Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

"I didn't want to rodeo that much anyway," Freckles said. "I needed to be home."

  "I think he pleased a lot of people who wanted him to quit," Edith said.

  "It got so," Freckles said, "that everybody was thinkin' of me like I was a soft-boiled egg."

  "Do you miss it?" I said.

  "No," he said. "I teach some in rodeo schools, and I judged Louisiana and also Oklahoma and the National High School Finals. I go some to banquets and talk to them kids."

  "What do you tell them?"

  "Well, I tell him how rodeo got started, and then I tell them you need to think you can win. I tell them not to think themselves off before they get on, and to try to stay away from them guys who've got a negative attitude. In the schools, though, when you try to teach those kids but they keep buckin' off, you want to show 'em. You want to ride 'em so bad—but I don't."

  Soper has a population of 380, and it is one of those crossroads towns, two dozen or so of those low buildings of weathered white stucco or clapboard planted back from the four corners. There are a couple of grocery stores, a garage, a coin laundry, a liquor store, a dry goods store, the post office, and four churches. In 1964 Freckles and Edith bought the five hundred acres two-and-a-half miles outside of Soper on the Boggy River three miles south of where the Muddy Boggy and the Clear Boggy creeks come together. They put a native stone and knotty-pine house on it, with Freckles doing all the stonework in the foundation and fireplace and chimney.

  "Before we moved to Soper," Freckles said once, "we had that place in Lawton. When we bought it, the house was just a shack, unpainted and with no windows and the floor fallin' in. It had no basement, and it was just sittin' on rocks. There were three rooms and we closed in the porch for a small room for Donna and I built a barn and a privy. This privy had no door yet, but I told Edith that if I rode my bull in Madison Square Garden in New York we'd drill a well and put in an electric pump and a bathroom, but if he bucked me off I'd just put a door on the privy. I rode him and it meant $1,300 to me, and we put in the well and I did the plumbing."

  After we had driven into the yard now and carried the luggage into the house, Freckles unloaded the two horses and turned them' out to pasture. Then he changed into old jeans and a jacket, and we went out and got into the 1961 pickup to feed the cattle. The two horses were grazing now near the barn.

  "When your horses get old," I said, "and have to be destroyed, who does it?"

  "I do," he said. "I give 'em a shot, and they just go to sleep."

  "How do you dispose of them?"

  "In a pit," he said. "I dig it with the scoop on my tractor, and I take the horse to where I dig it, and I just roll it in. I don't ever tell Edith, though, because they become like members of the family. I usually wait until she's goin' somewhere, and I tell her it just died."

  While Freckles and Edith had been in Oklahoma City, their brother-in-law, Shorty Gordon, had been feeding the 270 head of cattle. Now Freckles drove the pickup over the rutted, red-clay road and into the first pasture. He backed it up to the open-sided hay barn and got out and loaded a couple of dozen of the seventy-five pound bales onto it.

  "Doesn't lifting those bales ever bother you?" I said. "I mean, with all those broken bones you've had?"

  "No, not a bit," he said. "I've got that arthritis in the back and neck though, and if I'm ridin' the tractor and lookin' back, it hurts that night."

  "How about the push-ups?" I said. "Are you still doing them?"

  "At night before I go to bed," he said, "and sometimes in the morning. I do about twenty-five, but I don't do near enough."

  He had driven out into the pasture where, ahead, we could see the cattle, grazing in groups, over the dried, close-cropped grass. They are an off-white Charolais crossed with white-faced Herefords and Black Angus, and when he sounded the horn, they raised their heads and, seeing the truck, started toward us.

  "I'll put it in low," he said. "You think you can drive it out there and around that oak and back again so I can unload?"

  "I would think so," I said. "After all, Jim Tescher's kids started driving the pastures before they were three."

  "That right?" he said. "How about that!"

