“That’s fine then, you can have fruit juice or mineral water, whatever. Just make yourself at home,” and she went upstairs.
In less than thirty seconds Kenneth came down, shook Vergil’s hand, kissed Josephine. She said, “Dad, this is Vergil. He was in Vietnam. In the marines.”
Kenneth said, “fine. I’ll let you show your friend around, babes. Your mother and I are having a little discussion,” and he was back up the stairs, two at a time, and in a minute they heard strident voices from above.
“It doesn’t sound so good,” said Josephine, flat-voiced. “Some things never change. Come on, let’s go see Fay. He’s the one who really counts.”
The first thing Fay told her was that Old Egypt had come back up the day before, her childhood horse, her good-hearted gelding.
“It was lightning, Jo, done it. Two weeks ago, big old thunderheads come up, just acrack with lightning. I’m nailing up some loose shingles on the barn—them damn things flake off bad as dandruff—and I seen Egypt grazing over by the wagon (you know Kenneth bought a old Conestoga wagon from a guy in Oregon State and hauled it home a few years back). The wind come up blowing dust and I seen him turn around and get his ass to the wind. He could of gone into the barn, the door was open, but you know he liked rain—he was a horse that sure liked rain. I’m trying to finish up before the storm hit full, but as it was, hail was bouncing off my hat and there was a god-awful crash and a big stroke, I thought I was blind, this blue glary light and a thing like a big blue rat run across the ground sizzling and hissing and setting the grass afire and I seen Old Egypt is down and his legs going like he’s running away. He must of thought he was running away pretty good. And here come another one, split Kenneth’s pear tree in half, so I duck into the barn and wait until the lightning gets to a more comfortable distance and I go over to Old Egypt. He wasn’t moving but he wasn’t dead, not yet. You could smell burned hair and there was a burn from his right ear down his nose, and all down his neck, his mane frizzled up. He was cold to touch and his eyes rolled up. I tried to get him up but he was past getting, and he give one big shudder and quit. The Conestoga wagon was smoking. What I don’t understand is why he come back up now. We dug one hell of a hole with the backhoe and it don’t make sense. I think he wanted to see you one more time.”
He drove his little finger into his left ear, gouging for wax, added, “anyway, what they say, ‘death to the horse, life to the crow.’”
“It’s too sad to think about,” said Josephine, “we brought you something.”
“You’re a sweetheart, Jo, a darlin sweetheart.”
Josephine was embarrassed at his gratitude—what was he expecting, a leather jacket, a set of imported steak knives? “It’s actually junk, more like a joke than a present. We stopped at all these yard sales on the way out. I got Kenneth and Bette a saltshaker in the shape of the atom bomb. So Vergil got you this old accordion. I remembered you used to play a little accordion kind of thing. And I remember all those raunchy songs.”
“Concertina,” he said. “I still play it. It come to me by way of an old bronc buster and another one had it before him. They’ll last your life if you treat them fair. But I always wanted a accordion, you know. Been hoping to find a good little B/C two-row one of these days; that’s your man for the good Irish tunes. Let’s take a look.”
Vergil got the bedraggled instrument from the back seat, the bellows smeared with crayon scribbles, the lacquer chipped and scarred, leather straps hanging loose. Fay took it gently, looked at its sad rows of buttons and worked the bellows, loosing a C chord rotund and authoritative, a gibbering flash of sound, a stumble of stuck buttons and sour wheeze that set Vergil’s teeth on edge.
“Well, it’s a two-row,” Fay said and began to sing against a scribble of notes. “She’s a dancing young beauty, she’s a rose in full bloom, and she fucks for five dollars in the Buckskin Saloon …There’s some life in it. I can get it shaped up again, maybe. It’s got a kind of chesty sound.”
He threw his arm around Josephine, said thanks, but Vergil saw he was disappointed, recollected himself as a child expecting a fucking kaleidoscope—the hints had pointed in that direction—and receiving his grandfather’s milky-lensed telescope covered in torn and rotting leather, through which nothing could be seen but swarming blurs.
He thought Fay resembled the seedy man at the end of the bar in any Dublin pub, straggled hair unsuccessfully combed, the flat ear, wax yellow, the bony, high-colored face, muscular strength concentrated in the lips which could extend powerfully toward a glass of bitter, wet blue eyes, though instead of the boozer’s stained jacket and tie askew around a thin neck, Fay was decked in frayed shirt and drooping jeans held up by a gimcrack belt studded with glass jewels, most of them missing from the metal settings, scuffed boots and a hat so torn and blackened it could be worn only aggressively. When Vergil put out his hand Fay crushed it in a cruel grip and looked expressionlessly into his eyes, a direct stare of the sort a dog gives before it bites.
