Mustang: Wild Spirit of the West Read online

  “So the buyer, he ties it to the tailgate of his wagon and goes on his way. And would you b’lieve it, less’n half a mile down the road a stranger shouts at him, ‘Hey, feller, yer dawg’s got free.’

  “Sure enough! That hound was flying back to the Injun like an arrow. And you know how the hunter got his revenge for that tricky knot the Injun tied?”

  “No. How?” we all cried in chorus.

  “Quicker than you could bat an eye, he grabs his rifle and shoots the hound dead.”

  Stunned, I stumbled over the men’s feet, running down the steps, screaming for home. I burst into the house, gasping out the whole story.

  When I stopped for breath, Pa said, “Yes, that was mighty bad, Pardner. Only one thing could of made it worse.”

  “What?” I asked, choking on my tears and the heart gone out of me.

  “Torture. The killin’ bullet came so fast it didn’t hurt that hound. But it hurt the hunter aplenty. Maybe not at first, but to my notion it grew to be a festerin’ sore. And it hurt the Indian, too. He must of felt pretty mean when he found his old huntin’ companion dead.” Pa’s eyes slitted until I could see only the black holes. “But it was quick and clean. The one thing I can’t abide is a killer who tortures his creatures.”

  For days after that I didn’t go back to the cabins. But at last I couldn’t resist the magic talk, and the cowboy songs, and the lovely desserts. Mom thought I picked up my swear words there, but I really didn’t. Pa had much better ones, like “Goshallhimlock” and “Dummitdell,” and he knew how to whistle them through the wide space in his front teeth so they made a grand scary sound, like a bullwhip. I used to practice them under Grandma’s and my bed when no one else was in the house.

  Before I get on to that big plan God had in mind for me, and how He always coupled me with horses, I must tell you about our family.

  I shared my room with Grandma. She went out nursing by the day and wasn’t at home much. So I got to practice my swearing pretty often. I loved Grandma and was never afraid of her, even though she stood six feet in her white nurse shoes, and wore a high starched collar that made her look tall as a Spanish queen.

  With Grandma, and Mom and Pa, and Pa’s sister, Aunt Elvira, to love and protect me, I knew that life was good. Even as a little girl of five, I knew it, but I didn’t know then how good it was. Sitting in the grass, shoulder-to-shoulder with the bummer lamb, and the stay-at-home horses putting their noses together and bowing their heads over us, and the sun going down behind the mountains, I can remember shivering with a tingly happiness I can’t explain. Maybe I felt akin to all four-legged folk who don’t need words to show their content.

  The bummer and the horses were good listeners, and I’d make up stories to tell them, just like I was their mother. My favorite big whopper was realer than real. I told how Pa asked me one day to go mustangin’ with him, and we went up into the Pine Nut Mountains and on a high mesa there was a band of horses, not a big band, just a little one, but extra wild and beautiful. We were about to rope one when a gust of wind hit us. Like a voice in the wind I heard:

  The mountains are mine,

  and all the creatures in it,

  and I knew it was the voice of Godamighty.

  Pa’d becoming home then and I’d have to excuse myself from the critters to go to meet him. I guess I had a time-clock in my head the way horses do, for I’d know just when Pa would be coming and where he’d expect me to be, right at the edge of town. When he saw me, he’d swoop me up as if I were no bigger’n a dropped handkerchief and plop me on Hobo or Old Baldy, and I’d ride bareback all the way to the barn. Then, alone, I’d lead each horse to the watering trough. The other teamsters would let me do the same thing for their horses. For an hour or so I was the busiest teamster of them all, and I believed in my heart that the horses were just as eager to come home to me as to their barley suppers.

  Even the washing up for my own supper was fun because of the crazy mirror tacked on the side of the barn. It had a jagged crack as though lightning had struck it. So after washing in the tin basin with the yellow see-through soap, I’d stand up on the bench to dry my face and to laugh at myself. It was like going to the mirror-house in the amusement park. One half of your face set up higher than the other half. And I’d make faces and laugh until I had to give up my place to Pa or one of the teamsters who didn’t think it was nearly so funny They soused their heads in the sudsy water and combed without even looking in the mirror. I didn’t blame ‘em for not looking; some of them were pretty ugly.

