The Essential W. P. Kinsella Read online

  Fr. Alphonse and Bedelia do a little investigating and discover what Frank has done.

  “How could you do something so stupid?” roar Bedelia. Me and Rufus Firstrider is working on the corral. Frank laying down in the shade, his cowboy hat pulled down until his face don’t show at all.

  “Show a little respect for your ranch foreman,” say Frank. “Besides, what’s stupid? We got 400 cattle arriving, and they gonna come 400 a month almost forever. We get to keep the money we make. We all gonna be rich ranchers. Gonna call my spread the Ponderosa.”

  “We were going to do something positive,” say Bedelia with less anger than I expected. “You’ll be sorry,” she predict before she stomp off.

  As usual, Bedelia turn out to be right.

  We actually get the corral finished the day before the first cattle due to arrive. I read somewhere about this here guy named Murphy who has a law about Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. I bet Murphy was an Ermineskin Indian.

  Boy, we sure is excited when that first cattle transport turn off the highway and onto the main street of Hobbema. Little kids and old people are all along the street waving pennants left over from when the Edmonton Oilers won the Stanley Cup for hockey. People toot their car horns and wave.

  The truck back up to the corral, let down its end gate and the first Herefords, with wine-colored bodies and square white faces, step down onto the reserve. Eathen Firstrider, Ducky Cardinal, Gerard Many Hands High, and a couple of other guys who worked the rodeo circuit are there on their ponies to guide the cattle into the corral.

  The second truck waiting to unload when the first one is empty. Then another one, and another, and another. Each truck hold about 35–40 cattle, and after a while it seem to me there is close to 400 cows in the corral. But when I look toward the highway there are cattle transports lined all the way down the hill and about four deep all along main street.

  It seem some clerk in the Government in Ottawa add an extra zero to our order. And there is 4000 cattle arriving instead of 400.

  “It ain’t our problem,” the truck drivers say. “Our orders are to deliver these cattle to Hobbema. This here is Hobbema. If you ain’t got a corral, we’ll just drop them in the street.”

  And they do.

  By the end of that day there is more white-faced cattle on the Hobbema Reserve than there is Indians. The corral get so full it start to bulge at the seams. Then come a couple of trucks say they carrying the bulls.

  “Can’t turn these dudes loose,” a truck driver say. “They’re mean mothers if I ever seen some.”

  We have to chase a few hundred cattle out onto the street so the bulls can go into the corral.

  “They must weigh 5000 lbs. each,” says Frank, watching the wide, squat Hereford bulls wobble into the corral on their square, piano-legs. Each one got a bronze ring in his flat pink nose.

  “Lookit the equipment on them suckers,” says Frank. “I bet that’s what I was in a former life.”

  “In the present one,” says Connie, and Frank grin big.

  The trucks just keep unloading. I guess word must work back to the end of the line that we ain’t got no more corral space. Some of the trucks way out by the highway drop their loads and sneak away. Soon all the trucks are doing that. The main street of Hobbema look like a movie I seen once of a cattle drive somewhere in the Wild West of about a hundred years ago.

  The cattle fill up the school grounds and is munching grass among tombstones in the graveyard behind the Catholic church. One step up on the porch of Ben Stonebreaker’s Hobbema General Store bite into a gunnysack of chicken feed and scatter it all about. Four or five more climb onto the porch and one get about halfway into the store before Ben’s granddaughter Caroline beat it across the nose with a yard stick and make it back up.

  My girlfriend’s brother David One-wound have himself a still in a poplar grove a few hundred yards back of town. RCMP can’t sniff out his business, but it only take the cattle a few minutes to find it.

  “They could work for the RCMP, use them as tracking cattle,” says Frank. “And they’d be close to being as smart,” he say.

  The cattle like the sugar in the throwed out mash, and some of them get as close to mean as these docile kind of cattle can.

  Ben Stonebreaker has five cattle prods in his hardware department, and he sell them out in about five minutes. Mad Etta our medicine lady was herding three or four half-drunk cows out of her yard when Ephrem Crookedneck, who decide to put as many cows as he can into his garden, what only fenced with chicken wire, and call them his own, either accidentally, or by mistake jab Mad Etta with his new electric cattle prod.

