Once They Heard the Cheers
Page 14
"I used to think," I said, "that if I got cornered in a dark alley I'd holler for Rocky Graziano. Now I think I'd holler for you."
"I never look for it," he said, "but there's some people don't understand anything else."
In the pantry in that basement now, Loretta was showing my wife where she stacks on the shelves each year the 300 quarts she puts up of tomatoes, peas, beans, carrots, corn, and peaches, along with the thirty or more jars of jellies and honey. At noon we ate buffalo meat balls, and then, with Loretta and my wife in the car, I drove Tescher the seven miles to their nearest neighbors, the Harris Goldsberrys, where Tescher was to pick up the Caterpillar to bulldoze some cattle trails in his winter pastures.
When we got there, Harris Goldsberry, a slim, taciturn man, was working on the Caterpillar, replacing the hydraulic pump. While Betty and Loretta went into the ranch house, where they said later, they talked gardening with Margaret Goldsberry and had iced tea she had steeped in the sun, I watched the work on the
Caterpillar for an hour, and then we left Tescher to drive the machine back while we drove back in the car. By then the school was out for the day. Rodney Burman had taken the wooden-platformed cable car back across the river, and Troy and Bonnie were about their chores when Loretta knocked on the trailer door.
"May we come in?" she said.
The white trailer was set up between the white-painted chicken house and the white-painted privy. There was a basketball backboard and basket off to the right, and there were a couple of dozen white hens and a couple of roosters wandering around. Inside the trailer, after Loretta left us to go back to the house, Sandy Schulz, five years out of North Dakota State Teachers College in Dickenson, and in her fourth year of teaching here, showed us around. Her living quarters were in the back half of the trailer— the sofa-bed, a chair, a small television, the gas range and refrigerator, and the sink to which she would bring the water from a spigot outside. In the schoolroom half were her desk and the three others, bookshelves, a blackboard, and a wall rack of rolled maps.
"I suppose Bonnie gets reading and writing and arithmetic," I said. "What subjects do Troy and the Burman boy get?"
"The eighth graders?" she said. "We have reading, math, spelling, United States history, North Dakota history, and earth science."
"And your books?" my wife asked. "You're able to get whatever books you need?"
"Oh, yes," she said. "The county librarian sends out the boxes of the books you write for, and it's always exciting when we get new books."
It was getting toward six o'clock when we heard the Caterpillar coming up the road and into the yard. Tescher came in and washed up and changed for dinner and we had pheasant. After dinner we sat in the living room with the glass-topped wagon-wheel table, with the award buckles—several dozen of them—set between the spokes under the glass. The two National Finals award saddles were on their stands, and the rodeo trophies were on the mantel of the fieldstone fireplace.
"I gave away about sixty-five buckles," Tescher said "Some to relatives, some to rodeo fans, some to neighbor kids."
In the ten years he had rodeoed, he had won $160,000, but half of that had gone into expenses. Out of the rest he had built up the ranch, 6,000 acres now in three units with 350 head of Hereford and the two dozen registered quarter horses from which he sells three or four colts a year.
"We bought the place in the fall of '52," he said. "I sold a new Packard car to pay the $5,000 down payment. There was this old log house, sort of stuccoed on the outside. It was out where the school is now, and I remember sitting in the kitchen and tryin' to read the newspaper and having to hold it down so the wind wouldn't blow it away. It was cold. That first winter I trapped bobcats and beaver to buy our groceries, and we lived off that."
"Do you still trap and hunt?"
"That's right. We reload our own shells, and we get coyote and some bobcat and trap beaver and coon. The coon bring two to five dollars and coyotes forty. Their furs sell good over in Europe, and a fella told me a coat sells as high as $2,000 over there. Bobcat hide are up to $200 apiece, and the beaver run $25 or $35."
"And you've got your own bees and chickens," I said.
"We've got fifty hens," Loretta said. "We try to give the eggs away, but the neighbors give the children money."
"And the children, I suppose, have their chores?" Betty said.
"Troy gets up at six to milk," Loretta said. "Bonnie takes care of the chickens."
"And they break horses," Tescher said, "and they fill the creep feed."
"What is that?" I said.
"It's a bin in the calf bottom, where only the calves get in. It's oats and hay and they take care of that, every morning and night, from November first until about April twentieth. Then they have their own. Troy has three cows and a couple of yearling steers. When they get out of school, they have something to sell to go on to college if they want to.
"They're beef cows," he said, "and they all have their own brands, simple to put on, just straight irons and not writing all over the critter so they blotch. Barry helped brand this year, heelin' the calves and draggin' them out. There'll be three or four calf-rasslers—neighbors—and one dehorning and some vaccinating. One will do the castrating, and the women and children do the vaccinating."
"And how long does this take?"
"We'll do 300 a day, usually June 20 to July 4. You have to spend two weeks ridin' to bring them in before branding."
"And then you have to bring them all in close to here before winter?"
