Cattle Kate Read online

  But Andrew told me how he saw them talking together at the Mercantile one day when they’d gone into town for supplies. “Oh, the way your Pa looked at your Ma. They say sometime there’s love at first sight, and this was one of those times.” Then Andrew saw Pa’s buggy down by the stream near the home place, and he added it up real quick.

  “Did you like my Pa?” I asked Andrew.

  “Oh sure. I liked him right off. But I knew they’d have problems, this Irish and Scot thing, you know. I just didn’t know it would get that bad. I told her, ‘Himself will never permit it, and I hear Old Man Watson is a hardass,’ but of course, they were in love and none of that mattered to them. I thought it might help that we aren’t even Catholic, but it didn’t. The only thing your grandfathers had in common was that they hated the British even more than they hated each other. But that didn’t do your folks one bit of good.”

  “So you tried to talk them out of it?” I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  “Franny, remember this. When you come from people who have nothing but each other, family means everything. That’s what held people together in the Old Country, where nobody had anything because the Queen and her lords owned all the land. Our people could only rent, we couldn’t call any land our own. So when the Queen offered free land in Canada for homesteaders, everyone jumped at the chance—well, everyone who could afford the fare over on the ship. It took years to save up. And sometimes families were split up because there wasn’t enough to cover the fares for everyone. I bet every family in this county has folks back home still waiting to come over. So the importance of family becomes even more important when you’ve gone to a new country to start over. You see how all your uncles have farms around Da and Ma’s. Well, your Pa’s people are like that, too. People want to stay with their own. That’s why me and Molly are right here, close to the home place.”

  “Molly is an Irish girl, isn’t she?”

  My uncle nodded. “I wouldn’t have married anyone but an Irish lass.”

  I could see why. But I also knew I had two parents from different backgrounds and they loved each other and they loved us kids, and I wouldn’t want to trade either one of them.

  I never, ever knew my Grandpa Watson. Or Grandma Watson, either. I didn’t know my Pa’s brothers and sisters. I didn’t know my cousins on his side. Those people wanted nothing to do with me or my parents, and I guess as far as they were concerned, we didn’t exist. It was the opposite with my Ma’s people. I loved my Grandpa and Grandma Close. There were lots of cousins and uncles and aunts.

  I don’t know much about Scottish people, but Irish people are a lot of fun. They love to dance and sing and play jokes on each other. They love big suppers and delicious food. They like to sit around the table and talk. They treat their children like gold.

  That’s how I felt growing up. I never told anybody I knew the secret. And I never once, in all my years, felt that anybody ever treated me different because my birth had been a scandal.

  My Uncle Andrew was my special friend—“’Tiss me, woman,” he’d croon as he gathered me up in his arms for a kiss.

  But Grandma Close was the most precious to me.

  Grandma was the best chicken-killer in all of Canada.

  She wasn’t a very big woman, either in height or weight, but she could swing an ax like she was a lumberman. With such grace and ease, it could have been an Irish jig.

  I have lots of other fond memories of my mother’s mother. She always cut her bread against her titty. And she never cut herself, either. She was a sort-of-singer. She sort-of remembered the melody. She sort-of remembered the lyrics. When it became hopeless, she’d just hum like she was singing the right words to the right tune. And while everyone else laughed at her, I thought it was wonderful that you could go through life singing your own song.

  But mostly I remember how Grandma Close killed a chicken.

  First, of course, she had to catch a chicken. Now, chickens are pretty dumb—not as dumb as turkeys, but close cousins—and Grandma was convinced a hen could tell if you’d walked into the coop to pick her eggs or to pick her for your Sunday dinner. And if you had the chopping block on your mind, she’d run around that coop like she was already a chicken with her head cut off.

  Grandma could snatch a chicken quicker than you could blink, and she just ignored the squawking and jerking as she carried it out of the hen house feet first. As she walked to the chopping block marked with dark stains, she picked up the ax with her free hand. And then in a move that could have been set to music, she flung that hen’s head down on the block while she swung the ax in an arc that cut it clean off.

