Texas

by James A. Michener

  He stalked away, profoundly shaken by this ugly experience, for he was frightened by what he might have done. His fist had been inches from that fat, flabby face. His trigger finger had been twitching when the boy scorned his father, for it was obvious that Floyd rejected his mother, too: Dear God, what a burden. He was not sure whether it was he bearing the burden on this last trip to Dodge City, or the older Rusks, who would have to deal with Floyd back in Larkin County.

  So now the entire group had turned away from this pathetic boy; even the Mexican cook was unable to hide his disgust at the way Floyd gorged his food. He rode at the right-rear drag, dust in his face, and grumbled constantly about this experience which could have been so rewarding, this conquering of the range which so many boys his age would have given years of their lives to have shared.

  As the herd reached the south bank of the Arkansas River, the men could see on the opposite side the low buildings of Dodge City, and their eyes began to sparkle, for citizens of the town themselves had proclaimed it ‘The Wickedest Little City in the West.’ Here were the famed dance halls, the sheriffs office once occupied by Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, the ‘entertainment parlor’ once run by Luke Short. What was more important to the stability of the town, well-funded agents like J. L. Mitchener bought the Longhorns and shipped them east.

  As the hands prepared to herd their cattle across the toll bridge leading into town, the older men went to Poteet and said: ‘Dodge can be a tough town for a young fellow. What’ll we do with that miserable skunk Floyd till we head back to Texas?’

  ‘I’ll speak to him,’ Poteet said, and that evening he assembled the first-timers and talked to them as if he were their father: ‘Lads, when you cross the toll bridge tomorrow you enter a new world. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe runs through the town. You can see its water tower. North of the railroad the town fathers have cleaned things up. No more gunfights. No more roaring into saloons on horseback. On that far side of the tracks … churches, schools, newspapers.’

  ‘Tell ’em what’s south,’ a point man interrupted.

  ‘On this side of the tracks, it’s like the old days. Saloons, dance halls, gambling. You stay north, the better element will protect you. You move south, you’re on your own.’ He said this directly to Floyd, then added: ‘I suppose you’ll head south. If you do, don’t get killed. I want to take you young fellows back to your mothers.’

  When the meeting ended, Floyd asked one of the point men: ‘Will Luke Short be in town? He’s from Texas and he’s killed a lot of men.’

  ‘They ran Luke out years back. And you act up, they’ll run you out too.’

  During the approach to Dodge, Floyd had spent hours speculating on what he would do when he reached town. Girls figured in his plans, and the firing of his hidden pistol, and a gallop down Front Street, and a hot bath and good food. A thousand lads coming north from Texas to the railheads had entertained similar dreams, but few had come with such addled visions as those which attended Floyd Rusk, for he envisioned himself as a reincarnation of Wyatt Earp and Luke Short, though what this might entail he could not have explained.

  As soon as the Longhorns, the last batch to enter Kansas from Texas, had been led to the Mitchener corrals at the railhead, Floyd collected part of his pay and headed to the ramshackle area south of the tracks, and with unerring instinct, found his way to the toughest of all the saloons, The Lady Gay, once owned by Jim Masterson. He was startled when he saw his first dance-hall girls, for they were enticing beyond his hopes, and when he heard the coarse remarks made about them by the cowhands, he became confused and thought the men were somehow casting public aspersions on his mother. When two rowdy men from another outfit that had started in Del Rio referred to the girls as ‘soiled lilies’ and ‘spattered doves,’ he became infuriated and ordered them to shut up.

  The men looked at this fat, grotesque boy and unquestionably one of them made a motion as if to push him aside. Anticipating this, Floyd whipped out his gun and shot them dead.

  Before the gunsmoke had cleared, Poteet’s two point men leaped into action, rushed Floyd out of the saloon, and hid him in a ravine south of the river, for they knew that Poteet, always a man of rectitude, would refuse to cover up for one of his cowboys who had committed murder.

  When Floyd was safely hidden, the two men rode north of the tracks to where Poteet had rooms in a respectable hotel, and told him: ‘Fat Floyd killed two Del Rio cowboys.’

  Poteet tensed his jaw, then asked: ‘You turn him in to the sheriff?’