"In the fall you spend a week gathering your stock for sale. Then the last two weeks of December we're ridin' to get them out of the common pastures and into the private pastures."
"When there was that buyers' strike against beef prices about four years ago," I said, "did that hurt?"
"I actually think the cattle were too high," Tescher said. "Prices went up over the counter, and ours started droppin'. People thought we were reapin' in money, but we'd been losin' money for three years, and I think TV has a lot to do with it. I think it hurts the farmer and rancher, because just as soon as they hear one morning that round steaks went down in New York City, it's plumb across the country and cattle drop that much.
"You take cattle to market now, and you don't know what they'll bring. The next day it may be up, but otherwise supply and demand took care of it. This way it's just talk, and now our fat cattle are bringin' the lowest since 1953, and a lot of people are goin' broke. The land is so high that there's no way of payin' for it, and the wrong people are gonna end up with it, for a sideline and a tax deduction.
"It's sad," he said, "when a young fella who's willing to work can't go out and buy a ranch and make it pay for itself in twenty years. There are people who owned land for thirty years who are goin' broke. I'm sure that the supermarket gets a lot of it. I think, though, that three quarters of the people in the United States are livin' too high off the hog, includin' ourselves, and we've pure had to back off.
"I'll tell you," he continued, "I think it's a lot tougher world to live in now. Things are too easy, and that's why it's tougher to amount to something. Work don't pay all that well now, and there's millions of people who get paid for not working. There's no pride left in work. I think there's more pride left in ranching than in most anything else."
"Well you should be proud of what you and Loretta have done here," I said. "I remember twelve years ago when your back used to hurt you when you'd take some time to sit down."
"It's pretty good now," he said, "if I don't work too hard. Haulin' bales by hand, it hurts all the time."
"And if it goes out, you haven't got Benny Reynolds to snap it in."
"Once in a while the chiropracters could get it back in place, but most couldn't," he said. "Probably they weren't strong enough, but Benny could, and it sounded like snappin' a log chain."
"Speaking of hauling bales by hand," I said, "I remember you telling me that the children, when they were just little tots, would driv
e the pickup in low gear while you stood in the back throwing off the bales."
"That's right," he said. "They'd go with me feedin', and they'd drive when they were about three. When they wanted to stop, if we came to a tree or whatever, they'd just shut the key off. By the time they were third-graders they knew how to drive."
"That's amazing," my wife said.
"A lot of this amazes me," I said. "When I was out here before, you didn't have a phone. The nearest one was your dad's in Sentinel Butte."
"That's right," he said. "The phone came in in -1971, and it made the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. There are a hundred people on the exchange—it's Squaw Gap Exchange and there's an exchange building up here in the middle of nowhere—and everybody else is long distance."
"And what about the mail?" my wife said.
"The mail comes Mondays and Thursdays," Loretta said. "The postman comes to the mail box across the river, weather permitting. Sometimes we'll go for several weeks without mail, but if somebody goes to town they pick up everybody's mail."
"Do you still mine your own coal?" I said.
"We dynamite in and use coal augers," Tescher said. "It's during Christmas vacation and the kids help. Five families get coal off my vein along the river bank, and we take out twenty to thirty ton a winter."
"How cold does it get here in winter?" my wife said.
"I've seen it 52 below," Tescher said. "In January, three weeks at a time it'll never get up to zero during the day, and it'll be 20 to 30 below most nights."
"How hot does it get at the height of the summer?" I said.
"I've seen it 110," he said. "It was 105 one day in early September, and three nights later it froze."
"How much snow do you get?"
"On March 23 last year," he said, "everybody was startin' to calve, and on March 25 it was 20 below, and it snowed."
Loretta had left the room. When she came back she had a leather-bound diary in her hand.
"I have it in here," she said, and she read from it. "Sixth of April, still snowing and raining . . . Eighth, still stormy . . . April ten was the last time it snowed. There were thirty-four inches."
"A lot of calves smothered in the snow," Tescher said "Some froze to death and some got pneumonia. Some were three weeks old, and never saw the sun. In weather like that you've got to be right with them. The mother can save the calf at 20 below, but in the wet and chill they can't get dry. You didn't pay any attention to when the day started or ended because you had to be up all night. Everybody lost. Throughout this area we lost 20 per cent of the calves, but in a way it done us some good, because everybody was overstocked.
"There was an old-timer lived down here," he said. "He came in 1904, and even guys like that say they'd never seen anything like it. Easter came and we couldn't get in or out, and we called a pilot who flies some around here to round up the horses. He went and got 'em up on top of a plateau about a mile from here, and the Goldsberrys have that Caterpillar and it had a plow on it. For six days that Cat wasn't shut off. We had to plow trails for the cows. It was the only way they could get to the feed."
"Do you ever get angry at the elements at times like that?" I said.
"No," he said. "I'm sure some people do, but I take it in stride, and make the best of it. I get down when the machinery breaks down and repairs are so high-priced."
