by Elmer Kelton
Charlie heard a girl laugh. Anita Flores stood at an outside corner of the pen, watching. She wore an old cotton dress and stood in bare feet, a wisp of a girl just coming to flower. Her olive face was freshly scrubbed, her skin smooth as cameo. At sixteen, she would not be long in becoming a woman.
She was laughing at the embarrassment of the young wool tromper, who climbed back up on the frame. Anita Flores was always seeing something to laugh about.
Charlie noticed then that some of the shearers had not resumed work; they were staring at Anita. They saw the woman, not the girl.
“Anita,” he said sternly, “you oughtn’t to be out here.”
Laughter still bubbled in her brown and innocent eyes. Her voice carried a soft suggestion of Spanish accent. “Mama didn’t need me. I came out to watch for a little while.”
“Rosa wouldn’t like seein’ you at the shearin’ pens.”
“She has always let me, Mister Charlie.”
“Things change.” The wind lifted her cotton skirt a little, and Charlie knew damned well why Chuy Garcia had tumbled from that sacking frame. He dug the pointed toe of his boot into the sand. He had no daughter of his own. He and Mary had buried one long ago, an infant. In some measure Anita had substituted for the one they had lost. Still, she wasn’t his own. How could he tell her the facts of life? That was for her mother to do.
“The men are all lookin’ at you,” he said. “They ain’t lookin’ at you like some little girl.”
Anita glanced at the idle shearers, and she blushed.
Charlie said, “They don’t mean you no harm. They just been out in the shearin’ camps awhile. But they might take a wrong notion—might think you was offerin’ somethin’ that you’re not.”
Damn, he thought, that was a left-handed way to put it. But how do you tell a girl what she ought to know unless you say things straight out? Charlie Flagg had never been of a devious nature. He had always been a man to say what he thought and let the chips fall.
Her cheeks coloring, she said quietly, “I’ll go, Mister Charlie.” But a twinkle of laughter lingered in her eyes. “It was funny, the way Chuy fell. He always thinks so much of himself . . .”
“Wouldn’t of been funny if he’d broken a leg.”
This kind of male interest was probably new to her, Charlie mused as she walked away, but she’d damn well better get used to it. She was ripening in a hurry. Rosa and Lupe and us, we’ll have to watch her if we don’t want somebody to pick her green.
Teofilo Garcia’s teenage tie-boys went back to sweeping the wooden shearing floors as Charlie walked through the gate. These boys would roll and tie the fleeces when each shearer finished a sheep, then pass them up to young Chuy Garcia to be tromped tightly into the bags. In slack moments they would sweep the floors again and again to keep the wool from picking up trash and dirt.
To the shearing captain, Charlie said, “Sheep comin’, Teofilo.”
“Ready, Mister Charlie.” Teofilo Garcia rubbed excess engine oil onto his already greasy trousers and glanced at the departing girl with a measure of relief. “Old engine of mine, she’s give a little trouble. Temperamental, you know, like a woman. You got to treat her like a woman, with patience and kindness.” He hit the starter. The engine turned over once and sputtered out. It did the same a second time. Cursing with conviction, Teofilo kicked the machine and tried again. This time it caught. “Also, you got to be firm.”
Teofilo was about Charlie’s age, weighing two hundred and fifty or sixty pounds but bull-stout, even with his large belly. He didn’t have to shear sheep himself any more; he was capitán. He was the entrepreneur, owning the truck and the shearing machine. He contracted the jobs, furnished equipment, tie-boys, cook and grub, and he took the first share of the gross receipts. The shearers furnished their muscle, skill, and the shearing heads they attached to the eight long-armed “drops” of Teofilo’s smelly machine. It was a man-bending job—hot, heavy, numbing of muscle and mind. Little wonder that many a shearer came to hate the sheep and love the bottle that dimmed the everlasting bleating which echoed in his ears after the sheep were gone.
Teofilo cut off the machine and nodded in satisfaction. Charlie said, “If everything’s fixed, I reckon I’ll ride out and help the boys bring the sheep in.”
Teofilo wiped a sleeve across his sweat-beaded forehead. “Bad day to be out in the sun, Mister Charlie. Too hot and dry.”
“Cooler out there than in these pens. As for dry, we generally get some rain in May.”