  “Honest to God, I thought she was one of them. You seen her from behind. It was an honest mistake,” he say, after the doctor taped up his cracked ribs and put his dislocated arm in a sling.

  The cattle push up against the pumps at Fred Crier’s Hobbema Texaco Garage, and before long one of the pumps leaning at a 45 degree angle. Old Peter Left Hand’s chicken coop kind of sigh and fold up like a paper cut out, ruffled hens running everywhere, some squawking from inside the flattened building.

  Traffic on Highway 2A is tied up, and somebody in a pickup truck hit a cow right in front of the Hobbema Pool Hall. Some young guys built a fire in a rusty oil drum and they barbecue the dead cow. Other guys is stripping down the pickup truck while the driver trying to call the RCMP.

  “We is the law here,” Rufus Firstrider tell the truck owner.

  Constable Chretien and Constable Bobowski, the lady RCMP, come by, but there is some situations even too big for the RCMP. Constable Bobowski jump out of the patrol car, get shit on her boots, jump back in, then back out to wipe her feet on the grass. They stare through the windshield at the thousands of cattle milling around—some of them cattle bump pretty hard into the patrol car. Finally, they ease away a few feet at a time. I’m told they put detour signs on the highway a mile above and a mile before Hobbema.

  It ain’t near as much fun as we thought it would be to have 4000 cattle. Turns out nobody like our cattle very much. Cattle is dumb, and determined. They go just about anywhere they want to. They eat grass and gardens and leaves, knock down buildings, and some get in Melvin Dodging-horse’s wheatfield, tramp down his crop. Six or seven of them eat until they die. Then they smell up the air on the whole reserve.

  White farmers and even some Indians claim they going to sue the Ermineskin Nation Back To The Land Movement. The main street, and the gravel road to the highway, and even the walking paths is covered in cow shit. Seem like everyplace you can name is downwind of our herd.

  It is also pretty hard to keep 40 bulls in a corral when there is close to 4000 cows outside the corral.

  “Do something,” everybody say to Bedelia Coyote and Fr. Alphonse. But there is a point where people get overwhelmed by a situation and Bedelia and Fr. Alphonse is in that position.

  People try to get Chief Tom in on the act, but he stay in his apartment in Wetaskiwin with his girlfriend, Samantha Yellowknees, and after they put pressure on him, decide he have serious government business in California for the next month. Chief Tom don’t like the smell of cattle no better than the rest of us.

  Everybody grumble. But we got what we said we wanted. It pretty hard to complain about that.

  Everybody now eat good anyway. Old hunters like William Irons and Dolphus Frying Pan, have a couple of cows skinned and quartered before you can say, “hunting season,” and everybody got steak to fry and liver to cook. William and Dolphus have blood up to their elbows and they ain’t smiled so broad since they got too old to go big-game hunting.

  Next morning a tall cowboy arrive with a cattle transport offer to buy up cows at $400 each. He put down the ramp at the rear of his truck and pay cash money to whoever load an animal up. He load up 40 cows and promise to come back as soon as he can.

  “If he’s paying $400, these here animals must be worth a lot more,” says Frank.

  All the time the truck was being l
oaded, Bedelia was yelling for them to stop, shouting about our heritage and don’t sell the future for pocket money. But nobody pays any attention and somebody even shove her out of the way, hard.

  Frank get Louis Coyote’s pickup truck and using the same ramp we use to load Mad Etta when we want to take her someplace, we get three cows into the truck box rope them in pretty tight.

  Frank he head for Weiller and Williams Stockyard in Edmonton.

  Most of us don’t really have any idea how much a cow is worth. But after Frank make that first trip to Edmonton he report, “They is paying 80¢ a pound and these cows weigh around 1000 to 1200 pounds.” The three he crammed in Louis’ pickup truck bring $2640 cash money.

  When people find that out everybody want to get in on the act.

  When the cattle transport come back, David One-wound announce we going to “nationalize” it and the driver just barely get away with his empty truck and ten guys yipping on his heels.

