The Cowboy Way

by Elmer Kelton

  We kept seeing Jeff regularly for a while after that because he had to come through the Y to get over to the Lambert place and visit Ellie. After they were married he didn’t have that excuse anymore.

  We never did see Cleve after that, so I never had the chance—if I had ever gotten the nerve—to ask him about the horse thieves in that old well.

  CONTINUITY

  Ed Whitley would always remember where he was and what he was doing when the old man had his heart attack: in the dusty corrals behind the barn, preg-checking a set of Bar W black baldy heifers.

  It was not a dignified job for a cowboy who would much rather be on horseback, doing something else—anything else. It was not the pastoral western scene depicted on calendars or Christmas cards, and certainly not the stuff of song and story. It was messy work and smelled a little, but it had become an economic necessity of life for a rancher in a time of tight or negative profit margins. A dollar saved was better than a dollar earned, for it was not subject to income tax.

  To Ed’s knowledge, his father had had no previous indications that a coronary was imminent. If there had been, the old man had remained tight-lipped about them. Tom Whitley had always regarded aches and pains as a personal affront, to be borne in silence. To complain was to give them importance.

  Ed’s probing fingers had just confirmed the presence of a developing calf when he saw Tom fall against the steel squeeze chute, one hand grasping for a rail, the other clutching at his chest. The old man’s eyes were wide in surprise and pain and confusion, his mouth open for a cry that choked off before it started. Ed jerked his arm free and ripped off the shoulder-length plastic glove that had covered his hand and sleeve. He caught Tom and eased him to a sitting position on the ground.

  Ed’s grown son Clay vaulted over the crowding-pen fence and came running, along with ranch hand Miguel Cervantes.

  The old man wheezed, “I’m all right. It’s just that sausage I had for breakfast.”

  Ed knew better. He had seen that look before, when his neighbor Alex Hawkins had collapsed and died at the bankruptcy auction that sold out his cattle and rolling stock two years ago.

  “Help me get him to the pickup,” he shouted. He had never understood how doctors could have such a dispassionate attitude in the face of suffering and human mortality. With no more emotion than if he was reading the cafeteria menu, the emergency-room doctor confirmed Ed’s opinion that his father had suffered a heart attack.

  “We will not know the extent of muscle damage or blockage until we have done an angiogram. We must assume, though, that it has been severe. I do not wish to sound alarmist, but you had better prepare yourself and your family for the worst.”

  “Dad’s got a constitution like a horse. He hasn’t had a sick day in his life, hardly.”

  “With an eighty-year-old heart, it may take only one.”

  Tom was eighty-two, if one wished to be technical about it, but he acted as if he was twenty or thirty years younger. He rode more miles a-horseback than Ed and far more than Clay, who lived in town and held down an eight-hours-a-day job at the feed mill. Clay helped at the ranch on weekends.

  Tom persisted in wrestling fifty-pound feed sacks two at a time when Ed was not looking. Somewhere in his sixties he seemed to have made up his mind not to get any older, but not to die, either. He had gotten away with it, except for a little arthritis in his joints that occasionally forced him into minor retreat but never into surrender. He had also come into increasing reliance on reading glasses. But he still ate beef for dinner and supper every day, using his own teeth.

  In the back of his mind Ed had known his father could not live forever, but he had never allowed himself to dwell upon that. He could not visualize the ranch without Tom Whitley. From Ed’s earliest memories, Tom and the home place had been one and the same, inseparable. Tom’s father, Ed’s grandfather, had acquired the nucleus of the ranch around the turn of the century, homesteading four sections under Texas law. Tom had been born there and over the years had more than doubled the size of the place. With Ed’s help he had cleared the land debt so that the ranch now was free and clear.

  “Ready to pass on, without no encumbrance,” Tom had said when they paid the final note. But Tom had shown no inclination to pass it on. Now Ed had to face the shattering probability that the time had come. Nothing would ever again be as it had been. He could see no continuity between the past and the future. Losing Tom would be like cutting a tree off from its roots.