"I guess the neighbors out here are all pretty special people," my wife said.
"If you don't neighbor," Tescher said, "you're not gonna make it. We had a bad winter in '64-'65 when we were isolated for seven or eight weeks. One winter it was longer than that. That road you came in on, it was closed from Thanksgiving to March. When we had the old roads, the only road we had would be to come up the ice in the winter."
"What about illnesses?" my wife said. "Are you able to get to a doctor?"
"The nearest doctor is in Beach," Tescher said. "That's 44 miles, but we usually doctor in Dickinson and Williston. The one is 95 miles, and the other 120."
"Beach has changed, though," Loretta said. "They have two new doctors."
"Cindy broke her arm while she was in the eighth grade," Tescher said. "She had this horse she was breakin', and it drug her around the corral and hit the feed bunks and hooked on a post. She was kind of out of her head in the barn, and I didn't know if she was hurt internally. It was about 4:30 and in February, and we'd never been plowed out. We had to go down the river and it was three to four feet deep and the water would go over the lights. We had her laid out in the back seat, and I'd given her a pain killer. We had to go six miles down the river, north and east, and across Beaver Creek to where the road was partially open, and we got to Beach at about eight o'clock."
"Then once, when we were snowed in," Loretta said, "Bonnie fell and hit her head on the fireplace. If we could have taken her in and she'd had stitches in it, it wouldn't have a scar now, but Jim taped it."
"What if you get, say, the flu, and you can't get out?" my wife said.
"I've given all the children and Loretta and myself penicillin shots for the flu and sore throat," Tescher said.
"How did you learn this doctoring?" I said.
"We have a Red Cross first aid book," Loretta said.
"It's livestock penicillin," Tescher said. "I asked a doc about it and he said, 'That's all right, but what do you do if you have a reaction?' I said, 'Give 'em some of that stuff we have for the cattle. Epinephrine.' He said, 'Yeah. You're on the right track.' "
The next morning at breakfast we had orange juice, fried eggs, and Canadian bacon, pancakes with whipped cream and buffalo berries, red and tart, on them, and coffee. After breakfast, Tescher and I sat for a few final minutes in the living room, talking.
"As you look back over what you've lived up to now," I said, "are these the best years of your life?"
"The best years of my life," he said, "were the '30s, my childhood. We were very hard up, with a house full of kids, but I was happiest then, ridin' and breakin' horses, ridin' to other ranches and helping them brand. Then the idea of responsibility started to invade, but when I was Troy's age it was the best years of my life."
"And when you first found out you could win money in rodeo," I said, "those were good years, too."
"That's right," he said.
He was eighteen, and his hero was Bill Linderman, who twice won the saddle bronc title, and he had told me about it that night, sitting in the basement. In those days he and his brother Tom, who is four years older, used to travel in Tom's twelve-year-old Ford with wood and cardboard in place of the broken glass in the windows and no starter and almost no brakes, but with a good motor and good tires. The first major rodeo they went to was in Sheridan, Wyoming.
"When we got there," he told me, "we saw that Bill Linderman and some other name cowboys would contest, and it just sickened us. We thought of comin' back home, and then we waited until a few minutes before the entries closed, hopin' they wouldn't let us in, but they did. Tom won a third in the bareback and I won the saddle bronc, and it paid $192 and I thought I'd never see another poor day."
"When I won in New York in 1955," he was saying now, "it was the highest my feet were ever off the ground. A lot of times I felt I was overpaid. I didn't know how it could be happening to me. Will Rogers said that he'd rather be lucky than good, but if you're good you're lucky. A lot of people work real hard and can't make it, but just having the determination to work hard is a stroke of luck, too, because I think a person gets a lot of satisfaction out of working."
"What do you think is going to happen to this country in the years just ahead?" I said.
"I don't know," he said. "I sure don't know, but I think that people have to learn again to have respect for their work."
We had said good-by to the children in the kitchen before they had started across the yard to the trailer school. We said good-by to Loretta and Jim Tescher standing by the car. We said that yes, we would hope that someday we would be able to get out that way again, and they s
aid that, if they could get away from the ranch sometime, they might visit a sister of Jim's in the East, and then we would see them again. As we drove out of the yard and looked back they were waving to us.
"What a reassuring experience," Betty said, "just to know that there are still people like that in this country."
"They're what's left of an America that once was," I said, "and soon won't ever be again."
We drove mostly in silence, until we saw, about a quarter mile off to the right and coming off a rise, about a dozen antelope. When they saw us they turned, their white rump patches showing, and crested the rise. Then, just over the rise, they turned again and peered at us, like small children in a playground who see something of interest passing outside. The last we saw of them they crossed the road about a half mile ahead and disappeared down into a draw.
4
So Long, Jack
There are two honest managers in boxing.
The one is Jack Hurley, and I can't remember
the name of the other.