Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "I'd never been away from home before, except for one or two meals in a restaurant, and after two weeks I wrote my folks that I wasn't goin' to school no more. They wrote there was plenty of work at home, so I come back, and when I walked in they were at the table eatin' and all Poppa said was, 'You're late for supper.'

  "Then we moved to Arizona," he said. "My mother had arthritis real bad so we went to Tucson, and there were just hardly no jobs. I got a job for ten dollars a month with board and room milkin' cows at a dairy. Three of us milked sixty cows twice a day and cleaned the barn and washed the equipment, and your hands would swell up sometimes so you'd have to soak them in cold water.

  "Mr. St. Denis, he had the dairy and he pastured some cattle up in the mountains twenty miles from Tucson. He put me up there in a line camp for two and-a-half months. You want to hear about that, or am I talkin' too much?"

  "You're doing fine," I said. "I want to hear about all of it."

  "Them line camps," he said, "is where them big ranches will put a guy, or sometimes two, and they'll bring him out his groceries and he batches and cooks there for two or three months. I was fifteen, and they put me out there, livin' in this tin-roofed shack with this kid who was nine years old and what you'd call like retarded now. He'd just piddle around and follow me because he was scared of the dog. We had beans, and I'd shoot cottontail rabbits and make fry bread in a skillet. I was really put there to see that the cattle had water, and to clean out the spring after they tramped sand into it.

  "So this one day we were on our way in the wagon with the two mules to the spring to haul two barrels of water. We were goin' along where there was a kind of a ravine on the side and I got to noddin'. When I sort of woke up and looked around this kid was walkin' behind the wagon. I said, 'What are you doin' back there?' He said, 'I thought you was asleep and that the mules might drive you over the edge, and I'd get your boots.' Hell, you couldn't have driven them mules over that edge, but he liked my boots."

  "That kid must have been great company," I said.

  "Well, they talk about them line camps and being lonely," he said, "but I'll tell you somethin'. I've never been so lonely in my life as I was in New York."

  "So where did you go after Tucson?" I said.

  "Well, in Tucson," he said, "I worked some on and off for Mr. Hulen McMinn, helpin' him break horses. He really taught me— how to put a hackamore on, and how to pull one's head around and when to leave 'em alone and when to keep on makin' them do something right, and how to teach 'em to turn and to come to the run. He had no money, and I just got board and room, so I rode the freight to Colorado to find work."

  "How old were you then?" I said.

  "I was still fifteen," he said. "My brother Bryson was eight years older, and he'd taught me how to do it. You run as fast as you can and catch the ladder at the front end of the boxcar. I caught one in Tucson and then one out of El Paso, and I'll bet there were two hundred guys on it. There might have been thirty professional bums, but most were guys tryin' to find work. I got to Tucumcari and rode one from there to Denver, and in Englewood I got a job on a dairy and wheat farm for thirty dollars a month and board and room. I worked there for two months that summer, and then McMinn wrote me he had a bunch of horses and he'd give me a job for the winter.

  "I went back to Tucson for the winter and worked for McMinn, but there just wasn't any money. Nobody had any, and my brother Bryson had sewed sacks on the wheat harvest in Walla Walla, Washington, and he thought we should go out there, so we did."

  "What was that trip like?"

  "It was in July, and we had all our clothes in one suitcase, and we hopped a freight. We had no money. I mean I had fifteen dollars, but we ate that up this side of Denver. We'd go knock on doors and ask them if we could chop wood or mow the lawn for somethin' to eat. We'd find a boxcar with a lot of paper in it, packing paper from crates, and we'd wrap up in that. We had a bar of soap, and we'd wash in the water troughs for cattle. We hitchhiked, too.

