The Cowboy Way

by Elmer Kelton

  “You made your promise in good faith. Now for reasons beyond your control you cannot fulfill it. She would understand that. Anyway, you brought her back to her hometown. That’s close.”

  “I remember a couple of times my stomach was growlin’ awful at me, and I bore down on a whitetail deer for meat but missed. Close wasn’t good enough. I was still hungry.”

  “You’ve done the best you could.”

  “No, I ain’t.” Greenleaf brought the diggers up out of the hole and leaned on their handles while he pondered. “Mind lendin’ me these diggers a little longer, Preacher?”

  Ratliff studied him quizzically. “You’d be welcome to keep them. Should I ask you what for?”

  “A man in your profession ain’t supposed to lie. If I don’t tell you, you won’t have to lie to anybody that might ask you.”

  Greenleaf used the diggers to rake dirt back into the hole and tamp it down. The lard can still sat where he had placed it beside a nearby gravestone. “We had a full moon last night. It ought to be just as bright tonight.”

  The minister looked up at the cloudless sky. “Unless it rains. I would say our chance for rain is about as remote as the chance of Luther Quinton donating money for a new church. Would you like for me to go with you?”

  “You’ve got to live here afterward, Preacher. I don’t.” Greenleaf finished filling the hole. “If I was to leave you the money, would you see to it that a proper headstone is put up for her?”

  “I would consider it a privilege.”

  “Thanks.” Greenleaf extended his hand. “You don’t just know the words, Preacher. You know the Lord.”

  Even if the moon had not been bright, Greenleaf could have found the old Hopkins place without difficulty. He had ridden the road a hundred times in daylight and in darkness. Nothing had changed in the dozen years since he had last traveled this way. He rode by the deserted house where the Hopkins family had lived while they struggled futilely to extract a good living from a soil that seemed always thirsty. He stopped a moment to study the frame structure. The porch roof was sagging, one of its posts buckled out of place. He suspected the rest of the house looked as desolate. The wind, which had abated but little with moonrise, moaned through broken windows.

  “Probably just as well we’ve come at night, Letty. I doubt you’d like the looks of the place in the daytime.”

  Memories flooded his mind, memories of coming to work here as hired help, of first meeting Letty, of gradually falling in love with her. A tune ran through his brain, a tune she had taught him when they had first known one another and that they had often sung together. He dwelled at length upon the night he had brought her back here after their wedding in town. Life had seemed golden then … for a while. But reality had soon intruded. It always did, after so long. It intruded now.

  “I’d best be gettin’ about the business, Letty, just in case Luther Quinton is smarter than I think he is.”

  The small family cemetery lay halfway up a gentle hillside some three hundred yards above the house. Rocks which the plow had turned up in the field had been hauled to the site to build a small protective fence. Greenleaf dismounted beside the gate and tied the saddlehorse to the latchpost. He let the packhorse’s rein drop. The brown would not stray away from the sorrel. He untied the rope that bound the diggers to the pack, then unwrapped the pack.

  Carefully he lifted down the lard can. He had been amazed at how little it weighed. Letty had never been a large woman, but it had seemed to him that her ashes should represent more weight than this. Carrying the can under one arm and the diggers under the other, he started through the gate.

  He had never been of a superstitious nature, but his heart almost stopped when he saw three dark figures rise up from behind the gravestones that marked the resting places of Letty’s mother and father. He gasped for breath.

  The voice was not that of a ghost. It belonged to Luther Quinton. “Ain’t it strange how you can tell some people no and they don’t put up an argument? Tell others and it seems like they can’t even hear you.”

  The shock lingered, and Greenleaf had trouble getting his voice back. “I guess it’s because no doesn’t always make much sense.”

  “It don’t have to. All that counts is that this place belongs to me, and I don’t want you on it, you or that woman of yours either. Lucky for me I set a man to watchin’ you in town. He seen you fill that hole back up without puttin’ anything in it but dirt.”

  “Look, Luther, you hurt her enough when she was livin’. At least you could let her rest in peace now. Like the preacher said, she’s in no shape to do you any harm. She just wanted to be buried next to her folks. That don’t seem like much to ask.”

