OCR Text |
Show My Father's Money IT WAS MY FIRST TIME IN THAT COURT OR ANY OTHER AND WHILE WE WAITED for the J.P. to show up, despite my father's money, or maybe because of it, I felt like I was already doomed to purgatory, lost, abandoned. Not Buck. He was swaggering around the place like maybe he figured he'd been there often enough to give him squatter's rights, grinning like a fool, as cocky as if he had the world by the tail and ready to give it a swing around his head, whoopee. That was Buck all right; I don't know that I ever saw him when he didn't have that stupid impudent »rin on his face. And how stupid can you get, the J.P. due any minute and Buck most likely headed for a few days in the clink, and no doubt about it him with his four upper front teeth missing, and still he's grinning. Looking like a six-year-old md acting like one too: if I had a hole like that in my face I'd at least keep my mouth shut, but not Buck. Oh no, he's got to give everybody the big smile like it was full of pearly white and he was there for die grinding cameras. Or maybe he was proud of that hole, I wouldn't put it past him. His family had showed up about three years before, coming from I doubt if anybody knew where and lighting in western Colorado probably just by chance, old Sanders, a heavy slow-talking man who chewed tobacco and always wore faded jib overalls and an even more faded blue shirt, and with an even more yet faded wife, a skinny little woman with a chest flatter than mine and a dead hang to her irms like they'd worn out. The kids all had curly hair as yellow as the sun but that woman was as dried and drab as the adobe they farmed, like scrubbing clothes so long had washed her out too. Buck was the oldest of the kids, probably around sighteen when they first showed up, and there was a girl, Loretta, maybe a year younger, and then three more. Buck was stocky widi thick rounded shoulders, and that Loretta was as tall as he was and just as heavy but all of it spilling out in curves md straining every which way. I was beginning to notice things like that. They'd taken the old Mclntyre place a mile north of town, just twenty acres, about ifteen of them poor clay and the other five down by the river nothing but marsh grass. He pastured a few runty cows down there and farmed the rest but how they :ver got enough to eat off that place I'll never know, let alone something left over to sell for enough to keep them in flour and sugar and maybe now and then a new pair )f shoes. But somehow they got along, the seven of them jammed into a three-room souse that hadn't been lived in for ten years or painted for twenty. Passing along :he highway we'd see the little ones digging in the dirt in the shade of the house and Jut in the fields Buck and the old man under the sun digging in that adobe clay. We lived two miles further on, off the highway and across the Uncompahgre River, about three hundred acres of rich bottom land under irrigation and another hundred of good pasture along the river. We had a two-story house with a lawn tjLst <2 3 My Father's Money 211 |