The Wind of Pelican Island

by ROBERT EASTON

1

FROM outside the bunkhouse, far into the night, we heard a sound as though a kettle were boiling on some distant fire.

“Don’t care much for that sound,” Old Rube said. “That’s the kind of wind talks to cattle.”

We edged our boxes nearer the wood stove and Dynamite said to Rollo Jane: “Rollo, tear up that box and throw it in the fire; you Okies is used to sitting on the floor.”

Rube continued, “Like I told T. S. Ordway this morning ‘bout them Mexican steers you fellers drove. ‘T. S.,’ I says, ‘you got the biggest feed yard in the West; you been feeding Herefords and Durhams for years, but these here just ain’t feed-lot cattle. How do you know they’ll eat? How do you know what ailments they’ll take? These cattle is from the old longhorn strain and you can’t predict ‘em.’ ’Well, Rube,’ he says, — you know how slow he goes when he’s thinkin’ a lot, — ‘Well, Rube,’ he says, standing there all duded up in felt and tweeds, ‘maybe they oughta go on pasture first till we see how they gets along.’ And that’s how come him to call the barges and you fellers to be over here on Pelican Island.”

I said, “Thanks, Rube,”and shivered.

The bare boards of the bunkhouse didn’t begin to stop that wind. They simply focused it along their cracks until it struck us like a beam of ice. The kerosene lantern smoked and flared and ran a dirty shadow on the wall; the wind rustled old copies of the San Francisco Examiner on a table by the window, and brought us the damp decaying odor of the delta island.

“Rollo,” said Dynamite, “did ye hear me speakin’ to ye a while ago?”

He and Rollo were friends, though Rollo was a dirt farmer and Dynamite twenty-six years of Utah brimstone and powder. Rollo had lost his Oklahoma farm to dust in 1936 and now drove a tractor in the yards at $3.65 a day and helped us when we had a lot of cattle to move. Next him by the stove sat Sims, the perfectionist, the artist on horseback. He rode his saddle like a bronze statue. Then came old Reuben Child, the lame cowboy, the old Texas longhorn who had been a champion roper in his day and one of Ordway’s cow-foremen till he fell from a truck and broke his hip. Now he said, “You fellers is too green to be this far from timber. If you want wood on Pelican Island, dig a shovelful of ground.”

“Hear that, Rollo?” said Dynamite.

“Shore ‘nuff,” said Rollo mildly and never moved.

Dynamite rose and went outside, letting in a swirl of wind that sent doors slamming through the house and nearly ruined the lamp. Again we heard the faraway sound, a tiny shrill note, as if a mosquito were angry or a fly had got caught in a spider’s web.

“Don’t care much for that sound,” said Rube.

Dynamite came back with both hands full of dark brown earth, kicked open the stove and dropped in the dirt. He turned the damper till the flames roared up the black pipe. “Now damn you, you wise old man,” he said to Rube, “if this don’t burn we’ll take that crutch of yours and it will!”

“Smell it?” said Rube.

A smell like that of greasy leaves burning on damp ground filled the room.

“Whew,” said Dynamite, “smells to me like somebody needs a bath.”

Rollo Jane looked into the stove and said, letting his voice fade away like a little child’s and die, “She’s just a-burnin’. . . .”

Sims said, “What a hell of a way to spend Saturday night, watchin’ the ground burn.” He reminded us we were spending this night away from home on a windy island in a marsh with a cold supper inside us, and why we were. He said again, “Wait’ll Ordway hears his ground will burn. He’ll have a way to make money on it.”

2

T. S. Ordway had bought thirty-nine cars of Mexican steers. When we trailed them from the station to the feed yards he stood by the door of his big Lincoln sedan and never said a word. T. S. Ordway lived in that car. His office was the back seat. In it he drove thousands of miles each month between his various ranches, banks, and office buildings that were as common through the West as sagebrush and dry river beds. Men said of him that if Western Union had an office in the town T. S. Ordway had one. But he was his own main office. He did the business himself; and when he got out and stood beside the car, with the hair turning a little wispy under his city hat and the skin loosening from his rock-bound jaw, he was still all man — all the way up. He watched us pass without a word, and before half the cattle had gone by got back into the car and told the chauffeur to drive away.

