The Kean Land and Other Stories

The Kean Land

It is a small city in western Colorado. The main business section is downstream about a mile and a half where the railroad crosses the river. This is upstream where the suburban area crowds along both banks pushing on up the valley. Here, on the left bank, between the valley highway and the river, out of place, incongruous in the midst of closely built homes and street-corner stores and service stations and housing developments, is an oasis of clean uncluttered fields and woodlot, a farm caught, surrounded, imprisoned by the expanding city yet still complete, intact in its own quiet integrity. It has a small barn and a low flat-roofed building that was once a feeding shelter for cattle and a small house, half original log cabin, half frame addition.

On the porch of the addition sits an old man. He sits relaxed on an old rocker in heavy old work shoes and faded Levis and once-bright flannel shirt. His huge old frame, once powerfully muscled, is now lean and gaunt with age but his old eyes glow with an ageless vitality. He is talking to a younger man, to a writer of tales of the American West that was and is no more.

So Jeff Martin put you onto me. I haven’t seen Jeff in eight-ten years since he moved away but a friend of Jeff’s is a friend of mine and you can drive a nail on that. Maybe I’d better apologize for speaking so sour when you pulled in here. I thought you were another of those billy-be-damned real estate sharpers. Three of them already this week. They keep raising the ante. Can’t seem to pound into their heads price doesn’t mean a thing, I’m just plain not selling.

Sure, they’d like to get hold of this piece. One hundred sixty acres good land. What would they do with it? Slap together a couple hundred maybe more of those silly modern shacks they call ranch houses a real rancher wouldn’t live in and make a lot of money which seems to be the most important thing anybody can do nowadays. That’s progress. So they say. They’ve been putting the squeeze on me these last years, specially since this last boom started. Raised my taxes, twice. Zoned the section so I had to get rid of the cows. The horses too so I have to use a tractor. But I raise some garden stuff and take hay off the fields and with what I’ve got in the bank I make out. No one but me to worry over anyway. The kids are all grown. Getting kids of their own. Scattered from here to breakfast and all doing all right. They don’t feel about this place the way I do and no reason they should but all the same they say stick to it, dad, if that’s what you want and try a little buckshot on those real estate boys and if you need any bail money just holler. I promised Lettie, that was my wife, I wouldn’t sell, I’d keep it like this to the finish and there wasn’t any need for that promising because I’d always felt the way she did anyway. So I’m keeping it. When I’m laid under, the land grabbers can bid themselves silly over it and there’ll be a nice chunk of cash out of it to be split among the kids and I won’t be around to see what happens to the place . . .

So Jeff told you there’s a story in me, in my hanging on here. Well, yes, yes there is. About this place, yes. About how I came to be living here, in this house, the old part there first of course. But the real story goes way back and was over and done before I moved out here. I don’t figure in it much. I was just around and saw it happen and didn’t do much of anything that mattered myself except once when I unlocked the jail door down in town and maybe if I’d known what that meant I wouldn’t have done it.

I haven’t talked to anybody about what happened back then since Lettie died, that’ll be four years this fall. Nobody to talk to. The kind of folks crowding in around here now aren’t interested in the old days. Too busy making money or trying to and tearing up and down that highway there in cars that aren’t ever full paid for because of always being turned in on new ones and worrying about meeting installments on all the billy-be-damned gadgets people think they have to have nowadays cluttering their houses and getting in the way of decent living. They think me a cracked crotchety old fool. Much as say so. Maybe I am—from their side of the fence. I’ll say this much, in this country a man’s still got the right to be cracked and crotchety if he wants to. But try to tell folks like that how it all was and why I’m keeping this farm and they just plain wouldn’t get it.

