Memories

by Sevenstars

SUMMARY: A little follow-up to "The Lonesome Gun."

On one of the Yahoo Laramie groups, the point was made that it seemed implausible for Slim not to remember the stampede in which he saw a friend trampled to death. Well, apart from the fact that Jonesy never says he actually saw that, there is at least one possible explanation, so I wrote this fic in order to provide it. It ties in to "Naming Day," which you can also find on this site, and which tells more of the story of Slim's first trail drive.

Thanks as always to my pard Gloria for the beta.

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Slim woke with a start, sitting bolt upright in his bed. It took a few seconds for him to clear the cobwebs out of his brain and realize where he was. The bunkroom was dark except for the lighter patches that were the windows, and silent except for Jonesy's gentle, steady snores from the bottom bunk of the double, on the other side of the half-wall. Andy, as usual, was curled up in a knot under his blankets, puppy-fashion; Jess was an indistinct ridge under his, in the shadows of the upper bunk. Slim got his breathing under control and raked his fingers through his hair. The air in the room was pleasantly cool, but his longjohns felt dank and sticky against his skin, as if he'd been sweating heavily—which, considering what he'd just awakened from, didn't surprise him.

The crossboards that supported his mattress creaked faintly under his weight as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. Instantly a soft sinister four-beat click sounded from the other side of the room, and he heard Jess's voice, quiet and menacing: "Who's there?"

"Just me, Jess." He looked that way and caught the racing gleam of light off the Colt's barrel, just before Jess pushed cautiously higher—he was pretty close under the ceiling, after all—and took it off cock, then slipped it back into the holster that hung on the bunkset's upright, close by his hand. "Sorry. Did I yell, or somethin'?"

"Yell?" Jess echoed blankly. "No. Just heard a sound." Slim could hear the frown in the Texan's voice. "Should you'a' yelled? Thought that was me done that."

Which was true. Jess was a restless sleeper; he didn't just move around a lot—his bedclothes in the morning always looked like the cats had been having a fight in them—he also dreamed, frequently and violently. Often he talked in his sleep, though mostly in a disjointed way that gave only vague hints as to what was troubling him. Sometimes he woke Slim with his shouting. It amazed the rancher that with all four of them in the same room, he seemed to be the only one who was ever aware of it. Of course Andy always had slept like a log, even when he was little, and Jonesy—who, come to think about it, had once admitted that he'd several times been aroused by Jess's bunk-shaking sit-ups—probably figured it wasn't any affair of his, unless Jess called to him, which Jess never did. Slim still marvelled that they'd both heard—and, more important, come out to investigate—the tussle in the other room that night Jess was delirious with fever and mistook him for a Bannister. "You do," he agreed. "Doesn't mean I can't." He stood, padded over to the chair and pulled his shirt off the back of it, shouldering into the garment.

"You goin' somewhere?"

"Just need some air," Slim replied shortly, buttoning the shirt. He shot a quick look that way, being careful not to move his head, and caught the glitter of Jess's eyes just before the younger man slid his legs out from under the covers. "Jess... there's no need—"

"Just 'cause you want some air, don't mean I can't too," Jess told him lightly, dropping soundlessly to the floor.

They dressed without another word being exchanged, and quietly slipped out of the room without disturbing the other sleepers. Slim unfastened the bolt on the front door and led the way out onto the little porch. He leaned on the rail, looking for the Big Dipper, but a skim of clouds had come up and he couldn't make it out. "Drat," he muttered. "Wonder what time it is."

"Oh, 'round three, I reckon," said Jess, in such a calm, blithe, assured tone that Slim knew he wasn't guessing. He wondered at how alert and awake Jess seemed. Usually he was the hardest of them to get going of a morning: never fully functional, or even conscious, till he'd had at least one cup of coffee and preferably two. Possibly it was because of being roused by Slim's movements and going "on alert;" he wasn't off his high yet. Whatever the cause, it gave the moment a sense of unreality which, perhaps, contributed to Slim's own feeling of safety. He wasn't used to nightmares; had seldom had any even about the war, terrible though that had been. It seemed as if he ought to be more restless, more upset, than he really felt. Or maybe it was just the realization that he'd been missing something out of his life for a long time, and now he had it back again.