  ‘No, we hid him in a gully. We’ll pick him up when we ride south.’

  ‘But why? If he murdered someone?’

  ‘Mr. Poteet, we give you our word, don’t we, Charley? It wasn’t cut-and-dried. It looked maybe like they might be goin’ for their guns.’

  ‘Where did that boy get a gun?’

  ‘He practiced a lot when you weren’t around.’

  Suddenly all the fire went out of Poteet. He slumped forward with his hands over his face: ‘Oh my God, that poor woman. To have borne such a miserable son-of-a-bitch.’ Looking up, he asked the point men: ‘Must we take him back to Texas?’ Without waiting for an answer, he rose as if nothing worried him and snapped: ‘We’ll dig him out as soon as we sell the herd. Keep him in the ravine till we go south.’

  When Floyd was dragged before Poteet, the range boss tried to make him realize the gravity of what had happened: ‘Son, on the day a young feller kills his first man, he’s in terrible trouble, because it came so easy—a flick of the finger—he may be tempted to do it again. Most gunmen start at your age, killing somebody. Billy the Kid, and he’s dead now. John Wesley Hardin killed his first man at fifteen …’

  His words had the opposite effect to what he intended: ‘They’ll never hang John Wesley, never.’

  ‘Son, are you listening to me? Hardin is in jail for twenty-five years. Do you realize that if my point men hadn’t stepped in to protect you, the people back there would have hanged you?’

  ‘No one will ever hang me.’

  Only Poteet’s promise to Emma that he would bring her son back home prevented him from thrashing the boy and taking him back to the sheriff in Dodge. Out of respect for Emma, he would tolerate the odious boy, but he would no longer bother with him. The two point men, however, having saved his life, felt a different kind of responsibility, and late one afternoon on the way home they whispered to Poteet: ‘We think there’d better be a trial,’ and the trail boss agreed.

  Just before evening meal, one of the point men rode up to the chuck wagon, where Floyd was first in line, as always: ‘Floyd, you’re under arrest.’

  ‘What for?’ in a whining voice.

  ‘We know you shot them two men in Dodge unjustified.’

  ‘They drew on me.’

  ‘We know what a miserable coward you are, what a skunk, and we’re goin’ to try you correct, right now.’

  Floyd trembled as two other cowhands lashed his wrists and tied his ankles together, and he was terrified when the solemn trial began, with Poteet as judge.

  ‘What charge do you bring against this man?’

  ‘That in Dodge City he willfully gunned down two Texas cowboys.’

  ‘Without provocation?’

  ‘None.’

  Floyd tried to raise his hands: ‘They were comin’ at me.’

  ‘Were they coming at him?’ Judge Poteet asked.

  ‘They were not. He done it disgraceful.’

  Poteet asked for a vote on Floyd’s guilt, and it was unanimous.

  ‘Floyd Rusk,’ the judge said solemnly. ‘You have been a disgrace on this trail north. You have responded to nothing. You surrendered the respect of your comrades, and in my presence you scorned your father. It is not surprising that in Dodge you murdered two men, and now, by God, you shall hang.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ the boy cried, for he had certainly not intended to murder anyone in the saloon, and now he pleaded desperately for his life.

  Th
e cowboys were obdurate. Perching him sideways on a big roan, they led him to the branches of an oak tree, from which they had suspended a rope. When it was tied about his neck, Poteet stood near and said: ‘Floyd Rusk, on the trail north you proved yourself to be a young man without a single saving grace. As a murderer, you deserve to die. Tom, when I drop my hand, whip the horse.’

  In terror, the fat boy watched the fatal hand, felt the man slap the horse, and felt the rope tighten about his neck as the beast galloped off. But he also felt R. J. Poteet catch him as he fell, and then he fainted.

  ‘Emma,’ Poteet reported to his friend, ‘it was my last trail. Your check is bigger than ever before.’

  ‘And Floyd?’