  A couple of people load cows into their wagon boxes and start their teams out for the long trip to Edmonton.

  Some of the young cowboys like Eathen Firstrider, Robert Coyote and Ducky Cardinal decide to do a real cattle drive and start about fifteen cows in the direction of Edmonton.

  Some other people tie a rope to the neck of the tamest cow and lead her, walking in front of her, in the direction of Edmonton.

  Bedelia is still yelling at people to stop and is still getting ignored. Fr. Alphonse gone back to his office at the Reserve School, wishing, I bet, that he’d never found out about us being cheated.

  It is kind of sad to see all the crazy goings on. If we could just get organized we could make a lot of money for years and years to come. But people ain’t ready to listen to Bedelia; they just go on their own way selling cattle here, there, and everywhere. Local white farmers stop people as they walk up the ditches offer less than half what the animal would bring in Edmonton. But people is too greedy to say no. Ogden Coyote trade a cow for a 10-speed bicycle, have bright pink tassels on the handlebars.

  I remember reading in, I think it was Time magazine about how in Africa, when some little country that been a colony for a thousand years get its independence, the people don’t know how to act. They spend foolishly, act like fools and their country end up in a terrible mess.

  I wish I was a leader. I can see what should be done, but I don’t know how to go about it. I’m a watcher.

  “You could stop this foolishness,” I say to Mad Etta. “People would listen to you. Why don’t you do something?”

  “Hey, they are doing what they want. Water rise to its own level. You put food in front of hungry people they going to eat good before they think about planting seeds for next year. Same with money. I know what should be done, but the people ain’t ready for it yet. Maybe, Silas, when you’re an old man . . .” and she stop and stare wistful off into the woods behind her cabin. “But in the meantime, I got a bull and six cows tethered in the pines down the hill. How soon you figure we can use Louis’ truck to take them to Edmonton?”

  The next morning Frank come bounding into my cabin, smiling like he just got it on with a movie star.

  “Hey, Silas, our troubles are over,” he yell. “I had me a dream last night and these here cattle going to make us rich.”

  “How are they gonna do that?”

  “All we need is some old sheets and some paint.”

  “For what?”

  “Hey, we gonna sell advertising space on our cattle.” Frank is grinning so wide I’m afraid he’s gonna dislocate his ears.

  “That’s crazy.”

  “No it’s not,” and Frank jump up on a kitchen chair, then jump off quick, run to my bed and pull a sheet off with one hard yank, leave the rest of the blankets and Sadie right where they were. He set two chairs about four feet apart and drape the sheet over the chair backs.

  “Pretend that’s a cow. We tie a sheet over her, then . . .” and he pull from his pocket a huge magic marker about the size of a shock absorber, and paint on the sheet HOBBEMA TEXACO GARAGE. “We do that on each side of the cow, then we put them to grazing along the highway. They’ll be just like billboards.”

  No matter what I say to Frank, whether I laugh or make fun of his idea, he stick to his guns.

  “There’s only one thing to do,” I say, “let’s go make some sales calls.”

  In Wetaskiwin we get a parking place in front of Mr. Larry’s Men’s Wear, COUTURIER TO THE DISCRIMINATING GENTLEMAN.

  We troop inside.

  “We’re here to see Mr. Larry,” I say to a tall man dressed so fancy he could lay right down in a coffin and feel at home.

  “I am Lawrence Oberholtzer, the proprietor.”

  “I’m Frank Fencepost, ace advertising salesman. How do you like me so far?” and Frank stick out his hand grab one of Mr. Larry’s long pale hands that was by his side, and shake hearty.

  “I would just as soon not answer that,” he say, his voice able to freeze water or shrivel plants.

  “I’m gonna show you how to become the richest businessman in Wetaskiwin.”

  “I already am the richest man in Wetaskiwin,” say Mr. Larry. “Now please get to the point.”

  “How would you like to have 4000 cattle with your name on them?”

  “Don’t tell me; you’re cattle rustlers.”

  Frank explain his idea.

  “You can even advertise on more than one cow. Show him, Silas. This is my assistant Silas Running-up-the-riverbank.”

  Mr. Larry nod at me.