He could feel Jess watching him. "It ain't mannerly t'ask personal questions," the Texan said slowly, "but bein's this'n ain't about you, maybe it don't count. Jonesy said your pa used to ramrod trail herds up outta Texas?"

"Yeah, he did. Seven years all told—'50 through '57. Or would that be eight? Eight, that's right. He began when I was seven, and I went with him the last two seasons, after I'd gotten through the grades."

"But you ain't Texan," Jess observed.

"No, Illinois. Pa was born in Ohio, and his family came from Virginia originally, what they call yeoman farmers."

"So how'd it come he'd be in that line?" Jess's genuine interest sounded clearly in his tone.

"Well, Texas isn't the only place that ever raised cattle, you know," Slim told him. "Just the only place that invented the longhorn. Back a hundred, hundred-fifty years or so, the biggest beef-raisin' part of the country was the South, especially Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. Men like my great-grandpa used to graze their cattle on the balds in the piedmont back country, gather 'em up in public cowpens, and walk 'em to market—to Charleston, Norfolk, Baltimore, even as far north as Philadelphia. They were more like stockmen, really, than farmers—like our homesteaders around here, but for different reasons. They farmed mostly for their own use, didn't grow many crops for market because it was too hard to get 'em there—you think some of the roads out here are bad, back there they were about five times worse. Some families in that country didn't even own wagons; everything they bought had to be packed in, and gettin' hundreds of pounds of, say, corn or wheat out would have been close to impossible. But livestock was easy; it could go on its own legs. Sheep, mules, horses, cattle, even droves of up to five thousand hogs took the 'long trail' to the coastal market towns. Some owners in those parts ran three to five thousand head of cattle alone, and branding was required by law. It was a free-range economy, too: a stockman could graze five thousand head of sheep without owning a foot of land.

"Time went on, folks began gettin' heated up about slavery, and a lot of those men—most didn't own slaves or even want any—got pushed out by the big cotton planters, or moved on of their own free will, lookin' for better pastures. Some headed west to the pinelands of Alabama, Mississippi, southern Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, some south to northern and central Florida, and some, my family among 'em, to the Midwest, Ohio and Kentucky mostly, where they went on drivin' their stock to market over the mountains; forty years ago, when Pa was still a young man, folks in New York were already expectin' their regular diet of beefsteak, and gettin' it too—cattle bred in the Ohio River valley, raised on bluegrass and corn. As the country filled up and land got more expensive, the industry shifted west, and west again—to Indiana, to Illinois, to Iowa. The smallholders where I grew up all had more of their land in grazin' meadow and winter hayfields than in grain, and all the kids I knew, boys and girls alike, used to put in at least part of their time herdin' their fathers' cattle on horseback—some were only five when they started. Pa grew a little corn and wheat, got maybe $340 a year out of it, and we had pigs and chickens, dairy cows, a truck garden and fruit trees, but mostly he thought of himself as a stock-raiser, a specialist in beef; he never ran any less than fifty head of breedin' stock, and sometimes he got up to a hundred, besides the increase. Lots of men had more. Even when I was a youngster, I can remember in our part of Illinois two or three what you might call regular cattle kings—maybe not as a Texan would think of it, but they had breeder herds of one or two thousand apiece, fenced pastures thousands of acres big, and every year they brought in hundreds or thousands of feeders—from the south of the state, from Missouri and Iowa, even from Texas."

"Yeah," Jess agreed thoughtfully, "I recollect hearin' some about that when I was a little feller. Some of my kin was on them drives. So that was where your pa learned to handle cattle?"

"Pretty much," said Slim. "And so did I. About the only thing we didn't do in Illinois was rope 'em, probably because the saddles we used didn't have horns—mostly they were Morgans and Shaftoes, Kentuckys and plain pad saddles, and a few McClellans later; I had to figure that out for myself, after Pa brought me home a lariat one year. But we herded 'em and rounded 'em up on horseback, branded and earmarked 'em, and sent 'em to market by regular trails. 'Course Pa did some tradin' to Santa Fe, too, in the '20's, and he saw the way the New Mexicans did it, with ropes and the big saddles and all; that got him even more interested. He began drivin' up from Texas soon after it broke free of Mexico. After the Mexican War, when he came to really think hard about movin' further west, he started offerin' to head up drives. That's what brought us to... to what Jonesy talked about." He paused. "I don't know how to explain it, Jess. Sure, it's been fifteen years since I saw Ed Farrell, and men change, but not that much. And I shouldn't have forgotten the name of the man who was Pa's segundo for as long as he was trail-bossin'. Or the way we lost his son, who was my friend. And yet... I did. I forgot it, Jess, and I forgot Ed's face. It wasn't till... just now, in there, that it all came back."

