Riders of Judgment Read online

  Beneath the tale lies a deeper tale, one that is only alluded to and informs and broadens the novel. The forces in collision in the novel are not only the small farmers and the large ranchers, nor the passing of one generation of settlers to another, nor even the passage from an aristocratic class to an immigrant invasion. All of those forces come into play, but the novel is after bigger game. In the war between the rich ranchers and the poor immigrants, Fred Manfred was using the past to predict the future. In Cain Hammett’s struggle against the politically connected and wealthy interests that were transforming the West, we see the inevitable corporatization of America and its evolution from a farming and rural nation into a global concern in which the Cain Hammetts of the world—and that means all of us—are subordinated to interests and powers greater than ourselves.

  On January 2, 1959, Fred wrote in his personal copy of Riders: “Now here is a book that has been greatly under-rated. Technically it is better than Lord Grizzly. In fact, it is so well-finished that it seems to be only surface deep. But it isn’t. It bears a heavy load of meaning. I loved doing this book. It was with sadness that I saw the last page finished. I often became lonesome for the doing of it again. When I was a boy I swore that I would write a ‘real and true’ cowboy book—and when I finally did it, it was even better than I dreamed it would be.”

  I think Fred was right.

  The following is the talk I gave on October 22, 2012, at the University of Minnesota to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Fred’s birth, an event hosted by Cecily Marcus, head of the University of Minnesota Archives. Also speaking were Freya Manfred, his daughter and my wife, who acted as mistress of ceremony, our sons Nicholas Bly Pope and Ethan Rowan Pope, Robert Bly, Jim Lenfestey, John Calvin Rezmerski, Peter Campion, and Carol Connolly, with films by Mike Hazard and Greg Winter:

  I was honored, and very lucky, to be Fred Manfred’s son-in-law. Being a son-in-law is a little like being a professional spy: you’re admitted into the most intimate life of a family, and yet it’s not your family; you’re told things and shown things—and yet they’re not yours to hear or see. But it works—soon, and to your surprise, you find yourself becoming a part of that adopted family, sharing their secrets, their hopes, and their dreams.

  Of course Fred made all of that much easier, since he adopted not just me but the whole world. Fred did that by saying anything that came into his mind, from his darkest fears to his greatest dreams. A fleeting and even childish thought would often be followed by some profound philosophy, the highest artistic aspiration followed by despair at another season of watching the Chicago Cubs lose again. He was a man without filters, who never censored himself, and said embarrassing things that weren’t meant to embarrass, and so they didn’t, confidences that weren’t meant to expose, and so they couldn’t. Did he have a crush on a girl? Fred would tell you. Did he wonder whether he should bow to the king of Sweden when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature? Fred had an opinion on that, too (he wouldn’t bow!). Fred let her rip, not just because he couldn’t help himself but because life was short, and a hell of a lot of fun, and why even think about stepping on the brakes?

  Fred Manfred was that most original and unique of men—and the kind I admire most in the world—the self-invented man. A farm boy who quit the farm, a child of a strict religion which he abandoned, he was raised without art and yet became an artist; the son of an illiterate father, he transformed himself into a man of letters. When he was a boy everyone told him that he would grow up to be a small-town farmer, and so he became a citizen of the world. He was raised in a culture that didn’t trust too much education, and so he became his own university; he was a child of a culture where emotions were repressed, and so he became as famous for his passions as for his poetry. He was six foot nine inches tall and saw the world as if from a great height, but also up close and personal. When he was informed he was certain to die of tuberculosis he became his own doctor and invented his own diet—which helped to save his life; and in defeating death, he learned to embrace life. Fred’s personal reinvention only began with his enthusiasm. Fred was constantly told to be one thing or another—a farmer, a preacher, a Communist, a safe writer, and most of all, for God’s sake, to tone it down!—yet he resolutely, and at great cost but also with great pleasure, went his own way. Where others find the ecstatic and run from it, he embraced it; where others flee from joy, he dove right in.

