“And I intend to hold you to it right now. Beef prices are going to be very high before this war is over, and I think we need to expand.”
“How?”
“I want to buy Lester Doan’s herd and lease his acreage.”
Doan was our neighbor to the north. Several months earlier he’d been felled by a bad heart attack and I’d heard he was anxious to sell out and move to San Antonio to live with his daughter.
“I made a tentative agreement to buy his cattle a week ago.”
“You’ve already talked to him?” she asked in surprise.
“Sure.”
“How much?”
“Thirty dollars a head for cows, baby calves thrown in. Fifteen a head for calves over six months. And he’ll lease us the ranch for a quarter an acre per year.”
“How many head are we talking about?”
“Twenty-two hundred. Do we have that much ready cash?”
She quickly calculated in her head and nodded. “Yes, but if we buy him out we’ll probably run a little short of operating money.”
“We can go to the bank for a few thousand if we need to,” I pointed out.
“And you really think this is the thing to do?”
“Definitely.” I said firmly. “I know it is.”
She nodded. “All right. I’ve never doubted your intelligence, Virgil. Just your seriousness.”
“And there’s one other thing. Next year I want to replace at least a dozen of our herd bulls with that new Santa Gertrudis breed Bob Kleberg has been developing over at the King Ranch.”
“What! Is he already selling those bulls commercially?”
“No, but he’ll let me have a few for reasons of his own. He wants to try them on a herd that’s genetically unrelated to his own cattle.”
“Yes, and he’ll want too much for them,” she objected. “You know Bob.”
I shook my head. “I don’t care. They’ll be worth it. Remember what Grandpa always said? Your bull is half of the blood line of your calf crop. Good bulls are the cheapest way to improve a herd.”
She regarded me for a moment, then nodded slowly. “If that’s what it takes to get you home, then we’ll try it.” She sat down at the table and drained her coffee cup.
“It’s the thing to do. The Santa Gertrudis was developed for the kind of climate and pasture we have here in South Texas.”
She nodded absently as though she hadn’t heard me. “Virgil,” she said musingly, “please tell me why it’s taken so long for you to take this place seriously?”
“It was because I knew that when I came home and got involved with the ranch, that would be it. I’d never leave. You see, I love La Rosa as much as you do, but I wanted to have some life apart from it before it closed in on me for good.”
Her expression softened and she nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose I can begrudge you that. When are you moving home?”
“As soon as I get this business with Madeline settled and my apartment in Big Spring closed. Maybe two weeks. Three at the outside. How does that sound?”
She nodded. “Good enough.”
“This calls for another drink,” I told her. “The prodigal returns.”
“You go ahead. I’ve got to get dressed.”
We both stood. As she was about to leave the room I reached out and hugged her tightly against my chest and felt her arms go around me, this tiny, iron-willed woman who, even more than my own mother, had always been the center of my world. “Say something nice to me, Tía Carmen,” I said with a laugh. “You’ve got what you wanted, so tell me what a sweet boy I am.”
“You’re an incorrigible rascal is what you are, Virgil Tucker,” she said as she pulled away and poked me lightly in the belly with her fist. “Have your drink. I’ve got to tend to this ranch.”
“Is Alonzo driving you this morning?”
“Sí.”
“How’s the jeep working out?”
Instead of answering she whisked quickly from the room.
Thinking she hadn’t heard me, I shrugged and splashed more whiskey into my cup. Then I went outside and sat down on the back steps. It was a little cool, but the sun was coming up bright in the east and the day was dawning crystal clear, without a cloud in the sky. I lit a cigarette, and as I sat smoking and sipping my drink, I almost dozed off in the placid freshness of the early morning. Soon I heard the clop of hooves, and the old ranch buggy swung into the drive with Helena’s husband, Alonzo, at the reins.
Sixty-five years old, tall and slim, with naturally dark skin that had been baked by a lifetime in the sun, Alonzo looked like he’d been charbroiled on a spit. Rarely far from my aunt, he moved about the ranch as quietly and unobtrusively as a ghost. Dressed as he invariably was in his tattered khakis and ratty sombrero, his Colt single-action revolver and his bullet-filled bandolero, he could have easily been a renegade from Pancho Villa’s army.
