by Elmer Kelton
Now that Tom and Dolly lived in the Flores house, Charlie found no warmth in the place. Tom usually just sat there silent, his mind far away. Dolly never talked much to anybody. Nights, she sat watching a portable television set she had picked up on the rodeo circuit. The picture was fuzzy because the little rabbit-ear antenna did not pick up a good signal this far from San Angelo, but she seemed to prefer even that to any kind of conversation. Charlie tried sometimes to get interested in the television and somehow find himself a niche in that little world Dolly had walled in around herself. But he found it no substitute for conversation, or for the laughter of children. So far as he could tell, Dolly had no intention of providing either.
It occurred to Charlie that if Dolly was as cool in the bedroom as in the sitting room, he never would have any grandchildren.
He tried to hire temporary shearing-time help in town, but it was not available. Too many people had left. He borrowed Diego Escamillo from Page Mauldin and a man from Rounder Pike. He phoned San Angelo to see if Manuel Flores could work a few days, but Manuel said he was busy in school. Charlie received the uncomfortable impression that Manuel didn’t want to come.
He found a pair of wetbacks drifting through his south pasture and hired them for the duration of shearing, or until the border patrol came.
Big, fat Teofilo Garcia arrived early and set up his shearing machine. Charlie noted that Teofilo had brought only four shearers. Half the eight drops would be idle.
“That ain’t enough men to do a job,” Charlie observed.
Teofilo shrugged. “Is not many shearers to find any more. But with all this dry, is not so many sheep, either.”
Charlie’s own flock was cut to less than half what it had been when the drouth had started . . . and how many years ago was that? He had to stop and figure. It stood to reason there was less work to hold the shearers. Increasingly they were abandoning this line of endeavor for something that offered more opportunity.
While Tom and the other riders were out in the pastures gathering more livestock, Charlie worked his way through the sheep already in the pens. Used to be that he would mark out some of the older dry ewes at shearing time and sell them to lighten the grazing load on the range. If a ewe was not delivering a lamb, there was no profit in keeping her after she had yielded up her fleece. But now it was hard to tell which ewes had never lambed at all and which ones had produced a lamb but lost it. As for older ewes, there weren’t any. The old ones had long since made a one-way trip to town.
In an idle moment Teofilo walked out amid the bleating sheep and stood with Charlie beside the fence. He looked at the open sky, squinting his dark eyes at the harsh glare of the sun. “Brown in the west. Maybe this afternoon she blows up another duster.”
Charlie turned to look. That brownish haze along the horizon was such a common sight he paid little attention any more. It was the clear days he noticed. “West Texas rain.”
Teofilo did not smile; the old joke had stopped being funny.
Charlie stayed close to the tying table, making sure the fleeces were rolled and tied to suit him, and bagged as they were supposed to be. Wool was short in staple this year, and carried little grease. Times like this were hard on the clip’s appearance. The shearers were good, though. All four were old hands who worked with a steady competence, if not with the flash and speed of youth.
It was awhile before Charlie noticed that one of Teofilo’s young tie-boys had picked up a shearing head and joined the others. Of a sudden it occurred to Charlie that five shearers were working. He stepped to the machine and looked at the ewe the boy had tied down. Seeing blood in a half dozen places, he reached abruptly to shut off the shearing head.
"Get up from there!” he roared. The boy arose wide-eyed. Charlie demanded, “What the hell you doin’, tryin’ to kill that ewe?” The boy backed away as Charlie dropped to one knee. Carefully Charlie’s fingers searched along the cut places where drops of blood swelled like bright red rubies against white skin.
“You’re no shearer, you’re a butcher! And look at that ragged fleece! You’ve cut it up like it was a pile of rags. Now, you take that shearin’ head loose and don’t you let me catch you amongst my sheep again, do you hear?”
Hurt and angry, the boy kept his head down. He mumbled something Charlie could not hear over the roar of the machine. That provoked Charlie even more, for he liked to be looked in the eye by man or boy. He pointed to the tie-stand. “You get back yonder where you belong!”
