The Time It Never Rained

by Elmer Kelton

  Kathy raised her rifle but did not fire. The rabbit darted beneath another prickly pear, its cotton-puff tail bobbing.

  She turned to look at Manuel, and there seemed to be laughter in her eyes. “You’ve got a soft streak in you.”

  He shrugged, ill at ease, defenseless against a girl’s laughter. “They always make me think of a little girl in a fur coat.”

  “And you wouldn’t shoot a little girl in a fur coat?”

  He frowned. “Not unless she laughed at me.”

  “I’m not laughin’ at you, Manuel. But I know lots of boys who’d of shot that rabbit.”

  “If you want to, go hunt with them, not with me.”

  She looked at him quizzically. “I always hear people say that Mexicans are supposed to be cruel.”

  That angered him. “And gringos always show off their money.”

  Her eyes shifted to the new rifle in her hands. Any hint of laughter was gone from them now; she looked hurt. “I didn’t think of it like that. I didn’t bring this rifle out to brag; I just thought you’d like to see it.” She held it forward. “Here. I’ll trade you for a while.”

  He took a tighter grip on the singleshot. “This old one is all right for me. It hits what I aim at.”

  Uneasily she lowered the new rifle to arm’s length. “I didn’t intend to make you mad, Manuel, and I didn’t come here to show off.”

  He felt ashamed for flaring at her, and he wouldn’t look into her face. Staring into the dusk he said, “I didn’t mean you, Kathy. I didn’t mean anybody in particular. I know a lot of gringos who don’t show off their money. I know some who don’t even have any.”

  He found she was looking at him. He turned quickly away.

  She said, “And I know a lot of kind Mexicans. Most of them I know are kind. Especially when they won’t shoot a cottontail rabbit, or a girl who talks when she ought to listen.” She extended the rifle to him again. “Now, you want to trade?”

  He shrugged, bringing himself to look at her. “I guess.” He gave her the singleshot and took the repeater, turning it carefully to look it over. It was a beautiful thing, heavy in his hands and still smelling of new oil.

  Kathy pointed. “Yonder’s another jackrabbit. Try a shot.”

  Manuel did, but the slug picked up dust. The rabbit abruptly changed course. Manuel pumped another cartridge into the breech and threw the rifle to his shoulder again.

  He heard a startled cry from inside a mesquite thicket, near where his first bullet had missed. A man jumped up, hands in the air. “No me mate!”

  Manuel froze. He heard Kathy gasp. For a moment he had a wild fear that he had shot someone.

  “No me mate!” the voice pleaded again. “Me rindo. ” (“Don’t kill me! I surrender.”)

  Manuel almost dropped the rifle. He found the safety catch and set it. In shaky Spanish he said, “We did not know you were there.”

  He moved closer. Kathy followed a little behind him, frightened. The Mexican stood with hands in the air. In the dusk Manuel saw this was not really a man; this was little more than a boy. He said in English, “Kathy, it’s a wetback I found this afternoon. This is the one that got away from the border patrol.”

  The youngster trembled. Manuel began to regain his wits.

  “No tenga miedo,” he said quietly, motioning for the Mexican to put his hands down. “Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you.”

  “I thought you were chotas.”

  “Even a chota would not shoot you. We are your friends.”

  The boy dropped to his knees. His hands shook beyond any control.

  Manuel was acutely aware of the rifle in his hands and the fear the young Mexican had of it. He wished he didn’t have it. “Don’t be afraid,” he said again, knowing the advice was wasted. “There is no Immigration here now.”

  The Mexican raised his gaze to Manuel’s eyes. “The chotas ... they took my father and brother away?”

  Manuel nodded.

  Hopelessly the wetback said, “I had thought perhaps they would somehow escape, that they might come back to me.”

  “They took them to jail. You’re alone now. What are you going to do?”

  The boy shrugged. “What we had all intended to do, I suppose. Go and find work. We came because our family is hungry. Now it is up to me to send them money.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  It surprised Manuel that the boy was even younger than himself; he looked older. “You are too young. No one will hire you.”

