Trail's End

  The weather was cold and getting colder. The sun was low and getting lower. The December winds were gusting over the long grasses of the prairie as the clouds herded each other across the low sky, like the vanished buffalo of the plains.

The old trail lay barely discernible through the waving stems, unused for decades. Twin ruts, paralleling each other across the rolling land, sometimes they ran straight toward the horizon but often staggering over steeper rougher terrain. It was a trail that had lain silent for so long, forgotten by a faster, noisier world of which it was no longer a part.

  It was up this forgotten path the lone rider traveled, slowly coaxing his mount through waist high waves of the grey green grass. Occasionally he passed the skeleton of a wagon, broken and dry rotted or possessions abandoned and long forgotten, by people long gone and forgotten as well.

  The old man pulled the collar of his slicker tighter as he searched the horizon for his goal. It took a few moments as the old adobe ruin blended well with the brown grass and the walls were no longer as high as they once had been. But he had remembered the trail and ridden unerringly to this lonely point on the high plains.

  For days he had ridden the silent trail, thinking of the time he had come this way as a youngster. Of a time before he had grown old, before the world had left him behind as it had this vacant track.

  It wasn’t that he thought he belonged here, no one belonged here anymore. But as he rode the empty wind swept plains, he felt less alone with the ghosts of the past, than he had surrounded by a bustling world that no longer had time for a simple old man.

  As he rode he remembered the wild times, when as a fifteen-year-old lad, he had stepped out from his peers and joined the Pony Express. Looking for excitement, he had traveled to St. Joe back in the Missouri country, and answered the call to ride these same barren lands.

  Lands swept then by the same harsh winds, but swept also by dangers and Indians, and promises of adventure. He had ridden those days in a swirl of dust and sweat, riding a wave of energy and youth. And then suddenly that time was past. He hadn’t seen the changes until they were beyond him. He’d not realized his youth was gone until he was already old. And the excitement was in the hands of men younger, swifter and bolder.

  Now with little hope of  adventure ahead, he had taken to riding the old trails, where memories were real and the real world was over the horizon and out of mind.

  He remembered friends, some dead along this very path. Some, like him, were old and slow and waiting for the adventure that would never return. He thought back to times when he’d carried a gun and swaggered before the young ladies and turned their heads and held their hands.

  Good times when he had been on top of the world and not carrying it on his shoulders.

  He remembered watching Custer’s cavalry ride past and admiring the flash and show. And he remembered as well reading the headlines with shock when that magnificent troop had failed to return.

   He halted his mount and surveyed the plain and felt the ghosts of the Indians and the express riders and the cavalry riding in league with him. And he knew that soon enough he would join their ranks. After all, he was one of them. He didn’t know what plan had kept him here after the glory was gone. But he felt their presence on the trail beside him.

  Darkness was soaking up the prairie filling the hollows and draws as he reached the adobe ruins.  He stepped stiffly from the saddle and tied off his mount to a single rotting post where a hitching rail once stood.  The old trading post had died with the caravans, killed by the singing wires of the telegraph and the iron tracks of the railroad and the trader had moved on.  But it had been at this post, in its heyday, that the old man had met the girl who would become his wife.

  And the grey and sorry thoughts of the afternoon were replaced by joyful memories of a family, happy and filled with hope. He remembered courting that girl as he unsaddled the horse and carried his gear into walled enclosure. The roof was long gone but the walls would shelter him and his fire from the relentless wind.

  The sight of the first of the evening stars through the open roof brought back memories of that girl who stole his heart and the times they shared beneath these same stars.

  She was gone now and so were the children. A daughter, lost to the fever carried into his house by a stranger had been the first to go. And a son now buried who had grown strong and handsome and had worn a uniform as grand as those of Custer’s cavalry.  He had died on an island called Cuba in the war with Spain. Until he received the telegram from the War Department the old man had never heard of Cuba, and to this day he didn’t understand why the Army had had to fight the Spanish on soil so far away.

  The Lord had given and the Lord had taken away and the old man was left confused.

  He and his wife had lived a quiet life from that point on, as though to raise their heads too high, would catch the attention of the Lord again and something else might be taken from them. And then a year ago she too, had crossed over and left him alone.

  He had spent the time since, hurting and wondering why he was left behind, but no answers had come.

  So he had saddled the old horse and taken up this pilgrimage into his past, because the present had become to empty to face.

  Here at the ruined post he nursed his small fire, sheltered by walls abandoned, and felt at ease for the first time since his wife’s passing. As he listened to a coyote on a low ridge not far away and the call of an owl, the companions of his youth stood in the shadows cast by the flames. Tossing memories out of the darkness like night birds flitting through the vacant window openings.

