That Old Ace in the Hole

by Annie Proulx

  “Did Mr. Harshberger do those things too?”

  “He always claimed not, said what got him was the gamblin. They gambled terrible on the XIT. Monte, that was their game. The men would get right down in the road dirt and play at it. In the end he lost our ranch on the turn of a single card. He hit bottom. He said later that it is a good thing for a man a hit bottom because that’s when he learns what he’s made out of. The XIT lasted more than twenty-five years as a cattle ranch and never turned a dollar a profit. There was lawsuits against it for that reason. Wait a minute, I got some good pictures of my grainded.”

  She went into the adjacent room and he could hear her churning through papers and folders. She came back with a large soiled envelope, withdrew a handful of photographs, passed them to him. There was the usual shot of half a dozen cowboys seated cross-legged on the ground with tin plates in their laps, an arrow pointing at a small-headed youth wearing a striped, collarless shirt, chaps and a tall-crowned hat. Another showed the same young man with his left foot in the stirrup preparing to mount a muscular horse. In this picture he could see Harshberger’s legs were extremely long.

  “What happened with Mr. Harshberger? I mean, you’ve got the ranch now so he must have got it back.”

  She smiled enigmatically and said, “That was the Harshberger ranch. This here is the Fronk ranch. My husband’s people’s place. The Harshberger place is all wheat now. It passed out a the family permanent in 1947. It’s over in Roberts County.”

  He took up the last photograph, not quite understanding what he was looking at. It seemed to be a man’s back, raked and bloody, as though someone had taken the cat-o’-nine-tails to him.

  “Is this Mr. Harshberger too?” He held it out.

  “Yes. That’s quite a picture, isn’t it? He carried the scars to his grave.”

  “But how did he get them? Was he horsewhipped?”

  She laughed. “I don’t want to use up all my stories in one go,” she said, sliding the photographs back into the envelope.

  Bob thought there was little chance of that.

  “But I will say that it was a experience made him to get merried and start a family. He went back to Tennessee to find a wife and she was Fern Leake. When she was mad she told it that he had looked her and the other Tennessee girls over like horses. He didn’t care about pretty—he wanted a strong woman with a wide pelvis and he just about measured them off with a axe handle.”

  At that moment he began to think of LaVon as a faded panhandle Scheherazade. She was the talkative type Ribeye Cluke had told him to find but his head ached with the torrent of information.

  Every evening, if the wind was not too strong, Bob sat on the bunkhouse porch and, until the light failed (for he always forgot to buy a lamp), read Abert’s account of riding down from Bent’s Fort and then southeast to the Canadian River and across what later became the Texas panhandle.

  As he read, a few hundred feet away an old windmill made a shambling rattle and, with each revolution of the bladed wheel, a stream of water arced into the tank, the liquid pulse of ranch life. The tank had been in the ground so long and so many dust storms and gritty winds had blown over it that a deep layer of silt lay at the bottom and a clump of cattails ten feet across had grown up in the center. The original corner pipes, set for a larger tower, stood a foot outside the legs, which were fastened to the corner pipes with bolts and flanges. The whole mill floated in the air on three points. The platform at the top was rotted out, a single decayed board hanging by a rusted bolt. Another board lay on the ground. Green scum covered the surface of the water except where the mill pumped in fresh, a waxing-waning stream the diameter of a quarter. The vane had been shot up, but he could still read the stenciled letters MELKEBEEK & CROUCH WINDMILLS. At the grain elevator he’d learned that a single cow needed six to eight gallons of water a day, every day. He began to see the difficulties of the old trail drives with their hundreds, even thousands, of thirsty animals. What made a good trail, he thought, must have been access to water.

  The old windmill quit pumping one dark morning before sunrise and the silence woke him. When he went for water to LaVon’s kitchen he told her and by noon an elderly man and his helper were replacing the ash sucker rods, for the drop was not quite plumb and one of them had worn through and broken. In the background a dark snarl of branches showed the fuchsia blossoms of redbud.

