by Elmer Kelton
Chester turned away from him and covered his eyes with his hand. “God, George, why couldn’t things stay simple like they used to be? Sure, me and you pulled some stunts, but we never really hurt anybody. These days…”
George glanced through the back window. Allan was staring moodily to the rear. Todd was watching him in silent disappointment. So far as George was able to tell, there had been little communication between these two boys who used to roll and tumble and tear together. “Is he in trouble, Chester?”
“He will be, if he’s not already. He’s fallen in with a wild bunch. He’s usin’ somethin’; I can’t tell what, but somethin’. You can’t talk to him half the time. He flies into a wild rage at nothin’. He’s even got his mother and sister scared of him. I’m about at the end of my rope.”
Chester went quiet, but George could almost hear him crying inside. “I’m sorry, Chester. I had no idea.”
“Wherever these kids turn, there’s temptation and trouble. They can buy stuff me and you never even heard of, and do it in the school hallways. Nights, no matter what we tell him, he slips out of the house and is gone. The telephone rings, and I’d rather die than answer it. I’m afraid they’ve picked him up and hauled him to jail. Or worse, that they’ve hauled him to a hospital.
“I know even the little towns aren’t immune anymore, but at least people can keep track of things better. Where we’re at, you don’t know who’s livin’ three houses down the street, or what they’re up to. Be thankful you’ve got Todd out here so you can always know where he is and who he’s with.”
George could see his brother’s hands tremble. He said, “I wish there was somethin’ I could say or do. I’ve never been up against that kind of situation.”
“You were always the cowboy, George. I always had two left hands when it came to ranch work. I used to think the happiest day of my life would be when I could go to the city for a nice clean line of work where I’d never have to look another cow in the face. I thought my kids were better off than yours because the city had so much more to give them.” He made a bitter laugh. “Look what it gave my boy. I’d’ve been better off livin’ out here somewhere in a line shack, workin’ for cowboy wages, and they’d’ve been better off.”
George said, “We make our choices the best way we know how. We can never tell what’s ahead of us.”
“Well, I sure made the wrong one. I know I’ll never come back here to live; I’ve got too much of my life invested where I am. But it’s a comfort to know I could. Maybe somehow we’ll pull through this thing with Allan, and he’ll outgrow it. Maybe we’ll be able to keep his sister from fallin’ into the same trap; we’ll try our best. But just knowin’ this place is out here helps keep me and Kathleen from climbin’ the wall sometimes. It’s like an anchor in a rough sea.
“So keep your lease payments, George. Even get a part-time job in town if that’s what it takes to pull through, so long as you’ve got this place to come to of a night, and for your boy to come home to. Hang on to our anchor.”
George turned to look through the rear window again. Todd was talking, pointing, hopefully enthusiastic. If Allan was even listening to him, he gave no sign.
George said, “I reckon there’s worse things than a bad cow market.”
No more was said about Allan, or about the low value of cattle. Chester and Kathleen and their two youngsters left Sunday afternoon. Allan had not said fifty words to Todd, so far as George ever heard. Todd ventured, “I think he’s probably got girlfriend trouble.”
George said, “I expect that’s it.”
“It’ll never happen to me.”
George smiled. “No, it probably never will.”
He expected to hear from Bubba Stewart by Sunday night, but Bubba did not call. Monday morning Bubba was sitting in front of George’s house when George and Todd came out after breakfast. Bubba grinned at Todd as the boy mounted his bicycle and started up to the road to catch the school bus.
“Don’t let that old bronc throw you,” he warned.
Todd laughed. “I’ve got him broke gentle.”
Bubba watched Todd pedal away. “Good boy you got there.”
“I know.”
“I seen Chester on the road yesterday, headin’ back to the city. What did he say about sellin’ the place?”
George’s face twisted. “I never got up the nerve to ask him.”
Bubba pondered a moment, then nodded. “Figured it was somethin’ like that.”
“He’s got troubles. I couldn’t burden him with any more.”
Bubba gave the old place a long study, from the barn to the corrals and back to the house. “Goin’ to try to hang on a while longer, are you?”
“Seems like the thing to do. The market’ll turn around one of these days. It always has.”