“What do you think of Fay?” Josephine asked later. “Isn’t he the real thing?” She implied that Kenneth and Bette were not, that they were impostors and the Appaloosa ranch a fraud and that everything would collapse as it had twice before if it were not for Fay who held it all together through the strength of his hat.
“Yeah, he is,” said Vergil. “I think he’s a fucking nutcracker.”
“Nut Cracker? That was the name of a crooked sunfisher, a bucking bronco as mean as they get, and it was a woman, an Indian woman, Red Bird, up in Oregon, who rode him to a standstill back in 1916,” came Kenneth’s voice from the next room.
The ranch
Kenneth and Bette Switch had come out to Montana from Boston in 1953 with a little money that Bette thought Kenneth had inherited (he had embezzled it from the credit union where he worked after the board refused him a raise), bought an old run-down ranch near the Crow Reservation. The ranch adjoined the reservation bison-project land. Kenneth liked to say years later that when they started their little cow and calf operation, they were “too ignorant to breathe without getting a lungful of dirt.” They thrilled, driving down the red road, to rise up the crest and see the country furled out sixty miles and butting up against the Big Horns, and there in the foreground beasts from the west’s indecent past, immense heads down and the small glittering eyes rolling; then, a mile farther on, their own black baldies absurd as painted plywood.
It took only a few years before they were in trouble, with brucellosis in their herd; the county agent told them it might be the bison carried it; they would have to destroy their animals, then after a few years they could start again, maybe.
“Anyways,” the agent said, “if you don’t get it bad once in a while, how do you know when you get it good? You got to learn things the hard way sometimes.” It was clear he had them pegged as fool easterners with more money than sense who could afford to start over every few years in the college of experiential ranching.
While they waited for the infected land to cure itself, Bette got a gal Friday job at the county courthouse and Kenneth found something with a local horse auctioneer, Gibby Amacker, at first just tallying, bookkeeping and paperwork, but he began to learn something about horses, every kind and color, duns and buckskins, grullos, bayo coyotes and bayo blancos, moros and flea-bitten greys, medicine hats and war bonnets, claybanks, bays and greys, blacks, chestnuts, browns, paints and palominos, blue corns, pintos, sorrels, paint overos, tobianos and toveros, calicoes, esabellas, skewbalds, piebalds and calicoes, roans and strawberry roans; Appaloosas with white and spotted blankets, leopard and tiger coats, snowflaked, frosted and marbled, marked with handprints or two-tone peacock spots, mottled and varnished; horses with blazes, strips, snips, raindrops, dollar spots, splashes and stars, apron-faced, bonnet-faced and bald-faced horses; saw every breed led in and out of the sale ring week after week, Paints, Morgans, Arabians, Half-Arabians, Anglo-Arabians, Appaloosas, Quarter Horses.
He fo
und himself watching the Appaloosas with something like impatience and longing. He began to notice how their prices were moving up, had been moving up since he started working for Gibby, from thirty or so rock-bottom dollars a head to where sometimes they were bringing a hundred if they came from one of the ranchers, like Peewee Loveless, interested in restoring the breed, as Peewee said, to its old glory as the great hunting and war horse of the plains, ruined by immigrant clodhoppers and know-nothing easterners who bought up those survivors of the famous Nez Percé “palousies” of the northwest, with their striped hooves and white-rimmed eyes, the herd confiscated by the U.S. government and sold at a dispersal sale after Chief Joseph and his band took them on an eleven-hundred-mile journey across the flooding Snake River, through brutal Lolo Pass of the Bitterroots, through thirteen battles and skirmishes with ten different commands of U.S. troops, every time defeating or fighting the federal enemy to a standstill because of their superior mounts, only to arrive at the last place, the Lapwai Reservation in Idaho, where their horses were taken from them and replaced with bibles. The lucky but fool purchasers of these extraordinary horses bred them to anything that walked on four legs and had a mane, and in twenty or thirty years the spotted horses of the plains, descendants of the ice-age horses painted on the cave walls of France, of the fabled horses of Ferghana, between the Syrdarya and the Amudarya rivers on the steppes of Central Asia in Uzbekistan, of Rakush, the spotted horse of the warrior hero Rustam, celebrated in Persian miniatures and in Firdousi’s epic poem the Shah Namah, of the Chinese Celestial Horses from the Extreme West, the Blood-Sweating horses, of the galloping mounts of the Mongol Horde and Attila the Hun, of the Andalusian horses of Spain shipped to Mexico for the conquistadors’ savage forays, of a shipload of spotted horses from the Trieste Lippizan herd landed on Vera Cruz around 1620, of the horses abandoned by the terrified Spaniards after the Pueblo revolt of sixty years later and traded north by an agricultural people more interested in sheep, to the Shoshone, Cayuse, Nez Percé, Blackfeet, Blood, Arikara, Sioux, Cree, Crow of the North American steppes known as the Great Plains, had been bred down to dog meat.