  She’d throw the chicken on the lawn. It always amazed me how that headless hen kept jumping around, spraying blood everywhere.

  “Stand back, Franny,” she’d yell so I wouldn’t get all bloody.

  She never knew, but I had no interest in touching a headless chicken that didn’t know it was dead.

  Grandma got a big pot of water on the boil, and after that chicken finally gave up, she grabbed it and dunked it into the scalding water. She swished it around so the feathers got all soaked. Wet feathers have a smell of their own. Nothing in the world smells like it. I could be blindfolded in a cave somewhere and I’d know if someone was scalding a chicken. Anybody who’s ever smelled it knows what I mean. Anybody who hasn’t, can’t imagine.

  Grandma Close’s hands had to be like iron because chicken feathers straight from the pot are very hot, but she hardly waited before plucking those feathers. She’d leave a few on to cool off so I could pluck too, but really my job came after all the big white feathers were off and I picked out the pinfeathers.

  “Be very careful, Franny, because nobody wants a pinfeather in their fried chicken.”

  “I’ll be careful, Grandma.”

  She always double-checked that I hadn’t missed any.

  Since then, I have always killed my chickens exactly like she did. And I never cleaned a single chicken in my life without remembering that precious woman.

  ***

  The first time I ever heard my parents fight was the day we learned that President Lincoln had been shot.

  I was almost five and when I saw Mother crying, I thought something bad had happened to somebody in our family.

  “No, no. It’s the president who freed the slaves.”

  My mother wasn’t making much sense. But her grief over a man she never knew made her pick a fight with my Pa.

  “See, I told you you were wrong to think of moving to the States. Imagine if I hadn’t stopped you. Taking your family to a country in the middle of a civil war? What were you thinking? That wasn’t a war. It was a slaughter of young boys. How many mothers are grieving their boys so old men can play war? I want no part of a country like that. They throw their sons away like they don’t count, and then they kill a fine man like Mr. Lincoln. I’ll not have my babies growing up in a country that could do that. Shoot him. In front of his wife. A southern man, probably had slaves—they’ll never get over that war, you know. Never. No, I want no part of it. And the Indians…” but she never could go on with that thought out loud.

  My Pa just listened and hung his head, like he’d done something wrong. He’d suggested moving to another country to get away from his awful family, who treated Ma like dirt whenever they saw her. She wouldn’t hear of it then, and now when she cried over President Lincoln, she let him know she’d never hear of it.

  “We have a good life here, Father, and I don’t want you thinking about anything else. Our boys will take over this farm one day and our girls will marry nice Irish boys from here.” I saw my father smart at her declaration that his sons-in-laws would all be Irish.

  It took me a long time, and some good lessons in school, before I realized all my mother was saying.

  I don’t know how they taught it in the States, but in Canada, the Ame
rican Civil War was taught as a lesson to never do that again.

  “America went to war with itself over slavery,” our teacher told us as she began our history lesson about our neighbor to the south. “When President Lincoln was elected, southern senators feared he would interfere with their slaves, and so they threatened to leave the union. They wanted to keep their slaves. They said they needed them to harvest their cotton and keep the plantations working. Northern senators said it was wrong to hold another human being in bondage.”

  I thought the northern senators were right.

  “But nobody could see how bad that war would be. The North was strong and the South was weak. They thought the North would win so fast, that after the first shots in April, they predicted the war would be over by Christmas. But they were very wrong. The Civil War dragged on for four years. And it killed so many soldiers. Most of them were young men.”

  Ma’s rant about the senselessness of it all made sense to me now.

  “But some say it was worth it because President Lincoln freed the slaves. The war had just ended when President Lincoln was shot while he was watching a play in a theater in Washington.”

  “What did the Indians have to do with the Civil War?” I asked Teacher one day, remembering how Ma was so afraid of them.