Up on the sacking frame, Teofilo’s oldest son Chuy was staring at Charlie, hostility in his eyes. From what Charlie had heard around the wool warehouse, that boy had turned into a gringo-hater. Probably got it from running around with Danny Ortiz, Charlie figured. Well, that was his privilege and Teofilo’s problem. In his present mood Charlie didn’t particularly give a damn.
“Boy,” Charlie said again, “you better drag it!”
Shame-faced at being scolded in the presence of his friends, the tie-boy put away the shearing head and returned to his normal station. Charlie could see Chuy talking to him, and he could well imagine what Teofilo’s son was saying.
As his blood began to cool, Charlie started wishing he had taken the boy off to one side, out of earshot, before dressing him down. But it didn’t help any to be thinking of that now.
One of the older shearers quietly finished the ewe’s fleece and let her up. Charlie watched her rush bewildered into the bunch and shove her head down under other sheep’s bellies in an effort to find shade from the hot May sun. With all those cuts he would have to watch her; she was likely to develop a bad case of screwworms.
Busy on the other side of the rig. Teofilo had missed the ruckus. Now he came around, and Charlie pointedly told him he didn’t want any more kids butchering up his sheep.
Teofilo looked away and said quietly, “He is a boy, Mister Charlie. A boy has to learn.”
“Be damned if he has to learn on my sheep!”
Noon came. The shearers dropped out one by one as they finished the last sheep in the pen. Teofilo Garcia shut off the machine. For a moment the corrals seemed in dead silence by contrast, though the ewes and lambs continued to bleat for each other. The shearers and tie-boys trailed down to the live oaks where Teofilo’s old cook Mike had the chuckbox set up, waiting now with stewed goat, red beans, hot jalapeño peppers and the like.
The two wetbacks looked to Charlie, asking with their eyes if they were to follow the shearers. Charlie shook his head and pointed to his own house. “Vamos por la casa grande. La madama tiene la comida.”
Teofilo would have fed the mojados if Charlie had asked him to, but some of the crew would surely resent them. No use asking for ill will when good shearers were so hard to find; little by little, expedience was chewing away at the rancher’s prerogatives. Charlie led the way to the house, followed by Tom, Diego, and Rounder Pike’s man Anselmo. The two wetbacks stopped uncertainly to look at the door. At home they probably would not be invited into the house of the patrón.
Twenty years ago Charlie would not have asked even Diego or Anselmo into his house to eat. The line then between Mexican and Anglo had been sharply drawn. In recent times that line had become clouded and largely erased, so that Charlie rarely thought twice about asking a Mexican in. Somewhere along the way he had unconsciously drifted into acceptance of the idea so that now he did not remember it had been any other way.
The wetbacks gave him a moment’s hesitation. Moving afoot across the country until they had lost count of the days, they had not had a bath in Lord knew how long. In close quarters their presence would have been hard to ignore. But to ask them to eat outside, apart from the others, would have been blatant discrimination, and would have been duly noted by Diego and Anselmo.
Charlie found that Mary had bailed him out of the dilemma without even being aware of it. She had moved a large table onto the big outdoor porch where the men could all eat together in the cool shade. Charlie figured he could put the mojados on the
downwind side and no one need know he had ever been troubled. He showed them where to wash in the old German milkhouse while he went into the big kitchen for a look. He had seen Emil Deutscher’s car parked in the yard. He hoped to find Emil, but he saw only Hildy Deutscher, an apron tied around her ample waist.
“Wie geht’s, Hildy? Where’s ol’ Emil at?”
“He is at home planting cotton.”
“Plantin’, with the weather so dry? There won’t a stalk of it ever come up.”
Hildy Deutscher shrugged. “Just the same, the law says he has to. If he doesn’t plant he will be penalized on next year’s acreage allotments.”
Charlie snorted. “Government lends the farmer drouth money to get by on, then makes him waste it on seed and gasoline to plant a crop that can’t even grow.”
Hildy smiled thinly. “Don’t look at me; I don’t make the laws.”
“I wonder sometimes if anybody does. I get to thinkin’ sometimes they just come out of a machine, untouched by human hands.”