Teofilo shook his head. “Not this time. Yesterday this whirlwind came across the road and hit my truck. It was turnin’ backwards. That’s one bad sign, Mister Charlie. I think it won’t rain now for a very long time.”
Charlie smiled tolerantly. Most Mexicans he knew put lots of faith in signs. “It always rains when I got sheep to shear and need it to be dry.”
His red-roan horse, Wander, stood hipshot at the far end of the pen, switching his tail to scatter the flies that had found him. Charlie lifted the leather reins from the fence where he had looped them, swung into the saddle and angled the horse between the tall upright cedar posts that marked the gate, ducking needlessly to pass under the taut twisted wires that braced the posts one against the other. The roan’s hoofs lifted puffs of dust as he trotted away from the corrals. Out here by the salt troughs, where a dozen ribbon-like sheep trails converged and the animals congregated after watering, there never were any weeds or grass to hold the soil down. Even so, it seemed to Charlie that the ground was dustier than usual. Sure needed a rain to pack it.
The Hereford cattle that had been up to water were drifting out toward the waiting shade of live-oak trees. Charlie rode behind them and gave a loud holler, wanting them well out of the way when the sheep came in. Sheep had a way of always looking for a booger. The cattle moved into an easy trot, but as quickly as Charlie stopped pushing, they slowed down. One cow stopped and looked back to see if he was still coming. Tame as town dogs, Charlie thought. A man could almost walk up to them afoot in the pasture. They were far different from the wild brush cattle he had worked in the Pecos country during his youth. With those highheaded old sisters of fond memory, a cowboy did well to catch one glimpse of their hoisted tails as they clattered off into the thickets. A man took little pride in cattle like those old snuffies—only in his ability to be as wild as they were and to handle them. It had always seemed a game of sorts to Charlie, though a rough one. There had been exhilaration in the chase, the spurring and yelling and smashing through brush, the swinging of the rope and bringing those wild cattle crashing to earth. He had not had to concern himself with the economics of the thing; he was simply working for wages then, and the wages never went up. But later when he went into ranching for himself he quickly found it was difficult to show much profit on that kind of cattle or that kind of operation. These blooded Herefords were poor sport but far more negotiable at the bank.
Eventually he had matured to a point that he took pleasure in looking at these cattle, in knowing they were his, even if sometimes the market went down and they didn’t pay their way, and it took what the sheep made to cover the cattle’s loss. He would never want to be without some good cattle around.
He watched a roadrunner as it darted from under a clump of prickly pear and trotted along a dusty cowtrail, its long black, white-tipped tail stretched out, its spindle legs carrying it at an incredible speed. Paisano, the Mexicans called it; chaparral was the name the Anglos gave. It suddenly raised its tail like a rudder and stopped short. It jumped and came back around facing Charlie, watching him for sign of treachery. Plainly not liking his looks, the lean bird made a brief run for momentum, soared up and glided across the low brush. Charlie watched it as long as it was in sight. He could not imagine this country without the roadrunner, any more than he could imagine it without the prickly pear and the live oaks, the jackrabbit and the horned toad. They were all an integral part of it, biding their time to take it back if man ever relaxed his
hold.
He had often thought that if man were to disappear, the domesticated livestock would not long survive. Fences would sag and rust away. The artificial watering places would go to dust, forcing livestock to the natural creeks and rivers. There, in time, the sheep and goats would fall to the bobcats and coyotes, which thrived despite man’s most diligent efforts to bring them under control. Perhaps even the lean gray wolf—so long gone from here—would return to hunt and howl at the moon. The gentle cattle would fall to drouth and to the wolves. The land would go back to those creatures which impartial Nature had found fittest by ruthless selection and survival through ages past all reckoning.
Charlie met the sheep a quarter mile out from the corrals. In this West Texas range country the old method of herding sheep had gone out years ago. Coyotes had been thinned enough that ranchmen built sheepproof fences and turned their flocks loose to range free over the pastures just as their cows did. The word cowboy, once guarded with a vigilant jealousy, had come to apply as much to the handlers of sheep as to handlers of cattle. The average ranchhand was likely to be some of both. The hard knuckles of economics had driven most West Texas cowmen to discard their prejudice and turn to sheep. They found to their consternation that the two species mixed well, a proposition once considered akin to heresy. Now they raised cattle for respectability and sheep for a living.
