The Time It Never Rained

by Elmer Kelton

  “Same as we always did. We’ll face up to it.”

  “We’ll have to feed like hell again unless it rains a lot in the fall; and me and you, we both know it ain’t goin’ to.”

  “We don’t know that; it’s got to rain sometime.”

  Now it was Tom who spoke sharply. “Dad, you got blinders on. It ain’t goin’ to rain this fall. For all we know, it may never rain again.”

  “We can’t afford to be thinkin’ like that. It always did rain here, eventually. A country don’t change climate permanently, not all of a sudden.”

  “I been thinkin’, Dad, there’ll be some big-money shows comin’ up before long. If I was there, I could be sendin’ money home.”

  Charlie knew better. Tom never had sent money home, or saved any, during the times he had been winning well. “Son, everything you need, you’ve got right here. I know you been on short rations lately; everybody has. But any time now you’ll see things start to change for the better. I know this country like I know myself. It’s always been good to us.”

  “Maybe things never are goin’ to be again what they was once. Big changes are comin’ over the whole farmin’ and ranchin’ business. You can’t expect that they’ll pass us by.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve seen a-plenty of changes in my day? Times are always changin’. I’ve managed to make the changes with them.”

  “But you were younger then.” Tom flushed. “I mean ... well, when a man gets set in his ways . . .”

  “I’m not set in my ways. You show me a new idea and I’ll grab at it.”

  “Them fellers with their cattleman’s caravan . . . that was a new idea. Personally I think it’s too bad it fell through.”

  “There was nothin’ new about that idea. It’s as old as mankind . . . the hope of gettin’ somethin’ for nothin’ or of getting more out of the pot than you put in it. Nobody’s ever made it work yet. Nobody ever will.”

  Dolly Flagg stepped out of her kitchen and stood in the living room with hands on her hips as Tom walked into the house. “Did you ask him?”

  Tom side-stepped an answer. He tossed his hat into a corner, then dropped wearily upon a soft chair they had brought over from the big house. “We was doin’ some figurin’. Ranch stood a bad loss again.”

  Dolly’s eyes bored into him so hard that he turned away. “You never did ask him, did you?”

  Tom shook his head. “No point in it. It can’t be done.”

  “If you don’t ask him, I will.”

  “Dolly, we can get along without it. That car of ours is still runnin’. It’ll do till the rain comes.”

  She half shouted in derision. “Rain? I don’t think it ever did rain in this God-forsaken desert.”

  Tom’s chin dropped. “We’re doin’ the best we can. It’ll rain one of these days.”

  “Now you’re startin’ to sound just like him. How long do we have to wait? How long do we have to go on living in this shack like Mexicans, using old furniture borrowed out of that mausoleum of a house, depending on your folks to bring us even the groceries we eat?”

  “We’re partners. We agreed we’d share the bad as well as the good.”

  “We’ve had our share of the bad. I’d like to see what some of the good looks like for a change.” When she saw Tom had no reply to make, she went on: “When we were on the circuit we always had money. We had a good time. We were somebody, and people looked up to us. Where have we been lately besides that one-horse Rio Seco? I’m sick to death of it.”

  Tom’s face was pinched. He didn’t look at her.

  Dolly said, “Let’s blow this dump. Let’s go back where we can live like people, where we can see things happen ... make things happen.”

  “We got a stake here. Someday this’ll be ours.”

  “Who the hell needs it?”

  For a long time Charlie Flagg had watched other men burn the thorns from prickly pear so their livestock could chew the pulpy green leaves. He had sworn that Rio Seco would have six inches of snow on the Fourth of July before he would subject his animals to eating cactus. Now he found himself face-to-face with necessity. The low-growing cactus he had fought for years was, finally, to be what saved him—if anything could. He swore some, and he pawed sand over it like an angry bull. But in the end he knew what he was going to have to do.

  He bought the pear burner from Jim Sweet, and he hated it on sight.

  “Dangerous contraptions, ain’t they?” he demanded.

