Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "Heck," Skipper Lofting said, "I think Jim will talk."

  Skipper introduced us the next morning, and Tescher and I walked across the street to the Pancake House, where we ate and talked. He had driven in the night before with his wife, Loretta, and their then four-year old son, Barry—the third of their then four children—in the two-year-old red Chevrolet. The pillow and blankets were in the back seat, and his saddle was in the trunk along with the soiled laundry stuffed into a pair of his blue jeans. He had managed to get away from the ranch for the five weeks they had been on the road, and at Fort Worth and San Antonio, Houston and Baton Rouge he had won $5,753—about $5,000 riding saddle broncs and the rest of it wrestling steers.

  He was thirty-five years old then, and had been riding horses sice he was four. When he was ten he rode his first steer for $1.00 in a Fourth of July rodeo in Medora. Although he had never made enough rodeos to win enough to be the world champion in the saddle-bronc riding, he had won the event at the National Finals rodeo, where only the fifteen top contestants in each event compete, in 1959 and 1963.

  "Besides," Gene Pruett had said, talking about him, "the National Finals are the real test as far as I'm concerned."

  He is five feet, eight and a half inches, and while he was riding he weighed 187 pounds but had a 30-inch waist. It was all up in his chest and shoulders and arms and down in his thighs and calves. His build was like that of a middleweight fighter, but on a larger frame. He talked easily, although not expansively, and I followed him around for the four days, climbing up onto the back of the chute when he mounted to ride, watching how he measured the length of rein he would give the horse and how he took his hold on the resined rope before he nodded for them to swing the gate open. Being with him I had the same comfortable, secure feeling I used to have being around one of those quiet, competent front-line lieutenants and captains who never raised their voices and whose kids were always telling me they wished they could get them a medal.

  In rodeo the riding events are not only a contest between the man and the animal but also a partnership. The judges give points for how well the animal bucks as well as for how well the contestant rides, and Tescher drew poor horses and finished out of the money. He had put up the $35 entry fee twice, had the travel expenses for himself, his wife, and their son, and now they would be driving the 1,600 miles back to the ranch where, he had told me, they were living in a basement—the upper story of the house to be built when he had earned the money.

  "I'd like to see how you live and ranch," I had said to him.

  "You'd be welcome to come any time," he had said.

  "Is there a motel near there?"

  "Not really," he had said. "We live quite a way out, but we've got room, and you're welcome to stay with us."

  So I had given him a day-and-a-halfs head start and, after my wife and our daughter had taken the plane back East, I had flown up to Billings and from there to Miles City and then to Glendive, Montana, where Tescher's brother-in-law, Roy Kittelson, had met me at about ten o'clock at night. In a pickup he had driven me the thirty miles east across the state line to Sentinel Butte.

  "A lot of people thought Jim wouldn't make it out in the Badlands," Kittelson said, driving through the night. "In the wheat lands they say the topsoil is from six to eight feet deep, and out on those buttes there's no more than six to eight inches, but Jim mined his own coal, smoked Bull Durham, and saved every penny he could."

  In Sentinel Butte he drove me up to Jim's father's house. Matt Tescher had once raised cattle and wheat on 1,500 acres outside of Sentinel Butte, and had fathered fifteen children. When Jim was in the fifth grade, the house had burned down, so Matt Tescher had moved the rest of the family into town, while Jim and his brother Alvin, who was eight years older, stayed on the ranch. For six years they lived together in the two-room bunk house while Jim went through the eighth grade as one of seven pupils in the one-room school, and then started making a living breaking horses and hiring out to ranchers.

  The house, as we got out of the pickup, seemed completely darkened, but Kittelson led me up a lighted back stairway to the third floor finished attic where there was a double bed and where, he said, rodeo cowboys on their way through regularly slept. The next morning, after breakfast and after I had talked with Matt Tescher about Jim, asking him every question I could think of, Kittelson had picked me up again and driven me out to the ranch on the road we were now trying to find once more.

  "In 1964," I was saying now in the general store, "I spent a night in Jim's father's house, but I have no idea where it was."

  "Jim's father just passed away," Ward Cook said.

  "I'm sorry to hear that."

  "The house is right up here," he said. "You passed it on your way in. When you go out and start up the curve to the left, it's the last house on the left."

  We drove back on the blacktop leading out of town, with the square, three-story gray-painted clapboard house the last one on the left, and across the Interstate. We turned left onto the dirt and gravel road, with Camel's Hump Butte like a fortress on the right, and we drove north through the grasslands, some of it mowed, some with white-faced Hereford's grazing on it, all of it dry and golden-yellow in the morning sun.

  We followed the road for more than an hour, the grasslands giving way to the Badlands, the road narrower now, rising and falling and curving around the mustard-sided, stratified, flat-topped buttes. A coyote, like a small gray-white collie, streaked across the road about fifty feet ahead of us, and a chicken hawk on its hunting glide was low enough to pass through the windows of the car.

