Last Bus to Wisdom (3 page)

I entered by the kitchen door without knocking, as the kitchen and the adjoining windowed porch where the ranch crew ate at a twenty-foot-long table were Gram's domain, where I hung around to lick the bowls when she was baking and even did small chores for her like taking out the ashes and filling the woodbox. Pausing in the familiar surroundings to gather myself, I gazed around for possibly the last time at the cookstove of the old kind that cooks called a hellbox and the creaky cupboards and the rest of the tired kitchenware Gram had made do with, three times a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, as the latest in the succession of Double W cooks fending with a shortage of modern conveniences and a surplus of Wendell Williamson, classic tightfisted employer. I swallowed hard. What I was about to do was a gamble, but I was a hundred percent sure it would work. Well, fifty percent at least, the rest maybe the kind of hope only someone at that age can have. “Hunch up and take it” might be good enough advice if you were willing to go through life like a jackrabbit in a hailstorm, but I was determined to try for better than that.

Getting ready, I smoothed open the autograph book. A memory book was another name for it, because collecting autographs really was an excuse to have people dab in some lasting bit of wisdom, humor, or simply something supremely silly along with their signature.

•   •   •

W
HAT WOULD
I
HAVE DONE,
in that difficult period of life, without the inch-thick, cream-colored album with the fancily lettered inscription
YE WHO LEND YOUR NAME TO THESE PAGES SHALL LIVE ON UNDIMMED THROUGH THE AGES
embossed on the cover in gold or at least gilt? Autograph books were one of those manias that sweep through a student population, and at our South Fork one-room school it started when Amber Busby, as spoiled as she was curly-haired and dark-eyed, showed up with a fancy leatherette one she'd been given for her birthday and began cornering all of us to write in it. Immediately everybody, from the littlest kids just able to print their names to the seventh- and eighth-grade galoots edging up on the fact of a world half filled with girls, had to have an autograph book; it's a miracle how something ceases to be sissy stuff when everyone does it. Like other schoolyard manias, this one wore itself out in a week or two, but I kept at it, away from school as well as in. Gram, always desperate to keep me occupied—over time I had worn out enthusiasms on jigsaw puzzles, pen pals, board games, and things since forgotten—wholeheartedly encouraged this particular diversion, not that I needed extra motivation. The variety of sentiments people came up with to be remembered by appealed to the grab-bag nature of my mind, and by now I had a good start on filling the pages. I knew there was a long way to go, though, because I wanted to set a record. I loved the
Ripley's Believe It or Not!
panel in the Sunday funnies of the Great Falls
Tribune
that the Williamsons passed along to us when they thought of it, with its incredible facts that a North Dakota man ate forty-one pancakes in one sitting and that the Siamese twins Cheng and Peng shared a total of six wives in their lifetime and so on. I could just see myself in a full-color drawing: Donal Cameron—my name correctly spelled and everything—the Montana boy who collected more autographs and their attached memories than any other known human being. What that total was, of course, remained to be determined, but I was working at it. And this next autograph request counted double, in a sense.

Flipping past the scrawled sentiments of my classmates and the other schoolkids—
When you see a skunk in a tree / Pull his tail and think of me
was pretty typical—I picked out a nice fresh page, holding the place with my thumb, and set off for the office down the wood-paneled hall.

Only to slow to a halt as ever at the display table in the hallway nook. The show-off table, Gram called it, there to impress visitors with items discovered on the ranch from pockets of the past. I never passed without looking the fascinating assortment over. A powder horn and bullet pouch from the days of the fur trappers. A long-shanked jinglebob spur a cowboy lost on a trail drive from Texas. A big bone of some beast no longer seen on earth. All stuff like that until the array of Indian things, spearpoints and hide scrapers and flint skinning knives and other remnants of buffalo hunts long before Double W cattle grazed the same land. And resting there prime amid those, the object I longed for, the dark black arrowhead that was my find.