  “A screwdriver is dangerous if you don’t know how to use it,” Sweet replied patiently. “Sure, this thing could burn a man alive if he got careless with it. The secret is, don’t get careless.”

  The burner was simple, actually little more than a piece of steel tubing about five feet long, with a cut-off valve at one end, an S-curve and a funnel-like flame spreader on the other. Approximately in the center was a wooden handle which Charlie gripped with his right hand while holding the valve with his left. Because butane was extremely cold, the tubing itself was chilled almost down to the flame.

  The first time Charlie lighted the burner, the sudden flash and the angry roar made him drop the thing and jump back. Jim Sweet picked it up. “It’s as easy as pie, Charlie. To light it you just turn on the valve and let a little liquid butane drip out onto the ground, like this. You cut the valve off, then pitch a match down there and set that spot of butane on fire. Hold the end of the burner over it and turn the valve on again. Then the burner catches.”

  Charlie attacked the burner with a grim will to conquer it, the way he had gone after many a bronc in the days when all of his hair was still brown. In a few days he found himself reasonably proficient, and he began to lose his dread. But he never did learn to like the thing.

  The burner was attached by a fifty-foot rubber hose to a large butane tank mounted in the bed of the blue pickup. The roaring flame flashed forward several feet, hot enough to fire a dry tree trunk in seconds. Charlie cut the flame back to size by adjusting the valve. He found that to hold the flame steady on a clump of pear could virtually destroy it, blistering the thick, watery leaves so that the sheep wouldn’t eat them. But if he first made a slow, gentle pass with the flame, the thorn would burn back to a stub without the pear itself having time to singe. A second pass would burn the remainder of the thorn down to a spot of harmless white ash and yet leave the pear intact.

  Charlie developed this technique by himself. Later, when he found that many experienced pear feeders did it the same way, he felt a glow of pride for having worked it out without being told about it.

  Though he used the pear for feed, he did not give up his lifelong war against it. As livestock finished eating the burned cactus, he and Tom would grub up the stumps to retard regrowth and to clear the land of pear as best they could. Pear might be a life-saver in drouth, but it would be a moisture-robbing, encroaching pest like the mesquite when the rains came.

  By early winter the Angora goats had finished working most of the live-oak brush. They had eaten the leaves off as high as they could reach, as much as five feet. Unlike a sheep, a goat could rear up on its hind legs, brace its forefeet on a limb for balance and stay there while it ate the high leaves. The live oaks remained green the year around. They held their old leaves all winter, dropping them only as the new leaves began to push out in the spring. To keep the goats in condition without a feed bill, Charlie and Tom began cutting high branches out of the live oaks, letting them fall to the ground so the goats could eat the leaves. The ranch had too many live oaks anyway. More benign than the insidious mesquite, they could nevertheless become a costly encroacher, stealing from the grass.

  Charlie tried both jobs, burning pear and chopping live oak. Badly as he hated the burner, he decided Tom had a stronger back and better wind for swinging the ax. Charlie operated the burner most of the time.

  It was arduous, unrelenting work, as hard as Charlie had ever done in his life. As the weeks dragged by with their drab sameness, he felt the effect in his achin
g muscles. He could see it wearing on Tom. Outlasting this eternal drouth had become the only thing that mattered any more to Charlie. All else faded from importance; it was a vendetta. He found little time to keep up with the magazines and newspapers as he used to do. He got up early and came in late, sometimes so weary he didn’t care to eat. Even when he slept, he dreamed of dust and bleating sheep and mountains of feed. Of a morning before he put on his pants he would walk to the window and look out for a sign of a cloud in the flush of dawn. When he was dressed, he would step out on the porch and look again, hoping he had missed one in his restricted view from the window. The last thing he did most nights was to step out in his sock feet for a hopeful, futile search of the starry black skies.

  The drouth was the beginning, the middle, and the end of his conscious thoughts.