  There had been a lad named Rollie, his best friend in fact, who had charged into the yard with all the élan of the best of the express riders. He’d sailed from his mount, mail bag in hand and leapt for the saddled horse awaiting him. But as he landed astride the fresh mount, the cinch had given way, dumping him squarely on his nose in the dust in front of a stagecoach full of watchers.

  Never had Rollie believed it was truly an accident, and to his dying days he had blamed the old man for that prank. He chuckled in the darkness remembering the twin trails of blood from his nose, running down Rollie’s dust covered face. And the humiliated look of bewilderment as the stage passengers laughed.

  He remembered the tender times in the small cabin over on the Yellowstone River with his new wife, and felt a warmth in the night, as though she was at his shoulder now.

  He thought with joy of the beautiful little girl he had bounced on his knee, and raced round the tree in the yard. And then remembered with tears in his eyes, the marker he had carved for her grave beneath that same small tree.

  And then the boy took over his thoughts as he saw him grow up tall and strong and proud. And he had watched him march off to a useless war and never return.

  And a hollowness filled him and the ghosts of the past tightened their grip.

  As the moon rose over the empty plains and the night wind finally died, the coyote on the ridge spun round as a single shot echoed over the low rolling hills.

  And like a night bird escaping the ruined adobe walls, another ghost rose to join the legions of spirits that haunted the tall grass prairie.

 

Growing Up Slowly, All at Once

  It was a dusty little junction of two dusty little roads.
  On the north side of Highway P, across from the point where the graveled Union road joined the little two lane blacktopped highway, sat a single story, wooden framed, general store of the sort common in those days. It was covered with simple, peeling clapboard siding and had a set of three steps that led up to the long covered porch that spanned the front of the building.

  A second porch ran across the rear of the building and served as a loading dock of sorts for rolls of barbed wire and what common odds and ends of farm supplies the little store provided.

  The front wall was all windows from a level about knee high to a point about two feet from the ten foot high ceiling. A doorway in the center split the front wall evenly and a worn screen door that always banged shut with an extra little bounce announced the comings and goings of the occasional patrons of the Maple Junction Mercantile Store.

  Miss Minnie Cooper ran the store alone as she had for thirty years. And she lived in a couple of rooms towards the rear. Miss Minnie also acted as the unofficial mayor of Maple Junction.

  It wasn’t really a town of course. Besides the weathered old store Maple Junction consisted of the Highland Southern Baptist Church, it sat kind of catty-cornered across the highway from the store and just to the east of the Union road. There were also a couple of houses. One, next door to the church, was where the preacher Clark and his wife lived.

  The other, diagonally across Highway P, from the store and just to the west of Union road was my home. It was where Ma and Pop and I lived.

  The farmstead proper that my folks owned was a quarter mile down Union road and so the only things next to our house were a small chicken house, a large garden and the old wood shed that doubled as a garage with the addition of a lean-to roof off of one side. That’s if’n you didn’t count the outhouse of course.

  Thus was Maple Junction. With only a pair of houses and a thriving population of just six hardy inhabitants.

  It was, and still is, what I think of as my home town to this day.

  And it was pretty much my whole world as a ten year old boy in those days. Not even a real school intruded into that world.

  Preacher Clark’s wife had been a school teacher before she married him and settled at the junction. And my folks had worked out a swap whereby the preacher and his wife gained access to my mother’s ample garden and I, though not too excitedly, gained the benefits of Mrs. Clark’s competent tutoring.

  On most days there was one more soul occupying the junction. Seth Miller was an old man with no family, at least none close by. He showed up regularly and parked his old ’32 Ford sedan and took up residence in an ancient rocking chair on the porch near the flopping screen door of Miss Minnie’s store. If the weather was sour or the wind was foul, he had a second rocker near the huge wood stove inside the store.

  Seth was the only black man I’d ever seen up to that point in my life, and as kind and gentlemanly a sort as I’ve seen to this day.

  On those days when I could steal away from helping Pa down the road on the farm or get away from hoeing weeds in my Ma’s garden, I was often found sitting on a little stool nearby and sometimes whittling a stick while listening to Seth’s colorful greetings of the patrons of the store.

  On this day though, I was saddled with a seat in Mrs. Clark’s kitchen, and not at all that happy with what she was telling me.

  She had been teaching me arithmetic and reading all along. Though it flustered her somewhat that I continued to call the second class reading.