As well he might have been, I realized the dates were about right. Alonzo had arrived at La Rosa by wagon with Helena and their two children one stormy night thirty-five years earlier, carrying an ancient and well-worn letter from my long-dead grandfather. The essence of the letter was that the family was greatly indebted to this man and his kin for certain unspecified services that had been rendered some time in the distant past. Furthermore, the letter laid a burden upon its author’s descendants to give its bearer refuge and aid, regardless of the circumstances.
They spent that first night in the main house. The next morning Helena was at work in the kitchen while Alonzo busied himself with the remuda. Over the next few weeks the family slipped quietly into the gentle rhythms of ranch life. Whatever trouble he’d been fleeing, it was of a lasting nature; I knew that he hadn’t set foot off La Rosa in the three and a half decades that had passed since that stormy night.
For many years my aunt had used a buggy to travel around the ranch, sometimes taking the reins herself, but more often than not with Alonzo as her driver. The previous summer I’d accepted a stolen army jeep as payment of a debt of several hundred dollars that I never could have collected any other way. I brought the jeep home and taught Alonzo to drive it in the apparently vain hope that it would replace the dilapidated buggy. That morning the vehicle was nowhere to be seen as the old vaquero guided the buggy up to the back door.
“What happened to the jeep?” I asked as he alighted from the seat.
He took a can of Prince Albert tobacco from his shirt pocket and slowly rolled a cigarette. Placing the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he lighted it with a match he struck with his thumbnail. Then he regarded me for a moment with his sad, dark, impenetrable eyes as he slowly blew a cloud of smoke from under his drooping mustache. “It was a most wicked beast, Señor Virgil,” he said at last.
“What? The jeep?”
“Sí.”
“How? In what way was it wicked?”
“It sought to throw us twice.”
“Throw you?”
“Sí. Me and Tía Carmen. It sought to throw us on the way to the Bolivar pasture. But do not worry. It will do no further harm. I killed it with my pistola.”
I grinned in spite of myself. “What did Aunt Carmen have to say about that?”
“It was Tía Carmen who instructed me to shoot it, though I would probably have done so anyway. As I said, it was a most wicked beast.”
I roared with laughter and felt my heart swell with affection for this formidable old man. Years earlier, when I was a sophomore in high school, a bully, a compact, hard-bodied school yard tyrant named Stubb Martindale moved to town and chose the shy, skinny kid I’d been back then as the prime target of his malice. I fought him twice, losing both times but proving my courage. Still, Martindale humiliated me on a daily basis, and my life at school became miserable. At home I became more quiet and withdrawn than usual. Alonzo was the first to notice, and he drew me aside one evening to inquire about the source of my discontent. At first I was reluctant to speak, but he persisted, and the story eventual
ly poured out. All the while I spoke, Alonzo, who was then about forty-five and in his prime, nodded sympathetically.
“I will tell you what to do,” he said once I’d finished. “You must put your boots aside and wear your Sunday shoes to school, the heavy brogues with the thick soles and square toes. Lace them tightly, and the next time this hooligan begins to distress you, kick him hard in the cajones. Not as hard as you can, for you must give up some force for accuracy of aim. But kick him hard. Do not wait once his bullying has begun. Do not converse with him or trade insults or threats as boys are prone to do. Kick him immediately. This will be a great shock to him. He may even vomit. All of this will be very pleasing to you, but you cannot dwell on it.”
“No?” I asked, puzzled. I’d never before gotten such advice from an adult.
Alonzo shook his head. “No. You have more to do. If possible, kick him a second time in the privates, then jerk his feet from under him. Or trip him. It doesn’t matter how you do it, but you must get him on the ground one way or another. Then kick and stomp him into complete submission. Do not kick him in the head, for this could kill him and this is not what you want. But kick him in the stomach, the back, the kidneys, the soft parts of his body. Kick him a dozen times or so, and kick him with great force. When you are finished, say nothing. Utter no threats about what will happen if he ever molests you again. He will know without being told, and your silence will be even the more intimidating to him.”