  “Someone will.”

  “You would be better off to go back to Mexico. Come to the house with us. My mother will feed you, and you can start home tomorrow.”

  The boy shook his head. “I will not return home.”

  “You’ll go hungry.”

  “I have food in the bag, food your patrona gave me.”

  “It will not last long.”

  “It will last until I have work.”

  Manuel glanced at Kathy in frustration. He knew she understood all of it; old Elvira, the Mauldin housekeeper, spoke little but Spanish. “They all think the money’s just lyin’ on the ground over here,” he told her in English. “They think you pick it up like you’d pick flowers.”

  Kathy replied, “The faith of the mustard seed.”

  Manuel dug into his pocket but came up with only a dime. “You got any money with you, Kathy?”

  She shook her head.

  “I thought your daddy was rich.”

  “We just owe money; we don’t ever have any.”

  “Well, I guess it wouldn’t help him much anyway. He can’t afford to go anywhere that he could spend it.” He looked at the girl. “It’s fixin’ to get dark. We better go back.”

  She nodded. “Diego’s probably itchy to get home.” She pointed her chin at the wetback. “But what about him?”

  “What about him? We haven’t got anything to give him, or any way to help him. He’ll go on his way, and sooner or later the Immigration will get him. Maybe he’ll have a chance to earn a little money first and maybe he won’t. Probably he won’t.”

  To the young Mexican he said, “Buena suerte.” (“Good luck.”)

  “Gracias. Mil gracias.”

  Manuel started for the house, Kathy trotting to keep up with him. She protested that he was going too fast and he slowed a little, but not enough.

  She demanded, “What’re you mad about now?”

  “Who’s mad?”

  “You are. I didn’t do anything.”

  He slowed more. “It’s just these dumb wetbacks, comin’ over here thinkin’ everything’s goin’ to be like lickin’ up ice cream. There’s nothin’ you can do for them.”

  Kathy said, “Then there’s not much point worryin’ about it, is there? It’s not our problem.”

  Manuel shook his head. “No, it’s not our problem.”

  Directly Kathy saw another jackrabbit and pointed. Manuel felt no inclination to raise the rifle to his shoulder. He gave the rifle to her and held out his left hand for his singleshot. “It’s a nice gun, Kathy, but I guess I’ve shot all I want to with it.”

  Charlie Flagg sat in darkness on his screened-in porch, his rawhide chair leaned back against the rock wall. He still had his spurs on, his boots propped up on an old iron milking stool that had been kicked around the place for years, a relic left over from the time of August Schmidt. A south breeze flowed past him, cooling to his skin after the long day’s heat.

  The newly shorn ewes and their lambs had been turned out to graze. Charlie had scattered alfalfa hay in front of the gates to hold the ewes until they had paired with the lambs. The only bleating he could hear now came from two orphan lambs. Their mothers had died on the board because of the weight of a shearer’s knee on their water-filled bellies. The heat had almost killed a couple of others, but Charlie had saved them by pouring water over their heads until they revived and staggered off to a far corner of the pens, there poking their heads under each othe
r’s bellies for what shade they could get.

  Only two lost out of a full shearing day; that wasn’t bad. Charlie had the fleeces, and that was a major part of an older ewe’s value anyway. He wasn’t keen on seeing two more orphan lambs in the dogie pen, but he knew Manuel would take care of them; that boy had a knack.

  From over in the Flores house Charlie could hear the protests of the younger children as Rosa sent them off to bed. He liked to listen to her heavily accented English. It was a wonder to him that her children spoke it so easily, and with so little accent. A stranger, listening to them with his back turned, would have to perk his ears up to tell whether they were Mexican or Anglo.

  Lupe Flores would be down at the shearing camp, swapping windies with Teofilo. Charlie could see the flicker of the campfire. Some of the shearers would be gambling with the metal checks they had earned that day, and Teofilo would be keeping one eye on them. A capitán had to leave the reins loose enough that his men could have some fun, but he could not allow anyone to win so much that it stirred bad blood. Intermittently Charlie heard the strum of a guitar and voices lifting in the ancient Mexican canciones de muerte y amor (the plaintive songs of death and love).