  “Boy,” she exclaimed, “you know how to read, what you are learning now is grammar. And the proper use of grammar at that.”

  What I didn’t like was the addition of yet another subject. Along with history she was telling me that we’d now be studying geography. And at that I’d voiced my displeasure.

  “It just seems like too much to keep track of.” I complained, thinking mostly about another round of homework.

  “Boy,” she told me, “the world doesn’t begin or end with Maple Junction. Even you should know that and be aware of what’s beyond.”

  “Well yeah,” I exclaimed, “Pa took me down the Union road all the way to the county seat.” I then continued, “And Seth says if’n you know where all to turn, Hwy P can get you all the way to St. Louis.” I said proudly showing off my knowledge.

  “We’ve already learned “if’n” isn’t a word. Haven’t we?” She demanded sternly. “And yes, between them, Hwy P and Union road can lead you anywhere in the world. What you need to learn is how large and wonderful that world is.”

  “That sure seems like a lot to bite off.” I mumbled doubtfully as I stared at the floor. I was still worrying about this new expansion of my studies as the teacher handed me the geography book. History had been bad enough I thought, at least in the beginning. Learning about the pilgrims and Jamestown Colony and the Quakers in Pennsylvania had dragged me down. Though I had to admit, now that we had progressed to the Revolutionary War and the redcoats and General Washington, things were getting a lot more interesting.

  I slowly began to thumb through the new book and noted with interest it was filled with pictures and maps. I liked that. No child of ten is interested in a book on grammar, one with no pictures, that is. But the geography might not be as bad I decided as I tried to understand just what the new subject would be like.

  “We will start the new class tomorrow.” Mrs. Clark informed me. “Tonight you can look through the book and get used to it. And don’t forget the work I’ve assigned in arithmetic and grammar for tomorrow as well.”

  I groaned as she hid a smile from me. I shouldered my cotton book bag and retrieved the garden pail with which I’d delivered a dozen ears of sweet corn and a passel of tomatoes that morning.

  “My Ma says she’ll be sending over some snap beans and green peppers tomorrow. And maybe a watermelon on Saturday if’n she finds a ripe one.” I informed her. For which I received a thump on the top of my head. With a hurt look I spun around.

  “If’n?” She questioned sternly yet again. And with that I beat a hasty retreat toward the door.

  Outside I breathed the free air that only a boy leaving school can feel and headed home to return the pail and my books to the house before heading out for whatever adventure I could find. But Ma caught me and I soon found myself, hoe in hand, in the garden again.

  “Life just ain’t fair.” I thought as I grubbed out a few weeds in the asparagus patch. I didn’t mind the work in the sweet corn or tomatoes quite as much because I enjoyed eating them. But I just hated asparagus I thought as I chopped with a vengeance.

  While working my way down the row I looked across the yard to see Seth pull his Ford into his customary spot beside the store and I redoubled my efforts to finish my allotted section of the garden for the day. Ma had come out and began picking the beans from the trellis that we’d have for supper as well as what I’d take to school tomorrow. As I finished with the hoe she asked me to dig a few new potatoes and my mouth watered with the thought of the roast and fresh vegetables that would grace our table this evening.

  Though to a boy, it seemed forever, I was soon sprinting across the road and hailing Seth with a happy smile.

  But just as I bounded up the steps onto the porch, a large shining car with more chrome than I had ever seen on one, rolled smoothly off the road and up to the single gas pump near the corner of the store.

  A man dressed neatly in clean slacks and polished shoes and a white shirt, open at the collar, climbed from the beautiful new Buick and hailed us as he stepped towards the gas pump.

  But then he paused and turned and asked, “Boy? Would you care to earn yourself a cold pop?”

  “Why yes sir! I surely would sir.” was my anxious answer.

  “Here you go then.” The fellow replied. “I need to collect a few items for the missus inside the store. So if you could pump five gallons of gas into my car I’d be obliged.” He concluded.

  I jumped from the porch and began to push and pull the long iron handle on the side of the pump. The brownish tinted liquid began to bubble into the large glass cylinder at the top of the pump.

  As I worked away at the pump handle the fellow turned and greeted Seth warmly as he passed into the store. When the gas reached the five gallon medallion inside the globe I stopped pumping and placed the hose into the cap on the car. I then opened the valve that let the fuel gravity into the gas tank on the Buick.

  Seth chuckled as he commented, “You do know boy, you just happen to live across the road from what must be the last manual gas pump in all of Henderson county? I reckon Miss Minnie will never get around to running electricity out here to that pump.”

  “Do you see that car?” I asked Seth with more than a little wonder.

