The Last Ranch

by Michael McGarrity

  The cottage had a pitched roof, a covered front porch wide and deep enough for several chairs, two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen with enough space for a small dining table. It had all the modern conveniences: electricity, indoor plumbing, hot and cold running water, an electric range, a refrigerator, and—wonder of wonders—a telephone, which still remained only a remote, very unlikely possibility back at the ranch. Because it was frame-built and not adobe, even with the insulation Matt had added to the attic it still got hot as the blazes in the summer. By the end of the school year Mary eagerly looked forward to a return to the 7-Bar-K and the relative coolness of the double adobe ranch house with its shady veranda.

  Matt was away until Sunday working on a mesquite eradication project at the vast Armendaris Ranch north of T or C. With the drought persisting into a seventh year, invasive shrubs were taking over the desert grasslands at an alarming rate. Three years earlier, the Ag Department at the college in Las Cruces had recruited Matt to work with area ranchers to help improve deteriorating range conditions. Gus Merton had recommended him for the job and on the strength of his influential support, along with Matt’s degree from the college, his service in the war, and his excellent reputation as a rancher, he got the position. It was a plum job that he took to with enthusiasm and quickly came to love. Not only did it give him flexibility to set his own schedule, it paid well enough to keep the 7-Bar-K going without needing to rely on Mary’s salary or Patrick’s pension.

  Luckily, Mary also had a job she loved. She taught third grade at the T or C elementary school and enjoyed helping her sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes lackadaisical students explore the world through books and reading. Most every day they were a delight to be around—even the rowdiest and the neediest ones.

  What she didn’t save from her salary went into paying the monthly bills and improving the cottage with new windows, a new roof, painting it inside and out, planting more shade trees, and building a corral and horse barn to stable Kevin’s pony, a gray gelding he’d named Two-Bits because of a quarter-size black spot on its left haunch.

  A good deal of the renovations had been funded by an unexpected check from her brother, Tom, who upon their father’s death had returned from his California home to settle the estate. Her share minus Tom’s expenses was probably about a tenth of what she was due, but after getting into an initial snit about it she decided she really didn’t care and was happy to put the inheritance to good use.

  Soon after buying the cottage, she’d made a number of weekend road trips to Las Cruces, haunting the secondhand furniture stores and spending time with Erma while Matt looked after Kevin at home. What she couldn’t buy used she bought new in T or C, including the kitchen appliances and a nice bedroom set for Kevin’s room.

  Little by little over time, she made the cottage comfortable and pleasing to the eye. She painted furniture, built a bookcase for the living room, made curtains for the windows, refinished the wood floors, and planted flowerbeds in front of the porch. It was a perfectly agreeable home in a small town, which, despite the laughable notoriety of being named for a TV quiz show, and civic-minded attempts to transform it into something grander, remained an ordinary, provincial, often wind-blown, dusty cowboy town. Mary figured the name would forever remain a joke to most New Mexicans as well as the many curious tourists who thought it amusing that a town would do such a silly thing.

  She was frequently alone with Kevin during the week while Matt was away at his job. She kept busy after school with house projects, grading papers, preparing her teaching lessons, helping Kevin with his school work, and enjoying her son’s company. He was a bright child, easy to be with, and surprisingly mature as well as tall for his age. He towered over his classmates and was at least a year ahead academically. Mary wasn’t quite ready to have him skip a grade, although she feared he’d lose interest in school if he didn’t do so in the next year or two.

  Occasionally on the few weekends when the family didn’t go to the ranch and Matt was home at the cottage, she entertained with small impromptu parties, inviting colleagues from her school, a neighboring couple she’d come to like, or the parents of Kevin’s school friends. All in all, the people of T or C were mostly good, hardworking folks and Mary got along with them just fine.