  ‘He’s no good, Emma. If he continues the way he’s headed, you’ll be attending his hanging.’ He stood aside as she wept, and did not try to console her: ‘You’ve got to hear it sooner or later, but in Dodge City your son murdered two men. Shot them dead with a revolver he got somewheres.’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘My point men spirited him out of town. Saved his life. So on the trail south they held a trial, to show your boy what such actions meant.’ He told her about the mock hanging and explained how this sometimes knocked sense into would-be gunmen, but when Emma asked: ‘How did Floyd take it?’ he had to reply: ‘When he came to and realized the trick we’d played on him, he spat in my face and shouted: “Go to hell, you stupid son-of-a-bitch.” ’

  Emma covered her face, and when her sobbing ended, Poteet said quietly: ‘He’s alive, Emma, because I promised you I’d bring him back. If he was my son, he’d already be dead.’

  When he handed over the last check he would ever bring to the Larkin Ranch, he said with haunting sadness: ‘I’d wanted this last drive to be the best of all. An honorable farewell to the great range that you and I knew so well.’ When he tried to look across the plains, his view was cut by fences. ‘Sometimes things just peter out, like the dripping of a faucet. No parades. No cannon salutes. Just the closing down of all we cherished.’

  He said goodbye to this gallant woman with whom he felt so strong an affinity, then turned his horse toward San Antonio. The open range would see him and his breed no more.

  It was known among the neighbors around the square as ‘the year Earnshaw and Emma had their battle.’ There was no open brawling, of course, and bitter words were certainly avoided, but the differences were profound, and pursued vigorously. When the year ended everyone, including the two participants, understood better what values animated these two diverse frontiersmen.

  The Battle of the Bull, as it was called, was a complicated affair. Back in 1880, when Alonzo Betz, the demon barbed-wire salesman, gave his night-long demonstration of how his wire could discipline the biggest Longhorns, Emma had been surprised that her bull Mean Moses had allowed the fragile wires to restrain him. Indeed, it had been mainly his surrender that had established the reputation of Betz’s wire as ‘master of the range.’ Emma could never explain her bull’s cowardly behavior, and several times she voiced her disgust.

  When Betz’s new fences had surrounded a major portion of the Rusk lands, and when the expensive Hereford and Shorthorn bulls imported from England were safe inside to cross with the Longhorn cows, Earnshaw implored his wife to get rid of her Longhorn bulls so that all the Rusk cattle could be improved, but the use of this word irritated Emma: ‘What’s improvement? Turning strong range cattle into flabby doughnuts?’

  Patiently he had explained that the purpose of raising cattle was to produce as much edible beef as possible, in the shortest time and with a minimum consumption of expensive feed: ‘The payoff on thy cattle, Emma, is what they sell for at Dodge City.’

  She said: ‘I thought the important thing about cattle was that they were just that, cattle as God bred them, not man.’

  ‘It seems blasphemous to bring God into this.’

  ‘No, it seems like common sense. When I look at Mean Moses …’

  ‘That’s a very unfortunate name for an animal.’

  ‘Well, he is mean, and he does lead the others, and in a way I love him.’

  ‘How can thee say that?’ and she replied: ‘I just said it.’ What she did not say was that she prized her big, stubborn bull because he, like her, had survived on the Texas plains. She did not in any sentimental way identify with the bull, nor see him as her surrogate, but she did like him and did not propose to see imported bulls elbow him off her land.

  The arguing Rusks had agreed to leave Mean Moses outside the barbed-wire enclosures, free to roam as always, and to range with him, a dozen cows and another bull, breeding in the thickets, their calves going unbranded from year to year, with the herd never increasing fabulously the way the tended cattle did, but with a new bull moving in now and then to give renewed vigor. As a result, the Rusk ranch always had out in its barren wastes a solid residue of Longhorns. In the rest of Texas the breed was dying out, upgraded year after year into the fine cattle so highly prized by the Northern markets, but in Larkin County, Mean Moses and his harem had kept it alive.

  A great Longhorn was something to behold, for almost alone among the world’s cattle it could produce horns of the most prodigious spread, branching straight out from the corners of the head, then taking a thrilling turn forward and a breathtakingly graceful sweep up and out. ‘The Texas twist’, this was called, and when it showed in full dignity, men said: ‘That one wears a rocking chair on its head.’ Men who no longer raised Longhorns were apt to grow maudlin when they encountered on some friend’s ranch a beast with really magnificent horns.