I was heartbroken when Gram made me turn it in. I'd been hunting magpies in the willows when I spotted the glassy sparkle in the gravel bottom of the creek crossing. When I reached in the water and picked it up, the glistening triangular shard of rock was sharper and more pointed than other arrowheads that sometimes surfaced after winter frosts or a big rain. Much more beautiful, too, solid black and slick as glass—which actually it was, I later learned, a hardened volcanic lava called obsidian from somewhere far away—when I stroked it in the palm of my hand. My excitement at gaining such a treasure lasted until I burst into the cookhouse and showed it to Gram, and was given the bad news.

“Donny, I'd rather pull my tongue out than tell you this, but you can't keep it.”

“W-why not? That's not fair!” Dismay sent my voice high. “I'm the one who found it, and if I hadn't, it'd still be there in the creek and the haying crew might break it when they pull the stacker across, and so I saved its life, sort of, and I don't see why I can't—”

“You can talk that way until you're blue, but I just don't like your having something that rightfully might be theirs,” she laid down the law as she saw it. “Sparrowhead makes the riders turn in anything like this they come across, you know that.” I absolutely could not see why the Williamsons were entitled to something that had fallen to the ground probably before the ranch even existed, but Gram's mind was made up. “Go on up to the house and give it to him.”

“Good eye, Buckshot” was all the thanks I got from Wendell Williamson when I did so. “Lucky to find one of these. It's pre-Columbian.” He liked to say things like that to show he had been to college, although Gram claimed it only went to prove he was an educated fool besides a natural-born one. Anyway, when I looked up the meaning of the phrase in the Webster's dictionary Meredice Williamson kept in the bookcase with the Condensed Books, I was awed. Older than Columbus! That made the black arrowhead even more magical for me. Just think, it had lain there all those hundreds of years, until, as the man himself said, I was lucky enough to be the one to find it. Equally unlucky, it had to be admitted, to be forced to part company with it. Well, that would not have to happen for good if my gamble of calling on the boss of the Double W paid off in that way, too.

•   •   •

W
ITH HOPE AND TREPIDATION,
I now approached the office. The door was open, but I knew to knock anyway.

When he saw it was me, Wendell Williamson sat back in his swivel chair, which Gram claimed was the only thing on the ranch he knew how to operate. “What can I do you for, Buckshot?”

This was new territory for me, as I had only ever peeked in when he was not there. The office smelled of tobacco and old hides like the mountain lion skin and head draped over a cabinet in one corner, enough to set a visitor back a little, but I advanced as though life depended on it. “Hi,” I said, my voice higher than intended.

The man behind the desk, no taller nor heftier than average, had a kind of puffy appearance, from his fleshy hands to a pillow-like girth to an excessive face, his hairline in deep retreat up to a cluster of curly gray in the vicinity of his ears. Gram called him Sparrowhead behind his back because of what she believed was the quality of birdbrain under that jag of hair. Or sometimes her remarks about her employer were more along the line that he was the sort of person who'd drown kittens to keep himself busy. Regardless of what she thought of him, or he of her, they had maintained a prickly standoff, the boss of the ranch reluctant to fire the tart-tongued cook because of her skill at feeding a crew on the cheap, and the often-disgusted mealmaker who ruled the kitchen putting up with his stingy ways on account of me.

Gram's bad turn of health was about to bring all that to a crashing end, if I couldn't do something about it. Wendell—I didn't dare think of him as Sparrowhead just then—was examining me as if he hadn't seen me every day of the past couple of years. “I hear you're getting a trip to Minnesota.”

“Wisconsin.”

“Nuhhuh.” This strangulated utterance was a habit of his. Gram said it made him sound like he was constipated in the tonsils. “It amounts to about the same, back there.” I suppose trying to be civil, he drawled, “Come to say ‘Aw river,' have you?”

The joke about “au revoir,” if that was what it was, went over my head. “Uh, not exactly,” I stammered in spite of myself. “It's about something else.” He waited expressionlessly for me to get it out. Heaven only knew what rash requests had been heard in this office down through the years by one poker-faced Double W boss or the next. None quite like mine, though. “What it is, I want to get your autograph.”