Maybe you would. Seems Jeff Martin thinks you would. But I’m warning you, it isn’t pretty. The right and wrong of it’s hard for some to see straight. If you do anything with it you can fix the words up some, unravel them out where I get tangled. But don’t you go doctoring what happened any. The trouble with you writing men is you like to have things go along neat and fitting in together the way they don’t in real living. Trouble is you like to have things too fancy, twist them around so they work out slick in the end the way plenty times they just plain don’t. I won’t pretty this any. I’ll give it to you straight the only way I can which is telling about me and what I saw happen . . .

I grew up back east in Nebraska, back in the flat country. My folks had a farm there and I was their only kid. Something happened to my mother when I was born and she couldn’t have anymore. That didn’t slow her down in other ways though. The land was good being a piece my father had to buy because by time he came along there all the public land was gone and he went a heavy mortgage to get it but it was kind of far from the nearest settlement so we were to ourselves a lot. About all I can remember clear when I was a boy other than working twelve-fourteen hours a day when school wasn’t on and I’d be hiking the miles to it is those two, my father and my mother, fighting, arguing. Over just about anything any time but mostly over me. I was good size from the start and my father figured since I was all he’d have he’d get all the work he could out of me. He believed in work anyway, always said it was the best medicine for any human ailment. Mother figured the opposite. I was all she’d have and so she was bound determined to make something of me and her idea of something was an educated man. Less work and more learning was her stand. The two of them hammered away at each other all the time, thinking up arguments and throwing them at each other. They’d get so hot over it I’d be out working with my father and see him throw down whatever was in hand and go stomping into the house and I’d know he’d thought up a new argument and was hurrying to try it on her. I was near full grown before I understood that was how they liked it, how they kept some spice and tang in a hard life. My father had a big voice and when he got going he could shout her down but all the same I noticed it was my mother usually had her way. She had her way the year I hitched rides over into Illinois with a bank draft in my pocket and to Galesburg and enrolled in Knox College.

I can’t say I enjoyed that year though it started me reading some as I’ve done off and on ever since and I expect I learned plenty. Had to or be dropped from classes and my mother wouldn’t like that. But I was big and clumsy and fresh off the farm with only spotty schooling behind me and I didn’t fit in with the others. Didn’t specially want to. I never was what you’d call social-minded. More I saw of the students others looked up to because they had a little money and more I listened to some of the silly guff handed out by la-de-da teachers in their town clothes and their party manners, the more I kept thinking about my father back there on the farm who’d never had a full decent suit in his life and had to read following the words with a finger and spelling them out and did two men’s work every day and got peeved at himself because he couldn’t do more and still found time to go stomping into the house and show my mother what he thought of her by arguing and shouting her down and ending up doing what she wanted after all. I was about ready to quit anyway, near the end of that year, when the letter came from a neighbor there was cholera back home.

I took a train far as I could and hired a horse the rest of the way but even so I was too late. They were both gone when I got there. Already buried because people around were frantic over the cholera and got rid of bodies fast as they could. That was when I found out the two of them had pushed the mortgage on the farm up to the limit to get me that bank draft. The sharper who held the paper had already stepped in and foreclosed. I checked and found he’d done it the day they were buried. Maybe I could have stirred trouble but I was too hit to give a damn. I was seventeen-eighteen at the time. I had some money left from that draft. And I had a note from my father he’d given that neighbor for me the last day. It was just a misspelt scrawl in the squiggly squarish printing which was the only way he could write. I’ve still got it tucked away somewhere. I didn’t pay much attention to it right off but it turned out the best thing he could have left me. dere son—bruther scott wil help—in collerado

As I say, I didn’t pay much attention to that at first except to tuck it away in my purse as a keepsake. I wasn’t interested in asking anybody for any help or chasing down any relative let alone an uncle I hadn’t ever seen but only heard about some the few times my father had talked about his folks that he’d split with when he sided with the union in the Civil War. I just wanted to be let alone and to hell with the whole stinking world so I drifted off by my lonesome and down through Kansas and knocked around the panhandle and over into New Mexico.

