by Elmer Kelton
“Been awful dry, Old Warrior,” Charlie said when he finished with the rocks. “I’m afraid you might not be so proud of it if you could see it the way it is now.”
Other places might have several drouths in a single summer. Texas was more likely to have several summers in a single drouth. Drouth here did not mean a complete absence of rain. It meant extended periods of deficient rainfall, when the effects of one rain wore off long before the next one came so that there was no carryover of benefits, no continuity.
Charlie Flagg’s rain signs failed him; the summer was dry. He had-been away to war during the famous old drouth of 1918, so he had not seen that one with his own eyes. He remembered none like this except perhaps ’33. All this summer it had showered but three times. Each time, the sun broke out from behind the paltry clouds and the west wind swept in furnace-hot, stealing the scant moisture before the grass had time to taste the life the brief rainfall had falsely promised.
Charlie watched the grass burn a golden brown, then saw the gold fade to dusty gray as life retreated into the roots beneath the baking ground. He saw even this dead mat of grass dwindle as the animals continued to graze it. The ewes remained in good flesh, and their bags were rich with the milk flow for the normal term; the lambs should go out acceptably heavy this fall. Sheep always did well in dry times, so long as there was feed. Their ancestors had endured for untold centuries in the Pyrenees and on the open deserts of Spain, and before that perhaps on the hot sands of Morocco long before the first woolly Merino timidly set a cloven hoof upon the alien soil of the New World.
It was the cattle that suffered first; they were bred for the green midlands of England. The calves had no bloom, and Charlie was sure they would come up thirty or forty pounds light this fall.
Now in September the days were still hot but the nights cooled quickly, and the early mornings made a man hunt for a light jacket. Charlie knew he could no longer put off his annual prewinter visit to the bank.
He told Mary only that he was going to town, but instinctively she knew the rest of it. Her intuition always made him uneasy; it gave him an uncomfortable feeling that if ever he had some dark secret she would sense it immediately and discern all its sordid details. That, more than morality per se, had kept him from yielding to temptation on occasions through the years when pretty eyes had offered invitation.
She said, “You tell Emmett Rodale it’s been a long time since he’s been by for dinner. Tell him I’ll fix him one of those apple strudels he always likes.”
“Bein’ nice to Big Emmett won’t make him charge us any lower interest. Friendship stops at the door of the bank.”
“An old bachelor never eats right; he never saw fit to marry some good deserving woman who would take care of him.”
“I never heard him complain about it. I’ll bet Big weighs three hundred and fifty pounds. I’d be rich if I could raise cattle that had his fleshin’ qualities.”
Driving his green pickup toward town, Charlie skirted the edge of Coyote Flat, the dust rising behind him like a white fog. On one side of the parched caliche road lay a drouth-stunted cottonfield that belonged to farmer Emil Deutscher. A pickup sat in the edge of the rows, one door standing open, the back glass broken out. Emil stood in the short cotton, his big hands on his hips as he surveyed in droop-shouldered discouragement the thin scattering of open white bolls.
Charlie braked to a gradual stop, waited for the dust to drift away, then backed up, looking over his shoulder so he wouldn’t run into the ditch. By tradition there should have been little common ground between Charlie Flagg and Emil Deutscher. One was a ranchman, a man of the saddle whose only interest in farming was a small-grain patch he kept for winter grazing, more or less against his will, and in which he always hired someone else to do the plowing. He didn’t own a tractor and never intended to. Emil, on the other hand, was strictly a farmer. In the beginning Charlie had laughed about Emil’s heavy German accent and his plows and his pigs. But gradually he had found that when the work was done they thought much alike. They enjoyed the same things—a good tight house, a comfortable chair, a game of forty-two, a hot, heavy, fresh-cooked meal. The man in boots and the man with the lace-up brogan shoes had come first to mutual respect, then eventually to friendship. Their wives, especially, had much in common. Sometimes Charlie thought Hildy Deutscher spent as much time in Mary Flagg’s kitchen as in her own; she burned more gasoline in her car driving over here almost every day than Emil burned in his tractor getting the fields properly worked up. The two women rattled incessantly in the half-German, half-English mixture both had brought from the old country settlements. Charlie seldom had any real idea what they were talking about.
