II. Watering Hole (Next Town Over the Novel, chapter 2)

The Hunter ranch was hardly more than a homestead, really; they sold very little of their beef and occasionally one of their fancier-looking colts and mostly just made do, but they did have their own brand—the Tumbling JHH — and could afford to pay a ranchhand and his daughter, who mostly helped out Claudia Hunter and looked after the chickens and lent a hand with milking a few dairy cows.

The rancher’s daughter, Ellen Cauley, after her dead ma, tended to be the one that got sent for water. Old man Hunter routinely pledged to install a handpump in the kitchen so Claudia would have real, running water, but it never quite floated to the top of his to-do list. This was fine with Ellen: she liked fetching water.

At the back of the Hunter place was a little spring-fed creek, threading down along a procession of increasingly thick and healthy cottonwoods and willows. There it gathered itself briefly in a cool, fair-sized swimming hole curtained off from the rest of the wide open prairie by the tallest trees for twenty miles before going on about its business beyond Ellen’s interest. The swimming hole was her favorite spot.

“Go get another few buckets of water, if you could, please, Ellen,” was, she’d decided, tacit permission to go, gather your thoughts, wash your hair, for John will be back for supper.

So she took her time. Rather than lying the bucket down, undignified, to slowly scrape a sorry half bucket from the shallows of the creek nearest the house, why not amble down to the swimming hole where she could plunge the whole thing in and pull it back out immediately and luxuriously topped off—after plunging the whole of herself in, to scrape off the beef fat and soak the scouring salt from her black hair. There was a little time, yet, before supper, which wouldn’t be served, regardless, until the men came back from Short End.

She slipped into the private shadows of those big overfed cottonwoods and lolling willows and she might as well have been in the chill spring water already, the relief from the afternoon heat was so immediately palpable. Untying her apron and peeling off her homespun dress and a rough old petticoat she felt lighter still, and she was practically floating as she spread toes newly-freed from itchy stockings to set on the slick embankment. Down to her old telltale gray chemise and bloomers she jumped full into the shockingly cold water with a little gasp and a shiver. She broke out instantly and everywhere in gooseflesh but it was better this way: if she tried to ease herself in she’d be out here half an hour without ever fully enjoying the water.

Her long black hair was crumpled into a bun that’d grown sweaty and uneven throughout the day. She unpinned it, and sucked in a lungful of air to sink beneath the surface and let the cold water at her scalp. When she came back up for breath she caught it in a gasp.

There he stood between the willows, still wearing his range clothes: buckskin chaps and jacket, dirt-caked and reeking of horses.

“John!” Ellen half-shrieked. It was more indignant than startled, and even that was all affect: mostly it was gleeful surprise but it’d be immodest to let on.

John Henry Hunter was named after his Pa, also John Henry Hunter, who was in turn named after his pa before him, the original John Henry Hunter who’d fled the Arteridean Empire, so John the Youngest was John Henry Hunter III, really, but that kind of nomenclature sounded downright Imperial, hardly fitting working men, and anyways John’s Pa, Hunter II, had decided to go by “Hank,” leaving his son to reappropriate “John” without too much confusion.

Newly eighteen, he had most of his height if not all of his bulk, taller than Hank Hunter even if the old man still outweighed him. He was awkward, too, still possessed of a boyishness as taut and worn-out on his grown frame as his battered jacket.

“Miss Ellen,” he returned, and swept off his hat, upheaving mud-brown hair slick with sweat. The yellow mutt lazing at his feet with its head on its paws barked an echoed greeting: John’s dog, Lion.

Ellen sunk up to her chin. “We didn’t expect you back till suppertime.” She noticed he was clutching a frayed scrap of rawhide in his fist and cocked her head to one side. “Seems your lariat got chewed up.”

“Just so, Miss Ellen, and I’ve got Lion to thank for it.”

Lion peeped again, every inch the guilty puppy. This was some kind of trap, and the too-canny cowdog was in on it, same as always.

“Seems you should be braiding a new one, then, not peepin’ at bathin’ girls.”

“Ah, but all it needs is a good lovin’ pull from those magic fingers of yours, Miss Ellen,” John said with a grin. It was the wrong grin, too goofy and boyish to shoulder what Ellen was sure he thought was a terribly smart and scandalous double entendre.