I had my full growth already in those days and looked older than I was. People took me for a grown man so I tried acting like one and began drinking more than I could hold right and bucking smalltime faro games. Didn’t take long before I was flat broke. I kicked around picking up odd jobs, cadging handouts between, never staying long any one place, then I got into freighting, heavy hauling out of Santa Fe with the ox teams. I could do that. One thing I had in those days was muscle. Not much sense but plenty muscle. I’d sign on for a trip out and back and when we’d pull in again and be paid I’d quit and loaf around till the money went and go back and sign on again. Freighters in those days were a tough crew. A man who couldn’t hold his quart a day and bust a barrel with one wallop of his fist didn’t have a chance with them. They’d work up a fight and take a saloon apart just for the fun of it. Me, I’d hold back some because I wanted to make my pay-money last a while between jobs but then I’d get to feeling low again and I’d join in the drinking and likely the fighting too and wake up next morning in a back lot with a busted head or in jail for busting someone else’s head.

It was one of those times, in the Santa Fe jail I mean, that I got to thinking. There I was coming twenty-two and not doing so well by myself any way you figured. I wasn’t taking either my father’s or my mother’s side in that endless arguing they used to do. I was working, yes, off and on. But. I wasn’t working the way my father had, steady and slugging it through and aiming at some goal which for him had been paying off the mortgage and owning his land outright for once and building up his farm and though he never got there it was always there ahead of him and he was aiming at it. I wasn’t aiming at anything. There wasn’t even anything I felt like aiming at except maybe thumbing my nose at existence in general. And I sure wasn’t learning much the way my mother had wanted me to—that is, not the kind of things she had in mind. Thinking of those two reminded me of that note. I didn’t really fit where I was like I hadn’t at Knox and I didn’t have any notion where I would. That note was a hunch and I might as well play it. Soon as I could pull out I headed up here into Colorado looking for my uncle Scott.

I didn’t know much about him except he was a few years younger than my father and like my father had headed west after the Civil War broke up the family back in the Kentucky hills. Not much on size, my father said once, and not much use with a plow but all the same a goldamned good fighting man when the trouble came even if he did join the rebs and had to be licked. Seeing that they’d been on opposite sides in the war and kept going different ways after and neither one was a letter-writing man, how my father had managed to keep any track of him is something I never have figured out.

I didn’t even know where he was in the state or if he was still around but it didn’t take long to find out. I headed up Taos way and over the line, following the Grande upstream asking questions. Right away at Del Norte I hit a man who’d heard of him and sent me on towards this Mesa country. I kept on, asking my questions, and when I got up this way I was surprised to find how well known he was. I was surprised another way too. I’d say I was looking for Scott Hammon and people would stare at me quick and sharp and check me over before they’d talk. After a while I figured what they were doing. They were checking did I pack a gun. I didn’t and when they saw that they’d loosen some. But they wouldn’t say much, just send me on to the next place heading here.

That’s how it was when I reached this valley. There wasn’t much here then, just a little settlement that was hardly even a real town yet, just a stopping-off place where a couple stage lines crossed and some stores and a few saloons and a blacksmith shop had sprung up to take care of people from the ranches scattered about and those who had come into the state in the mining-boom days and prospected around and got sense enough to quit that dream-chasing and settled here because it was nice country. No, there wasn’t much here then—except the things that made it nice country. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been missing the feel of good growing earth under my feet down in the dry sandy areas till I got up here where the valleys were wide and green and had trees that were trees not twisty prickly little runts. It wasn’t flat and dull like over east in the part of Nebraska I’d known. Lift your head any time and you’d see the mountains ranging off into the distance telling you to stand tall with rock in your spine the way they did. It was my kind of country. It’s still the same kind but it isn’t the same anymore. Look out there and the mountains are still all around, still standing tall with real rock thrusting through. But about everywhere in between, like here in this valley, there’s the mess and clutter and meanness and littleness and frittering around that somehow blots out most of the decent when too many people get crowding together. But that’s a side trail, not what I started to tell you . . .