  “It’d be mighty hard for me to miss it, settin’ right there and shinin’ in the sun that way.” Seth answered chuckling again.

  “Do you know him?” I asked remembering their greetings as the fellow entered the store.

  “Why I sure do.” Seth answered. “That’s Mr. Harper, the druggist from over Smithton way. As kindly a gentleman as ever you’ll see.”

And at just that moment Mr. Harper, the druggist, came carrying a brown paper sack out the door. Just as he reached the top of the steps he stopped and turned. “Thank you for your service boy.” He said as he tossed a shining nickel my direction.

  With a smile I caught the coin and uttered a quick “Thanks mister” and spun toward the door myself. But I paused just long enough to watch him start the big Buick and rumble east down Hwy P as he pulled away from the store.

  I quickly entered the store and felt the breeze from the row of huge, slowly turning fans spaced down the center of the ceiling.

  I headed directly for the large, chest type cooler that held Miss Minnie’s assortment of cold pop. I slid the shiny lid open to reveal the tops of the glistening bottles.

  As I stood looking over my possible choices, Miss Minnie returned from somewhere in the back and called out to me.

  “Now make your pick and close the lid boy. Are you trying to cool the whole building holding the door open like that?” She proclaimed.

  I quickly looked past the bottles of Pepsi Cola and 7Up. I paused at the root beer and grape flavors and then made my choice. I pulled from the case an icy cold bottle of Nesbitt’s “Imitation Orange Flavored Soda” and headed for the counter with my nickel.

  “Mr. Harper has already paid for your soda pop boy.” Miss Minnie informed me.

  Confused I stood before her with the coin in my hand. “But he gave me a nickel for pumping his gas.” I informed her.

  “Mr. Harper is a kind and generous man.” She proclaimed. “The world would be a better place with more men like him.”

  Pocketing the coin, I turned and happily retreated to the porch, where taking a big slug from the neck of the bottle, I then settled again on my stool to ponder the druggist, Mr. Harper.

  I was nursing the remainder of the bottle slowly when Seth asked, “Boy, why is it you’re settin’ here with me when you could be off fishin’ or whatever it is you young folks like to do now a days?”

  “I went fishing down to Cherry creek not too long ago.” I told him. “But it’s a long walk down to the best fishing hole. I caught two perch and a drum that day, but the perch both died when I pulled the hooks from their mouths.”

  “Anyway,” I continued, “by the time I carried them home they weren’t smelling too good and Ma wouldn’t cook ‘em.”

  Seth chuckled at my misfortune.

  “I ended up feeding them to Mrs. Clark’s cat. But that dang fool animal just drug ‘em under her porch. By then they were really smelling bad and she made me crawl under there and drag them back out. I couldn’t wash that smell off my hands ‘till I used kerosene. Even then my supper tasted terrible.”

  Seth laughed a lot harder now.

  “You know, you could come over Sunday after services and we could take your car to the creek.” I plotted aloud. “That way we’d get back while the fish were still fresh.” I told him.

  Seth looked at me with a smile. “Well there’s a heap of reasons why that won’t work boy. The first is that Reverend Clark,” Seth was the only fellow I knew that called him Reverend.”

 “He just gets way too ambitious on Sundays. He’d let you all out of services and then beat a path over here to me and preach his sermon all over again.”

  “Yeah, he does get windy.” I agreed. “Last week he preached a sermon that started out with the apostle Paul getting martyred by the Romans and ended up by telling us how that somehow meant we needed to all pitch in and put a new coat of paint on the parsonage. When I asked Pa about that he allowed as how he didn’t really catch the switch either.”

And with that Seth nearly tipped his rocker over laughing loudly.

  We laughed and joked for a while after that and then Ma called from across the road. I had to get back for one last chore before supper she said. So rising I placed the now empty pop bottle in the wooden case near the door and headed for home.

  When I arrived at the house my Ma looked at me with her hands on her hips.

  “And just how did you swindle Minnie out of a pop?” she questioned.

  “But how did you know?” I asked with surprise.

  “Well,” Ma began, “even if you could grow a mustache, I doubt it would be an orange one.”

  Still surprised at being caught out, I told her about Mr. Harper and his offer.

  “He is such a nice man.” Ma agreed. Then she continued, “I think he stops at Minnie’s store just because he knows she can use the business. Not because he needs to buy things there.”

  “But Miss Minnie always has money.” I stated.

  And Ma looked my way. “Think about it. Everything in her store, she has to buy somewhere. And then she must wait for someone else to buy them from her.” Ma paused.

