The Cowboy Way Read online

  Bubba nodded. “I imagine Chester would be tickled to get shed of the old place and have the cash to put into his business. Plumbin’, isn’t it?”

  “He contracts air-conditionin’ and heatin’.” George frowned. “If I’d had any judgment, I’d’ve gone partners with him years ago and left the cow business to somebody else. He offered to take me in.”

  “Kind of hard to picture you as a city slicker. It fits Chester, a little, but you was always the cowboy of the family.”

  “And look where it got me.” George’s voice had a rough edge. Bubba pushed his empty plate aside and signaled the waitress that he needed his ticket. “Well, you holler if you decide. See you around, George.”

  George stared absently at the cold gravy on Bubba’s plate and did some mental calculations for the hundredth time. He could settle his accounts and buy the family a house in town, maybe San Antonio, where Chester was. Then he could find himself a paying job for a change. There were lots of things he could do besides wet-nurse a bunch of feed-loving cows or the runny-nosed sheep that helped subsidize the cows’ feed bill.

  He sipped the last of his coffee and watched Bubba paying the cashier. Bubba’s father and grandfather would turn over in their graves if they knew the direction Bubba had taken their ranch. But financially it was a sensible direction. Bubba was still building and buying while the old-line ranchers who stayed by tradition were losing their butts and all the fixtures. He had the judgment to change with the times. George begrudged him nothing.

  He picked up his check and found it was even a bit less than he had expected after commission, feed and yardage. He walked out onto the auction yard to his pickup and long gooseneck trailer. One of the trailer tires had gone halfway down. It was so slick the original tread barely showed. The ranch business had come to a hell of a pass when a load of calves wouldn’t even buy a new tire. He passed Bubba Stewart’s ranch entrance before he came to his own. Bubba had built a large stone archway with the Lazy-S brand displayed at top center. Many people used to make a joke of the brand, claiming it fitted Bubba all too well, but some of the scoffers were gone now, while Bubba was growing stronger.

  George’s entrance had no architect-designed archway. It had only a pair of chest-high stone pillars he and his brother Chester had helped their father to build thirty-odd years ago. They were plain and simple, but each time he drove between them across the cattleguard he remembered his father’s pride in a job that had required two days of back-bending work. A mailbox just off the road shoulder was the only thing bearing the Dixon name. George had never thought he needed anything more. About the only people who ever hunted him up were feed and mineral salesmen.

  He drove to his barn first and unhitched the trailer, then waded through the mud to a water trough that was overflowing onto the ground. A lifetime of water shortages had given George a contempt for waste. The old float had sprung a leak and filled, leaving the water to run unchecked. He unwired it from the valve and fetched an empty plastic sheep-drench bottle from the barn. It was less efficient than a commercial float, but it did not cost anything.

  George had long operated on a principle of thrift: never buy a new nail if a bent one could be straightened. Disgustedly he hurled the old float as far as he could throw it, thinking, I’m getting damned sick and tired of this.

  He saw a yellow school bus stop on the farm-to-market road. Shortly his fourteen year-old son Todd came pedaling to the barn on a bicycle he had left hidden in a clump of brush near the cattleguard. The bicycle frightened a couple of calves too young to haul to town, and they stampeded away with tails hoisted.

  George’s frustration boiled over. He gave his startled son a dressing down for needlessly scaring the stock. “Now you get your clothes changed and start your chores!”

  Face red, Todd said, “I’ve got to be back in town tonight for a 4-H Club meetin’.”

  “We’ll talk about that later. Right now you do what I told you!” Regret arose as he watched the boy walk the bicycle to the house, shoulders hunched under the weight of the reprimand. The boy hadn’t deserved that. It had just been one of those days. Better for all of us, he thought, if we get away from this place.