  This is land that waters flowing eastward from the Rocky Mountains laid down some 60 million years ago. Many centuries of warm rains that followed turned it into a jungle, and new layers of sediment compressed the swamp vegetation into layers of lignite, a soft coal. Clouds of ash from the volcanoes that formed the mountains of the West drifted down and decomposed into strata of blue betonite clay. After the plains had developed, the streams that drained this land started the erosion that still goes on, cutting down through the soft strata and sculpting the Badlands into the buttes, the plateaus, and between them the valleys and gorges.

  When you drive through here you drive through eons, the horizontal strata on the sides of the buttes the visible evidence of what were the horizons of their time. Once, off to the left and coming down off a tableland, we saw a black-hatted horseman riding after a stray Hereford. Once a jeep, red and with the dust rising after it, passed us going the other way, and once, unable to find the landmarks—the deserted farm buildings and the vacant one-room school—I drove into the only ranch we saw along the road. My wife got out with the section map in her hand.

  "I guess they were startled to see me drop in out of nowhere," she said when she came back. "There were two men working on some machinery, and I said, 'Are we on the right road for Jim Tescher's?' One of them said, 'That's right.' Then the other one, kind of laughing, said, 'But do you know the way the rest of the way?'"

  "Did they say how much farther it is?"

  "I didn't ask," she said. "We're on the right road."

  We drove, slowly and with the car nodding up and down, over cattle guards—a dozen or so four-inch pipes set six inches apart between the wire fencing—and at some of them the cattle, unable to cross the guards, lay in the road and, protesting with their mooing, moved only when I advanced on them sounding the horn. Beyond the landmarks, and after turn-offs to other ranches, the road in places was no more than wheel tracks and then, where it widened again and climbed up onto a plateau, we saw the first of the signs—Tescher's name among four others, and then another pointing to the right and finally, with the letters cut into a plank supported on two posts: "Tescher Ranch." Between the words was the brand, the inverted V with the single rocker through it, and below, in smaller letters: "Quarter Horses. Herefords."

  In the dozen years that had passed so quickly I had wanted many times to return here, just to be reassured that America
can still make it. When a national poll reveals that more than half of all workers are dissatisfied with their jobs, and the products they turn out and the services they perform prove it, when exaggerated advertising creates artificial appetites for those products and our economy is based on the waste of the natural resources we should be preserving for generations to come, when the founders' dreams of equality for all go up in ghetto flames and are dissipated in looting, and when, among our highest elective officials and their appointees, integrity becomes for so many, no more than a word, one should have some place to go to find that a man and his family, not afraid of the hard way and rejecting the superficialities and the deceits of our society, can still more than survive.

  "Yes, we are still ranching," Loretta Tescher had written some four months before, "although cattle prices aren't anything to brag about. We built our new home and also have a modern bunkhouse that you and Mrs. Heinz are very welcome to stay in instead of Medora, if you wish.

  "Our family is growing up. Gary is rodeoing and is setting twelfth in the standings. He rides broncs and bulls. Bonnie, our youngest, is eight and she is nursing a collarbone she broke while riding horseback. Here's hoping to see you this fall."

  The top of the plateau was planted in alfalfa, the road across it straight between the ankle-high deep green. Off to the right, and below, we could see the almost dry bed of the Little Missouri, cottonwoods clumped along its banks, and as we started down the curve toward the river we could see, amid the trees, some buildings.

  "That must be it down there," my wife said.

  "It has to be," I said. "There's no one else out here."

  Where the road flattened just above the river bed we came around a curve, and we drove into the ranchyard and up to the house of stained-cedar siding now standing atop the cement-block foundation and basement where they had been living and I had stayed that night twelve years before. I walked up the three steps and opened the door into the boot room and walked in.

  "Hello?" I said. "Anybody here?"

  "You made it," his wife said, coming out of the kitchen and shaking hands. She is slim and dark-haired and was wearing slacks and a blouse. "You look just the same."

  "I doubt that," I said.

  She had grown up on a ranch at the edge of the Badlands. After she was graduated from high school at sixteen, she had taken summer courses at North Dakota State Teachers College at Dickenson and for five years had taught in a one-room school.

  "You have any trouble finding it again?" she said.

  "A little," I said. "My wife had to ask at one ranch, and we had our doubts a half dozen times."

  "Bring your wife in," she said. "Jim's on the phone, but he'll be off in a minute, and Gary's here. He has to be in Abilene tomorrow night, but he said he wouldn't leave till you got here and he saw you again."

  He was not quite thirteen then, and he had been a part of my story. In December of 1963 Jim Tescher had won the saddle-bronc riding at the National Finals at Los Angeles, and three months later, during the night I spent with them in that basement, he had told me about coming upon the boy admiring the gold-and-silver belt buckle set with diamonds.

  "He said to me," Jim had said, " 'But how come you've never been World Champion?' I tried to explain it to him, that I feel it's more important for me to be with the family and build up the ranch than to be going halfway across the United States to some little rodeo just to win $100 and build up my standing. I told him, though, what I might do this year. I said, 'If you'd really like me to be World Champion, I might give it a try. If I start out winning pretty good and everything's all right here, I might just stay with it more.' I'll have to see how it goes."

