Crossing Purgatory by Gary Schanbacher

Author:Gary Schanbacher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

17

Harvest upon them, almost before Benito thought possible. He’d finished the chicken coop, worked on a lean-to shed, and made sturdy the goat pen after his only buck and two of his does breached the rails and wandered along the river course until Benito finally had to give up a day tracking them down. They did not have many acres in crops, only him last spring to sow and to tend Captain Upperdine’s trail stock. But a second section of grass needed cradling and the acres in corn stood ready. And, Genoveva’s expansive garden. He’d hand-watered the garden and the corn that past spring before he’d left for Plaza del Arroyo Seco, hours trudging the cart from the river to the field, buckets brimming, empting, refilling, beginning of day to ending. There’d been little rain. But now, harvest called. He’d not yet finished the adobe, hadn’t time to start a room for Paloma.

The women began putting up garden produce while the men finished the haying and began cutting and shocking the acres planted in corn. After drying in the field, Benito and Thompson gathered the shocks and stacked them beside Upperdine’s storage bins and each evening after supper, weary, they all collected around the growing mountain of stalks to shuck and strip the corn by the dim wash of a lantern. The dried corn went into baskets and burlap sacks, stalks and husks were chopped and pitched into the wire and wood-slated storage bins to be used as fodder over winter. Cobs were saved for kindling. After just a single evening’s work, they all suffered cramped hands and bloodied fingers.

Most evenings, Captain Upperdine easily tired of the labor and much preferred entertaining them with ditties sung by trappers and with yarns about the old days. He’d pace the yard, moving alternately within and beyond the reach of lantern light.

“I come out here with the freighters when I was no more growed than the boy here,” Upperdine pointed to Joseph, who straightened and watched Upperdine intently. “Put on blustery airs so the others might think to take my measure, but mostly they just laughed. They brought me along because they needed a hand.” Upperdine paced, and drank from the cup he seemed always to have in hand during evening hours. “Worked me into the routine from the get-go. Pulled night watch right off. Nobody needed to prod me awake. Every time the wind stirred, every titmouse moving through the grass was a grizzly or a prairie wolf or a savage. When I pulled early watch, I couldn’t hardly calm back down until about daybreak, and when I pulled late watch, couldn’t sleep at all beforehand. I was wore thin before even a week in the barrens.”

“So one night, I stationed up, hunkered down, and the night was real warmish, and I dozed a little. But even in my sleep, things seemed too still, too calm, and I jerked awake. Not five paces away they’d come up out of the dark, five, six Red Men, moving among the livestock, selecting the best of the horses.

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