by Elmer Kelton
Here he sold his freedom bit by bit, and was paid for it on the installment plan.
March Nicholson, the county PMA officer, stood at the open window, looking down on the freshly mowed courthouse lawn, the buried sprinkler system showering green bermuda grass dotted by patches of dying winter rye. It always irritated him the way people parked haphazardly around the courthouse curb, ignoring the town ordinances, if indeed there were any. Across the street under a live-oak tree, half blocking the driveway to Nicholson’s rented home, stood a pickup truck with a Hereford cow tied in the sideboarded bed and a saddled horse in an open-topped trailer hitched behind it. Horse droppings had tumbled over the tailgate and onto the ground; Nicholson would have to use his shovel tonight. He cursed under his breath. In the back of another pickup waited two Border Collie sheep-dogs, resting but alert-eyed, watching a farmer pull up in a bobtail truck with two big tractor tires and several sacks of planting seed.
Nicholson’s baleful eye was pulled away from the horse droppings by a brush-scarred green pickup pulling into an open parking space.
“Well, I’ll be damned. I wish you’d look who’s come to the meeting.”
His district supervisor pushed to his feet from a chair in the courtroom’s jury box where he had slouched to read a copy of the morning San Angelo paper. He watched a heavy, graying ranchman step out of the pickup and limp up the concrete sidewalk toward the front steps of the courthouse. He saw nothing which made that man look different from the couple of dozen stockmen and farmers already gossiping in the courtroom.
“I don’t know him. Is he somebody special?”
“He’s Charlie Flagg.”
The name meant nothing to the supervisor. “One of the rich ones?” he guessed. In this part of the country it was often hard to tell the rich man from the poor one by looking at him. The rich man was as likely to be wearing patched trousers and runover boots as the most destitute Mexican cowboy in town. One could not afford to put up a front and the other did not have to.
Nicholson shook his head. “No, not rich. Charlie Flagg is one of those operators in the middle ground . . . smaller than a lot of them. You’ve seen that sign on the edge of town, the one about the three old cranks? Charlie Flagg is Crank Number One.”
The supervisor watched the ranchman pause on the front steps to swap howdies with a deputy sheriff. The deputy, who probably did not swing a leg across a horse’s back twice a year, was dressed in a neatly tailored Western shirt and tight-legged cowboy pants, shiny high-heeled boots and a nicely creased Stetson hat. The rancher, probably on horseback half his waking hours, wore a nondescript straw hat beaten badly out of shape and a pair of old black boots, his baggy khaki trousers stuffed carelessly into their tops. There was a lesson in this somewhere, the supervisor thought; someday he was going to reason it out.
“Gives you trouble, does he, March?”
“No trouble . . . or anything else. Never sticks his hard head into my office. He’s one of those old mosshorns who thinks he made it all by himself and he doesn’t need anybody. I’ve tried to get him to go into some of our programs. You ought to hear him snort. Says the government didn’t help him when he was getting started and he doesn’t need it now.”
“Then I’d simply forget about him if I were you. Some people you can’t change; you just have to outlive them.”
“Charlie Flagg is too contrary to die; he’ll outlive us all,”
Nicholson’s face twisted as he looked at the men who sat in little groups scattered around the big courtroom, talking weather and crops and prices. He had sent out five hundred postcards announcing the meeting; this looked like about all the crowd he was going to get.
“It’s frustrating,” he complained. “A man devotes his life to service, and this is the response they give him. Sometimes I wish I was selling cars in San Antonio.”
The supervisor said, “The rest’ll come in when it’s time to get their checks.”
Nicholson walked down the aisle and out into the hallway to see if there were any laggards. He saw Charlie Flagg come up the steps, laboring a little because of a slightly game leg. Part of a postcard stuck out of one shirt pocket. Nicholson shoved his hand forward. “Mister Flagg, when I sent you that card I had no hope you would actually come to the meeting.”
Flagg gripped Nicholson’s hand hard enough to bring a stab of pain, but he looked puzzled. “Meetin’? What meetin’?”
“The meeting to explain the changes in the farm program.”