  For all of these choices Fred paid a price. I don’t mean simply the price of living at a near poverty level—to Fred money was trivial, a gift, I think, of his poor roots. But his raw-boned and intransigent genius was eventually scorned by the East Coast intelligentsia, who refused to acknowledge his extraordinary life work to capture the heart and culture of the upper Midwest, an effort only matched by Mark Twain and William Faulkner. Fred wanted the fame, knew he deserved it, and hoped that, after his death, he would be acclaimed as he wasn’t acclaimed in life. We all want to make a big splash with our lives, and Fred wanted to make his splash into a cannonball; and when the fame he wanted eluded him, he grew wistful—and who can blame him?

  Fred paid other prices as he labored gloriously to achieve his magnificent dream of becoming a world-class author, the chronicler of his age and region. In order to look inside himself, he had to shut out those parts of the world which got in the way of his vision. He put on blinders in order to see more clearly. He took from his past whatever he needed to survive in the present—from his farm roots he learned a work ethic that had him laboring on his last novel just six weeks before he died. From the Calvinism whose dogmas he rejected he found a moral rectitude that gave structure and guidance to his life. From his giant size he gained a sense that he was larger than life but also a certain insecurity and even alienation that imbued his work with tremendous compassion. Did he pay too much for all he gained? I think it was a bargain.

  Part of what made Fred special was that he never entirely left his roots behind. Born into a family of five brothers, he fathered three children, who magnified his life. He grew up in a Progressive tradition that said all men were their brother’s keeper—a tradition he maintained so that even as his farm friends grew more conservative, he grew more liberal. Nor could he ever entirely move past the shock of losing his mother when he was seventeen, a loss which kept him, or at least a part of him, forever a teenager, with many of the desires of youth but also its limitations. He loved women but from a distance, like the love-struck teenager that still lived inside him— and shied away from the second marriage he could have found, if only he could just get past his fear that dreaming of love was better, or at least safer, than the ups and downs of the real thing. At times, and increasingly as he grew older, he became his own biographer, disguising his life in his art.

  But for Fred all of that was a ripple on a larger lake. His vision of writing, of being a true man of letters dedicated to his art and his craft, made all of the rest of it, the good and the bad, the missed opportunities, and the nearly missed mortgage payment, seem all worthwhile.

  And it was.

  For William Carlos Williams

  who is hacking out a new road up ahead,

  all the while singing his come-on song

  Dark and true and tender is the North.

  —Anonymous

  Part One

  Cain

  Cain came riding down through a cloud. He was still very high above the timberline in the Big Stonies. He rode a tall black gelding named Lonesome. Behind him sauntered Animal, his gray pack mule, tied to Lonesome’s tail.

  Cain let his horse pick the way down the steep slope. Sometimes Lonesome’s iron shoes rang on scoured rock. The cloud gave way to clear air very slowly. From the horse’s back Cain could occasionally make out varicolored ground: rock blotched over with moss, then bare rock, then carpets of mushy grass.

  A single ponderosa pine suddenly appeared out of the mist. It came out of the cloud as if walking toward them. Its orange trunk was just barely visible, while
its upper reaches were lost in drifting silver.

  For late August the air was cold. Cain drew down his hat, making his stub ears splay out some. He tightened his bandanna snug around his neck. He shivered. He rolled his shoulders. His slicker rustled comfortingly. He walloped his arms around his chest, walloped until finger tips tingled inside his gloves.

  Cain was a knobby-muscled fellow. His movements, though quick, were blunt. His face was rough-cut, as if slapped into form with the side of an ax. He had a black walrus mustache, and it gave his face a weathered walnut hue. He wore a black hat, with the wide brim shaped up on both sides against the crown, making points in front and in back. The two dents up front in the crown, into which his thumb and forefinger fit when he handled it, matched the two deep hollows in his cheeks exactly.

