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.”
