Читать книгу Shaman's Dream: The Modoc War - Lu Boone's Mattson - Страница 69

Oliver Applegate watched his uncle squat and wrestle the lava fieldstone into an upright position, then lever it onto his knees. As the old man wrapped his arms around the rock and staggered away with it, Oliver saw again, with fascination, the vein bulging down across the man’s forehead and over to the corner of his eye. Was it his deeply held-in anger threatening to break loose or just the exertion of rearranging the surface of the earth? He knew his uncle to be prodigiously capable in both regards.

“Don’t just stand there,” Jesse sputtered back over his shoulder. “There’s enough here for both of us!”

There was. As far as Oliver could see, the land sloping down to Clear Lake was strewn with the dark grey lava boulders. Sand and desert scrub flowed around them. Likely, his uncle intended to move every stone and uproot every bush, sooner or later, to encourage the bunch grass. It fatigued him to think how the old man’s will had shrunk itself down to this stone-like thing he was witnessing, with no waste about it, nothing in excess, just what he intended to use. Maybe his body had been as strong once as Oliver’s own, but by now that was over. It didn’t seem to matter, however, for the muscles had been pre-empted by this other thing, and now Jesse didn’t seem to need them: the will alone could move his mountains.

Oliver took his turn at struggling to lift the stone from the earth, then staggered to where his uncle stood catching his breath at the end of the fence. Jesse pointed to where he wanted Oliver to drop the rock he was carrying. This fence was just for practice, Oliver reckoned; a little undertaking to enclose the spring that fed water down to what would be the ranch headquarters. A fence here to keep the cattle out, keep the water fresh for the buckaroos who would be coming. The next fence would be quite another proposition, though, and so would be the ones after that. It fatigued him to think of what his uncle had sketched out in rough and shown them: some ideas, he had said, he thought Carr would want to think about.

If someone else came up with ideas like this, Oliver would think they were tetched; but where Jesse Applegate was involved, things happened. Blazing the road through in ‘46 no doubt left him with the idea that he could go around the landscape rearranging. He had done that as a strapping, young man; and now here he was like some patriarch, all right, driven out to this desert, to wrestle the very earth.

The next fence would run due north from the lakeshore practically up to the California-Oregon state line, three and a half miles. Then there would be another one off the south-eastern toe of the lake more or less due east, four miles, then northward. Up as far as where there was the canyon. Then across it. And there would be others besides.

Oliver had listened silently, as had his father and brothers, half fearing that Jesse was serious. Today, as he trudged back to lay hands on the next rock, he was more than ever afraid Jesse meant it. This Carr fellow and his uncle had known each other half-a-dozen years, more or less, when Carr ran a mail service along the old road, but it hadn’t occurred to anyone that the friendship would grow into a whole family proposition.

Yet it had done so, or was growing. And maybe it would turn out to be a good thing. He had to admit, the vision beat anything even his brother E.L. had come up with, trying to devise the family’s fortune. He recalled the letter from E.L. that Ivan had shown him, written a good ten years ago, when O.C. was still a boy. It laid out in aching detail the scheme whereby their pooled family assets of a mere seventy-nine hundred dollars could be parlayed to ninety thousand in just a few years. An empire would be theirs. Perseverance, E.L. counseled. Energy. Diligence. And of course, most important of all, E.L.’s favorite: the exercise of thinking powers. Mind was the means to success.

But E.L.’s optimism had grown more cautious. Not so Uncle Jesse’s. He still went on propping things up, wrestling the future out of the land, trying to out-think it. And O.C. couldn’t fault him for that.

These two old prophets got together, Jesse Carr with his Mexican ideas about ranchos, Jesse Applegate with his need to get his assets out of Oregon and down into California, both with gold-fever in their eyes. This rocky land was the gold, leagues of it, just like the old Spanish land-grants Carr had come to covet down by San Francisco. Covet and aspire to.

Oliver could hear Carr now, assuring his uncle that they could buy up this parcel, homestead that, claim the vast meadow was swamp and get it from the government just for the draining of it. They could fence it. Lord yes! Run cattle. Divide it, if need be, and sell it. Get rich off the people who were coming.

Put the rancho’s legal title in Jesse Carr’s name, but with him staying sort of a silent partner, for reasons he wouldn’t explain. The place would be Jesse Applegate’s to run, his and his sons. The Applegate Ranch they could call it. Carr didn’t care about a name. Call it what you want to. What mattered was to lay claim to it, now. While the getting was good. Before it all got grabbed up.

“Swamp land?” his father had asked, after Jesse Applegate explained it. “What swamp land?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lindsay!” Jesse said, disgusted. “Use the imagination God gave you!”

Oliver considered the calluses on his big hands and wondered how many lava boulders there were in fences that totaled … how many miles did Jesse say? He didn’t dare to calculate.