Going west from Denver in 1919, even in our new Studebaker, wasn't easy. The roads were a mockery of the word road. The weather consisted of rain, but the game car and its powerful motor kept us floating. Stude, as we called our car, never let us down, after Cramp had two bearded blacksmiths at the railroad yards hammer out a big hook which they bolted to Stude's front end. After that, if we sank into a mud hole, a rope tied to the hook and, hitched to any two passing horses, started us on our way again.
This time we were heading for Salt Lake City in earnest. We wanted to cross the desert country before the full blast of summer was upon us. Mama was wondering if there was such a place as California.
“I don't see how the covered wagons made it,” Mama said, as we changed a tire on a mountain road.
“They ate well.” said Gramp; “they ate one another.”
Mama knew Gramp was just trying to get a rise out of her, so she said. “It was better food than you get nowadays on the road.”
“Are people good to eat?” I asked.
“Some,” said Cramp. “Imagine Lillian Russell in a toasting pan.”
“Gramp!” said Mama, in her low, icy voice.
Cramp kicked the tire in place and said, “Of course, I'm not much, just bones and old scar tissue, but. now you, Sari, or even Stevie here with an apple in his mouth… .”
Mama said, “Gramp, I'm putting you in Coventry.”
“Now, Sari,” said Cramp, knowing he had gone too far, “I was just leaching Stevie history, about the Donner party that got snowed in and lived off one another, and you, Stevie, you know… .”
But I shook my head and pointed to my sealed lips. When Mama put anyone into Coventry, that meant no one talked to him until Mama, like a Pope in skirts, withdrew the interdict.
Cramp had been in Coventry twice on the trip, and he didn't like it. He liked to talk and be talked to. He lit a cigar, sighed, and pointed to the car. We got in and drove on in silence.
Mama hummed a little tune, I made faces at my reflection in the windshield, and the car ran on over bad roads, past sod huts and ranch fences, ran on, making the only real sounds after Mama had stopped humming a tune.
It was past noon, and I was hot, tired, and thirsty. I pointed to my mouth and swallowed. Mama tapped Gramp's shoulder and pointed to her small mouth, and then drank an imaginary glass of water and swallowed in a ladylike fashion.
Gramp held one hand to his ear and said, “Eh? Speak louder.”
Mama Cut something with a phantom knife and put it on a fork that wasn't there and swallowed again. It made my mouth water.
Gramp said. “Can't hear a word you're saying. Speak up. Sari!”
Mama folded her arms, scowled, and said to me, “If some people had any sense, they'd know we're hungry.”
Gramp said to his steering wheel, “If some stomachs could talk, they'd talk to an old man who never meant anyone any harm. Hut, of course, snobs and stylish people from New Brunswick, New Jersey, they're too good to talk to the likes of me. I'm just old American stock, fought in the Civil War, raised up a family of sons, and now in my declining years, I'm shoved aside, and who the hell cares!”
The last four words were shouted across the plains and frightened two steers who were rubbing themselves against a fence post.
“You win,” said Mama. “You're such a ham, Cramp. I bet you'd he bringing up a few tears next.”
Gramp grinned. “Hell and high water, Sari, a man doesn't like to think he isn't fit to talk to!”
Mama crossed her arms. “I withdraw Coventry.”
“Can I talk, Mama?” I asked.
“Yes, dear.”
“Gramp, we dropped our spare tire about a mile back.”
“Why didn't you yell out!”
“Coventry, you know.”
“I'll break your damn little… .”
“Gramp,” said Mama in her Coventry voice.
Gramp finished, “… little piggy bank and buy you some real cowboy boots.”
Gramp turned Stude around, and we went back and found the tire. Near it we saw a chuck wagon drawn up and some men outside who didn't look at all like cowboys but more like hobos sitting around, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes while a cook filled tin coffee cups.
“How far to Salt Lake City?” asked Mama.
“Oh,” said a long cowboy (who looked the way Gary Cooper was going to look in a few years), “just about a hundred miles, more or less.”