We put the steers on barges and ran them down the slough into the river and up another slough to Pelican Island, and when we trailed them down that levee road they followed, as orderly as soldiers. Modern cattle would have been all over the place, but these old critters just put their heads into our ponies’ tails and trudged along.

They made a queer sight — all sizes, shapes, and colors, but most of them were pintos, black and white, and there were also many solid blacks, which is the color of the vicious Spanish cattle that once ran along the Rio Grande. For shipping they had been dehorned six inches from the head and only stumps were left, big around as your wrist, but you could imagine what those horns had been.

We had trouble on Little Betty slough that crosses the island as a kind of outlying defense against the marsh. On one side is a field of young grain; on the other a wilderness of reeds and ponds — a foreign land lying beyond water. Here, no matter what the season, it is always earliest spring. The wiry grasses, the clumps of low growth that look risen from the bottom of the sea, have in them every color of green. Kildees run crying over the mud flats; ducks go silently in squadrons down the sky. Everywhere there is an almost inaudible squashy noise. This is the unknown land where life moves in water as at its beginning, and overhead the north wind blows and makes the grass stems sing like wires and brings small clouds upon the sky that lie close together and overlap, like feathers on the breast of a bird.

The marsh is a strange thing, but it was the field of grain that gave us trouble. A drainage ditch six feet wide and seven deep separated it from the road and was full of water; hungry steers trying to cross fell in and swam along until we snagged them with our loops and dragged them out. My pony, Old Barb, a chunky sorrel with white stockings, had a bad time with a big Jersey steer. We played him like a giant trout to a low place in the bank and then, when I turned Old Barb sharply away and stung him to make him hit that line, a horn stuck in the bank and Barb hit the end of that rope and went straight in the air, like a dog at the end of a chain, and came back over. I felt him coming and got away in time. We rose together, sticky with mud, and he looked at me as if to say, “You got us into that.” But on the next try we snaked out our fish. We had to do this several times before we reached the pasture that covers all the western part of the island. There is good feed on it and a nasty bog called King Tule on the west side toward the Bay, but ordinarily cattle won’t go there, and if Rube hadn’t talked to old T. S. about these Mexicans being so unpredictable we could have come home and had our Saturday night. As it was, we went to the bunkhouse of the farm crew, and the only good thing we found there was Rube himself, who had followed us in his pickup truck like an old dog on the scent. Everyone else had gone. So we rustled around and found some cold stew and built a fire afterwards in the drafty old bunkhouse, and settled down to talk ourselves into a better mood.

3

And now Sims had spoiled it. Sims was a kind of sour apple anyway. He said, “Nowadays it takes money to make money. If I had what Ordway’s got I’d go to El Paso and buy me thirty-nine cars of steers at six cents a pound; and I’d lay ‘em in here at seven, hold ‘em four months, and let ‘em go to the butchers at ten. That’s business.”

“Sure,” said Dynamite, “good enough business for me.”

Rube said, “Remember this — it takes a big man to make big money. Didn’t T. S. build this feed yard himself out of a marsh? Didn’t he build the levees and turn the mud flats into gold? Likely he will clean up on these Mexican steers, but think of the risk he takes. What did he pay for ‘em? Sixty thousand dollars. Stands to lose it, don’t he? What if they takes sick or the market drops or the butchers don’t like ‘em? Where is he then? I tell you it needs a big man to make big money.”

“Goddamn,” said Dynamite. “I wish’t I’d grow a little.”

“I’ll tell you a story,” said Rube, “about T. S. Ordway that’ll show you what I mean. Many years ago when he was starting out in life he took a contract as builder on a dam, a subcontract it was, and under it he went out and bought materials and hired men. He did the job all right, finished on time, but when he come for his money they gave him script instead. He never said a word. He went to town that night — Las Vegas, I think it was — and sat down to a poker game. Now up till then he’d never played a game of cards for money, but he sat down that night to play for money; and in the morning he got up with cash enough to pay his men. He said, ‘I never paid my men in script and I never will.’