He gave me a beady look, as if suspicious I was making fun of him. I quickly displayed the autograph book. “Mered—Mrs. Williamson—already put in her name and a sort of ditty for me.”

That changed his look, not necessarily for the better. “She did you the honor, did she. You must have caught her when she wasn't packing up for Beverly Hills again.” He reluctantly put out a paw-like hand, saying he guessed he'd better keep up with her any way he could. Taking the album from me, he splayed it on the desk with the practiced motion of someone who had written out hundreds of paychecks, a good many of them to cooks he'd fired. I waited anxiously until he handed back what he wrote.

In the game of life, don't lose your marbles.

Wendell Williamson

Double W ranch

in the great state of Montana

“Gee, thanks,” I managed. “That's real good advice.”

He grunted and fiddled busily with some papers on his desk, which was supposed to be a signal for me to leave. When I did not, he frowned. “Something else on your mind?”

I had rehearsed this, my honest reason for braving the ranch boss in his lair, over and over in my head, and even so it stumbled out.

“I, uh, sort of hoped I could get a haying job. Instead of, you know. Wisconsin.”

Wendell could not hide his surprise. “Nuhhuh. Doing what?”

I thought it was as obvious as the nose on his face. “Driving the stacker team.”

This I could see clear as anything, myself paired with the tamest workhorses on the place, everyone's favorites, Prince and Blackie, just like times on the hay sled last winter when whoever was pitching hay to the cows let me handle the reins. The hayfield job was not much harder than that, simply walking the team of horses back and forth, pulling a cable that catapulted a hayfork load onto the stack. Kids my age,
girls
even, drove the stacker team on a lot of ranches. And once haying season got underway and gave me the chance to show my stuff at driving the easy pair of horses, it all followed: Even the birdbrain behind the desk would figure out that in me he had such a natural teamster he'd want to keep me around as a hayhand every summer, which would save Gram's spot as cook after her recuperation, and the cook shack would be ours again. To my way of thinking, how could a plan be more of a cinch than that?

I waited expectantly for the boss of the Double W to say something like “Oh man, great idea! Why didn't I think of that myself?”

Instead he sniffed in a dry way and uttered, “We're gonna use the Power Wagon on that.”

No-o-o!
something inside me cried. The Power Wagon for
that
? The thing was a huge beast of a vehicle, half giant jeep and half truck. Talk about a sparrowheaded idea; only a couple of horsepower, which was to say two horses, were required to hoist hay onto a stack, and he was going to employ the equivalent of an army tank? I stood there, mouth open but no words adequate. There went my dream of being stacker driver, in a cloud of exhaust. I was always being told I was big for my age, but I couldn't even have reached the clutch of the dumb Power Wagon.

“Cutting back on workhorses, don't you see,” Wendell was saying, back to fiddling with the papers on the desk. “Time to send the nags to the glue factory.”

That did that in. If charity was supposed to begin at home, somehow the spirit missed the Double W by a country mile. Apprentice cusser that I was, I secretly used up my swearing vocabulary on Wendell Williamson in my defeated retreat down the hallway. I can't account for what happened next except that I was so mad I could hardly see straight. Without even thinking, as I passed the show-off table and its wonders for the last time, I angrily snatched the black arrowhead and thrust it as deep in my jeans pocket as it would go.

Gram watched in concern as I came back into the cook shack like a whipped pup. “Donny, are you crying? What happened? Didn't the fool write in your book for you?”

“Got something in my eye,” I alibied. Luckily the veterinarian's pickup pulled up outside and honked. In a last flurry, Gram gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Off you go,” her voice broke. “Be a good boy on the dog bus, won't you.”

A
ND HERE
I
WAS
,
stepping up into what I thought of as the real bus, with
GREYHOUND—THE FLEET WAY TO TRAVEL
in red letters on its side and, to prove it, the silver streamlined dog of the breed emblematically running flat-out as if it couldn't wait to get there. Maybe not, but I had two days and a night ahead of me before climbing off at the depot in farthest Wisconsin, and that felt to me like the interminable start of the eternity of summer ahead.