  “But it is. You heard her when she laid that curse on me after I took this place. She named a dozen awful things that was fixin’ to happen to me, and most of them did. Anybody that strong ain’t goin’ to quit just because they’re dead.” Quinton shook his head violently. “I’m tellin’ you, she’s some kind of an Indian medicine woman. If I was to let you bury her here, I’d never be shed of her. She’d be risin’ up out of that grave and hauntin’ my every move.”

  “That’s a crazy notion. She never was a medicine woman or anything like that. She wasn’t but a quarter Indian in the first place. The rest was white.”

  “All I know is what she done to me before. I don’t aim to let her put a hex on me again.”

  “You can’t watch this place all the time. I can wait. Once she’s in the ground, you wouldn’t have the guts to dig her up.”

  “I could find twenty men who’d do it for whiskey money. I’d have them carry her over into the next county and throw her in the river, can and all.”

  Frustration began to gnaw at Greenleaf. Quinton had him blocked.

  Quinton’s voice brightened with a sense of victory. “So take her back to town, where you ought to’ve buried her in the first place. Since you seem to enjoy funerals, you can have another one for her.”

  “I hope they let me know when your funeral takes place, Luther. I’d ride bareback two hundred miles to be here.”

  Quinton spoke to the two men beside him. “I want you to ride to town with him and be sure he doesn’t do anything with that can of ashes. I want him to carry it where you can watch it all the way.”

  One of the men tied up Greenleaf’s pack and lashed the diggers down tightly against it. The other held the can while Greenleaf mounted the sorrel horse, then handed it up to him.

  Quinton said, “If I ever see you on my place again, I’m liable to mistake you for a coyote and shoot you. Now git!”

  To underscore his order, he drew his pistol and fired a shot under the young sorrel’s feet. That was a bad mistake. The horse bawled in fright and jumped straight up, then alternated between a wild runaway and fits of frenzied pitching in a semicircle around the little cemetery. Greenleaf lost the reins at the second jump and grabbed at the saddlehorn with his left hand. He was handicapped by the lard can, which he tried to hold tightly under his right arm. He did not want to lose Letty.

  It was a forlorn hope. The lid popped from the can, and the ashes began streaming out as the horse ran a few strides, then whipped about, pitched a few jumps and ran again. The west wind caught them and carried them away. At last Greenleaf felt himself losing his seat and his hold on the horn. He bumped the rim of the cantle and kicked his feet clear of the stirrups to keep from hanging up. He had the sensation of being suspended in midair for a second or two, then came down. His feet landed hard on the bare ground but did not stay beneath him. His rump hit next, and he went rolling, the can bending under his weight.

  It took him a minute to regain his breath. In the moonlight he saw one of Quinton’s men chasing after the sorrel horse. The pack horse stood where it had been all along, watching the show with only mild interest.

  Quinton’s second man came, finally, and helped Greenleaf to his feet. “You hurt?”

  “Nothin’ seems to be broke except my feelin�
�s.” Greenleaf bent down and picked up the can. Most of the ashes had spilled from it. He waited until Quinton approached, then poured out what remained. The wind carried part of them into Quinton’s face.

  The man sputtered and raged and tried desperately to brush away the ashes.

  “Well, Luther,” Greenleaf said, “you really done it now. If I’d buried her here, you’d’ve always known where she was. The way it is, you’ll never know where she’s at. The wind has scattered her all over the place.”

  Quinton seemed about to cry, still brushing wildly at his clothing. Greenleaf thrust the bent can into his hands. Quinton made some vague shrieking sound and hurled it away as if it were full of snakes.

  The first Quinton man brought Greenleaf his horse. Greenleaf’s hip hurt where he had fallen, and he knew it would be giving him unshirted hell tomorrow. But tonight it was almost a good pain. He felt strangely elated as he swung up into the saddle. He reached down for the packhorse’s rein.

