The Time It Never Rained

by Elmer Kelton

  He didn’t drive directly to the house. He cut out across the pasture and took the winding two-rut road that led him to the top of Warrior Hill. By now the physical pain was gone, but another pain had taken its place. He got slowly out of the pickup, buttoning his wool-lined coat against the cold north wind, pulling his hat down tight to keep it from blowing away. He walked out across the knob and looked down awhile across his ranch ... what was left of it. He could vaguely see the windmills at headquarters through the haze of moving dust. He could see nothing where the O’Barr land lay; it was obscured by a heavy pall of brown.

  He looked a moment at the cairn of rocks. “Old Warrior,” he said slowly, “it don’t look much like it did when you knew it. It must’ve been somethin’ fine the day you came up here the last time. It must’ve been worth fightin’ for then, and dyin’ for. I’m beginnin’ to wonder if it still is.”

  He stayed on the hill for perhaps half an hour, until he realized he was shivering all the way to his boots, chilled to the bone. Often when he had faced a decision, he had found it easier to make up his mind on this hill. Today he found no answer here; he was still as much in doubt when he drove off of the hill as he had been when he climbed it.

  Two mornings later he took his customary look out the window before he put on his britches, and he saw what appeared to be clouds in the predawn sky. He dressed quickly and walked out onto the porch, afraid he had been mistaken. To his pleasure he saw that he had not been. Clouds were gathering in the north.

  It had been his observation that most of the best rains to hit this country drifted in from the east, but he was willing to take a rain from whatever direction it chose to come.

  By midmorning the clouds were shifting and becoming heavier, some dark-bottomed and beginning to look seriously like rain. He heard the pickup radio report that a moist frontal passage was due across West Texas with some prospects for precipitation. He hadn’t paid much attention, for he had lost faith in weather predictions.

  Can’t afford to get excited, he told himself. He had been fooled too many times, had let his hopes build, only to be dashed to the ground.

  But somehow this looked like the one. It smelled like it, felt like it. Charlie thought he could sense a change in the sheep. And he had seen the roan horse Wander run and pitch, even at his age. You might fool the Weather Bureau, but you didn’t fool horses much.

  Don’t get excited, he told himself. You don’t count on a rain till it’s floating chips up around your belly button.

  But at noon he was hardly able to eat. Twice he got up from the table and walked to the window to look out at the weather. By midafternoon the sky had clouded over solidly. The sun was gone. The clouds were drifting north toward the cold front the weathermen had talked about.

  When these clouds hit that front, it’s liable to be Katy-bar-the-door.

  Charlie knew a jubilance he hadn’t felt in a long time. He kept humming an old nonsense ditty that had been popular in his younger years: It ain’t gonna rain no more, no more, ain’t a-gonna rain no more . . . So hopeful was he that late in the afternoon he saddled Wander and hauled him in a trailer to the north mill. There he rounded up the yearling ewes that had been in a draw pasture and moved them into a small trap on higher ground. Most sheep were stupid about getting out of dangerous draws and onto safer footing when the rains came. Likely as not they would do the wrong thing, heading for protection of the brush in the low areas where flood water might trap them and carry them away.

  Home for supper, Charlie stood on the porch and watched the clouds until Mary called him the third time to eat. Finally she went out to see about him.

  “Just looky yonder, Mary. Don’t it look good?”

  “It hasn’t rained yet. Come and eat your supper.”

  “It’s goin’ to, though. You can tell.”

  “And you’ll starve unless you come in and eat. Afterwards you can sit out here and watch the clouds all night if you’re of a mind to.”

  Charlie didn’t eat much. He listened for the roll of thunder or the patter of rain. Finally he thought he heard thunder and stood up, pushing his plate aside. “Hear that? We’re fixin’ to get it this time.” He moved out onto the porch and stood watching, waiting.

  The smell of rain was so strong it went to his head like whiskey. “Looks like you could reach up and poke a hole in them clouds and they’d spill pure water.”