“Now that’s what T. S. Ordway done in Las Vegas,” said Rube, and pulled a sack of Bull Durham from his shirt pocket and began rolling a cigarette. The wind rattled the shingles on the roof, and made a thousand sighing and complaining sounds, with always at the back of them that little note, higher now and sharper, like a wasp getting ready to sting.

“Don’t care at all for that sound,” said Rube. “Ever see wind talkin’ to cattle?”

Sims said, “If you mean those Mexicans we drove today, they’re too poor to listen.”

“They’re longhorns,” said Rube. “I seen their daddies in Chihuahua when the wind come whisperin’ of dust. Then they traveled.”

Rollo Jane, who until now had spoken hardly a word, became excited at this mention of the wind and said, “It was wind done for me.” And I knew he was thinking of the farm he had lost in Oklahoma. “Three year in a row it come, bringin’ the dust. We’d get the land all worked up nice, put in the seed and watch her come; and every year when she got about so high” — he made a measurement between two fingers — “the dust took her — buried her there in the fields. We prayed for rain, but that feller up there sent us the dust instead.”

Rollo had a wife and three babies in a trailer house up at the village.

Sims spoke now. “Like back home, when the apples get about so big” — and he made a measurement between his two fingers — “the cyclones come.”

Dynamite opened the stove and the wind blew out a little puff of ashes. “Eire’s dead.”

Rube stretched and yawned. “Look outside, young feller. There’s a whole island to burn.”

Dynamite drew back his hand in a mock gesture of menace, but went outside.

“Minds me of one time years ago,” said Rube, “a young feller from Stockton — I forget his name — went out at night to look for cattle on Rainbow Island over there; but he never come home. Next day they tracked him to the edge of a peat burn, and that was all they could do.”

“Oh, these islands will burn,” said Sims.

“Take Pelican, here,” said Rube. “One place over in the pasture burned thirteen year till old T. S. come along with his pumps and flooded the land.”

Dynamite returned carrying a small box with dirt for the fire, letting in a hostile blast of air that took the papers off the table and drew dust right out of the floor.

“See them steers?” Rube asked; and then he said, “Mercy, goodness! I plumb forgot to milk old Daisy Bell — sittin’ here gassin’ with you fellers; and she and her baby out in the cold wind. You’re no good!” He dismissed us with a wave of his crutch and stumped away into the night. We heard the sound of his pickup start and die out down the levee. It left us very much alone.

For a while we sat around the stove listening to the wind whine and groan and pick away at the old bunkhouse. A board got loose somewhere and went to slamming; and always up high was that wasp, sharpening himself, getting closer and closer.

Dynamite went outside, came back and said to Sims, “Lookie here.” His eyes had become extra blue, I saw, so I went outside too.

We stood upon the porch and the wind whipped us with the moist, rotting odor of the marsh. We could see the levee clear to the landing, and everything was all right down there. Off the other way — west toward the Bay where clouds running low under the moon made the fields go light and dark — we could see the silver grain, and beyond it in the pasture something was wrong. The steers hadn’t lain down; they weren’t feeding the way hungry cattle should. They stood together in groups of four or five, or maybe ten or twenty — you couldn’t tell, they were so far away; but when the moonlight came just so, you could see their heads go up and a flicker of it running on their stubs of horns.

Dynamite said, “I don’t like the look o’ them steers.”

Sims said, “Aw, what could be the matter with ‘em?”

Rollo came out and joined us.

“Think I’ll take a ride down there,” said Dynamite and went across the yard toward the barn, braced forward into the wind. I followed him and so did Rollo, and before we had our horses curried off, Sims came and began saddling his Appaloosa mare. I could tell he was mad.

When he got outside he set the mare up and spun her like a top as though they were in Madison Square Garden.