  He often wondered what there would be to talk about or even to think about when and if it ever started raining again. On reflection he knew he and Tom had never talked a great deal anyway. He could not recall that they had ever had a deep or serious conversation about anything other than horses or cattle or cowboys. They had never talked of politics or philosophy beyond some surface comment on news of the day, or some local development that touched them personally. He was not sure, when he let his mind run back over it, that Tom even had any politics, or any philosophy.

  Times, Charlie tried to remember how things had been here in the good years when it used to rain; he found it increasingly difficult to pull up a picture in his mind’s eye. It seemed twenty years since this land had been green with a thick turf of good cow-grass.

  Gradually he sensed a darkness coming over Tom. Sometimes now when Tom spoke at all he did it curtly and with a brooding anger Charlie did not understand. He tried to remember what he might have said or done, but nothing came to mind.

  One day he watched Tom up in a live-oak tree, swinging the ax, striking with such vengeance that the leaves went flying.

  “Don’t fight it so,” Charlie warned him. “The work’s hard enough without you fightin’ it thataway.”

  “I’m gettin’ them cut, ain’t I?” Tom said sharply.

  Charlie studied him in troubled silence, letting his pear burner wait cold. He watched the live-oak branches split off and crash to the ground, each one raising a puff of dry dust as it fell. The goats clustered a little out of harm’s way, waiting patiently for the men to get done. Charlie had developed a respect of sorts for the intelligence of these Angoras. Sometimes they would trail a man and watch him with a curiosity and an interest much like a dog’s, something cattle seldom did and sheep never.

  Charlie stood by as Tom climbed down from what was left of the live-oak tree. “Son, you got somethin’ troublin’ you?”

  Tom gave him only a glance, then turned away to decide on another likely tree. He side-stepped the question and asked one of his own: “What’s the matter? That burner not workin’?”

  “Tom, even as a boy you never was one to fret much over things. Whatever you didn’t like, you just turned your back on and acted like it never existed. Lately I get the feelin’ you’re turnin’ your back on me.”

  “That wouldn’t do any good. I’d know you existed. And this damn ranch, I couldn’t ignore that either.”

  “Am I supposed to take some kind of a meanin’ from that?”

  Tom didn’t look at him.

  Charlie said, “Been a long time since I’ve noticed you limpin’. That foot don’t hurt you any more?”

  “I’ve plumb forgot about it.”

  “Maybe that’s what’s eatin’ on you, then. Now that your foot’s healed up you’re thinkin’ you could be out on that rodeo circuit again if you wasn’t saddled down with all this.”

  “It has crossed my mind.”

  “If that’s what you want to do, I wouldn’t tell you no. I’d just ask you to think hard on it first, and to know your mind.”

  “I know my mind, and it ain’t the rodeo that bothers me, not all that much. It’s this place, and what we’re doin’.”

  “There’s nothin’ the matter with this place, nothin’ some good rain wouldn’t fix.”

  Tom swung the ax with one hand and drove the bit into the trunk of a tree. There he left it. “Dad, I been home a year now . . . a year past . . . helpin’ you.”

  “Helpin’ yourself. Whatever we’ve got here, it’s half yours.”

  “Big deal. What we got here is nothin’. For a whole year now we’ve done nothin’ but work our butts off, and we’re deeper in the hole than we was when I first come.”

  “I didn’t tell you it’d be easy. Nothin’ good in this life ever comes to a man easy. You just got to be patient, and give a little.”

  “Funny to hear you talkin’ about givin’ a little. You never give a particle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we have to sweat like a nigger at election and live tighter than the bark on that live oak yonder, and still you’re throwin’ money out every day because you won’t give in and do what everybody else does.”

  Charlie thought he knew what was coming, but he didn’t want to push it. He eased himself down onto a big live-oak branch and stretched his weak leg out in front of him. “I’m doin’ the best I know how, son. That’s all a man can do.”

  “You have any idea how much money we’re spendin’ every day to buy feed with? It’s enough to scare a man out of his britches.”

  Charlie shrugged. “You can’t starve a profit out of an animal.”

  “Do you know how much cheaper we could buy that feed if we’d get into the government program?”

