Call Me Chef
by Tom Sheehan
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
His number 2 cook, Giovanni Ciampa, said one day, as the train left one stop and started on its way again, “I do not poke my nose in your business, Sardi, but I notice you skip out at each stop to buy small things for yourself or perhaps for a lady friend. Can I help with anything? Romance for itinerants like us is a problem from the very beginning.”
“Ah, Joe, you I trust to the utmost. I’ll ask you right up front to keep my secret always. I have taken this job to become, one day in my dreams, a cowboy. It has driven me since I first heard about them. The stories, the legends, the whole drama of the west as it changes the country feeding it. Yes, the things I buy, the things I keep in my personal bag, are things that I will need as a cowboy. I can’t make the change dressed like this.” He swept his hands down his cook’s attire, the floury sleeves, the apron already having its share of bright juices and liquids, and sweeping stains where he wiped his wrists in a hurry. “Ah, no, never dressed like this. This is not a cowboy.” There was disgust in his voice that Giovanni understood.
Seven trips Benevento made back and forth across the great country, across the great river, saw Chicago and St. Louis and burgeoning towns and settlements in Texas and along the Rocky Mountains. It was easy to keep his dream alive, for continually he saw from the train windows the herds moving on the wide grasslands or finally corralled for rail movement; he saw the cowboys at every drive’s end clearing their dry mouths, cutting the trail dust in their throats, relaxing as if relaxing was a brand new thing for them. He was caught up in the excitement of their world, those simple successes after fraught perils only special men could survive.
In the midst of his eighth trip on the railroad, in an overnight stop in Colorado, he planned to step off the train just after midnight, when the whole world seemed asleep, when deep dreams were at hand.
On his way to the door, silence everywhere like a silken mist, he touched Giovanni on the cheek to waken him.
“Joe,” he said in a whisper, and getting Joe’s attention. “This is where I get off. This is where I become a cowboy. Wish me luck, my friend. I have written a note to the owners saying that you are the best man for the job now. You know all that I have taught you, all that my grandfather taught me. Speak up when you want to make a point. Trust the taste on your lips. Don’t take a back seat for anybody on the train or in the big offices. You are a good chef. I hope to become as good a cowboy, but we’ll let time do the talking there. Be well, my friend. Buona fortuna. Arrivederci.”
He swung his personal bag over his shoulder, heard the tinny rattle of its contents, and stepped into darkness and a new world. In the morning, from an old man at a livery stable with a crude sign saying “Horses for sale,” he bought a horse and a saddle and started to learn how to ride. Benevento was a good learner and handled the horse quickly. Two days later he sought employment from a trail boss whose herd was resting a few miles back on the prairie.
“You look brand new. Is them duds you’re wearing that new they look like they wasn’t worn anyplace yet? Who’d you work for last? You ever drove herd?”
“Well,” Benevento said, “I can ride that horse of mine all day.”
“Who’d you work for afore this?” the trail boss said. “Can you rope, pull out a dogie for chow, run down a runaway and bring it back? You ain’t lookin’ the type.”
“This will be my first job, but I have read everything about cowboys and I know I can do the job. I came all the way from Italy to be a cowboy.” The pain and the dream were both in his face.
“Oh, boy,” the trail boss said, “I got a dreamer here on my hands.” He snorted and thought a bit and said, “The only thing I got right now is a sick cookie who’s ailin’ and abed in the chuck wagon. If you can heat beans and water and make the coffee, you got a job until he gets better. Then, when that’s scored up, we’ll see how good you done. You game for that? What’s your name?”
“Sardi Benevento, and I can cook anything. I can make your mouth water from half a mile. All I want is a chance to be a cowboy when your cook gets better. You help me and I’ll help you.”
“That’s a deal, Sardi. Follow me.” And he led him to his herd at a sit-down a few miles out on the grass.
It took one meal and the whole crew of drovers knew they had a “chef” working the chuck wagon. He plain outdid himself and the sick cook in that first meal, his personal bag of supplies coming up as handy as a can opener. From then on, anytime a drover or ramrod or the trail boss went into town, Benevento made sure they had a list of condiments and vegetables that he’d put on a list for them. Every purchase made his cooking tasks much easier.
The night the top wrangler came back with a half-barrel of apples, Benevento promised them apple pie for a late snack. By darkness he had all hands drooling for the dessert. He surprised them at camp by unpacking his reflector oven, a shiny tin contraption, from his personal bag and erecting it in front of the open fire. Flames seemed to leap into its parts.
