I wrote this short story last week, when I felt like writing something and knew that it had to be a Christmas story…and perhaps in order to revel in a little vicarious snow and ice. I had run across a favorite passage from Shakespeare quoted in Washington Irving’s Old Christmas, and it inspired me to do a little brainstorming. A Western Christmas story, because I’ve never really tried that before…drawing on that quotation. I decided I’d share it here, even though it’s rather longer than any fiction I usually post on my blog…because it’s Christmas.
As of 2020, this story and four more are now available in the collection Outlaw Fever: Five Western Stories.
A million diamonds glinted in the smooth, untouched white curve of snow in the basin, struck out by the sun that pierced the bright silver-white sky. The bitter wind whisked across it, kicking up little powdery swirls. Cal Rayburn turned up the collar of his sourdough coat with one hand, hunching his shoulders a little so the collar half covered his ears. He squinted at the blinding-bright landscape, and one side of his cold-numbed lips twisted back a little in a half-smile. Not another human being for miles, but still he fancied he could feel an odd festivity in the air. What did it come from, he wondered? The fields and mountains looked the same as they did every day. If he had not known it was Christmas Eve day, would he still have felt it?
Cal reined his horse to a stop at the crest of a white rise, and looked back over his shoulder toward the rampart of mountains that towered over the line camp. Their white peaks were seamed with black and silver where the wind scoured the snow from the rock faces, their lower slopes heavy with snowy pines. As he looked, a wind roused among the trees of the nearest slope, blowing clouds of snow like white smoke shot with crystal from their laden branches. The beauty of it caught in Cal’s chest and almost hurt. It was moments like these that he didn’t mind being alone out here.
His horse stood hock-deep in the trampled snow, its head tucked down a little against the wind. Cal scanned the empty, untracked basin again—no sign of cattle; they would all be back in the shoulder of some sheltering hill, or deep under the pines. No sign of anything. He smiled, and his lips formed the words softly aloud: “Here shall he see no enemy…but winter and rough weather.”
His horse swiveled a blue-dun ear backward, inquiringly. It was a habit that had grown on Cal from his grandfather. Gramps had always been a well of quotations: poetry, Shakespeare mostly, bits of psalms and other scriptures—an apt phrase for any occasion, and some things that sounded surprising coming from a little dried-up old man who’d been a farmer and blacksmith all his life; but the beauty of them you couldn’t deny. Gramps had set store by that.
“When you got some beauty in your mind, boy,” he would say, “it don’t matter how ugly a place you’re in. You get by.”
Well, there was nothing ugly here…except the aloneness.
