The Last Ranch

by Michael McGarrity

  With the loss of pastureland to the army, the scarcity of grass, and the high price of hay, Matt and Al turned to harvesting cactus, burning off the spines, and mixing it with molasses to feed to their cattle. It was backbreaking work, but it kept the cattle from starving, although it was discouraging to see the weight drop off the animals so quickly on marginal feed. Supplements helped some, but not enough.

  When the wells started to dry up and the live streams stopped running, they had to keep the thirsty cows from suffocating by digging the mud out of their nostrils when they rooted for water in the few remaining stagnant pools. Finally forced to move the critters to an overgrazed high pasture with the only reliable water source on both spreads, they were obliged to dig into their dwindling cash reserves to purchase hay. Al predicted if the rains didn’t come by fall works, they’d be in debt and selling underweight cattle for next to nothing. Matt didn’t doubt it.

  On a day that promised rain and brought only lightning from a brief, passing thunderstorm that dropped a sprinkle of spit and sparked a fire in the high pasture, they lost the last of the native grass and all the hay bales they’d hauled for the cattle. Only the frightened critters were saved.

  They were licked for the year, and they knew it. They cut their losses and sold most of the mixed herd, keeping only the best mother cows, calves, and the pick of the yearlings. The proceeds barely paid the bills. It meant if the drought didn’t break come spring, they’d have to sell off all of the remaining cattle, which would put them flat out of the cow business.

  Matt had already taken a hard look at switching over to ponies, and the prospect didn’t look bright. Replies to letters he’d written to folks in the rodeo business that he’d sold horseflesh to before the war warned him off. The rodeo business had changed and now just a few trainers of top-flight cutting horses dominated the marketplace. Dismayed, Matt kept the news to himself.

  Throughout it all, Mary’s consistently high spirits offset Matt’s occasional gloominess. The baby growing inside her and the joy of being with Matt on the ranch made her unshakably optimistic. She went about each day full of energy, helping Patrick with the few remaining ponies, fixing delicious meals from recipes she found in library cookbooks, sewing curtains for the living-room windows, and working diligently on a quilt for the baby, learning how to make it from an instructional pamphlet.

  Matt worried that without her dear friend Erma’s companionship and missing the attraction of town life, Mary would soon tire of the ranch. If she did, it was never mentioned and through back-and-forth visits with Brenda Jennings, Mary soon formed a strong friendship with her. Both were pregnant, exceedingly happy about the prospect of motherhood, and had endless things to talk about. Brenda favored a girl because she believed them to be easier to raise. Mary didn’t care one way or the other as long as the baby was normal and healthy.

  Mary’s mood became a little less cheerful when Brenda left for Hot Springs, where she would remain until her baby’s birth. Soon after Brenda’s departure, Jim and Millie gave notice. Both had recently turned sixty-five and were qualified for old-age pensions under social security because of Jim’s long-ago employment in a slaughterhouse and Millie’s early work as a hotel housekeeper.

  Although it was left unspoken, Matt figured if Mary hadn’t arrived as the new lady of the house, the Sawyers would have gladly pocketed their monthly benefits and stayed on. From a monetary standpoint, Matt wasn’t sorry to see them go. It meant Patrick’s Rough Rider pension could now be used to help pay ranch bills rather than their salaries. It also meant more work for Matt, but since his labor didn’t cost a cent all he’d lose was a little extra sleep. The only serious drawback was that Patrick would lose their company and friendship, which had come to mean a lot to him. But he held his tongue, wished them well when they left, and didn’t grumble about it.

  With the household down to three, Patrick decided to take over the casita as his domicile. With the house now hers to do with as she wished, Mary immediately started fixing it up. Matt’s every free minute was spent helping on one project or another, the most important being turning his old bedroom into a nursery. When they finished all of her projects, the inside of the old place actually looked like a home and not an oversize, somewhat run-down bunkhouse.

