Imogene's Story, As Told By the Storekeeper

Excerpt two from Common Decency, 

From the storekeeper, Donne Tucker:

    

    “Well I can tell you what I know, that she was born Mary Imogene O’Malley in the sand hills.  Her parents were Bartholomew O’Malley and Maureen O’Connell and she had a younger sister named Anna Madeline, born later, who didn’t stay around any better than their mother had.  Maureen left in 1951, again in 1955, and the last time in 1957, fed up with the dry weather and lack of money, and went back East.”

    She took that youngest one with her, at least for a while, until she ran off and ended up in foster care.  Imogene was the one who stayed.  Even after Bart drank himself to death, or maybe because he did, she was still there.  The things that had bothered her mother, the plain old house and the long road to town, that was what she liked.  For Imogene it was the horses and the cattle, and that this was her Granddad’s original homestead.  She got some of this outlook from the neighbor who helped raise her of course. Rosa Johnson was one who could fix fence, ride a horse, work in the hayfield and not miss any more than what she had, and Imogene fit right in with that.  Some said she was a throw-back, that she’d skipped a generation, and it helped that Rosa was same age as Imogene’s Granddad and he would’ve liked her just as good - would have grinned at the sight of her chasing down a half broke colt and jumping onto its back for the heck of it.  The two of them, him and that girl, they could’ve made it work, people said, but he up and died too soon.  Whereas Bart, he more or less just threw the place away.  Or tried to, or would have - like his brothers did - if his mother Mary McLeod hadn’t kept hold of that original homestead.  Bart was just no great shakes as a rancher. The war might have been what took it out of him, but others said he just never had it in him. He couldn’t ride a horse unless it was hooked to a plow, and he’d let a cow die rather than get in there and pull the calf.  People weren’t surprised that he drank.  What they were sure of is that he would have died a lot sooner if it hadn’t been for his daughter.  Imogene could drive almost as good as she could ride, and it was her even at 10 and 12 - tall enough to reach the pedals - who drove that old truck of his home every day after school with him in it, or he’d never have got there.  It was her that dragged him into the house so he didn’t freeze to death if there was snow on the ground and it was her that did whatever cooking ever got done in that kitchen. 

    Rosa, a couple of miles up the road, she sometimes helped the girl get along, but without a lot of frills.  It was well known what she thought of the O’Malleys.  That was Rosa Johnson.  She’s still one of the real characters in this country, or maybe she was what gave the country character - the kind people count on when things need to get done.  She brought pies to the bake sales and she ran the food stand at the auctions.  And St. Bonaventure’s Catholic Church at Coleman Village would have fallen down and disappeared into the dust of those miles after miles of sand dunes across McPherson County if she had ever failed to attend Sunday morning Mass.  She was the backbone of that Church like she was of her family.  Her giving up, it was just one of those things that didn’t happen - kind of like her son Mason ever joining her there.  That didn’t happen either.  They were two of a kind when it came to stubborn. Some people said that came from his granddad - old Moses being the one who came to this country for the homesteads and then stayed to take what others left behind.  But the one good thing his son Nils ever did was to get married to Rosa Coleman.  Her dad was just some old cowboy who followed a big bunch of starved out cattle into the sand hills and when the cattle got fat in the tall grass he decided to stay too.  He made good off of those cattle, no matter whose they’d been to start with, and she grew up to be like her dad, taller than most and straight-backed. But her older boys, once they got big enough to join the Army, that was the last anybody ever saw of them.  She eased up on that youngest boy, needing at least one of them to stay, and maybe - she’d tell you this herself - she gave him too much rope.  He raised good enough cattle, rode in the rodeos, raised a little hell - him big enough to get respect most anywhere - but he never did find a girl he dared to bring back home.  Not until later.  Some people wonder if that O’Malley girl was even his daughter, but you don’t dare to say that out loud.  She was back and forth to her Aunt Katie’s place over to the west of hers till Bart passed away and then here she was, back for good, no explanations.

