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Short Stories & Tall Tales
THE SILVER FREIGHT
Edward Massey
The boy rested the shotgun butt on his right thigh, barrel extended above his head. He held his right hand high on the butt, resting his finger lightly on the trigger guard. He kept his finger clear of the barrel. It was dead cold. The boy’s posture was as erect and stiff and straight as the shotgun. Together, the shotgun and the boy formed a totem sitting next to a man.
The deep blue tissue of cold sky stretched high above him. He followed the sky’s edges out as far as the eye could carry. Moonlight and white hills combined to provide enough light to see the trail across the frozen rock. He could see they were alone out in the open. Someone could be hiding behind the scruffy sagebrush and scrawny pines up in the foothills. Not much cover, but someone could be there.
The totem boy’s breath streamed out ahead. He measured how he felt inside. Calm. He measured his breath. Normal.
The man sitting next to him held the reins one in each hand. Working on a Sunday, the day before New Year’s, not in the official capacity conferred by the star peeking from his vest, he was a man with two families, at the extra job he needed to support the boy’s mother. With a bare flick of his wrists he formed a little ripple that traveled down the leather straps to the back of the horses.
The twelve-year-old boy holding the shotgun measured his head and shoulders even with the man wearing the star holding the reins. The lurch of the wagon’s roll over a rock brought their shoulders together. He tightened his grip on the double barrel. He felt the cold in his knuckles.
Slowly scanning all the way around the horizon, the deep blue had started to change, soon bright. He could see dirt and sage and winter dead bushes all the way to the bluff. No one could be behind those scrawny bushes. He leaned his shoulder into his father again.
“Big day tomorrow,” John Willford said. “New Century.”
“Do we have to work?” asked Mark Willford.
“You won’t.”
The boy waited for more. The wagon rolled. The sky brightened. The pause lasted. His father had said all he had to say. They passed a mile in silence.
“Mine holiday,” said his father. The boy found the thread from the long pause. “You get the rest of the day off, today. We’ll unload this by noon. You’ll miss church, but we’ll have you home before dark.”
The horses pulled the wagon and the boy and the man with the star another mile over the frozen ground.
“I’ll let you get home by yourself,” his father said in answer to no particular question.
“O.k.,” said the boy. He cast about for an acceptable way to ask where his father was going. “You need to work?”
“I’ll go back to Park City.”
“Trouble?”
“Don’t expect any,” said his father. “A little excitement, maybe, what with the miners and it being New Year’s.”
“Can I help?”
“You’re helping now.”
The boy heard the double meaning in his father’s words. He spoke truth and used it to say no.
Silence settled between them again. The boy felt a thrill just talking to his father, even if this was the way they talked to each other, punctuated by silences.
They drove on through the narrow ribbon formed by the creek on the left and the sandstone bluffs on the right, horses’ hooves on frozen mud the only sound.
Determined to make his point, the boy pushed the shotgun out in front of his chest with both hands.
“I was thinking more about tonight,” he said. “You know, about helping you with the miners.”
“I know you were.”
Maybe not a mile this time, just a long pause.
“It won’t be nothin’.”
Pause.
“I can help, Pa.”
“I know.”
The boy tried to find a way to argue his case. They rolled on for more than a mile in silence.
Like he could read minds, his father said:
“I like the way you handle that gun, but not tonight.”
No matter how he tried to control it, the pride rose up. Best not to let on; best not to get proud over doing a job you were supposed to be able to do.
“I need the experience,” he said.
“Mark Willford, that’s not how you get experience.”
Horses hooves on silence.
How do you get experience? He knew it was not something to ask; it was something to figure out.
“Your Ma needs you tomorrow.”
“Aw, Pa, she’ll just have me tending stove.”
“Well, do a good job,” said his father. “You need the experience.”
They continued on, Mark Willford trying to figure out how to keep going what passed for talk between them.
John Willford Simms interrupted his effort.
“You finished the sixth grade?”
The question surprised the boy. His father knew every thing about him. Why’s he asking?
“You know for sure, Pa. You’re joshin’. I’m half-way through the seventh.”
“You did pretty well, didn’t you?”
The man, over six feet tall, was solid like an oak. The boy, already measured up as the same height, was growing into solid like a barrel. The boy sensed how big his father was without making any connection to how big he was. He would always be a boy.
“I reckon,” said the boy.