  At night with the moon-shadows playing across my bed, I’d drop off to sleep almost before my head hit the pillow. And I’d dream of a barn with roomy box stalls for the horses, but one horse was all my own and he would be looking for me over the half-door, nickering for me. Just me.

  3. Every Bad Has a Good

  WELL, ONE night when I was five-and-a-half I didn’t fall asleep at pillow’s touch. I had a queer floating feeling as if I’d been shot from a cannon way out into space and couldn’t get back. Yet I could hear voices on earth, dear familiar ones.

  “You’ll see, Joe,” Mom was saying . . . .

  Right here I’ve got to interrupt and tell you more about Mom. She was so good and pretty that I hardly ever thought about her. She didn’t need my help the way Pa did. She had Grandma and Aunt Elvira to help her, and things in the kitchen always happened on time. Meals came regular. So I didn’t even think about them in my hurry to get back out with the horses where I was needed.

  Well, on this night Mom was saying, “You’ll see, Joe, Annie’ll outgrow her horse-fever. I remember my own tomboy days—I wanted to be a high trapeze star, and look at me now. Happy as a chickadee with one little tyke to care for and another on the way, and I’m praying for a boy.”

  Another baby? A real boy? Even in my dizzy outer-world feeling I hated the news. I didn’t want a brother to take my place and to be Pa’s Pardner. But Pa made it all right again. He talked about me.

  “I don’t think she’ll ever outgrow horses,” he said. “I’ve seen her with ‘em, her feelin’s exposed like raw wounds. She’s terrified when they are. She’ll stand alongside ‘em, blinded by lightning, battered by wind. When one’s sufferin’ and in pain, it’s like it was her pain. And when they’re friskin’ and happy, she’s happy.”

  I didn’t mean to listen, but I was too fascinated not to. Besides, it was true!

  “Mebbe,” Pa was saying, “when she grows up she’ll be a doctor for horses, or something big like that. Mebbe her hankerin’ to go with me on every trip and her adoptin’ each wild’un I bring in is all part of a big plan.”

  “Like what?” came Mom’s voice.

  “Don’t know. I just figger it’s some special kind of learnin’ she’s getting. God’s sure trainin’ her different from most girls.”

  I must have fallen asleep then. When I awoke, I was screaming in pain. It was the next afternoon or maybe the next after that, for the sun was coming in the west window, and there, sitting on the edge of my bed, was good old Dr. Whitcomb with his white dusty hair and his black rusty suit. He was trying to move my head, and Mom with her hand clamped over her mouth and Grandma in her starched nurse’s uniform and Aunt Elvira with her big teeth gritted were all standing by looking fit to cry. And I not caring if they did, for I was hurting from the top of my head all the way down to my tailbone. In the midst of my screaming I saw my Pa in the doorway, and I stopped the way you turn off a spigot. He looked years older than yesterday, and his face was gray as gray and his eyes sunk deep in his head.

  Dr. Whitcomb let go of my neck. Then in the stillness he said, “I think, though we can’t be sure, it’s the polio.”

  • • •

  From that day till I was eleven, I had pains all up and down my spine. I’m going to skip over those sickness years fast as I can, because now I wear blinders on my memory so I won’t even think about them. But if I skipped them entirely, you’d never understand why I had to do what I did
when the time came.

  Besides, every bad has a good. I really got to know my Grandma. Mom, of course, was busy with my new baby brother. But Grandma stopped being a nurse for strangers, and she gave all her time to me. Her swirly, weepy-willow skirts were a refuge in pain. And her spirit was strong enough to lift and hold me.

  Each morning after she helped me out of bed and dressed me, we walked the three blocks to a new doctor in town, who worked on my spine and neck with his bare hands. We had to walk there instead of ride because I couldn’t stand the slightest jarring; it made the pinched nerves send out needles of pain. We must have been a queer sight—big, towering Grandma taking little mincing steps to match my painful slow ones. It took us a full hour, going and coming every day, week after week.