She laughed, anyway, but mostly at his expense, and, splashing, brought her hands above the surface for inspection, nails worn to the quick. “Magic indeed.” She swam a sinuously indirect route closer, linen gleaming taut and wet across every breaching, undulating curve. She laughed again when John averted his eyes—not for her modesty’s sake so much as to avoid staring into her big velvet doe’s eyes and losing his nerve.

“I’ve personally seen ‘em work marvelous restorative magic,” he continued, trying to wrangle his not-quite-a-grown-man’s face into something a little more seductive before she maneuvered beneath his downcast gaze. “Would you kindly?” He shook the scrap of rawhide again.

She reached for the proferred remnant of rope but didn’t quite take it, glancing cautiously between it and John. It seemed perfectly ordinary; of course it did.

“Well?” he prompted.

She drew back on the rope, and the end she’d taken hold of slid easily through his fingers even as the shreds of its other end remained stubbornly jutting from the bottom of his closed fist: the rope indeed appeared to be, miraculously, lengthening.

Paddling backward to play out its length, Ellen grinned delighted approval at him, her earlier sarcasm dissipated like morning fog. John’s own smile became a little less sheepish, emboldened by her clear approval. He detected in the subtle wrinkling of her nose, though, that she’d set her mind to figuring out the trick, and he couldn’t have that.

With an expert, whipcrack jerk of his wrist the lariat twitched up over Ellen’s head, and with a second coiled around her, pinning her arms to her sides. Blessedly, she took this in stride and just laughed at him.

John reeled her back to him, casually coiling his miraculously reconstituted lariat as he did so. When she was close enough he grabbed the loop encircling her directly and held her at arm’s length. For a breathless second they just studied each other, and Ellen sensed the intent he’d plainly harbored for years had finally, somehow, crystallized into resolve. Today was the day.

He darted in and kissed her, experimentally, on the mouth.

He drew back just far enough to take in and gauge her reaction, but her face had clouded over into something dark and inscrutable. John’s heart guttered in his chest. Truly, he was awful at reading people. He’d been sure—

“About time,” Ellen said then, smile shattering her deadpan, and stepped forward, up onto the bank and into a second, less ambiguous kiss.

John froze, transfixed less by her mouth than the feeling of her body against his; she felt naked with just that worn out chemise plastered slick against every prominence of her shape. And while he was standing there, stunned with teenage thirst and a touch of stark fear, she slipped her arms around his back, locked them around the coiled standing end of his lariat, and yanked him, backward, into the watering hole, hooting and panting at the cold.

Ellen laughed and sucked in a breath to sink beneath the surface, out of view. A second later the loop of John’s lariat floated, empty, to the surface. He looked around for her, coiling the rope and catching his drifting hat as it bobbed near. He was just tossing both to the bank when Ellen burst from the water, behind him, tackling him with the intent to pull him under.

“About time,” she said again, lower, directly into his ear. He slid into the deep cool with her thighs hooked around his hips, her only remaining secrets warming the small of his back. In spite of the cold he was aware of his pants chafing, wet and uncomfortable.

Ellen held him under for five, ten, fifteen seconds, wondering who’d scramble for air first even as she became aware of his longing galvanizing beneath the grip of her calf. He’d never done this before, with anyone. She’d always assumed so but now she was perfectly certain. She’d be as gentle as she knew how.

Afterwards, as the two lay puddled and relaxed on the slick embankment, Ellen’s thick wet hair draped and dripping over John’s chest, Lion emerged from the brush and padded over to collapse impatiently nearby. The knowing hound had stayed respectfully out of sight until then.

“That’s right you old yeller dog,” Ellen laughed. “You saw nothin’.”

John reached with the arm that wasn’t encircling the girl and scratched the dog under his chin. “Lion’s nothin’ if not polite”.

Ellen had shoved herself up on her elbows to look down at him. She smoothed dripping hair from her forehead, expression darkening to something more somber, even resigned. “Wasn’t sure you’d come home.”

John playfully shoved Lion away, turning to Ellen curiously but making no move to get up. “What d’you mean? We were jus’ goin’ over to Short End. You know that.”

Ellen looked at the water, focused on a leaf spinning on its surface. “Doesn’t matter if it’s Short End or anywhere. Every time I expect our pas to come back without you.”