  Bob, reading on the porch that evening with the repaired windmill clanking reassuringly and pushing out its regular gush of water, discovered that the Canadian River, which he had thought named for French Canadian fur trappers, was more accurately named the Cañadian (and so noted on Abert’s original map), from cañada, an old Mexican-Spanish word meaning “a small canyon,” especially a cliff edge along a river that functioned to hold sheep on their range, a natural barrier. Government printers had dropped the tilde from the lieutenant’s report and so inadvertently renamed the river. He thought it a shame. Before that, he knew, the Indians had called it the Gualpa, a name Lieutenant Abert spelled “Goo-al-pah.”

  Abert seemed to take particular pleasure in observing and sketching the Cheyenne, and his friendly personality and sense of humor gleamed from the fine-print pages. From time to time Bob glanced up from the book and looked west across the pasture. The odd dark shape in the grass he had noticed the first evening was still there, still unidentified, but it was too dark to walk among the rattlesnakes of the rough field. As usual the fading light left him with the book to his nose, squinting at the small type, and he stretched, went in to bed, not the least sleepy, to toss and turn for hours and wish for electricity, to swear again he would buy six lamps, a vow always forgotten in daylight.

  He stopped at the ranch house nearly every day to fill a jerry can with water. The bunkhouse still showed signs of horse-oriented male occupancy—spur gouges on the porch steps, dark spots on the floor from ancient tobacco splats, and on the outhouse seat a dark brown stain. One morning, turning off her Dust Devil vacuum cleaner, LaVon said that that stain probably came from a well-known foreman of the 1940s, Rope Butt, who had suffered from a bleeding ulcer and later cured himself with coffee enemas.

  “Wally Ooly, the druggist, told him a try that. Rope seen it all,” she continued. “In his lifetime he seen the panhandle shift from horseback roundup days and a lonesome bed on the prairie to a pickup truck with a CD player and a cell phone.”

  Bob marveled that the pioneers and first settlers had strung out their panhandle towns in such a relatively straight line and at such measured distances from each other.

  “I suppose that’s because they were thinking the railroad would come along someday.”

  LaVon snorted. “Forget that pioneer and first-settler stuff,” she said. “They didn’t have much to do with town locations. It was all the rayroads. The rayroad corporations said where the towns was goin a go and that’s where they went. Nothin a do with pioneers. It was all corporate goals and money and business. Then they sold lots and hoped it would all work out. The rayroads didn’t care about the towns—they was after the long-term wheat and cattle freight charges. They had plans for the whole region, the whole state—the whole country—and they run things. What the rayroads done is break things up. Used a be a special kind of panhandle region here from Dodge City to Mobeetie to Old Tascosa, all tied together by the trails. I agree there was some towns away from the rayroad that people started, like Cowboy Rose, but most a them was out in the boondocks and they wasn’t worth much. Funny, now it’s those little places that people like. A course Cowboy Rose got the spur track in later but it never started out as a rayroad town. Rayroad towns was strictly about money—business street, depot, bank, couple a merchants. Not much else. It was a different place then. But everthing changes.”

  Although Bob was sorry to lose his idea of the pioneers bravely setting up in the wilderness, the railroad theory explained why so many towns looked like the last one and the next one. It was that way all over the west, he thought to himself, and
said so to LaVon.

  “Um,” she said. “Who do you think settled the west? No, not pioneers. Business! First the traders like the Bents and St. Vrain, then the army posts a protect the traders and wagon trains, then the rayroads. It’s all about business in this country. Has been from day one.”

  “LaVon,” he said, “whereabouts would I buy a lamp? Something for camping would be good, you know, one of those propane lamps. If I want to read at night it’s impossible.”

  “You could get a can of kerosene when you go downtown and I’ll give you one a my kerosene lamps. Save you a few dollars. What we use when the electric goes out. I’ll dig one out today and clean it up for you. You get the kerosene.”