  Sometimes Patrick came for a visit and would bunk overnight on the living-room couch after keeping Kevin up late telling him stories and tall tales about the old days on the Tularosa. Erma came up from Las Cruces very rarely, and only after Mary was doggedly persistent with repeated invitations. They were still as close as sisters when they got together, but her career as an artist had begun to flourish and she’d taken on a part-time position at the college teaching two painting classes each semester.

  Brenda Jennings occasionally stayed over during her trips to town and brought Dale along to play with Kevin, much to his delight. With Mary’s help, Brenda was homeschooling Dale, but the two women had started seriously talking about the possibility of Dale living in town with Mary and Kevin starting in September so he could attend public school. The best of friends, the boys were hounding their mothers relentlessly in favor of the idea.

  Mary was content with her life, but there were moments when she yearned for a new adventure, or at the very least a return visit to San Francisco. She longed to feel the moist, humid sea air against her face, see the grand, tall buildings and lovely Victorian houses, ride the cable cars, visit the museums, and enjoy the excitement of being in a cosmopolitan city once more. She fantasized about a day of shopping at the Emporium on Market Street, capped by dinner and drinks with Matt at a restaurant in Chinatown, or dancing with him late into the night at one of the smoky jazz nightclubs.

  Arriving home, she parked the car in the driveway. Kevin leaped out in a hurry to tend to Two-Bits, who waited patiently in the corral at the back of the property, his head draped over the gate, his tail happily flapping. Inside the open horse-barn door, Matt’s pony, Maverick, lounged in the shade, rubbing his shoulder against the doorjamb.

  Matt had left Maverick behind, choosing to rest his pony and ride Armendaris Ranch horses during his stay there. Next to the corral he’d also parked the two-axle, two-horse trailer he’d bought in an auto salvage yard and rebuilt.

  That week, every night after dinner in the cool of the evening, Mary and Kevin had gone riding along the riverbank, loping the ponies north out of town toward Elephant Butte Reservoir, where folks came from all over the state to swim, fish, and boat on the water. It had been grand fun, topped off with a cold soda pop bought at the service station along the road to the reservoir.

  She watched Kevin climb the corral gate. Two-Bits greeted him with a shake of his head as Kevin scratched his ear and gave him the apple he’d saved from his lunch box. Like his father, he found caring for ponies a pure pleasure and not a chore at all. And like his father, he had a connection with ponies that seemed far from ordinary.

  In the house, Mary kicked off her shoes, changed into blue jeans and a short-sleeved top, went to the kitchen, and made Kevin a snack. She was impatient for Matt to come home on Sunday, not just because they’d leave soon for the ranch but because she was feeling especially fertile and the timing was right.

  For two years, they’d been trying to get pregnant again, without success. Supposedly nothing stood in their way; Kevin was clear proof of it. But all the examinations, consultations, and tests with specialists in Albuquerque had been fruitless. The doctors were mystified and stymied, but Mary was not quite ready to give up. A little girl had been floating through her dreams for some time.

  She planned to start her summer at the ranch with a little seduction and had splurged on some sexy undergarments to set the mood.

  ***

  The summer at the ranch started with Dale coming to spend the week with Kevin. When the boys weren’t helping Matt with the ponies, a chore they both enjoyed, or out riding, they could be found at the
camp they’d thrown up behind the barn, or dangling in the Witch’s Tree with Matt’s binoculars scanning the basin for signs of army activity. After supper, they sat with Patrick in the living room, listening to overseas shortwave radio broadcasts and making lists of the countries they could identify. At nightfall, Mary would order them off to bed and they’d scoot out the door to their camp with their flashlights to read under the stars in their bedrolls. Before turning in, she’d slip quietly to their camp to check on them and find them fast asleep.

  Mary loved to watch the two young boys together. They were great friends, and seemed to have endless energy matched by prodigious appetites. She prepared three hearty meals a day and they packed the food away like starving stevedores. According to Dale, who was always first to clean his plate and hold it out for seconds, she was a really, really good cook.