  He tinkered around the barn as long as he could, knowing that when he went to the house Elizabeth would want to know what had made him ride the boy so hard. Todd came back with his old clothes on, milk bucket in his hand. He gave the barn a wide berth as he went to the pen where he had started a new calf on feed for the county stock show next January. Feeding show calves was one thing Todd would have to give up when they moved to town. It was too expensive anyhow; once a boy got past the county show and moved up to the big ones where the real money was, he went against the professional steer jockeys who dominated the circuit. That was simply one more thing gone wrong with the cattle business.

  Todd finished milking the Jersey cow and trudged back to the house, followed by a red dog that was like a shadow to him. Presently Elizabeth came out onto the front porch, searching with her eyes. Hands clasped over her apron, she watched George make the long walk from the barn. The sight of her usually lifted his spirit, but not today. He studied the way she looked, framed between the porch posts that George’s grandfather had put up. She deserved better than that old house, he thought.

  He supposed she saw the answer to her question in his face, but she asked it anyway. “Did the calves sell all right?” He handed her the sale sheet. “They sold.” She did not look at the paper. “It’ll be better next year.” That was always her response to bad news: things’ll be better tomorrow, or next week, or next year. He wondered how she found strength for that faith. His had about played out.

  “Supper’s on the table,” she said, and moved toward the door. He caught her arm. She turned to face him, but it took a minute for him to bring out the words. “Bubba Stewart made me an offer again today.”

  He caught a flicker of reaction in her eyes, but she covered it so quickly he could not read it. She asked, “What did you tell him?”

  “Told him I’d have to talk to you, and to Chester. I’ll call Chester after supper.”

  “You’re really serious this time?”

  “The times are serious.”

  Elizabeth looked past him, toward the barns, the corrals, toward the road that led out to the highway. “Supper’s getting cold.” She turned abruptly and led him into the house.

  Todd was already seated at the table. He avoided his father’s eyes. George tried to think of something that would ease the sting of rebuke. “What time’s that 4-H meetin’?”

  “Seven-thirty.”

  “We can make it without rushin’ our supper.”

  That was the extent of conversation. Elizabeth offered no comment at all. Finished, George glanced at the clock on his grandfather’s old mantel and decided Chester should be home from work by now. He dialed the number. The telephone rang a couple of times. A man answered in a voice George recognized as his brother’s, though its tone was oddly somber, as if Chester had just heard bad news, or expected to. “Hello. Chester? This is George. How’s things in the big city?” Chester said he had seen them worse, but he did not remember when. George said, “They aren’t good here, either. That’s what I’m callin’ you about. I was wonderin’ if you could come out this weekend. I need to talk to you.”

  Chester hesitated a long time before sayin’ it would be hard to get away and asking if they couldn’t talk about it on the phone. “No,” George told him. “It’s not going to be simple. We may need time to talk it out.”

  Chester hedged, saying he did not know how he could leave the business. But finally he relented, though his voice carried no pleasure. “I’ll come.”

  “Bring the family. The kids haven’t seen each other in a while.”

  Chester was silent another long moment. “I’ll just have to see about that, George. I can’t promise.”

  Todd brightened as his father hung up the telephone. “You mean Allan’ll be out to see us?”
r />   Allan was fifteen, just enough older that Todd had always looked to him for leadership, like the brother he had never had. Allan through the years had always come out from the city each summer to spend a few weeks. Todd would follow him like the red dog followed Todd. This year Allan had not come. Too many things to do, his father had explained to a disappointed Todd. George had reasoned it was natural for boys, even those who had been close, to drift apart as they became older. Each was developing his own interests and pointing himself toward the lifestyle he would follow as an adult. George remembered a cousin who had been his best friend until they were both about Todd’s age. They had not seen each other in ten or fifteen years now, and the cousin rarely even crossed his mind.

  He said, “Son, I wouldn’t count on Allan. Even if his folks come out, and his sister too, he might not be with them. City boys his age have got football and girlfriends and such as that.”

  “He’ll be here,” Todd said enthusiastically.

  George frowned. “You ever wish you could live in the city where you could do the things Allan does?”