  To celebrate, Matt suggested they invite Erma for a visit. The notion thrilled Mary. Erma readily agreed and came up by train for a long weekend. The two gals gabbed constantly in the cab of Matt’s truck on the drive to the ranch. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought the two of them hadn’t seen each other in years. Each night he went to bed while the two women stayed up late visiting in the living room. They were so compatible and shared so many traits, Matt figured the only thing that separated them from being biological sisters was the accident of birth. Before Erma returned to town, they agreed Mary would stay with her in Las Cruces during her last month of pregnancy and Matt would join them when her due date was near.

  It didn’t work out that way. Restless and uncomfortable on a late September night, Mary’s contractions began. She waited for a time before gently waking Matt to tell him the baby was coming.

  “Are you having contractions?” he asked.

  Mary nodded. “Mild ones. They started two hours ago.”

  “How much time do we have?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Mary replied. “Everything I’ve read said it can take hours.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Heat a hot water bottle—my back is killing me.”

  “Shouldn’t we leave for town right away?”

  She kissed him on the cheek. “There’s no rush. Besides, I have to pack.”

  “Lie down. I’ll pack for you.”

  Mary gazed at him as if he were a rather dull, impatient child. “A hot water bottle would be very nice.”

  “Okay.”

  In the kitchen, Matt stoked the cookstove, put water on to heat, woke Patrick up, and sent him hell-bent over the mountain to fetch Al and Brenda, who’d recently returned to the Rocking J with their new baby boy. Matt knew mama cows could take hours to deliver; others could drop a newborn calf lickety-split. He would take no chances. He needed Brenda here to lend a hand.

  He returned to find Mary in the living room walking in circles, pressing her fists against the small of her back. Her overnight bag was on the floor next to Patrick’s easy chair. “It hurts,” she said with a tight smile. “A warm bath would help, I think. Not too hot, though.”

  He put more water on the stove, laid out fresh towels and a clean nightie in the bathroom, and returned to find Mary squatting on the floor, her head resting on the couch cushion.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Mary lifted her head. “It’s nothing. The contractions are getting stronger and closer together, that’s all. This helps relieve the pain.”

  “We should leave now, dammit,” Matt demanded.

  Mary shook her head. “It’s not that bad, Matthew. The bathwater, please.”

  It took a while to get two large pots of water boiling. He ran cold water in the bathtub, mixed in the hot water from the stove, and checked to make sure the bathwater was warm before helping Mary ease into the tub. There was a blood-tinged stain on Mary’s discarded nightie. He looked at her in alarm.

  “Don’t worry; it’s just from the mucus plug.” She sighed and reached for his hand. “Ah, this is nice. Thank you. Just let me soak for a while.”

  He stayed with her, watching her intently. When she was ready to get out, he helped her to her feet and toweled her dry. Dressed in a fresh nightie, she padded barefoot to the living room and started walking in circles again. She seemed better, no pain showed on her face. He watched from the kitchen door as she went round and round and round.

  “The walking helps,” she announced as she padded past his desk for the umpteenth time. “But I think I’d like that hot water bo
ttle now. My back is killing me. And a big glass of water, please.”

  He filled the hot water bottle, got her situated on the couch with it tucked against her back, and gave her a kiss and a big glass of water.

  “You’re very good to me,” she said, after draining the glass.

  “I’m not sure I’m any good at all.” His hand shaking, Matt put the empty glass on the side table. “Over the years I’ve helped a whole lot of mother cows deliver their babies, but this is different.”

  “My water just broke,” Mary whispered, embarrassed. A murky stain appeared on the cushion. She gasped in pain.

  “What is it?”

  “Everything is speeding up.” She howled, gasped, howled again, and didn’t speak until the pain passed. “I can feel it moving.”

  He glanced at the desk clock. It had been four hours since she had shaken him awake. Where was Patrick? He should have brought Brenda by now.

  He pulled her gently off the couch. “Squat, like you did before,” he told her.

