Dandelion Iron Book One (17 page)

Every millimeter of our property brought back memories. Playing catch with my dad using salvaged baseball mitts and a ball shedding horsehide. Wren tagging me “it” during a blizzard and me tumbling through the snow trying to catch her. Sharlotte, Mama, and me helping a big heifer give birth to Betty Butter out by the south ditch. The calf’s body steamed in the cold.

I drove the horse across the grass and through the memories until we stopped in front of the graves of the baby girls and my daddy and my mama.

If we lost the ranch, what would happen to the graves? What would happen to our sacred home, made sacred by the blood spilled there, by the bodies buried there?

It would be gone, all gone, and everything Mama had worked for would be chaff before the flame.

I dismounted and stood there before the graves of my ancestors. Bob D nestled his head under my arm, and I petted him while he nickered softly.

He didn’t bend to eat. It was like he could feel the power in the moment.

As could Sharlotte.

She strode over in her New Morality dress, her hat low on her forehead, and her boots churning up dirt. She stopped beside me on the other side of the grave markers.

“Pilate told me you ain’t going.”

I nodded. Shame dug into my chest. Standing before the dead, it felt like a betrayal to everything Mama had held precious—work, duty, family, and the entrepreneurial adventures she’d dedicated her life to.

Sharlotte cleared her throat and spoke. “Mama borrowed from Howerter, borrowed three million dollars. No one knows it but me. She put up the farm, our land, our headcount, all as collateral. Used it to keep us going and to finance this drive west. Also, a fair chunk of that money went for your schooling. College and such. You know how much your tuition and board were each year?”

More shame. I didn’t.

“A hundred thousand dollars. So she spent nearly a half a million dollars already on you, Cavvy, and was going to spend a bunch more. Not that I blame her.”

That was a laugh.

Sharlotte’s voice bristled with bitterness. “Mama went all in betting on this cattle drive, and on you, Cavvy. That’s a poker term. You remember?”

I nodded. The amount of money choked me. In Cleveland, I never had money for anything extra other than school. I felt poor, and yet me going there had marked me as rich and privileged even though I hadn’t felt like it.

Now I knew why Wren had tried to strong-arm Ms. Justice. There had been fifty thousand dollars left on the table.

It’d been quite a wager, but then Mama had loved Texas Hold ’Em and could bluff anyone to throw away full houses and flushes—throw them down in disgust onto the green felt of our poker table. Even Pilate. Only Wren would ever stand up to Mama, and my sister would lose just as often as she won. ’Cause Mama was so good, reckless, but always so lucky.

“That old poker table still in the basement?” I asked.

Sharlotte nodded.

What would happen to the poker table if we lost the ranch? Gone. Salvaged. Sold off to Dob Howerter and his evil Colorado Territory Ranching Association.

“If we sold every one of our beefsteaks in Hays, we’d get around three million dollars. Just enough to pay off the loan, but then we’d be broke. I asked Howerter about letting us stay on our ranch if we let him buy us out. He said we’d missed our chance to join the CTRA, and he wouldn’t let us keep our house even if we begged. He said to the victor go the spoils. And you remember, he was real mad that Mama didn’t join his association when he started it, but then why would she? Mama wasn’t about to give Howerter any of her profits, just so she could get his dumb seal of quality. Stupid, it’s all so stupid, but this is his revenge.”

I couldn’t believe how vile the man was, but then I could. The scuttlebutt claimed that Howerter had gone sterile, and it never sat right with him. Since he couldn’t have babies, he wanted the rest of the world instead. Mama had children. Mavis Meetchum had children. And Howerter had the Colorado Territory Ranching Association.

“So we have no choice,” I said with a sigh.

“None that I can see.”

“What about leaving the Juniper?” I asked. It was a question loaded with dynamite.

“To do what?” Sharlotte asked right back. “I don’t know computers. And the way I hear it, after the SISBI laws, immigrating to the U.S. would be harder than getting our headcount to Nevada. No, I was born here. I’ll die here. Your story might be different, but then after Wren’s gunfighting in Cleveland, it might not be.”

I swallowed hard and harnessed my
shakti
. “Are you ordering me to go, Shar?”

Surprise, surprise, but Sharlotte softened. “Not hardly. I can’t order you to die with us. ’Cause you know as well as I do, this is a suicide.”