  Todd nodded. “Sure, I’ve thought about it. I’ve wished I could go to all the football games and to the picture show when I wanted to. I’ve wished I could go hang out at the mall like Allan does, and check out the girls.” He gave his mother a quick glance. “Just look, though. That’s all I’d ever do.” He pondered a moment. “But there’d be things I couldn’t do. I couldn’t ride a horse. I couldn’t feed our show calves. Those are things Allan wishes he could do.”

  “You might not miss them all that much. You’d have a lot of things you can’t get in the country. You’d probably have a bigger and better school.”

  Todd’s eyes widened. “You’re not thinkin’ about havin’ me go live with Uncle Chester and Aunt Kathleen, are you?”

  George blinked. He had not expected his son to misread him so badly. “No. That never crossed my mind.”

  Todd seemed relieved. “I’d probably get tired of the picture show. I might even get tired of hangin’ out at the mall. I’d rather have my horse and my show calves.”

  “We can get used to anything if we want to bad enough.”

  “I suppose. I just don’t think I’d want to.” Todd shrugged off the subject as easily as he would slip out of his coat. “You still got any of that pie left, Mama?”

  George glanced at Elizabeth. She had that look in her eyes again, that frustrating mask she could draw down at will to cover what she was thinking.

  From experience he knew Chester and his family should reach the ranch about noon Saturday. That morning he took advantage of Todd’s day off from school to repair a section of the fence he shared with Bubba Stewart’s ranch. Some kind of animal had run into it and had broken off an old cedar post, leaving the fence to sag. He could only guess what it might have been; Bubba had a regular menagerie over there. While George put his shoulders into driving a set of posthole diggers against the resisting hard ground, Todd leaned on a crowbar and said, “If we’d waited till afternoon, we could’ve had Allan to help us.”

  George answered, “You know how goofy you and Allan get when you start playin’ around. One boy can be good help. Two boys are like one good man had got up and left you.”

  He heard something crashing through a cedar brake. A long-legged animal with twisting black horns burst into the open, saw the two people and whipped back, disappearing as quickly as it had come. George said, “One of Bubba’s exotics. I swear, there are as many on our side of the fence as on his.”

  “If they come over here, does that make them ours?” George shrugged. “In a way, I guess. They go where they want to go and eat our feed. But Bubba paid for the breedin’ stock. I’d hate to be a judge and jury.”

  “I still think they’re ours.”

  “It won’t matter long anyway.” Todd gave him a quizzical look, but George had said too much already. There would be time enough to tell him when the deal was made. “Here, let’s see you hit the bottom of this hole with the point of that bar.”

  They finished the fence repair a while before noon, and they were still unloading the tools into a frame shed beside the barn when the red dog started barking. George saw Chester’s blue automobile raising dust along the graded road. The car was three years younger than the one in George’s garage. Todd jumped up into the pickup bed for a better look. “It’s Allan!” he exclaimed, and ran toward the house, shouting to his mother. George finished putting away the tools and half-smiled, remembering that he used to make much the same fuss over his own cousin thirty-odd years ago. He paused at the windmill to rinse the dirt and grime from his hands, then walked to the house amid the dust settling from the passage of Chester’s car.

  Chester had a tired look in his face, as if he had not slept. His voice had the same dark and pained quality George had heard on the phone. “Howdy, George. Good to see you.” George reached out, and Chester’s handshake startled him. It was strong, almost crushing, but it was not the strength of pleasure; it was like the desperate grasp of a drowning man. George pulled away, looking back to his brother even as he gave sister-in-law Kathleen an obligatory hug. Through the years she had been the bubbly sort, but she also seemed subdued, troubled. The couple’s daughter Pamela, at nine too young to play with boys, stuck close beside her mother.

  George turned to his brother’s son, who had shoulders like a football player. “Allan, we needed your muscles with us this mornin’. We had a couple of mean postholes to dig.”