  On the third night of Dale’s visit, a pelting rainstorm brought Mary, Matt, and Patrick to the veranda in time to see Kevin and Dale running through a sheet of rain to the house as thunder boomed and lightning cracked across the sky. Dried off and in fresh clothes, Mary let them stay up until the last raindrop had fallen and the roar of floodwater in the pasture stream bed had eased to a trickle. They slept on the veranda on an old mattress covered in blankets.

  In the morning, she found them mud-splattered, gleefully wading in the stream bed. She ordered them into the stock tank, clothes and all, and told them they’d get no breakfast until they presented themselves at the kitchen table washed and scrubbed for her inspection. She made them clean their fingernails twice before letting them take their seats.

  It rained lightly on and off during the day. The boys moved their camp into the barn tack room, helped Matt and Patrick shovel mud out of the corral, and rode with Matt in the truck to inspect the ranch road. They returned an hour later, with muddy boots and dirty clothes, to report that it was washed out in spots but passable. She made them clean up and change again.

  In between her cooking chores, she did the laundry with the veranda and kitchen doors wide-open to let a lovely, cool, moist breeze course through the house. Under a low cloud–covered sky, she hung out the wash just as the rain intensified. She hurried with her empty laundry basket to the veranda, where Matt, Patrick, and the boys were watching distant, horizontal lightning whip-crack above the silvery expanse of dunes at White Sands. Under the rat-tat-tat sound of rain on the veranda roof, everyone was smiling, but not a word was said about the drought lifting for fear of jinxing it.

  The rain subsided until evening when a good, soaking shower settled over the ranch that lasted deep into the night. By morning the sky had cleared and a golden sunrise made the wet land glisten. It stayed dry and sunny all that day and the next, quashing Mary’s hopes for continued showers. She knew better than to wish for days and days of constant moisture on the Tularosa. The basin almost always got its precipitation in spurts—sometimes drizzles, sometimes downpours. It could be weeks or months before the next storm arrived.

  On Dale’s last evening on the ranch, the sky turned dark and angry, a harsh wind whistled through the cottonwood trees, and thunder rolled behind massive clouds that towered above the Sacramento Mountains. The spectacle brought everyone out to the veranda, the boys perched on the top step, Patrick settled in his chair, Mary and Matt at the railing.

  When the first spray of wind-driven rain splashed against Mary’s face, she turned to Matt and said, “I think the drought has broken.”

  Matt grinned like a kid at Christmas as the storm unleashed a lashing downpour. “Now that the grass will start coming back, I’m going to buy us some cows.”

  20

  On the afternoon of August 6, 1957, Matt, Mary, Kevin, and Patrick were at the T or C cottage preparing to leave for the ranch after spending the previous day shopping for new school clothes for Kevin, taking Patrick to see the doctor, and buying supplies for the ranch. The telephone rang just as they were at the back door. Matt answered to find an agitated Charlie Hopkinson on the line. He’d just returned from a court appearance in Albuquerque, where a district judge, at the request of the army, had ordered US Marshals to evict John Prather, Charlie’s client, from his ranch on the Tularosa.

  “Seems like nothing can or will stop them,” Hopkinson added angrily. “Old John’s ranch headquarters is but a mile and a half inside the government’s boundary and they refused to budge an inch on the appeal to exempt it from condemnation. The judge had no choice but to rule for the government. But John isn’t budging either; he vows to stay put. The marshals are going to be there in the morning with an eviction order. Word is that reporters from all over the country are coming to cover the standoff. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Much obliged,” Matt replied.

  After apologizing for being abrupt as he had other folks to alert, Hopkinson hung up. Patrick nearly had a fit when Matt told him what had happened. Like Patrick, John was one of the last of the old-timers on the basin—a man who’d come to the Tularosa from Texas as a young child with his family in 1883, not long after Patrick’s father had arrived.

  “It’s indecent,” he sputtered, too upset to think of a better word. “It ain’t right. I’m going over there to stand by him when the marshals show up.”

