A Cowboy Named Emmet
A Death Song of a Son Who Missed the West
Samuel P. Edwards
Published by XSG Media (www.xsgmedia.com) at Smashwords
FIRST EDITION | Smashwords Edition
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Copyright © 2012 by Samuel P. Edwards, www.eurekaproductions.tv
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ISBN-13: 9781456324919
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Also by Sam Edwards
In the Last Days of the Empire: Watching the Sixties Go By on Greenwich Village Time, a Bartender’s Tale
The Great American Light War: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69365
An All American Boy: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69378
Available at eurekaproductions.tv and online book retailers.
His name was Emmet
Though he’d have liked it with two t’s
Like Emmett Dalton of the Dalton Boys
who lived to make a movie for my dad’s childhood
A version by RKO Later seen by me on Saturday matinees
Double featured with the life of Jesse James
(Just as Frank James lived to guide tours
In the American way of repentance)
My Granddaddy kept that Emmett’s Colt Peacemaker
And blood-spoke holster from a long gone Longhorn hide
Nailed up on a yellow pine wall with Oregon Trail
Abandoned things that weathered time
Under sage and creosote bush
Along with out-of-focus bucking horses
And Old Timers with bandanas,
Old Timers with wide-winged chaps
And deep bucket hats of an earlier West
We liked looking back then
Not like now over your shoulder turned.
I used to trick my dad into last week’s Elko shows held over,
Endlessly reeling out the last gun battles
In black and white, reel sputtering
Ranch hands too broke for the bars
Quiet in the habit of bunkhouse meals
Except for ‘short stop the spuds’
Here there and bars being where loners might differ.
My dad was master of the sigh and warbled groan
And the undertone explicative
You know it was something like, “Puchee!”
And the beer would erupt in a breathy blast.
He grew up in California when there were no effete estates in vines
In the Santa Ynez Valley, now traveled by gleaming symbols
Of middle class might in minutes
Where at 18 it took my dad a couple of weeks Puchee!
To herd cows from Santa Ynez to summer on Figerora Mountain
The roads over the San Marcos Pass had steps
For the heaving teams wweating the harnesses wet
And fancy Santa Barbara dry as when passed by
Coastal schooners bracing for Point Conception
Bound for hip Monterey;
Wasted no water still iridescent from mountain streams undam’d On burnished lawns and European shrubs
Not found by the native hotsprings;
Proof of the throbbing of this earth
Still only partially plundered.
Only an indigenous “few” had been displaced
As a very little boy I sat in wonder at the livery stable
Enormous to me from my horizon
The smell of hay and leather then
Like backhoes and oil to boys now
On an Anacapa street unmalled
While my Dad dickered with the man
Who planted the giant fig
– Roots making a boy’s horizon –
At the Southern Pacific Station where he’d look the other way
As I put a dollar still heavy with silver
On the hot gleaming tracks – Puchee!
Inviting to the touch like the barrel of his saddle-worn Winchester
Just before the Daylight steamed by gorgeous in orange and yellow
With streamliner plates by the boiler
Not wonderfully functional in black and steam
Beating time for the continent along the Road of Tears
Their cars loaded low with cannons and tanks the color of oak.
My dad knew all the incarnations of paving
The grand coastal road had taken from missionary dirt
To the highwayman’s ambush at Gaviota
To the first highway hotel with livery for the car.
The sign painted by hand in a serif type