It Happened on Christmas Eve

MARK HANSON USED HIS six-inch jack knife blade to scrap the duck butter out from under his toenails. Seated on a ladderback chair and his left leg cranked up over his right one, he could have used his reading glasses to see his handiwork better. Wearing his red union suit in the coal oil lantern light, he must have made a sight—but he wasn’t looking for no company to drop by the Box 6 line shack that late at night, so it really didn’t matter what he wore or nothing at all. But it was little late in the cool season to go natural.

The days had been warm enough for December, but about supper time, the old north wind began howling out of the Keystone Mountains, and some high clouds came floating in. He’d spend most of the fall after roundup in the line camp looking for mavericks they’d missed and trying to keep the losses down by shooting painters every chance he got.

Mountain lions, cougars or painters were all the same species. They liked colts the best—easier to kill, and folks said horse meat was sweeter than beef anyway. But some dumb yearling heifer off grazing by herself made easy pickings for one of them big cats. He’d shot two that fall and a third one got away packing some of his lead. He’d skinned the others out and stretched their hides on the side of the shack and the shed.

Been so dang long since he got a letter from his kin folks in Arkansas, he guessed they’d all died. Course Arizona was twelve hundred miles from there, so he’d stopped looking for any after his ma died. Been ten years since she’d sent him a Christmas fruit cake in a tin box. Why he’d rationed that last one out till spring, but Maw Hanson died about then. No one else back there knew him, he’d been gone so long.

But he was going to Soda Springs on the fifteenth, get his supplies, his red tin jug of coal oil refilled and check the mail. Buy a few small pints of hooch for when he was too stiff to get out of bed and get his supplies that Mr. Grady who owned the Box 6 would have ready to go in his panniers.

Poor man didn’t know much about ranching. He was from back east somewhere, but he treated the hands fair enough and Mark liked the line shack work. That way he didn’t have to listen to the palavering of some loose tongued kid night after night. There were times that Mark wondered how long he could stay on the ranch payroll. Maybe several more years barring a bad horse wreck or a tough accident.

Stubby Garret was past seventy when a colt piled him off in a deep canyon and broke his neck. The old man never suffered a minute, Doc said. Lamey Smith died of bad food by hisself in a line shack—that wasn’t a great thing. No one knew he was ill, and the poor devil must have lingered for days, before he went on to the big sky.

But he’d be sad leaving this life. Since the war, he’d wandered across the west working for outfits, learning how to toss a rope and ride a cold-backed one. Barbed wire changed many things. The Hereford and Shorthorns weren’t as tough as them old longhorns he started with driving them to Kansas.

He snapped his jackknife shut and blew out the coal oil lamp. Time to get some shut eye—took a lot more of it than it used to—sleep that was.

On the fifteenth, he saddled Ike before sunup, strapped a pack saddle and panniers on Squeaky, the shortest horse in his string, and headed for Soda Springs. Collar turned up on his heavy canvas-sided coat, he hunkered down in his Porter saddle and headed out.

He rode down Dry Wash about mid-morning and smelled mesquite smoke. Curious, he sent his horse up where the bank was caved off and looked across the greasewood flats. Sure enough, he saw a new adobe house near where there used to be a seep. Never had much water in it, but it probably needed to be developed. He could hear something making a pounding sound, and when he rode closer, he saw a boiler and steam engine plus a derrick rig like they used to drill oil wells. Dumb fool. There was no oil out there. But you couldn’t tell some folks nothing—they simply needed to learn.

A big burly young man with heavy leather gloves was doing the drilling. He shut off his winch and climbed down.

“Found anything yet?” he asked, dismounting. “My name’s Mark Hanson, by the way.”

“Iverson. Nope, but I ain’t a hundred feet down. Tough rock, but I’m making about five feet a day.”

“You think there’s water down there?” Mark took off his cowboy hat and scratched his head.

“You know about artesian wells?”

“Heard of ‘em.”

“Well, Mark, if I find some it will come pouring up here and turn this place into a Garden of Eden.”

“It surely will, but I ain’t much on believing there is any of that water under this old caliche, but I’m wishing you good luck, sir.” Mark started to remount his horse.

“Hold up. My wife’s coming with coffee for us.” He pointed to a woman headed from the house with a coffee pot and tin cups rattling in a poke. Something bothered him about the way she walked

“I wasn’t looking for a handout,” he said, feeling like he had overstayed his time and dropped the reins.