He halted at the edge of the road, leaving room for the yellow school bus he knew would be here shortly to pick up the Flores children and others who lived along this route. He struggled over the fence, supporting himself on a cedar post and grunting as he brought his leg across and dropped to the soft ground. His weight had stretched the wire.
Emil walked toward him, halting in the edge of the cotton. Near Charlie’s age, he was medium-tall, a blocky man in grayed-out denim overalls that once had been blue. His square, friendly face was ruddy, blistered by harsh sun and constant wind. His blond-haired, fair-skinned Nordic ancestors had not bequeathed him proper protection for the severity of the climate he faced. The burn of the sun left tiny blotches in his skin, blisters that might turn to cancer if not periodically treated. It was a price a man paid to stay here.
They howdied and shook and talked about how uncommonly hot the days were. Charlie said, “Your cotton looks about like my grass. Ain’t makin’ much, is it?”
Emil Deutscher soberly shook his head. His German parentage showed strongly in the way he put his words together. “I will gather many acres before I have a bale. Those Mexican picking crews, they have been here to see. They take one look and then go on to the plains. They say the picking is always better at Lamesa.”
Charlie nodded. He had seen a lot of transient family groups from down in the Lower Valley, going along the roads in their tarp-covered trucks. He hadn’t seen many stop for anything but gas. “Maybe next year.”
“Sure, next year. It’s a great next-year country.” Emil knelt and scooped up a handful of dry earth. He let the dark soil run slowly through his fingers, the thinnest of it drifting away like a silken veil in the west wind. “Look at that, Charlie. Best soil in the world.”
“With rain it’ll grow anything. Without rain it ain’t worth a damn.”
“The rain will come. We’ll make a crop of winter oats and wheat.” Emil picked up another handful of soil and stirred it with a grimy finger. “As you say, it will grow anything in the world, when God sees fit to give it moisture.”
“I’d settle just to grow some fresh grass. You can keep your farmin’.”
“Everybody is at heart a little of a farmer, Charlie. Even you, I would bet.”
Charlie shook his head. “Not me. And can you see one of them Houston oil men out here with a plowhandle in each hand?”
“Even the city people, Charlie, they like to plant things and see them grow. When you are in the city, look up high in the windows of the tall buildings and you will see little flower beds there, little flowerboxes. When you look at the big buildings, you see nothing except man. When you look in the tiny flowerbox, you see a little bit of God. We are all tied to the Mother Earth. Deep inside, everybody wants to go back to it. Me and you, Charlie, we are the lucky ones. We never left it.”
Charlie looked at the poor cotton. “Not so damn lucky, maybe.”
“Next year, Charlie.” Emil stared at the dirt in his hand. “It takes away from us sometimes, but later it will give back more than it took. Next year ...”
Charlie parked his pickup across the street from the bank and stood on the corner, waiting. The traffic light seemed a long time in changing. He turned his back to the wind and watched the noisy passage of a livestock truck carrying a doubl
e-deck load of ewes, probably to market. Many stockmen were selling off part of their older animals to lighten the grazing load on suffering pastures.
Bad weather’s got a lot of the boys boogered, he thought. But if a man sells off the mother stuff, where’ll the lambs and calves come from? You can’t produce with-out a factory.
Charlie glanced without enthusiasm toward Big Emmett Rodale’s bank. He took out his old railroad-type watch. Early yet. It always paid to let Big have his morning bowel movement before you went to talk business with him; his humor was better. Charlie walked down to the coffee shop and pushed the door open. The thick aroma of soapy steam, frying grease, and reheated doughnuts wrapped around him like a soggy blanket. He had only pity for a man obliged to take his meals in a place like this.