  “This isn’t what Letty asked for, but I have a feelin’ she wouldn’t mind. She’d’ve liked knowin’ that no matter where you go on this place, she’ll be there ahead of you. And she won’t let you forget it, not for a minute.”

  Riding away, he remembered the old tune Letty had taught him a long time ago. Oddly, he felt like whistling it, so he did.

  HORSE WELL

  The Jigger Y chuckwagon was camped at Horse Well the night the showdown finally came between Jeff Bowman and Cleve Sharkey. I was just a button then, not yet ten years old. The first excitement of the Crane County oil boom had simmered down in the wake of the Depression, as every Texas oil boom did sooner or later. The place had almost settled into the calm that permanency brings, as much permanency as there can ever be for a community that depends on anything as hard to put a handle on as cattle and oil.

  The times were still tight, and there were some around who would turn a fast dollar whenever the opportunity arose. A Jigger Y steer butchered in the dark and peddled out by the chunk in town and in the oil camps was one way to do it.

  My dad was foreman of the Y. It was his job to make the cattle operation turn a profit whether beef prices were good or not. He usually went to Midland when it came time to hire cowboys; the men in Crane were mostly working in the oil fields. Dad knew a lot of people in Midland, and there were usually some job-hunting hands waiting around the Scharbauer Hotel for a ranch owner or a foreman to show up. That was where he hired Cleve Sharkey.

  The next day Cleve Sharkey came sliding his shiny green Model A coupe to a stop on the gravel in front of the L-shaped kitchen and bunkhouse. As he stepped out, I decided he was the ideal cowboy to fit all those stories the old-timers used to tell about the good old days, back when they were young. He appeared to be seven feet tall, but of course I was looking up at him from pretty low down to the ground at that time. He wore his Levi’s jeans tucked into the tall tops of a fancy-stitched pair of high-heeled boots made for dancing, not for cow work. He was good-looking too, I thought, like the people in the stories I had heard old Wes Reynolds and Daddy George Lee and those others tell.

  That was an early age for a boy to learn that you shouldn’t judge people by what they looked like. My old pet cat Blue Boy came ambling across the bunkhouse porch, full of curiosity about the new hand, and put himself right between Cleve’s feet. Cleve came near falling, and he gave Blue Boy a kick that boosted him off into the little patch of Bermuda grass at the edge of the porch.

  Right there I got off to a bad start with Cleve. I told him what I thought about anybody who was mean to cats. He in turn told me what he thought about kids who mouthed off to grown-ups. My dad stepped out of our house about that time and came walking across the yard, still too far away to see that anything was wrong. Cleve carried his bedroll and war bag on into his room, and I left before Dad had a chance to challenge me about being at the bunkhouse without any business. I picked up Blue Boy and carried him out to the barn to satisfy myself that he was all right. Actually, he was too fat to hurt.

  I made it a point after that to stay out of Cleve’s way, though I watched him from a safe distance. He was a good cowpuncher, even if his behavior didn’t fit the model I had been led to expect in a top hand. Dad had bought some rank young broncs over on the Pecos River, and Cleve rode the worst of them. He could rope a runaway cow and stand her on her rump about as well as anybody I had seen.

  But he was hard on his horses. Some of the broncs lost a lot of hair where his spurs raked them.

  After Cleve had been on the ranch awhile, he took to going to town pretty often. I never was much of a hand with a rope, but at the time I thought it was because I never had a chance to practice with a really good one. One Saturday evening after he had gone, I borrowed the rope from his saddle in the barn and practiced roping fenceposts. I forgot to take it in, and that night it rained.

  Next afternoon Cleve found his ruined rope where I had left it hanging on a fence. It was as limber as a dishrag. But it still had plenty of sting left in it when he doubled one end and applied two or three smart licks where I would feel them the most.

  One day Buddy Green quit us, and Dad had to go to Midland to hunt another cowhand. Buddy didn’t say why he was leaving, but I thought I knew. For three months, when Dad wasn’t around, I had seen Cleve bullying him. Buddy was a little feller who looked like he had been weaned short of his time. Cleve could have hurt him bad if he had ever taken the notion, and Buddy probably decided sooner or later he would take the notion.