  Except for a small red heart carved in the leather just below the pull strap, his boots were black too. So too were his .45 Colt and its holster and the cartridge belt, and his pants, shirt, and vest. His Cheyenne-style saddle, bridle, and reins were black. But blackest of all was the kingly horse Lonesome. Lonesome had a coat of somber powder-black and a curling mane and tail that glowed purple in the sun. Setting off all the striking blacks of Cain’s rigging was the white sock above Lonesome’s left rear hoof and the silver ornaments on the bridle and saddle and the hand-forged inlaid silver spurs.

  Cain rode very light, for all his blunt body. He rode with much of his weight in the stirrups, knees taking up the spring, making it easy on the horse. To sit in the saddle like a bag of sand all day long was to kill the mount. He rarely used the reins; drove mostly with his knees. It hurt him to see men rein in their horses with vicious jerks. A horse frothing blood at the bit was enough to set him against the rider.

  Behind him, on Animal the pack mule, under a tarp and balanced exactly, rode his bedroll and camp supplies and the remains of a whitetail bighorn sheep. Late the evening before, Cain had finally got his shot and dropped a young buck. He’d butchered in the dusk, shining up his skinning knife with a few quick strokes down his leather chaps, and disemboweling the sheep with easy strokes, the guts welling out like baby snakes, moist and sliding. He’d trimmed out the better meat, all of it smelling deliciously gamy, and wrapped it up in the dust-brown hide. The noble head, with its curling horns resembling hand-carved bench knobs, he’d also saved for mounting later on.

  The trail lifted up, to the left, and then crossed over a low neck of rock. The rock was speckled over with various kinds of mosses: brown, green, red, black, orange. The cloud thickened. Old pocked snow lay melting on the left; tiny blue bell-like flowers grew on the right.

  Cain smiled to himself. The grimace lifted the ends of his mustache. It creased wrinkles back through a five-day growth of beard. Here comes bachelor Cain Hammett, he thought, a snowball in his left hand and a posy of true flowers in his right.

  They crossed a great open space. The ocher soil was matted over with blooming short grasses, with white and purple and gold flowers. Patches of miniature ferns rode above the grass like diaphanous green veils. Perfumes of the most delicate kind, yet each quite distinct, and weighted with the fresh scent of cloud dew, touched the inside of the nostril no matter which way a man turned his head. It was all a park, almost too good for grazing.

  Again the trail sloped down. The cloud thinned out. As Cain came around the shoulder of a huge rock, the cloud suddenly vanished, evanescing up and away, making a solid bank above him and shrouding the blue peaks to the west.

  Then for the first time he could see, far down to the east, vast throws of eternal rock away, the great Crimson Wall. Forty miles long, it stretched across his path like the Great Wall of China. It ranged from north to south and was as red as geranium-petal rust.

  Beyond Crimson Wall the further valley spread out before him like a huge relief map. It was midforenoon, and the full sun struck it with a flood of brilliant light. He could trace the Bitterness River and all its branches as they trickled east through huge breaks in the blood-red Wall, down, down, the Red Fork where Dencil Jager had his horse ranch, the Shaken Grass where he had his own little spread, and then the Bitterness itself where Dale and Rory Hammett had their sheep ranch, all coming together in the violet color of a violent land called the Bad. The Bitterness flowed east, swinging and aggrading through gray alkali wastes, until at last, fifty miles away, it turned sharply north for the Yellowstone. Cain knew it all well, had seen it many times, and yet each time he saw it as a wonder again. This was the country all right. The big open.

  Lonesome nickered low. Cain gave the horse its head, and Lonesome immediately headed for a small patch of succulent green growing out of sappy ground. Both Lonesome and Animal were hungry and they snapped at grass to all sides as if they couldn’t get enough of it. It was the first good feeding they’d had since leaving the meadow beside the Shaken Grass. The horse moved under Cain, the high shoulders rocking the saddle, making the leather cinches creak. The mule’s movements as it grazed stirred up the lifeless head of the bighorn. The horse and mule tromped around in the tender patch. Presently the air was sweet with the smell of crushed greens.