Dynamite, standing doing up his tie rope, never looked around. He said to me, patting the rump of his brown nag, “This horse’s got a lot of Steeldust in him.” The horse had no more Steeldust in him than I had, but Dynamite liked to think so because that was the breed of Texas ponies. Rollo opened the barn door wide to bring out his black Percheron, and the wind sucked in behind him and swept the floor clean all in one “ whoosh.” He clambered up the great beast, who was just as slow and gentle as Rollo, and we started.

4

The wind flattened the clothes against our backs and blew the ponies’ tails out all around them like the skirts of women. It pushed the clouds away from under the moon and made our shadows run before us, cut so clear that when they crossed a ditch or board we wanted to duck our heads. It cried and laughed and died beside us in the reeds like a complaining child, and then it would come again with a rush and a sweeping of a thousand wings and you could hear that little note away up there, that wasp getting readier and readier.

“See what I see?” said Dynamite.

I could see cattle standing up. All over the pasture they rose, stretched, and stood together facing us, sniffing the wind.

“Well, we’re here,” I said, and as if they heard me speak that field of steers turned altogether and began to move. Slowly and surely they followed down the wind toward the great bog of King Tule and Oyster Neck, that juts out sharply in the Bay, and they never made a sound.

“Take your good holt,” said Dynamite, “’cause now we’re gonna ride.”

He leaned from his saddle and flung open a wire gate, and it was my bad luck to stay and shut it. The others went away down the field like bits of darkness blown by the wind. There was no question what to do; we had to get around the herd and beat those cattle to King Tule, and we had to do it quick. I got aboard Old Barb and set sail. The steers were walking quietly. I passed close to them; they paid no attention. I thought, “This is absurd. This isn’t a stampede. These are gentle cattle walking over a pasture.”

First I overtook Rollo, who sat his Percheron like a sack of meal, drumming with both heels and swearing helplessly to see me pass; and then I got close to Sims and saw him holding in his mare, afraid of that bad ground. Barb passed him going like Man o’ War for the wire, and I felt proud. Dynamite was far ahead. How he got speed out of that brown nag was the mystery of all the world of running horses, but he got it — plenty of it. He already had turned past King Tule and flanked the herd.

A cloud covered the moon, and in that darkness the wind made up its mind to do us no good. It rose and sounded through the wiry grasses and brought that wasp down out of the sky and set him right behind us. The cattle broke into a trot. They weren’t excited, they were like old men going home; and a thought of Mexican deserts ran across my mind, shrouded in dust, with cattle moving shadowy as ghosts. Barb went for a matrero, which is what the Mexicans call a cunning steer, and sent him back toward firmer ground. They would go when you pushed them, but you had to push them, every one. A big dun three-year-old had his eye on the reeds of King Tule, a hundred yards away. Twice Barb scooped him up and put him where he belonged, but on the third run the steer dodged, Barb spun in the mud, and I heard an awful sound — a sound like somebody had taken a stick and wrapped it in a towel and broken it over his knee. And as I heard this, Barb went away under me and I floated in air. It was a leisurely thing. I thought, “Good, I’m clear of him.

This isn’t bad. Now I’m going to hit on the back of my shoulder.” And then I hit.

I wasn’t hurt; I didn’t even lose my hat. I got up right away and saw the steer wave his tail and head for the King Tule, and then I saw Rollo bear down like a locomotive and scoop him up. I noticed cattle running all around me, close to me. I saw their shadows on the dark wet grass. I saw the hip of a red steer that was going to hit me before I could turn, and felt a jar and a shooting pain. From the ground I saw Barb ten feet away try to get up, get only his head up and then fall back. A wave of cattle shut him out. A hoof struck my anklebone as a hammer drives a nail, and sent pain clear to the thigh. I smelled a horrible decaying odor of the ground itself, and then I saw Barb rise again, brace his forelegs, and stay sitting on his rump like a huge dog. He swiveled around upon himself to face the cattle, and his ears went up sharp and clear against the sky like two leaves. The steers gave way before him. To me he wasn’t a horse — he was an island seen through the trough of the sea. Crab-fashion, on hands and knees, rolling and falling among the hoofs, I got to him, moving faster than ever in my life before; and as I came beside him the next great living wave broke on us and went away on either side, as water does around a stone.