Flagg shrugged his heavy shoulders. “They change the farm program the way I change socks. Before you can get your meetin’ over with, they’ll be callin’ you from Washington to tell you it’s all different.”
Nicholson sagged a little. “You didn’t come for the meeting, then?”
Flagg shook his head. “I come up huntin’ the judge. They sent me a call for jury duty and I got a shearin’ crew comin’ tomorrow. Court can wait, but a shearin’ crew won’t.”
Nicholson saw that the postcard in Flagg’s pocket was not the one he had mailed. “Well, I still say you’ll be in to see me someday, Mister Flagg.”
Flagg’s gaze was steady and without compromise. “What I can’t do for myself, I’ll do without.”
A short, stocky ranchman came up the stairs in time to catch the last of it. He paused to spit a long stream of brown tobacco juice at a hallway cuspidor, getting most of it in. “You’re preachin’ again, Charlie,” he grinned, “and this ain’t even church.”
Charlie Flagg turned, a little embarrassed. “Hello, Rounder. I didn’t go to preach, but he asked me and I told him.”
Rounder Pike laid a rough hand on Flagg’s shoulder. “You’re fartin’ against the wind, Charlie. We’ve got used to government money like a kid gets used to candy. Most people wouldn’t quit takin’ it now. Them as did would go right on payin’ the same old taxes and not get nothin’ back. We’re like a woman that’s been talked into a little taste of sin and found out she likes it. You’d just as well join the crowd. You’re payin’ the freight anyway.”
“Never.”
“Never is an awful long time.” Pike gripped Flagg’s shoulder, then walked on into the courtroom.
Nicholson motioned toward the door. “There’s plenty of room, Mister Flagg.”
Flagg started to turn away. “You’ll find, Mister Nicholson, that ranchers are contrary people. And old ranchers are awful contrary.” He limped down the hall toward the office of the county judge.
Nicholson’s supervisor had come out into the hallway to listen. He said, “One of those rugged individualists, isn’t he?”
“Someday he’ll just be a ragged individualist. He’s standing still while time goes on by. But he’ll be in to see me one of these days. He’ll come in like all the rest.”
The supervisor frowned, watching the rancher go through an open door. “Somehow, I hope he never does.”
Nicholson’s eyebrows went up.
The supervisor said, “He’s gone out of style, but the world will be a poorer place when it loses the last of his kind.”
“You sympathize with him?”
“I pity him, a little. A man can get awfully lonesome standing out there all by himself.”
Chapter Two
IT WAS NOT YET MIDMORNING, BUT ALREADY THE southwest wind touched warm against Charlie Flagg’s stubbled face as he climbed the narrow ladder up the steel tower of the windmill to look beyond the empty livestock pens and across the big pasture. He could see the sheep half a mile away in a drift of gray dust. He cocked his head to listen, but he couldn’t hear them over the racket of Teofilo Garcia’s shearing crew setting up equipment in a corral.
Beneath him, gentle whiteface cows drank cool water from a long concrete trough. They paid him no attention. A steer calf touched its nose curiously to a plastic bottle which Charlie had wired on as a no-cost float to save six dollars. Charlie’s spur jingled, and the calf jerked its head up, startled, water dripping from its hairy chin. “Don’t wor
ry, pardner,” the ranchman spoke quietly. “We already done our job on you. This is the day for the sheep.”
Charlie Flagg was far past fifty now, a broad-shouldered man who still toted his own feed sacks, dug his own post-holes, flanked his own calves. The scorch of summer sun and wind had burned him deep. His face was so brown he might have passed for a Mexican shearer, had his eyes not been the deep blue of a troubled sky.
His Western straw hat was bought new in April but now in May was already spotted with sweat stain, the brim curled higher on the right side than on the left because the right hand was the one he used to grip it. He wore it for service; at his age he had no interest in show. His khaki pants fitted low and loose on broad hips. He had been letting his belt out gradually, and a little of soft belly pushed against the silver buckle. He used to depend upon hard work and hot summer to take that softness away. The last few years, October found most of it still there.