  “Coins in the cash register isn’t the same thing as money in your pocket.” She concluded.

  And though I didn’t know it, I had just received my first lesson in finance.

  Ma and I had supper without Pa that evening. He’d been working at the quarry that day, she told me. And he would still have to go by the farm for evening chores.

  “It would probably be dark before he sat down to eat.” I thought.

  Pa sometimes drove a loader tractor or a dump truck for the rock quarry over towards Pineville, just to make a little hard cash to supplement what our small farm brought in. “And,” I thought, “he kind of liked to drive the type of equipment over there that we’d probably never be able to afford.

  All we had was an old Ford pickup truck, the kind with a wooden flat bed on it, and a Farmall tractor that was well used already when Pa bought it.

  After we got the tractor, Pa and everyone else had to sit through two sermons in a row from the preacher Clark about not spending money you don’t have.

  “Sometimes it ain’t all that easy living across the road from a preacher.” Was all Pa had said. But he paid off the banknote just as he’d promised. And things around the farm had gotten a lot easier after that.

  After supper I worked on my arithmetic and then dug out the new geography book, compliments of Mrs. Clark. I was thumbing my way through it when I guess I dozed off. Anyway, I almost woke up as I remembered Pa steering me to bed that night. But not quite, I guess.

  On Saturday I awoke and was just finishing with feeding the chickens and collecting the eggs as Pa pulled the truck into the yard. He climbed out and called when he saw me.

  “Are you and your mother ready for a road trip today?” he asked as we headed to the house and a breakfast of fresh eggs and fried potatoes and our own thickly sliced, sugar cured bacon.

  As we ate Pa allowed as how we needed to make a trip to the exchange with the load of corn he’d shoveled from the crib already this morning.

  Any reason for a trip to town was a good one for me. And I suspect Ma felt the same as she seemed extra happy today as well.

  The three of us filled the cab as we chatted our way to town. Pa let Ma off at Lester’s Dry Goods store. Then he and I continued down to the Farmer’s Exchange.

  The man at the exchange used a hoist slung under the wheels to lift the front of the truck into the air and the whole load that had probably taken Pa thirty minutes of hard work to load, slid into a pit in the floor.

  After moving through the machinery of the mill the corn was ground into feed, cobs and all, and sacked up in big heavy burlap bags which we stacked against the back of the truck cab. Pa went inside to take care of some sort of business while I stood in the lot and threw rocks at the large flock of pigeons that darted and whirled around the grainery. And then we left to pick Ma up with her new bundle of cloth.

  Ma was happily telling us about the new shirts she planned to sew for Pa when we rounded the curve on Highway P.

  That’s when we saw the car on its side in the ditch.

  The brakes on the old truck groaned mightily, laboring to stop the heavy load we hauled, as Pa halted before the wreck.

  An old black sedan had somehow missed the curve and lay crumpled on its side against an oak tree.

  Pa leaped from the truck and was bent over with his head inside the wreckage looking at the driver as I rounded the front of the car.

  He stood and yelled at me like he never did, demanding I return to our truck. But I had already seen what he was worried about.

  There, through the smashed windshield, I saw my friend Seth. His head was broken bad and bleeding and his neck was turned oddly. And by then Pa had me by the shoulder and half dragged and half pushed and half carried me back to where Ma stood near the back of the truck in the center of the roadway.

  She gently took my arm and guided me towards the cab but halfway there I stopped and puked in the middle of the pavement.

  I sat shaking in the cab and began to tear up as the vision of Seth Miller remained locked in my mind. I was shocked and in shock by what I’d just seen as Ma and I sat mostly silent in the cab in the hot noonday sun.

  Another car had stopped by now and I heard pieces of what Pa and the other man said.

I remembered later Pa had pointed out a groove in the pavement and I heard the word “blowout” and I remembered Pa was telling the other man how he knew Seth and that the old man just couldn’t hold it.

  I didn’t know it back then, but in the days before power steering and radial tires, a blown tire on the front of a car was a very dangerous problem.

  It was about then the other man turned his car around to return to Pineville and get more help. Pa soon returned to our truck too.

  “We’ll wait.” He said softly as he climbed into the cab. “It don’t seem right to just leave Seth here alone.”

  I was nearly sick again and sobbing softly as Pa finally drove us home. I couldn’t stomach any of Ma’s fine cooking come supper time. And I lay in bed a long time that night before a troubled sleep finally claimed me.

  The next day was the only occasion I ever remembered my folks skipping a church service in the whole time I was growing up.

And even in the warm summer sun, Miss Minnie’s porch became a cold and empty place.