The Time It Never Rained

by Elmer Kelton

  He couldn’t tell that the rain was any harder, not yet. It hadn’t really started with force. The goats were not soaked. If only it would hold off a while!

  The goats began moving tentatively in the general direction of the house. Charlie made a run at them with the pickup, racing the motor and honking the horn, hoping to give them enough momentum to keep moving after he pulled away to look for more. They broke into a run.

  He wheeled the pickup off to the left and went in search of more Angoras. The next bunch already were shivering. He honked the horn at them, but they paid little attention. He got out of the pickup and took an empty feed sack from the back and began to swing it, shouting obscenities at them in English and Spanish, slapping them across the faces. He could sense the fear that was taking hold of the animals. The goat was more sensitive, more perceptive than the sheep, more responsive to weather changes.

  Charlie had heard old-timers claim the goat could tell hours ahead where a hail or a cold rain was going to fall, and they would move out of that area if they could. That sounded like superstition to him, and he put no stock in it. But now that he thought of it, he remembered he had sensed something vaguely wrong with the goats yesterday, a skittishness that was unlike them. They had drifted restlessly back and forth across this small pasture he had placed them in after shearing. He had attributed it to the natural stress that followed their being roughly handled and moved to a new place. But perhaps they had felt the weather coming on.

  Charlie hadn’t. There had been no sign at bedtime last night that anything strange was brewing. The Weather Bureau hadn’t mentioned it on the radio except to say a cool front might move down from the Panhandle. No severe changes, the report had said. Charlie had only half listened, for he had been disappointed in rain reports too many times.

  He had to fight the goats to keep them moving. He knew some weren’t going to follow. He slapped at them with the sack, having to go from goat to goat to start them. Even then he was forced to keep moving back and forth, shouting, waving the sack. The goats wanted to stop and-face back into the wind.

  Presently Manuel got there on the horse, with the other goats. “Mister Charlie, you ought not to be walkin’ thataway. Why don’t you at least stay in the pickup?”

  “Think you can get them movin’ all right?”

  “I’ll start them. There’s another bunch over yonder a way.” He pointed.

  Charlie got back in the pickup and went to them as fast as he could drive on the open ground, honking the horn.

  The rain was falling harder. Daylight was coming on. Charlie could see big drops strike the bare earth so hard that little puffs of dust rose from the impact. He found this set of goats easier to start moving, and he stayed behind them with the pickup, prodding them up with blasts of the horn. A few dropped out and started back the other way. He jumped out and tried to turn them afoot but couldn’t. So long as the whole bunch didn’t turn and follow them, he decided to let them go. Main thing now was to save as many as he could. A man couldn’t expect to save them all.

  Gradually the muttons he was driving with the pickup converged with the ones Manuel was pushing a-horseback. Now and then one stopped, arching its back against the chill. When one did this, there was little chance to move him again. Manuel would step down, lift the goat bodily and put it into the back of the pickup, pulling a loose tarp over it.

  Through the rain Charlie could make out the dim shape of the buildings ahead. A little longer now—ten or fifteen minutes—and they would have the goats to safety.

  The rain was driving harder. Gradually it became so dense that Charlie could no longer see the windmills and the barns. The north wind strengthened, its chill breaking straight out of the Panhandle. He had his window down so he could pound his hand against the pickup door. The wind cut through Charlie’s coat like a sharp knife.

  The goats slowed. Up front, some stopped. Those behind began piling up.

  “Keep them movin’, Manuel!” Charlie shouted. “If ever we let them stop, we’ll have old Billy Hell gettin’ them to move again!”

  Through the downpour he saw someone running toward them, a gray, shadowy figure in the drenching blue of early-morning rain. It was Mary, an old felt hat pulled down over her head, an old slicker of Charlie’s over her shoulders. The black dog followed her, barking at the goats.

  “Mary,” Charlie shouted, “you get back to the house before you catch your death!”

  She must have heard him, but she ignored him. She fell into the goats, yelling at them like a man.

  Manuel spurred around toward the front of the herd to try to break up the jam. Charlie drove at the goats from behind, blasting the horn, leaning his head out the rolled-down window and yelling, beating against the door. The rain was falling so hard it was like thunder against the cab of the pickup. The water drove through the open window and soaked him. The wind lifted higher, driving the rain in sheets.

  And there, no more than two hundred yards from the barns, the goats stopped. They balled up, milling senselessly, huddling together in an effort to warm themselves against each other.

  Charlie jumped out and ran through the rain. “Don’t let them pile up! They’ll smother each other!”

  But Manuel couldn’t hear him in the wind, and there was little he could have done about it if he had.

  All around the fringes of the herd, Charlie saw goats crumple, their bodies trembling. One after another they died. How many more must be dying in that mad pileup, trampled or smothered! A single mutton moved away from the others to stand in the only shelter he could see, a barelimbed mesquite just now beginning to bud out and promise spring leaves. Other muttons followed him, but the tree was no protection. Gradually the goats began dropping, their bodies a-quiver.

  Charlie remembered the gasoline can. Maybe if he could get a fire started ...