  Instead she got down on all fours. An intense pain in her lower back whipsawed through her. She could feel pressure in her rectum and with each contraction she could feel the baby descending. She started pushing, taking in huge gulps of air, and pushing again. Each repetition wrung an explosive gasp of pain.

  “It’s coming.” She pushed again. “Get the oilcloth off the kitchen table and take me into the bedroom now.”

  He got the oilcloth, guided her to the bedroom, spread the oilcloth on top of the blanket, and gently lifted her onto the bed. She gasped, pushed again, and the top of the baby’s head appeared.

  “I see it!”

  “Get it out,” Mary grunted loudly, her voice filled with pain.

  “Keep pushing!” Matt yelled.

  Mary pushed and the baby’s shoulders appeared. Matt eased it out. The placenta discharged and Mary collapsed against a pillow, exhausted.

  “It’s a boy,” Matt announced shakily. He cut the umbilical cord with his pocketknife and slapped the baby on the rump. And with Matt’s pronouncement, bloody, red-faced Kevin Kerney, perhaps the last child to be born on the old Tularosa, entered the world, took his first breath, and began to cry.

  18

  Other than the town of Hot Springs renaming itself Truth or Consequences after entering a national promotion by a television quiz show and winning the right to do so, Matt didn’t find much to laugh about in 1950. Soon after the historic event, locals shortened the name to T or C, which made it a little less onerous to some but still decidedly oddball at best.

  In spite of it being a tough year, Matt was by no means unhappy: he had a beautiful wife who was an incredible partner and wonderful mother, a healthy and astonishing baby boy who brightened Matt’s day with amazing smiles and giggles, and a once deplorable excuse of a father who’d transformed himself into a doting and kindhearted grandfather. In part, Matt figured he had little Ginny to thank for it.

  Even with everything okay on the home front, little else prompted lightheartedness in Matt. Fighting in Korea cast a gloom over him every time he listened to the radio news or read a newspaper. And the iron curtain that had descended over eastern Europe half convinced him that another world war was imminent. It depressed him that schoolchildren were being taught to hide under their classroom desks if and when the Soviet nuclear bombs fell. Finally, the drought he’d hoped would ease by year’s end only deepened and intensified.

  National radio news reporters called it a Texas drought and focused their stories there, but as always nature paid no heed to the state boundary lines drawn on maps. Throughout the year with no summer monsoons, no hoped-for late fall moisture, and only bone-cold, dry winter days, locals began griping that the Texans should have kept the damn drought to themselves.

  The income from Matt’s military disability and Patrick’s Rough Rider pension barely covered the basic necessities, and when the water well at ranch headquarters dried up, Matt borrowed cash to drill a new one, which put him into debt to the bank with no reliable source of earnings on the horizon. Additionally, the cost of feed kept climbing. But he was forced to keep some livestock on the ranch or risk losing his agricultural property tax reduction, which would result in a much larger tax bill that they could ill afford.

  1951 came hot, dry, and marked by pale-blue, cloudless skies. The ground was so desiccated it had sunk in spots from a lack of moisture, forming shallow, bowl-shaped indentations in the dusty pastures. Summer rolled in but the rain clouds never did, and the relentless sun fried what little grass was left and baked the ground into hardpan. Hot gusts whipped through the cottonwood windbreak, stripping leaves and sapping moisture from the thirsty trees.

  Autumn and winter brought no relief, and Matt began to wonder if young Kevin, now on steady legs and constantly on the move, much to the consternation of his mother, would ever hear the sound of live water running in the stream bed by the corral. If he hadn’t sunk a deeper well, the place would have been unlivable. Without water there was nothing of value to the land. The truth of it was driven home by an exodus of small ranchers on the fringes of the Tularosa moving permanently, lock, stock, and barrel, off their land into town.

  Al and Brenda at the Rocking J were doing a bit better than that, but not by much. The wells on the west slope of the San Andres foothills still produced steady water, which he’d leased to a large producer who was running a small cow-calf herd across a twenty-five-thousand-acre pasture on the Jornada. Along with Al’s occasional job driving a livestock truck, it brought enough in to pay their bills. They were staying put.