  He got out and climbed up in back with the cutting pliers to cut the wire bindings on the bales. As I drove slowly toward them, the cattle came toward us like children following a leader, and then, as I drove into them, they spread into two mooing, advancing lines to crowd against the sides of the truck. After I had made the turn beyond the oak, I could see the route we had'come, the bales tossed to either side and the cattle, strung out and around the bales, forming a long aisle.

  He had jumped down from the back of the truck now, and he came around to the driver's side and I moved over and he got in. He drove down to where a lone cow was standing, watching us, near some scrub growth. He got out and got a half-bale out of the back, but when he started toward her, the cow retreated into the brush. He walked in after her, and came out without the hay.

  "She had a calf," he said. "A good big one, about an hour ago, and she ain't cleaned out yet. If she doesn't clean out, I'll take her into the chute and clean her and put a bolus up there as far as I can so she don't get an infection. I was just countin' the calves, though, and there were seven when we left and there's eleven now."

  We went back to the hay barn, and he loaded again and we fed the cattle in two other pastures. In one of the pastures he emptied bags of commercial feed into a trough, the cattle crowding it, and when we got back to the house he started a fire in the fireplace while Edith opened the mail.

  "Why, Brown," she said, "here's a letter from Mabel Dobbins, and Carlina's being married."

  "That right?" he said. "Carlina?"

  "Why," I said, "I remember Mabel Dobbins and Carlina."

  It was a story he had told in '68. It had happened in April of 1952, while they were living in Lawton.

  "I was getting ready to rodeo," he had said, "but I had this field I was gonna harrow. I was crossin' this ditch when this tractor turned over backwards on top of me. It pinned me under and broke my leg. The exhaust pipe was stuck into the ground, and that killed the engine, but the gasoline and the battery water were runnin' over me, and I lay there quite a while.

  "About a hundred yards away there was this neighbor's house, and Edith was there, talkin' with Mabel Dobbins while Mabel was doin' her laundry in the washing machine in the garage. Mabel's daughter, Carlina, was four years old then, and while they were talkin' she kept runnin' in and sayin', 'Come see what Brown is doin'. Come look at Brown, and see what Brown is doin'.' Well, finally they come out, and when Edith saw that tractor upside down she run right out of her shoes. She run through some stubble and skinned her feet, and I told her, 'Go find somebody to come with a jack.' By the time they got there, though, I had got the seat out from under me and crawled out, but it was the most painful break I ever had.

  "Then I was tryin' to hire somebody to drive that tractor, because I was gonna put in sweet feed, but everybody kept puttin' me off. Then one morning I got up and I heard this racket outside and there they were. There were twenty-eight big tractors with the operators, and the women brought in the food—meat loaves, lots of chicken, vegetables. Each woman brought what she had fixed for the family, only more, and they had the table out in front of the house. Those tractors started at 8 A.M., and some of them worked until dark."

  That was typical. When Freckles got out of the Army he hired out to break horses, and he shod horses, rodeoed, and did janitor work in a taxi garage in Lawton. When he bought the land in Lawton, Andy Jordan, the taxi owner, loaned him $2,000—"with no note or nothin'," Freckles said—to buy twenty-five cows. Todd Whatley, a bull rider and steer wrestler, loaned him $32,000—"on just my word"—to buy the place in Soper, and he paid each loan back within a year.

  "Last year," Freckles was saying now, "Wiley, my son-in-law, was helpin' me and we were gonna go and spray the cattle for lice and flies. We got a hose, and we were runnin' water into a barrel, an
d Wiley left the tractor in second gear. I reached down and clutched it with my hand and pulled the power take-off lever on it. It ran straight up my feet and right up my belly and right up my chest and right over my head, jaws, and ears. It mashed my chest in, and it was quite a while before I could get any wind.

  "I got up to the house, and I could see kind of a blur and I lay down on the bed. Edith, she called the doctor. I went into the hospital and they X-rayed me, and it was nothin'. Shorty, my brother-in-law, thought we were playin' a joke on Edith, and he said to her, 'What will those bastards think of next?' "

  "Those tractors," Edith said, "scare me more than those bulls."

