Destiny, Texas

by Brett Cogburn

  No whining, no excuses, no saying you’re sorry. There were things to do, and I never counted on anyone else to do them for me. Get moving, even if you’re old and tired and you’ve messed everything up.

  I would have sat on the porch, but Juanita would get up and make me come back to bed. She thought I was getting too old to sit out in the night air, even if it was summertime and almost as hot as the daytime.

  I took my pillow and walked out into the pasture beside the house. I could always think better without a ceiling blocking the sky. There was a little bit of a breeze blowing through the dry grass, and I found a likely spot and rested my head on the pillow, with nothing but the stars overhead to get in the way of my thinking.

  I fell asleep. It was already turning gray when I woke up, but there was still time for me to be sitting at the kitchen table when Juanita came downstairs. I tried to shake the dirt and grass off the pillow. Juanita was picky about her household.

  There was somebody sitting in a chair on the porch. It wasn’t Juanita, for I could see the occasional glow of a cigarette when they drew on it.

  “Do you always take a pillow with you when you go for a morning walk?” Gunn asked.

  “Why didn’t you telegraph me you were on your way?”

  “Figured I could get here before you got around to going to town and picking up a telegraph.”

  It had grown light enough for me to make him out. He hadn’t shaved in days.

  “Good to have you back.”

  “You’re not near as glad as I am to be out.” There were crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes that I didn’t remember and a scar on his chin that looked like the leftovers of a bad cut. That wasn’t there when he went off.

  “Take a few days to unwind. We’ve got plenty of time before I put you back to work.”

  “Sounds like you need some help. I saw Hamish at the depot house in Destiny. He was on his way to Fort Worth.”

  “We’ll get things going again. I’m keeping the best of the stock. We’ll high-grade them, and you can pick out a few of our top horses to hold out of the deal.”

  “Woman I saw in town stepped wide of me. I don’t know how she knew, but she did. You’d have thought I had the plague. Maybe I’ve got some mark on me that don’t show in the mirror, ‘convict’ written on my back.”

  “Lot of newcomers. It will take them a while to know who you are. The Dollarhyde name is still worth something around here.”

  “Not enough, apparently. Hamish says things have gone to hell in a hand basket.”

  “I never knew you to back down from a fight. We built it once, we can do it again.”

  We sat without talking for a while. I waited until he had rolled another cigarette before I spoke again. “Your saddle is in the barn. I oiled it up for you when I heard you were getting out.”

  “Chairs,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what I did in prison. Wove chair seats.”

  “That’s all over now. Put it behind you. It’s going to take both of us to keep our stick afloat.”

  “First time I ever heard you sound like you needed help.”

  “You want any inheritance, you’re going to have to fight for it. I taught you that much. Folks in town will be saying that we Dollarhydes are done.”

  “Maybe they’re right.”

  “Boy, what did I always tell you?”

  “We keep what we claim. We keep what’s ours.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Prison’s the same way, but you don’t always win.”

  “If it was easy, everyone would be winners. Life is dog-eat-dog, and I’ll be damned if I would have it any other way.”

  “Anyone ever tell you that you’re an optimist?”

  “Is that a nice way of saying your father is one stubborn old son of a bitch?”

  Chapter Forty-three

  1898

  “I can’t believe we’re farming now.” Gunn set aside the posthole diggers, lifting them high and stabbing them into the ground beside the hole we were working on. One-armed or not, he could dig like a badger.

  “You didn’t have to do the plowing.” I looked at the neat, even rows of broken, fresh-turned ground while I lifted the tamping bar and beat at the hard-packed earth in the bottom of the hole. “I traded a fat beef for that plow work. First meat those farmers have probably had in months, and they were more than glad to break ground for us.”

  “Still, I never thought we would stoop to farming.” Gunn’s white shirt was stained and soaked with sweat, even though it was a cool fall day.

  “It’s livestock farming.”

  “Whatever name you give it, it’s still farming. Ranching is where you turn out some cattle on grass and hire cowboys to handle them.”

  “No, that’s cowboying you’re talking about. Ranching is growing beef and making money at it. Big pastures, little pastures, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Matters to me.”

  I pointed to the eighty-acre perfect square of plowed ground, on the edge of which we were building the new fence. “Those men I hired are supposed to come back tomorrow and pull a harrow over this to smooth it out, and then they’re going to plant it in wheat. Given the rain, this little patch of wheat will graze a bunch of yearlings until we have to pull them off in March. Come May or June, we can pay someone to harvest the wheat and maybe make a little money per bushel.”

  “Sounds like farming to me.”

  “I’ m trying to figure out a way for us to make the living we used to make on four hundred thousand acres with twenty-four thousand acres.”

  “Why don’t we ride up into the Indian Nations and see if we can lease some reservation ground from the Indians? That’s the only open country left available that I know of.”

  “How many times do we have to go over this? We don’t have the coin to play that game. If you’ve got a stash of money that I don’t know about and want to spend all your time kissing up to Indians, Indian agents, and bribing politicians, go ahead.”

