“We’re not going to teach you how to be world champions in three days,” Rope says. “We’re going to teach you how to practice. Learning how to practice is how we end up learning how to bulldog, because I’m not going to be able to be your coach. Dad isn’t going to be able to be your coach. You’re going to have to be your coach. And when you go home, and a steer gets you down underneath him, you’re going to have to be able to say to yourself: ‘OK. Now what did I do wrong?’ ”
At 3:00 p.m. the machines are put away, and the students are introduced to real steers. They’re Mexican cattle, called corriente—common, cheap, inferior—in their homeland. Hernán Cortés landed their ancestors on the eastern shore of Mexico, and their breed has been improved not at all in the past four hundred years. Their lean, lanky bodies and bony, homely faces betray their kinship to the old Texas longhorns, although their own horns aren’t unusually long.
“They’re tough, tough, tough cattle,” Ron Wilkinson says. “They’re tough little cattle from a tough country.”
A student gets into the chute with a steer and gets a hold on his horns. When the gate opens, the steer and his would-be dogger take off together down the arena. Another student grabs the animal’s tail and hangs on as a sort of brake. Some of these encounters turn into wrestling matches, often with the steer on top.
Jim Wilton, another ex-student of Butch’s, who has come down from Toronto to help with the school, hollers Canadian-accented encouragement to the boys.
Why does a fellow willingly submit himself to this sort of ruction?
Jim grins. “You’d think a lot of them would say, ‘Naw, this isn’t for me,’ but once you try it, it’s hard to keep from doing it. I would say conservatively that 75 percent of the guys at this school will keep going. It’s the macho event of the rodeo, you see. The big guys, the guys who are too big to ride bucking horses and bulls, they do well in it. And even if you lose, you get to go to the dance with mud on your clothes.”
Rope is a patient teacher. He concentrates his attention on each student and vividly explains what he’s doing wrong. He remembers what each one has done earlier in the day, and addresses each by name without having to consult notes. By 5:00 p.m. his charges are filthy and dragging, but Rope sends them back to the Steer Saver for more practice. He rides on the tailgate of the pickup, closely watching each take his last exhausted turn.
“They’ll be better in the morning than they are now,” Butch says. “They improve overnight. I’ve never figured out how. They’ll go in tonight and they’ll take a shower and eat and sit on the bed, and they’ll talk. And they’ll come in tomorrow, and we’ll warm them up a little bit, and they’ll all do better.”
Saturday morning, everybody’s wearing clean shirts and jeans. Several of the young men are inserting a pinch of Skoal or Copenhagen between cheek and gum. Rope asks: “Is anybody sore?”
Silence.
They resume their crazy game, chasing the Steer Saver around the arena on the Sure Catch. The students are more talkative today, though not much.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
“How’s it going?”
“Pretty good.”
“You done bulldogging before?”
“Yeah. But I’m used to a whole different style, you know. When I get hold of the head, I just want to crank it in, and I’m getting the hell beat out of me. But it’s going OK. Maybe I can come to a happy medium between the two styles, know what I mean? It’s a good school.”
He’s Tim Moorhead. He drove eleven hours from Montgomery, Alabama, to attend the school. He says he has thrown steers in practice, but hasn’t yet competed in a rodeo. “I was running with a PRC [professional rodeo cowboy] named Terry Kelly for a while. He got me interested. I didn’t touch my first steer until last year. At thirty years old. I went to another school in Alabama, and that was brutal. Oooh, man! That was steer-wrestling boot camp there. They started out with fifteen students and wound up with six on Sunday. I was black and blue all up my legs. I had a steer horn rip my pants and cut my leg. I got kicked right here. I had a big cut over here. I was bleeding. I went through hell. I didn’t get that kind of brutal treatment in the Marine Corps.”
“Why do you want to do this?”
“I just got bored. I grew up playing football from the time I was seven years old, then I went into the Marines. I missed the physical contact. I’ve had two lower-back surgeries. I’ve broken just about every major bone in my body. But I can’t stay away from something like this, know what I mean? I got to running with Terry, and he asked me if I wanted to throw a few on the ground, and I just loved it. The first time that steer hit the ground, I was hooked. And coming off the horse! That’s like a high!”