At the top of the steps I stopped short, not sure where to sit. The seats in long rows were easily four times as many as in the Rocky Mountain Stage Line sedan, the roomy high-backed sets on each side of the aisle making my ride from Gros Ventre squashed between the mailbag and the bulky woman seem like three in a bed with room for two, as Gram would have said. This was a vehicle for a crowd, and it already was more than half full. Way toward the back as though it was their given place sat some soldiers, two together on one side of the aisle and their much more sizable companion, who needed the space, in the set of seats across from them. Slumped in front of them was a bleary, rumpled guy in ranch clothes, by every sign a sheepherder on a spree, who appeared to have been too busy drinking to shave for a week or so. Across from him, like a good example placed to even him out, rested a nun in that black headgear outlined in white, her round glasses firm on her set face. Then toward the middle were scattered leathery older couples who I could tell were going home to farms or ranches or little towns along the way, and some vacationers dressed to the teeth in a way you sure don't see these days, coats and ties on the men and color-coordinated outfits for the women. One and all, the already-seated passengers were strangers to me, some a lot stranger than others from the looks of them, which didn't help in making up my mind. Much more traveled than I ever hoped to be, Gram had forewarned, “The dog bus gets all kinds, so you just have to plow right in and stake out a place for yourself.” Yeah, but where?

Now I noticed the dark-haired woman nearest me, with her name sewn in red on her crisp blouse in waitress fashion, although I couldn't quite read it. Wearing big ugly black-rimmed glasses that made her look like a raccoon, she took short quick drags on a cigarette while reading a movie magazine folded over. She was sitting alone, but her coat was piled in the seat beside her, not exactly a friendly signal. Robbed of that spot—I'd have bet my bottom dollar that she knew how to be good company, snappy when talking was called for but otherwise minding her own business; some people simply have that look—I kept scanning the seats available among the other passengers, but froze when it came to choosing. It was a bad time to turn bashful, but I decided to take potluck and ducked into an empty set of seats a row behind the nonstop smoker.

No sooner had I done so than I changed my mind. About potluck, I mean. What was I going to do if the bus filled up and whoever sat next to me was anything like the nonstop talker about the digestive system? Or if the drunk sheepherder toward the back, recognizing me as fresh off the ranch—my shirt said something like that—came staggering up the aisle to keep me company? Or the nun decided to sneak up and get going on me about God? I didn't know squat about religion, and this was not the time to take that on. It panicked me to think about trying to keep up with conversations like those all the way to the next stop, Havre, or who knew, endless hours beyond that.

I bolted back out of the bus, drawing a glance between rapid-fire puffs as I passed the seated woman.

Luckily I was in time. The lanky driver in the blue Greyhound uniform and crush hat like a pilot's was just then shutting the baggage compartment in the belly of the bus. “Sir? Mister?” I pleaded. “Can I get my suitcase?”

He gave me one of those
Now what?
looks, the same as when he'd punched my ticket and realized I was traveling by myself at my age.

Straightening up, he asked with a frown, “Not parting company with us, are you? There's no refund once you're checked onto the bus, sonny.”

“Huh-uh, no,” I denied, “nothing like that,” although jumping back on the Chevy bus for its return trip to Gros Ventre was mighty tempting. “I need to get something out, is all.” He hesitated, eyeing the profusion of suitcases in the compartment. “Something I need helluva bad.”

“That serious, is it.” He seemed more amused than compelled by my newfound swearing skill. “Then I guess I better pitch in. But make it quick. I can do my tire check while you're at that. Remind me, which bag is yours?” When I pointed, he gave me another one of those looks. “Don't see that kind much anymore.”

Kneeling on the concrete while the traffic of the busy Great Falls depot went on around me, I unlatched Gram's old suitcase and dug out the autograph book, stuffing it in the pocket of my corduroy jacket. While I had the suitcase open, I reluctantly tucked the black arrowhead in under the moccasins; I hated not to be carrying it as a lucky piece, but I didn't want to risk being jabbed in my sitting part all the way to Wisconsin, either.