  “Nothing that I know. Why?”

  “Well, my Ma was so sad when President Lincoln died, and she and Pa had words that day and she ended with talking about Indians, so I always wondered what they had to do with it.”

  Teacher promised to look into it, and came back a couple weeks later with news that showed me exactly why my Ma didn’t like Indians.

  “I’m sure your Ma was upset over the Sioux Uprising in Minnesota. That happened during the Civil War. The Indians went on the warpath and killed a lot of settlers who never did them any harm. It was horrible. They hanged a whole bunch of the Indians.”

  It sounded awful to me. I was a grown woman in Wyoming Territory before I learned there was another side of the story. The Indians fought back because a horrible Indian Agent was starving them. His famous words were “Let them eat grass.” They wanted to hang about every Indian man they could find, but President Lincoln stepped in. Still, they hanged thirty-eight Sioux. I wished Ma had known the whole story, but I bet even if she had, she’d have said that was no excuse to kill and scalp innocent people. And I have to agree.

  ***

  My first brother was born in November of 1861, and even though my Pa had been thrown out of his family, he followed tradition and named his son after his father. Grandpa Watson never saw his namesake. I’ve often wondered if his heart would have been softened by a boy when it hadn’t been by a girl. But we’ll never know because Grandpa Watson died in 1872. Like he’d promised, he made no mention of my Pa in his will. It was like my Pa had never been born. That was the first time I ever saw Pa cry.

  By the time little Johnny was three, I had fallen in love with Darby.

  I called him “my pony,” even though he was already an old horse. But he was a new horse to me and for my entire life, every new horse has been “my pony.” Even my beloved Goldie, years later in Wyoming Territory.

  As far as workhorses went, Darby was just fine. He was short and stout, gray with patches of brown. He had a skinny tail, one blotch of black on his right leg and a nick out of his left ear. He was no beauty to anybody but me. I liked the way he smelled and how his tail flicked back and forth and up and down. I liked how his nose felt so smooth. I liked how his hide tickled my little fingers. I heard my Pa brag, “She’s a farm girl, alright. You’ll be hard pressed, Mother, to keep her in the house.”

  My Ma was as good at hitching Darby as Pa was, and she was often in the barn helping out, and I thought of her as a farm girl, too. That didn’t stop her from showing off in the kitchen and the garden and at the quilting frame. My Pa was a strong man who was a good farmer. But if you put him in the kitchen, he would have burned the house down. No, my Ma could do just about anything, anywhere on this farm. I wanted to be exactly like her.

  ***

  Mondays were wash days for Ma. She always said that after a Sunday of rest, it was best to get the worst job of the week out of the way. First, of course, she had to build a fire in the backyard, where she stored the tin tub for rinsing and her black iron kettle for washing (it did double-duty for making lye soap). Pa hauled wood for the fire—when Johnny got old enough, this was his first real chore. Thankfully, Ma had a well. Some women had to haul water from a stream, but we had it so much better. Ma taught me to use a fourth-cake of soap for each batch—eventually the family would be so big, we’d need a whole cake for each—and she washed the whites first, the coloreds second, the work britches and rags last. After stirring and scrubbing on the washboard, Ma would rinse everything out and hang the wash on the line that stretched from the house to the big oak tree. It was under this tree that Johnny and I played to stay out of the way.

  Ma used the rinse water on the garden, with a special splash on the roses she was trying to grow. Soapy water cleaned the porch. By the time all this was done, so was most of the day, and I remember my Ma was more tired on Mondays than any other day of the week.

  It’s no wonder she lost track of me one day when I was supposed to be watching Johnny under the tree. But when I saw she was busy, I snuck off to the barn to see Darby. I was just going to pet him, but once I got there, he was standing by the stall wall and well…if I climbed up on the hay bale, I could reach the first log of the wall, and then I could climb up to the top log and get on top of Darby.