  The next morning, after breakfast, we went out and Freckles scraped the heavy frost off the windshield of the truck and I drove over the frozen ground while Freckles fed the cattle again. Then we came in and sat in front of the fire and talked while we waited for Skipper Lofting to drive down from Oklahoma City and pick me up.

  "Tornado," I said, mentioning the bull on which Freckles made his greatest ride, "I think I read that he died."

  "That's right," Freckles said. "They retired him in '69 and he died in '72, I think, and they buried him at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. I read it in the paper. There was just a little piece about him, but the cowboys liked him. Some bulls they don't like, but he looked good when he bucked, and he throwed everybody a long way off and he fought the clowns. He bucked some guys off and stomped on them, but he wasn't a dangerous bull, and when I read that he died I was a little sad."

  "Well, he helped to make you famous in rodeo," I said. "When you were growing up, did you ever want to be famous?"

  "No, no," he said. "Not at all. I just wanted to be a good hand."

  "I wonder today," I said, "How many of the young want to grow up to just be good hands. What do you think is happening in this country?"

  "This country?" he said. "I worry about it some. When I was growin' up, my mother and dad, they taught you everything you needed to know before you left. They taught the girls how to cook. They taught the boys how to build a fence, how to set post holes right, how to fix a corner fence, how to stack hay, how to harness and how to do up lines. I was probably seven or eight years old workin' teams.

  "Kids don't know how to do things with their hands now. Then I see kids get thrown off, and they lie there and moan and beat the ground. When I was four years old, they were gonna let me go to school and visit one day. I was tryin' to get on this horse, by the potato cellar on the bank, and I threw a leg over and slipped off and the horse stepped on my leg. I started to cry, and my sister Ella said, 'Stop cryin'. Momma will hear you, and she won't let you go to school.'

  "That's the way we were brought up then," he said. "We had a Great Depression, and we had no money. Nobody had no money, and the younger generation, if they had to go to work for almost no money, I don't know what would happen. Some could handle it, I guess, but a lot couldn't."

  There were some, of course, who couldn't handle it then, either, but this one did. When Skipper Lofting drove up and came in, Edith made coffee, and after we had talked for a while, Freckles walked us out to the car.

  "Now take care," I said, as we shook hands, "and stop fighting those tractors."

  "Yeah, I will," he said, "and you come see us again. We'd really enjoy it."

  "I would, too," I said.

  We drove out the rutted, red-soil driveway that was softening into mud now under the midday sun. We were heading for Cut and Shoot, Texas.

  "I'll probably never see him again," I said to Skipper, "but after I've been with him I feel a lot better for it."

  "I do, too," Skipper said. "The old coot is something special."

  7

  The Backwoods Battler

  They are a God-fearing people who cling to an

  old order even though schools, power saws and

  bulldozers are moving them into oblivion. For

  decades they rightly assumed that the land was

  theirs for the hunting, whoever might have the

  title.

  Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

  We drove west out of Soper to Durant and then south across the Red River and into Texas. It was midafternoon when we saw Dallas rising in the sunlight out of the level plain like a cropped Camelot, its rectangular and flat-topped corporate towers short of the clouds where men's dreams lie, for there is a difference between aspiring and dreaming, and corporations aspire. We skirted the city on the by-pass and put up in Corsicana, and the next morning we drove the Interstate through the mist and rain into Conroe in time to have lunch at the motel.

  "Did you get him?" Skipper Lofting said when I came off the phone.

  "Yes," I said. "I went through two secretaries at Roy Harris Real Estate, and it turns out that he not only runs that, but he's also the clerk of Montgomery County. He'll see us at the County Court House after lunch."

  "Doesn't he kind of surprise you?" Skipper said.

  "Everything about this story surprised me," I said. "After all, how many times in his life does a reporter sit down with a subject and say, 'Now, tell me about the time your Uncle Bob cut a man's head off.'?"