  I never did tell Dad about any of that. One of the first lessons he had ever taught me was to keep out of other people’s business.

  I was a little disappointed when Dad came back from Midland, bringing Jeff Bowman. I followed Dad’s rattling old ranch pickup to the barn and watched dismally as Jeff unloaded his saddle and other tack. I had hoped Dad might bring out somebody who would whip Cleve Sharkey. At a glance I knew Jeff Bowman wasn’t likely ever to do it.

  He was almost as short as Buddy had been, though he was some wider in the shoulders. His clothes were nothing like Cleve’s. He wore a wrinkled blue work shirt, patched khaki pants, not even Levi’s, and an old hat that looked as if he had let twenty-seven horses run over it. His boot heels leaned in two directions.

  He wouldn’t have fit the stories I had heard from Wes and Daddy George.

  Cleve rode in from the beef pasture about milking time. I happened to be making mighty quiet in the barn at the moment because Dad had been threatening to teach me to milk our Jersey cow, about as uncowboylike an activity as I could imagine. That is how I happened to be perched out of sight on top of the feed sacks when Cleve walked in carrying his saddle, his big spurs jingling. Jeff Bowman was standing by a rack, patching a broken bridle rein. Both men stiffened as they saw each other. Cleve dropped his saddle unceremoniously to the floor.

  “Jeff!” he said, after a minute. “I thought they had you in the—”

  Jeff Bowman had both of his fists clenched. “I got a parole.”

  Cleve stammered a little. “Dammit, what did you have to come here for? You tryin’ to ruin me?”

  Bowman’s voice cut like barbed wire. “I didn’t know you were here. But anyway, you like to’ve ruined me. You didn’t even have the decency to come forward and tell them the truth.”

  Cleve’s face clouded up, as I had seen it do more than once. His fists doubled, he stepped closer to Bowman. “You ain’t stayin’. You’re goin’ to tell the foreman you don’t like the looks of this place and you want to go back to Midland.”

  I had always thought when people laughed, they saw something funny. Bowman laughed, and there wasn’t anything funny about it. “There was a time you’d of scared me, Cleve, but not anymore. Ain’t nothin’ you could ever do to me worse than you’ve already done. I need this job. If anybody leaves, it’ll be you.”

  Cleve bristled like a porcupine, but Bowman stared him down. Finally Cleve picked up his saddle, flung it onto a rack, and stomped out. I didn’t have much id
ea what they were talking about. I wasn’t even sure exactly what a parole was. I just knew I was going to try my best to get along with Jeff Bowman.

  It turned out he was a better hand than Cleve, and he wasn’t hard on his horses. More important than that, he took a lot of time trying to teach me how to use a rope. It didn’t do much good, but the fault was mine, not his. I never did get the knack for it, then or later.

  One day Morgan Lambert of the Cross L dropped by for a visit. He brought his daughter Ellie along. She was probably just one side or the other of twenty then. I considered her pretty old. But I considered her pretty, about on a par with a little girl who had sat at a desk next to mine in the third grade, one who made my face turn warm every time she spoke to me.

  Jeff and Cleve felt the same way about Ellie, seemed like. Before Jeff had come, I had seen Cleve trying to butter up to her. He had no better luck with her than I had with the girl in school. But somehow it was different with Jeff. He was a long way from handsome, but she appeared to overlook that from the start. The two hit it off well as soon as my dad introduced them.

  Before long Jeff was borrowing the company pickup and making trips over to the Cross L every few nights. Once in a while I would catch Cleve watching the pickup as it bounced out across the needle-grass flat to the east and disappeared around the jog in the horse-pasture fence. He looked as if he was festering up a sore.

  One night a little before the Y started its fall roundup, a big dance was thrown over at the Mayfield place. Mother and Dad took us kids along. Jeff borrowed the pickup, as usual, and went after Ellie. Cleve headed for town in his Model A coupe, and after a while he brought out a town girl who wore enough rouge and lipstick to paint a barn door. She created some comment among the grown-ups, but I couldn’t understand why. She reminded me of a birthday package.