  “Never thought I would see the day when there isn’t enough room for cowboys in Texas.”

  “People are hungry for land, like we were when we came out here.”

  “Most of those dirt farmers will starve out in another year. They’re building half-assed towns where no towns should exist.”

  “Yes, most of them will starve out, but it will take a lot of them longer than that. And even when most of them are gone, it will be too late to help us.”

  “There are still big range operators. Burk Burnett is running more country than he ever did.”

  “Yes, but that won’t last, not at the size they’re used to operating at. Not the way we used to operate. They’re running stock in places farmers are least likely to want to settle, or leasing Indian ground. They’re playing a big-money game that is going to change when Congress busts up the last of the reservations up in the Territory. Instead of fighting a losing fight, I intend to be ahead of the game.”

  “Bobwire and stock farming, huh?” Gunn, like a lot of cowboys, referred to barbwire as “bobwire.”

  “And other things. A smart man sees what opportunities are coming and plans accordingly.”

  “Bobwire. I hated the stuff since the first wagonload you hauled in here. And here I am digging postholes and helping you string more of it,” Gunn said. “No job at all for a good cowboy.”

  “Tough job for a one-armed complainer and an old man. Finish that hole and I’ll get another post out of the wagon.”

  “I promise you this is the last fence I’m helping you build. In four years, I’d think you’d be sick of fencing and cross fencing this place.”

  “It the only way we can control what grazing we have. Take a look at the country we used to run cattle on, the same country you’re pining so for. There isn’t much grass left because we ran too many cows on it. Grazed it so hard we killed it out. There are weeds and sagebrush and mesquite taking over where there used to be good grass. This countr
y was made to graze, but it needs a break to keep things growing. It needs backed off of when the rain doesn’t come.”

  “There were more buffalo here than we ever had cattle.”

  “And those buffalo didn’t stay on the same range all the time. They grazed things short and then moved on. Gave the grass time to come back without hitting it too hard.”

  “Not everyone agrees with you. They say it’s because it’s been drier than normal.”

  “All the more reason to graze something a bit and then give it a break. You know, manage things. These smaller pastures we’re fencing off give us a chance to do that.”

  “You sound like Hamish. Did you get all this from some book? All the cowmen in Texas, and I don’t see them doing this.”

  “You haven’t looked hard enough, but I admit there aren’t many. And I admit I’m making this up as I go.”

  “I guess that means we’re going to keep building fence and digging stock tanks for water.”

  “And we’re going to cut a little hay to have around when we get a bad winter and the snow stays on the ground. And I’m going to have a few more water wells drilled. Those tanks we’ve been digging catch a little rain, but it’s not enough. We need more windmills. That was one of the troubles we had running cattle on open range. There’s not much standing or running water out here, and a cow will only graze so far from water. We couldn’t even use all of the grass we had. Get out ten miles from water and see how much better shape the grass is in than closer.”

  “None of that explains how we are going to make money with our little herd, no matter what we do.”

  “I’ve told you this all before. We kept the best of our breeding stock, and I spent years breeding up those cows, mind you, crossing the best of our old longhorn and shorthorn crosses with good Hereford stock. If we can’t make money with numbers, we’ll make it with quality. Give us a few more years, and everybody will want to buy our bulls and heifers to improve or start their own herds. One of our steers will make a man twice the money those old longhorns would on the same ground. Smaller ranches mean other cattlemen are going to be in the same dilemma we are. We’ll sell them the cattle to make a go of it, and get premium prices doing it.”

  “Even if one of your fancy whitefaces makes twice the money a longhorn would, running a couple of hundred of them isn’t going to make the same money as running twenty thousand longhorns.”

  “It isn’t only the price difference. I used to have twenty to thirty cowboys on the payroll, and more during the spring and fall. Had cooks and blacksmiths and doctor bills when one of you fool cowboys busted himself up riding horses that never made me a dime. While you boys sat around bragging how you wouldn’t do anything that couldn’t be done from a saddle, I was losing calves to wolves, losing cattle because they drifted in the winter, and losing them because they were strung from hell to breakfast and anybody with a horse, a running iron, and some dishonest smarts could drive a bunch off and sell them and we’d never know what happened except that our count was low during roundup.”

  “Profit isn’t everything. This ranch used to be something to be proud of. It used to be big. People knew our brand and it meant something.”

  “Keep helping me with the improvements I have in mind, and our brand will mean more than it ever did. We’ve got a railroad in our backyard and the means to ship our high-grade cattle anywhere.”

  “I miss the time when I could saddle a horse and ride all day and never hit a fence or quit seeing our cattle. I miss spring roundup and making a drive up the trail to market,” he said. “I ride into town now, and there are more men talking about cotton prices than there are cowboys. I don’t even recognize where I live anymore.”

  “Speaking of saloons, the city marshal was out here yesterday while you were gone.”

  “Was he looking for me?”

  “Not like you’re thinking. He only wanted to talk to you.”

  “That marshal doesn’t like cowboys.”

