In Time by C K Williams

Author:C K Williams [Williams, C K]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226899510
Publisher: The University Of Chicago Pres
Published: 2012-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

PART III

The Rest

Two Encounters Early On

1. COWBOYS AND POETS

The first book I ever passionately, desperately loved, and which I read devotedly probably a dozen times, purported to be a true story. I found out later, however, it was almost entirely a fabrication, a lie. The book was Lone Cowboy, the autobiography of the Western writer and artist, Will James. Not William James—I realized this fact when I looked Will up in the encyclopedia in my grammar school library and found only the uninteresting William.

I came across Lone Cowboy when I was eleven or twelve. I was mad about horses then, all I wanted to do was ride and have a horse one of my own, not a very likely prospect in Newark, New Jersey. So what I did instead was to read obsessively about horses and their riders; everything in our school library, then in the branch library not far from our house, and finally in the big central library downtown. I think I read literally every book I could find that had anything to do with horses, the way ten years or so later I’d read everything I could find on the Holocaust, and after that everything by and about the various poets whose work I’d fallen in love with. But right now it was horses, and especially it was Will James; in some ways I think I almost assumed his biography as my own. As some children have imaginary playmates, I had James, and I had that book, which recounted a real cowboy’s life: being born under a wagon in Montana, the mother dying in childbirth, the cowboy father so distraught by her death that he became careless of his own life and was killed a few years later by a raging steer. Then he was adopted by a French Canadian trapper, Bopy his name was, a diminutive I think of “Beaupré,” who was also a cowboy during the warm months when pelts were thin.

I still remember that life so well. The winter one had two wolf cubs as pets. The gift of a little horse for a birthday. Buying saddles and boots. The slow wanderings down out of Canada. The herds of cattle, wild horses, roundups, and line camps. Then the trapper, too, disappeared, probably drowned fetching water from a flooded river, and you were on your own, to wander and work as a cowboy all over the West, from Montana even down into Mexico. Then, as vengeance for some sort of affront, you stole a herd of cattle, were caught, and ended up in prison for a time, where you begin to draw and paint seriously. And so started another life as an artist, then as an artist-writer.

The part about prison, the most seemingly unlikely yarn, turns out to be almost the only thing in the book up until then that was true. I found out years later in a study of James I happened on in another library that he had actually been a French-speaking

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