A fat old ewe plodded along head-down in the lead, using a deep-worn trail and taking all its unnecessary jogs and turns, wearing the trail a little deeper and assuring that her descendants forty years from now would follow exactly in her tracks. The rest of the band strung out complacently behind, giving unquestioning trust to those up front. There was a constant din of blatting lambs and anxious mothers, looking back for offspring lost in the shuffle. Nothing could be so anxious, and so ineffective in its anxiety, as a sheep.
Tom Flagg rode near the lead, keeping his horse reined to one side out of the dust. At twenty-two, Tom fitted Charlie’s image of what a cowboy was supposed to be—the image Charlie had tried for at Tom’s age but had been too busy or too broke to perfect. Tom sat his horse with the pride and easy grace—even the arrogance—of one born to the leather. He rode with back straight, shoulders squared. He wore his straw hat low over his eyes and cocked a little to one side in a go-to-hell attitude, the brim flared and the crown carefully dented fore and aft. Instead of some old blue work shirt, he wore a Western-cut shirt with imitation pearl snaps, a shirt he had ripped at a rodeo and couldn’t wear for show any more. His square silver belt buckle glinted in the sun, a buckle he had won roping calves in Pecos on a Fourth of July.
Charlie had heard Mary say Tom fancied himself too much, but Charlie didn’t put stock in that. Tom had something to fancy himself for. There was little worth doing that he couldn’t do on horseback except perhaps make love. Tom had learned all his father could teach him about cowboying, and more besides. He could do things with a rope that Charlie had never attempted in his best time. If he was a little on the wild side, as some people said, it didn’t worry Charlie. He had scattered a fair crop of oats himself before the muddy trenches of France stole the exuberance from him. Whiskey was better if it was slow to age; maybe a man was the same way.
Charlie said, “Everything go all right?”
Tom shrugged. “You put me in charge, didn’t you?”
Charlie had given his son the responsibility, though tacitly Lupe Flores was head man when Charlie was not around. Lupe was a patient, unassuming teacher and something of an insurance policy. Many a time he had pulled Tom Flagg out of a jackpot so easily that Tom never realized he had even been in trouble.
Charlie held his ground and let the sheep slowly pass him. He nodded to a dark-skinned Mexican of forty or more who worked for Page Mauldin and had come over as swap-out neighbor help, a custom as old as the ranching industry. “How’s it goin’, Diego?”
“Bueno, Mister Charlie . . .”
Diego Escamillo might speak to Charlie’s son as “Tom,” but he would address the older generation only as “Mister Charlie” or “Mister Page,” a waning relic of deference lingering from an ancient pattern of racial relationships. Charlie recognized it as a dying custom and did not particularly mourn it, but he was still taken by surprise sometimes when some young Mexican called him by his first name without the “Mister.” Archaic or not, he sort of liked it.
Manuel Flores, fifteen, rode along on the outside of the “drags.” He sat his brown horse with the careless grace of a brush-country vaquero born to the saddle, which indeed he had been. His ancestors had worked cattle and sheep for generations before the Alamo. He could be one hell of a cowboy, Charlie figured, if he lived on a ranch large enough to give him a challenge.
Manuel carried a young lamb stretched belly-down across his brush-scarred old hand-me-down saddle. Charlie asked him, “What’s the matter with that cordero?”
“Lame in one leg, Mister Charlie. He can’t keep up.”
“You’d just as well of left him. His mammy would find him again soon as we turned her loose.”
Manuel frowned. “A cow might, but a ewe isn’t too smart. I’ll do what you think is best, Mister Charlie.”
Charlie knew Manuel wanted to find out what was the matter with the lamb’s leg. He had always been like that, keeping a penful of cripples and dogies around. From the time he had been five or six years old Manuel had gotten more pleasure from feeding some dogie lamb than from feeding himself.
Manuel said, “I know his mother when I see her. I can get them together again.”
Charlie had always been able to identify every cow he owned, and to match her with her calf, but he had never reached a point that most sheep did not look the same to him. Manuel had an eye for them, though. If Manuel said he could find that ewe in this bunch, he could do it.
