Book Review: "Winds of Morning"   by H. L. Davis

William Morris and Company, 1952.

Review by Martin Murie

Marvel not that I said unto thee,
Ye must be born again.
The wind bloweth where it listeth,
          and thou heareth the sound thereof,
        but canst not tell whence it cometh,
      and whither it goeth
  and so every one that is born
          of the Spirit

Saint John III, 7, 8.

Amos Clarke, a young deputy sheriff. arrests a man, Busick, who shoots up an Indian camp. One of his rifle shots accidentally kills Piute Charlie. They head for town, in Busick’s wagon, pulled by horsepower. On the way, Amos learns that Busick has put an old man, name of Hendricks, in charge of his herd of “rough” horses, without pay. Hendricks is apparently well acquainted with the country. He has returned for reasons unknown to Busick. Amos, musing to himself, pictures old Hendricks as a senile man, incapable, half crazed.  

They pull into town and Amos fills out the appropriate forms and the ancient jailer locks Busick into a cell.

While waiting for Busick’s jury trial to run its course Amos meets Busick’s daughter, Calanthe. They have a scatter-shot conversation in the Sheriff’s office while the trial drones on, upstairs. Amos is nervous when Calanthe says that if her dad goes to prison she will have to get a boring job waiting table in town or being a cook, or get married. She tells him she wants a house in town where there is a sense of permanence, rather than a sheep camp.

Busick gives up his claim to his herd of horses that are out there somewhere being tended to by old Hendricks. The horses are now the property of the county and the sheriff urges Amos, to take charge of the herd, move them to the high country, out of reach of Busick, who has been freed by the jury of townspeople, all of whom have private reasons for releasing him. 

The sheriff rolls some silver dollars in his hands, one of his habits, and says, "The only thing is that this Busick’s loose again now, and he might hold you to blame for this whole business. The lawyers said he was packin’ a rock in his hat for you. There might be trouble with him if he runs into you around town."

Amos balks, at first, because he doesn’t want townsfolk to think he is afraid of Busick, and he tells the sheriff  "... he won’t have to run into me. He can catch me at a slow walk, any time the notion strikes him." But on second thought, Amos sees the horse drive to high country might be more exciting than serving papers and other mild paperwork that constitutes his job in law enforcement.

  The sheriff says, "You can keep along the breaks of Camas River with 'em, and they won't bother anybody. The winter wheat’s all froze out up there anyway, so what can they hurt?"

The pace picks up when Amos ride out of town leading a couple of pack horses carrying a bed roll, pistol and groceries in case old Hendricks has run out of money.

  "The road I had brought Busick in on forked off across the railroad track and struck down into the sand hills along the river. The two pack horses broke the tedium by trying to turn in to it, but I yanked them back and held to the old county road skirting the hills on the upper side of the railroad. They settled down to the dejected shambling gait that horses affect when they don’t know where they are going."

He finds old Hendricks and realizes he’s sized him up wrong. He is not senile, not crazed in the head, but Amos can detect restlessness, a sort of ambivalence, in Hendricks, and fear in a Mexican young man, Esteban - timid seeming, scared, alone in foreign territory. He had shown up at Hendricks’ camp, appointed himself night herder. Something is biting at old Hendricks and this extremely cautious Mexican who had run away from a Greek crew tending railroad track without even collecting his wages.

~~~~~~~~~~

  We readers will be with horses from now on, as they negotiate varied landscapes. Davis knows his territory, and horses, and the men and women encountered and sized up on the way to high country. 

By simile:
"Exploring the real ins and outs of a community like that is something like taking a deep look into a waterhole out in the desert. You can ride within a few feet of a desert waterhole every day for a year without ever actually seeing the water at all, only the things it reflects: sky, willows, snakeweed, tules, rye grass, maybe a few circling snake doctors and a bird or two. But when you get down to drink from it and lean close, the reflections disappear and the life under the surface becomes visible: water bugs, tadpoles, minnows, dwarf crawfish, pin-point mollusks, naked roots, red water weeds, thread grasses. The mere shadowing out of some surface images that never really existed opens up a whole new world as active and populous as your own, different from anything in it and still part of it."

And by just plain enjoyment at being there: 
"It was a kind of deliverance to spread down beside the old orchard without knowing who had set it out or what his character had been or what sentiments he had squandered his life’s enthusiasm on . . . the mud around the pool where the spring ran out showed tracks of bobcats, porcupines, coyotes, lynx cats, skunks, rabbits, grouse, quail, badger, chipmunks and two or three deer . . . It was consoling to think that nature could take hold of an orchard that had been planted as an outpost against the wilderness , and, with scarcely an effort, turn it into a wilderness itself after all the wilderness around it had disappeared. It was evening up with humanity for some of its triggering with the designs of nature, and there was no reminiscence of humanity mixed into it."

~~~~~

"The wind dropped and white frost began falling . . . the sharp frost crystals flashing blue and orange and blinding white in the starlight as they came floating down through the darkness like incandescent flakes of diamond, like threads raveled from a star, like streaks of pain lightening a last agony of loneliness, like a man’s gloom of knowledge lit and tormented into restlessness by shreds of love."

And satire: old Hendricks, shifting into the high cackle of a truly senile old man. 
"Well, sir, heh-heh, a lot of these high-flyin’ young folks a-rippin’ around in their big cars don’t have any idea of the hardships we went through to build this into a land of opportunity for ‘em like we done, a-ridin’ on them covered wagons like it shows in the movin’ pictures, and haulin’ forty-cent wheat a hundred and twenty miles to market and gettin’ shot at by Indians when we run off a few of their horses that they didn’t have any use for and we did. It was to get our children a better chance in life than we’d had, . . . Well, it’s a great thing. We’ve made something out of this country. Wrested it from the wilderness, that’s what we’ve done. The old pioneer spirit, heh-heh-heh . . . Yep,. Heh-heh-heh . . . By God, that’s exactly how the rickety-headed old fools sounded. I’ll swear to it!  Damn such a place!"

