladimir knows among seasoned punchers and counter-punchers in the International Arena Donald’s a Lightweight.  Photos of “Arab Spring” bouts taped to his locker room mirror, Vladimir Putin is acutely aware that matched toe-to-toe Hill and Bill’s tag team would take him down.

A pink caterpillar,
You crept across the freeway of childhood
–fragile, vulnerable, trusting.

Safely across,
You wrapped yourself in the chrysalis of adolescence
–and wondered.

Now, reborn a woman,
You unfold in the brilliant morning sun and fly
–on iridescent, Technicolor wings!