“All right, muchacho, take the lamb and find some pocket to put it in. And you’d better chalk that ewe’s nose before they shear her because she won’t look the same with the wool off.”
Lupe Flores walked next to the netwire fence, leading his horse and pushing up the drags, punching lazy ewes into movement, keeping tired lambs on the go. There was an old and remarkable affinity between Mexican and sheep, an affinity the Anglo rarely attained, a thing that went back perhaps to the pastores of old Spain. Lupe talked quietly and gently to them most of the time, but an old-time muleskinner would have marveled at Lupe when the lid blew off. Using the worst of two languages, he could singe the bark from a cedar post at twenty paces on those rare occasions. Seven or eight years younger than Charlie, Lupe outweighed him by twenty pounds. The extra weight caused him to sweat heavily as he walked behind the sheep. His dark, round face was caked with dust, ribboned by sweat.
“Hace calor,” said Charlie. (“It’s hot.”)
Lupe whistled agreement under his breath, his face as affable as a Collie dog’s. He had always been this way, agreeable to anything Charlie said, dependable but never self-asserting. Some Mexicans—especially the younger ones—gave Charlie an uncomfortable feeling that they were saying one thing in agreeing with him while something altogether different was going on behind those black eyes. He had latched onto Lupe years ago because he had not seen that quality of resistance in him. Whatever Charlie wanted always seemed to suit him fine; there was never any argument or sign that Lupe even considered one. He was comfortably subservient, every ranch owner’s ideal for a hired man.
Charlie said, “Teofilo tells me it’s not goin’ to rain. Says he seen a whirlwind turnin’ the wrong way.”
Lupe’s face twisted in disdain. “That Teofilo, he’s always got some superstition.”
Charlie smiled at the boy Manuel. “What do you think about it, muchacho?”
Manuel shrugged. “My science teacher, she says these old superstitions are left from the Dark Ages. She says if you want to know about the weather, call the Weather Bureau.”
Charlie grunted. He had long since decided that when the Weather Bureau predicted rain a man had
better wear his sunglasses.
Lupe Flores halted in midstride. “Rattlesnake!” He handed his bridle reins to Charlie, grabbed up a dead mesquite branch and climbed over the netwire fence where it was tightest against a cedar post. Charlie saw the snake slithering away through the short dry grass. As Lupe caught up it whipped its body into coils, its ugly head lifted high, its beady eyes fixed on Lupe, its forked tongue darting. The rattles set up a song that made Charlie’s roan horse shy quickly to one side, almost jerking Lupe’s bridle reins from Charlie’s hand.
A frenzy came over Lupe. Range men, like range animals, have an instinctive fear and hatred for snakes. A deer or a roadrunner will kill one when they have the chance. Lupe swung the stick, catching the snake behind the head and bursting its lead-gray skin. He swung again and again, cursing all the while, keeping it up long after the snake was beyond recovery. He stood with shoulders heaving and looked at the long body battered and torn but still convulsing. He cast aside the big stick and picked up a smaller one, whittling a sharp point onto it. He forced it through just behind the snake’s head. He raised the stick, allowing the snake to hang free. The tail twitched, still rattling a little. Lupe cut the rattles off, then draped the snake over a nearby limb, its white belly up.
“There,” he said, returning to the fence with hat in his hand, wiping sweat from his dusty face onto his sleeve. “Leave him that way, it brings rain.”
Charlie couldn’t hold back a smile. “Now who’s superstitious?”
Lupe climbed back over the fence and dropped heavily, reaching up for his reins. “That’s no superstition, Mister Charlie. It really works.”
Charlie glanced at Manuel, The boy looked away, hiding a grin that would not set well with his father.
As the sheep approached the corrals, Tom Flagg edged his horse forward. The ewe in the lead halted and looked distrustfully at the open gate. She held her ground and thought things over while the rest of the band bunched uncertainly behind her. If anybody made the wrong move, she would dart back into the bunch, starting a general rush of sheep away from the gate. But Tom squalled at the proper place and the proper moment. She broke for the opening. The rest of the sheep strung along behind her. One jumped over the shadow of the cross wires, and the next half dozen dutifully jumped just as she had, though probably none had any idea what they were jumping for. It was simply the thing to do.