After a few months of listening to Peewee’s Appaloosa tales, he asked him right out, “Peewee, you think a man could make a go of it breeding Appaloosas? You think the market is there?”
“A good question. You know, my youngest boy’s home from the university just now, talking about what he’s gonna do, and he breaks it to me, he’s not gonna stay on the ranch. Well, I says, you don’t have to, I’ll set you up good. And if I was a young feller starting out I’d think about Appaloosas, there’s more people starting to look at the Appaloosa with a favorable eye. And you know what he said to me? Said, no way, I’m not getting in no horse-breeding business, because I want to get into TV camera work, I told you that a thousand times. Well, he always tooken pictures since he was a kid, but they’re so damn strange nobody’s gonna pay money for them things, but he says this is different, there’s this new videotape stuff, whatever it is, and that’s what he means. Probly get mixed up with a bunch of damn Commonists. Anyhow, he’ll find out the hard way. Answer to your question, if you know something about breeding horses and you got the interest and somewhat of a bankroll or a tight belt, to my way of thinking the Appaloosa might be a good bet.”
“Suppose you don’t know much and your bankroll’s nonexistent?”
“Why then, you’ll learn or go broke, won’t you? There’s a couple of people around working on bringing back the good Appaloosas. It’s practical because they make a damn good stock horse, yes, a fine riding horse with that natural flat-footed gait, the old Indian shuffle that lets him keep going. A couple of fellas started in the thirties but the war set ’em back. You talk to anybody yet?”
“Just you.”
“I don’t count! Might want to talk with somebody at Coke Roberd’s place down in Coloraydo. He’s been specializing in Appaloosa and Quarter Horse for long years, bred in high-quality Thoroughbred stock, some say he bred in from a Austrian or Polish spotted horse that was in a circus come through, oh, years and years ago, maybe what they call a Lippizaner, you heard of them, or they say maybe he got it off a gypsy when one of them bands come through. Then there’s Claude Thompson up in Oregon, he’s breeding in Arabian blood. A war vet from up around there, George Somebody, has throwed in with him and he has something to do with the Appaloosa Horse Club. I heard his great-great-uncle or grandmother or somebody bought a couple of the original Nez Percé horses at the government sale way back, so they got some of that good blood. And there’s a few more been working on it. You’d have to say they are restoring what was a lost breed. It’s only a couple of years since the breed was approved by the National Association. But you got your work cut out for you. If I was you I’d start myself a serious linebreeding program. Concentrate on quality, castrate anything that ain’t first mark, send the duds and cripples and poor ones to the canner. You got to be hard about that. And keep real good records.”
Half an hour later Kenneth saw Peewee over by the fence talking to Gibby Amacker, both of them laughing, and he knew they were enjoying the joke of Kenneth Switch breeding Appaloosas, made up his mind to make them laugh on the other sides of their mouths. (He never got the chance. Peewee drowned in midwinter when a green colt he was riding through a shallow spillway took fright at the sensation of breaking ice around his ankles and plunged into the deep water. And on St. Patrick’s Day Gibby Amacker choked to death on a mouthful of rare sirloin while laughing at a string of jokes about Basque sheepherders—not the raw ones about sheep and rubber boots and crusty underwear, nor the one about shoe polish on the satin comforter, nor the one about the pressure cooker, but a childish play on words told by his brother-in-law Richard through his heavy blond mustache.
“Hey, Gibby, a family of Basques gets caught in a revolving door. Know what the moral is? Don’t put all your Basques in one exit … Jesus, it’s not that funny. Hey, Gibby, are you all right? Somebody? Hey, somebody GET SOME HELP.”)
Umbrella Point
The second morning of their visit Vergil awoke to the infernal shrieking of a rooster. The electric clock buzzed and hummed, showed 5:47.
Downstairs, Kenneth poured him a mug of lukewarm coffee, Josephine and Bette still asleep. He stood nervously near the kitchen table. There was a poster taped to the kitchen door, showing a bull rider in a ball of dust over the sentence “Lord, help me hang in there.” The sky was blood orange in the east. Kenneth’s deep voice crowded him into a Spanish-style chair with a plastic seat and octagonal-headed tacks that cut into the backs of his thighs. The creases from Kenneth’s nose to the corners of his mouth precisely mirrored the line of his chin, stamping his face with a diamond shape horizontally bisected by wide, chapped lips. His eyes were enormous, huge grey irises partially obscured by the curtains of loose flesh under the eyebrows which rested on his eyelids. These eyes were further magnified by glasses set with half-moon bifocals. His eyebrows and thin hair were the color of his skin, a reddish tan.