Among bulldoggers, coming off the horse is called “going in the hole.” Later on this day, some of the students will “go in the hole” for the first time in their lives. “A lot of these boys out here are scared,” Tim says. “You can see a lot of bad crashes among beginners. But the ground doesn’t hurt that bad.”
He lights a cigarette. “You have to sort of like pain to do this. Plus the women. That’s another point entirely. Women like anything that’s physical, I think. Know what I mean?”
While the beginners continue to work with the Steer Saver and the Sure Catch, Rope divides the advanced students into teams of two to work with the steers again. When the first steer bursts from the chute and the guys grab him, Rope yells: “Yeah! Yeah! I like it! We’re getting things done this morning!”
Butch was right. The boys are better than they were yesterday. “You thought I was fibbing to you yesterday, didn’t you?” he says. “It’s a little amazing.”
Rope is bright-eyed and cheerful. “Get your elbow up and drop down to your butt one time for me, Pecos!” he yells, as Pecos is being steer-handled about the arena. “Good job! Good job! There you go!”
At the other end of the arena, Ron is supervising the work of the beginners on the Steer Saver. One of them jumps from the Sure Catch, misses the Steer Saver, and hits the ground on his shoulder. Ron runs to him.
“You OK?”
The boy jumps up. “Yep.” He walks away and goes back to work.
“Ah, that thing called youth,” Ron says.
After lunch, the school moves on to the acid test: bull-dogging from horseback. It’s a different story entirely from everything they’ve done so far. When the steers and the horses leave their chutes, they’ll be running thirty to thirty-five miles per hour. The boys must jump from the back of one to the back of the other.
The corriente steers run like coyotes, so fast that the first five or six riders can’t “go in the hole.”
“We either need slower cattle or faster horses,” one of the students says. Finally, Steve Brady from Liberty, Mississippi, throws one, and a cheer goes up. But the next boy almost falls off the horse when it bolts from the chute. The boy’s so busy trying to stay aboard that he can’t begin to think about “going in the hole.” Then he falls in front of the steer, and the steer runs over him.
Rope hollers: “You’ve got to tell me if you’ve never ridden a horse before! I can’t tell that just by looking a you!”
The boy is slow getting up. He walks stoically back to the fence. Rope says: “Pardner, you didn’t tell me you don’t know how to ride. Riding is part of this bulldogging, OK?”
The boy nods.
By 2:15 p.m., more and more of the students are requiring help to get off the ground, and the steers are strutting about as if they’re in charge. Some are bucking like jackrabbits. You can almost hear them thinking, “I’m bad! I’m bad!”
Some of the riders can’t bring themselves to leave the horse and make a try for the steer. “We got to move out of that saddle, folks, from Point A to Point B!” Rope yells. “That’s what it’s all about!” Are you willing to make a commitment to me to drop in that hole and go from Point A to Point B? You been kind of weakening on me, and right now’s the time to get that squared around
! On the next steer I want Jeff! You ready, Jeff?”
“I… I…I guess.”
“I don’t want to hear ‘I guess.’ Are you ready?”
“Yeah.”
As the boys each throw their first steer, the only sign of pride that they allow themselves is a big grin. But there’s much camaraderie among them now. They’re no longer strangers. Rope grins, too. “Every guy today who was a virgin, I broke him in,” he says.
At the end of the day, he names several whom he wants to appear at 9:30 Sunday morning to work some more on the Steer Saver. The others don’t have to come until ten.
“Get some sleep,” he tells them. “Don’t stay out in the bars too late.”
Two guys don’t show up for the third day. “They had enough,” Ron says. “It was not what they thought it was going to be. It was a little bit too much. A little bit scary. They make it through the Steer Saver and do OK going off of the Sure Catch, but when they back those horses in there and start running those live cattle, that’s a whole different game. One boy yesterday, he just told me, ‘Ronnie, I’m just scared to death.’ And I said, ‘Well, let me tell you something. Nobody here is going to make you get down. And if you don’t like it, if you don’t want to, you just get a good night’s sleep and see how you feel in the morning. If you decide you want to run cattle in the morning, come back.’ But he didn’t show up.”