Be careful not to say too much. From whatever year marked an earlier age, he had learned that you never talked much about how good you were at things you did. That was to risk the wraith of God and those you wanted to love and trust you.
“Your teacher told me you know how to read and write.”
“Of course I do, Pa,” said the boy. Why wouldn’t a seventh grader know how to read and write? Then he thought better of the retort forming in his mouth. His father had just told him he had been talking to his teacher. The Sheriff talked to the teacher all the time, but the boy never knew the Sheriff became the father and talked about him. Best be humble. “The numbers give me trouble, though. And I have algebra this year.”
This was a conversation. Questions. Answers. Talk flowing straight-ahead out into the cold mountain air.
“Teacher thinks you’re doing o.k. in school. Never mentioned numbers.”
“It comes. But numbers is hard.”
“Teacher told me you read important things. Like the Greek…what’d she call them?”
The man edged the right wheels of the freight wagon past a wall the bluff made down to their trail. The question and the maneuvering came all easy and his eyes never moved from straight-ahead.
“Classics,” the boy said. He slid the shotgun onto his left thigh and held it with both hands.
“Yeah, The Classics,” said the man. He thought a moment. “Well, maybe she called them something else. Myths. No, Epics. The Greek Epics.”
“Might ‘a’ been,” said the boy.
“Anyway, you like them?”
“Sure,” said the boy. “There’s a whole bunch of ‘em. All adventures.”
“You say?” said the Sheriff, a tone in his voice. “Adventures, huh?”
The boy wondered at the tone. It didn’t make sense for the Sheriff to be interested in adventure stories. They were boy’s stuff. It made him feel uneasy.
“Names are hard though,” he said.
“Tell me one,” said the Sheriff. He added, “One of the adventures.”
“Have you heard about the horse?” asked the boy, feeling no less uneasy, not sure where to start, but happy to have the chance to show his father what he knew. “The Trojan Horse?”
“That was the one they used to trick them guys, right?”
“Say, Pa,” the alerted boy said. “I think you’re tryin’ to trick me, yourself.”
“Naw,” said the Sheriff. He had never seen the need to tell his son that immigration from Derbyshire to Summit County limited what you owned to what you could carry. His mother had carried three books across the ocean and across the plain: the Bible, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. “Maybe Ma read me a few stories.”
“Like I was saying, they’re all adventures. You know the story.”
“Well, I know what I know,” said the father. “I don’t know what you know.”
The boy thought about that. He knew he was expected to face right up to the challenge.
“You’re right, Pa. That horse was a trick. What really gets me is you’re reading along and all of a sudden there’s this little lesson. You have to stop. You just can’t keep reading. It makes you think.”
“I never heard tell that before.”
The son was not so sure he believed the words he heard.
“Y’know, Pa, a little bit like you. You’re always teaching lessons.”
The father’s slight smile went unobserved. He had trained the boy well to maintain a straight-ahead lookout.
“I thought those stories were just boring old things to kids,” said the father. “Here, you got ‘em being adventures and lessons.”
The boy noticed.
“Well, I guess that’s why I like to read ‘em. This Trojan War was supposed to be about some woman, but that’s not it at all.” The boy paused, wanting encouragement, heard none, he had to decide he wanted to tell his father what he thought. He carried on. “It was really about selfishness -- the selfishness of some general named Agamemnon.”
“How so?”
“He took all the pretty women … and the gold … for himself. He was a selfish s.o.b.”
“Some people are like that,” said the father. “You’ll have to learn how to know which ones.”
“I know that, Pa,” said the boy, “but that’s not the lesson.”
“How so?”
“Here’s what stopped me cold. The war goes bad for him. He starts to think about the mistakes he’s made. Lo and behold, he realizes,” the words had started to come in a rush. The boy caught himself. “Well, he realizes it all goes back to when he stole Zeus’s daughter.”
“You don’t say.”
The boy tensed up, alerted, the moment the words floated into the cold mountain air. He better tread carefully here. Better to test it.
“You know who Zeus’s daughter was?”
“No.”
“Folly,” he said.
He looked at his father.
“Keep a sharp lookout,” said the Sheriff. “Eyes straight ahead.”
He suffered the rebuke in silence. Was this new information? Or had he discovered something as old as the mountains that surrounded them.
“Zeus’s daughter was named ‘Folly,’” Mark Willford said for emphasis. He waited out the silence.
