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In the previous episodes, Buck Turner, a
rancher, tells us of the conflict between him and Ike Renner as he begins
a ride with his son into Contention City, Arizona on a bitterly cold
January morning in the 1890s. Renner, Turner tells old friend Jed
Buckmaster, is a homesteader who has repeatedly clipped the barbed wire
fence separating the K-10 and the Lazy-R, letting his cattle across.
Renner’s Lazy-R side is overgrazed. He didn’t know anything about
ranching when he got the place and ran too many cattle on his 160 acres.
Furthermore, there’s a drought. All of the
ranches in the area are struggling. The K-10 is no exception. Renner
can’t afford to keep his emaciated cattle nor does he feel that he can
afford to sell them. Turner rode to Contention City to try to get Sheriff
Brucker to come and help him. Brucker had to refuse because he was too
busy enforcing the law in the boomtown.
Jed urges Buck to kill Renner, saying that he
has no other choice. Buck doesn’t want to because then he’d have to
support Renner’s widow and children.
An interplanetary craft Buck calls a skyship
crashes off the trail into Contention City. Buck and his son, Caleb, come
close to being killed. Buck rescues one of the big-eyed, light-green
skinned creatures. The others are killed by the impact. They bring the
creature back home to Edith, Buck’s wife who has an interest in
medicine and happens to be a self-made doctor. The father and son drape
the creature over Buck’s horse, ‘49er. Over Bear, Caleb’s horse,
they tie on several of the creature’s possessions they find in the
skyship.
Edith finds the alien heals faster than humans
usually do. The Turners both find that their hastily constructed small
home is ill-suited to serving as a hospital.
After the first two weeks of convalescence, the
creature looked healed though he didn't act it. He laid around like a pair
of dirty dungarees unless he was using the toilet, eating or taking
medicine, getting his dressings changed, or getting cleaned. Then, when he
was up, he moved slower than frozen water.
I didn't know whether to put the blame on the
way he was raised, his race, or a personality defect, but this laziness
angered me. I wanted him to get better, get up and start repaying us for
our hospitality.
Edith already didn't do the amount of cooking,
cleaning, sewing and mending a typical woman on the frontier did. With the
creature as her preoccupation, she only did less. There was Becky who
could already do a little work too, but there's a limit to what a
ten-year-old girl can do. Too many chores were going undone.
"He certainly looks better than he's
acting," I recall saying many times when I was settling in after the
day's work was finished, taking my boots off, shaking the pebbles and dirt
out. I was tired of the alien putting on the air that he was sick all of
the time when he didn't look it.
"As banged up as he was, if he were human,
he'd be dead," she'd say.
"For as much as he does around here, he
might as well be," I'd say, snorting in derision.
There was this persistent, strange odor of wet,
burnt underbrush that he emitted no matter what the women did. It was to
be expected as members of different races have distinct odors. The same
would apply to members of different species, I supposed. I grew weary of
the oppressive scent as much as seeing him lay around.
Edith deduced the creature preferred heat over
cold. She had Becky heat up water in the kettle to a degree a man would
have found intolerable. They'd pour the steaming water into a pan, and the
creature would stick one of his slenderly clawlike hands in it, and the
creature would nod his oversized, hairless head and sigh, "Kkkkh!"
Becky kept washing until he began trembling.
"Could be he's cold and that's why he
doesn't do much," Edith said. "Kind of like a snake or
lizard."
"He doesn't look like a snake or lizard to
me," I said.
"But what I was saying is every creature
has a different reaction. Snakes and lizards slow down in cold. We shiver.
"Then, too, it could be just that he's
sick."
"That's crazy," I said, observing the
ritual one day. "That water is still boiling hot. Ain't nobody can be
shivering, washed off with water like that. You could boil us some supper
in that water."
"What's hot to you wouldn't necessarily be
hot to him," she replied.
"He's a blasted salamander," I said.
"Undoubtedly, the place he comes from is Hell."
She also suspected the creature was sad or had
some other emotion as alien as the way he looked.
I said: "Then he should just tough it out.
If he didn't want to take the chance he'd crash, he shouldn't have gotten
in the blasted skyship."
"We've got to do something," Edith
said. "He should be doing more than he is. Even if he is different
from us, this can't be normal for him."
"So now you admit it too! Like I said all
along, he's lazy," I said. "We're doing everything for him. He's
got it too good. If he's not better now, he's not going to get any
better."