  “He said he only wanted to talk to you and make sure you were getting along all right since you got out of prison. Destiny isn’t quite as wide-open as it used to be, and he wanted you to know the rules when you come to his town.”

  “Checking up on the con, huh? Thinking I have to take that from him because I’ll be too scared of going back to prison.”

  “Maybe so, but have the sense to consider that and don’t make trouble in his town. You’ve got a prison record, and there are those that are going to judge you more harshly because of it. There are always those folks that like to see someone successful humbled—the high and mighty brought low, you know? We had a good run for a long time here and cut a pretty wide swath, and some are bound to be jealous.”

  “I remember when the city marshal didn’t bother Dollarhyde hands.”

  “You sound like a child.” I took a fence post from the wagon and brought it back and dropped it in the hole he’d finished. “There was a time when I didn’t know anything but the cotton business and running a plantation. When I first came out here, did I try to do things like I did in Alabama? Did I know the first thing about cattle? All I knew is that things had changed for us, and I heard that the buyers up in Kansas might buy Texas steers. That was the situation then, and I adapted to it. This is the situation now. Adapt to it. You’re forty-four years old. Time you grew up and took ahold.”

  “I could go to work riding for Burnett. The wages I could earn would help us out.”

  “Take your saddle up across the Big Wichita if you want to. Go be a thirty-five-dollar-a-month cowboy if you want to. Or, you can stay here and build something. Cowboying is for young fools. There’s no future in it.”

  Gunn put his mind to tamping the dirt back in around the fence post with the tamping bar. Once finished, he gave the post a tug to make sure it was set tight and started for the next stake set in the long line stretching down the side of the new field.

  “Tell me you’re going to hang in there,” I said.

  “I haven’t gone anywhere yet, but tell me you don’t miss the old days.”

  “I don’t miss all of it, but I miss the good parts worse every day,” I said.

  “I was thinking about Abilene the other day. Damned, there were some wild gals in that town.”

  I took the posthole diggers from him to take my turn for a spell. “I wonder what ever happened to Train Horn Sally, or Sal, or whatever they called her?”

  “What did you ever know about her?”

  I drove the diggers three inches into the hard ground, liking knowing that there was still a little steel in my shoulders and arms. “Boy, I wasn’t always so damned old. No sir, I wasn’t.”

  Chapter Forty-four

  It was a cold, drizzly fall morning. I guess that was fitting, considering what we had to do. I had the wagon hitched by daylight, and didn’t wait long for Gunn to saddle a horse. Neither of us said anything to each other when we rolled out of the ranch. The team plodded along the muddy road, and both of us tugged our hat brims down and kept our chins tucked into the collars of our yellow, India rubber slickers.

  Hamish had built himself a house down the road a piece in the middle of the homestead quarter section I had him file on all those years before when he was but a boy. Hamish didn’t talk about his business ventures with me, but I knew that he owned some hardware and lumber businesses scattered across central Texas, and there were hints that he was dabbling in other investments to go with his law office in Forth Worth. A month earlier, he had come to me to see what I thought about him and some other men opening a new bank in Destiny or up the tracks at Wichita Falls.

  Whatever it was he was doing, he must have been minting coin, or else he was spending his wife’s money, for he had a beautiful house. To add to that, he had bought another section of river-bottom ground north of his home and had planted fruit trees along the road through it and all the way up to the house. I could have told him that the country was too dry for fruit trees, unless you wanted to carry water to them
, but he wouldn’t have listened. Tiffany was a good woman, but she probably thought every house should have trees lining the lane up to it. Next thing would be that they put up white plank fences, acting like they were someplace else other than west of “it never rains enough” Texas. Hamish should have known better, but he had spent too much time back East.

  He met us in the yard and climbed up on the seat beside me. Gunn wouldn’t ride on a wagon when he had a choice, but Hamish had no such scruples. A wagon seat was as good as sitting astride a horse to him. No two brothers could have been so different.

  Tiffany and her children were on the porch and waved to me—good-looking kids, a boy and a girl. That boy was about the age that Joseph was when I took him in. Gunn never had married, and it looked like I was going to have to count on Hamish for some grandsons.

  Hamish didn’t say anything, either; he only nodded at me then kept his gaze straight ahead. I turned the wagon around and drove out of the yard, putting the team to a trot once we hit the road into Destiny. The train usually made town by seven, and I didn’t intend to be late.

  The old bone pile at the edge of town was long gone, replaced by a cotton gin. Tiny bits of cotton were scattered all over the dead grass wherever you looked, the trash left over from the summer’s harvest, like bits of snow that hadn’t yet melted under the rain. Clay County had shipped three thousand pounds of cotton the year before. I never said it, but the irony wasn’t lost on me. Me, a cotton man in my earlier years, ending up in the cattle business in prime Texas cotton country.

  But they could have their cotton. That market was more up and down than the cattle business ever thought about being, and that was saying a lot. Cotton was at sixty-five cents a pound when I left Alabama, and it was at six cents a pound the last harvest the Destiny farmers made. That was a guaranteed way to starve, yet the damned fools were plowing more new ground every year.