I shouted and brandished my hat. The cattle came on silently, loosely packed, so they could barely swerve and miss us. Barb’s forelegs quivered. He kept putting a jerk in them to take that slack out, but just when the flow of cattle had begun to thin they snapped and let him down. Blood ran from his mouth where the bit had cut him. I took the bridle off and watched him lie there, opening his mouth as the pain hit him, but I couldn’t stand that and looked away.

Rollo Jane alone was keeping the cattle from King Tule, and how that boy did ride! I looked for Sims and saw him back on the tail of the herd, pretending to work hard, but he wasn’t — he was afraid of that bad ground. The moon came out very bright, and far ahead I saw Dynamite fly over a piece of black marsh. Water from a pond he crossed shot up like silver sparks. He seemed to be in the air. He was like a man who drew his horse up under him and left the ground. And he was riding to win, he and Rollo, for with the help of Barb and me they’d bent the right flank south and pointed it for Oyster Neck. Two men there could bend her back along the Little Betty, and they were there. Rollo came down like six men upon those cattle. He was catching Dynamite, racing on the throat of the neck and a little to one side, when all of a sudden he disappeared.

But Dynamite didn’t know. He dashed onto the point of land and turned the leaders. I saw him leap a ditch and then another, quickly; and in the moonlight far away it looked as though his pony had begun to buck. He turned fifteen or twenty head and circled to do it again, and then he must have seen it was no use: behind where Rollo should have been the cattle streamed away down Oyster Neck. He didn’t quit. He charged back across those steers and back again, making shadowy lines of them shoot from the herd; but he was one alone and the job was too big. I could see his brown nag fail, tripping once, and at last Dynamite pulled him up and stood there making a long dark eddy in the flow of cattle.

Those steers never had run; they flowed like water pressed by some invisible hand, as the earth rises behind a mountain stream and sends the water down.

Still, if the fence held across the Neck, Dynamite would win. I remembered Jim Magee, the construction boss, telling of the stout fence he had built on Oyster Neck to keep the cattle from the bluff and the bogs along the water; and down where the point of land narrowed I could see a black mass of steers damming up, and I knew the boards had stopped them. Behind that dam the dark area of steers grew and grew, swirling in the moonlight slowly and more slowly, until they almost stopped; and then there came a sound ringing like a shot, and then another, and then a volley of them; and I saw the cattle release slowly down the Neck. They gained in speed, frightened by the crash of splintering wood, pressed forward by the wind, running silently, with never a sound since the moment they began to move.

The lead steers spread out singly on the bluff, clear against the sky, and behind them two thousand pairs of stubby horns were coming to find shelter from that wind; and in the bottom of the Bay they found it.

I watched them go. I thought I heard waves breaking on a beach, and the sound grew and the wind took it away and brought it back louder than before, undulating, alive; and then I knew it was the moaning of the cattle as they broke in waves upon the rock and died.

5

Sims rode up to me and said, “Have a spill?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’ve had a spill.”

Barb was quiet now, poor devil, but every so often he gave a kind of shiver as the pain took him. I asked Sims if there was a gun in the bunkhouse, and he said one of the farm boys had a forty-five. I pointed out where Rollo had fallen, and told him to get over there. He went, loping his mare like he’d ridden on marsh ground all his life.

I saw Dynamite riding back from the Neck. He didn’t even look after those cattle, but went off with Sims into a shadow, and I couldn’t see what they were doing. After a long time Dynamite rode up to me and sat against the moon, with the wind tugging the brim of his hat, and when he saw Old Barb I could hear him choke. He said they had found Rollo lying with a broken collarbone at the edge of a peat burn; his horse had been too heavy to get out and smothered. Then he looked at Barb again, and all he could do was swear a little softly and say to me, “Well, dammit, we made our ride; that’s all a feller can do.”