  They moved Tom into the intensive care unit. The hospital had rules about visitation, but it was lax on enforcement in regard to family members. Ed never asked permission to stay in the room with his father, and nobody contested him.

  For a long time Tom seemed to be asleep. He was hooked to a monitor, its green screen showing heartbeats as a series of bobbles up and down from a straight line. Ed would watch the screen awhile, then stare at Tom, forcing up old memories as if he had to retrieve them now or lose them as he was losing his father. Most were pleasant, or at least benign.

  He could not remember a great deal about his grandfather. The face that came to his mind’s eye owed more to old photographs than to life. He knew that Morgan Whitley had come of age in the waning years of the great trail drives and the open range. The ranch’s outside fence still retained segments of the original wire and posts that Morgan had installed some ninety years ago, though the toll of time had caused most to be rebuilt in recent years. Even when replacing it, Tom and Ed had coiled and saved some of the rusty old wire and hung it on the barn wall as a keepsake, for Morgan’s strong hands had once gripped it. A lively imagination could fantasize that his fingerprints were still fixed upon the steel strands.

  Many ranches had unbroken family ownership into the third, fourth, and fifth generations. It conveyed, in a peculiar way, a sort of immortality to those who had gone on. This continuity fostered a reverence for the land as if it were a living member of the family. It engendered in the later generations a strong urge to protect and improve rather than to mine the land for immediate gain at the expense of the future.

  But Ed feared for that continuity when Tom was gone. Tom’s boots made big tracks, as his father’s had before him. Ed felt inadequate to fill them. His life had been relatively easy compared to Tom’s and to Morgan’s. Most of the building had been completed before he had come of age. He had inherited the fruit without having to dig through the rock and plant the tree.

  This was Saturday, so Clay was not on duty at the mill. He had remained at the corrals to finish the day’s job. It was an unwritten tenet of ranch life that not even an emergency should interrupt work in progress if any alternative was available. Ed arose from the hard chair as Clay and Ed’s wife Frances came into the room. Neither asked aloud, for they could not be certain that Tom would not hear. Ed answered just as silently with a shrug of his shoulders, followed by a solemn shaking of his head. Frances slipped her arm around his waist, offering him emotional support. Clay said his young wife Susan was downstairs with their five-year-old son. The hospital did not allow children into ICU.

  Clay moved close to his grandfather’s bedside and stared down gravely into the lined face that had been a part of his daily life as far back as memory went. Tears welled into his eyes. When Ed had been a boy, Tom had been demanding of him—often unreasonably demanding, in Ed’s view. He remembered a time when Tom had taken a dislike to Ed’s way of mounting a horse and had made him practice getting on and off until Ed had thought his legs would collapse. Tom had drilled him mercilessly in the art of roping, making him do it over and over, day after day, until he rarely missed a loop. Not until years later did Tom confide that his own father had done the same thing to him. It was not enough to pass on property. It was necessary to pass on knowledge and skills if the property was to have meaning and continuity.

  Tom had mellowed by the time his grandson had come along. He had shown infinitely more patience in teaching Clay the cowboy trade. At those rare times when discipl
ine was called for, Tom had walked away and left that painful duty to Ed.

  Odd, Ed thought, how sometimes the further apart people were in age, the closer they seemed in their relationships with one another. The boy had learned diligently, polishing the horseback skills passed down from his great-grandfather Morgan through Tom, then through Ed and finally to Clay.

  Frontier realities had limited Morgan Whitley’s formal schooling to a couple of years, though he had acquired a liberal education in the school of practical experience, with graduate honors in hard knocks. Better times had allowed Tom to finish high school before turning to a full-time career as a working cowpuncher and eventual partnership with his father.

  Ed, the third generation, had gone on to earn a degree in animal husbandry at Texas A&M. It was an accomplishment Tom had always regarded with a conflicting mixture of pride and distrust. “Most of what I know about a cow,” he had often declared, “you ain’t goin’ to find in no Aggie textbook.”

