RUBY with the TAWNY CHEEKS
Johnny Lamp’s son asked Ruby with the Tawny Cheeks to tell him again about cooking for all the cowboys. So she did.
“Half of them were my brothers the others half were hired. We were moving a herd of north. I rode ahead and took a pack horse to carry my kitchen and kindling. By the time the cows and the boys were a quarter mile away they could smell the fire I built, smell my coffee and salt pork and beans. I liked being the only girl and they took care of me. Taught me how to shoot. Sometimes I put rattlesnake in the beans. I liked sleeping close to the fire and when the burning wood popped and sparks rose I counted the flying embers along with all the stars.
“ In the desert I’ve seen strands of white light crack the sky into jagged pieces and the earth seemed to swallow them whole. For a moment heaven and earth were connected. Things could spontaneously combust in the desert. A burning bush like in the Bible caught the wonder in me and I began to think hard about the fire. Just where exactly did it come from? The wind blew down from any kind of sky and took off in any kind of direction, some times bringing the rain, sometimes not. I’ve been told a body could walk the edge of a river right back to its source, but I’ve never done it. But fire? It appeared to have no particular origin. Every fire that I ever saw came from a tinder box. Iron and stone, that’s what I’ve seen. A shard of iron and a stone; scratch one against the other and the smallest most insignificant sparks are let loose, emancipated from one or the other, I don’t know which. And try as he might, Da just couldn’t explain it well enough to satisfy and ended up saying that somethings are best left in a cloud of mystery. It was wizardry. I studied the beginnings of each fire. Tiny threads of lightning wisps, sparks falling onto broken pieces of black char cloth making a wormy glowing ember. Insignificant in size but consequential. Ma blew gently to keep it going. If she blew too hard the orange worm disappeared. If the worm was strong and eating the char cloth she she took both and poked them into a nest of dried grass cupped in her hand. Smoke, then the crackle like an incantation, then as the fire rose up as she dropped the blazing bundle onto a stack of kindling. The earth did not swallow this fire but instead made a bed for it.