The Old Woman reported that she, like Cardoshia, became a virtual prisoner at Freemen Ranch. In a decidedly mixed blessing, Squire Kannon’s father, Squire Klyden, took a shine to her, sniffing after her like an old goat in rut. Squire Klyden was a more deeply embittered and significantly cruder version of his martial scion. Playing a dangerous game, the Old Woman reached even farther back in time than Squire K required of Cardoshia. She dressed up in pioneer women clothes, including sun bonnets and button-down shoes, exercised subtle Victorian flirtations, and led the old goat around as if by a carrot on a string.
She kept up the carriage house in exquisite order and made sure the Squire Klyden got his tonics, his Jack Daniels, and his Red Man tobacco pouches, taking care to find vintage stock of the latter to circumvent his fury about politically correct rebranding. Squire Klyden began taking her out for picnics in his rusty old blue and white F100, but always inside the ranch. Never did the watchful Freemen let them out of their sight, frustrating her plans to simply carjack the lusty relic. She knew she could easily take him, but the armed zealots were another matter. Fortunately, the old goat passed out each night before the late-rising sap of the ancient bristlecone might overcome the twin impediments of dotage and drunkenness.
“Things seemed to be at a vexing impasse,” said the Old Woman, “but then a hero arrived in the third act.” She beamed at Tanemahuta.
Tanemahuta picked up the narrative from his end. “Once I accepted the mission to scope out the Freemen ranch, I recalled the vivid story you shared with me, Kandude, and studied up. No stranger to code switching, I traded the Subaru for an old Chevy pickup and got some appropriate duds and an ironic MAWA ballcap. I picked up a used Taurus 9MM at a gun show and collected some patriot literature. I contrived to run into a couple of the Freemen at bars in Abilene, where a few of the more imaginative boys were able to overcome their instinctive loathing of a giant brown native with face tattoos in light of my avowed enthusiasm for overthrowing the government. I claimed I was a Hawaiian cowboy wo had been thrown off my kindly White employer’s ranch and cheated of my cowboy heritage by bureaucrats and real estate developers. Even the haters were fascinated by the story of the Hawaiian cattle ranching tradition.
“A couple of the boys invited me back to the ranch, where Squire K, though interested in my story, was skeptical. At his direction, Foreman Ruger gave me the worst jobs on the ranch, and I spent long days mucking out horse stables, pumping septic tanks, and carrying heavy loads around in the People’s Rights Armory. The men were amazed that I could lift as much as any two of them.”
“The turning point came when four of the biggest haters jumped me one night on the way to the decrepit out-building where I was bunking. Unfortunately for them, those bad boys knew nothing of Māori warriors. But they found out. I left them in a quivering heap in front of the People’s Rights Armory, tied down by a cargo net. The Squire, impressed, assigned the badly beaten wretches to excrement duty, and assigned me to the corral. Though my rodeo days are long over, I was better than the young top hands in managing the horses, especially breaking. I took personal charge of the Squires’ rebellious stallion, Weisser Blitzen. I was in.”
“It didn’t take long for me to spot the Old Woman,” said Tanamahatu. “I saw her out and about with the ancient Pappy, and now and again on the porch. The issue was how to make contact. She might not conclude that a tattooed Māori insurrectionist might be a friend.”
The Old Woman took up the story. “It had become my habit to take a bit of air on the porch of the carriage house each night after the old goat passed out. Not incidentally, this provided the chance to study the patterns of the night watch, though no opportunities to sneak out suggested themselves. One night, a quiet voice spoke to me from the shadows. “Old Woman – I am Kandude’s friend. I am here to help you escape.” I had a bit of a start when a living object the size of Rhode Island moved to the edge of the shadows, and that is how I met the warrior Tanemahuta.”
The two shared everything they had learned about the movements and security measures of Freemen Ranch. One moonless night at 3 in the morning, Tanemahuta tied two horses to a clump of trees not far from the back of the carriage house. The Old Woman, using the old bed sheet with knots trick, let herself out the second story window and to the ground. Tanemahuta was waiting below to catch her for the last drop of several feet.
The Old Woman and Tanemahuta quietly led the horses for half a mile before mounting and making their way through the darkest pathways through the ranch, which Tanemahuta had scouted over many a night. They evaded the surveillance cameras and sneaked out beyond the fence line in a remote corner of the ranch between the comings and goings of the perimeter night riders.
As it happened, the Old Woman had had a minor part in a B western in her Hollywood days, and could ride a horse well enough. They rode far beyond the neighboring ranches and finally stopped at a farmhouse, where the Old Women was able to call her old lover in Ft. Worth. The long-retired oil man, delighted to have a visit from his colorful past, picked them up in his Range Rover and put them up in one of the condo’s he still kept in Ft. Worth, unknown to his lovely wife, who was Miss Oil Derrik 2003.
The retired oil man and the Old Woman had a nostalgic reunion. The Old Woman declined his gallant offer to renew their past amities, reminding him that sweet remembrance was the best of old amours. The courtly old gentleman had dropped them off, not without some misgivings, at the Flying Q.
The five friends reflected on their many travels and travails, and the lessons they had learned in political science, history and religion. They talked about the border conflict, the Freemen Ranch, and events in the Holy Land.
Morton, the only scholar and intellectual among them, spoke. “Even with the low expectations life has brought me, I am increasingly perplexed by what I see and hear. This is a country whose largest part professes devotion to Jesus, a figure who rejected material wealth and power. It seems terribly ironic that vast numbers of his professed disciples have welded together a nominal worship of Jesus, blind allegiance to a political identity, a merciless ardor for theocracy, an oxymoronic conflation of capitalism and spiritualism, and an appetite for absolutism into a single ideological construct. Moreover, these true believers have attached themselves to a mortal idol who is the antithesis of the Christ figure.”
This is the malignant stuff of religious wars from which our first colonists and founders sought escape and reinvention, the surmounting of which was the main object and achievement of the Enlightenment. Indeed, this twisted orthodox cult is a betrayal of the lessons of Jesus, whether you believe that he is God, man, or inspirational fable. The amalgam of religious materialism, theocracy, and will to power is an insult to the founders of America, to the engineers of progress who advanced, however imperfectly, civil rights, justice and equality for the last 250 years, and to the men and women who died in the defense of democracy.”