“Then why do it at all?”

Sharlotte pointed to the graves. “’Cause Mama loved a long shot. She would’ve done it, could’ve done it. Us together, our family, even Wren, we have a chance. It’s a bad chance, but remember how Mama went all in that one Christmas Eve? She had nothing but off-suited low cards, but she won with bad cards, and we can, too. We have to. If we can get a ten million-dollar payday, we could pay off Howerter, re-invest in a new herd, heck, we might even make this a regular thing. We’d be flush. You could go back to school. Wren could go back to hell. I might even consider other options. If we can make it through.”

The memories came on strong—Mama at the table, laughing, clutching her cards to her chest, betting high on every hand, and winning, always winning.

She’d taken out impossible loans from her worst enemy to send me to school, all to save a ranch she loved in a land she’d chosen above the U.S. I felt the guilt and obligation keenly.

“I have to go,” I whispered.

Bob D nudged me as if to agree.

I talked on. “We have to save our ranch and show Dob Howerter he picked the wrong family to mess with. We have to be heroes.”

“Whether we want to be or not.” Sharlotte tacked on those last words, gazing down on Mama’s grave. A fire burned in her eyes. Anger. Not at me, but at Mama.

It was raw
shakti
, but right then it didn’t feel like a creative, powerful female energy.

To borrow from the Hindu myths, it was Kali’s fury in her eyes.

And what did Kali’s fury do?

It destroyed the world.

Well, let the world die. I was going to save the ranch even if at the end of things, it was the only dirt left in the universe.

It was our land, where our parents and baby sisters were buried. It would be ours, forever and ever, amen.

You don’t let go of sacred ground. You fight to the death for it.

(iv)

A month passed. Sharlotte had rushed the funeral, rushed to get me home, all so we could prepare for this cattle drive. Going west.

A month of work, of fretting and fighting and preparing our headcount—a round-up, branding, medicine for the sick, and bullets for the terminal.

We left on Monday, April 1, 2058. Most of the same people were there from Mama’s funeral to help us with the final pack. More cooking. Aunt Bea’s churros, two henhouses of eggs, and enough coffee that even Pilate couldn’t have drunk it all. Everyone laughed we were leaving on April Fool’s Day, but hoped for the best, predicted the worst, being neighbors, friends, enemies, and consultants, as people are wont to do.

The
Moby Dick
floated over our heads all loaded up. Before dawn, we had bucked bales out of our hay sheds and into the
Moby’s
cargo hold. Sketchy said we needed the calm of the morning ’cause around 9 AM the wind would pick up, and the
Moby
didn’t like wind that close to the ground.

She was right about the weather. Down to about five minutes.

Aunt Bea took off first in our Chevy Workhorse II, steam-powered, pulling the two-axle supply trailer. We called the whole rig our chuck wagon. Then our employees and new hires led Charles Goodnight, our best steer, and Betty Butter, our best cow, to amble after the chuck wagon. Both were really smart, but Betty, a scarred-up and snotty Holstein, had the temperament of a shaken wasp’s nest. Ask the two coyotes who’d gone after Betty one night. We’d found her bleeding but alive the next morning, a hundred meters away from the mangled corpses of the coyotes.

Sharlotte, on her horse Prince, trotted into the herd moving west. She’d sheathed Mama’s M16 in a leather scabbard next to her thigh. We’d named Mama’s gun Tina Machinegun, partly ’cause as kids we confused sixteen with Tina, partly ’cause Mama had loved Tina Turner. Seeing the assault rifle put a tremor in my belly. Bad memories.

The dogs barked around Sharlotte and Prince, happy to be working and moving, but dodging the falling steps of the cows around them.

Wren galloped ahead to look for trouble. She’d found her old traveling clothes—worn chaps, a leather vest, and a dark green wool poncho. The poncho, woven rough, swirled around her in the breeze of her speed.

Pilate and Petal rode tail, which was the worst place to be on account of the dust raised by the hooves of our headcount.

On my favorite horse, Bob D, I turned around one last time to look at our blue house. It was a cloudy day, a little windy, but all in all, it felt like spring was knocking on the front door with her sister summer waiting to kiss us on the porch. My favorite New Morality dress, gray as the sage, was enough to keep me warm, though I had thick leggings and my Mortex parka stuffed into my saddlebags for when the weather turned chilly.