Bubba shrugged. “Well, I’d’ve liked to add this place to mine. It would’ve been good for my hunters. But I reckon I know how you feel.”
George could see Todd way down by the road, putting his bicycle into a shielding clump of brush. The yellow bus was waiting for him, and Todd trotted across the cattleguard afoot to catch it. “It’s not for me, Bubba. It’s for him.”
Bubba had both hands shoved into his pockets. George had learned years ago that this was his horse-trading stance. Bubba said, “I saw one of my black bucks out yonder by your fence.”
“They’re all over the place,” George replied. “You’ll have to put them on a leash if you figure on keepin’ them at home.”
“It gave me a notion, George. I was thinkin’ maybe there’s a way for me to add this place to mine without you losin’ it. How about you leasin’ the huntin’ rights to me so I can bring my hunters over? It wouldn’t make any difference to them whether I own the place or not, so long as they’re in my lodge come dark. I could even pay you to guide them, if you was of a mind to agree to it.”
George was enough of a horse trader himself not to let the smile he felt inside come out and betray itself on his face. “I owe you a cup of coffee, Bubba. Come on in the house.”
DUSTER
Hamp Bowdre listened to the auctioneer’s machine-gun voice as a dozen drouth-stricken sheep clattered out onto the scales. A chilly west wind whistled through the cracks in the plank siding of the auction barn. His corded right hand squeezed his left shoulder. Damned rheumatism—sign of another norther coming. It’d be a dry one—like the rest of them had been.
One of the ring men grabbed a ewe and peeled her lips back.
“Now, boys,” the man said enthusiastically, “most of these ewes has got good mouths. They been on hard West Texas country, but they’re bred for March lambs and worth ten dollars if they’re worth a dime.”
“Five dollars!” the bid starter shouted. The auctioneer picked it up from there. He wheedled and bluffed and let a sour-faced San Angelo trader have them for five-and-a-half.
Hamp took a tally book from his pocket and jotted a note. He was conscious of a knotty old cowpuncher beside him.
“Howdy, Hamp. They’ve sure lowered the boom on the livestock market.”
Hamp frowned at the intrusion.
Eby Gallemore prodded, “What you keepin’ books for?” Hamp drew up within himself. Eby could ask more questions than a prying old woman.
“You ain’t figgerin’ on buyin’ some sheep for yourself, are you, Hamp?” Eby laughed as if he had just told a big joke. “You’ll never own a sheep or a cow-brute as long as you live. You’re just a wore-out old ranch hand who’ll work for wages till they nail you up in a box. Like me.”
Sudden impatience lashed at Hamp. “If I was like you, Eby, I’d poke a rag in my mouth and keep it there!” He stood up stiffly and hobbled out.
Eyes narrowed against the bite of dust, he watched wind whip sand off the road and whisk it away. He clenched his fist. Dammit, if it would only rain!
Eby Gallemore’s words were still running through his mind. Wore out. Never own a sheep or a cow-brute as long as you live. Hamp’s jaw
ridged under his wrinkled brown skin. They’d soon see if Hamp Bowdre was wore out.
The boss came for him by and by. Crawling into the rattly old pickup truck, Hamp could see bad news carved deep into Charlie Moore’s young face.
“It’s all over with, Hamp,” the boss finally spoke. “They’re closin’ me out.”
Hamp couldn’t say he was surprised. After four years of bare ranges, ruinous feed bills, and plummeting livestock prices, the wonder was that the bank had stayed with Charlie this long.
“I told old Prewett my lease contract is up at the end of this month—that I’d be needin’ feed money besides. But he couldn’t go, Hamp. Bank examiner’s been crawlin’ all over him about these big livestock loans he’s stuck with. Well, I flipped my lid—told him if that’s the way it stood, they’re his sheep, and his cattle.”
Moore’s chin was low, his gray eyes sick. “Prewett’s been good to me, and I oughtn’t to’ve done it, Hamp. But I did. So it’s the bank’s outfit now—soon as they get out and take count.”
Hamp didn’t say anything. He didn’t know anything that would help.
Moore said, “I’d rather pull my own teeth than tell Vera. She really loves that ranch—her and the kids.”
