That Old Ace in the Hole

by Annie Proulx

  “Was that what did him in, bad teeth? I know there was boys died from bad teeth.”

  “There was, but he wasn’t one. He died for love of a little bitty pigtail girl, seven year old. Red Poarch was one died from bad teeth, head swole up like a watermelon. Now, there’s a death I wouldn’t wish even on the worst pig farm man.”

  The old man stirred the photographs, held one of a severe woman for a moment, dropped it dismissively and took up the portrait of Fanny again.

  “There was a dance. We had dances in them days, went from supper to breakfast. This one was in the schoolhouse at Cowboy Rose, when it was a schoolhouse, not like now, all fixed up into a house for two funny boys and the kids sent on a bus to a far-off school, and it was a box supper. After World War Two the box suppers stopped. They got in the movie show in Woolybucket and the diner and that’s what people wanted a do, step out and get entertained. It was the women wanted it. Anyway, that dance. Didn’t get much work out a none a us that day, we was so busy scrubbin and smoothin and brushin our hats and puttin grease on our boots. Quite a rough road a Cowboy Rose and everbody a-horseback set off after noon dinner a get there in time to bid on the supper boxes. Some drove in a automobile, though there wasn’t so many of them around here and most of us stuck to the horse. One or two rode a tractor over. You know how that box supper game goes—the girls make a fancy dish and put it in a fancy box and the men bid on the box and whoever wins a box with a high bid gets to set with the lady that made it. Somehow or other ever cowboy always knew what his favorite gal’s wrap-up was to be—flary paper with a flar in the knot, wood crate with strawr packed around some pots a keep somethin hot, pink paper and jingle bells and all manner of foofaraw getups. Some reason, Fanny come in late after all the others, and they’d already started the bids. He’s climbin up the steps when this little shirttail girl hardly reaches his belt buckle comes out carryin a bowl and the tears runnin down her freckles like rain.

  “‘What’s wrong, little girl?’ says Fanny, or so I hear.

  “‘I didn’t know I was supposed a wrap it up,’ she says and commences blubberin. She was the youngest kid a Jake Ahrns, ranched north a White Deer, the Double Circle near the Franklyn spread. ‘I don’t got nothin a wrap it up in.’

  “‘Well, what is it?’ says Fan.

  “‘Strawrberries and cream,’ says the girl. Now, you don’t know how hard it was to git cream in them days, but the Ahrns kept a milk cow and the girl had hustled around for the berries in the season. They was preserved, I imagine, as the dance was near wintertime. Nobody had a freezer in them days.

  “‘Well,’ says our Fan, ‘I got just the thing,’ and he whips his new red bandanna he’s wearin in that photograph off his neck and ties up the girl’s bowl. ‘Guess I’ll have to bid on it to git my rag back,’ he said and give her a smile. When that boy give you a smile it was like the sun come out.

  “So, in they goes and the girl puts her red bandanna bowl up with the fancy boxes and the biddin recommences. Mr. Kresskatty was the auctioneer and he was good at it, the same old patter he used when he sold cows and it was funny hearin him extol the merits a the fancy wrap-ups and the savory smells comin out a the boxes. After about five minutes he holds up the little girl’s bowl wrapped in Fanny’s bandanna and says ‘What am I bid for this fine wild rag and content, not too heavy, not too light and comes with two spoons, probly a mess a sugar grits.’ He hardly got the words out when Fan was on his feet biddin two dollars. Now, your usual sum for a box supper was a dollar or a little more. Nobody said nothin except Mr. Kresskatty, who said right fast, ‘Goin, goin, gone! Sold to the cattleboy without no rag on his suspicious neck,’ and everbody bust out laughin and Fanny set with the little gal and they eat strawrberries and cream. Fanny told it later she reminded him of his little sister back in Missouri or Minnesota. But the next Sunday he rode all the way over to the Double Circle to visit with that little girl. She couldn’t been more than seven year old. Sally or Susy. He talked with her, he took her for rides, he played dominoes with her and her brothers and sister for he was only a half-growed boy hisself and I think circumstances might a pushed him to man’s estate a little early. He got about like one of the kids a that family. Then one day we heard the fever was in amongst the Ahrn kids and that little gal was sick and askin for Fanny. Wasn’t he fit to be tied? Nothin would hold him. Away he went without leave and we didn’t see him for a week. Deddy said he was fired. The news got back to us. That little Ahrn girl was dead and Fanny’d held her hands all through the last hour and the child’s fatal last words was, ‘Fanny, won’t you come see me next week?’”