  In a way Charlie wished he could go down there and share the company. He was vaguely lonesome. But an old reserve held him back. As the ranch owner—and more to the point, as an Anglo—he wouldn’t fit in. With one or two or three individually it would be fine, but not with the crowd. He wouldn’t be comfortable, and neither would they. His presence would be an inhibiting factor in the camp.

  Charlie never tried to analyze or rationalize his feelings toward Mexican people; he would never have thought of apologizing to anyone for them. He did not dislike Mexicans; on the contrary he liked most of the ones he personally knew and respected them. Yet he tended to distrust the strangers among them. It was an inherited attitude going back through generations of forebears whose names he did not even know. It was deeply grounded in history, in wars won and lost, in the Texas revolution, and the bitter decades of border strife that followed, when each side feared and halted the other with equal blindness and ferocity, when one was gringo and one was greaser, when blood spilled on both sides of the river and no one was innocent.

  Charlie’s philosophy, though he did not fully realize he had one, was simply “live and let live.” He took it as unquestioned fact that Mexican people in general possessed a different outlook, a different set of values. They were of a culture most Anglos never understood or seriously tried to understand. The most common charge was that Mexicans were improvident, that they lacked the Anglo’s drive for success. Yet often Charlie envied the Mexican for not always being caught up in a constant blind rush, for placing less value upon accumulated dollars than upon the enjoyment of life’s simple pleasures, for not wasting today worrying about tomorrow and more accumulation. Pinned down, Charlie would not have said this was inferiority. For all he knew or gave a damn, they were right.

  Like most Anglos he knew many Mexicans who did not fit the blanket assessment he casually set upon the group. In Charlie’s earliest years old Juan Nieto probably had as much influence on him as his own father. Juan had never learned to read or write, and his knowledge of the Bible was restricted to his sometimes distorted but always elemental interpretations of what he had learned from the priests. Nevertheless he had absorbed Nature’s lessons with a keen eye and questioning mind. He had taught Charlie about the earth and the creatures, the way the various species interdepended upon one another, the way the Indians and the early Mexicans lived with nature instead of working at cross purposes with her. Juan had taught Charlie the fine points about riding and roping, the details about horses and cattle and sheep that the Mexican eye often sees and the Anglo overlooks.

  Then there were Lupe and Rosa Flores. Rarely did Charlie think of them in terms of their race. They were simply people to him—good people. He took pride in their loyalty to the ranch, their honesty, their hope that their children might grow up, to a better life than their own. If some of his liking was based on the fact that they simply never gave him any argument, any resistance, he did not realize it.

  And Teofilo Garcia. Teofilo was a businessman. As such he stood in the top order of the caste system which developed within most Mexican communities. Shy on formal education, he nevertheless had an aptitude for both figures and mechanics. His principal fiscal shortcoming as Charlie saw it was an easy tolerance for less ambitious relatives and in-laws who worked far less than he did and swarmed around him like an invasion of locusts as their winter rations ran thin. The result was that Teofilo usually had to visit his spring customers for an advance to get his shearing outfit in working order.

  Mary Flagg stepped out onto the porch and eased into her rocking chair, disturbing the aimless drift of Charlie’s thoughts. She had been in the kitchen picking rocks out of beans for next day’s dinner. Charlie glanced at her small outline in the darkness. She had been cool since he had let Tom go to the roping. He figured she was going to bring up the subject again, so he tried to head her off.

  “Listen to the music over in the shearin’ camp. Funny thing to me why other people can’t put their hearts into music that way. When a Mexican sings a cryin’ song, he cries all over, and he makes you cry with him.”

  “You shouldn’t have let Tom go. His place is here. But every time he asks for something, you let him have it.”