  Tom’s eyelids fluttered awhile before he opened his eyes, blinking as his vision adjusted itself to the fluorescent lights of the hospital room. He focused first on Tom and Frances, then let his gaze drift to Clay. At first he seemed confused about his surroundings. Ed grasped his father’s hand to keep him from tearing loose the tube that fed him glucose.

  Anyone else might have asked how he had come to be where he was or what kind of shape he was in, but not Tom. He had always been one to take care of business first. “You-all finish with them heifers?”

  Clay said, “We did, Granddad—Miguel and me. They were all settled but three.”

  “Hell of a note, stoppin’ work to rush me in here like this when there wasn’t nothin’ wrong except that sausage. I could tell the minute I ate it…”

  Ed said, “It’s a lot more than the sausage. Doctor says it’s your heart.” He stopped there. He thought it best not to tell his father how serious his condition really was unless it became necessary to prevent him from climbing out of bed. It would be like Tom to get in the pickup and head for the ranch in his hospital gown if they wouldn’t give him his shirt and Levi’s.

  Tom grumbled, “Probably just overdone myself workin’ that squeeze chute. Never did see that we need to preg-test those heifers. You can tell soon enough which ones come up heavy with calf and which ones don’t.”

  Ed could have told him, as he had before, that checking the heifers early for pregnancy allowed for culling of the slow breeders before they had time to run up an unnecessary feed bill. Moreover, high fertility was a heritable characteristic. The early breeders were the kind a rancher wanted to keep in his herd, for they passed that trait on to their offspring. The slow ones were a drag on the bottom line.

  But to Tom, that had always been an Aggie textbook notion. He distrusted selection judgments based on records or mechanical measurements. He preferred to rely upon his eyes. He had not thought much of artificial insemination either, when Ed had first brought it to the ranch.

  Tom had not always been so reluctant to try new ideas. Neither, for that matter, had Ed’s grandfather Morgan, up to a point. Though Morgan had been a product of the open range, he had built a barbed-wire fence around the perimeter of his holdings as soon as he had been financially able to buy cedar posts and wire. That had allowed him to keep his own cattle in and his neighbors’ out. He had gradually upgraded the quality of his herd through use of better sires without his cows being subject to the amorous attentions of inferior stray bulls. But as the years went by, Morgan had become increasingly conservative, content with things as they were and quick to reject the innovations of a younger generation. He had looked askance upon the advent of the automobile and truck as tools of the ranching trade. He argued that anything he needed could be carried by a good wagon and team. As for cattle and horses, they could walk anywhere it was needful for them to go; they didn’t have to be hauled.

  He and his son had almost come to a fistfight over Tom’s purchase of a light truck. In time he became accepting enough to ride in a truck or car, but to the end he stubbornly refused to place his hands on the wheel of one.

  Tom often told about building his first horse trailer. He had long wished for a way to eliminate the waste of time involved in riding horseback to a far corner of the ranch to do a job, then returning home the same slow way. It took longer to get there and back than to do the work. He acquired the chassis of a wrecked Model T and stripped it down to the wheels and frame. Atop this he built a three-sided wooden box with a gate in the rear. Crude though it was, it could haul two horses, pulled by the truck.

  Morgan had ridiculed the idea. “First thing you know, you’ll never see a cowboy ridin’ anymore, or a horse walkin’.”

  Gradually, however, the horse trailer became a regular and accepted fact of survival in the ranching business. It allowed more work to be done in less time and with less labor.

  Through thrift and careful borrowing, Tom had managed to add on to the ranch, each addition and each mortgage coming over Morgan’s strong objections and predictions of imminent ruin. He had brought a telephone to the ranch, and a gasoline-driven generator to furnish limited 32-volt power so the two houses and the barn could have electric lights. He had even bought Morgan a radio in hopes it would keep his widowed father from feeling so lonely when he sat alone at night in the original old ranch house. At least, he argued, Morgan could keep up with the world news.