  “Picture your cows grazing in a row beside the highway, Mr. Larry.”

  I take out four sheets I been carrying, unfold them, drape them over racks of suits. When I finished they read like this:

  THIS HERE STORE

  IS A FANCY PLACE

  SHIRTS & SUITS

  FOR EVERY RACE

  CHINK OR JAP

  CHRISTIAN OR JEW

  MR. LARRY’S

  IS THE STORE FOR YOU.

  Frank he look so self-satisfied he just know it is impossible for Mr. Larry to turn him down.

  Out on the street we gather up the sheets from where Mr. Larry threw them and decide to call on Union Tractor Company.

  Six businesses later, we put the sheets in the truck and head for the Alice Hotel to have a beer.

  “They’ll be sorry,” says Frank. “I can’t help it if I fifty years ahead of my time.”

  The cattle problem solve itself, sort of like flood water recede slow until you never know the water been high at all.

  Everybody on the reserve eat good for a few weeks. The old hunters is happy as pigs in a barnyard. A lot of us carry cattle off to sell in Edmonton. Louis Coyote buy twin Ski-Doos for him and Mrs. Blind Louis.

  I buy me a new typewriter but it ain’t no smarter than my old one, so it get pushed to the back of the kitchen table and my little sister Delores, who claim she going to tell stories just like me, pound on it once in a while.

  Frank buy a video recorder and him and Connie pick out about a hundred movies. Frank is working on tapping into the power line to the UGG Elevator so’s they can watch movies soon as they get a TV, which Frank is working on too.

  Mad Etta was about the only smart one, she corral two of them Hereford bulls, and got them in separate pens behind her cabin. We drive her around to local farms and she sell their services.

  “Etta ain’t going to go hungry for a while,” she says, rocking back and forth on her tree-trunk chair. “It sure nice to be supported by somebody who enjoy their work,” she say and laugh and laugh.

  “It’s back to the drawing board for us,” say Bedelia and Fr. Alphonse. “We got a lot of work to do yet,” they say. According to them, the Cattle Treaty was only one of 23 claims outstanding. They going after money for land of ours been given away, used for highways, irrigation canals, and Government Experimental Farms.

  “Anytime you need help negotiating,” says Frank, “the great Fencepost is available, free of charge.”
r />   Frank never quite understand why they don’t answer him back.

  Distances

  The cadillac was the color of thick, rich cream. It pulled up in front of Mrs. Richards’s Springtime Café and Ice Cream Parlor. The main street of Onamata was paved, but the pavement was narrow; there was six feet of gravel between the edge of the pavement and the wooden sidewalk. Dust from the gravel whooshed past the car and oozed through the screen door of the café.

  My friend Stan Rogalski and I were seated at a tile table, our feet hooked on the insect-legged chairs. We were sharing a dish of vanilla ice cream, savoring each bite, trying to make it outlast the heat of high July.

  It was easy to tell the Cadillac owner was a man who cared about his car. He checked his rearview carefully before opening the driver’s door. After he got out, or unwound would be a better description, for he was six foot five if he was an inch, he closed the door gently but firmly, then wiped something off the sideview mirror. On the way around the Caddy he picked something off the grille and flicked it onto the road.

  He took a seat in a corner of the café where he could watch his car and everyone else in the café, which at the moment was me, Stan, and Mrs. Richards. My name is Gideon Clarke.

  The stranger looked to be in his mid-thirties; he had rusty hair combed into a high pompadour that accentuated his tall front teeth and made his face look longer than it really was. Across his upper lip was a wide mustache with the corners turned up; the mustache was the same coppery red as the hair on his head. I guessed he’d worn his hair in a spiffy duck-ass cut in the fifties, but now the duck ass was out of style. Elvis was being replaced by Chubby Checker, and it would be a long time before long hair was in fashion in the Midwest. The stranger’s hair was combed back at the sides, hiding the top half of his ears. At the back, it covered his collar and turned up a little at the ends.

  “I’d like something tall and cool,” he said when Mrs. Richards waddled over to his table.

  “I have pink lemonade,” she said in a tiny voice that belied her 250 pounds.