“Oh.” The Sheriff’s straight-ahead, watchful eyes widened in the father’s understanding. He turned from the straight-ahead look at the hard road and said to the boy. “I get it. When that General embraced ‘Folly’, that’s when all the trouble started.”
“Yep.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
The boy stood tall in the bucket. Father and son both looked straight-ahead. Both could feel and hear the pride.
“I’ll be damned.”
Horses hooves on silence.
“Ain’t that something?”
Now, that was a compliment.
Horses hooves on silence.
“Why don’t we switch,” said John Willford. The boy’s face clouded with the thought the Sheriff was relieving him. He was, but he said, “You handle the reins better’n me, best as I recollect.”
The trail continued, two long scars scratched in the sandy rocks by wagon wheels, summer or winter, except when there was snow. For one bright day the snow looked like a giant sheet that had never been scratched extending all directions. A wagon trail covered in snow was perfectly beautiful and perfectly treacherous. No way to know where to go and no traction and no way to move the heavy snow. A trail covered in snow didn’t happen very often. The air was dry and mostly it was just cold winter gray.
On the trail about three hours, the cold early morning darkness of the last day of December of 1899 had given way to cold early morning sunlight. By the time the boy dropped his father at the Sheriff’s office and took the rig back the sun would be as high in the sky as it was going for the day. It would still have no heat in it.
“You can read and you can write. You know your grammar, and you struggle with your numbers, but you can get ‘em. That about right?”
Mark Willford risked a peek. He could see his father’s eyes moving around, looking both directions, as they came out of the little canyon into a clearing.
“I can add and subtract and do long division and all my multiplication tables. I just don’t like them. This year is the worst.”
The boy wondered why the questions; he knew to answer questions before asking any. Besides, he would take attention in any form. John Willford was a busy man what with his job and his first family. He never came to visit his second family at home. The boy saw his father at church and at work, like today.
“We’ll be there soon,” said John Willford. Bright clear blue had replaced the dark canopy of sky. They could see for miles around. They could be seen for miles around right out in the open inching a shipment of silver behind two tired horses over frozen scratch marks.
“Like I said, let’s us switch.” This time the man’s voice held no concern for the boy’s feelings. “You take the reins and I’ll ride shotgun for a while.”
Ahead they could see the few rough buildings of the town that had sprung up around the railroad siding. Behind them lay the foothills of the Uintah Mountains, hiding the mine and the small smelter where they had picked up their load and started their day.
Mark Willford started to jump down off the side of the freight wagon.
“Here, let me take this,” John Willford interrupted him, reaching his left hand around the double barrel and extending the long gun barrel away, butt toward his son. “Mind the trigger. Now, step down. You know how to handle a gun, don’t you?”
“Pa, you just said you like the way I handle the gun. You taught me, remember.”
Mark Willford remembered. His father pointed out every mistake and just as fast told him when he did right. He was that way with everybody.
What he never told his son was that he believed his son had been given something above average by God. He wasn’t willing to lay a name to it and he didn’t believe it would count for much if the boy wasn’t well trained.
Mark Willford had won the rifle competition in the County Fair and come this July, at Pioneer Days, they would let him compete with the adults. Of course, he knew how to handle a gun.
“Well, then, do it right,” said John Willford.
“I was doing it right,” said the boy. “I was holding it straight up and down. I know not to have an accident.”
“Best know,” said John Willford, “seein’ that I’d be on the other end of your accident.” He sidestepped to his left and sat down. “Best also know that when you’re changing drivers, taking the gun off guard, like you were fixing to do, ain’t the way to do it.”
“Yes, sir,” said Mark Willford. It was like reading those Greeks.
Mark Willford drove a few long minutes in silence to the turn toward the railroad siding and entered the streets of the small town. John Willford looked far down the street past the siding. Clear. He pointed to a spot.
“Head her to number two down there.”
The alleyway next to the siding held a conveyor leading up to and over the ore car. Mark Willford’s job was to use the reins to maneuver the horses and the silver wagon right up next to the conveyor. He was not going to admit it was hard work. He was going to get it right. On the first try, he backed into the number two spot.
“You can handle the wagon fine.”
“Thanks, Pa.”
“It ain’t to thank,” said the Sheriff.
Being told you did a good job was no common thing. You had to thank a person for that gift. Before he could disagree with him, the Sheriff spoke again.
“It’s time to get a job. You best talk to Mr. Parley up here about riding guard for him on these silver wagons.”