  In the doctor’s office my swearing stood me in good stead. The doctor, who was a red-haired young man with a voice like a bassoon, never seemed shocked at all. He said to Grandma, “Mrs. Bronn, I couldn’t work on Annie and manipulate her muscles, I just couldn’t hurt her like this if she cried like a child. But she’s taking it like a man, and talking like a man helps her. Some day she’ll walk right out of this office, square and firm.”

  It was funny what silly things the young doctor bribed me with—Kewpie dolls and tea sets made of tin, and other things I couldn’t use. But Grandma knew what I needed. She bought me shiny red shoes she couldn’t afford, while she wore cardboard in the soles of hers. And she read me books bursting with adventure. Oh, how I ate and breathed and slept with them. Some we read twenty-six times. And they were all living inside of me until I was fit to burst.

  Now books were my life. For these moments I skimmed across the ice with Hans Brinker, I wrassled wildcats with Daniel Boone, I climbed mountains with Heidi, and it was my thumb instead of Peter’s that plugged the hole in the dike!

  That same doctor sent me to school in an agony of braces. It wasn’t that they hurt me; it was the awful fun-making of my schoolmates. “Hey, Annie, how come you get excused from gym?” “Lucky you ain’t a horse or your Pa’d shoot you for going gimpy.”

  I hated standing on the sidelines, watching the other kids doing the things I wanted to do, and trying to let their cruel teasing slide off the hard shell I was growing.

  But what happened at school was as nothing compared to my separation from the horses. I couldn’t ride them, or hook up for Pa, or even brush them. And the way my Pa acted was even worse. He moved about me in a sort of tight quietness, stepping careful and awkward, just the way I did. It was like his back was twisted, too. And he never called me “Pard” any more. He called me “Annie,” through lips that hardly opened.

  Even so, I wanted oh so much to live, and I dreamed of a time when I’d be well, and of the ranch I’d own and the horses I’d ride. Mostly I’d dream of that special horse who would whinner for me over the half-door of his stall. The dreams were fiercely real because they took the place of riding and skating and jumping rope.

  All this while Grandma was my salvation. She rummaged around in her memory and came up with exciting true stories of pioneer days. Over and over I asked for the story of how the mustang mare saved Pa’s life. And she taught me how to knit and to sew, and to make my own dresses. Always we chose the brightest colors. Sometimes I was a redbird. Sometimes a bluejay. And she taught me to be expert at tiddledy-winks and jacks and marbles so I could beat my boy cousins.

  She even taught me to cook. Floating island pudding was my triumph. This meant I had to gather the eggs. In careful, halty steps I went into the chicken house, and except for one grumpy old hen, they let me reach in under them and take their eggs while they were still warm.

  One day I came across a hen on a hidden nest in the hay mow. I didn’t know she’d been setting there for three weeks. With a loud squawk, she surrendered one brown egg. I was already late for school; so I tucked it into my pocket. All morning long I sat in the hot schoolroom unmindful of the egg. At recess I fell into a puddle, and my teacher helped me back into the room and sat me on the radiator to dry off. That night while I was doing my lessons in front of our big red-bellied stove, I heard the faintest “peep” from my pocket. The baby chick had hatched right there!

  Pa looked over his newspaper at the scrawny little life in my hand. A smile of pride spread across his face. “Your walking so gentle and careful, Annie, it could only of happened to you,” he said.

  For a long time I believed that yellow fluff of a chick was part of God’s way of making it up to me.

  4. Trapped!

  GRADUALLY, WHEN I was nearly eleven, the hurting eased, but I still walked slowly and carried my head sidewise, for my spine hadn’t straightened. And I still couldn’t ride or jump rope or play run-my-good-sheep run.

  Pa and Mom wanted to do everything they could to help me. So one spring day, just after school let out, I was bundled off to a hospital in San Francisco where crippled children were treated without any cost to their parents. The only thing the parents had to promise was not to come to visit for several months, as it might slow the recovery.

  “You’ll like it there,” Mom had said. “There’ll be other children like you. And sooner than soon you’ll be home again.”

  But I didn’t like it. And there weren’t other children like me. The others wore casts or braces on an arm or a leg, and they could race down the halls on crutches. But I was in jail. A surgeon locked me up in a plaster cast. It began at my hips and went up and up until it covered even the top of my head. I looked like a humpty-dumpty with skinny arms and legs dangling. Holes were cut for my mouth, my eyes and ears, and a little hole was left at the top so I could scratch my head with the blunt end of Grandma’s knitting needles, which she had sent along to keep my hands busy.