  Mary came out onto the porch, a plate in one hand and a cup towel in the other. She sniffed the air and looked at the clouds. She began finally to catch some of the excitement that had been building in Charlie. “You might be right. Maybe this is finally the time.”

  Thunder rolled. Lightning flashed to the north, small flashes at first and far away. Gradually they moved closer. The thunder crashed. Charlie could begin to smell the burn of the lightning.

  Down at the corral Wander was nickering, trotting around with head high, anticipating the rain.

  The first drop of water hit the porch steps. Charlie felt a tingle. He knelt to stick his finger in the spot, the size of a two-bit piece. He looked up and felt another drop strike him in the face. Jubilant, he moved down off the porch and out into the open, looking up at the near-black skies.

  “Come on now,” he cried out. “Rain! Rain!”

  Mary called, “You better come back. You’ll get soaked.”

  “I want to get soaked!”

  He felt a few more drops and heard others strike around him. He stood expectantly, waiting for the drenching downpour.

  Then he began to see a break in the clouds to the west, a tiny rent at first, gradually widening so he could make out the red tinge of last daylight through the opening. His mouth went dry.

  “Come on,” he cried. “Rain while you can!”

  He stood waiting for the rain and watched the rent widen across the sky. Before long it extended overhead. The clouds began to split like breaking ice. Gradually the wind shifted to the west. Now it brought the familiar smell of dust.

  There was an old saying in West Texas that it was a waste of the Lord’s time to pray for rain when the wind was out of the west.

  Charlie stood in the yard, unwilling to believe the clouds could build with such promise, then break apart with such heartbreaking speed. Finally the clouds were gone, just broken pieces still showing against the night sky. Stars began to twinkle.

  “It’s over, Charlie,” Mary said at last.

  Charlie dropped to one knee and stared at the walk, where the scattering of raindrops already had dried in the west wind.

  He knelt there a long time, crushed. He felt something wet his face again and knew that this time it was not rain.

  Charlie sat hunched two-thirds of the way up in the spectator section of the San Angelo auction arena, looking down over the front row of steel lawn chairs where the buyers sat. He could hear the wind howling outside, searching for a way under the eaves of the building, and it made him feel cold despite the heaters running at each end of the half-moon auction arena.

  In times past he had always enjoyed coming to the auction. He almost always ran onto friends here. Today he had purposely found a place high in the stand and studiously avoided looking around him, afraid a glance in somebody’s direction might be taken as an invitation to climb up and visit. He didn’t feel like talking to anybody. He didn’t trust himself to hold up his end of a conversation without his voice breaking.

  A steel gate was flung open, and a near-white Spanish goat walked in with a tiny bell around its neck, leading a set of Rambouillet ewes. They plodded suspiciously, the first ones halting to look fearfully at the men sitting at ringside, just beyond the curved steel-pipe fence. Someone beside the gate shouted and popped an empty tow sack. The ewes jumped in fright and hurried to the far side of the ring, where a closed gate brought them up short.

  The auctioneer leaned to his microphone. “Now, boys, these next few strings are all part of the Charlie Flagg sheep from down at Rio Seco. We’ve mouthed them, and we’
re sellin’ them to you in age groups. These here are young ewes with a lot of good left in them, and bred to shell out a lamb crop before long. Anybody who wants to, just climb in the ring and take a look at their mouths.”

  A ring man jumped astraddle of a ewe and grabbed hold of her head, prying her lips open with his fingers and showing her teeth to the men sitting around the ring. “Boys,” he shouted, “I just wisht you’d look at that ivory!” He glanced around quickly for sign of interest at ringside. “They’re as good as walks, boys. We’ll start them at seven.”

  The auctioneer took up the chant at seven dollars a head. Charlie hunched a little lower.

  God, I bet I owe fifteen.

  He would have taken it as a hopeful sign if anybody at ringside had gone in to look at the mouths for himself. No one did. For a time it didn’t seem as if anyone would even raise the starter’s bid. But eventually someone did, and someone else came in with a second bid just as the auctioneer was about to knock them down. It took a while, but the auctioneer finally got eight-fifty a head before he pronounced the ewes sold.