  With no cattle to work, Matt went to the Roswell livestock auction and picked up three good-looking geldings at rock-bottom prices and trained them with the hopes of eventually selling them as cow ponies. He also took on occasional work as a wrangler on what once was the vast old Bar Cross Ranch that covered a forty-mile stretch of the Rio Grande and enclosed the rugged Fra Cristobal Mountains in the northern Jornada. The size of the outfit and the terrain required cowboys on horseback—not in pickup trucks—to bust cattle out of the thick bosque or haze them out of narrow slot canyons and off precarious rocky shelves. That necessitated running a remuda for the cowboys during both spring and fall works, a job Matt truly enjoyed.

  Hoping for a break in 1953, the drought only worsened, and during the summer Matt took a job as an assistant horse trainer for a rich California doctor who dabbled in racing quarter horses at the Ruidoso Downs racetrack in the Sacramento Mountains. Matt liked the job but hated being away from Mary and Kevin, and he returned home vowing never to be gone that long again, although the money he’d earned paid off the bank loan for the water well.

  A week after his homecoming, and a week before leaving for his wrangler job at the old Bar Cross, he sat with Mary on the veranda in the still summer night.

  “I don’t see how we can keep going like this,” he said, looking out into the darkness, which suited his sour mood to a T.

  Mary reached for his hand. “Except for when you’re gone, Kevin and I are quite happy here.”

  “Sometimes I think I’d sell this place in a minute if the only potential buyer in the universe wasn’t the US Army.”

  Mary laughed. “You’d have to shoot Patrick first.”

  “Probably,” Matt allowed. “But you’re here alone too much.”

  “It does get lonely at times,” Mary admitted. “But Brenda and I visit back and forth as often as we can, and Kevin and Dale are as close as brothers. They’re both very smart little boys.”

  “Wildcats when they’re together,” Matt countered.

  “That too.”

  “I’m missing too much of him growing up when I’m away,” Matt grumbled.

  Mary squeezed his hand. “Are you complaining?” she chided jokingly.

  “Not me. How about we pack some gear and trek to the line cabin in the next day or two? I haven’t
checked on our high pastures for months.”

  “I’d love it. So would Kevin.”

  “Good.” The moon crested the Sacramentos, casting light on the dead cottonwood at the edge of the windbreak that his grandfather John Kerney had planted seventy-some years ago. With thick boughs bent low to the ground at a tilt, it had an almost eerie appearance in the moonlight. “I’m going to cut that dead tree down for firewood,” he announced.

  “Don’t you dare,” Mary warned. “Kevin loves that tree. He calls it the witch’s tree. I often find him there, especially when Dale comes to play.”

  “Has he fallen out of it yet?”

  “Once or twice,” Mary admitted. “His only injuries have been a bruised knee and wounded pride. He now has strict orders not to climb above the first branch.”

  “Then it’s unsafe,” Matt said, remembering his boyhood friend Jimmy Potter, who’d died in his arms after falling out of a tree in the Las Cruces bosque after climbing it to inspect an eagle’s nest. It had been a nightmare that haunted him for years. “I’m cutting it down.”

  “Can’t you just trim it so he can’t climb any higher?”

  Matt mulled it over. The last thing he wanted was to argue with Mary about a dead cottonwood, or spoil the fun Kevin might have sitting in the branch of the tree with his best pal. “I’ll take a look at it tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” Mary said, pondering if it was time to voice the plan she’d hatched during his absence. She decided to do it. “I don’t think it’s fair for you to be the only one working to keep everything together. I can contribute too, you know.”

  “You already do. This place would fall apart without you.”

  Mary waved off the compliment.

  Matt was undeterred. “Did you discover the Spanish gold hidden at Victorio Peak while I was gone?”

  For years, until the proving ground closed the range, treasure hunters had scoured the nearby mountain looking for gold and jewels allegedly buried by the Spanish.