  At first I didn’t mind the cage much because I was excited by the prospect of emerging tall and straight and beautiful. But soon I began to feel smothered. My prison was crushing me. It seemed as if my spirit was battering against the cast, like a moth beating its wings in a glass jar. In the dark of night I would fill my lungs to bursting, hoping to crack the cast and escape to freedom. When this failed, I tried to claw it open with my fingernails. But it was strong as steel. I was like an animal in a trap, all crazy from hurt and fear. I prayed to God to set me free, crooked or lame.

  But I didn’t know if He was hearing me, and I’d sob myself to sleep, dreaming of our house, and Hobo rubbing off his winter hair and snortin’ in that friendly way, and sometimes I’d be feeding the bummer lamb and him buttin’ sassy-like if I didn’t hold the bottle just so. Then I’d wake up in the dark, and the house was not there, or Hobo, or the corral, or the cabins out back. Or Pa and Mom. Or Grandma.

  While I couldn’t have visitors, I could have letters. But somehow when they came, they made me all the sadder. I missed out on so many things—Hobo’s helping to break a new mustang to harness, my little brother’s new puppy dog, and Aunt Elvira’s wedding. She sent me a piece of the cake to sleep on and a picture of her in her wedding dress. She was pretty in white; it made her teeth look smaller. I slept with the cake under my pillow for two nights and then ate it. It made me feel more lost and lonesome than before.

  Even Grandma’s letters broke my heart. She had a full-time job now, working in a hospital. “It’s a sit-down job at the admissions desk,” she wrote. “I live here nights, too.” At this I blubbered all down the inside of my cast. How could I picture my bed at home without the big flannel warmth of Grandma!

  A dozen times a day I looked at Mom’s watch that she had given me as a parting gift. “Every time you look at it,” she’d said, “you’ll know what we’re doing at home and that we’re thinking of you. It’ll hurry the time along.”

  But nothing could hurry those poky hands. They lagged and dragged, not trying to get ahead at all.

  The only bright spot in my life was a large painting in the hall that I had to pass on the way to the bathroom. I would glance at it hurriedly going, and stop to worship it for a long time a-coming back. The paint
ing, called “Roaming Free,” showed a band of wild horses skimming across the desert, manes and tails flowing. The exciting thing was that they were leaping right out of the picture, at me! And they were strong and wild and muscley as if they’d found good grass and good water and lived a good life. If ever I went a-mustangin’ with my Pa, that’s the kind I’d like to catch, especially that little buckskin in front.

  The picture had me bewitched. It was as if someone had taken my dream, and by mouth-to-mouth breathing had brought it alive. I studied it with all my senses. I could just feel what it was like out there, winging along with the herd. “I hope they never catch you, little Buck,” I’d say under my breath. “Go it, you little bullet! Go it!”

  I gloried in his freedom, but at the same time I wanted to capture him, too. I wanted to be a mustanger now that I was a grown-up eleven. I could see the chase in my mind and feel it in my heart. I could even smell the desert. And there was Pa on Old Baldy and me on Hobo galloping over sand and sage and rock, and we’d flush the bunch of wild ones out of the foothills, and we’d cut little Buck away from the others. Riding herd on him, we’d run him into a box canyon and I’d capture him! Alone! He’d be mine! Mine to gentle and . . .

  I felt a hand on my arm! I jumped, startled out of my trance. “I like that picture too, Annie.” It was my doctor. I hated him because he was my jailer. His hair was black and curly, and I could see horns coming up out of the kinky places, just like they were there.

  “Wild horses aren’t really wild, Annie, you know. They’re feral,” he said in a voice so tender I was surprised. It wasn’t his doctor-voice at all. “Do you know, my child, what feral means?”

  I didn’t answer. I clamped my lips tight; I wasn’t going to show my ignorance to him.

  “Well, feral means gone wild. Those free-roaming horses are offspring of tame horses. Years ago they probably escaped from missions, or Indian camps, or ranches, and then they multiplied like weeds. In fact, you might say a mustang is a kind of weed.”