"You was dreamin'?"

Slim sighed. "I was dreamin'. Only it was almost more like livin' it, all over again."

He heard Jess shift position. "You feel like tellin' about it?"

"I maybe should," Slim agreed. "You risked yourself to save me from him—seems it's the least you deserve. Were you ever on a trail drive, Jess?"

"You bet," was the prompt response. "More'n one. I told you that."

"That's right. I'm not thinkin'. Then you know about trail-cutters," Slim guessed.

Jess's sour grunt was all the answer he needed. A trail-cutter, properly speaking, was a cowhand hired by local cattlemen along an open trail, armed with a certificate of authority, generally from a local judge and usually on court letterhead, and a list of the brands—sometimes as many as fifteen of them—that he represented and the people he worked for. He had the right to hold up passing herds and cut out all local cattle that had strayed into them—which local cattle often did, sometimes of their own free will (cattle being social animals, though perhaps not as much so as horses), sometimes under the urging of trailhands who marked them for the cook's use or who, loyal to their boss, wanted the outfit to reach market with at least as many head as it had started out with, and figured it wouldn't hurt to have a few locals to make up for the inevitable losses along the way. Trail outfits didn't like him much, for when he caused them to "throw the herd up" for a cut, he cost them half a day or more, apart from the cattle; to their way of thinking, any local animals that fell in with them were compensated for by those of their own that strayed off and got lost, or weren't found after stampedes, and that the local inhabitants were free to butcher or sell, being entirely unable to find their owners. Besides that, he was sometimes crooked: smart rustlers might pose as trail-cutters, showing forged credentials that claimed as many as several dozen brands, and as most cowboys, and even a great many bosses, were short on formal education, such fakes were easily passed. If the boss suspected they were frauds, he could refuse to permit a cut without a duly sworn peace officer in attendance. But even these weren't always as much on the up-and-up as they should be, and some cutters, if they failed to convince, resorted to outlawry, the favorite tactic being to set off a night stampede and try to make off with some cattle in the confusion.

"Ed's son Mike was on his first drive, the same as me," Slim went on, "and he was about my age, thirteen, but small for his age, just like I was big for mine—not over four feet eight, and I was five four and a quarter with my boots off. That's why Jonesy called him 'little' Mike, I guess. He was Jonesy's cook's louse, and I was horse wrangler. We'd had a night wrangler for a while—Joey Redhawk; remind me to tell you about him some time—but he'd been killed in the Nations. We crossed out of the Cherokee Nation into Kansas, five hundred miles up from San Antonio, the eighteenth of May, on schedule, Pa said, with maybe ten days more to Independence. Baxter Springs had a rough rep even then—you probably know that; there was a bad crowd there that would cut a herd for as much as half the beef in it. So when we got to the Neosho River fork, instead of bearin' northeast, Pa turned us up Cabin Creek, through Vinita, and an easy twelve-mile dry day to the creek where Parsons Station was, almost thirty-five miles due northwest from Baxter. He figured to jump across and pick up the Neosho again, follow that to Iola, and then slantwise to Independence, water and grass all the way, and no cutters. He hoped.

"Lookin' back, I see we should have expected trouble. A big herd like that... you can't hide it; the word goes out ahead of you, and even civilized Indians gossip. Maybe Pa shouldn't have let Ed take on so many head—that was Ed's job, ride around to the spring roundups and get things organized every year before Pa came down from our land in Illinois, line up cowmen who were willing to contract with him—but that was '56, the last year before the Panic, and prices were sky-high; nobody wanted to miss out, and there were only so many bosses and crews available. I think everyone was overburdened with cattle that season, though ours was the biggest herd I know of that made Independence.