A third student’s back is hurting too much for him to continue. But the others are on horseback. Several show marked improvement, but by 2:30, some haven’t yet brought themselves to “go in the hole.”
Tim Moorhead, who has had the two back surgeries, goes, but misses his steer. He lands on his head and turns a flip. He doesn’t get up. He lies very still. Several of the guys group around him, asking questions. Finally, he rises and walks over to the stands and sits down. The others applaud in relief.
“How you doing?”
“All right, I guess.”
“Did you hurt your back?”
“Yeah. Upper back, though. Right between the shoulder blades.”
“You turned a flip out there.”
“I did something. I sure didn’t bulldog right, that’s for sure. Man. It felt like a dream when I was first laying out there.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“No, sir. I’m fine. Thanks.” He sighs. “Oh. My back hurts. Damn. Wooo! I feel kind of disoriented. I’ve got to drive home tonight. That’s going to be a looong eleven hours. I hope it’s just the muscles. I can’t stand another surgery. I’ve broken every bone in my body. Oh! Damn! I’m in pain! I think I’m done for the day. But I’ll be back. I ain’t going to quit. That’s what it’s all about, you know? It was my fault totally. I didn’t come out of the saddle the way I was supposed to. Man, I’m going to be sore tomorrow. Damn it! Wooo!”
“You got a right to hurt, I tell you.”
“I did it the wrong way, you know? I don’t think I’ll do it wrong again. Oh. Man. I wish I was home right now. I’ve got to drive eleven hours.” He gets up. “I’m going to walk this off, sir. And have myself a cigarette.”
As the afternoon wears on, the weariness of the students and the horses and the Mexican cattle begins to show. Rope decides it’s time to shut down. “Everybody wants to go more,” he says, “but everybody’s so tired that their bodies can’t take any more.”
Tim Moorland pleads for one more try. Rope reluctantly assigns him the next-to-last steer of the school. It’s a good steer, and Tim gets a good ride and a good haze, but he doesn’t “go into the hole.”
Should he have gone?
“Maybe,” Ron says. “But he had a lot on his mind.”
“Go and do good,” Rope tells his students. “Take care of yourselves. And practice, practice, practice right.”
One by one, the young men solemnly shake his hand, then walk stiffly, some limping, to their pickups and vans for the long drive home. They’ll meet again, “on down the road,” as rodeo hands say. Some of them will, anyway.
June 1994
Almost every little town in Texas, it seems, throws a party sometime during the year to celebrate some local glory. One of the reasons, of course, is to raise money for civic clubs, schools, churches, or other doers of good works. Another reason is just to have a good time.
I love these small-town festivals and the sense of community I feel when I attend them. They make me think that humankind were meant to live in small towns, and that big cities are a huge mistake.
A Time to Reap
Cheerleaders shiver in the bright morning chill, mothers herd excited children to their places on the floats, Miss Teen Texas arrives in a stretch limousine, waving, waving. A white kitten with black ears saunters down the street, pauses, glances incuriously at the hullabaloo, then continues on toward the courthouse.
At last the drum major’s whistle shrills, the Brownfield High School band steps out, its music golden as the October morning, and the big parade is on its way.
“It’s the cotton,” says Sunny Martinez, who’s taping a hand-lettered sign to the door of his 1954 Chevy pickup. “This is our way of celebrating the cotton harvest.”
“Vote for Sunny’s Ugliest Truck,” his sign says. His truck is ugly. An unclassifiable green in color, not washed or waxed for forty years. “But it still runs beautiful,” he says.
Mr. Martinez and his truck are waiting in line, waiting their turn to join the parade. If noise and confusion are a gauge, half the ninety-five hundred residents of this West Texas town, it seems, will march down the street. But a big crowd is standing along the route down Broadway, too, waiting to cheer. “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” Mr. Martinez says.