  That’s closer, Charlie thought. But they started with the best ewes. The rest won’t bring that much.

  In a way, considering that the drouth covered much of Texas and some of its neighboring states, it was a marvel to him that the ewes found takers at all. But somehow they did, one bunch after another, each string selling fifty cents or a dollar cheaper than the one before it. Every time that steel gate slammed shut behind a draft of ewes, Charlie hunched a little lower, and gloom settled darker and heavier on him.

  A ponderous, familiar form moved through the open passage-way at the center of the arena beneath Charlie and stopped behind the buyers’ chairs. Big Emmett Rodale looked up, searching the spectators until his gaze reached Charlie. Shifting his half-chewed cigar to the other side of his mouth, he laboriously started climbing the steps to the level where Charlie sat. Charlie moved over a little on the wooden bench to make room for him. It took a lot of room for the banker.

  “What’re you doin’ here?” Charlie demanded, unable to keep a little resentment from coloring his voice. “Come to be sure you get your money?”

  Rodale seated himself and fidgeted, trying vainly to find comfort. There wouldn’t Be any for him on that hard, flat bench. He had a hurt look. “You know better than that:”

  Charlie knew. He wished he hadn’t spoken so sharply, but he wasn’t given much to apology.

  Big said, “I didn’t think when it came to the nut-cuttin’ that you’d really go through with this. I didn’t think you’d really sell all your sheep.”

  “Told you I would. Did I ever tell you I’d do somethin’ and then fail to do it?”

  “Nope. I just hoped this one time you might. They sellin’ any good?”

  Charlie had been jotting the head counts and prices in a small shirt-pocket tallybook. He passed it over for the banker to read. Big frowned and shook his head. “That’s a long ways from prosperity.”

  The ewes in the ring were knocked down at seven-forty. Charlie said, “This is about the tail end of them. They’ll lack a lot settlin’ what I owe.”

  “I told you that before you decided to sell them.”

  “I can’t keep sheep if I can’t buy feed.”

  “But you didn’t have to do it this way. You could’ve bought feed; you could’ve kept the sheep. All you had to do was bend a little.”

  “I’m too old, Big, and too brittle to bend.”

  “Older men than you have done it. A man has to learn to change with the times. You’re tryin’ to live in a time that’s dead and gone, Charlie. I wish it wasn’t, but it is. There’s no way a man can still make it all by himself.”

  Charlie gave him a long, challenging stare. “Bet you.” Big looked back at him, first in exasperation, then finally with a grudging admiration. “Anybody ever tell you, Charlie Flagg, that you’re one stubborn son of a bitch?”

  Charlie stood on top of Warrior Hill, the wind tugging at his hat, at the bottom of his heavy coat. It was less cold today than it had been. The dust seemed less heavy across the ranch, and he could even see one of the windmills on the Sam O’Barr country, vacant and unleased since Tom had let it go.

  Charlie dropped down onto one knee to rest his weak leg, though the effort brought a stab of pain. His throat was tight as he looked across the remnant of his domain, the tattered leavings after all else had been taken away. He glanced at the cairn of rocks.

  “Well, Old Warrior, they finally got me almost where they had you. First my cattle, then my son, then most of my land and all of my sheep. There’s nothin’ much left now but that bunch of damn goats, and Mary and me, and three sections of deeded land with a mortgage on it so heavy it’d kill the best horse you ever stole. But I swear, Indian, this is where it stops. This is as far as I back up. I’ll stand here the way you stood, and if they take the rest of it they’ll have to bury me here beside you!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  NOT SINCE THE BEGINNING OF THE DROUTH HAD CHARLIE found much time on his hands. Now, suddenly, he had it. The bounds of his range had contracted by half when he had split with Tom. Now, his sheep gone, he had turned back the rest of his leased land to its owners. He had only his own three sections left, a little more than a mile deep, hardly three miles across on the longest dimension. Hardly enough to break a sweat on the old roan horse, hardly enough to heat the radiator of his badly deteriorated old pickup. To a man used to operating far more country, it was almost as if he had been locked up in a small yard, the outside fence too high to climb. He felt a strong sense of being fettered, constrained, of choking for want of air.