“This ain’t a handout, it’s just being neighborly,” Iverson said. “Meet your neighbor, darling. His name’s Mark Hanson.”

“Oh, good day, sir,” she said. “My name is Mary. Do you live close by?” Shocked, he realized that the woman was blind.

“Oh, over by them mountains—I’m sorry I just realized that you can’t see them.”

“They’re purple from here and one sticks out, doesn’t it?” she asked.

“How do you know that?”

“Iverson has described all the sights around this place, so I’d understood where I was at.”

“How long you two been here?” he asked her.

“About four months. This is December fifteenth. Ten days till Christmas.”

“It sure is. I’m going into Soda Springs to get my mail, my pay, and my provisions for six more weeks.”

“Will you be sending any Christmas cards?” she asked as Iverson took charge of the coffee. He poured three cups and told her to sit down on the stool he brought over for her.

“Sugar, Mark?”

“No, ma’am, Drink mine black. Guess I been in so many dang cow camps that had neither, so I just stopped taking it.”

“You’ve been a cowboy all your life, sir?” she asked.

“Since the war. I came to a crossroads coming home and said, by doggies I’d heard lots about Texas, and I decided to see about becoming one. For ten years I drove cattle to Kansas. Then I went to see Montana but it was too cold up there for me, so I drifted south.”

“Why you must have enough experience to write a book about it,” she said, sipping on her cup.

He chuckled. “Sure thing. The old cowboy from Arkansas, who never run an outfit, never had a wife, had some broken bones, rode some fine horses, but never one of his own that amounted to a hill of beans.”

“That could be very interesting reading.”

“I guess, but who’d want to read a book about an old geezer punched cows all his life.”

“I bet there are lots of people back east that would love to hear your tales of the frontier.”

Mark shook his head. “Miss Mary, that book business would be a flop, I’m afraid.”

“Would you drop back by and tell us some of those stories?” Iverson asked. “I’d take them down and she’d know how to paint the words.”

“If I find time, reckon I will.”

“You do that and have a nice trip to Soda Springs. And Mark, come back Christmas Eve. We’ll have food. Hot chocolate and string popcorn on a tree. No reason not to have Christmas, even out here.”

“No, there ain’t,” he agreed. “I sure like your coffee, too. Bet it’s Arbuckle.”

“Of course it is!” She smiled and got to her feet.

“Now there isn’t any need in that. I can catch my own horses.”

“Sure you can, but I was going to ask to feel your face so I’ll know what you look like next time you come by.”

“I don’t reckon it would hurt.” He swung off his sweat stained hat and she gently traced his nose, eyes, lips and mouth.

“You’re a kind man, Mark. Thanks for being so nice.” She stepped back.

“Thank you, ma’am. I’ll come down here Christmas Eve if that would be alright. Reckon I can find us a short juniper tree up in the Keystones. There’s some grows up there.”

‘Would you?” She clasped her long hands together. “That would be so wonderful. I was worried about finding one.”

“No problem. You got popcorn?”

“Plenty of that. You just come, sir.”

“Me and that tree will be coming, ma’am.” He waved to Iverson back on his drilling and watched them hug. Sweet people.

Mark must have hummed Old Dan Tucker all the way to Soda Springs. Been a long time since he had Christmas with anyone but some muddy soldiers in Mississippi the last winter of the war. A sloppy mess was what that was. They ate a wild goose some soldier had shot on the ground, and it had tasted like the dang mud, too. Yuck. Maybe that was why he liked the desert so much now.

At the old German’s store, he got his supplies loaded, coal oil can filled, bought two pints for medicinal purposes and found some sure enough blue material on a bolt for a dress. Surely, she could get it made. The old German, Hans, who ran the store asked about the material—he said he might send it to his relatives back home later. None of that old coot’s business.

Then he sprung the extra dollar and bought a rum fruit cake in a tin. There was no letter nor package for him. It all put away in his panniers, he waved goodbye to Hans who told him to wait and ran out with a small sack of hard candy.

“How much is a writing tablet?” he asked the man. “And two pencils?”

“Thirty cents.”

“Good, go get them. I may write some letters.”

“Jou ain’t wrote a letter in all dez years I knowed jou.” Hans shook his head, but he got the paper and pencils anyway.

“Well, I just might start.”

Mark paid him and heard Hans’ garbled Merry Christmas, he shouted back, “Same to you.”

He stopped about sundown at the Iverson’s and shared his candy, while Iverson kept up his pounding and she sat on her stool overseeing things. He put the two tablets and pencils in her hands and closed them. She perked up realizing his gift.