He has lived in Brownfield forty of his sixty years. “Brownfield is getting better and better,” he says. “Brownfield is better than any other town I have surveyed.”
Everything has turned out beautiful, it seems, for the Brownfield Harvest Festival and Terry County Fair, one of dozens of such festivals that Texans have thrown throughout October, celebrating the harvest of everything from peanuts in Aubrey and Whitesboro and Grapeland to yams in Gilmer and rice in Winnie and Katy and Bay City. In Cameron, they celebrate pumpkins. In Center, poultry.
In Brownfield and throughout the Texas South Plains—the largest agricultural area in one of the largest agricultural states—it’s cotton that’s celebrated, as Mr. Martinez says. Although the town received its name from an early settler, it could as easily have been named for the flat brown fields that surround it to the horizon and beyond, full of cotton ready for the picker. And grain sorghum. Also cattle. Corn. And, yes, peanuts. But mainly cotton, the region’s big cash crop.
“The Fabulous Fifties” is the theme of this year’s whoop-de-do, and most of the float-builders have come up with pretty much the same idea—the old malt shop with soda fountain and jukebox playing do-wop songs. On each, smiling, waving, is one of the candidates for harvest queen: Patricia Thomas, sponsored by the Optimist Club; Stacy Flores, by Amigos Travajando Unidos; Cara Burran, by the Noon Lions; Misty Day, by the Evening Lions; April Moore, by Rotary.
Interspersed among the floats are pickup loads of cheerleaders, trailers full of 4-H Clubbers, Girl Scouts, the trucks of the Brownfield Electric Department and the Fire Department, cop cars with sirens wailing, fancy motorcycles, the latest thing in cotton pickers, the district governor of the Lions, beautifully restored Fords and Chevys driven by members of the Nifty Fifties Car Club and the Lubbock Mustang Club, Sunny Martinez’s ugly truck, a few horseback riders, and enough tractors for an Aggie funeral procession.
“Our festival is pretty much your typical homemade small-town affair,” says Rodney Keeton, president of the Chamber of Commerce. “Everybody in the community pitches in. Everybody comes. Everybody has a good time.”
The parade leads the crowd down to Coleman Park, just beyond the fringe of downtown, where all the civic and church groups of Brownfield have set up booths—nearly one hundred of them—to sell homemade food and s
oft drinks (no beer, Terry being a dry county), crafts, and the chance to play games and win prizes.
The booths surround the American Legion Amphitheater, where a stream of local singers—both solo and in groups—takes the stage throughout the day. Some are professional in a small way, some semipro, most thoroughly amateur, their earnestness compensating for lack of finesse.
“About two weeks before, people start calling and telling us they want to entertain,” says Ann Hearn, festival chairwoman and entertainment coordinator. “Everybody just likes to show off their talent. A lot of them don’t get an opportunity to do that very often.”
Across the way and up the hill at the National Guard Armory, the Terry County Fair—a separate but related event—is under way.
“The Harvest Festival is one of the big fund-raisers every year for the service clubs and the Chamber of Commerce,” says Greg Dellinger, president of the Terry County Fair Association. “We tie the fair in with it. They started the fair in 1904, and when World War II came around in the ‘40s, they shut it down for a while, and it stayed shut down until about 1973. Then they started it up again, and it’s been going strong ever since.”
In the huge, barnlike building, large tables are laden with more than three thousand entries in baking, canning, quilting, arts and crafts, floral arrangements, and antiques. Samples of all the winning crops of Terry County are on display: cotton, several kinds of beans, hay, pumpkins, walnuts, peanuts, pecans, peas, cantaloupes, cucumbers, honeydew melons, watermelons, okra, onions, jalapeno and bell peppers, tomatoes, turnips.
More than twelve hundred ribbons were awarded this year. “It’s for everybody in the county,” Mr. Dellinger says. “We’re an agricultural community, and this is a celebration of what we do. Every year, it seems to get bigger and bigger.”
Generations and Other True Stories Page 20