“Any place to cat around here?” Mama tried out her Lord-I'm-just-a-poor-little-woman-alone-in-the-world smile. “It's been a long time since we've had solid food.”
“Best place is right here. Come on over.” And the cow-boy held the strands of barbed wire apart for Mama to crawl through. “And bring your friends. Plenty for all.”
We followed him around to a small fire and met the cow hands (they're not called cowboys, but hands. I found out). and Stretch, as they called the tall one, yelled out, “Hey, Cookie, we got company.”
Cookie was a wide, fat, dipped-in-some-soot-and-oil mixture, part Mexican and part mustache. He came over, a flour sack tied around his middle, and said, “Sure, plenty in the chuck wagon for all.”
“Don't bother on account of us,” said Mama, sitting down on the saddle Stretch had put down for her.
“No bother, is it, Cookie?”
“No siree,” said Cookie.
“Punching cows?” asked Mama.
“Steers, ma'am. No cows around here.”
“Herding steers?” asked Mama.
“No, ma'am, we're … well, we're gathering in the calves, and… .”
He went on to talk of the process of overtaking a lot of new-born calves. I guess you could call it “making steers.” Mama nodded and listened, and then Stretch blushed under his tan and said weakly, “Anyhow, that's what we're doin'.”
Cookie came over with some frying pans and tin trays and set down his camp cooking before us. Cow hands eat well on the range—or did—or else we were lucky in finding a good outfit.
Cookie was an expert on outdoor and Spanish cooking. Each of us got a tin pan full of puchero, a meat and vegetable stew, with a side dish of calabacitas rellenos, stuffed squash, to be common about it.
“I'm sorry,” said Stretch. “We haven't butchered a steer, or we could have Cookie give us a mess of steaks.”
“This will do fine,” said Gramp, as his tin cup was re-filled with cow-hand coffee, which experts claim is the best coffee in the world. “Cookie should get a medal.”
Stretch picked up a sliver of fire from the ground and set his cigarette glowing. “He'll get a swift kick in the slats if he's got no fugazza left for you.”
“I got, I got!” screamed Cookie. “I've got enough left. You fellas got no sense humor. All the time, lady, they want to kick poor Cookie in the—the ribs. What for fun is that?”
Stretch winked at Mama. “Keeps him spry and busy. Bring on that fugazza.”
It came—large squares of pastry, covered with cheese, tomatoes, onions, thyme, and baked out of doors in a tin stove. It was very good and, like the apple pie that cow hands eat, very hot—hot enough to boil their insides for any expected blizzards. Hot pie has always amazed visitors to America, but nobody eats it as hot as the cow hands.
We ate with cow hands a lot after that, every chance we got on the road, and some of them ate well, and some badly. If they had a Mexican or colored cook, they ate well. But no damn yankee could cook well for cow hands, and a cow hand would leave an outfit and drift around until he found the kind of grub he liked. Cookie was one of the best, even if he did live in terror of the hands who promised him all sorts of fearful adventures if the standard of the food fell away.
The best food we ever ate in a cow camp was on the birthday of a foreman down in Texas. The cook made molé de guajalote, turkey in a hot pepper sauce. It takes four kinds of hot peppers (not chili powder—which is only used if the peppers are difficult to get). It has sesame seeds, coriander, almonds, cloves, and cinnamon in it—and, of course, garlic. But then, everything in Mexican ranch cooking uses garlic; even the tea seems CO taste of it, and the coffee just a hint. Turkey and hot peppers topped with fried pasta and baked in a casserole, covered and buried in a campfire, is a pleasure that the old mountain men liked best next to wrassling grizzly bears.
We thanked Cookie and Stretch, Gramp bunded out bis few remaining cigars, and we left the cow camp and beaded Stude toward Salt Lake City. We smelled the lake a long way off, then saw the spires of the great temple against the hot blue sky, and soon we were in the streets of Salt Lake. Gramp made no jokes about Brigham Young and his twenty-four wives and six hundred children, except to say that a good wife is like an elephant, “very interesting to look at, but who wants to own one. Imagine owning twenty-four of them… .”
“Gramp,” said Mama, in that cold voice.