  He expected some joking rejoinder, for that had always been the boy’s way. Like his mother, he had an answer for everything, and usually a funny one at that. But he offered no reply. He turned away from Todd as if trying to avoid him and stared silently back down the road.

  Probably got chewed out about something, and he’s pouting, George thought. He had no intention of saying anything to make it appear he was butting in. “You-all come on into the house. I expect Elizabeth’s about got dinner ready.”

  Kathleen and the girl hurried ahead. Chester held back, glancing uneasily at his son. “You made it sound pretty urgent on the phone, George.”

  George did not know exactly how to start. “It’ll keep. Let’s go have dinner.”

  They visited over the table, talking weather and rain and dry spells, exchanging gossip about old friends and acquaintances, studiously avoiding the subject that had brought Chester and his family all the way out here. Nobody smiled much, and nobody laughed. After they had eaten, George and Chester walked out onto the porch and seated themselves on the steps. They were silent for a time. At length George ventured, “I guess business must be pretty bad in the city.” That would account for the somber mood in his brother and sister-in-law.

  Chester nodded. “But there’s a lot of people worse off.” He rubbed his hands nervously against his knees. “I think I can guess what you wanted to talk about, George. I keep up with the cattle market. If you want to cut the lease you’re payin’ me for my half of the ranch, I’d have no objection.”

  George’s jaw dropped. He had not considered that Chester would misconstrue his intentions so badly. He fumbled for words but found none.

  Chester went on, “We’re brothers, George. Sure, I can use the money, but I don’t want it comin’ out of your hide.” He stared out across the pasture. “Hell, let’s just eliminate the lease payment altogether till the cattle market goes up. I wouldn’t want you hurtin’ this old place by over-stockin’ it so you could pay me. I remember how much our daddy and granddaddy loved it.”

  George stared at the ground. He felt as if Chester had punched him in the belly. He had lain awake for hours last night trying to plot out just how he was going to put this proposition to his brother. Suddenly his whole plan had gone up in smoke.

  Chester said, “Would you mind drivin’ me around, George? Sometimes when the traffic is heavy and all the phones are ringin’ at the same time, I get to thinkin’ about this ranch. It’s like a tranquilizer to me, with no bad side effects
.”

  “The side effects come when you try to raise cattle on it,” George said dryly. He stood up. “You boys want to go?”

  Todd was eager, but Chester’s son seemed distant and cold. Todd grabbed his arm. “Come on, Allan. We’ll ride in the back of the pickup, like we used to.”

  Allan hung back, like a dog reluctant to follow the leash. His father said brusquely, “Come on, son. You’ve got nothin’ better to do.” The boy burst out, “I did have, if you’d just left me alone.”

  “I’ve left you alone too many times. Get in the pickup!” Chester’s face was flushed, his hands clenched. He glanced uncomfortably at George. Allan climbed into the pickup bed, his eyes angry and downcast. Todd hesitantly followed. His questioning gaze touched George, asking for an answer George did not have.

  It struck George that Allan looked different, somehow adult, yet somehow lost, even bewildered. Todd’ll be at that stage in another year or two, he thought. Damned if I know how we’re going to handle it.

  They drove through what had always been known as the horse pasture, now used mostly for young heifers being grown out to join the breeding herd. At one end was a surface tank built to catch runoff after a rain. For the first time since they had left the house, Chester spoke. “Remember how we loved to fish in that tank, George? Never caught much of anything, but we sure did drown a lot of worms.”

  George nodded soberly. His problem was getting no easier.

  Chester said, “Doesn’t seem like it took much to keep us happy. A horse to ride, a tank to fish in, a .22 to hunt rabbits with. We never gave Dad a lot of trouble, did we, George?”

  George shook his head. “Not much, I guess. We ran some weight off of his calves, learnin’ how to rope when he wasn’t lookin’. I remember once we ran his pickup into a rockpile and ripped the oil pan out from under it.”

  “But that wasn’t real trouble. Not like today. Livin’ out here, George, you’ve got no idea…”