    She had that hard straight look on her face that maybe came more from trying to get along with a hard-case half-breed hired hand that sometimes worked up there at Johnson’s.  He went by the name of Joe Ed Davis, though he had a brother by the name of Jesse Prairie, and word was he’d been a big-time hotshot money-winner in the rodeo - a bronc rider, horse trainer, all-around hand and a pretty good cowboy if you didn’t care he’d been to prison.  He was who to have around when you needed to move cattle, work calves or get a little veterinary work done. That guy could swing a rope like nobody’s business.  He could stop a bull on that big bronc horse he rode, drag it to a horse trailer and haul it back to the barn when nobody else could.  Cattle or horses, it didn’t matter, he could handle it.  A tall, scarred-up, rough-looking fellow, he was strong enough to lay down a wild stud colt with nothing more than a rope and geld the thing right out there in the pasture, if that’s what was needed.  Some of it he learned growing up on the reservation, people said, and some of it from that Oklahoma state prison, where a guy could get real good at rodeo if he wanted to. The downside was he had to visit a parole officer every now and again, so anybody with a gripe could cause him trouble. Most ranchers had nothing but good to say about the guy, as long as he knew where he belonged.  They didn’t want him around their women but the wives didn’t want him in the house for dinner anyway so he just packed his own gear and hauled his own horses and ate in his truck like that’s how he wanted it, no insult taken.  Or none you could see.  He was just here for the work, at least for the first five or six years. He’d be here in the summers and gone back to the reservation for the winters and then he’d show up the next spring with a couple trailer loads of good broke using horses. Some said it was rodeo stock his uncle bought and sold but they’d have a sale down at Willy’s corral behind the bar and the ranch work’d start up all over again. 

    Imogene would’ve been better off with a good guy like Lester Jonas, but she was probably afraid Lester couldn’t hold the line against Johnson.  Lester said Rosa Johnson would come out of the house and stand on the porch with her arms crossed whenever she caught wind of something she didn’t like, or she’d drive out onto the hayfield at supper time and Miss Imogene would ride home with her. Johnson wouldn’t have handled that near so fair on his own.  It was Johnson, after all, who brought Joe Ed Davis in, even talked Bart into boarding him at the O’Malley house for awhile.  I guess they thought it wouldn’t matter to Imogene, no more than she was home, no more than she looked at guys.

   But she was home enough. And she saw him. It’s hard to figure why she did -- he was sure no pretty boy, just kind of a tough guy with tattoos and scars, one even right across his mouth, and this home-made chopped-off black Indian hair that hung down to his collar under that bronc rider’s hat he always wore.  A guy’d swear he wasn’t anything most women would ever have wanted anything to do with.  He could of been sent back to the slammer just for asking one of them to dance if he’d gone about it like other people did.  So he acted like he didn’t care. He’d pretend to be drinkin’ along with Bart and Mason Johnson down at Willy Bell’s bar here, all the while Willy watering down his whiskey, and there’d be Johnson running his mouth that nobody could ride that old Smoke horse of his like Imogene -- her there in a corner booth doin’ her homework.  He’d say she’d about ruined that horse to the saddle with all that bareback riding she did in the night when nobody was watching, like she thought she was smart.  Like nobody could ever catch her, he’d say.  And Willie says Imogene would maybe raise her head and let her look drift across to Joe Ed without making a point of it, like maybe she was just checking the clock for when she’d get to go home.  And Joe Ed would meet her eyes with that dead-on black-eyed stare of his and Willie said you just knew they’d made a date in the dunes.  But he never let on as to what he saw.     

    Willie keeps people’s secrets.  You about have to when you run a bar with rooms upstairs. He gets the mail for the cowboys who don’t have any other real home, and he has a barn out back and some oats and hay and a little bit of pasture for their horses. And when somebody wants to come pay for a horse, he doesn’t have to try to find Joe Ed or Lester or any of the others.  He just puts it in his bank, at interest, and gives it back when they need it.  All these years and there’s never been a question.

   Plus Willie didn’t like how the big shots tried to push Joe Ed, trying to get him riled. He knew it was easy enough to do.  Joe was hotheaded and a hard drinker and way too fast to pull a knife. And Imogene had got beat up by Bart for most of her young life after her mother left, and was hounded by Mason Johnson after that, as was her Aunt Kate in her younger days.  So she was looking for a defender, a tough guy who might be on her side. She might of have still believed in love and romance and the children she got out of it -- and to whom she was a lovely and gracious mother, like Rosa -- but all we ever saw was the hard times.  And as much as Bart and Mason were around there, you’d think they might have figured out what was coming. I could see it from my store across the street. But that’s what the drink does for people - kind of dims the headlights.

    So Joe Ed got away with it.  He got to lay his claim on her where nobody knew and stand up amongst us on land of his own that was hers after Bart died, and be a rancher.  He married her and had kids with her – her one of our own -- and nobody could say a dang thing to stop it.  Because she said yes.”