And Gramp replied, “I must buy some new cigars.”
“Alter we settle at the hotel.”
We found a very good hotel, with the biggest moose in the world (his head anyway) hanging over a big fireplace in the lobby, his big glass eyes looking down sadly at us as we registered, Gramp writing our names with a big pen in a fancy hand.
We had huge rooms with high ceilings, and everything smelled of American history. The hot water dripped but would not flow. Gramp and I changed, and Mama said she would rest on her spine on a good bed and forget the bad roads.
We went to buy some cigars, and Gramp found Salt Lake didn't have any places that sold cigars: “Sorry, but the war, you know … didn't import many.” Which shows you how old that excuse is. World War I, in 1919, being in the just-gone past.
“Hell and tiddlywinks,” said Gramp, “the things they blame on wars. I bet Ajax went to the wars of Troy because he dropped in to buy a few stogies and they told him, ’Sorry, just out, this war business over a woman, you know.‘ Helen didn't launch a thousand ships, Stevie, but she most likely took a hundred good cigar brands off the market.”
“A good cigar,” I finished, “is a smoke.”
It was a mistake for Gramp to warn me. It developed in me a guilt complex, something to hide and guard. The gospel according to Freud was still very new in the republic then. But years later I figured out that was what happened—that and three servings of ice cream. For when Mama heard me muttering in my bed, she came to test my head for fever and to tuck me in, and she found me talking in my sleep about cigars and maidens.
We knew something was wrong the next morning at breakfast. We knew it was real wrong when we took off in Stude for the mountain passes. A few miles past the stinking lake Mama said. “Coventry for the next three days, Gramp.”
Gramp, a good cigar in his mouth, asked, “But why?”
“Stevie talked in his sleep last night. So I'm your new young wife.' And all your others are worn out.”
Gramp looked at me with distaste. “It wasn't that bad at all. He built it up in his little mind.”
Mama put her arms around me. “Now. baby boy. you just shew Mama all the jack rabbits.”
“You like jack rabbits, Mama?”
“A jack rabbit is only a jack rabbit, but a good cigar is a smoke.”
Gramp inhaled his cigar carefully, flicked the ash off. and said, “Please don't talk to me. I've just put you and Stevie into Coventry. Why didn't I ever think of that before?”
Mama looked at me, and I looked at Mama, and I showed her the first jack rabbit, but she didn't seem interested… .
The clerk took the gold toothpick from under his mustache and said. “Try that little shop next to the hotel. The ciders of the church buy their smokes there. He may have some old stuff in stock.”
“Thanks.”
It was a dusty little shop, but it Smelled neatly of Turkish blends and polished pipes. A little old man with a bright blue eye shook his head when Gramp asked for his favorite brand of cigars.
“The war?” Gramp asked.
“The war. And what I have, I have to keep for the elders of the church. That was a beautiful woman you had with you.”
“Oh, Sari,” said Gramp.
The little old man leaned over. “Sneaking in an extra wife?”
Gramp looked at the ceiling. “That isn't done anymore, you know—at least publicly.”
I started to say something, but Gramp gripped my arm and I think Intrembled. the tobacco habit had him in such a grip. If there was any way of getting cigars. Gramp was going to get them.
The little old man winked. “A mighty beautiful and comely offering to the codes of the early saints, I must say. Getting married at once? Well. I don't blame you. Other wives getting older, and not so much chance any more of defying the gentiles and their mealy-mouthed habits of one wife at a time.”
“It is to be quite an event,” said Gramp, “and I did want to pass out some good cigars. As you say, the custom of many fruitful unions is frowned upon; the good work of Smith and Young is going fast. Just two dozen cigars to pass out would have done it—the important elders, you know.”
The little man nodded and climbed up over his shelves like a chimp and brought down a ccdarwood box. “Two down Belindas, prime Havana leaf.”
We went out. glowing, the box under Gramp's arm and a fresh cigar in the corner of his mouth. Gramp looked at me and winked. “It's a man's world, Stevie, mum's the word. As a famous man once said, ’A woman is only a woman,‘ but… .”