  He could not buy feed for the goats, so he had to rough them through on live-oak leaves and whatever else they could pick up. He realized he had his country overstocked, but he felt they would do no great harm between now and spring. Goats were far more a browse animal than grass and weed eaters. One of the failings of this area was that it had become too much of a browse country anyway, the brushy plants overtaking and crowding out the grass and desirable weeds. In that respect the goats would do his place good. If he could hold them until shearing time, that mohair clip would make a handsome dent in the debt the cattle and sheep had left him. After shearing he could sort off the older mutton goats and send them to market, whittling the herd to the right size for his three sections.

  All his other livestock gone, he found himself coming to a greater admiration for these high-stepping, quick-eyed Angora goats. They followed him around somewhat like the black dog, their curiosity lively and persistent. They were bright and proud, as if they knew they were the only animals left in this country that still pulled their own weight. Mornings, Charlie chopped live-oak branches for them. This kind of feed cost him nothing beyond his own sweat, and he needed the live oak thinned anyway.

  Afternoons or early evenings he went out with a backpack rig and made it a point to kerosene the base of a hundred mesquite trees every day. He figured if he could kill a hundred a day for a year, that would be 36,500 less mesquite trees. In a little less than three years, a hundred thousand. Someday perhaps, given rain, he could restore this range and make it appear again the way it must have been to draw that last Comanche back here for one final look. Lately a wish had begun to dwell on Charlie’s mind, a hope he could live long enough to see this range better than it had been when he had taken it over.

  He felt he owed that to somebody . . . to old August Schmidt, perhaps, or to God, or maybe just to the land itself.

  Though the work was much less than he had been accustomed to doing, he found it uncommonly tiring. He would sometimes run out of breath and have to stop before the chopping was half finished. He would sit on the ground or on a fallen live-oak trunk, the ax at his feet. He would breathe heavily and watch the goats go after the old season’s live-oak leaves while he regained the strength to finish the job.

  Times he felt a little pain in his chest, or a touch of nausea. He was sure he knew what caused
it: that damn coffee. With time to kill, he spent too much of it in the kitchen with a cup in his hands. It wasn’t that he wanted coffee so much; it was just something to do. It was something almost everybody did. It had often seemed to him, watching other stockmen as well as himself, that the economy of the whole ranching industry was built around a coffeepot.

  Well, he would cut down on it one of these days, soon as the weather warmed up and he didn’t need hot coffee to thaw the chill from his bones.

  The kitchen was a refuge of sorts. There he was not reminded so much how severely he had been crippled. There he did not have to look at distant windmills that he had long considered his own, or a hill that showed through the dusty haze, a hill that had been his but was no more.

  Times he felt that his arms and legs had been chopped off and left lying there so that he had to keep looking at them.

  He quit going up on Warrior Hill for that very reason. Up there he saw too much that he had lost.

  At first he tried to busy himself catching up on chores long neglected because of their low priority. He tightened fences, replaced some bad posts. He re-leathered windmills that didn’t need it. He curried Wander so much it was fortunate the horse still had any roan hair left. He drove over onto Kathy Mauldin’s place and talked with her while she burned pear for the cattle, or he passed the time of day with Diego. And times, when the place closed in on him too much, he drove to town. He had never been one of those ranchers who spent much time sitting around the coffee shop or the feedstore; he had never understood the ones who did. But anything beat sitting around the place with idle hands, eating his heart out.

  On his way home one day he circled by what had been the Emil Deutscher farm. The Deutschers were gone now; they had sent Charlie and Mary a letter from Fort Worth, where Emil had found a job doing ordinary carpenter work around an aircraft plant.

  Charlie saw a big landplane working in Emil’s field, leveling it. He had never been a farmer but he recognized this as a preparation for irrigation. Dust rolled in a huge cloud. A man sat in a pickup at the edge of the field, his door swung open as he watched the moving machinery.