  “The feed wouldn’t be cheaper. It’d just mean somebody else was helpin’ pay for it, is all.”

  “I don’t see nothin’ wrong with that.”

  “I been makin’ my own way since I was a kid. Nobody’s ever had to pay my bills; I don’t see where anybody ought to.”

  “You’re livin’ in the past. Drive by the employment commission office sometime and look at all them lazy sons of bitches lined up for relief checks when there’s people tryin’ to hire them for honest work. You think they worry about somebody else helpin’ pay their bills?”

  Charlie shook his head. “I’ll let them wrestle with their own consciences; I don’t intend to wrestle with mine.”

  “I don’t see where conscience has got a damn thing to do with it. It’s somethin’ everybody else does any more; why shouldn’t we?”

  Charlie felt more disappointment than anger. “You know how I’ve always looked at things. Of all the people in the world, son, I’d of thought you’d be the last one I had to explain to.”

  “You never have explained it to me; you just throwed it out there and I accepted it. Now I don’t accept it any more.”

  “You’d understand it if you’d known your great-granddaddy.”

  “You’re fixin’ to throw old Granddaddy up to me again. I remember all them stories about how he fought his way through the hard times and never would accept charity or take the pauper’s oath. Maybe that was all right in Granddaddy’s time, but people don’t do it any more.”

  “Your great-granddaddy would, if he was still here.”

  “But he ain’t here, and that’s the point. The way I remember it, he spent the rest of his life with the seat hangin’ out of his britches.”

  Charlie gritted his teeth. “He was poor, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Damn right that’s what I mean!”

  “But by God he was still a man. They didn’t take that away from him. He still had his pride.”

  “You ever try to cash in pride down at the bank?”

  “It don’t matter how much money a man puts together; if he loses his pride he’s a poor man.”

  “Dad, you’re livin’ in the past. You’ve been sittin’ here lookin’ backwards at a time dead and gone. They’ve written a whole new set of rules.”

  “Their rules, not mine. I’ll keep on livin’ by mine.”

  Tom’s eyes crackled from pent-
up anger beginning to find release. “You think the rest of us ought to live by them too, just because they’re yours?”

  Of a sudden Charlie’s weak leg seemed to be paining him. He turned away from Tom’s demanding gaze. “You tryin’ to say you want to quit?”

  “I’m tryin’ to say you ought to listen to somebody else awhile.”

  “I’m listenin’.”

  Tom studied him a long moment. “No you’re not. I been talkin’, but you ain’t heard a thing I’ve said. And you never will.”

  “You’re wrong; I’ve heard you. I don’t agree with you, but I’ve heard you. And I suppose you’ve heard me the same way. Maybe I’ve done you an injustice, son.”

  “You see that, do you?”

  Charlie nodded. “I oughtn’t to’ve waited so long to talk things out with you. I ought to’ve talked to you more when you was a boy, so you’d of come up thinkin’ right. I guess it’s askin’ too much to expect you to understand now.”

  Tom said in exasperation, “Aw, hell!” and yanked the ax free from the live-oak trunk. He set in chopping the branches out of the trees. If anything, he swung the ax harder now than before.

  Charlie was not surprised, after supper, when he heard the front door open and Tom stood there, absently holding onto the doorknob after he had closed the door behind him. Mary said something to Tom about having some coffee left if he wanted it, but Tom gave no sign he had even heard. His eyes were on Charlie. In those eyes, Charlie could see decision.

  Tom said, “I been thinkin’ over our talk, Dad, and I been talkin’ to Dolly. I’ve decided there’s no use us tryin’ to go on the way we have.”

  They’re leaving, Charlie thought, a little surprised that he felt no anger. Instead there was only an emptiness, a sad sense of loss.

  Tom turned to his mother. “Maybe you can talk to him; I can’t.”

  “About what, son?” Charlie had told her nothing of their argument.

  “About us bein’ the only damnfools left in this country, pretty near. About us backin’ down and takin’ some help on this feed business.”