  "Well, not every day," Skipper said. "Sometimes not even once a week."

  In 1957 Roy Harris was the fifth ranking heavyweight in the world and moving toward a fight with Floyd Patterson for the title. What interested The Saturday Evening Post,though, was not how well he could fight, but that he was out of a place called Cut and Shoot, Texas, on the western fringe of the Big Thicket where time, apparently, had come to a halt at the turn of the century.

  In June of that year I flew out of New York to Houston on a dinner flight, and I checked into the Rice Hotel, and the next morning Lou Viscusi picked me up. Lou had managed Willie Pep to the featherweight title, and he had Joe Brown, who was then the lightweight champion, and he was also promoting fights in Houston. In his powder-blue, air-conditioned Cadillac we drove the forty miles north to Conroe, and then turned right onto Route 105. After a couple of miles we turned right again onto a farm-to-market and then off that and right once more onto a dirt road. We had gone about three tenths of a mile and were coming out of a grove of tall pines when he stopped the car.

  "Well, there it is," he said. He is a stocky, broad-chested man, but his voice is rather high and laughter was in it now.

  "You're kidding," I said. "That's the set from Tobacco Road. You had it hauled in here, and this is a gag."

  "No, no," he said still laughing. "This is the way they live, and this is the way they are."

  Strung out in the clearing about fifty yards ahead of us was a tin-roofed combination of log house and clapboard cabin with a porch running across the front, all of it raised about a foot and a half on piles. A wisteria vine was climbing one of the two-by-fours that supported the porch roof, and there was a traffic of hound dogs, chickens, and a couple of hogs in the yard. On the porch, and sitting in what turned out to be rope-bottomed chairs, were three men, one of them in bib overalls, another in a flowered sports shirt and chinos, and one bare-chested, and there were two women and a couple of children.

  "They're eying us pretty good," Lou said. "I'd better drive in and introduce you before they come out after us."

  "Hell, yes," I said, "and I wish we'd come with a horse and wagon instead of this Caddy."

  It was mid-June and warm and humid, and we left our jackets in the car, and walked across the ground that was strewn with dried corn cobs, several worn automobile tires, a couple of rusting wheel covers, and sections of inner tubes, the hounds sniffing at us and the chickens scattering ahead of us. Big Henry, Roy's father and in the flowered sports shirt and chinos, came down off the porch and Lou introduced me. Then Big Henry introduced Uncle Cleve, in the overalls, Roy's older brother, Tobe, bare-chested, Roy's mother, and three of his four younger sisters.

  "You from New York?" Big Henry said, as we sat down.

  "Yes," I said, and then, trying to get out of the big cit
y as soon as I could, "but I live in Connecticut."

  "Ever been to Texas before?"

  "No," I said, "but I have a couple of good friends who are Texans and whom I greatly admire."

  "That right?"

  "Oh, yes. One of them is General James Earl Rudder, who's the Texas Land Commissioner now, and who on D-Day led 250 Rangers up a ninety-foot cliff in Normandy. I think he's Roy's CO in the Army Reserve now."

  "You know him?"

  "Very well," I said. "Two years ago I took him and his thirteen-year-old son back to Normandy and the cliff for an article for the tenth anniversary of D-Day."

  "You did that?"

  "Yes, and the other Texan for whom I have great respect is Lew Jenkins, who was once the lightweight champion of the world."

  "You know Lew Jenkins?"

  Here we go, I thought. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes I told stories about Lew Jenkins. I told how I met him off Normandy when he was in the Coast Guard and had put the infantry ashore in Sicily and Salerno and the British ashore behind the Jap lines in Burma and then again in Normandy. I told how he was ashamed because he left them there to be killed and wounded and how he told me that if there were ever another war and we were in it, he would join the infantry. There was, in Korea, and he enlisted in the infantry and won the Silver Star, and I told that and some stories about Lew as a fighter, scrambling, as one of those the nesters in the Big Thicket used to refer to as "those town-raised bastards," for rapport.