  "In La Grande, Oregon, this railroad bull ran us out of the yard. He told us he'd give us thirty days for vagrancy, so we tried all morning to hitchhike, but nobody would stop. Finally my brother Bryson said, 'We'll split. You're a lot younger lookin' than I am, and somebody will probably pick you up.' So he took the suitcase, and went down around the curve in the road, and sure enough, pretty soon this car came along. There were these two old ladies in it, and it was a real long expensive car, and they picked me up. They were goin' real slow, and when we came around the curve, there was my brother Bryson standin' with his thumb in the air, and he looked real dejected. I said, 'That's my brother Bryson there, and we're travelin' together.' But they didn't stop, and it was two-and-a-half years before I saw my brother Bryson again.' "

  "What happened to him?"

  "Well, we were gonna meet in the park in Pendleton, and I waited three days, walkin' from one part to another. I piled grass between two cross ties in the railroad yard and slept between them, but Bryson got a job stackin' hay for a farmer who gave two dollars a day for two weeks, and I got a job breakin' horses at a dude ranch fifty miles from Cody, and I was there until I got into the Army."

  "What was that job like?"

  "It was the first good job I ever had," he said. "When I got there my shirt was torn down the front and I had on these old brogan shoes, but they needed horse-breakers and I told them I could break. They said, 'We'll try you in the mornin', kid.'

  "There was this long bunkhouse and they gave me a real good meal. For breakfast there was hot cakes, eggs, anything you could eat, and after we ate we went out and they cut me this bay mare out. I went up to her and put a hackamore on her and got on her and turned her, and they didn't say nothin'. They got to cuttin' me horses, and they cut me twenty-one head—not all the same day— and I rode them all. They give me sixty dollars a month and board and room, and I thought that was the highest a guy could ever get. I was the tickledest kid you ever seen, and I worked there from 1938 to February of 1942.

  "My folks were real poor and my mother needed medicine, so I sent home money every month, and I bought a 1936 Chevy car and a saddle and an eiderdown sleepin' bag and a good hat and boots. Simon Snyder owned the ranch, and he was tough, but he didn't drink or smoke, and I was a kid who could have been influenced. I was ridin' those colts and they were buckin' me off, but I was gettin' back on. There were some bad horses, too, but I wasn't afraid of hittin' the ground, only that when they bucked me off that made them much worse.

  "You gathered horses in the spring and fall, and some got away. There was this big sorrel horse, about twelve years old, that the riders used to let get away on purpose, but I rode him fifty miles to Cody to that rodeo, and it was the first bull ridin' trophy I won."

  "And didn't you have your leg or your foot broken in that rodeo?" I said.

  "No," he said. "What happened was, a bull kicked my right leg, and the muscle and tendon swelled up so I couldn't put my foot in the stirrup, and I rode back to the ranch with my leg stickin' out straight."

  "The fifty miles?" I said. "How long did that take?"

  "About nine hours," he said, "but I felt real good. I'd won a little over $200, which was a lot of money, and that trophy."

  "And you left that job in February of '42?"

  "We had just got into the war then," he said, "and Simon Snyder said to me, 'The government is allowin' me one man, and you'll be it if you want to stay out the war.' I felt awful bad leavin' him, but I'd of felt awful guilty if I hadn't been in. I sold my 1936 Chevy and got $200 for it, and went to Cheyenne and enlisted."

  "What were you in?"

  "I was in Fort Sill in the horse-drawn artillery, and then I transferred into mule pack as a horse-shoer. Hulen McMinn, he'd taught me, and then they sent me to the horse-shoein' school at Fort Riley. I seen right away there that a man could learn a bunch, and I wanted to learn.

  "They made you sit at a desk and dissect feet for a week, and they had these feet in formaldehyde and they st
unk like hell. You had to do that before you got to the blacksmith shop, and then you worked one of them forges for two weeks before you even picked up a foot. I had the highest grade ever graduated from that horse-shoein' school, and then they was wantin' people for the OSS, and they come around. They were gonna jump into Mongolia and go work with the Chinese and use little mustanglike horses. This major and this colonel that come to interview us, they asked me if I'd be afraid to jump out of an airplane and I said, 'I don't know. I never was up in one before.' "

  "I like that," I said. "I hope the colonel and the major did."