"Anyway, two days out of Parsons the cutters stopped us. I was only a kid, but even I could smell somethin' bad about that lot, and Pa, he'd seen and done so much, dealt with so many kinds of men, he must have known even better than I did that they weren't on the level. He met 'em up front, with five men armed with rifles, and made it plain that he wasn't stoppin'. We had nineteen on the crew, not countin' me, Mike, and Jonesy, and rustlers don't want to fight if they can help it; they're in business to get beef to sell, and they can't spend their money if they're dead. So these cutters—eight, there were—they backed away.

"Pa didn't think we'd seen the last of 'em. He doubled the night guard and told 'em to keep special watch outward, the way stampeders would be likeliest to come. Two more days went by and we didn't see a sign of 'em. Everybody was gettin' edgy, and I guess the cattle were pickin' it up too.

"Jonesy used to look after Mike and me, sort of special—step in when the crew's hazin' started to go a bit too far, take us into the chuck wagon to sleep when the weather was bad or he thought the herd might run. He had a good instinct for it, too. You know how longhorns are, I guess—they'll stampede at the smallest set-off, a sound, a scent, a look at somethin' that doesn't seem right. Sometimes even a timid little rabbit, on an innocent nighttime journey, will get lost in the middle of a herd across his path, and before he finishes bumpin' around workin' his way through, he'll start a rampage that'll take a day to stop. But what Jonesy knew was that the real cause of a run is a sort of, well, a nervous instability or a latent hysteria that already exists in the herd before it starts; if that's not there, the cattle will ignore the loudest thunder. That night he felt it. 'They're gonna go,' he said to me when I brought the remuda in to cut the night horses out. 'I can smell it. If we can get 'em through tonight, we'll be all right, but I got a bad feelin' we won't.'

"So Mike and I were in the chuck wagon when the herd went off. From what I remember Pa sayin' later, it wasn't the cutters; the fact is, we never heard another thing of them. Maybe, like Jonesy said, it was one of our own nighthawkers that scared 'em—lightin' a match for a cigarette or throwin' down a smoked-out butt, sneezin' or blowin' his nose—or maybe it was a horse puttin' a foot wrong or snortin' at somethin' he smelled. Anyway, I came awake and heard 'em. There's no sound like a big herd runnin' at night, and we'd had runs enough by then that I knew what it was.

"Jonesy was under the wagon, cook's privilege; he must've heard 'em comin' through the ground. He got on his feet, yelled through the opening of the tilt for us to stay where we were, and went up a tree that was there, like a scalded cat on the run from six big dogs—what that did to his sacroiliac I can only imagine. Next I knew they were on top of us. You know that cattle will split and go around an object in their path if they see it in time, and they tried to. But the ones on the inside of the split must've banged the wagon as they went by, and I could feel it swayin', then liftin' off its wheels, tiltin', fallin'—

"I remember sprawlin' across a slidin' pile of supplies, grabbin' for my belt and gun—it was an old Colt Paterson .34, Joey had given it to me when he died—and tryin' to figure out where Mike was. The bottom of the wagon was turned toward the cattle, which gave us a breastwork, and maybe I could have survived, at least. I know now, lookin' back, that it wasn't the cattle that killed Mike, that he wasn't trampled; when we found him he just looked like he was asleep. Maybe he hit his head, or banged his chest hard enough to stop his heart; I don't know.

"I think that may have been the only time in his life that Pa came close to panic. You have to remember he was almost fifty-two, and Andy wasn't born yet; I was his only livin' child—there'd been too many others that hadn't made it. Bein' boss he must have been up as close to the leaders as he could get, and when he saw the way they were goin' he spurred his horse all the harder—I was just staggerin' up onto my feet when it whirled up alongside me, I felt his arm go around me and landed face-down across his pommel, and then we were off again. The rest of that night is still pretty much a blur. Pa brought me back to the chuck wagon as it was gettin' light; Jonesy was there already, down from his tree, pickin' up what had spilled. He'd found Mike right off and put a blanket over him. Ed didn't find us till midmorning. After that... well, the way Jonesy told it is the way it went. From that day on, I never saw Ed again. He hadn't even troubled to draw his time. Pa wrote him that winter, two or three times; the letters all came back marked Unknown."

"And all this," Jess said slowly, after a pause, "all this you honest and true didn't remember till just tonight."