  He bought the kerosene at the Drag On Crossroads Store between Woolybucket and Cowboy Rose, watched attentively while LaVon showed him how to light the lamp, trim the wick, daily wash the chimney. It was a success and he stayed up late reading on into the lieutenant’s survey, the lamp casting its dim yellow light on the pages. It was slow going for the print was small and close-set and the only map was execrable—extremely small and devoid of any detail. He kept consulting his Western States road map, but, as its maker had dispensed with the smaller rivers and their tributaries, it was nearly as useless as the miniature map.

  He read that the Bents had built a subsidiary fort in the Texas panhandle, “Adobe Fort,” and he wondered if it were the same as the famous ruin, Adobe Walls, scene of the battle that followed the mutilation of poor Dave Dudley, a battle that marked the point where the U.S. government determined on the willful and wholesale extinction of the region’s Indians. Bob promised himself his own trip of exploration. The Bents, he thought, had certainly dominated the country in their time, powerful traders. Maybe LaVon was right: business interests had wedged the west open.

  And now, in his reading, Lieutenant Abert was weeks out of Bent’s Fort on his survey, down the Arkansas a few miles to where it joined the Purgatoire. At an early camp, after feasting on tender venison, they took sightings to determine their position; it was the only correct observation the expedition made, the persistent error later laid to a faulty chronometer.

  He itched to see the lieutenant’s sketches of the country, which were not included in this edition of the expedition. (A few years later, in the Denver Public Library, he saw an original copy of Lieutenant Abert’s Report. And there at the back were the illustrations he had once longed to see, beautifully colored, and this, said the librarian, was probably done by Abert’s own hand. Bob let his finger rest on a page that Lieutenant Abert himself had touched—a transcendental contact that never failed to thrill him.)

  On Sunday afternoon, clear and breezy, the few clouds in the shapes of cowboy mustaches, Bob felt he should have a harmonica and play it sitting on the porch with his chair tilted back and his feet on the rail. He wrote instead to Mr. Cluke.

  Dear Sir.

  Things have been going along as well as I could wish and I have been circumspect about my interest in the region in every way. I tell people I am scouting land for a luxury home developer. Found a good place to rent, only $50/mo., an old bunkhouse on a ranch here. It does not have running water so I have to haul some every day from Mrs. Fronk, the ranch owner. She asked for two months’ rent in advance. She knows a lot about everything, very helpful but talkative in the extreme. The bunkhouse does not have a cook stove, either, so I eat out all the time. There are a few cafés, one good one. None of them have credit card machines so I have to pay cash. It is pretty much a cash society here and some swapping. So I am visiting the ATM machine a lot. There is only one ATM machine around and I have to drive quite a way to get to it. It is not in Woolybucket.

  I have found out that bad droughts go with the region, this is where the big dustbowl was. On the other hand, the Ogallala aquifer is underneath everything, though they didn’t have a way to pump it up to the surface until the 1960s—deep well pumps and pivot irrigators that let people get at the water and that is what made the panhandles into today’s “breadbasket.” If you talk to farmers here they tell you that they are saving the world from hunger by growing high-quality wheat seed, sorghum, soybeans, peanuts, cotton, etc.

  I suppose you know our competitors, Texas Farms, King Karolina, Murphy Farms and Seaboard, already have a few hog setups here. There was a terrible accident at one of the Murphy Farms places a year or two ago. A truck driver died after he backed his truck into the effluent lagoon, twenty-five feet deep. It was a tragic thing and it did not make local people feel any better about hog farms.

  Water is something to worry about. Although there is still a lot of water in the Ogallala, it is shrinking very fast. One lady I met said “I’m not worried, they will find another source, icebergs flown in or something, they always do.” But I don’t think they will be flying in icebergs in the near future. I hear a lot down at the grain elevator and one farmer told me they’ve used up about half the water in the Ogallala since the 1960s and there’s very little recharge. Some of the farmers take the attitude that if they don’t use it somebody else will. It seems that in Texas if you own the land surface you own the water rights under the property and you can do what you want with it, so it’s like a lot of people sticking straws into a big common pot of water and sucking up as much as they want (although the Ogallala is not a big underground lake, but saturated sand and gravel). Some ranchers and farmers who can’t make a go of it these days are selling their water rights. They call it “water ranching.” It is very controversial.

