The Time It Never Rained

by Elmer Kelton

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Other Books by Elmer Kelton

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Afterword

  Praise for Elmer Kelton

  “Kelton characters are well done.... People from rural Texas and those who have an appreciation of its distinctive values will find this book, Kelton’s forty-sixth, thoroughly rewarding.”

  —Austin American-Statesman on The Smiling Country

  “Western storyteller Kelton returns for his fortieth-plus novel, a sequel to 1978’s The Good Old Boys that again features hang-loose Hewey Calloway, circa 1910, as his lovable old ‘Smiling Country’ of West Texas fades into the automobile age.... Old-timey dialogue, newly minted, rhetorical stretchers, and whopping good humor right out of Twain.”

  —Kirkus Reviews on The Smiling Country

  “Kelton is a genuine craftsman with an ear for dialogue and, more importantly, an understanding of the human heart. Calloway is one of the most memorable characters in recent Western fiction, even though he doesn’t carry a gun and would probably run away from a bad guy. But his heart is as big as the open range, and it’s ever so easy to root for his happiness. An exceptional sequel.”

  —Booklist on The Smiling Country

  “Cloudy in the West will be read and reread by adults and children. Elmer Kelton is a Texas treasure, as important for his state as Willa Cather is for Nebraska and Badger Clark for South Dakota. Kelton truly deserves to be made one of the immortals of literature.”

  —El Paso Herald-Post

  “A story of murder and greed set in Texas in 1885 features Elmer Kelton’s most endearing character yet, a twelve-year-old boy named Joey Shipman.... A wonderfully humorous book with just enough evil in a few of the characters to keep realism alive and well. All this, and the most delightful narrator since Huck Finn.”

  —Amarillo News-Globe on Cloudy in the West

  “The fast-moving Cloudy in the West succeeds as a young adult novel, traditional Western, and an all-around good read.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  Other Books by Elmer Kelton

  Bitter Trail

  Buffalo Wagons

  Hot Iron

  Texas Rifles

  The Pumpkin Rollers

  Cloudy in the West

  The Smiling Country

  The Good Old Boys

  The Buckskin Line*

  The Day the Cowboys Quit*

  Captain’s Rangers*

  Massacre at Goliad*

  *forthcoming

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE TIME IT NEVER RAINED

  Copyright © 1973, 1984 by Elmer Kelton

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  ISBN: 0-812-57451-6

  Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 84-157

  First Forge edition: May 1999

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In a broad sense this book is dedicated to the old-time

  Western ranchman, whose lifestyle gave him an

  inkling of Heaven and more than

  his proper share of Hell.

  In particular it is dedicated to my father,

  Buck Kelton. . . one of them.

  Introduction

  DURING THE LONG TEXAS DROUTH OF THE 1950s A joke—probably already as old as the state—was told again and again about a man who bet several of his friends that it never would rain again, and collected from two of them.

  Indeed, it seemed the rain was gone forever. For parts of West Texas the ordeal lasted a full seven years. Though some would argue that it was not the most devastating drouth they had ever seen, it was by all odds the longest in memory.

  Each new generation tends to forget—until it confronts the sobering reality—that dryness has always been the normal condition in the western half of the state. Wet years have been the exceptions. Walter Prescott Webb, in his classic The Great Plains, noted how the land changes west of the 98th meridian, and how this has affected the people who live there, etching its marks upon their characters and impacting upon their culture. Traditionally it has taken a strong-willed, individualistic breed to live west of that line, especially when that living is tied closely to the soil, as is the case with the rancher and the farmer. Those not strong enough either did not cross the line or retreated after being bruised by the demands of that uncompromising land. Those who remained became tough, resilient, and almost militantly independent. As a group they have been like the old rancher who declared, “I don’t want anybody giving me anything, and I don’t want anybody telling me what to do; I just want to be left the hell alone!”

  This fierce protectiveness for one’s own prerogatives has been compromised to some degree in the last generation or so, but enough remains to be a potent political factor. Resistance to regulation may be stronger in drouth-prone West Texas than anywhere. This trait remains a puzzle to people in other areas, willing to trade their freedoms piecemeal for what appears to be a guarantee of security. They, perhaps, do not have this heritage of recurring struggle for survival which every succeeding generation of West Texans has had to face, each in its own time.

  My father’s family has been west of the 98th meridian more than a century, and not one generation has been spared this cycle of drouth and hardship. When Dad was about seventy-five, I asked him how many really wet years he had seen.