Dolly was in the kitchen pouring tea into ice-filled glasses. Charlie watched as Tom went in and spoke to her. If she said anything in reply, Charlie neither saw nor heard. Her auburn hair rolled up at the back of her neck and an apron tied around her slim waist, she looked tired and ill at ease. She didn’t fit in this big kitchen. She seemed out of place alongside the comfortable-looking older women. It was probably the first time she had ever helped prepare a meal for a crowd of working men. Charlie could tell by looking and sniffing that the food bore Mary Flagg’s trademarks, and perhaps some of Hildy’s. Any help Dolly had given would have to be classed as unskilled labor. He had a notion she wouldn’t take any prizes as a cook, because every time Tom came to the big house for anything, he raided the refrigerator.
Charlie made a crooked face as he noticed Mary had remembered to fix the turnip greens. When everybody else was eating cake, she would spoon out another helping of greens for Charlie and tell him in the presence of all that he needed to lose some weight.
He noted that Dolly walked a long way around the wetbacks, as well as the neighbor help. To her they were all the same.
By midafternoon he could tell the old shearers were tiring. They moved slower. One had begun feeling badly and had gone off to lie in the shade of the live oaks. That left only three to do the shearing.
This wouldn’t of done in the old days, he thought, not when we had so many sheep. We’d of been a week getting through.
Even as it was, supper would come late if the men were to finish all the sheep in the pens. Charlie saw Teofilo pick up a shearing head and study it, evidently considering shearing a few himself. In his younger days he had been a powerhouse. But Teofilo put the implement down. At his weight he could not stand up to that kind of work any more.
Charlie motioned for Teofilo to move out away from the machine so they could talk. Leaning against a live-oak tree, Charlie rolled a Bull Durham cigarette. For sake of economy he had given up ready-rolls. He offered the sack to Teofilo, who accepted it and rolled a smoke for himself.
The brown haze Teofilo had pointed out this morning had turned into a duster, laying a golden mask across the sun. Charlie had to turn his back to the wind and cup his hands so he could keep a match burning long enough to light his cigarette. A roll-your-own was hell to light, and harder to keep burning.
“Teofilo,” he asked impatiently, “what’s the matter with that crew of yours? You got nothin’ but old gray heads any more who can’t put in a day’s work. Why don’t you hire you some young shearers?”
“You tell me where, Mister Charlie.” Teofilo’s round face showed futility. “You don’t get no young men no more. Only these viejos, too worn out to shear and too old to start somethin’ else. This drouth, she makes all the young men quit. You go out to a ranch where one time you shear five thousand sheep, now you shear maybeso two thousand. You go to a ranch where one time you get three days work without once you move the machine, now you get one day—maybe half a day. Not much money for a shearer that way. The rancher, he don’t want to pay more because already he’s lose his butt on these sheep. So the young shearer, he says to hell with all this hard work. He goes to the oilfield or to a filling station, or maybe in the Army. Pretty soon now nobody is left to shear sheep but the old men. And with them . . .” he paused sadly “. . . every once in a while we got to stop for a funeral.”
“Looks like you could train a few young boys, at least. Don’t look like everybody would quit.”
Teofilo looked away discreetly. “Sure, Mister Charlie, I try. But it don’t work so good. Young boy, he got to shear plenty sheep to learn. I don’t have no sheep to teach him; he’s got to learn on the rancher’s. And he’s make mistakes, and cut up some sheep. Pretty soon the rancher gets mad and says, ‘Boy, you get the hell out of this pen and don’t you ever come back.’ A few times like that, the boy thinks maybe this shearin’ ain’t worth a damn anyhow, so he goes and looks for a job in town. It’s close to the pool hall there, and no rancher to cuss him out.”
Charlie cast a quick, suspicious glance at Teofilo. Garcia was gazing across the pasture, his face unreadable.
By four o’clock only two shearers were working at a time. The shearer who had dropped out first was still feeling badly and hadn’t come back. The others wearily took turn about going to the chuckbox for rest and a cup of coffee. It looked as if the sheep never would get sheared.