Even though she'd acquiesced, I regretted
finding him, thinking of him as a genie in a story. The genie gives you
what you asked for but it always turns out bad. The members of my family,
especially Caleb, asked for excitement. This was the wrong type. It was
one more way Ike Renner messed up life. If I had left the creature alone,
whoever took his skyship would have taken him too.
I couldn't have done that. I'd been too curious.
I knew what it had done to the cat.
Out of all the tack we pulled from the
creature's skyship there probably wasn't one thing we could use.
With my wife dispensing medical care and advice
from our home, we had the closest thing to a clinic out here. With the
creature recuperating, our home became the closest thing to a hospital. I
should have known to expect it with her avocation some time ago, and built
the hacienda accordingly. I didn't. I was in a hurry to get us a place to
live so we could start operations. The creature's cot and tick always in
the way. It would have been that way eventually with some patient or
other.
You live, you learn.
With the extra work we had to do, which we
couldn't humanly accomplish, the K-10 was getting to bear a semblance to
Renner's run-down spread. I would have hated to see it had we been as lazy
as he was. Tasks were postponed for days. We got so far behind that there
wasn't time to keep the books or maintain the house or land. With
everything so dry, we desperately needed to cut a firebreak. If a wildfire
started too close to the houses we would have all been dead. The men and I
went to town frequently, hauling back feed for the cattle. There would
have been money in that, selling or trading for the feed to other
ranchers, but I was certain the others couldn't afford to pay enough to
make it a profitable business.
Too, we had to patrol our boundaries. We had to
build a new corral. I didn't want Renner getting any ideas about coming
over here and rustling.
All that was the job of the men. I could have
used five more of them. Caleb and I did what we could to stay abreast of
the other chores. There were just some things we couldn't do. Neither of
us could sew enough to darn a sock, forget mending blue jeans or making a
new shirt. We certainly couldn't afford new clothes what with all that we
were having to spend on feed and food for the house. Furthermore, I didn't
believe sewing was a task befitting of a married man.
By far the biggest and most vital job we faced
was sinking our well deeper. Because of the drought, the water level had
sunk rapidly. It was getting harder to draw up a bucket of water:
impossible to draw a full one. Soon, I expected, the bucket would only
come up with mud.
All of my plans were going amiss. When we chose
this land, I never fancied myself having to need a well. Up until six
months before the creature crashed, a trickle of a creek ran between my
house and the neighbors. It had been getting less and less through the
years. Now, it only ran right after it rained.
When I complained about having to dig the well,
or something else left undone, Edith glowered at me, like I was selfish.
That wasn't the case. I was only the practical one in our marriage. She
was obsessed with trying to heal the creature, like it was the most
important thing in the world. A fence goes up between two people when they
have different priorities. That fence was the creature. On my side was
practicality. Living. Making it through hard time. On hers, craziness.
There was a good chance all their care would go
for naught. Even if he healed completely, there was no guarantee the
creature would stay and work for us. I didn't even see a reason to believe
he could help us out even if he wanted to. I'd have bet a creature like
him had never even ridden a horse and been sure of winning.
Further, he'd given no evidence he spoke English
or Spanish. How can you work with someone you can't talk with? In the time
it takes to make yourself understood, you might as well go and do whatever
needs to be done yourself.
If I had to, I knew I could count on aid from Jed
and his family. Elizabeth offered, but I wasn't the kind of a man who had a
yen to receive charity. They were having it tough too. He was a friend from
the old days. I would have sooner shot my hand off. Still, I'm more
practical than prideful.
I'd have cheerfully ridden the creature over to
the convent in Tucson where they took in poor sick people. He wasn't a
person, but I'm sure they'd overlook that. Those nuns are good, curious
people just like Edith. I'd give them whatever money I could to help with
his care.
That was not to be, though I suggested it. Edith
was as stubborn as I was. After all her work, I would have had to hit her,
grab the creature and spirit him away before I could take him to the
convent. Then I would have had to pay when I returned. It would have been
months before she availed me of her wifely charms, if ever. She was
stubborn, too.
I figured the people who took away the skyship
didn't want him. They left him with us. If they wanted to find him, they
could have. If a people can build something that flies around, even if it
crashes sometimes, you can find somebody who was ridden but a few miles
away.
After a few weeks, I figured if they didn't get
him, they never would. I was right. They probably had something against him
too.
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