  “Four,” he replied. “They were 1906, 1919, 1941 and 1957.” That was little more than one out of twenty. He had seen twice that many dry spells severe enough to be termed drouths. The rest of the time varied between “pretty good” and “pretty dry.”

  Drouth by Texas definition is a period of severely deficient moisture that laps over from one year into another. Often it is of two to three years’ duration. Anything shorter, though it may be serious, is termed a dry spell, as if more annoyance than hardship.

  In the mid 1950s I asked a Kansas lamb buyer about conditions in his area. He said they were tough; he had suffered through three drouths that summer. I did not totally relate to his terminology. I told him we were already in the third summer of the same drouth. As it turned out, we had three more to go.

  Drouth by Texas standards does not necessarily mean a total absence of rainfall. Rains may indeed come, occasionally, but they are usually light, and moisture from one seldom remains unt
il the next. Natural selection has long since eliminated those native plants which cannot endure extended dry conditions, but the plants which remain tend to go dormant. They retain life only in their root systems, not above the ground for livestock to graze. Introduced crops and “improved” grasses seldom survive the more cruel of these tests.

  In earlier times, livestock on such drouthy ranges would literally starve. By the 1950s, good transportation had made it possible for stockmen to haul in feed or to ship livestock to market.before they declined to such a desperate condition. This did not prevent the economic collapse of a substantial percentage of ranchmen, however.

  Their plight led to a number of federal aid programs supposed to keep them on the land. Many of these programs compounded the problem instead of presenting a solution. They were initiated hurriedly with few ground rules by politicians who coveted favorable publicity. When rules finally were completed months later, they were enforced retroactively, placing extra hardship upon many of the early participants. In the main the programs were inadequately planned and motivated more by political considerations than by sound appraisal of actual needs. Many ranchmen, like my character, Charlie Flagg, elected to shun them but suffered nevertheless because the programs’ inflationary impact nullified the benefits for those who participated and added to the economic misery of those who did not.

  The Time It Never Rained as you read it here is my third version. I began writing the first shortly after the drouth was broken! It failed to find a publisher, as did a second version in the early 1960s. I set the novel aside for about ten years. After critical acceptance of The Day the Cowboys Quit in 1971 I decided to try again, completely rewriting it. Perhaps I had become a better writer after ten years, and perhaps editors were more prepared to accept the premise that all which comes out of Washington is not necessarily golden.

  By this later time I was able also to treat racial problems more frankly, particularly the relationships between ranch workers of Mexican heritage and the Anglos who employed them.

  During the 1950s I was a farm and ranch reporter for the San Angelo Standard-Times and covered the drouth story day after day, month after month, year after year. Most of my friends and many of my relatives were fighting the battle at ground zero. I watched them, and I bled with them, inside.

  I hoped the novel would give urban people a better understanding of hazards the rancher and the farmer face in trying to feed and clothe them. The heaviest readership, however, was west of the Mississippi. In effect, I found myself preaching to the choir.

  Many people over the years have asked me if I based Charlie Flagg on their fathers. My mother was convinced that I wrote it about my father. The truth is, I did, in part. I wrote it about him and about many, many others I knew, people who still retained an old frontier heritage of fighting their own fight, testing one strategy and when it failed trying another, but above all simply enduring, and enduring.

  They are not the traditional Western fictional heroes, standing up to a villain for one splendid moment of glory. They are quiet but determined men and women who stand their ground year after year in a fight they can never finally win, against an unforgiving enemy they know will return to challenge them again and again so long as they live.

  They are the true heroes.

  ELMER KELTON

  San Angelo, Texas

  Prologue

  IT CREPT UP OUT OF MEXICO, TOUCHING FIRST ALONG the brackish Pecos and spreading then in all directions, a cancerous blight burning a scar upon the land.

  Just another dry spell, men said at first. Ranchers watched waterholes recede to brown puddles of mud that their livestock would not touch. They watched the rank weeds shrivel as the west wind relentlessly sought them out and smothered them with its hot breath. They watched the grass slowly lose its green, then curl and fire up like dying cornstalks.

  Farmers watched their cotton make an early bloom in its stunted top, produce a few half-hearted bolls and then wither.

  Men grumbled, but you learned to live with the dry spells if you stayed in West Texas; there were more dry spells than wet ones. No one expected another drouth like that of ’33. And the really big dries like 1918 came once in a lifetime.

  Why worry? they said. It would rain this fall. It always had.