  Jim and Loretta had moved out of their bedroom that night and into the other room with the three smaller children. Gary and I had shared the double bed, and it seemed to me that most of the night he was riding broncs or bulls. The next morning, when he started for school, I had followed him out into the damp, gray chill of mid-March and across the yard to the bank above the river. Fastened to two posts in the ground was a three-quarter-inch cable that ran the 320 feet across the river to a cottonwood tree on the far bank. Tied to the forward post, and suspended from two pulleys that rode the cable, was a weathered wood platform, about five feet long and half as wide and with eight-inch sides.

  The boy had his lunch in a Karo syrup pail. He put that on the platform and then he climbed on. Kneeling, he loosened the tie and he pushed off, the platform sliding down the sag of the cable to the mid-point about eight feet above the water that would be ice during the winter. Then the boy grabbed the cable over his head, and he pulled the platform across the river over to the cottonwood tree where he climbed down the seven slats nailed to the trunk of the tree. He got into the Jeep, which he had left there the afternoon before, and he drove the four-and-a-half miles to the one-room school he attended with seven others.

  In 1964 it would go well for Jim Tescher. Going into the National Finals he had won $20,041, and he was second to Marty Wood by $1,206. With Loretta and the boy watching that week in Los Angeles, he won $1,516, gaining $635 on Marty Wood, but with $21,557 for the year he finished second. He was short by $571, and someone told me later that, sitting in the stands that last night, the boy had cried.

  "And you're built like your dad," I said to Gary now. "How are you doing?"

  He was twenty-five, and although slimmer than his father, he too had it up in the chest and shoulders and arms. He was wearing jeans and a dark green shirt, and he had greeted us in the kitchen and I had introduced my wife. His father was sitting just inside the living room, the phone cord running from the kitchen, and he had waved to us, with some papers in his hand, as we walked by.

  "I guess I'm not doin' too good," Gary said. "I'm not in the top twenty. I was $1,000 out of the top fifteen, I saw in the Billings Gazette."

  "Are you making a lot of rodeos?"

  "I'm trying to," he said, "but I got hurt in August. A horse threw me down over its head, and stepped on my arm. It didn't break nothing, but it laid me up."

  I remember his father's hurts. When he was fourteen, he was hunting deer and riding down off one of those buttes into a draw when the horse turned a somersault and his right arm was broken. When he was sixteen his left ankle was broken while he was rodeoing in Dickinson, North Dakota, and a bareback horse ran away with him. For a week he didn't bother to go to a doctor, and then, with a cast on, he rode bareback at Glendive, Montana, for the $3.00 mount money. When he was twenty he had three vertebrae broken in the small of his back in a car wreck coming away from a rodeo in Forsyth, Montana. At Spencer, Iowa, one year he broke his left thigh bone when the horse reared in the chute, but they poured a couple of drinks of whisky into him and he got back on the horse. In 1959 his collarbone was broken when he was thrown in Madison Square Garden, and two years later he broke two vertebrae in his neck at Beach, North Dakota, just playing around after the rodeo with Alvin Nelson—using each other's saddles and betting on riding—and he was in a brace for two months. His left ankle was broken in the chute at Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he remounted and won money anyway, and he had had calcium deposits removed from his left shin bone. Wrestling steers, he had horns tear the left side of his nose loose and rip his upper lip. And Jerry Izenberg said it well.

  "The cowboys," Jerry wrote once in the Newark Star Ledger, "represent the last frontier of pure unpampered athletes in an age when basketball players put Ace bandages on acne."

  "But don't you ever have any pain from any of this?" I had asked Jim Tescher that night, sitting in the living room in the basement. Just before dusk I had ridden in the pickup with Roy Kittelson driving among the cottonwoods while Tescher, standing in the back, had thrown the seventy-five pound hay bales to the cattle.

  "Most all the time," he said. "I can feel it now, sittin' here, and it bothers me lyin' in bed. It doesn't bother me when I work, though, or when I ride—just afterwards. When it gets real bad I know those vertebrae in my back have
slipped, so I get Benny Reynolds to put 'em back in place."

  Benny Reynolds was a six-foot three-inch, 195-pound, easy-going, four-event cowboy out of Melrose, Montana. In 1961 he won the All-Around World Championship.

  "Benny remembers what twist to give 'em," Tescher said, "so why pay one of them fellas $3.00?"

  Now, twelve years later, he came off the phone and walked in to where we were sitting at the dining room table and we shook hands. He was wearing blue jeans and a checkered shirt, and he appeared the same, perhaps just a little heavier.

  "I'm sorry to hear that your dad just passed away," I said. "Ward Cook told us in Sentinel Butte."

  "Thank you," he said. "You met Ward?"

  "I stopped there for gas and directions," I said. "He also told me that you and Tom were great riders, but nobody knows it."

  "Ward said that?" Tescher said, smiling. "Well, I went to high school with him. That is, I guess I shouldn't say that because I only went two days."

  "Coming out here again," I said, as we three sat down, "I've naturally been remembering when Gary and I slept together, and he seemed to be rodeoing all night. Then, of course, I remember how much he wanted you to win the world championship."