He hooked an arm over an angle-iron rung and leaned out, sun-grinning against the glare. He surveyed the band of sheep and counted six riders beside or behind them. Satisfied, he turned away and let his gaze drift leisurely over the ranch while the steel fan clanked and groaned above him, and the sucker-rod bumped against the standpipe as it pumped up and down. It always hurt his leg a little to climb this ladder, but the view pleasured him enough to be worth the pain.
It was a comforting sight, this country. It was an ageless land where the past was still a living thing and old voices still whispered, where the freshness of the pioneer time had not yet all faded, where a few of the old dreams were not yet dark with tarnish. It had not been so long, really, since feathered Comanches had roamed these hills a-horseback seeking after game, or occasionally in warpaint seeking honor and booty and blood. Eighty years . . . one man’s lifetime. Across Warrior Hill and down along a creekbed where a wet-weather spring seeped during the good years, a person with sharp eyes and lots of time might still turn up arrowheads as perfect as the day skillful brown fingers had shaped them from brittle flint.
Old August Schmidt had told Charlie once that in his youth he could still see the smokestains of Indian camp-fires beneath a ledge of limestone ancient beyond imagination, relic of some primeval sea; and once in that deep swale below where the house now stood, he had ridden unexpectedly upon a shaggy buffalo bull, last remnant of the vanished herds.
When August had been an old man he had shown Charlie the slumped remains of a Mexican mustanger’s dugout, a primitive camp used as headquarters for a winter—maybe as much as a winter and a spring—while the raw-hider ran down the last of the wild horses.
It was in the mustanger’s time that Warrior Hill had earned its name. An aging Comanche—alone, so far as anyone knew—had made his way back from the reservation in Indian Territory far to the north, perhaps for one final hunt on ancestral grounds, perhaps simply to die where his grandfathers had died. The mustanger saw him and found two Rangers tracking him. Together they gave chase and ran the old warrior and his gotch-eared pony to ground. On top of the hill the Comanche jumped down from his lathered and droop-headed horse, raised his arms toward the sky and sang a chant that made the mustanger’s blood run cold. Then he turned with bow in hand and charged the guns, shouting defiance into the face of certain death.
His bones were still scattered on that hilltop when August Schmidt had bought the land. The old German settlers, more than any others of early Texas, had somehow understood the Indian and had made their own treaties with him. August Schmidt had loved this country on sight; he thought he knew why the old warrior had come home to it. He gathered the bones and carefully covered them with a cairn of stones on top of the hill. The rest of his life he tended the cairn, keeping it as neat as it had been that first day. The hill was a place he could go when he needed solitude to think. It was a place that always seemed to give him strength when he faltered in the trying years, for there he had buried a man strong beyond measure.
Each of these men had had his own time—the Indian, the mustang hunter, the pioneer rancher—and each had passed from the scene. For more than twenty years now it had been Charlie’s turn to use this land, to shape it in his own way and to be shaped by it. To a degree he never knew, he had been shaped by all those who had gone before him.
He called his ranch Brushy Top, after the brushy Concho divide which ran along the edge of it. It was not so large that he could not see beyond it from here. North and west it was his to the edge of the cotton farms on Coyote Flat. To the south and east lay Page Mauldin’s vast expanse of live-oak hills. Charlie had fifteen sections of rangeland in all—three deeded, the rest under lease. Almost ten thousand acres, the way people figured it in town, but Charlie tallied it easier in sections. It took fully four acres in this country to feed a sheep, twenty for a cow. Charlie’s was not large as Texas outfits went—not large enough that the worry of it followed him to bed at night the way Page Mauldin’s far-flung ranch operations did. But it was enough that Charlie had brought up a son on it and sent him to all the school he would take, and he had never missed paying Lupe Flores his monthly wage.
West of the corrals and away from their hoof-churned dust, two houses sat protected by the deep shade of long-reaching old live-oak trees. One was a white-painted frame with rubboard siding and a porch. Charlie had built it good and solid, hoping it would content his help and make them want to stay. Lupe and Rosa Flores had lived in it seventeen years. The house had been expanded gradually as their five children came along.