As I say, I finally came drifting up here. I dropped off the stage I’d hooked a ride on about where the bank building is now down there in the center. It was along mid morning. First person I saw was a gent wearing a storekeeper’s apron leaning against a hitching rail soaking up sun. I asked my question and he took his time looking me over and pointed at a two-story building across the road and sitting back about a hundred feet. It was fairly wide with a single doorway in the middle and a platform running clear across the front that could have been called a porch only it didn’t have a roof. I went over and up on the platform. The door was open and I looked in. A hall ran straight back through and around the stairway leading up and to another door at the back. I stepped into the hall and there was a doorway on each side of me. I picked the one on the right and looked in and saw a big room, the length of the building back, fixed up for a meeting place and makeshift courtroom. No one was there. I turned around to try the other door and saw a sign tacked up over it: Sheriff Office. The door was ajar and I pushed it further and saw a small room with an old desk and a couple chairs and another door, standing open, leading to whatever was behind. This room too was empty and I was wondering whether to push in further when I heard my father’s voice coming through that open inner doorway. It was my father’s voice, the same flat tone with the lingering trace of Kentucky drawl, only it wasn’t because it was a bit sharper, had more of an edge. Sobered up, eh? Prove it. Walk that chalk line.

I stepped quiet over to that inner doorway and looked through and there he was. He was standing about eight feet in with his back to me and just like that as I saw him first is still how I remember him best and I knew him at once and why people were careful talking about him because there was a big handle-worn forty-five hanging in an oiled old holster at his side and he was just as my father had said, not much on size, but the bare sight of him, just the back of him, standing there straight with a kind of military erectness and a plain completeness within himself told with no mistake he was a goldamnned good fighting man in any kind of trouble no matter what side he might be taking.

It was a fair-sized room he was in, the rest of that side of the building behind the little office. The back half of it was rigged for a jail with bars across and a partition in the middle making two cells. He was facing the one on the left and in there was a scrubby mean-looking man concentrating in a sort of silly mad earnestness on putting one foot after the other along a chalk line on the floor. This one was facing towards me. When his head came up he saw me and in the instant my uncle Scott was aware and was around, checking me over. He didn’t know who I was or anything about me but in that one look he knew I was just a big young one and harmless. Have a chair, he said. Be with you in a minute. Somehow doing what he said seemed a good notion and I backed off and sat on a chair by the front window and I heard a lock rattling in the inner room and then the mean-looking man came in and stood scowling and my uncle followed and went to the old desk and pulled open a drawer. He took a gun out of it and walked over and dropped it in the man’s holster and stepped back and stood still with his hands hanging limp and easy at his sides. You did some blowing last night, he said. About what you’d do when you sobered and had your gun again. Well, you’re sober and you’ve got it.

The man stood rigid all over like he was frozen and couldn’t move. His throat worked some and he got his voice out. Quit it, Hammon. That was just the whisky talking.

Well, then, my uncle Scott said. I can’t think of a single reason why you ought to stay around this town anymore. Can you?

The man took a deep breath. No, he said.

Right, my uncle Scott said. Your horse is out back. It’s a good day for traveling.

The man turned and faded through the outer door and my uncle went over and at down behind the desk and looked at me. Well, bub, what’s on your mind?

I gulped some and didn’t know how to begin. I’m Ben, I said. Ben Hammon.

He just kept looking at me in that steady way of his. John’s boy?

Yes, I said.

He studied me some more. His voice was careful, not showing anything. How is John doing these days?

He’s dead, I said.

My uncle Scott’s eyes shifted and he was looking past me, out the window. When?

Four years ago. He and mother. Cholera.

My uncle Scott looked out that window what seemed a long time. Then he was looking at me again. What are you doing here? I fumbled in my mind and couldn’t figure how to say what I wanted to say so I reached in my shirt pocket where I had it now and took out that note. I leaned over and put it on the old desk, in front of him and sat back and sudden I was about ready to bust out bawling because he reached the way my father would have done and held that wrinkled old note with one hand and pushed the forefinger of the other along it, spelling out the words. You took your time coming here, he said without looking up and there wasn’t any real answer to that and we just sat there, me on my chair by the window and him behind that old desk looking down at that note and then be raised his headed about hit me with the words. What’re you after now? Money?