John squinted at her. “Not sure I follow.”

Ellen snorted and still avoided his gaze, though there was a plainly bittersweet smile at the corners of her mouth, and her very looking away had a faraway, wistful quality. “Come on, John, you ain’t for this place. Ain’t for me, neither.”

John half-sat up now, with indignation. “How can you say a thing like that, Ellen Cauley, after—”

She laughed at his earnestness. “Oh it’s all right, John! Everyone knows you ain’t gonna stay here forever. I don’t expect nothin’ from you.”

His eyes narrowed, angrily. He felt he was being patronized, and he hated it. She was only a year older than he was, after all, and he didn’t imagine she’d seen much more of the world than he had. “Well that’s mighty considerate o’ you, but do I get a say?”

Ellen pushed him, hard, back to the slick bank of the watering hole, pinning him with the whole of her weight and laughing down at him. “No. Your ma and I are bored o’ your tricks and it’s time you packed ’em off back east.”

“Ellen!” the voice was distant, but not so distant the pair wasn’t immediately on their feet reaching for their underclothes. It was plainly Randall Cauley, the ranchhand. Ellen’s pa.

John was pulling trousers over still-soaked underwear when the rustle of the big ranchhand moving through the trees joined his voice in trying to flush out his daughter: “Ellen? We’re back!”

Cauley lumbered out from the undergrowth, a bear in cowskin chaps, swinging his head around to behold John still buttoning his shirt, and opposite him, Ellen tucking in hers.

“Pa….” Ellen said quietly. John just held his breath, watching the old hand’s drooping mustaches twitch with the calculus of what he was seeing, how he’d react. He couldn’t imagine hotheaded Randall Cauley was going to take this in stride – he’d seen him lay a man out in Short End for suggesting he’d just walked out of a brothel he had, in fact, just walked out of. He was an angry, hypocrite oaf and John hated him, and moreover hated that John had to silently tolerate him and his crass mouth and cruel ways on long lonely cattle drives, not just because his old man had explicitly told him to mind Cauley rather than presuming authority, because it was good for him, but for Ellen’s sake.

“Ellen,” Randall said again, but this time it wasn’t a call, it was a quiet statement of disappointment as he briefly closed his eyes. When they reopened they were pinched with fury. “How could you!” he hollered, spittle flying, freckling his mustaches and stubbled chin. “The boss’s son!” And he was already reaching for John’s shirt to grab him, bring him to meet the fist he was hauling back with his other hand.

Ellen grabbed that chambered punch, tried to pull him back. “Pa!” she yelled, and her voice was a whipcrack: “The boss’s son is right! Don’t you raise your hand to him! This is exactly how—”

Randall swung around; sensing his intent John lunged forward. “Now, Cauley, look here, I — ” But before John could stop him, physically or diplomatically, Randall had lain his heavy rawhide glove across Ellen’s face, hard. She reeled back, tripped on a root and sat down hard on the bank.  All John had accomplished was bringing himself into easy range for the punch that followed: Cauley’s left hand into John’s gaping jaw.

That was the moment, Randall’s fist connecting with his master’s stunned face, that Lion joined with a feral growl. The cowdog threw himself at Cauley’s trailing right arm, teeth sinking with ease, as nature intended, through his cowhide gloves and through his comparatively flimsy skin.

John ignored Lion and Randall, taking a knee to check on Ellen, but Ellen’s huge, worried doe’s eyes were fixed on her Pa. With an effort John saw what she saw: her father beset by a dauntless cowdog who’d already drawn blood and was snarling like a rabid wolf, shaking his teeth through more of Randall’s arm as the ranchhand went down under him.

“Lion!” John hollered. “Down!”

Lion jerked his head up as though John had yanked a physical tether, and grudgingly began to back off of Randall. His curled lips sank once again into the guilty puppy expression, perverse beneath a coat of blood smeared muzzle to belly.

John watched, dazed, as Ellen scrabbled on her knees to her pa’s side to examine his injuries. As he sat up he cradled an arm that was unknowable shreds; layers of comingled blood, dust, cowhide and flesh hung in strips from his forearm. Ellen helped him up, slipping an arm around his shoulders. “Come on, Pa,” she said. “Let’s go.” She retrieved his hat, knocked off in his fall. “Let’s get you to the house.”