  Cain relaxed in his saddle. He let his back hump some and the flesh over his belly fold up. He rolled himself a cigarette. He took a match out of his hatband and lit up. The forenoon sun became warm. After a bit he began to heat pleasantly inside his slicker. The sun also dried Lonesome’s damp coat. It left gray streaks in the powder-black hair. Some of the streaks resembled the markings of coastlines on a map.

  Once more Cain’s eyes could not resist tracing out the great curving escarpment of Crimson Wall far below, scarves of rock sheering down from north to south, from where it curved in a bright red crescent out of the footslopes near Antelope to where it vanished in blue shadow near Hidden Country. Green flanks of land stretched to where Red Fork ran south; deep green hills rolled to where the Shaken Grass ran north. And where the grass ran thin, bare folds of soil lay skinned and fleshy red.

  He found himself breathing heavy in the thin air. His nose stung from it. His eyes, seeing so sharply, so widely, and so alive to blood racing within, teared vaguely at the corners. Every now and then his lungs sucked deep of the searing air.

  “So dummed high up here, when a fly lights for the night it has to settle on the ground.”

  Right in the middle of a bite, Lonesome suddenly snorted, once, and lifted his handsome head high, and his raven mane tumbled back, and his ears began to flick. The mule, Animal, jerked up his head too and stood with both of his long gray ears shot forward.

  “What’s the matter, boys? Somebody around after all?”

  Quickly, deftly, with his left hand he opened his slicker and shifted his six-gun around ready to hand on the left, butt up. He also loosened his .38 Winchester in its scabbard under his right leg. With narrowed smoke-blue eyes Cain stared at the falling footslopes below, then up at the soaring cliffs behind. But search as he would he could see nothing. The only things moving were small black spots on a far bench just this side of the red Wall, and these he knew to be Dencil Jager’s grazing horse herds.

  Once more he examined every ravine, every canyon, every gulch, every cluster of pine caught on a cliff face. Could someone have trailed him this high into the Big Stonies? He’d been careful to double his trail in the waters of the Shaken Grass, and then later in the upper reaches of the Red Fork. He tossed back his hat to hear the better. Both he and the horse, and the mule, listened intently. The falling silence lay around them like a pause between psalms.

  If someone had trailed him up that high in the Big Stonies, getting a bighorn for cousin Rory might turn out to be an expensive trip at that. Especially since he’d thought it a foolish whim in the first place. She for asking; he for agreeing to it. And then both saying it was really to be a treat for Gram Hammett.

  He was staring down at a brow of black volcanic rock when he saw part of the rock detach itself and assume slow wings. The wings banked and beat up toward him. Eagle. Now what could have c
housed up that thing? Lonesome and Animal were right. Something or somebody, more than just a stray wild critter, was stirring around below.

  Cain studied Lonesome’s manner of standing; then Animal’s pointing gray tuber ears. Yes. Both sensed another horse below. Both looked as if they were about to break out with a greeting whinny.

  Cain checked his guns again; took off his left glove for better handling; had a quick look around. Better get down off the ridge. Against the blue sky they’d be easy pickings for a long-range rifle below. Best to circle home halfway up the sides of ravines and gulches. Though not too low or a man could get hung up in the bottom of some draw.

  His wonderful country had lately been not quite so wonderful. Lately it had become full of long riders, full of solitary men who went on long spying expeditions armed with high-powered glasses and rifles. Everywhere a man looked he almost always saw a hatted head pricking out atop some high hill looking the country over.

  “Hup up, Lonesome boy, let’s be joggin’. And we’d best take a cross canyon here and streak it down the Red Fork. The same one them Cheyennes took to get out from under the guns of General Plunkett. It looks tough. It is tough. And nobody but a rustling Red Sasher takes it these days.”