The shop was half full of merchants and store clerks with white shirts and dark ties, ranchmen and farmers in greasy hats and Levi’s and khakis, all drinking coffee together and swapping gossip like idle wives. Some of the ranchmen who lived in town could be found here about this time any day. It amazed Charlie that they could run a ranch from the coffee shop, but some seemed to manage. For all his hard work, he couldn’t discern that he made any more money than they did.
Rio Seco was one of those farm and ranch towns where time and circumstances had erased the sharp line once drawn between townsmen and country people. Many ranchmen lived in town, and many businessmen owned acreage in the country. Hardly a farm or ranchhouse was so far beyond the forks of the creek that it did not have electricity. Nearly every country home had butane gas, hauled by truck and pumped into underground steel tanks. Woodchopping had gone out like the freighter’s mule. Many a salaried employee locked up at 5:30 and drove a few miles to some small place he owned or leased and had stocked with cattle or sheep. Prices had trended steadily upward the last several years. Townsmen had eagerly invested their money in the land for its green promise of abundant profit. Rio Seco had hardly a barber or lawyer or storekeeper who did not boast ownership of a few cattle. Cattle were easier than sheep for the part-time operator because they needed less attention. These days you did not need a lifetime background in livestock to make money out of cattle. All you had to do was buy them and turn them loose. Any fool could show a profit on an up market.
Many townspeople were asking themselves why they had not stumbled onto this bonanza twenty years ago. They looked with suspicion on the traditional ranchmen who had been in the business thirty or forty years but drove old cars and lived in clapboard houses so aged that there was still gingerbread latticework across the front porch and oval glass in the front door. They’ve got it made, all right, most. folks agreed. You couldn’t stay in the livestock game that long and not be rich.
In Texas, nothing gave a man status like ownership of cattle. Now there was status enough for everybody. The goose was hanging high, and they had the world by the tail on a downhill pull.
Charlie knew most of the men here by their first names, so it took him a while to shake hands all around. It tickled him to see people like druggist Prentice Harpe wearing their suit pants tucked into the tops of shiny cowboy boots. Four or five years ago Prentice had bought a load of speculation cattle and his first pair of boots, all the same day. The cattle had made money. Nowadays he wore boots to church.
A couple of men squeezed up in a booth to make room for Charlie.
“Coffee, Mister Charlie?” He looked up at the waitress, a tall, slender young woman whose mouth smiled but whose eyes were tired and sad.
“Coffee’d suit me fine, Bess.”
Harpe said, “You better try a slice of this boggy-top pie, Charlie. It’s mighty good.”
Charlie liked the looks of it, but because the others were eating it he ordered a doughnut instead. He always had to be different.
Bess Winfield spilled a little of the coffee in Charlie’s saucer and leaned over to put a paper napkin under the cup to keep it from dripping. Charlie protested, “No need, Bess, I can do it myself.”
But she fixed it anyway while Charlie fidgeted. He wondered if he would ever be old enough that it did not make him uneasy to have an attractive young woman this close to him. Bess’s white uniform fit snugly over full breasts that held his attention even though he felt guilty. Just because the fire had died out at home didn’t mean a man’s mind didn’t still stray in that direction sometimes. He hoped no one else noticed. He decided they were probably looking at Bess too, not at him.
The crowd talked dry weather and cattle prices awhile, and football and the ungodly high cost of labor. Gradually the men began getting up and leaving, one at a time, until Charlie was left by himself, sipping a third cup of weak coffee without enthusiasm, staying here only because he had rather drink bad coffee than go sit down across the desk from Emmett Rodale and ask him please to set him up a line of credit for the feed he would need this winter. No, Charlie might imply the word please, but he wouldn’t say it out loud. A team of Percheron draft horses couldn’t have pulled that out of him.
Bess came around with the glass pot half full of coffee. Charlie placed his hand over his cup as a sign he had had enough. In truth, he had had enough after half of the first cup.
He said, “You look tired, Bess. Busy mornin’, I suppose.”
“No worse than any other.”
“Maybe you and Tom danced too much last night.”