Charlie stared at the young tie-boy, who wasn’t being pressed much to keep up. The boy glanced now and again at the nearly idle machine, his hands making graceful little make-believe motions as he imagined himself shearing. It was, after all, an old craft and an honorable one that a skilled workman took pride in, and that a boy could admire.
Reluctantly Charlie shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his dusty khaki pants. With a jerk of his head he said, “Boy, come over here.”
The youngster regarded him warily but took a few steps in Charlie’s direction, stopping out of reach.
Gruffly Charlie said, “Boy, you really want to be a sheep shearer?”
The lad glanced at the fence; he was ready to run. “Yes, sir.”
Charlie pulled out his right hand and rubbed it roughly across his chin, considering how much work it would be to keep a cut-up sheep from finding a place to lie down and die. He looked toward Teofilo Garcia to see if the capitán was watching, but Teofilo appeared to be busy moving sheep. Charlie pointed his chin at the shearing machine.
“All right, then, you can’t learn nothin’ standin’ here. Get over yonder and go to work!”
Charlie was blue-lonesome the night the visitors came. Mary had cut down her club and church activities and was at home most of the time, but they seemed not to find much to talk about. Many nights they didn’t pass a dozen words between supper and bedtime. Charlie seldom considered walking over to Tom’s house; he knew he wouldn’t find conversation there either.
Hearing the car, he dropped his newspaper on the floor and got up to snap on the big yard floodlights. He was so hungry for talk that lately even the border patrolmen had a hard time getting away from him.
“Who is it, Charlie?” Mary called from the kitchen.
He wondered how she managed to spend so much time in there, and why he saw so little come out of that kitchen any more. She hadn’t baked him a cake in so long he couldn’t remember what kind the last one was. Always had some of those damn greens ready for him, though, seemed like.
Charlie opened the front door and squinted. “Looks like a whole carload of them.” The druggist Prentice Harpe slipped from behind the steering wheel. On the off side, Charlie saw the sour-faced Yancy Pike. Finally, from the rear seat, a tired, droop-shouldered Page Mauldin crawled slowly and painfully from the car.
“You better put some coffee on, woman,” Charlie said over his shoulder, then stepped out onto the porch in his sock feet, pleasure rising warmly in him. Company was scarce. People had too much trouble on their minds to idle away the time v
isiting neighbors the way they used to. He called, “You-all light and come in this house.”
They shook hands with him one by one, Page Mauldin the last. Charlie couldn’t remember when Page had last set foot on this porch. In fact, he couldn’t remember for sure when he had last seen Page anywhere. The old rancher had worn out two automobiles in the last three years.
“You-all sit down,” he said, but Mary stood in the kitchen doorway and they had to file by and shake hands with her first, bowing slightly, most of them, in a manner that was dying out. They held their hats in their hands.
Page said, “Mary, I’d take a paralyzed oath . . . the years pass kindly over you. You’re as pretty as I’ve ever seen you.”
She smiled. “I wish I could say the same for you.”
Page glanced at Charlie. “She’s always been an honest woman, too. Never lies, even when a lie would help.”
Charlie only grunted. “You-all sit down. We’ll have coffee directly.”
He saw a nervous eagerness in the face of Prentice Harpe. Now that the cattle business had gone into drastic decline, the druggist no longer wore his cowboy boots. It occurred to Charlie this was the first time Harpe had ever been out to this ranch. There had never been any reason for him to, Charlie supposed. But the thought set him to wondering: Why now? Yancy Pike wouldn’t of come, not without he wanted something. What have I got that anybody would want?
Whatever it was, they didn’t bring it up right at first. They started small talk about the last duster, comparing it to the big ones of the ’30s. They talked lamb crops and livestock feed while the smell of coffee drifted out of the kitchen.
Tom had seen the car, and his curiosity got the better of him. He came over to see who was there. He apologized for Dolly’s absence; she was awfully busy, he said. Charlie knew what she was busy at—that damn TV set. The hardest work she did, some days, was walking back and forth to turn that dial.
