Disappearances by Howard Frank Mosher

Author:Howard Frank Mosher
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Texas, 1929. In one respect it resembled Vermont, since the Depression that was about to rock the rest of the country would be largely unfelt in both states. Texas was too rich to notice, Vermont too poor. It was vast even beyond the Canadian wilderness our farm overlooked. Uncle Henry said that it made him uneasy. It was so full of anomalies—cities soaring out of desert wastelands, oil where there wasn’t even water—and except for the anomalies so flat and expressionless. Maybe the flatness was what unsettled Uncle Henry, as though his own expressionlessness needed contrast to be effective. My father on the other hand could not have been more at home. As soon as they got off the train in El Paso he produced a forked stick he had broken off one of our red astrachans before leaving and announced that he would witch an oil well for anyone who could tell him where to find the lost herd. Uncle Henry said they hadn’t been on the station platform two minutes before my father had a crowd around him, laughing and hanging on every word he said.

No one seemed to be able to tell him anything about the lost herd, but with his affinity for discovering grotesqueries he quickly learned about a woman rancher named Yellow Rose who was said to know about longhorns and possibly own some. She lived a short two hundred miles from El Paso, and was also said to discourage visitors of all kinds by conspicuously displaying two forty-five pistols holstered in bandoleers crossed over her abundant bosom. Everyone advised my father against attempting to make her acquaintance, much less offer to buy one of her sacred longhorns. Of course he was all the more determined to meet this flower of the desert, and set out for her ranch by rented car. The driver refused to go beyond the ranch gate, so he and Uncle Henry had to walk the last twenty miles to the house, where Yellow Rose was busy barbecuing a beef in celebration of their arrival, which she had been anticipating for several hours. “That cowardly El Paso driver dropped you off at the wrong gate,” she roared. “I’ve had a car waiting for you by the main entrance since sunup. Break out the whiskey, boys. The Varmintors have arrove at last.”

My father was a great success on Yellow Rose’s ranch. He fiddled all night and rode with the hands all day. Uncle Henry said they were amazed at his ability with a lariat, which he had picked up during his year in Montana and never forgotten. He challenged a Mexican knife thrower to a contest and won easily. He won a free-style wrestling contest. The second day on the ranch he found three new oil wells with his divining rod. Yellow Rose offered him a thousand dollars a well, but he turned it down, telling Uncle Henry that he would lose the gift to divine if he accepted money for it.

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