She glanced at John as she steered Randall back toward the house, and her face – turning rapidly red where Randall had struck her — was a stew of guilt and of indignation. John had no inkling what was reserved for whom. Blessedly, Randall didn’t look up at him at all. He just let his daughter drive him away, back through the cottonwoods.

John didn’t see the Cauleys again for the rest of the day. They holed up in the ranchhand’s house, a smaller one story building that shared a roof with the lower story of the main house but was separated by a broad driveway from the dooryard to the barnyard. Its private entrance stayed shut until John could see a lantern lit inside.

Hank Hunter loomed around that evening like a thunderhead, John waiting for him to open up and rain down vengeful lightning. It was self-evident something had happened, and even if it hadn’t been so immediately the Cauleys never ate supper apart from the Hunters and neither of them showed up for brisket. The three Hunters ate in suffocating silence until finally Claudia said “Take a plate over to Randall and Ellen when you’re finished, John.” She made no accusations but her tone perfectly conveyed a conviction that whatever had happened was his fault.  This edict would force a probably necessary confrontation.

“Yes ’m,” John said to his plate.

Afterwards, Claudia Hunter set to cleaning up herself, looking pointedly at John now and again as he assembled two supper plates for the Cauleys to convey her dissatisfaction at not having Ellen’s help.

John had six inches of height on her, easily, but shrunk such under her withering mother’s stare that their resemblance drew even nearer as they clattered around the kitchen area staying out of each other’s way. Same earth-brown hair, same electric chicory-blue eyes pointedly avoiding one another’s gaze.

John was glad to get away from her but so horrified at knocking on the Cauleys’ door he crossed the hard-packed driveway, usually a five stride walk, in a dithering, shuffling ten. His full stomach lurched uncomfortably at the prospect of Randall answering. He knocked, eventually; his usual knock, hoping Ellen would recognize it and make sure she was the first to the door. It appeared to work. He knew a moment’s relief as the door cracked open and Ellen’s big black doe’s eye peered out.

“You weren’t at supper,” John said, and raised a plate to the rough-hewn gap for her to see and smell. “I’m sorry.”

She opened the door enough to accept the plates. “I am too.” John’s momentary relief evaporated in a flare of anger as lamplight fell over the darkening bruise where Randall had backhanded her at the watering hole. The moment Ellen had taken one of the plates John’s hand darted to her face to tilt her chin and better see it, but she shook him away.

“Where’s Randall,” John said, flatly, jaw tightening and reminding him of his own bruise as the muscles protested.

Ellen just spat out an exasperated puff of air. “Saintssakes just leave it for now, John. Thank your ma for supper.” She forced him out the door, and closed it.

John looked out at a narrow strip of stars visible from beneath the overhang of the roof, then went back inside.

Lion woke him up the next morning, licking him zealously in the face while John tried to fight him off, tangled in his nightshirt and bedsheets and the dog’s long tawny limbs.

“Goddamn,” John swore good-naturedly. “All right! Hold your horses.”

John slept in a barely-finished loft on the second floor of the Hunter house accessed by a wooden ladder, so he’d been quite surprised the first time his dog had appeared in his bed. Unfortunately Lion’s preternatural skill with ladders didn’t extend to climbing down, and every morning John had to now negotiate the little ladder with the eighty pound cowdog slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain or an errant calf.

The moment John’s bare feet touched down onto the floorboards the dog’s cooperation ended and he leapt down, sending his master reeling, to go scratch at the front door. He was off like a shot the second it was opened for him, beelining to the base of the windmill to lift his leg. Yawning, John lurched toward the outhouse.

Half-asleep, he waved away the flies that boiled out as he opened the door and shut it behind him. He could have fallen back to sleep standing there, if not for the sudden barking: serious, angry barking, that broke off in a rising yelp before being stifled painfully and completely. Barely, he could hear retreating hooves.

He yanked his nightshirt back in place even as he burst back out the outhouse door. Through the alleyway between the Hunter and Cauley houses he could see the windmill. No Lion, but a rising cloud of dust in which he could barely make out the smudgiest hint of a horseman storming away. From the sheer amount of earth being kicked up it was clear the horse was dragging something.