And people:
Riding out of town on a dark night, old Hendricks begins to speak of one of his daughters,  "the Farrand woman," whose husband was shot dead. Did she do it? 
Or was it a lover? Or a drunk from the Greek railroad repair outfit? 
"I said no," Hendricks said. He toned it down a little after a dozen more fence posts. "I never did want to go there (the Farrand place). At first it was because I didn’t want her to see what I’d got to look like. Now it’s changed around. I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to look at her. Not now." Amos says to himself, "That was final enough. It settled several things. He was not avoiding the Farrand woman because of any grudge, any sense of enmity, any moral condemnation. It was because he loved her."

 ~~~~~

"It was Calanthe, coming up through the frost with a rope . . .. . She was only half-dressed, and hurrying because of the cold, and she had been crying. Her hair kept tapping against the tear stains on her cheeks as she waited. She looked up and saw me, and pushed it back from her face with the end of the rope, staring doubtfully. There was always reason to look twice at any new thing in that country, where half the shapes and colors seemed some transient effect of light rather than solid substance. . . . "

"I was bringing your horse back," I said. "I didn’t know whose it was, but I thought . . . He’s down there in the brush."

  She began to cry again. There was only one way to stop her that I could think of, not a very good one, but it was a case where anything was better than acting helpless. It was anger in her more than hurt. The hurt must have come first, but the anger had taken the harder hold on her, and crying was apt to make it worse instead of easing it. She cried so bitterly that I was afraid old Hendricks might hear it in camp and think she was being mistreated.

Calanthe again:
A loose horse splashed across the creek and edged close, eyeing the grain sack in my hand. He was one of the sheriff’s horses, the leader in our pack string, and a chronic pet from long time back. I folded the sack on the ground and sat on it to keep him from making a nuisance of himself about it.

  Amos asks Calanthe “What other people can you get help from? Who are they?”
“There's plenty of 'em,” she said. “Never mind who they are. You wouldn't know them, anyway.”
“Ross Tunison?” I said.
“He’d be one,” she said. “I could get help from him if I needed it. What of it? I know him. I’ve known him longer than I have you.”  . . .
“Have you ever let him kiss you?”
"You would throw that up to me, wouldn’t you?" Her voice was low, with a curious dull quality in it, that sounded ominous. “I didn’t throw anything up to you,” I said hastily. “I didn’t say anything except . . .”
“You did, too!” she said. “I know what you meant! I know what you thought, too, and what you let that old man think when you told him about it! You figured it out that I was some slut starting out to work the road camps for enough to live on, or something like that. Didn’t you!”
“I didn’t think anything of the kind,” I said. “Neither did the old man. I didn’t tell him anything about that. He likes you. He thinks you’re all right. He said so before I started down here. He said you was a good girl. You can ask him if you don’t believe it.”
She rested her chin on her hand, thinking it over. The pack horse tried to pull the sack out from under me, and I pushed him away and threw a stick at him. He trotted a few steps away and then began edging back again. 
“I don’t need to ask him,” she said. “It’s all right, I guess. There was something I said, one or two things. I was afraid you’d think something about them. You pick things up from men around a lambing camp, and sometimes you forget whether they’re dirty or not. Mostly I remember. I will from now on, if it . . . There’s that horse behind you!”

~~~~~

Amos challenges the night herder, Esteban. “I want you to tell me something, and I want you to tell the truth about it. You will, if you know what’s good for you. Over across the hills yonder there’s a place on the river named South Junction. You worked there on the railroad with some Greeks a few weeks ago, didn’t you?”
“Hac unas semanis, si.”
“There was a woman there. You know which one I mean. Somebody killed her husband, shot him in his house at night. Was it you, or was it the woman?”
“Era yo,” he said, in his vacant-sounding mumble. “Yo, si.”
“Did you want to do it or did somebody else put you up to it? Was it because the woman told you to?”
“No. Ella no. Yo, no mas.”
Amos goes back to the camp. They discuss Esteban’s confession, come to no firm conclusions. 
Hendricks announces that they have to push the horses across the Camas river.
“South Junction? You switch around fast don’t you?”

He roped another bedroll and kicked it over beside the first one. “That’s it. You ought to be a little more respectful about it. Maybe you ain’t heard it yet, but you’re talkin’ to a man that’s come into some sense. Yes, sir, redeemed and transfigured, that’s me. I’ve been so I didn’t know enough to pour piss out of boot with the directions printed on the heel. Now I can do it right off the bat, if the print ain’t too fine. I’ve changed. I’ve felt the witness. I’ve got ahold of a few brains for a change. You don’t need to let ‘em scare you, though. I ain’t goin’ to act high-toned about ‘em. I’m a hell of a lot too democratic to let a little thing like brains go to my head. It’s South Junction, yes.”

~~~~~~~~~~~

I’ve steered away from plot. It’s the lingo and close attention to weather and earth and horses and people being dissected that I wanted to dredge up from fifty seven years ago. It resonates today. This novel is about struggle, inside us and outside, all inter-mingled in a complex that none of us can ever get a good hold on. 

The wind bloweth where it listeth
      and thou hearest the sound thereof,
    but canst not tell whence it cometh,
and whither it goeth.

It’s about responsibility. Most of us know about responsibility and we go to outlandish lengths to find excuses, to weasel out of it. Hendricks finally has to quit weaseling and free himself. He says that if he gets any credit for it he’ll throw the credits back.