“How much do you know about horse breeding, Vergil?”
“Not a fucking thing.” He wanted to ask Kenneth why he had never swung his daughter by her ankles, leaving it to the ranch hand.
“Well, I think that by the time you leave the Switch ranch you’ll know a little bit. Give you some idea of background, I didn’t know a goddamn thing either when we came out here twenty-seven years ago. What I knew about horses you could put on your thumbnail. I was smart enough to know I didn’t know anything and I hired Fay McGettigan who was working for Peewee Loveless, after Peewee drowned, and Fay knew horses—knows horses—like not many men do. We had a hard time the first few years out here, especially Bette who had a lot of trouble adapting, but all it took to turn things around was one horse, one horse, Umbrella Point, one of the most beautiful Appaloosa stallions that ever set hoof on the soil. Those pictures in the hall and the living room? Umbrella Point.” (There were dozens of photographs showing a muscular and athleti
c dun horse with a brilliant blanket of white over his rump and back, enlivened with peacock spots; white spotted forefeet; a white face; and on his throat a white shield. Besides the photographs there were a few bad paint-by-the-number acrylics featuring horses. Vergil guessed Kenneth had painted them. In his photographs Umbrella Point was depicted in a variety of positions and activities—galloping, calf roping, standing pensively, romping, rolling, in a sit-down halt, running for the blue in a stump race, dashing into an area keyhole, nuzzling, sleeping, and standing on a high trail under a pine branch blurred by the wind—compact but perfectly formed and with a jaunty, good-humored eye, plump cheeks which gave him a roguish air, and a wispy rat tail that Vergil thought hideous.)
Kenneth swilled his coffee through his teeth, spoke in his acquired western drawl. “The way I came by this horse is mighty peculiar, so much so that I wouldn’t believe it myself if it didn’t happen to me. I was in Idaho at a rodeo, still working part-time for Gibby Amacker—this was just a few weeks before he killed himself laughing at the Bascos—and I was supposed to pick up a string of ponies that some Texas bronc buster had to sell and had got hold of Gibby’s name some way and called him up and the old man said, you bet, I’ll send Kenneth over to pick ’em up, that was typical of Gibby, it wasn’t my job to pick up horses but he rode roughshod over everybody. Fay had just started working for me, so I said we’ll go over there together, so Fay and me went down there and the guy’s Quarter Horses looked pretty good, and he was sick about selling them but he was having some kind of money trouble. Well, that’s what makes the horse world go around and around. So we load them up and I give him a receipt and one of the horses gives this nicker and the guy starts to bawl, oh that’s Pearl, I can’t sell Pearl, and he’s shoving the receipt at me and trying to get the door unlatched to get Pearl out. Look here, I says, you told me three horses, I got the damn receipt all made out and the horses loaded up. No, he says, I’m gonna get Pearl out and give you another horse to take in her place. I got a Appaloosa stallion, been using him for roping, he’s smart and quick, but I’ll swap him for Pearl. He don’t mean as much to me as she does. Fay gives me a look when he hears the word ‘Appaloosa.’ So we go over to the other side of the fairground where he’s got this other horse, Bum Spots, and Fay jams his elbow in my ribs so hard I almost yelled. At the time I didn’t see anything special, but for Fay it was love at first sight. Bum Spots was six years old and he hadn’t been gelded and Fay knew he was perfect. Well I’m casual. Fay says, you know anything about him? I was ready to bet he was probably just some unregistered outcross breed. Oh yeah, the guy said. He’s a rodeo accident. This rodeo in Coloraydo a stallion got loose and served two mares; sure enough, one of ’em was Pearl. Don’t suppose you knew the name of the stallion, Fay says, offhand. Yeah, one of Coke Roberd’s horses, I believe it was Gee Whiskers or Gee Whizz. I paid that boy two hundred dollars for Bum Spots right then and there; no way was that horse going into Amacker’s ring. And Fay says on the way home, ‘that was when my heart started to go pit-a-pat, because Gee Whizz sired X-Ray Baby who just become the world champion running mare Quarter Horse, so Bum Spots is a half-brother to a world champion.’ Which, of course, this gravel-headed blubbering cowboy didn’t know or he wouldn’t never of sold Bum Spots, a.k.a. Umbrella Point, to us.”