John launched himself after, flat out, bare feet painfully slapping the hard packed dirt for the force and abandon with which he ran. To his right, Ellen flung open the door to the ranchhand’s house, quizzically calling for her pa, but John ignored her, stopping only at the ranch’s front gate. An iron JHH, their brand, creaked overhead on a rusting chain in a low wind.

John couldn’t catch Cauley like this—because of course it was Cauley, and he was equally sure he kenned what he was dragging—and even as Ellen caught up to him, he put his fingers in his mouth and blew a loud, shrill whistle.

“What’s going on?” Ellen demanded. “John! Where is my Pa?”

And then with the clatter of shod hooves echoing from under the shared eaves of the two small houses a flea bitten grey stud emerged at a flat gallop from the barnyard beyond and Ellen’s protestations were lost as Steel swept John up like a twister.

Steel was a cutting horse, used to harrying slippery critters, and even bareback and unbridled he knew at once John wanted him to chase the receding cloud of dust ahead even if it did smell of Randall Cauley’s familiar paint. John hardly had a moment to reflect on the poorness of the decision to swing aboard the horse in his nightshirt—the powerful, uncurried back painfully chafed and hammered his groin with every driving stride—before Steel was overtaking Cauley’s horse.

John reached reflexively for his lariat. His fingers closed, frustrated, around nothing. Steel was pulling up alongside Randall and John dove at him from his galloping horse’s back without slowing. Cauley’s horse was already crowhopping sideways, away from Steel’s bared teeth, and John caught the paint off balance. Randall, John, and the horse beneath them all went down together.

John heaved himself up off Randall, left him writhing half-pinned under his thrashing horse and followed the rope looped around Cauley’s saddlehorn to a horribly still gap in the thick waist high grass.

John looked down. His stomach heaved, and he fell to his knees beside the unrecognizably mutilated rag of a carcass, yellow trailing in tatters, really, from Lion’s gape-mouthed, broken, bloodied skull. He wondered how fast the dog had died, recalling the starved yellow pup he’d originally cornered eating one of their chickens. John reached for what was left of his dog’s face, but became aware of Cauley struggling upright behind him, and his fingers clenched shut. He turned to face Randall.

Ellen’s father stood there wearing a look so insolent it exerted a seemingly magnetic pull on John’s fist, and suddenly he was throwing himself at Randall a second time, his knuckles closing with Cauley’s untenable face. He could feel Randall’s jaw crack, his teeth shear free of his skull as the older cowboy folded under him, and it wasn’t nearly enough, and straddling Randall’s fallen body he hit him again.

Cauley spit blood and teeth and John’s entire hide prickled with rage as Randall just started to laugh.

“Hurts, don’t it, little John Hunter, havin’ some asshole cowpuncher mess over what you hold dearest ‘n’ there’s not shit you can do about it?”

John fought to hold onto a near-hysterical sob of incomprehension that anyone could be so cruel, so stupid.

“Pa! John!”

It was Ellen, riding up on a sorrel mare she’d managed to hurriedly catch and bridle. The mare greeted Cauley’s lingering paint and Steel, standing a ways off, shrilled at both of them as if in admonishment.

John’s rage melted at the sight of her, into a desolate helplessness.

Ellen slid down from her horse and took a few hesitant steps forward. She surveyed the scene: Randall, pinned and spitting blood, the grim depression in the grass where she assumed Lion lay, and John, staring at her with a look of such sublime brokenness she caught her breath.

“Good God,” Ellen managed. “Pa. I. John.”

John stood up, eyes still on Ellen, and he didn’t even bother with hiding the fact that they were brimming. He didn’t know in that moment that this would be the last time he looked Ellen Cauley in the face, but it was.

Eventually, he turned away to wipe his face on the filthy sleeve of his nightshirt. He went back to Lion, collapsing into the grass next to him.  Gingerly, he loosened and slid Randall’s lariat from around the dog’s neck, and then he hoisted him — like a sack of grain or an errant calf – over his shoulder, blood soaking his nightshirt. Steel followed him, halterless, back toward the house, with Ellen staring after.

That afternoon, John hugged his mother before walking out of the house and into the barn and swinging aboard Steel, who was kitted out for a ride of indeterminate length, carrying everything John owned and one thing he didn’t. He turned the grey stallion eastward into endless prairie, and never came back.