  But it didn’t. And many a boy would become a man before the land was green again.

  Chapter One

  RIO SECO WAS TOO SMALL TO AFFORD A PROFESSIONAL manager for its one-room Chamber of Commerce. The part-time volunteer, elected because no one else wanted the job, made his living selling an independent brand of gasoline two cents under the majors though he bought it from the same tank truck that serviced half the stations in town. A man of wit, some people thought, he had erected a big red-and-white sign on the highway at the city limits:WELCOME TO RIO SECO

  HOME OF 3,000 FRIENDLY PEOPLE—

  AND THREE OLD CRANKS!

  Farther inside the city limits, half-hidden between a Ford billboard and one for Pepsi-Cola, he had placed another sign: THIS IS GOD’S COUNTRY

  DON’T DRIVE THROUGH IT LIKE HELL

  This cattle, sheep, and farming town was much the same as fifty others dotted along the interminable east-west highways which speed traffic across the great monotonous stretches of western Texas ranch country. To an impatient motorist hunting a cooler place to light before dark, these dusty little towns are all cut from the same tiresome pattern and, despite the signboard, a long way from heaven.

  Like most of them, Rio Seco had old roots. It had been born out of necessity, a trading place for sprawling cow outfits, for scattered sheep camps and industrious German dryland farmers who had come west with their wagons, their plows, and a compulsive will to build something. The town long ago had made its growth and found its natural level. Now it held steady, gaining no ground but losing none. Oil companies had come and punched their holes and found them dry. They had gone again, leaving dreams of quick riches to drift away on the arid wind like the cotton-white clouds that promised rain and failed to deliver.

  Life still depended on two fundamentals: crops planted by the hand of man and grass planted by the hand of God.

  Give us rain, they said at Rio Seco, and it makes no difference who is in the White House.

  If one thing set the town apart, it was probably the trees—pale—green mesquites and massive, gnarled live oaks, rustling cottonwoods and shady pecans, watered by a hundred windmills whose towers stood tall above a timid skyline. Modern municipal mains provided purer water for drinking and cooking, but most of the older generation clung to wells for yards and gardens and trees. For a man who has often turned his face to the hot breath of drouth, the sight of a windmill tower—its big steel fan clanking patiently and pumping up water clear and cool—somehow reaches deep and touches something in his soul.

  The town had three cultures—Anglo, German, and Mexican. The first two had largely merged through the years—beef and beans and apple strudel. The third remained unassimilated, except perhaps in Rio Seco’s unhurried pace of living. Most of the Anglos were addicted to Mexican food, and most of the Mexicans loved football, but these were superficial things.

  Many of the older rock homes had a no-nonsense squared-off solidity the Germans had brought from their original settlements in the Pedernales River section of the hill country. Across the railroad tracks, beyond roads dusty from passage of livestock trucks on their way to the shipping pens, lay the Mexican part of town—ageless adobes and small frame shacks, and a fair number of modern GI houses built since the war. The old and the new stood side by side in sharp contrast: a wrinkled, ancient Mexican working up adobe bricks out of straw and mud in a barefoot method known to the fathers of his grandfathers, while next door a three-man crew with electric saws, cut raw lumber for a new frame house. Two small brown-faced boys sat on a forebearing Mexican burro, their black eyes alive with curiosity as they watched an older brother tuning the motor of a hotrod.

  For the ranchman, business cente
red around Emmett Rodale’s old stone bank and Jim Sweet’s feedstore-wool warehouse, a long, cool, cavernous building of concrete tile. There in round, well-packed jute bags wedged between steel poles and stacked nearly to the high ceiling lay stored the gray-white fleeces that for three generations had been a cornerstone of Rio Seco’s economy.

  For the farmer, business focused on the same bank, the cotton gin and a small grain elevator with twin steel tubes that stood taller than anything else in town except the sun-catching silver water tower emblazoned with crudely painted red letters: SRS ’51.

  In the second floor of the rock-fronted courthouse was a room which in recent years had emerged as another important economic fact of life: the county office of the federal PMA. Next to rain, perhaps, it had become the most important fact. Here the man of the land came to declare his crop acreage, his past year’s plantings. Here he was told how much land he would be allowed to seed in cotton, in grain sorghums, in whatever other crops might be under federal control. Here he came for price support and to receive checks to help him pay for terraces and water-spreading, for water wells and surface tanks, for battling back the prickly pear and thorny mesquite.