Hamp nodded sympathetically. The ranchman was in his mid-thirties, fully twenty years younger than Hamp. The year Moore had come home from the war he’d borrowed money to buy livestock and lease this ranch from old Whisky Sam O’Barr. The next year, he’d hired Hamp.
“Gonna hate to part with you, Hamp,” Charlie said disconsolately. “We’ve been a great team.”
Yes, Hamp thought, they sure had. Well, it wasn’t the first time drouth had done him out of a job.
As they drove over the cattle guard onto Moore’s mesquite-dotted pasture, Hamp thumbed at a windmill whose tower barely showed through the haze of dust. “We better take a look at that Lodd mill. It’s been weakenin’.”
Out of habit, Hamp first boogered two sheep away from a feed bunk and peeped under the lid to see how much cottonseed meal and salt mixture was in it. Enough for three or four days, he noted. Sheep couldn’t last long on bare range without supplemental feed. The salt was to keep them from taking too much at one time. But it took lots of water, or a sheep would dehydrate on meal and salt.
They found the mill pumping a weak stream about the size of a pencil. “Drouth’s droppin’ the water table,” Hamp observed. “The well needs to be deepened fifteen, twenty feet.”
Moore shrugged. “That’s Sam O’Barr’s worry now—and the bank’s.”
Hamp cast a worried glance at Charlie. He’d never heard that grudging tone from the boss before. He walked over and looked in the concrete storage tank. Half empty. Sheep were drinking up the water faster than it was coming out of the ground.
A cloud of dust boiled toward them on the two-rut road. An oil-field pump truck with a big water tank on back pulled up beside the windmill. A college-age kid in oil-stained work clothes stepped out from behind the wheel and eyed the two ranchmen warily. “Truck’s heatin’. Needs some water in the radiator.”
Suspicion began working in Hamp. That concrete tank ought not to’ve been so low on water. Casually he edged over to the truck and put his hand on the front of it. Warm, but not hot. Anyway, a big twenty-gallon can of drinking water was strapped on the side.
“You’re from that drillin’ outfit over across the fence, ain’t you?” he queried. The youngster nodded.
“You-all have got a contract to take what water you need from Old Man Longley’s wells. But it’s a far piece over to Longley’s, and it’s just a mile over here. Ain’t that right?”
The youngster looked as if he’d been caught sport roping another man’s calves.
Hamp shook a stubby finger at him. “Now you hop in that truck and git! You ain’t gonna steal another load of water here just because you’re too triflin’ lazy to go git it where you’re supposed to.”
Hamp watched until the truck was gone. “Two more truckloads would drain that tank. And we’d have a bunch of salt-poisoned sheep.”
“The bank’s sheep,” Moore said.
Hamp eyed him sharply. Charlie acted as if he wouldn’t care.
At the ranch Charlie drove the pickup into the shed. “Would you feed the stock for me, Hamp? I’ve got to talk to Vera.”
Hamp forked some hegari bundles across the fence to a half-dozen saddle horses and a couple of potbellied dogie calves. Charlie’s cowboy sons, Mackey and Jim, had finished milking the Jersey cow and were feeding their lambs. Hamp leaned against the fence and watched them with a glow of satisfaction. It was almost as if they were his own boys.
“Hey, Hamp, looky here at old Hungry,” called ten-year-old Jim, proudly petting a thick-bodied Rambouillet lamb. “County agent was out today. He said you did a good job of doctorin’. Old Hungry’s gonna win that San Angelo show.”
Hamp nodded, but he didn’t grin with Jim. Chances were they wouldn’t be making the San Angelo show now. He hobbled off to the frame bunkshack that served him as a home. It was bare except for an old dresser and a cot, and a table in the corner. But it was all Hamp needed—all he wanted. He pulled the light cord and sat down at the table.
He tore a sheet off of a writing tablet and began scrawling figures. One thousand sheep at five-and-a-half—five thousand five hundred dollars. Fifteen sections of land at forty-five cents per acre lease—four thousand three hundred twenty.
He had done it so many times lately that he had all the figures in his head. But it brought him satisfaction to mark them down on paper.
