The Leader of the People
John Steinbeck
Then the cart came into sight and stopped. A man dressed in black dismounted from the seat and walked to the horse’s head. Although it was so far away, Jody knew he had unhooked the check-rein, for the horse’s head dropped forward. The horse moved on, and the man walked slowly up the hill beside it. Jody gave a glad cry and ran down the road toward them. The squirrels bumped along off the road, and a road-runner flirted its tail and raced over the edge of the hill and sailed out like a glider.
Jody tried to leap into the middle of his shadow at every step. A stone rolled under his foot and he went down. Around a little bend he raced, and there, a short distance ahead, were his grandfather and the cart. The boy dropped from his unseemly running and approached at a dignified walk.
The horse plodded stumble-footedly up the hill and the old man walked beside it. In the lowering sun their giant shadows flickered darkly behind them. The grandfather was dressed in a black broadcloth suit and he wore kid congress gaiters and a black tie on a short, hard collar. He carried his black slouch hat in his hand. His white beard was cropped close and his white eyebrows overhung his eyes like mustaches. The blue eyes were sternly merry. About the whole face and figure there was a granite dignity, so that every motion seemed an impossible thing. Once at rest, it seemed the old man would be stone, would never move again. His steps were slow and certain. Once made, no step could ever be retraced; once headed in a direction, the path would never bend nor the pace increase nor slow.
When Jody appeared around the bend, Grandfather waved his hat slowly in welcome, and he called, “Why, Jody! Come down to meet me, have you?”
Jody sidled near and turned and matched his step to the old man’s step and stiffened his body and dragged his heels a little. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We got your letter only today.”
“Should have been here yesterday,” said Grandfather. “It certainly should. How are all the folks?”
“They’re fine, sir.” He hesitated and then suggested shyly, “Would you like to come on a mouse hunt tomorrow, sir?”
“Mouse hunt, Jody?” Grandfather chuckled. “Have the people of this generation come down to hunting mice? They aren’t very strong, the new people, but I hardly thought mice would be game for them.”
“No, sir. It’s just play. The haystack’s gone. I’m going to drive out the mice to the dogs. And you can watch, or even beat the hay a little.”
The stern, merry eyes turned down on him. “I see. You don’t eat them, then. You haven’t come to that yet.”
Jody explained, “The dogs eat them, sir. It wouldn’t be much like hunting Indians, I guess.”
“No, not much—but then later, when the troops were hunting Indians and shooting children and burning teepees, it wasn’t much different from your mouse hunt.”
They topped the rise and started down into the ranch cup, and they lost the sun from their shoulders. “You’ve grown,” Grandfather said. “Nearly an inch, I should say.”
“More,” Jody boasted. “Where they mark me on the door, I’m up more than an inch since Thanksgiving even.”
Grandfather’s rich throaty voice said, “Maybe you’re getting too much water and turning to pith and stalk. Wait until you head out, and then we’ll see.”
Jody looked quickly into the old man’s face to see whether his feelings should be hurt, but there was no will to injure, no punishing nor putting-in-your-place light in the keen blue eyes. “We might kill a pig,” Jody suggested.
“Oh, no! I couldn’t let you do that. You’re just humoring me. It isn’t the time and you know it.”
“You know Riley, the big boar, sir?”
“Yes. I remember Riley well.”
“Well, Riley ate a hole into that same haystack, and it fell down on him and smothered him.”
“Pigs do that when they can,” said Grandfather.
“Riley was a nice pig, for a boar, sir. I rode him sometimes, and he didn’t mind.”
A door slammed at the house below them, and they saw Jody’s mother standing on the porch waving her apron in welcome. And they saw Carl Tiflin walking up from the barn to be at the house for the arrival.
The sun had disappeared from the hills by now. The blue smoke from the house chimney hung in flat layers in the purpling ranch-cup. The puff-ball clouds, dropped by the falling wind, hung listlessly in the sky.
Billy Buck came out of the bunkhouse and flung a wash basin of soapy water on the ground. He had been shaving in mid-week, for Billy held Grandfather in reverence, and Grandfather said that Billy was one of the few men of the new generation who had not gone soft. Although Billy was in middle age, Grandfather considered him a boy. Now Billy was hurrying toward the house too.
When Jody and Grandfather arrived, the three were waiting for them in front of the yard gate.
Carl said, “Hello, sir. We’ve been looking for you.”
Mrs. Tiflin kissed Grandfather on the side of his beard, and stood still while his big hand patted her shoulder. Billy shook hands solemnly, grinning under his straw mustache. “I’ll put up your horse,” said Billy, and he led the rig away.
Grandfather watched him go, and then, turning back to the group, he said as he had said a hundred times before, “There’s a good boy. I knew his father, old Mule-tail Buck. I never knew why they called him Mule-tail except he packed mules.”
Mrs. Tiflin turned and led the way into the house. “How long are you going to stay, Father? Your letter didn’t say.”
“Well, I don’t know. I thought I’d stay about two weeks. But I never stay as long as I think I’m going to.”