At fifteen, Manuel Flores was out on horseback doing a man’s part as ranch boys were expected to do, helping round up and drive the sheep. Charlie could see little Juan, the youngest, playing cowboy on a stick horse in the broom-swept front yard. The girls Anita and Luisa were likely in the house helping their mother with the cleaning and the cooking. Candelario, seven, was hanging onto the shearing-pen fence, large brown eyes a-sparkle as he watched the transient Mexican hands sharpen their shearing heads and stretch a greasy shade tarp from each side of the rig for the job that was soon to begin. Candelario was learning some new words down there from Garcia’s crew. If he took any of them home, Rosa would blister his bottom with a willow switch.
Charlie’s own house had stood for most of seventy years. Its square lines bore the strong flavor of hill-country German, for when August Schmidt had become able to afford it he had brought an immigrant rockmason from Fredericksburg to help him, and with his own hands he had built this house to stand forever. The limestone blocks had been chiseled one at a time into straight lines that would butt together without a flaw. Age and weather had darkened the stone, but the building seemed as sturdy now as it had ever been.
August Schmidt had grown old here before he sold the place to Charlie. Now Charlie would grow old in this house, and someday, perhaps, his son.
Charlie watched his wife, Mary, wearing a floppy old straw hat with a brim wide as a Mexican sombrero, move through the front gate into their yard. When Tom had first learned to walk, Charlie had found him one day at the barn, toddling dangerously around the horses’ feet. That was when Charlie built the white picket fence, with the gate latch high and on the outside.
Tom had been a fool about horses even then. At twenty-two, he hadn’t changed much.
Mary started work in her flower beds, trying to do some trimming before the day turned hot and she had to start dinner. Those damn flower beds! Years ago Charlie had to hammer and chip them out of caliche and solid rock for her, then haul good soil from way over on the Flat with a team of mules and a wagon. It took a dozen trips. For such a little woman, she had a streak of stubbornness broad as a saddleblanket. The German blood showing out, he figured. After traveling across the Atlantic to fight Germans in World War I, he should have known better than to marry one here at home.
The garden was Mary’s red flag of defiance against the dry nature and plainness of this rolling range country. Charlie raised hell about the water it took, especially when he was obliged to drill another well a
nd put up a new steel windmill behind the house. But no matter, she raised her flowers anyway—petunias and pinks, roses and larkspur, zinnias and phlox. Charlie would have been content with the flowers Nature chose to put there; they were many and colorful when the season was wet. But he guessed a man had to tolerate a few things. The world had known but one perfect man, and no perfect woman whatever.
He climbed slowly down from the mill, careful not to let a foot slip on the thin, slick angle-iron. He favored his left leg a little; it had been broken in a horse fall years ago. Few were the old-time cowboys who didn’t have a bad leg or a crooked arm or some other mark of the trade. On the ground he moved toward the shearing pens, stopping at the netwire fence to run his big hand playfully through Candelario’s coarse black hair.
“Qué dice, muchacho?” (“what do you say, boy?”)
The boy was momentarily startled. He had been so interested in watching the shearers that he had not heard Charlie coming. His brown face turned all grin and dark eyes. It pleased Candelario that Charlie often spoke Spanish with him, though Charlie’s Spanish was typically gringo and often caused the kids to giggle behind their hands. Rosa Flores spoke only English in her house and demanded that her children learn to speak it with less accent even than hers. She said too many Spanish children—she always spoke of them as Spanish rather than Mexican—knew no English when they started to school. Through this fault of their parents and not of their own, they fell hopelessly behind from the start. Most would stay behind as long as they lived.
But Lupe spoke Spanish with his children. He was more orthodox than Rosa and had less schooling. Hence in Candelario’s boyish reasoning, Spanish was a man’s language and English was for women—and Anglos. He liked to hang out with the shearers, marveling at the profane glories of border Mexican.
Charlie heard a startled shout and turned quickly, in time to see a boy lose his footing and fall from a sacking frame. The lad grabbed at a wooden brace and broke his fall, landing on a pile of empty wool sacks. He got up shame-faced, dusting himself. From the shearing pen came derisive laughter and some whistling.