  He ran and fetched it. Yonder lay some dead brush he had piled a long time ago to rot away. The rain slackened a little. He hurried with the can and began slinging gasoline over the dead wood. Wet as it was, there was only a slim chance it would burn. Charlie emptied the can, bent to shield the match with his body while he lighted it, then flipped the match at the brush. The first went out before it got there. The second one caught. Flames swept over the brush with a violent roar. Steam arose, and Charlie could hear the hiss of rainwater in the flames.

  Chances were the fire would go out when it finished the gasoline. But just possibly the intense heat might evaporate the water from the surface of the wood and allow the flames to bite into the dry heart beneath the bark.

  Manuel had tied his horse and was afoot now. At first he and Charlie and Mary tried driving the goats toward the fire, but the animals wouldn’t go. They started seizing muttons by the hind legs and dragging them from the edge of the pileup, toward the warmth of the flames.

  A pitiable cry arose from within the tangle of dying goats. Charlie had butchered many a goat to eat, and he knew the death cry. It came now, multiplied by twenty, thirty, forty. A chill went up his back, a chill that had little to do with the wind and the rain. He cried, he choked. He prayed, he cursed. He grabbed goats two at a time and dragged them toward the fire. He moved in desperation, like a man in a ghastly nightmare.

  “Two hundred yards!” he heard himself crying aloud. “Two hundred more yards and we’d’ve made it!”

  Some of the animals at the edge of the pileup began to see the fire and started following the goats Charlie and Manuel were dragging out. Now suddenly there was a rush by many to reach the warmth. The hope of salvation turned to horror, for the goats on the outside in their frantic struggle to get nearer began pushing the innermost goats into the fire. Charlie could hear the agonized cries of animals burning alive, cries that fused with the moaning of goats freezing to death.

  Abruptly then, Charlie stopped fighting it. “Mary,” he half-shouted in anguish, “they saved me, but I can’t save them!” He stood there with his shoulders slumped in despair, his chest heaving in a pa
inful struggle for breath. He looked upon the miserable huddles of death and felt too shattered even to cry.

  Manuel was sobbing, still carrying on the struggle, his tears washed away by the rain that pelted his face.

  Charlie was aware of two more people running toward them from the big barn—Kathy Mauldin and Diego Escamillo.

  Kathy took a long look at the frightful scene, then turned her back on it. Head down, she said, “Looks like we’re too late, Uncle Charlie.”

  He summoned voice from deep inside. It didn’t sound like his own. “You came; that’s what matters.”

  Mary moved up to Charlie, her old hat wilted, the sodden brim hanging down and almost covering her face. For a long time they stood together but not quite touching, trembling from the cold, helplessly watching the struggle of those goats that remained alive. When this was over they would be lucky to have one left out of three, or one out of five.

  Kathy put her arms around Manuel, and the two young people leaned their heads together, saying nothing.

  Charlie watched them a moment, shaking his head. He had been through his hell already; theirs might not yet have started.

  He found his voice. “Rain’s comin’ even harder. We’d just as well get out of it.”

  Manuel trembled. Charlie wondered whether it came from cold or from emotion. “After all the time you waited for rain, Mister Charlie . . . why did it have to come like this?”

  “I’ve lived through other drouths, son. They usually break hard.”

  “But why? It already robbed you of most everything you owned. Why take what little you have left?”

  Numb, Charlie said, “I’m not a prayin’ man, especially. I couldn’t claim to know. In olden times when the Indians really wanted somethin’ they made a sacrifice. Maybe this was our sacrifice. Maybe now we’ll get the rains.”

  “What good will they do you? You can’t start again.”

  Charlie lifted Mary’s heavy hat brim and looked at her eyes. He saw little hope there now, but he remembered other times when there had been little hope. He knew how it would be. Today those blue eyes would cry. Tomorrow the life would start showing again, and they would begin to hope, to calculate, to plan.

  “There’s still the land,” Charlie said, more to Mary than to Manuel. “A man can always start again. A man always has to.”

  He didn’t think what he said was reaching her now, but it would. Tomorrow it would.

  Diego drove the Mauldin pickup down from the barn, a long trailer behind it that he and Kathy had used to haul their horses here. He began grabbing up live goats and shoving them into the trailer, motioning for Manuel to help him, and Kathy. They would haul the goats up to the barns a load at a time. They would save some that way. Not most, not even half, but some.

  Charlie knew he could be no help. He was incredibly tired now, and chilled to the bone. He laid his heavy arm around Mary’s shoulder. “I think me and you need some hot coffee. Come on, woman, let’s go to the house.”

  He turned his back on all he had lost, and they walked together through the cold rain.

  Afterword

  ELMER KELTON IS A SON OF THE WEST TEXAS RANCH country that he brings so vividly to life in his fiction. Born on a ranch in Andrews County, Kelton grew up among stockmen and dryland farmers. He left his native precincts for military service during World War II, but after acquiring a degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, he returned to West Texas to pursue newspaper work. From 1968 to 1990 he was associate editor of Livestock Weekly, published in San Angelo. In his spare time Kelton writes fiction—in all, more than three dozen novels since 1955. He has written formula western novels, and he has written “serious” western novels. Six of his books have won prizes and awards of various kinds. But Kelton has said that, of all his works, The Time It Never Rained is his favorite because “it was the most personal one I’ve ever done.” It is my favorite, too. And the reason it is my favorite is its central character, Charlie Flagg.