  “Is that wise?” Mary asked, concerned Patrick’s agitation might kill him. He was eighty-two and had high blood pressure.

  Patrick’s face turned bright red. “Don’t try to mollycoddle me. I’m going over to John Prather’s and that’s all there is to it. He’d do the same for us.”

  “Do what you think is best,” Mary said, giving Matt a questioning look.

  “Patrick’s right,” Matt said grimly. “Now that the army has won against Prather, I guarantee they’ll come after us next. It’s time to start digging in our heels.”

  The thought of losing the 7-Bar-K made Mary heartsick. “Kevin and I will stay here.”

  “No, Kevin goes with us,” Matt countered. “I want him to learn firsthand that right and wrong isn’t always about what the law or some judge says it is.”

  “That’s the truth of it,” Patrick snapped in agreement.

  “He’s a child.” Mary looked at the two Kerney men and protectively wrapped her arm around Kevin’s shoulder. “He could get hurt.”

  “This is a battle of wills, not a shooting war,” Matt said. “You head on home to the ranch.”

  “I’ll be fine, Mom,” Kevin piped up, excitement flashing in his eyes. “I want to go.”

  Mary looked at the three Kerney men, all eager to join the fray. Although she’d never met John Prather, she’d read about him in the newspapers. Last year, after a judge in Albuquerque had ruled against him in condemnation proceedings, he’d become something of a local hero when he told reporters he wasn’t about to move and anyone who tried to force him off his ranch risked life and limb.

  The story made headlines across the country and several national papers ran profiles about him, detailing how for more than half a century he’d built his spread on remote rangeland south of the Sacramentos, scooping out tanks to catch rainwater, sinking a thousand-foot well, building fences, roads, and a house made of rock, and running cows on eight sections of deeded land and twenty thousand acres of leased government land.

  All along, while other ranchers had caved in to the army’s demands and sold or been forced out, only Prather on the south end of the Tularosa and Matt and Al on the north had stood pat. Since the day she’d married Matt and moved to the 7-Bar-K she’d known the ranch one day might get swallowed up by the army, but it hadn’t preyed on her mind. The grueling six-year drought had been at the forefront of the family’s concern.

  “I’m going with you,” she said firmly, unwilling to be so easily brushed aside.

  Matt frowned and then smiled. “I wouldn’t dare try to stop you. We’d better get going. It’s a far piece and time’s a-wasting.”

  “Throw some bedrolls
in the back of the truck,” Mary ordered. “I’ll pack some clothes, make some snacks, and fill the canteens with water.”

  Within ten minutes, the four Kerneys were squeezed tightly in the cab of Matt’s truck, with Kevin on Mary’s lap, two rifles in the rear window gun rack, and bedrolls, clothes, and a small cooler filled with water and snacks in the truck bed, rolling south above the speed limit on their way to the Prather Ranch.

  ***

  Close to the desert grasslands of Otero Mesa, nudged next to the southern tip of the Sacramentos, the Prather Ranch sat hard against the Fort Bliss McGregor Range bordering the White Sands Proving Ground. At dusk, after an afternoon of hard driving under the furnace of an August sun with only a quick stop for a meal at a small diner in the ramshackle village of Organ at the foot of the San Augustin Pass, the Kerneys arrived, hot, sweaty, and achy. Pickup trucks haphazardly parked in front of the solidly built rock ranch house announced that folks had already begun to gather. Several vehicles with Texas plates had press placards on the dashboards.

  John Prather met them at the front door with a smile, a handshake, and a friendly howdy. A soft-spoken man, he was lean and deeply tanned. He wore thick eyeglasses and a sweat-stained cowboy hat pulled down low to the tip of his large ears, and appeared unperturbed by his predicament.

  “You’ve come a far piece,” he said as he gave a nod of greeting to Mary and Kevin.

  “We’ve got to stand together,” Patrick announced. “You and me are the last of the old-timers.”

  “We’re almost extinct, I reckon,” Prather chuckled.