"Honest and true," Slim agreed. "I remembered the drive, all the other men, our lead steer, my remuda and the grulla pony Pa bought me in Austin, Joey, all the things that happened from San Antonio to the River, even bein' stopped by the trail-cutters—everythin' except that one night, and Ed, and Mike." He shook his head. "I don't understand it, Jess. How could I have forgotten somethin' as important as that?"

He wasn't really expecting an answer, and it surprised him when the warm, gravelly Texas accent asked, in that same slow, pondering way, "How did it go? You remembered right up to that night, and then you picked up again right after?"

"I guess so. I hadn't thought about it much. Except when you get a river crossing, or a stampede, or Indians holdin' you up for toll, one day, or night, on a drive is pretty much like another."

Jess nodded. "Yeah. That's likely why it never seemed strange to you that you didn't recollect, that you had a hole in your memory where that run ought'a' been. You just told yourself it must'a' been one of them nights when nothin' happened worth rememberin' and you slept clean through." He eased closer. "You ain't really goin' loco, Slim, if that's what you're thinkin'."

"How do you know?"

"Well, you said you lost your night wrangler, that Joey, the one that give you his gun, right? Kind of a special friend of yours, I'm guessin'?"

"Yeah," Slim breathed. "He was the one gave me my nickname. Everybody else picked up on it after he died—Pa, Ed, the whole crew. Even Ma, when we got home."

"So Mike was the second friend you lost that trip," Jess guessed. "Louse and wranglers mostly kinda hang together, on account of us'ally bein' the kids of the outfit, and the butt of a lot of hazin', like you said; they can't help gettin' to be close. And you was just a kid, too—what'd you say, thirteen?"

"That's right, but what's it got to do with—?"

"I'm gettin' to that," Jess interrupted. "When I was in th'Army, there was this surgeon I knew, and one time I was laid up we got to be friendly. I was bored and restless and he used to tell me things he knew, to keep me from jumpin' out of bed before I was supposed to. I recollect one of 'em, about somethin' doctors call amnesia. It means loss of memory. He said there are two main kinds of it. One you get from an injury, like a knock on the head. Th'other comes when you do or see somethin' that's really awful—trauma, I think he called it. You just forget it. You blank it right out. Far as you're concerned, it never happened. He said it was sort of self-defense; your mind puts up walls to protect itself from somethin' it don't know how to bear." Tentatively, he extended his hand and laid it gently against Slim's shoulder. "I reckon maybe bein' thirteen years old and losin' two friends... that might count."

"You think?" Slim looked hopefully around at him, seeing the gravity of his expression, of his eyes.

"You ain't all that much of a hardcase," Jess told him. "Tough on yourself, on me, on Andy. But there's a lot more in you than you want us to see. It makes sense."

"Amnesia," Slim murmured thoughtfully.

"That's what they call it. So Cap'n Gauthier said, anyhow."

"Amnesia," Slim repeated. Then: "Wonder what set me off dreamin', gettin' it all back again?"

"Maybe seein' Farrell layin' there dead, like you'd seen his boy all them years ago," Jess guessed. "Mind's a funny thing, Cap said. Lots we don't know yet about how it works."

Slim drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I'm glad I remember again," he said. "I didn't feel right, listenin' to Jonesy tell about that night and feelin' like I was hearin' somethin' that happened to somebody else. I'm glad I've got Mike back in my past again. Even glad I've got Ed—he wasn't bad, Jess, not really, not till he lost his son. He was a good segundo to Pa, and he always treated me decently."

"Known lots of men that wasn't bad, till somethin' come up to shove 'em over the edge," Jess agreed. "Reckon 'most everybody's got a reason for doin' what they do. Sometimes other folks can look at it and say they'd maybe do the same, if somethin' the like was to happen to them. Sometimes not. Reckon you never rightly know how far you can be pushed till it happens."

The rancher sighed and shook his head sadly. "We could have been friends all these years... Ed and Mike and me."

"Ain't no good goin' back over things like that," Jess reminded him. "Can't be always thinkin' what-if. Good way to go loco for sure."

Slim slapped the Texan's shoulder lightly. "Glad you were here tonight to help me understand. Thanks, Jess."

"No trouble." Jess grinned briefly in the dark. "We got maybe another hour we can sleep—you want to try?"

"I think I'm ready to do that."

The door closed silently behind them.

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