“But I could be expelled,” I objected.
Alonzo smiled coldly at my naivete. Though I didn’t know it at the time, he was well aware that the principal of the school could hardly dare to expel the son of the county’s largest rancher on so small a provocation as a school yard brawl. But he saw no reason to share that knowledge with me. “That is possible,” he lied. “But it is of no consequence. Also, your father will almost certainly thrash you if he finds out, but that too does not matter. You see, to rid yourself of this bully you must convince him that you do not fear the school authorities, that you do not fear your father, that you do not fear anything, and that you will go to any lengths to be free of him. Then he will know you mean business.”
The strategy worked. And despite Alonzo’s warning, I gave the hulking boy one solid kick in the mouth, knocking out a tooth and splitting his lips so they bled copiously. Left whimpering and humiliated, abandoned by those who a moment before had been his admiring friends, Stubb Martindale never again so much as raised his eyes to meet my stare.
A few weeks passed. Late of a Saturday afternoon in November, Alonzo once again drew me aside. “Your horse is saddled at the barn,” he said. “Let us take a ride down toward the river. We will enjoy the beauty of the full moon, eh?”
At that time the ranch employed only four other full-time vaqueros. All of them were Mexican-American men Alonzo’s age or older, and all bore the signs of the cattleman’s life in the Texas brush country—scarred faces, broken and badly set bones, missing fingers; one had a missing eye whose empty socket was covered by a homemade patch. All four were descended from people who had worked on the ranch in the days of its founding. And like Alonzo, they were always armed with Colt pistols. Not far from the barn, they joined us.
We rode on slowly, not hurrying, saying little. Our horses were trained cow ponies, sturdy, close coupled and agile, bred from native Spanish stock with strong infusions of quarter-horse blood. An hour later, just as the sun was setting, we emerged into a natural clearing, a meadow of some five or more acres that had been turned into a holding pen many years earlier by cutting and piling the brush along its sides until it formed an impassable wall. At the pen’s far side stood an ancient bull—a massive animal of mixed blood, part longhorn, part Hereford, part anyone’s guess—its head and shoulders looming huge in the gathering darkness, its horns thick and battered and dull with age. It stood placidly chewing its cud, yet its old eyes were still fierce and proud even now in the winter of its life.
“What are we doing here?” I asked in Spanish.
“I wish to instruct you on certain matters,” Alonzo answered in the same language.
“I get plenty of instruction in school,” I scoffed.
Alonzo turned to face me, his face full of feigned surprise. “And these schoolmasters, they told how to deal with your bully? Your friend Martindale? How to rid yourself of him?”
“No,” I admitted with a shake of my head.
“Just as I thought. Now listen carefully.” Alonzo jabbed his finger toward the bull. “This old toro here is perhaps the most dangerous beast on La Rosa. I have watched him since his youth. He has fought the other bulls many times, and always he has won. He is especially dangerous now because he has learned never to hesitate. Also, a certain contempt has grown in his heart for those who think him weak and irresolute because of his age, and he longs to see the fear in their eyes in that moment when they learn differently.”
I thought he was ascribing a lot of wisdom and insight to a bull, but prudently I said nothing. Instead I asked, “What now?”
“Watch and do exactly as I tell you.”
The five of them sat on their mounts for several minutes, the bull staring at them and they at the bull as the darkness gathered and the full moon rose above the horizon. At last Alonzo raised his arm for attention. The others gathered their reins in their hands. “Aheeeee!” he yelled, and the five men raced off across the clearing, riding first toward the bull, then circling him. The mighty old animal whirled in his tracks, following the lead rider as the five rode around and around him, a perfect melding of men and beasts in a blur of motion. Then Pablo, the one-eyed vaquero, tossed his lasso deftly over the bull’s neck. At almost the same moment one of the other men roped his horns. Their horses, long trained to do so, skidded to a stop and quickly backed up in opposite directions, taking the slack out of the ropes. The bull thrashed and pawed. Alonzo rode behind and carefully threw his rope under its right hind foot. His horse backed up and the rope came tight, immobilizing the hapless animal. Alonzo dismounted and motioned to me. “Come,” he said softly. As he walked calmly toward the bull, he pulled his ancient bone-handled knife from his pocket. The bull struggled against the ropes, its eyes full of rage as it tried desperately to hook the old man with its horns. Alonzo spoke softly to the animal in that magic voice of his that could calm the wildest of horses. “Easy, old toro. Easy. You have been chosen for a noble end.”