Squatted down in his run over boots, he spoke to her, “I’ll start coming over when I can, and he can write them down. I’ll try to recall the stories, and you can make them in good English, huh?”

“Oh! Can I hug you?”

“If he won’t get jealous?”

She stood and held out her hands holding the treasures he gave to her to hug him. “Look Iverson, look. He brought paper and pencils for you to write down his words.”

“Good,” the man said, holding the cable in one gloved hand that went up and down, ready to stop his operation in an instant if the drill bit hung up before it broke his cable.

With one of her sandwiches of prickly pear jam in his hand, he ate it riding on home.

Christmas eve came quickly. Despite the cool weather, he took a good sponge bath, shaved and washed his too long hair. He must have spent most of the day heating the iron on the cook stove top to flatten the wrinkles in his go-to-meeting clothes.

After lunch, he saddled his gentlest horse to drag a juniper bush on a rope over to the Iverson’s for the festivities. He had the material Mary had requested in a poke, along with the fruit cake. This time he didn’t worry about making it last all winter—why they might just eat it all that night.

He came out of the draw and blinked his eyes. There, boiling twenty feet up into the air was a gushing water fountain from under his drill rig. Iverson and Mary were dancing in a circle like a maypole ring, shouting and hooting at the sky.

Excited, he dismounted and hurried over to share the new rain.

“This is wonderful. Will it quit?” he asked, afraid if they left it open it might soon run out.

Wet faced, the big burly Iverson hugged him and shouted. “Not for years. I can cap it in a few minutes.”

“Need some help?”

“You can help. Ain’t this a real Christmas present?”

“By golly, it sure is.”

They finally, using pipe wrenches almost as tall as Mark, got the shut off installed and the well capped.

“What next?” Mark asked.

“We clear land, put up fences and get the ground broke for cotton and Mexican June Corn and sorghum. You ever made sorghum?”

“Sure, I know how to.” Been years but he didn’t figure that he’d forgotten how.

“Merry Christmas, Mark.”

“Sure is. Well let’s celebrate, I brung the tree.”

She clasped his arm tightly as they went to the house. “You’re a real Saint Nicolas.”

“Aw, Hans at the store would make a better one, he speaks the lingo.”

Iverson shook the dust out of the evergreen, and they made a board stand before they took it inside. She was busy popping corn, and soon, the three of them were stringing it with a needle and thread.

She cried over the blue material, holding it to her cheek to feel the weave and then waltzing around with it in the small square she knew in the kitchen part of the small adobe.

They began to spend more and more nights with Mark reciting stories like crossing the Canadian with two thousand steers in ’72 on the way to Abilene. And half the cowboys couldn’t swim.

“Why couldn’t they swim?” she asked.

“’Cause they wasn’t a tank deep enough in the country they came from to learn how,” Mark said. “Thank the Lord, I was raised in Arkansas, ‘cause I learned to swim.”

His stories began to appear in big city newspapers under the author’s name, Willy Make-it, and the checks grew larger. By the second cotton crop of forty acres, Iverson’s farm had almost two hundred acres in cultivation and two more artesian wells. Mark was the agriculture advisor for the operation and oversaw the help ‘cause he spoke their lingo.

He still wore his cowboy gear, but his dress became a bit more spiffy. The handmade boots came from Kansas and a Mexican lady in Tucson made his pin striped shirt, complaining the material he sent her was for pillow coverings. His Sunday special Boss of the Plains hat hung on a rack of Longhorns.

A young New York reporter came by one day and asked a million questions. Who was Willy Make-it? Was he real, and had all those thing actually happened?

Mark made a sour face, “You calling my best friend a liar?”

The reporter smiled and swallowed hard. “No, sir, but he must have done a million things back then.”

“Son, there was a million things needed done out here in them days.”

After the interview ended, Mark watched the boy get on his bicycle and pedal off. He shook his head. “Now ain’t that a sorry excuse for a horse.”

“He gone?” Mary asked from the doorway.

“Yeah, rode off on his dang bicycle.”

“I figured it was about time for your daily piece of fruit cake, Mark.”

“Been a long time since that Christmas. Never figured it would end up like this. You and Iverson have sure treated me nice.”

“Why, it was your stories that fed us until the farm got cleared and planted. And they still bring us a hefty amount each month.”

Mark blushed and scuffed the ground with his boot. She was right. And it had all happened on a Christmas Eve.