  The old man’s voice speeded up and he fairly rattled off the rest of the tale. “And so he did. A week to the very day, we buried young Muddy Fan, dead of the same ailment that killed the girl. There was a song made up about it and everbody on the range knew it and knew who it was about.” And he began to sing a wavering line through his nose, though what the words were, beyond “…as ever I did see,” Bob Dollar could not tell.

  “Sir, Mr. Crouch,” said Bob, taking LaVon’s photograph of the freight team from the manila envelope he carried. “LaVon showed me this picture and I was wondering how the driver managed that big of a team.”

  The old man looked at Bob for the first time, brought the photograph close to his eyes and studied it.

  “I think the driver is Hefran Wardrip. Freighter. Freightin was big business before the railroads come in, specially when the big outfits started fencin. When I was a boy freightin was all done. But my granddeddy done it and my deddy would tell how when he was a boy he used a see one a them trains goin north, another one headin south or east. The rivers run west to east but the most a the freight trails and later the cattle trails run north and south. There was freight kings in the old days like they had cattle kings later.”

  “I thought the Santa Fe Trail was the only trail,” said Bob.

  Tater Crouch snorted. “That was earlier and different. The main one in the panhandle region was the Jones and Plummer Trail, started from a military road and grew, run from Dodge City to Mobeetie and over to Tascosa. They dreaded two things—crossin the Cimarron River and crossin the Canadian. Both a them was treacherous with quicksand and could come up fast. Both them rivers is soft-bottomed.”

  He looked at the picture again, tapped it with his fingernail. “Harnessin up and drivin a big team like this one was a skill and it took years to learn if you didn’t grow up to it. There was a many men could do it then. There’s hardly nobody alive now knows how except you see some old fool at the rodeo once in a while show off his skills backin a freight wagon into a imaginary dock. Them drivers knew the country like the back a their hand. The mail wagon drivers—P. G. Reynolds had the mail contract—used horse teams, Morgans, they say, and those boys had a perilous existence. There’s one feller in the blizzard a 1886 froze to death settin on the box and the passengers never even knew it until they got to Fort Supply and the driver didn’t get down and open the door. Couldn’t. He was froze dead. But I can tell you that on the freight wagons where they used mules the driver always set on the left-wheel mule and he drove them with a single jerk line. That jerk line run through the bridle bit ring of each team and fastened to the left lead mule’s bit. I still got that harness somewheres, attic or barn loft or I don’t know where.”

  “LaVon’s been telling me about the XIT and the barbwire,” said Bob.

  “Oh, the XIT? What the XIT done with the barbwar was show the ranchers that it could be profitable. There was a lot a opposition to barbwar early on. It cut the common range up like a pie where the big boys thought it should be all for all, and the early war they had was vicious—and they called it ‘vicious war’—hurt the cattle bad and then the screwworms would get at them. The XIT used a different kind a war, a ribbon war, wide and flat and the prongs was clamped on. It would prick the cattle but not cut them up like the Glidden stuff. But the XIT was not the first in the panhandle to use barbwar. That was the F
ryin Pan, the ranch that Mr. Glidden himself backed though it was his salesman, Henry Sanborn, that persuaded him to put up some a the money for the ranch. They called it ‘the Panhandle’ and they had a brand of a pan with a long handle, but some old cowboy took a look at it and said, ‘Panhandle, hell, that’s a fryin pan,’ and the name stuck. Mr. Glidden was old then and he didn’t want a have nothin a do with the ranch life, rather stay up in De Kalb, Illinois. But he backed Sanborn with barbwar money. He made a fortune with the barbwar. But Sanborn liked it here and he settled in. Bossy fella, local folks didn’t much like him. He was a great one for public works and it didn’t make no difference. He started Amarilla. There’s a piece a that war from the XIT over on the wall. I got it myself. Found a roll of it in a draw.”

  The old man suddenly dozed a little and the photograph fell from his hand. Bob picked it up and after waiting a few minutes LaVon said, “That’s it. Let’s go.”