In a short while they were sitting at the white oilcloth table eating their supper. The lamp with the tin reflector hung over the table. Outside the dining-room windows the big moths battered softly against the glass.
Grandfather cut his steak into tiny pieces and chewed slowly. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Driving out here got my appetite up. It’s like when we were crossing. We all got so hungry every night we could hardly wait to let the meat get done. I could eat about five pounds of buffalo meat every night.”
“It’s moving around does it,” said Billy. “My father was a government packer. I helped him when I was a kid. Just the two of us could about clean up a deer’s ham.”
“I knew your father, Billy,” said Grandfather. “A fine man he was. They called him Mule-tail Buck. I don’t know why except he packed mules.”
“That was it,” Billy agreed. “He packed mules.”
Grandfather put down his knife and fork and looked around the table. “I remember one time we ran out of meat—” His voice dropped to a curious low sing-song, dropped into a tonal groove the story had worn for itself. “There was no buffalo, no antelope, not even rabbits. The hunters couldn’t even shoot a coyote. That was the time for the leader to be on the watch. I was the leader, and I kept my eyes open. Know why? Well, just the minute the people began to get hungry they’d start slaughtering the team oxen. Do you believe that? I’ve heard of parties that just ate up their draft cattle. Started from the middle and worked toward the ends. Finally they’d eat the lead pair, and then the wheelers. The leader of a party had to keep them from doing that.”
In some manner a big moth got into the room and circled the hanging kerosene lamp. Billy got up and tried to clap it between his hands. Carl struck with a cupped palm and caught the moth and broke it. He walked to the window and dropped it out.
“As I was saying,” Grandfather began again, but Carl interrupted him. “You’d better eat some more meat. All the rest of us are ready for our pudding.”
Jody saw a flash of anger in his mother’s eyes. Grandfather picked up his knife and fork. “I’m pretty hungry, all right,” he said. “I’ll tell you about that later.”
When supper was over, when the family and Billy Buck sat in front of the fireplace in the other room, Jody anxiously watched Grandfather. He saw the signs he knew. The bearded head leaned forward; the eyes lost their sternness and looked wonderingly into the fire; the big lean fingers laced themselves on the black knees. “I wonder,” he began, “I just wonder whether I ever told you how those thieving Piutes drove off thirty-five of our horses.”
“I think you did,” Carl interrupted. “Wasn’t it just before you went up into the Tahoe country?”
Grandfather turned quickly toward his son-in-law. “That’s right. I guess I must have told you that story.”
“Lots of times,” Carl said cruelly, and he avoided his wife’s eyes. But he felt the angry eyes on him, and he said, “’Course I’d like to hear it again.”
Grandfather looked back at the fire. His fingers unlaced and laced again. Jody knew how he felt, how his insides were collapsed and empty. Hadn’t Jody been called a Big-Britches that very afternoon? He arose to heroism and opened himself to the term Big-Britches again. “Tell about Indians,” he said softly.
Grandfather’s eyes grew stern again. “Boys always want to hear about Indians. It was a job for men, but boys want to hear about it. Well, let’s see. Did I ever tell you how I wanted each wagon to carry a long iron plate?”
Everyone but Jody remained silent. Jody said, “No. You didn’t.”
“Well, when the Indians attacked, we always put the wagons in a circle and fought from between the wheels. I thought that if every wagon carried a long plate with rifle holes, the men could stand the plates on the outside of the wheels when the wagons were in the circle and they would be protected. It would save lives and that would make up for the extra weight of the iron. But of course the party wouldn’t do it. No party had done it before and they couldn’t see why they should go to the expense. They lived to regret it, too.”
Jody looked at his mother, and knew from her expression that she was not listening at all. Carl picked at a callus on his thumb and Billy Buck watched a spider crawling up the wall.
Grandfather’s tone dropped into its narrative groove again. Jody knew in advance exactly what words would fall. The story droned on, speeded up for the attack, grew sad over the wounds, struck a dirge at the burials on the great plains. Jody sat quietly watching Grandfather. The stern blue eyes were detached. He looked as though he were not very interested in the story himself.
When it was finished, when the pause had been politely respected as the frontier of the story, Billy Buck stood up and stretched and hitched his trousers. “I guess I’ll turn in,” he said. Then he faced Grandfather. “I’ve got an old powder horn and a cap and ball pistol down to the bunkhouse. Did I ever show them to you?”
Grandfather nodded slowly. “Yes, I think you did, Billy. Reminds me of a pistol I had when I was leading the people across.” Billy stood politely until the little story was done, and then he said, “Good night,” and went out of the house.
Carl Tiflin tried to turn the conversation then. “How’s the country between here and Monterey? I’ve heard it’s pretty dry.”
“It is dry,” said Grandfather. “There’s not a drop of water in the Laguna Seca. But it’s a long pull from ’87. The whole country was powder then, and in ’61 I believe all the coyotes starved to death. We had fifteen inches of rain this year.”