  "That was the truth," Freckles said. "How could I know? It's like when I was growin' up, my dad taught me things like that. He would point and say, 'What's that over there?' If I said, 'That's a cow,' he would say, 'You should say, 'I believe that's a cow.' Don't make it a fact unless you're sure.' Today when somebody says somebody throwed a steer in six seconds, I say, 'I think it was six flat.' "

  "So did you jump?"

  "Only in trainin'. They sent me to a school in Washington, D.C., to learn to talk Chinese in two months, and I was the only guy I knew that didn't have a college education. Then they flew us to Kunming, where we trained. We took our trainin' jumps, and I was in the Seventh Commando with 120 Chinese and seven or eight Americans, but the war ended before we had to jump behind the lines, except there were no lines really.

  "In Kunming, when we were alerted to jump in, they had this rodeo. The Red Cross sponsored it and the boys in the mule pack put it on. Them mules really bucked, and I won the bareback mule ridin' and got second in the saddle-mule ridin', and I won the all-around. The G.I.s just swarmed that thing, and I think I won forty-six dollars. It cost you $2.50 an event, and they paid us in Chinese money, and we got a whole slew of that."

  "Now, you'd been on the backs of animals since you were about two years old," I said, "but you'd never even been up in a plane until you volunteered. Weren't you nervous about that first jump?"

  "No," he said. "There wasn't nothin' scary about the whole thing. I just figured that, if them other fellas could do it, I could do it. That opening shock shakes the hell out of you, but from then on you wish it was ten thousand feet because it's the most beautiful feeling."

  During those nine days that I spent with him in '68, around the hotel and out at the Coliseum, it was like being with Vince Lombardi in Green Bay or Jack Dempsey on Broadway. At the Finals the year before, the first bull he had drawn had been Tornado, which had never been ridden in 185 times out of the chute. Freckles rode him, and they gave him three standing ovations. He rode five other rank bulls, and that last night, when they named him winner of the bull riding, the walls shook. Freckles came running out, tugging off his big hat, and the clowns, who are out there not just to amuse the crowd but to divert the bulls from the grounded riders, wrestled him down and rolled him in the dirt while the band played "Oklahoma."

  Now, a year later, everywhere he went heads turned. People nudged one another and eyes followed him as he loped along, always seeming to be in a hurry, with that gimpy side-to-side gait that derives from all the broken and chipped bones in the legs, ankles, and feet.

  "Down home," he said once, meaning in Soper, Oklahoma, where he ranches, "I run everywhere. You get your pickup stuck, and you gotta get the tractor, so I run and get it. You gotta get your bucket, so I run to it. If it's too far, I just run awhile and then walk a while. On the way to the house, after I've fed the calves before breakfast, I may drop down and do fifty push-ups, too. I can come in at night and be tired, and I'll just jump down there and do thirty push-ups, and it just seems like it makes me feel better.

  "I learned that in the Army," he said. "If you messed up, if you took a wrong step in the dummy plane or didn't tumble right on the tower, the jump master would say, 'Give me fifty push-ups.' We did a lot of runnin' and jumpin' and tumblin', too, and when I got out I just felt it was kinda foolish not to stay in shape."

  "How many push-ups can you do going on age forty-eight?" I said.

  "I've done about seventy-five," he said, "but I never did try to see how many I can do. If somebody said that I'd have to do sixty after I'd done fifty, it would be a lot of effort."

  During the Finals his wife, Edith, slim dark-haired and dark-eyed, had been with him. They had met and been married in 1942, while Freckles was at Fort Sill, and they have a married daughter.

  "There was this buddy of mine," Freckles said once, "and he said, 'My wife works in a dime store and there's this black-haired girl there she could get you a date with.' We been married twenty-six years now."