That did it. That cut me loose. Goldamn it, no! I said. I been taking care of myself! I’m looking for a place where maybe I belong! That’s sure not here! I was starting out of that chair towards the door when he stopped me short. Sit down. It was about the same as if he’d caught me with a rope and put me back on that chair. He reached that note over and watched me put it in my pocket. Your father, he said, was a big noisy stubborn stiff-minded jackass. Like maybe you are too. He went his way and I went mine. But when we were kids and I was a scrawny little runt he whopped every big lout that tried picking on me. Maybe this is where you belong and maybe it ain’t. We’ll just find out. I’ve got quarters upstairs and there’s room enough for you too. You go get—

Wait a minute, I said. I didn’t want to say this because I didn’t know how he would take it but I had to say it. I stood up and looked right at him. Maybe you, I said, maybe you were kind of stubborn and stiff-minded too. And somehow that was the right thing for me to say and the little wrinkles around his eyes showed plainer. Good lord, boy, he said. Of course I was. Still am. I’m a Hammon same as your father was. Waited till he was dying before he turned to me. Likely I’d have done the same. But he knew damn well he could, didn’t he? You go get your things and move in.

Well, sir, I started in to say.

None of that, he said. The name’s Scott.

Well, now, Scott, I said. Everything I’ve got is on me right now.

He looked at me sharp and the little wrinkles around his eyes showed even plainer. Been taking mighty good care of yourself, haven’t you? That wipes out any moving problem anyhow. He pushed up from behind the desk. Come along. I’ll introduce you around.

That’s what he did, took me out and to every place near, the stores and the saloons and the blacksmith and the harness shops and the few houses close in, introducing me to everybody, nothing fancy, just telling who I was and I was visiting a while and if I liked it maybe I’d find something to do and stay around. What struck me first was how easy and friendly people were with me, how they took me as someone to be easy and friendly with and no questions asked except those meant to make me feel the same. Then I figured why. It wasn’t anything about me, it was the fact I was being introduced by a man named Scott Hammon and he was backing me and that was enough for them and not because there was a big forty-five hanging in a worn old holster at his side that showed it had been used plenty but just plain he was Scott Hammon and they liked him and were proud having him as a neighbor and as their sheriff who kept things quiet in their little town so folks could be easy and friendly with each other.

I learned all about that the next days, some from him but most from other people. He’d worn a badge in one place and another for quite a while up in the mining country and made himself a name calming some rough camps. He was fast with a gun, people said. Not as fast as some of the real experts were supposed to be and he’d been winged a few times, but once he had his gun out he was so billy-be-damned thorough with it that after a while he was known around and even the best would think twice or maybe three times before forcing him to a draw. He never backed away from a showdown but he didn’t go about pushing things to that either if he could avoid it. His way, when he could, when he had to arrest somebody and knew he couldn’t do it peaceful, was to try to get in close and jump the play quick and lay the barrel of his gun along the side of the man’s skull with power behind it and tote him off unconscious. More than one man, thinking it over after, had thanked him for doing it that way. And right too because a sore head’s better than being dead any time.

Then he sort of slowed down. Not really, just in how he looked at things. Maybe that was because he got married, a woman who’d come into the mountains for her health, lung trouble, and he had a fair taste of being peaceful with her before they found she’d come too late. They settled here because it was nice country and a quiet place and he worked at the stage station and took care of her till she died and then he quit his job and sat around all day staring off at the mountains and the town people knew a good thing when they had it and got together and asked him wouldn’t he take care of them now as their sheriff. He got up and took that old gunbelt off the nail where it’d been hanging and buckled it around his waist again