He started for the bunkhouse to get a car and a bottle of whiskey for Rollo, and I told him to find me a gun. Then Barb and I waited alone. The night wore away and a rim of light came up along the east, as though out there a thousand miles somebody had kindled a fire. Everything I heard became an echo, which is what happens when you’re very tired, and that made the island a queer place — as though all over it hundreds of people were trying to talk in different languages. Barb got restless and wanted to stand up, so I sat on his head. I wished Dynamite would come. Barb had his mouth open and would put one eye on me as he took a deep swallow of air. He didn’t look like my horse at all, down in the rotten mud that way, with me sitting on his head. I didn’t want to remember him like that.

The lights of a car turned up the Little Betty and pretty soon Dynamite came on foot. He carried an ivory-handled forty-five with a bright silver barrel, and said for me to hold the bottle of whiskey while he used the gun.

“Give me the gun,” I said.

“No,” he said, “I’ll do it.”

“Give me the gun,” I said,

“Why, you silly kid — you don’t know how to shoot a horse. You likely never shot a horse in your life.”

I held out my hand and he gave me the gun. As I walked around in front of Barb, moonlight reflected from the silver barrel. I thought: “What a silly gun. This is the kind of gun with which men perform tricks at a circus. I can’t shoot my horse with it.” Then I whistled and Old Barb raised his head. I drew the imaginary lines from each ear to the opposite eye and pulled the trigger at where they crossed.

“Good shot,” said Dynamite.

After breakfast, we sent Sims with Rollo to the doctor; I took his Appaloosa mare and rode with Dynamite for Oyster Neck to see what had happened. I wasn’t feeling very happy. The wind had blown itself away and only a breeze, gentle as May, floated some delicate white clouds. We followed the auto ruts along the Little Betty that Jim Magee had made the summer before when he hauled lumber for the fence, and that ran far from the place I didn’t want to see. We found the fence splintered to pieces. Dynamite thought there would be crippled cattle on the rocks, perhaps some that were unhurt, and we were starting for the bluff when a horn sounded behind and we saw a pickup truck bouncing over the field. I thought it was Rube come to say: “I told you so,” but this time it was T. S. Ordway himself with Jacks, his foreman, at the wheel, and Jim Magee sitting on a box behind.

Jacks looked the same as ever, — welltanned leather doesn’t change, — but I had expected signs of concern on the face of T. S. Ordway. After all, sixty thousand dollars doesn’t run right off the books every night. He sat looking straight ahead out the windshield. He wore the same city hat and tweed coat that looked grown onto him as all his clothes did, as though he never took them off. He was talking to Jacks about a bridge he planned to build across the slough. He waved to us without interrupting himself and sat there watching the distance, deliberately saying every word as men do who are used to having people listen. The new bridge, he said, would cost thirty-five thousand dollars, but by doing away with the barges and the ferry it would in the long run save money.

Jim Magee climbed off his seat and stood beside the truck. He was a fighting Irishman but ready to smile first, with bare forearms like oak limbs.

T. S. stopped talking and looked far away at nothing, as he always did when he had a lot on his mind, and then he said to me, “Boy, I’m sorry you lost your horse.”

That made me feel better because all at once I remembered Barb had been his horse, not mine.

Now he said to Jim Magee, “Guess we’ll have to build a stouter fence — eh, Jim? ”

Jim agreed to that, but the owner said no more; he was talking to Jacks again about the bridge. “I’d like to see it made of concrete piers; they would last longer. Let’s go back now and see if that bottom will take concrete.”

Jim climbed aboard and they drove away. Half a mile down the field the car stopped and we could see T. S. and Jim stand beside it and put their heads together, looking up now and then and pointing off across the field, and we knew T. S. Ordway had thought of something else to build.

Dynamite reached thoughtfully through his pockets to find the dirty plug of tobacco he always carried, and as he fished it out he brought up with it the big idea for which He had been searching.

“One thing here you can be sure,” he said, “you’re working for a great man.”