  Over a lot of those twenty-six years Edith had sat in a lot of those bleachers in a lot of those little towns where there would be more people in the trees than in the stands. She had sat up in the good seats in the good arenas, too, wherever it was just waiting for that chute gate to open again, and Freckles to come out once more on the back of another bull or another bucking horse.

  "With everybody else in the place holding their breath while Freckles rides," I said to her one night, "I don't know how you can stand it. Have you ever talked to him about retiring?"

  "No," she said. "That's up to Brown."

  When she doesn't call him Brown, she calls him Brownie or Mister Brown and, of course, she knew what Casey Tibbs knew. Casey Tibbs won nine bronc riding championships between 1949 and 1959, and one day he was talking about Freckles.

  "He's just like an old hound dog," he said. "You pen him up and take the others out huntin', and he'll howl himself to death."

  In 1974, at the age of fifty-three, Freckles finally hung up his rope. The following year at the Finals they built an act around him. Red Steagall, the country singer, had written a ballad about Freckles' famous 1967 ride on Tornado, and with Steagall singing, Freckles came out under a spotlight and then they brought out a trained bull. The next year that act was over, too, and when I got out there they had a job for Freckles. During the performances he stood at the back of the announcer's stand with a headset on, coordinating with the stock contractors and the others back by the runways and the chutes, the stock and the riders for the various events.

  Freckles and Edith had driven the two hundred miles up from Soper seven miles north of the Texas border, to Oklahoma City in a red-and-white pickup with a camper on it that belonged to their daughter, Donna, and her husband, Wiley Harrison. In a trailer behind, they had hauled two of their quarter horses for cowboys who did not have their own mounts with them to ride in the Grand Entry that opened each performance. For that they received two tickets for the week.

  The Finals ended on a Saturday night, and I met them in the motel lobby at nine o'clock the next morning. Freckles had already been out to the Fairgrounds to feed and load the two horses, and he had carried Edith's and his luggage out to the parking lot and stacked it behind the seat of the pickup. There was no room in the cab for my bag, and now he was trying to unlock the door at the back of the camper to stow it there.

  "Somebody tried to jimmy this lock last night," he said. "Looka here."

  Around the lock set in the metal door you could see someone had been trying to pry it open. The metal of the frame was bent and jagged.

  "But there's nothing in there," I said, looking in a side window.

  "Just a spare tire," he said. "They were tryin' to get that."

  That was all he said. We watched him work with the key for three or four minutes until he finally opened the door.

  "But doesn't he ever get mad?" I said to Edith, while Freckles was lifting my bag in. "I'm ready to turn the air blue."

  "No," Edith said. "He always says, 'There's no cryin' over spilt milk. There's another rodeo tomorrow.' "

  The temperature had dipped just below freezing during the night, and as Freckles drove, with Edith sitting between us, east out of Oklahoma City and then south, there were places where a heavy frost had covered the road. It had coated the grasses along the sides of the road and in the fields, and they glinted amber now in the pale mor
ning sun.

  "Is there a trick to hauling horses?" I said to Freckles, thinking of the two standing side by side and mute in the streamlined trailer behind us.

  "Just to give 'em a little warning," he said. "When you want to slow, you kind of touch the brake easy at first, and when you're gonna turn you give the wheel a little touch first, so they can set theirselves."

  "Tell me about your last bull," I said, "and why you finally decided to pack it in."

  "My last bull was in Tulsa in '74," he said. "He bucked me off, and I lit on the back of my head. I went to this doctor, a real good bone specialist who took care of me after I come back from that time in Portland. He didn't say too much to me, but he told Edith that I had arthritis real bad, and one of them falls was liable to kill me. The neck wouldn't bend. It wasn't limber enough to stand one of them falls."

  "So you told Freck?" I said to Edith.

  "No," she said. "I said to the doctor, 'Did you tell him?' He said, 'You tell him.' I said, 'I'm not going to.' I told Donna, and she said, 'Tell him.' I said, 'I won't. He'll find out for himself.' And he did."