“Think I could?” asked the boy.
“You’re made of pretty good stock.”
Praise came rare as rain and never direct. High praise came when you were measured and told you measured up.
In that moment he realized he would have to leave school, and he learned praise is best used as a salve to pain.
“How much schooling did you get, Pa?”
“About third grade.”
“Is that enough schooling to be Sheriff?” the boy asked.
“Evidently,” answered his father.
The boy feared he had overstepped. He just wanted to know what he was going to miss. How could he even ask his question? It seemed like he was contradicting.
“Oh, Pa,” he said, searching for words, “you know what I mean. How’d it work?”
“Your Grandpa left us down in the valley when he was sent up here to settle the Mission. They discovered the coal and the very next year the Legislature made a County up here. He was already looking out for the mission, so they made your Grandpa Sheriff. He moved Ma and us kids up here and Ma schooled us some. Did a pretty good job, too. By the time the schoolhouse got built, I was fifteen and already working. I was just too old to go back to school.”
“Truth be told, Ma was real concerned. She kept talking about all the fine gentlemen in England, all real educated. Pa came from there, too. Hell, we all did; but what he cared about was the practical things. He saw she kept me reading and writing and that was good enough for him. I learned as much from her as I ever would have learned in some old schoolhouse.”
Mark Willford knew about himself mostly as the son of the Sheriff. That Sheriff was the son of a Sheriff.
“So Grandpa thought you knew enough to become Sheriff.” He stood on the dock and looked at his father. “That right, Pa?”
“Keep working. There ain’t nothin’ to be gained looking at me.”
“Oh, Pa, I can haul and look.”
Silence grew between them. Mark Willford hauled and waited for an answer.
“So, how did you become Sheriff, Pa?”
“Don’t know what Pa thought. Wasn’t his way to tell me.”
Haul and wait.
“They never expected him to die. I guess they thought I could handle it.
“I helped the men build the cabin and worked in the garden and I knew I had to get a job. When I was twelve they let me go down in the mine. I wasn’t the only twelve year-old working in the mines. Lucky for me, it didn’t last long. They asked me to handle one of the wagons hauling coal.
“Truth to tell, I wondered if they gave me that job to get on Pa’s good side. Nobody ever said and I never asked. Rode that wagon ‘til I was eighteen, ‘til I made deputy.”
Something different was going on. John Willford never told him more than what to do and how to do it.
“Didn’t you work on the silver wagons, like we’re doing now.”
“That wasn’t ‘til after I was a deputy.” The Sheriff looked down the street, causing a long pause, and then coming from nowhere, he said: “Pa never did the silver lottery. We don’t seem to know much about how to make money.”
Mark Willford heard the “we.” Best do his job, work the back end of the wagon. Sweat grew down the back of the boy’s shirt.
“I got that job hauling salt. They use salt in the reduction of the silver ore. Until they built the railroads they had to haul the salt up from the lake where they dried it out. That’s how I ended up on the silver freight.”
Mark Willford saw his first step. If you could drive the silver freight, you could become Sheriff.
“I was eighteen when Pa told me to come start working for him. I can’t remember if I was driving the salt wagon or the silver freight, but I kept the other job. Had to.
“I worked as deputy a little more than twenty years. I guess they just naturally figured I was ready to be Sheriff.
“They just give you the star and you keep working. ‘Cept for him dying, wasn’t nothing.”
Mark Willford noticed that his Pa never even mentioned how his Pa died.
Mark Willford felt the full sweat of lifting and hauling. He could feel his father watching him. Just keep unloading.
“I kept on reading, pretty regularly.”
Done.
Mark Willford went to the front of the wagon. He had wrapped the reins securely around a nail pounded into the dash board. He slowly unwrapped them and turned back to face his father.
The glint of Luke Willford’s star shining bright in the cold morning sunlight on John Willford’s chest flashed in Mark Willford’s eyes.
He ignored the deep hollowness that came with knowing he would not go back to school. After all, he was the beneficiary of all the hardships his pioneer family had suffered. He could handle it.
Mark Willford drove father and son and wagon down the little street.
If his Pa thought it was time to get a job, then today was the day to get a job. After all, he was made of pretty good stuff. Pioneer stock. He had even made it through the sixth grade.
He knew he would be in these mountains forever. That was fine. He also knew he would become the Sheriff. But more than all of that he knew he would be the last Simms not to make it through the twelfth grade.
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