  The peculiarity of the breed was that only steers and cows produced the great horns, and even then, only occasionally; some unexplained sexual factor caused their horns to grow very large in the first place, and then to take that Texas twist as they matured. A Longhorn bull never showed the twist and only rarely produced horns of maximum size. What horns he did produce were apt to be powerful, straight weapons trained to protect and, if need be, kill, not much different from the horns of a good bull of whatever breed.

  So the famed Texas Longhorn of cartoon and poster showing fierce, beautiful-looking horns was always either a castrated male or a cow. Mean Moses, for example, had horns which came out sideways from his head and absolutely parallel to the ground for a distance of about eighteen inches on each side. Then they turned forward, as if controlled by a T-square, ending in very sharp points. Fortunately for the people who had to work him, he had a placid disposition, except when outraged by the misbehavior of some other Longhorn; then he could be ferocious.

  In the early years of barbed wire and imported bulls, Mean Moses had stayed off by himself with his Longhorn cows, hiding his yearly calves in forgotten arroyos and testing his saberlike horns on any wolves that tried to attack them. Four or five times he had stood, horns lowered, when wolves attacked, and with deft thrusts had on each occasion impaled some luckless wolf and sent the rest off howling.

  Emma sometimes saw her proud bull only three or four times a season, and when she did she was curiously elated to know that he still roamed the range. As she studied the vanishing Longhorns she noticed several things which renewed her determination: The cows never need assistance in giving birth. Sure, Earnshaw’s pampered breeds bring in more money, but Earnshaw pays it out for cow doctors at birthing time. And my Longhorns can live on anything. That bad winter when the Herefords died of freezing and starvation, come spring, there my Longhorns were, walking skeletons but alive. Three weeks of good grass, they were ready to breed. And what did they eat during the blizzards? Anything they could chew, just anything they could find in the snow—cactus, wood from old fence posts, sticks. What wonderful animals.

  Things might have continued this way had not Earnshaw, always seeking to improve his wife’s herd, instructed his Mexican helper González to ‘round up that last bunch of cows running wild and bring them within the fence to be properly bred.’

  ‘Okay, boss.’ The roundup was not easy, b
ut with the expert help of the two black ranch hands it was accomplished. Mean Moses was deprived of his harem; the cows would be bred to the good bulls; and within three generations even the lesser characteristics of the famed Longhorn would be submerged in the preferred breeds that were developing.

  Emma Rusk did not approve of this decision: ‘Earnshaw, we don’t have to use every cow on the range in your experiments. Let Mean Moses and his cows stay out where they’ve always been.’

  ‘Emma, thee either breeds cattle properly or thee doesn’t breed at all. The utility of the Longhorn is diminishing …’

  ‘Those cattle have their own utility, Earnshaw. Play God with your English cattle. Leave mine on the range.’

  ‘Thee will never have first-class cattle …’

  ‘I don’t want first-class cattle. I want the cattle that grew up here.’

  She lost that argument, as did the half-dozen owners in other corners of Texas who struggled to keep the breed alive; like Emma, they were submerged in the sweep of progress. But if Emma was powerless to protect the rights of Mean Moses, the bull was not. During the famous trial of the barbed wire. Moses had been tempted only by a stack of hay, and the pricks of the barbs were sufficiently irritating to fend him off, but now the essence of his being was insulted: his cows had been taken from him, and this he would not tolerate.

  Among the two dozen Longhorn cows imprisoned behind barbed wire so that the English bulls could breed them was an extraordinary lady called Bertha, widely known for two virtues: she gave birth to a strong calf each year, and some aberration had allowed her to produce the damnedest pair of horns ever seen in Texas. It must have been a sexual deformity, for her great horns started out flat like a bull’s, and when the time came for them to take the Texas twist, they remained flat but turned in a wide sweep right back in huge semicircles till they almost met a few inches in front of her eyes. As John Jaxifer said when he drove her inside the barbed wire: ‘You could fit one of them new bathtubs inside her horns.’ His description was accurate, for the immense sweep of the horns and their smooth curve back to form an ellipse did take the outline of a gigantic bathtub.