Missions accomplished, I returned the suitcase to the baggage compartment as best I could. Headed to climb back on the bus, I nearly bumped into the driver coming around the front. I still was on his mind, apparently. “Say, I saw you come straight off the Rocky bus—did you get your Green Stamps?”

I plainly had no idea what he was talking about. “They're a special deal this summer, long-distance passengers get them for their miles. You're going quite a ways across the country, aren't you?” I sure was, off the end of the known world. “Then, heck, go in and show your ticket to the agent.” He jerked a thumb toward the terminal. “Hustle your fanny, we're leaving before long.”

My fanny and I did hustle inside, where I peered in every direction through the depot crowd before spotting the ticket counter. Miraculously no one was there ahead of me, and I barged up to the agent, a pinchfaced woman with a sort of yellowish complexion, as if she hadn't been away from the counter for years, and rattled off to her while waving my ticket, “I'm supposed to get Green Stamps, the driver said so.”

“Those.” She sniffed, and from under the counter dug out sheets of stamps, about the size you would put on a letter but imprinted with a shield bearing the fancy initials
S&H
, and sure enough, sort of pea green. Next she checked my ticket against a chart. “Sixteen hundred and one miles,” she reported, looking me over as though wondering whether I was up to such a journey. Nonetheless she began counting out, telling me I was entitled to fifty stamps, a full sheet, for every hundred miles I was ticketed for. As the sheets piled up, I started to worry.

“Uhm, I forgot to ask. How much do they cost?”

“What the little boy shot at and missed,” she answered impassively, still dealing out green sheets.

Really? Nothing? Skeptically I made sure. “The dog bus just gives them away?”

“Believe it or not,” she muttered, little knowing that was the most convincing reply she could have given me.

Pausing, she squared the sheets into a neat stack. “That's sixteen,” she announced, studying the chart again with a pinched frown. The one extra mile evidently constituted a problem for her. “What the hey,” she said, and tossed on another green sheet.

“Wh-what do I do with them?” I had to ask as I gathered the stack of stamps off the counter. Handing me what she called a collector book, which was right up my alley, she explained that I was supposed to stick a sheet onto each page and when enough pages were filled, I could trade in the collection for merchandise at any store that hung out an S&H sign. “You've always wanted a lawn chair, I bet,” she said expressionlessly.

“Uh, sure.” Shoving the Green Stamp haul into my opposite jacket pocket from the autograph book, I turned to dash to the bus. Behind me I heard her recite, “God bless you real good, sonny.”

•   •   •

A
LREADY THIS WAS
some trip, I thought to myself as I dodged through the depot crowd, enriched with a pocketful of trading stamps and a blessing, not really sure I was glad of the latter if that implied I might need it. In any case, I scurried out and vaulted back into the impressive silver-sided Greyhound. The same seat was available and I dropped into it as if I owned it.

There. I felt more ready. Now if I was trapped with someone who wanted to talk my ear off about canned succotash or similar topics, I could head them off by asking for their autograph and get them interested in my collection. It was at least a plan.

As the loudspeaker announced the last call for the eastbound bus, which was us, I waited tensely for whatever last-minute passenger would come panting aboard and, as surely as a bad apple falls tardily from a tree, plop into the seat next to mine. And sure enough, the sound of someone setting foot on the steps reared me half out of my seat to see. But it was only the driver, who shook his head to himself as I sank back down and he started a passenger count with me, then slid in behind the steering wheel. The next thing I knew, we were pulling out of Great Falls and lurching onto the highway.

•   •   •

O
NCE UNDERWAY,
the bus lived up to that tirelessly loping emblem on its side. In short order, the country along the highway turned to grainfield, miles of green winter wheat striped with the summer fallow of strip farming and tufted here and there with low trees planted around farm buildings as windbreaks. I stayed glued to the window, which for a while showed the blue-gray mountains I had been used to all my life, jagged tops white with snow left over from winter. All too soon, the familiar western peaks vanished behind a rise and did not come back. Apparently everything this side of the Rockies was dwarfed in comparison and only any good for plowing, not a cow or horse anywhere in sight. I could just imagine Wisconsin, the whole place a cornfield or something.

