Nobody had seen him since the fall. After sheepherding, he’d come by Crooked Creek Ranch to bathe and leave his summer’s pay with my grandparents for safekeeping; had hooked up the field cultivator to spread and work the summer’s worth of chicken manure into a small alkali flat that was a thriving hay meadow in my grandfather’s mind’s eye; had been seen loafing and sipping on Picon Punch at the bar in the Basque restaurant in Mica; had stopped over at the Shooting Star Ranch to shine as a deft roper during their autumn branding and arranged to winter there in exchange for maintaining their tack and harness. As usual in the fall, he had scooped up his prospecting gear from the Dreaming Lion Ranch and headed south. That was the last anybody had seen of him.
He would usually have been back as October’s warm spell, Indian Summer, was cooling, before bitter cold and deep snow were serious risks in the mountains. Here in the valley, he would set trap lines for the winter. Maybe he had sensed bad winter coming and headed south on the eternal search for gold (or golden solitude with no responsibilities), far enough south that the Sonoran desert held him, ever promising but never delivering, all winter long. But, then, he would have drifted back to the Beckworth Meadows by April in time for lambing, spring round-ups, and deep disking the vegetable gardens. Yet he did not come. People began to wonder if the early snow had caught him and the Tormentoso winter had devoured him.
Then, a very old pickup truck rattled and clattered up to the Crooked Creek ranch house and out tumbled a disreputable looking bundle with a wild bushy beard and an unkempt mane. A pick and rucksack and a fat, 6’ square object (later revealed to be a cattail quilt) spilled out after him. He straightened up, squared his shoulders, futilely smoothed the mane, strode to the door, knocked, and then bowed respectfully to my grandmother. She stood stock still, then greeted him stirring warmth with exasperation. She jerked her head sideways. Obediently, Luke walked around the house to the patio facing east.
He set a wooden stool beside the galvanized metal washtub, then placed another nearby. He began shedding fabric, furs, feathers and cattail fuzz. Even stripped down, he still sported an unfamiliar fur. There was a terrible stink, but maybe he was used to it. He sat in sunlight, absorbed in simply being. He was the scrawniest man I had ever seen.
My grandmother came out in a canvas apron and perched on the other stool. Luke hung his head and offered her his left arm — looking close you could see that his fur was not natural, but rather involved a ruin of weirdly dark and hairy waffle-cloth long underwear. Waffle cloth is normally a light oatmeal color, with bright narrow raised edges around square hollows, the squares about half an inch on a side. But not this version.
She looked at his arm and then up into his eyes and shouted, “I’ve never seen a man go without a bath so long that his body hair’s grown through his Long Johns!” His body hair had wound its way through the waffle cloth, encasing him in an outer skin that was both him and not him.
With firm, deft, graceful movements, she began clipping the wiry hairs down close to the cloth. Remonstrating and occasionally expostulating — I could not hear the words — she eased the first two fingers of her left hand under the cuff of the sleeve, working it a little loose. She drew out a pair of nail scissors with the right hand, slid them in, and snipped. One square of the waffle cloth was detached. Relentlessly, but unhurriedly, she worked her way around that wrist. Luke regarded it with bemusement, blew softly on his newly bare wrist, and smiled.
She snipped and lifted her way around the next row of squares, then the next. Onward, she worked her way up from the wrist, first clipping the hairs on the outside and then working underneath the fabric. Having trimmed the hairs on the outside meant that on some of the squares, the hairs slid through when she lifted the cloth with the scissors. Then, with a bigger scissors, she cut off the fabric.
On the stubborn squares, she eased the nail scissors under the fabric. She snipped the hairs one by one to free the cloth.
She and Luke began to sing. In some places, the fabric disintegrated as she worked. Shadows glided from the west. Finally Luke stood, naked as a baby, the long underwear in rags about his feet, some sores and angry patches on his skin.
Cowboys who had been moving furniture during the weekly mopping of the house’s concrete floor staggered out, carrying huge kettles to pour into the washtub. My grandmother returned to the house. Luke folded his skinny frame into the tub and sat there for half an hour. Then he grasped the scrub brush, worked up a good foam on the soap, and scrubbed — wherever the skin was whole — from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. Then a dip to rinse. My grandmother returned, donned rubber gloves, dipped a washcloth in a bucket of clean water and carefully cleaned injuries and sores. After he toweled himself off, she set to work with the medicines. As the day waned, he was decorated, almost tattooed, with purple gentian violet and vermilion mercurochrome on his sores and injuries, a wild and savage look, but recognizably human.
“Thank you Ma’am, Bless you for your kindness. Never again, Ma’am,” he promised. “Welcome back,” she said. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, even if not a pretty one.” They laughed.
.Moss Springmeyer strives to express the world (s) in a grain of sand. Moss’s resourceful, ageing werewolf stars in “Fur-Break”, Spring 2024 Altered Reality (p. 16). https://www.alteredrealitymag.com/spring-2024-issue/ . “Choirboy” probes the glory and cruelty of a very special gift in Story Block 2, Spring 2024 The Green Silk Journal https://www.thegsj.com/current-issue-spring-.html.
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