  “You’re wastin’ your money,” Morgan had declared. “I won’t ever listen to the thing. I won’t even turn it on.”

  Tom had often delighted in telling about the time a few weeks later when conversation somehow turned to country music, and old Morgan exclaimed, “Say, that Uncle Dave Macon can sure play the banjo, can’t he?” The aging open-range cowboy had died just before the outbreak of World War II, leaving Tom to run the ranch after his own lights. Tom had sometimes wondered aloud how his father would have reacted to the technological innovations that war and its aftermath had wrought upon the ranching industry.

  Tom had cross-fenced the ranch for better control of grazing. He had replaced the generator with REA electricity. But in time he had settled into the same brand of conservatism as his father when it came to modern innovations. He treated with skepticism many of the ideas Ed brought home from A&M.

  “Aggie textbook notions,” he would snort. Some he accepted after a time. Others he never did.

  Despite heavy medication, Tom awoke in the early morning hours, as he was accustomed to doing at home.

  Ed’s back ached from sitting up all night in the straight hard-backed chair. He suspected that hospitals purposely installed uncomfortable furniture to discourage visitors from staying too long. Tom stared at his son with concern in his eyes.

  “You ever get anything to eat last night?”

  “I slipped away for a bite with Frances while Clay was here.”

  “You better go and get you some breakfast, else you’ll be the one sick in here instead of me.”

  “Later. I don’t want to miss seein’ the doctor.”

  “Ain’t no doctor goin’ to show up this early unless he’s still here this late.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  Tom stared at him awhile.

  “Sure, you’ll be all right. Ever since you were old enough to straddle a horse, I’ve been tryin’ to get you ready for this. Now it’s come time, ready or not.”

  Ed realized his father was not just thinking about Ed’s immediate need for nourishment. “Don’t you be talkin’ thataway. You’ll be out of here in a few days if you’ll do what they tell you.”

  “I’m goin’ out of here in that long black wagon. We both know that. I could feel old St. Peter breathin’ on my neck half the night. But you’ll be all right. What you goin’ to do about Clay?”

  “What’s there to do about him?”

  “You’ll have to talk him into leavin’ that piddlin’ job at the mill. You’ll need his help full-time when I’m gone.”

  Ed’s throat tigh
tened painfully. He did not want to talk about this, but Tom was persistent. He seemed to sense that he did not have a lot of time to get the talking done.

  Tom said, “He’s a good boy, even if he has got some newfangled ideas. Some of them’ll work, and some won’t. You’ll have to get a feel for how tight to hold the reins, and how loose, same as I did with you and my daddy did with me.”

  Ed did not know how to reply. It hurt too much to acknowledge what Tom was saying. “You’ll come through this all right,” he said, though the words were hollow. He knew differently, and so did Tom.

  Tom said, “That’s the way of the world. It’s up to the young ones to keep movin’ forward, and up to the older ones to keep the young from runnin’ the train off of the track. And it’s why the old have to pass out of the picture, so the train won’t come to a stop altogether and maybe even slide back down the hill.”

  “Things wouldn’t ever be the same out there without you.”

  “They ain’t meant to be. If my daddy had had his way, we’d still be drivin’ cattle afoot to the railroad. If his daddy had had his way, there wouldn’t even be no railroad. We don’t none of us—old or young—ever have it just the way we’d want it, and that’s probably a good thing.”

  * * *

  Though some ranchers saw Sunday as just another day for work—it seemed there never were enough days to do it all—Tom Whitley had always accepted Sunday as a day of rest. It was fitting, Ed thought later, that on a Sunday he slipped away into his final rest. Helplessly Ed watched the monitor screen as the line jumped violently up and down, then flattened. The most strenuous efforts of doctor and nurses could not alter the inexorable course of nature.

  Frances was with Ed at the end, and so was Clay. It helped, not having to face this dark moment alone.

  Ed said quietly, “I don’t know how we’ll survive without him, son.”