“We didn’t dance atall.”
Surprised, Charlie said, “Tom told us you-all had a date.”
“We did, but some of the boys got up a roping down at the arena. I sat out there in my dancing dress on the hard boards of that grandstand and watched them rope till past midnight.”
Charlie scowled. “If I was a young man again, be damned if I’d leave a pretty woman sittin’ by herself while I was off with a bunch of ugly cowboys.”
He remembered it hadn’t been that way with him and Mary—not in the early years, anyway.
She said, “I wish sometimes you were a young man, Mister Charlie.”
Bess Winfield’s parents had come to Rio Seco as tenant cotton farmers years ago. Her father had been allergic to calluses on his hands, though it was generally supposed he had them on his rump. Bess was a pretty girl, as girls went in a small town like Rio Seco. Charlie thought she deserved better than working in a sweat kitchen, and she could have had it. He knew she had received several proposals, most of them honorable. She had declined them all to wait for Tom Flagg.
It had been a long wait.
“I’ll talk to him,” Charlie said.
She shook her head. “No, don’t. If he ever changes—and maybe he will—let it be on his own.”
The Ranchers & Farmers Bank was about the oldest institution in town. It dominated a corner, its thick limestone walls and age-yellowed mortar showing the sturdy German influence which had come here in the early times from the old Pedernales River settlements. Long years had stained the stone, but the building stood solidly, a living tie to a pioneer period that had passed into the fading shadows of old men’s memories.
Inside, the buzz and clatter of electric calculators and the insistent ringing of an upstart telephone did not dispel the bank’s elusive flavor of a bygone era. It still had its high ceiling with elaborate metalwork painted white, the electrical wires running across the surface in metal conduits instead of being hidden inside the walls. The old walnut counters still stood with their delicate lathework and marble tops, worn down by generations of arms and elbows. Occasionally someone would suggest that the place was dingy and needed a complete redecoration to brighten it. Big Emmett would hump his back like an angry bulldog.
“It was plenty fine for your ol’ daddy,” he would snort. “You figure you’re better than your ol’ daddy?”
Someone had suggested that a complete modernization might appeal to the ladies and draw more of them into the bank. Bachelor Big had risen to heights of profanity that would have done Sam Houston proud. “This is a bankin’ institution, not a powder room! Women run everything el
se in the country today. Be goddam if they’re gettin’ this bank!”
Other institutions might go cosmopolitan and turn their backs on the ladder by which they had climbed. Emmett Rodale’s was still plainly an agricultural bank. Across the big walls hung old ranch pictures—the Sugg Ranch remuda of horses watering in the Concho River, the last delivery of big Longhorn steers out of Crockett County, a string of freight wagons drawn by mules hauling wool to San Angelo. There was a picture of Emmett Rodale himself at twenty, a cowboy on the old Bar S. A big, dusty pile of Sheep and Goat Raiser magazines sat atop a small table in a vacant comer, and last year’s dried-out maize stalks leaned against a windowsill.
The bald, portly banker rocked back in his outsized chair when Charlie Flagg stepped into the building. Rodale wore a necktie in concession to propriety but left it at half mast in protest against total conformity. His reading glasses were perched halfway down his nose, for he had been reading the new issue of West Texas Livestock Weekly. He frowned at Charlie over the rims.
Beside the front door stood a free scale. By habit, Charlie always paused to weigh himself. That is, he always stepped onto the scale. He never looked any more where the pointer stopped; he didn’t care to know.
Big’s voice could peel the scales from an armadillo. “What’re you doin’ here, Flagg? You’re supposed to be out yonder workin’.”
Half the people in town were afraid of Emmett Rodale. The rest knew the way to get along with him was to answer him as roughly as he talked. He had a loud bark but no teeth.
Charlie nodded toward the scale. “You ought to use that thing yourself once in a while. You’re gettin’ as fat as a pet coon.”
Big grunted and laid the paper down. “Pot callin’ the kettle black. Tell me what you come to ask for so I can say no and get you out of my hair.”