  But as they went out the door the old man raised his head and croaked, “She ever tell you how her granddeddy got them lash marks all over his back?”

  “Not yet,” said Bob.

  “Come on, come on,” said LaVon, pushing him in the small of his back.

  “Wait a minute. Show you somethin,” said the old man struggling out of his chair. He came to the door where they stood, plucked at Bob’s sleeve and pointed out a small roundlet fastened to the wall with a single screw. Outside the wind shrieked. Tater Crouch pushed the roundlet to one side with his finger.

  “See that hole?”

  “Yes. Yes sir.”

  “It’s a crowbar hole. The wind gets blowin, you stick your crowbar out and let it set a minute, then pull it in. If it’s bent, it’s dangerous a venture forth.” He laughed an old man’s dry wheeze.

  “Come on,” said LaVon.

  On the way down the drive Bob remarked to LaVon that Fanny’s was a sad and touching story. She snorted.

  “That was the biggest load a horse poop I heard in years. So happens Sal Ahrn was a hale and hearty woman when I was a girl, she married Darwin Lawson. I never heard a word a that story about that Fanny and his bandanna. I’ll look into it.”

  “I wish you’d look into telling me about that photograph of Mr. Harshberger’s back.”

  “All in good time,” said LaVon.

  As they passed by the old bunkhouse Bob rolled his window down to get a better look and within seconds regretted it, for the wind had shifted and carried a full load of hog farm flavor, a huge fetid stink like ten thousand rotten socks, like decaying flesh, like stale urine and swamp gas, like sour vomit and liquid manure, a ghastly palpable stench that made him retch.

  “Don’t you dare throw up in my truck, Bob Dollar,” said LaVon, stepping on the brake.

  “Go!” croaked Bob. “Let’s get out of here.”

  A few days later when Bob came for water LaVon said, “Well, I have checked out that Muddy Fan story. I went to the Babtist graveyard and found the stone of Sarah Ahrn Lawson who died in 1962 at age forty-nine. She was born in 1913. Up in the Bar Owl buryin ground I found a stone for Fanny Wallace Meers, 1904 to 1920. I went over to the Prairie Home and talked to old men and women, and some a them remembered Sal Ahrn. Some of the men, especially Gardaman Purt, Vivian’s brother, Gardie we called him, remembered Muddy Fan, said he had a gift to ride. Then I went up to the library in Cowboy Rose and looked in the back issues of the Cowboy Rose Yippee and there wasn’t a thing about fever, but I did find a small item that said a Bar Owl cowboy had died in a ‘mishap.’ It gave his name as Fane Wallace Moors. A ‘mishap’ could mean anything from a fit a chokin to a bullet. And he was dead ten years before Tater’s famous box supper.”

  There was a long silence. The phone rang.

  “Oh, hello, Tater. We was just talkin about you. Yes? Yes, I found that much out.”

  He could hear the old man’s voice squawking over the line.

  “You don’t say. Well, Tater, I appreciate your call. It’s good a get these things straight as we can.” She hung up, frowning.

  “I wish he’d remembered all that before I wasted two days runnin around. That was Tater and he said he was goin through his deddy’s letters and found one from Fanny’s folks thankin his deddy for his letter of condolence and it all come back to him. It was somebody else died for love of a little girl. It seems young Fanny had a worse end.” But she did not tell Tater’s revised version. Nor, Bob thought, had she explained the photograph of her grandfather’s scarred back. He wondered if LaVon’s Compendium accounts of local families stopped short and left the reader wondering.

  Before he fell asleep an idea hit Bob like a bite from a fire ant: Tater Crouch’s Bar Owl Ranch would make a prime hog farm location. The smell was already there.

  12

  ROPE BUTT

  A cruelly battered pickup and horse trailer came on, straddling the center line. The driver, Rope Butt, spat out the window, spoke aloud the great and dark poetic line that had come to him at sunrise, They say an old cowboy just ain’t no good. He did not force the search for the next line; it would reveal itself. In a region once made up of the great ranches all but the tattered remnants of a few had fallen away, cotton growing up against the foundations of the houses, verandas buried in the dirt, the costly imported stained glass windows slivered by bullets. Rope Butt believed himself to be the only living cowhand of proficiency still alive in the panhandle for all that he was in his nineties. Despite his age he could still do a hard day’s work and had a slightly worn reputation as a good hand, for what he lacked in strength he made up for with experience and cow sense. He had been a real nut-cutter in his day but now he was an old, old scorpion, solitary, bitter, and knew it.