  I’ll just mention in closing that the entrepreneurial spirit is strong here. Most people live in small ranch houses and drive old trucks, they are conservative and frugal, and at first you think that they are still pioneers. But I am finding out there is big money in the banks and big money invested in agricultural machinery and land. The trouble is, it will all come to an end in another generation as the young people do not wish to be here. Only the Mexicans (you don’t hardly see them) are poor. There are no black people here. Maybe you know all this.

  Later Bob Dollar remembered the bunkhouse at night, the yellow glow of kerosene light, the red blanket on the swaybacked bed, the steerhide rug on the floor, stripped from some old speckled and purplish longhorn, the floor littered with the furry bodies of moths attracted to the lamp. Outside a flock of wild turkeys scratched and gobbled, flying up at sunset to sit in the cottonwood branches that hung over the bunkhouse. He had parked under the tree only once, dismayed to find the Saturn streaked with turkey excreta in the morning. A small colony of prairie dogs flourished near the cabin and he knew that where there were prairie dogs there were rattlesnakes, sometimes sharing the same burrow.

  The violent sunsets came on slowly, faded to clear yellow, dimmed blue until the water lily moon floated up. And somehow, after listening to LaVon’s stories, it all mixed in with Lieutenant Abert’s explorations, the slangy old days of the XIT, the Frying Pan, the Matador.

  Bob Dollar began to see that the two panhandles once had been part of a single region where the curtain had risen on many stages. Here the Indians had lived nomadic hunting lives; traders opened routes to Santa Fe and Taos to sell calico and took peltry from the Indians in exchange for manufactured goods; army scouts came to map the terrain and tangled with the Indians; buffalo hunters shot and skinned for the eastern trade. As the great herds disappeared, ranchers brought in cattle to run the free and open range and the sons of settlers became cowboys. Mule team freighters carried in lumber and fence posts, kettles and flour, wire fencing. The flood of people came with the railroads, small farmers who believed that drought and wind could be overcome by hard work and the plow. Finally came oilmen and flimflam tricksters, government men to tell the farmers what they were doing wrong. Now corporate agriculturists like Global Pork Rind had moved in.

  The states of Texas and Oklahoma stacked like dirty pots in the sink, their handles touching. The same obelisks of sunlight fell on both sides of the state line, both shared out the same cold cuts of wind. Both l
ay in country of metallic light, tarnished brass clouds. LaVon told him there was much cancer in both panhandles, and multiple sclerosis, which she believed was somehow connected with owning little dogs. She mentioned the cancer centers as Perryton (benzene from the oil fields), Panhandle (nuclear weapons disassembly) and Pampa (a large chemical plant).

  Slowly Bob began to think that Texas was the unnamed place lurking behind the song line “And the sky is not cloudy all day,” for often the panhandle skies were cloudy day after day with pot-metal overcast. Occasionally the clouds drew apart a little to reveal blue wash. He could imagine that in a drought the farmers’ gorge would rise at the sight of such clouds, low enough to prod with a stick but yielding no rain.

  There was something, he thought, about projecting territory that worried: a pot handle can come off if the rivets fail, can bend or break under blows and weight. The Oklahoma panhandle was shaped like a finger pointing west. The Texas panhandle attached to the state like the neck of a bottle. It was the northern territory, unlike the rest of Texas, geometric, bony and high and hard-rocked, cut across by the Cañadian (in his mind he replaced Lieutenant Abert’s lost tilde). It was a place defined by its position atop the caprock. As a lone tree attracts lightning, the panhandles drew end-of-the-world thunder, grass fires, blue northers, yellow dust storms and a yearly parade of dirty tornadoes. At night, the light out and limbs composed for sleep, no one could know with certainty that he or she would awaken in the morning or be carried into the sky with whirling metal and smashed wood. So there was an underlying sense of unease to panhandle life. If LaVon’s stories were true, he thought, people had developed a counterpoint humor and a gift for narrative, sharpened accounts that launched ordinary life into mythic clouds of hyperbole.