Old. Wore out. Never own a sheep or a cow-brute as long as you live.
He grinned without knowing it. They wouldn’t say that again.
He wondered how Eby Gallemore’s eyes would pop if Hamp showed him a savings account book adding up to more than twenty-three thousand dollars.
Hamp Bowdre still had sixty cents out of every dollar he’d ever made. While Gallemore and his kind had drunk up their wages, or spent them on women, or pooped them off around the rodeos, Hamp Bowdre had been living like a monk, saving against a time when he could be his own boss.
He’d had many chances these last few years, but Hamp was a cautious man. He’d seen this boom-and-bust business before. Wait till the bust. Wait till everybody else wants to sell.
Well, they wanted to sell now. Four years of drouth and demoralized markets had done that.
It was going to rain this spring. Hamp had been through drouths before, and somehow he knew. It would rain, and the livestock business would start a slow but steady upward climb.
Maybe he could get this place, he was thinking. Now that Charlie Moore was dropping out, it was possible. Talk around town was that hard-drinking Sam O’Barr had spent all his money and was getting desperate. Since that wildcat oil bunch had drilled two dry holes on his ranch, the oil-lease money had petered out. Only the land lease was left. Charlie had been paying sixty cents an acre—too high the way things had turned out.
I’ll offer Sam forty-five cents, Hamp thought. He’ll snuff and stomp, but bare and dry as the place is, he won’t find anybody else to take it. Maybe someday I’ll even find me a rich partner.…
The two boys came to the shack to call Hamp for supper. A tear rolled down Jim’s freckled cheek. Mackey, a year older, was gravely quiet.
“Hamp,” Jim burst out, “what am I gonna do with old Hungry? Daddy says we’re fixin’ to move to town.”
Hamp patted the boy on the head. Sure tough on the kids.
Tough on Vera too. With dancing blue eyes, and a little on the plump side, she was usually quick to laugh, but there was no fun in her tonight.
Hamp ate the cobbler pie she had baked especially for him, but he couldn’t enjoy it. Vera had always been as concerned about him as if he belonged to her family. She had often made him regret he’d never married.
Hamp thought he’d probably hire him a Mexican couple if he got this place. But he was going to miss the Moores.
The next morning Charlie Moore was sick. Moody and sleepless, he had taken a long walk in the night air. Now he was fighting off the flu.
Banker Prewett was out shortly after noon the second day and found him sitting up in the living room. “Mind if I look the sheep over?” he asked.
“Have at it,” Charlie answered, a little curtly. “They’re your sheep.”
Hamp frowned. He’d never seen Charlie act this way before, and he didn’t like it. He’d thought better of Charlie.
The wind buffeted the pickup around as Hamp slowly drove the banker over the bare, dusty pastures. Prewett was studiously silent during most of the ride. “I hate to do this,” he said finally. “Charlie Moore’s a good man, Hamp. I’d like to’ve helped him.”
Hamp nodded. He’d thought about lending Charlie enough money to pull him through. But it would take Charlie years to pay it back, and Hamp was getting too old to wait. If he was to get a place for himself, it had to be soon.
Hamp said suddenly, “Mr. Prewett, would the bank take five-and-a-half a head for these sheep—the whole outfit?”
Surprised, Prewett straightened. “It might. Who’s interested?”
“I am.” Briefly Hamp explained his idea. Prewett nodded in silent admiration. Hamp had it figured out to a T.
Their last stop was the Lodd mill. Hamp knew something was wrong—the sheep were all gathered around it.
“She’s gone dry,” he exclaimed.
The mill had stopped pumping. Sheep nuzzled vainly at the dried mud in the trough. The concrete tank was drained.
Hamp’s face flushed red as he saw where the truck had backed up to the tank. Water had sloshed out over the side, and the heavy tires had left deep prints in the dried mud.
Anger clenched Hamp’s knotty fists as he walked out through the bleating sheep, the blowing sand gritty in his eyes, nose, and ears. He knew it would take days to get anything out of the drilling company.
But these ewes were already drawing up. They had been without water a day or two—and with all that salt in them. They had to be taken somewhere today or they’d begin losing some unborn lambs.