  Charlie gritted his teeth and decided against arguing with her. He never could get the last word, and there was no use raking an old bed of coals. What was the harm in letting the boy do what pleased him now and again? The years ahead held time enough for him to shoulder the burden of manhood.

  Mary began to rock her chair gently. The creak of it was vaguely irritating to Charlie, for it overrode the music from the camp.

  Why is it we seem to rub each other the wrong way any more? he wondered. It didn’t use to be like that. If this is part of growing old, the hell with it!

  Sometimes it was restful to let his mind reach back to those early years. The past was a warm and secure refuge from an uneasy present and an uncertain future. It was unchanging, dependable, an anchor post he could tie to. It was not that times had ever been easy. He and Mary had struggled along in the beginning on a rocky, water-shy bit of leased range farther west, living in a drafty old two-room shack with a smoky woodstove and a single coal-oil lamp. But Charlie could remember the pride they had in it, for it was their own. There had been a warm sense of sharing, even when there was so little to share. There had been a closeness then, and an eager physical love that held them together like two strong and opposite magnets. This had been a bridge for them over those first years of hardship, a source of strength when they clung together and watched the lowering of a tiny casket into a rocky grave. They had observed older couples pulling apart, slipping the bonds that had originally tied them. They had discussed it many times and assured themselves that it would never happen to them.

  But it had. Somehow, dammit, it had. They had not sensed it fully at the time, and neither had ever verbally admitted it to the other. Thinking back on it, Charlie was fairly sure it had begun when Tom was born. Before, there had been only the two of them, and they had held to each other. Now there was someone else to take Mary’s attention, and this ranch to take Charlie’s. More and more, Mary became absorbed in the keeping of the rock house and the garden and the raising of the boy, while Charlie was busy with horses and cattle and sheep, with building fences and putting up windmills.

  It was ironic now, when he thought of it, that their best time together had been those years of hardship. When life had eased and their financial condition became more secure, they had drifted into diverse paths. They seldom sat and talked as they used to. They slept in separate rooms, and Charlie seldom fumbled his way to Mary’s bed any more. Even when he did, she was likely to drop off to sleep and leave him feeling like a damn fool.

  He felt a need now to make conversation, to get her mind away from
Tom. He told her about Teofilo Garcia’s wrong-way whirlwind and Lupe Flores hanging a rattlesnake belly-up on a bush. “Rain sign ... dry-weather sign. They’re great ones for superstition, these Mexicans.”

  He could sense worry in Mary’s voice. “Charlie, do you think Teofilo could be right?”

  “It’s just a foolish superstition.”

  “It has been a long time since it rained. Somehow I have a bad feeling.”

  Charlie shifted his boots on the stool, his spurs jingling a little. “You’re turnin’ as spooky as them Mexicans.”

  He sat silently a while, breathing the good cool air. He began to notice the dry smell of dust in it. Sheep had stirred a lot of ground today; now the wind was picking it up.

  Well, a shower would fix that. They ought to be due a shower any day now.

  He happened to glance up at the black sky. “Looky there, will you, at that quarter moon! It’s standin’ on end to let the water run out. I tell you, woman, that’s a sure sign of rain.”

  Chapter Four

  CHARLIE NEVER KNEW FOR SURE HOW SOME OF THE rocks would roll down off that cairn on top of Warrior Hill. There hadn’t been any rain to wash them down. He reasoned that livestock walking this way probably dislodged them from time to time. He had considered putting up a little protective fence, but somehow the idea of a fence didn’t seem to fit for an Indian who had spent his life free and unfettered. Fences were an invention of the white man, built to keep other people out but at the same time locking himself in.

  Charlie picked up the fallen rocks and carefully put them back into their proper places. He had promised old August Schmidt that he would keep up this grave just as August had kept it. At first it had given him a queasy feeling, but in time he had come to enjoy an occasional climb up here. From on top of this hill he could see every part of his ranch, and far beyond it. Gradually, as he had come to love this land the way August had loved it, he began also to feel a kinship to this Indian, who must have loved it more than either of them.