Watching the miles go by, with no company but my indistinct reflection, loneliness caught up with me. It had been held off by the woman talking a blue streak at me on the ride from Gros Ventre and then the confusion of getting settled on the Greyhound, but now if I could have seen myself, hunched in that seat amid the rows of passengers confined within themselves by the cocoon of travel, surely I matched the picture of despair conjured by one of those sayings of Gram's, lonely as an orphan on a chamber pot.

Eleven going on twelve is a changeable age that way. One minute you are coltish and sappy, and the next you're throwing a fit because you're tired or hungry or something else upsetting is going on inside you. Right then my mood churned up a storm. Things had been tossed turvy, and although I was the one cast out alone onto a transcontinental bus, home was running away from me, and had been ever since some doctor's dire words to Gram. For if I lost the last of my family to the poorfarm or worse, with that went everything connected to the notion of home as I had known it, and I would be bound for that other terrifying institution, the orphanage.

Full of instinct and intrigue as a schoolyard is, kids grasp to a terrifying extent what losing the world you have known means. Too many times had I heard the whisper race through recess, jackrabbit telegraph, that so-and-so was “going to the other side of the mountains.” Packed up and dumped in the state-run orphanage over at Butte, that meant, across the Continental Divide where the sun went down and so did kids' lives. Designation as an orphan truly did sound to me fatal in a way, the end of a childhood in which my parents, in their shortened lifetimes, literally moved earth, and would have done the same with heaven had it been within immediate reach, to keep me always with them no matter how unhandy the circumstances.

So, right then it did not seem at all imaginary that life was turning against me, Gram and me both, to an awful extent. I resented the human plumbing or whatever it was in her case that produced this situation. If that nun back there playing with her beads or whatever wanted to do something useful, why didn't she pray up a better system of women's insides so a boy wouldn't worry himself sick about losing his grandmother, all he had, to some kind of operation?

And getting booted out of the cook shack and off the ranch like we were nobody—if that wasn't enough cause for resentment, I didn't know what qualified. I could have driven that stacker team in haying time just fine, and if Wendell Williamson didn't think so, he needed his sparrow head examined.

The list didn't stop there. These shirttail relatives I was going to be stuck with for an endless summer—why hadn't this Kitty and Dutch pair, the Brinkers by name, ever visited us, so I'd at least know what they looked like? Even if they were dried-up old coots who probably kept their teeth in a glass at night, as I figured they must be, it would have helped if I could picture them at all.

•   •   •

I
COULD HAVE
gone on and on like that, nose against the window and feeling sorry for myself, but that gets old, too. Stirring myself so plowed fields would not bore me out of my skull, to be doing anything I took out the autograph book. It opened to
In the game of life, don't lose your marbles.
Right. If you were lucky enough to own any marbles to start with. Moodily I moved on from the Double W brand of advice, flipping to the front of the book. Naturally, Gram's was the very first inscription. Wouldn't a person think, in a nice autograph book that she'd spent real money for, she would have carefully written something like
To my one and only grandson
 . . . ? Instead, in her scrawl that barely did for grocery lists:

My love for you shall flow

Like water down a tater row.

Your Gram,
Dorie Blegen

I was finding out that people came up with surprising things like that almost automatically when presented with the autograph book. It was as if they couldn't resist putting down on the page—their page, everyone got his own, I made sure—something of themselves, corny though it might be, and happily signing their name to it. Wistfully thumbing through the inscriptions, I lost myself for a while in the rhymes and remarks of my school friends and teachers and the ranch hands and visitors like the veterinarian and, when I hit it lucky, a big shot like Senator Ridpath when he spoke in the Gros Ventre park on the Fourth of July. That was my prize one so far; the senator was surely famous, if for nothing more than having been in office almost forever. What a pretty piece of writing his was as I looked at it with admiration again, every letter of the alphabet perfectly formed, and the lines about the pen being mightier than the sword composed there as balanced as a poem.