The doors were locked, the barns and sheds empty, and the whole ranch was closed down tight. We sold off our extra animals to neighbors, who gave us too much for them. Out of pity. They’d keep an eye on the ranch. We didn’t leave any cattle behind ’cause with the price point the Sysco executive was offering, it would’ve been foolish. Like Sharlotte had said, if we could get that ten million-dollar paycheck, we could come back and buy a new herd and undercut Howerter’s prices. Ha. That would show him.

Yeah, and if June Mai Angel came and burned it all down, well, what we did wouldn’t matter. All our drama and fear wouldn’t be worth a gutter-dirty dollar bill.

Well, if that did happen, we’d fight to get our cattle to Nevada and then we’d fight June Mai Angel. Might as well fight two wars if you’re going to fight one.

Turning back, the cattle spread out before me as far as I could see. We mostly had Herefords, and their glossy red bodies looked dark as dried blood against the yellow grass of the open plains. Their white faces looked like snow banks against the grass.

I guided Bob D and the rest of our ponies into the mix. That was my job, the remuda, thirty-six horses, two for each of the hands.

Interstate 70, going west. My desire to fight had waned over the weeks since I’d stood before Mama’s fresh grave. Now, a fear settled in at the impossible thing we were trying to do.

The first attack came twelve days later, the day after Good Friday, in what used to be Strasburg, Colorado. I didn’t know who hit us, not right away.

All I knew for sure was that a gorgeous, viable boy fell out of the sky and right into my lap.

Chapter Eleven

It’s clear that during the twentieth century we forgot history’s most important lessons. So as a society, let’s take our education from those strong women who built this country hundreds of years ago. Let’s turn our calendars back to when women were chaste, strong, and ever obedient to an ever-loving God. Our greatest lessons lie in our past, not in the present, and certainly not in an unknowable future.

—Reverend Kip Parson
From the Eighth Annual International
New Morality Conference
June 21, 2057

(i)

Dusk outside of Strasburg, Colorado; the wind blew a bone-kissing chill down my parka. We were setting up camp by the ruins of a gas station complex, which at one time would have had pumps, a convenience store, a Taco Bell Express, and showers for the truckers. Now, a few minivan carcasses lay slumped on weed-split concrete. No more gas for the engines. Too electric to work.

I was building our temporary corral for our remuda of horses—we only needed a few aluminum poles and rope to keep our ponies together ’cause they were so well trained. We’d sold our brood mares along with our nags and colts too weak to make the trip.

Our regular employees and new hired hands pitched tents, Aunt Bea had her cooking fire going, and I was pounding the aluminum poles into the ground with a three-kilogram sledge. It had been real warm, so the ground wasn’t completely frozen. After threading the rope through eyeholes in the aluminum poles, I commenced to picking Bob D’s hooves. He nickered softly and closed his eyes against the wind. I’d gotten used to his strong horse smell, so much so, it felt like home now, as much as the infinite plain around us.

I kept glancing up at the cold sky, expecting to see the
Moby Dick
. Sketchy would scout ahead and come back every couple days, just in case we needed the hay and water in the
Moby Dick
.

I’d been right about the water. An average cow needs at least seventy-five liters of water daily, and the Moby couldn’t carry enough for our entire headcount. However, she had pumps, so the plan was, she could water down half the herd, float off, reload, and then come back to water the other half.

Pretty clever. Mama and Sketchy had planned it down to the liter.

The history of those first twelve days on the trail was etched on my hands. Dry skin whitened my knuckles. Cuts, scrapes, and scratches cut a roadmap across the backs of my hands. My fingernails remained black and grimy even after I washed them. At the Sally Browne Burke Academy for the Moral and Literate, my hands had been pink and soft, and I wasn’t even girly ’strogen enough to use lotion. But back in the World, my job was to think, and you don’t need tough hands for that.

Cattle meandered around us—three thousand cows managed by thirteen people. Pilate kept saying we needed someone named Bilbo Baggins to make us an even fourteen, since thirteen was unlucky, though I had no idea what he was talking about. Besides, if you included Sketchy, Tech, and Peeperz, we had sixteen.