He felt along the bull’s neck for a moment, then jabbed quickly with the knife about halfway between the head and the shoulders. He wriggled the knife around until he’d punctured the bull’s jugular, and the blood began to spurt out hot and steaming in the cold night air. From out of nowhere there appeared the small silver cup I’d seen several times on a shelf in Alonzo’s house. It was held under the wound and filled five times, and each time one of the vaqueros drained it, Alonzo drinking last. Then it was filled a final time and passed into my hands. “Drink quickly,” Alonzo said. “Drink while his great heart still beats.”
If I’d been asked the day before, I would have replied with a laugh that no, I never expected to be out in the brush in the dead of night drinking raw bull’s blood with five wild, crazy old men. But now there was no mirth in me. I saw in Alonzo’s bearing the same grave seriousness that was in the priest’s eyes at communion time, and I accepted the cup without hesitation. As I raised it to my lips, I felt a weightless freedom possess me as though I’d shed my part of that collective delusion we call civilization. For a few moments the world appeared as it must have been in the very morning of time, and as I drank I was aware of little beyond the hot, salty liquid that filled my mouth and the flat, limitless land that stretched away forever beneath the silver moon.
Afterward, the vaqueros built a small fire. Someone produced a large stoneware jug of homemade tequila and passed it around. When the jug came to me, I hesitated. “Go ahead,” Alonzo said softly. “Your father will not mind this one time.”
“Did he…?” I began.
“Did he what?” Alonzo asked.
“The blood, I mean…” I groped for words for a moment, then shook my head and muttered, “Nothing.”
Alonzo grinned, his teeth flashing white in the firelight. The other vaqueros laughed softly. I raised the jug and took the first drink of my life, the fiery liquid burning as it went down. I choked a bit, and coughed, and then drank again, the liquor spreading out to warm my belly.
“Easy,” Alonzo said. “You want to go back home sitting on your horse, not draped over his back like a sack of grain. That would be undignified.”
The others cackled. “Dignity!” one-eyed Pablo called out. “Let us drink to dignity!”
“Fool!” one of the others said. “Do you not know that one loses dignity quickest by toasting it with the bottle?”
Another shook his head. “No, it goes quickest when dealing with women.”
“You are right, my friend,” said the third. “Women can take everything if they are of a mind to.”
“Bah!” Alonzo snorted.
“Alonzo expresses contempt,” Pablo said.
“Alonzo is a wise man,” one of the others said.
“Sí,” Alonzo agreed profoundly, his voice full of good-natured self-mockery. “Very wise.”
“Tell us, Alonzo the Wise,” Pablo said. “Have you ever lost your dignity?”
“Sí.”
“Relate the story to us.”
Alonzo shook his head sadly. “There is little to tell. It was many years ago and the wench is long dead.”
“Best not let Helena find out or she’ll take her great kitchen knife and remove something more useful than your dignity.”
The other men hooted in glee.
“I think not,” Alonzo said. “Now that we are growing older she has even less interest in such usefulness than I do.”
The others laughed again, and I joined in. The flames leapt and flickered while the moon climbed bright and cold in the eastern sky. The jug went around twice more and I discovered that I was mildly and pleasantly drunk. When at last the fire had died down to embers, we climbed on our mounts and started home. Riding quickly this time, we spurred the horses and shrieked and laughed wildly in the moonlight. I put the quirt to my gelding and shot ahead of the others in a burst of speed. Near the barn I whirled him around and shouted, “Arriba! Arriba! Hurry up, old fellows! Get a move on!” I’d never felt better in my life.
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