He went to work at his fold down table at the rear of the wagon. Soon, cinnamon swimming in the air, sugar coming sweet as honey bread, he had his first apple pie in the oven and the aroma raced across the grass. Night riders on the far edges of the herd were afraid they’d be left out, but there was plenty of apple pie for all of them, the fire hot for hours, the oven soaking up the direct heat, night filling up with the absolute sweetness sitting in the air. In addition, as an extra part of his dessert, he prepared a special sauce to top the slabs of apple pie. The night was lustrous.
Two days later the original cook was back on the job and Benevento had his first turn as a drover.
The trail boss, Max Farmer, said, “Sardi, you’re one helluva cook. But a promise is a promise, so you get your shot at bein’ a cowpoke, not that I think there’s any more glory in it than bein’ a great cook. I gotta tell you to keep awake on the night rounds. Sing sweet and low, like one of your nice goodies, and don’t close your eyes. We got strange goin’s on in this territory. There’s always somethin’ goin’ on out here two ways if you was to look twice.”
So Benevento sang lightly, sweetly, a soft tenor; “Sleep little babies, sleep on my side. Sleep, little dogies, sleep as I ride.” It came out as, “Dormi bambino, dormi su un fianco. cani poco sonno, sonno come io giro.”
He sang sweetly, soft as a nightingale in the shadows, and the small speck of light he spied at a distant point was minute, almost insignificant, like a firefly at work, but he had seen no fireflies yet, and decided to wander over that way.
With his horse tied off on some brush, he slipped into a swale and made his way to where the light had been seen. There came the snicker of a horse and the covered cough of a man on a small hummock. The man, obviously, was watching the herd and any other activity. He coughed again and never heard Benevento sneak up behind him and stick the stiletto he’d carried forever against the other man’s throat.
“Say nothing, Signore, or you are dead,” Benevento said. “Walk with me, walk quietly to your horse. You make one move and I will sink the blade into your throat. You will never make noise again. Never sing. Never say hello or goodbye to any loved one.” He nudged the knife point a bit tighter against the throat of the man.
“You understand me?”
“Yes. Don’t cut me. I won’t do anything.”
Benevento led the man to his own horse, unhooked his lasso and tied the man up. Then he walked him to the man’s horse and had him climb into the saddle, still tied up. That is the way the night camp guard saw them coming into firelight and called Max Farmer, the trail boss. “Hey, Max, we got company coming in with the Sardi the cook.”
Farmer asked the man many questions and got no answers. He repeated many of the questions, the firelight reflecting on the man’s face, and the fear showing in his eyes.
From the edge of the firelight, from the edge of darkness, Benevento, the just replaced cook, walked to the chuck wagon and from his bag retrieved a small honing stone. At the campfire, in view of the captured lookout, whose hands were still bound, Benevento started sharpening his stiletto. The keen knife edge was slowly drawn across the stone, the whisper of the fine abrasion circulating in the air as thin as a bird’s wings. Slowly, again and again, he drew the blade and the shiny tip across the stone. He kept thinking about the whir of a hummingbird’s wings.
“Perhaps, Boss, you might give me an opportunity to pose some questions to him.” He didn’t wait for an answer from Farmer, but drew up a sitting box and sat directly in front of the captured lookout.
“You and I have had a discussion, haven’t we, Signore? We spoke of small things, didn’t we, Signore? Shall we start again with some more questions?”
The trussed man, in the light of the fire, under the eyes of a dozen men, with Benevento and the stiletto yet making slight but serious sounds in the night like the mystical threat of a hummingbird, came loose at every seam. He told them everything he knew; how many men they had in their rustler’s gang, who the leader was, when and how they planned to kill as many man as quickly as they could and then to stampede the herd. Later on they would have the forces to regroup the herd and make off with it.
“Well,” Farmer said after he heard the whole story, “maybe we can do a little surprise on our own. We’ll just go over there and shoot up that whole camp of rustlers as fast as we can. Scatter them to the winds and all the hills.” He was not a big man but he had the big word.
That is, until the former cook and cowboy, Sardi Benevento, said, “Why endanger any of our men with that effort, Mr. Farmer. Why don’t we get the herd as close as we can in the night, while they’re all sleeping and stampede the herd right through their hideout? That should soften things up for us. And we’ll do the regrouping.”
“Why, Signore,” Farmer said, “you are no longer a cook in this-here outfit. You are now lead scout and a full-blown cowboy. But if I was you, I wouldn’t throw away that shiny tin oven of yours.”
Copyright © 2021 by Tom Sheehan