  Charlie is one of the most remarkable and memorable characters I have encountered in twentieth-century American fiction. I will readily corroborate Kelton’s experience, recounted in his introduction, that many readers have believed the character of Charlie to be based upon their fathers. When I first read The Time It Never Rained several years ago, Charlie’s integrity and stubbornness reminded me of my father; he was a farmer rather than a rancher, but he loved and fought and suffered with the land very much as Charlie did. Just recently an older student, at my urging, read the novel. She immediately became convinced that Charlie was modeled after her father-in-law, who had ranched down in the San Saba country during the great drouth of the 1950s, and no amount of diplomatic argument on my part could convince her otherwise.

  Westerners—Texans, in particular—tend to identify strongly with Charlie Flagg and with what he represents. Charlie is, to use J. Frank Dobie’s phrase, “out of the old rock.” He embodies what we believe were the best qualities of the legendary Texan rancher: strength of will, independence, self-sufficiency. He loves and respects the land, harsh and unyielding as it is. His sense of right does not waver. He opposes equally the inert, clotted force of bureaucratic regulation and the evil of untrammeled power that too often crushes the powerless. Part of the appeal of Charlie lies in the fact that he is an anachronism, one of the last survivors of a dying breed. He springs from an older, better time—a time when, it is widely thought, our forebears acted from a deep conviction that seems increasingly implausible in the gray, ambiguous morality of the modern world. Charlie is our symbolic father, and we honor him for his courage. As we turn the novel’s pages, we can only affirm the cliché: they don’t make men like Charlie Flagg anymore.

  But while Charlie may be a genuine hero, commanding our respect and admiration, he is also a thoroughly believable human being. He is sketched in the novel with warts and wrinkles intact; his flaws show clearly. Far from being the slim young giant that Owen Wister’s The Virginian branded into the American consciousness as the cowboy archetype, Charlie is old and overweight. He is contrary and more than a touch cantankerous, taking secret delight in his reputation as someone who is different. Most disturbing are Charlie’s difficulties in communicating with his wife, Mary, and with Mexican-Americans. The cowboy’s code is essentially a masculine code, and it offers few helpful guidelines for the interaction of male and female. The tension of those long, silent evenings when Charlie and Mary speak hardly a half-dozen words to each other is excruciating; such scenes provide a striking illustration of what Larry McMurtry has called the “domestic tragedy” of the ranch household. Charlie’s position as el patrón among the brown underclass of the area inevitably generates a degree of condescension on his part. Though he treats Mexican-Americans kindly and his relationship with Manuel Flores ends happily, he is unquestionably guilty of the paternalistic attitude of which Manuel accuses him.

  So Charlie is no saint. He is, however, a man of principles—of principles rooted in the West Texas land and culture. His unbending resistance to federal drouth relief issues from the rancher’s fierce self-reliance and a suspicion of interference from outlanders bred of generations of proud isolation. But it would be a mistake, I think, to read into the novel a specific political message—that all government aid should be sternly and righteously rejected. The real lesson of Charlie’s story is that, no matter the circumstances of our lives, we should never give up. “Minute a man quits tryin’, he’s blowed up,” says Charlie: “A man had to make his try, and when that didn’t work he had to try something else. Try and keep trying. Endure, and try again.” At novel’s end there appears little hope for a new beginning—at least not for Charlie. He is too old and too debilitated. But he has triumphed nonetheless; he has endured. The future of Charlie’s beloved region is deeded to Kathy and Manuel, who becomes Charlie’s spiritual son, filling a role that his biological son Tom has, for the present anyway, abdicated.

  Though the people of the novel constitute its most i
mpressive aspect, other elements of The Time It Never Rained were also fashioned by an expert craftsman. The narrative spans several years, but plot development never seems halting or disjointed. Time passes, the seasons come and go, and gradually the cumulative weight of the drouth’s disastrous impact sinks deeply in the reader’s consciousness. Kelton’s style, in this novel as in the rest of his fiction, is beautifully understated. He has mastered the West Texas stockman’s laconic, pithy way of speaking better than any writer I know of. That manner of speech is shown best in the book’s colorful dialogue. But even in the third-person narration enough of it is injected to suggest the rhythm and flavor of the region—without becoming annoying dialect.

  Deservedly, The Time It Never Rained has been widely acclaimed for its high merit as a work of literary art. Upon its original publication in 1973, the book won both a Spur Award from Western Writers of America and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. In 1982 Jon Tuska (writing in The American West in Fiction) adjudged it to be “one of the dozen or so best novels written by an American in this century.” Lack of space permits neither a defense nor a denial of Tuska’s claim, but it is a judgment for readers to ponder. At the very least, I believe those who have come this far will acknowledge that The Time It Never Rained is one of the major achievements of recent Texas literature.

  TOM PILKINGTON

  Tarleton State University

  Stephenville, Texas