  Usually, Pa lifted me up and led Darby around so I could have a ride. But Pa was out in the field and Ma was busy with her wash and Darby looked like he wanted to take me for a ride. It never occurred to me that once I got up on him, there wasn’t much to keep me there. I could hold onto the mane, but my little legs couldn’t even stretch to both sides of his back, so I just slid around on him as he moved. This didn’t frighten me. It was a jolt of joy!

  The first Ma knew what I was up to was when she saw me and Darby come out of the barn. If she hadn’t screamed, we’d have probably just walked around the yard. But her scream scared us both. I turned to look. Darby took off.

  Ma said later that she saw me flying off the horse and breaking my neck. She saw a small coffin and me all laid out in the white pinafore she was still sewing. She saw Uncle Andrew destroyed by grief. She saw Pa and Grandma Close and Grandpa Close and all her sisters and all her brothers and everyone in the world screaming, “Why weren’t you watching her?”

  But that didn’t happened.

  I realized right away that I had to hold on—HOLD ON—and snug my legs as best I could to stay on top. Darby didn’t buck or anything, he just ran for all he was worth and it was a smooth, loping ride once you got the hang of it. I got the hang pretty quick. But then there was that little gully that Pa had built over with a wooden bridge—just four planks, really, with one length of board doing the trick. Darby dashed toward that gully and ignored the bridge like it wasn’t even there and when he jumped—JUMPED—he did it in one fluid motion that made my tummy flutter. I’d never felt that before. I liked it. Darby and I landed solid on the other side of the gully and then—they don’t call it horse sense for nothing—the animal realized it was time to tone it down. He slowed his gait considerably, ending up in a slow walk as I continued the laughing wail that started with the first leap forward.

  “Darby, oh Darby, that was so much fun.” I was giggling and patting my pony in pride and it took a second for me to hear the screams coming at me from two sides. From the house, Mother was running and tumbling over herself, her skirts hiked up to let her run. From the field, Father was running like a sprinter, his hat blown off by the wind he was creating. Back under the oak tree, little Johnny was crying and wetting his pants.

  Pa reached me first and pulled me off the horse in his sunburned arms. Ma was there a
second later, crying and scolding and laughing and crying and scolding and telling Pa, “I just turned my back for a minute.” Darby looked at the family with his big, brown eyes, and if he could have talked, I know he would have said, “I wasn’t going to hurt her.”

  Pa patted him on the side of his neck and said, “It’s all right, Darby. It’s all right.” Then he gave me a big swat across my behind. Then Ma spanked me too. I started to cry.

  Ma picked me up to carry me back to the house. “Don’t you ever do that again. Do you hear me? You could have been killed. You can’t ride off on Darby by yourself. Do you hear me?”

  I heard her. But Pa came home the next week with a little saddle. “You’re just going to encourage her,” Ma protested. “The girl had no idea she was in danger. I don’t want her to be a scaredy cat, but I don’t want her to be reckless, either. She’s got to learn you can’t take off without understanding the consequences.”

  But my Pa knew there’d be a repeat performance someday, and it was safer for me to ride on a saddle. That was the best gift he ever gave me. Until later, when he gave me the gun for my homestead in Wyoming.

  ***

  If Ma ever needed proof I was her tintype, it was when her labor came early.

  I was in charge of two brothers now. John was four and James was one, and they were a handful. John always wanted to climb and James had just discovered he could follow his brother on his shaky legs. I was forever chasing after them. I was rounding them up, once again, the morning Mother came out on the stoop and shot off the rifle into the air. Twice. All three of us stopped in our tracks and stared at Mother. She was doubled over, holding herself up by the arm of the rocker. It scared me. It made little Jimmy cry.

  I ran to Mother, my brothers following. “Mama, Mama, what’s wrong? Should I get Pa?”

  “Pa is in town, but Mrs. O’Malley will be here soon.”

  “Should I run get her?”

  “No, she’ll come. She knows the signal.”