  He was irascible and quick to take offense, could not abide correction or gainsaying. He preferred working to staying home in his tiny three-room house. When he was younger anything could cause him to quit and move on to another outfit. So often did he fire up that the sight of his truck with the horse trailer attached inspired wits to remark that they guessed Rope Butt was “full a quit again.” But it had been twenty years since he had ridden full-time for a brand, for not many ranchers in these days of health plans and litigation liked the idea of hiring an antique cowboy. He stuck with his horses and raised a few fighting cocks to make ends meet. He regretted that most ranches had reduced the number of their horses in favor of trucks and ATVs. He remembered when the Cutaway Ranch ran three hundred horses. Now the ranch belonged to a Minneapolis insurance company and there were thirty horses on the place, half of them rarely used. The calls for Rope to fill in when some hand fell ill or had to go to court came only once in a blue moon, and his melancholy thoughts turned to cowboy poetry.

  As the truck swayed down the highway, three more lines came to him. First he repeated the good first line: They say an old cowboy just ain’t no good.

  Then, His campfire has went out, Though he done all he could.

  But the only rhyme he could summon for “out” was “sauerkraut,” which lacked poetic glory. He let it go. The right line would come in time. That was the thing about poetry. It crept up through the draws and coulees of the brain.

  He had known the best men and the worst men. The panhandle attracted some strange people, from Harvard graduates to crims on the lam. He didn’t much care for the two nancy boys who had lately come up from Dallas, but he was willing to live and let live, for certain bunkhouse friendships were not unknown, though little talked about. It was Francis Scott Keister who hated the two—Frank Owsley and Teddy Paxson—with incendiary intensity, who talked about tar and feathers and worse. “Woolybucket County don’t need no damn fags,” he said. “I rather see the old schoolhouse where many a Cowboy Rose kid learned his ABC turned over to a hog farm than to them homaseashells.” But Rope had bought a red bowl from their glassworks studio and ate his mush from it every morning, finding it cheered him considerably to have such a bright blaze on the table. He imagined Francis ate out of the cook pot.

  Because of
what had happened in later years he especially remembered the crazy Dutchman, Habakuk van Melkebeek, who showed up on the Cutaway one spring day in the 1930s looking for work. He claimed he came from the town of Kampen in the Netherlands and that he had been working in Oklahoma as a hired man on a wheat ranch. The Cutaway foreman at the time was Hermann Slike, a crusty old German-Texan with nostrils like the entrances to twin caves. He’d grown up in an overpopulated soddy and escaped before he sprouted whiskers.

  “You know anything about windmills?” he asked the Dutchman, sizing up the spindle legs, the spider arms. The fellow had too much face—pillowy lips, a big curved nose with a bulb of flesh on the end, eyelids thick as piecrust and brows like weeds. There wasn’t a cowboy in the outfit who’d voluntarily work on the mills, and when one or two were forced to get up on the towers with their grease cans they cursed Slike from breakfast to bunkhouse and, after one man was blasted by a lightning bolt, a Cutaway cowboy had only to hear the word “windmill” and he would quit. There were tall weeds around windmills, good places for rattlesnakes, and a tool dropped in the weeds was there forever. It was said that the Cutaway ran three crews of ranch hands—one coming, one going, one working. So Slike himself had spent many lonely hours on greasy ladders skinning his knuckles on recalcitrant metal and worn gears.

  “Ja. I know pretty good.”

  Slike gave Rope Butt a quick, conspiratorial glance like a conducting wire.

  “Well, we’ll try you out. I need a good windmill man. Hell, I’d take a bad windmill man. Most important man on a ranch if you ever seen cows dead from thirst. Cows got a drink. We got forty-one mills in twenty-eight pastures on this spread. Rope here will show you where they are. You’ll be responsible for mill maintenance, keepin the tanks in good repair. The cattle business is a business and water is the name a the cattle business.”