Shortgrass Song by Mike Blakely

reason recently. Ab suggested Mexico. It made perfect sense to him. Many Texas slaves had escaped to Mexico, and the Snake Woman had probably started out a Mexican anyway, according to Long Fingers.
    But Ella said Mexico was almost as far away as Canada. Besides, she insisted, it was ridiculous to send two able bodies away from the farm when there was so much work to be done. Ab knew he was stuck with them then, and no amount of reasoning would change his wife’s mind.
    â€œDo you farm?” he asked Buster.
    â€œI bossed a truck farm before. I can blacksmith, too.”
    â€œWell, that’s something. We can’t pay, you know. At least not this year.”
    â€œHe’s never been paid before anyway,” Ella said. “He was a slave.”
    â€œYou and that squaw will have to sleep in your wagon. The boys are using ours till we get the cabin built.”
    â€œThey can’t both sleep in that tiny wagon,” Ella said. “We’ll move the boys back in with us. Mr. Thompson and the Indian woman can sleep in our wagon.”
    â€œShe can have the big wagon by herself,” Buster said. “I’ll sleep in mine. I’m afraid she might cut me up in the middle of the night.”
    Buster and the Holcombs looked through the dugout door at Snake Woman, squatting by the creek, eating her supper alone. No one insisted that Buster had to sleep with her.
    â€œHey, Buster,” Pete said.
    â€œPete, you speak to him properly,” Ella warned.
    â€œI mean, Mr. Thompson. Will you play your fiddle now?”
    â€œI will if you’ll run get it.”
    Pete and Matthew tore out of the dugout and came back with all of Buster’s instruments. As the fiddler opened his case, Caleb slipped away from his mother’s arms and knelt in front of the mandolin leaning against the dirt wall between the guitar and the banjo. He had never seen anything as beautiful in his life—not even the pocketknife he had lost earlier that day.
    It was just his size—barely half the length of the ungainly instruments flanking it. The body of the guitar was just a flat-topped box. The body of the banjo looked like an old drum. But the little mandolin had the graceful outline of a teardrop, tapered everywhere and inlaid with wooden bits of more colors than the mountain showed at sunrise. Yet, there was an intriguing violation of the teardrop form. The hollow box of the instrument grew an odd curlicue from one of its sides. The curlicue had a leather strap attached to it, and Caleb knew instinctively the strap was meant to sling over the shoulder of the mandolin player. Eight strings, stretched in pairs, gleamed yellow in the firelight.
    â€œMr. Thompson,” he said in a timid voice, “can I have this one?”
    â€œCaleb, please!” Ella said.
    But Buster raised his hand. “Little man,” he said, winking at Caleb, “if you learn to play it, you can sure have it.”
    Caleb looked at his mother. She smiled. At last he was going to have something he wanted. He was going to learn to play the mandolin.

SIX
    The next morning, Buster went to work breaking ground in the creek bottom for his truck patch. He thought he might have to get Snake Woman to irrigate the patch by hand if the rains didn’t come. Maybe next year he could try to dig an irrigation ditch.
    â€œDon’t you go gettin’ ahead of yourself,” he muttered. “You might not be here next year.”
    About halfway into the third morning, a rivet bolt broke on Buster’s plow, so he led the oxen to the creek where they could drink and went back to the wagons to get a new rivet bolt and a hammer.
    Caleb was sitting in the milk wagon, practicing his mandolin chords, when Buster came to get his hammer out of his tool crate.
    â€œMy fingers hurt,” the boy said.
    â€œThey will at first. Then they get tough. Look at mine.” He showed Caleb the calluses on the fingertips of his left