That Old Ace in the Hole

by Annie Proulx

  “Ja,” said Habakuk. “I need pencil, paper. I write them mills down, where, pasture, number, how bad, write some records. Mills make money. Daar moet de molen van malen—that’s what the mill has to grind, no?” Although Habakuk came from Kampen, which had a reputation for breeding dunces, he considered himself shrewd and was wary of others whom he suspected of trying to get around him. He was clever, but it was the sharpness of a fairy-tale Hans to whom good things happen by luck, not through smart figuring.

  “I guess so,” said Slike, wondering what the man had said. “Rope, show Milkbeak where he can put his things and give him a couple a real tall horses. Git him some pencils and one a them brown tally books on the shelf in the office. That ought a fill the bill. Take him out there after dinner and start showin him the mills. Keep it up until he sees ever fuckin one. Make sure he gets a full tour. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” And he walked away, his face twisted with a complicated expression, partly sour as if he’d raised a tumbler he suspected was filled with vinegar, partly pleased as if he’d swallowed champagne. A few yards away he turned and said, “Show him the toolshed and the repair shop. Show him the windmill wagon. Goddammit, show him everthing. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  Over the next weeks Slike’s humor improved. Habakuk van Melkebeek was an inspired windmill man, brilliant and efficient if somewhat quirky. Although he was tall he was catty and as flexible as spring steel. There had been a few practical jokes in the bunkhouse, remarks about his comical accent, suppositions that “Dutchman” meant German, resentment that he was getting paid almost twice a cowhand’s wage, but the jokesters’ sense of humor dimmed when the big man responded with a joke of his own, squirting windmill grease into their boots while they slept, and, in his mild voice saying, “If I go another place, you fix the windmills. Be nice, I stay, fix them good.” It didn’t take long to see that the crane-shanked Dutchman was a little crazy but indispensable and that he earned his seventy-five a month. In the distance riders would often see his lanky figure balanced atop a rickety mill, or his cranky wagon dusting across a pasture, and they would thank God they were horseback cowboys and not windmill monkeys.

  After Rope Butt’s guided tour, Habakuk was on his own and often, because the press of work was great and traveling time a waste, he slept out on the prairie instead of coming in to the bunkhouse. Traditionally the mill locations had been named by direction and incident—The Terrible Swede in the canyon pasture, Red Mill (for a swatch of nearby dirt), Short Fingers where a well driller had maimed his hand, Hard Luck where a hapless cowboy had fallen off the tower. But Habakuk painted a number on a mill’s vane and its tank, dedicating to each several pages in his tally book.

  Every possible ailment afflicted the Cutaway windmills: leaky tanks, worn leathers, broken sucker rods (in many the copper rivets had been replaced with bent nails), broken furl winch wires, missing sails, helmets ventilated with bullet holes, motor cases in desperate need of oiling, channels plugged with sludge, tailbone pivot bolts worn, washers, rings and bearings worn, bearing bars broken, tail chains broken and wedged in the mast pipe, crows’ nests on several nonworking mills, stopped because the wheel’s vibration had shaken some of the birds’ treasures—marbles, bolts, pieces of bone, shiny pebbles—loose from the nest to lodge in the water column and ruin the cylinder. Around a few of the mills Chinese elms, cottonwoods or willows had grown, and damn the shade, he said, these had to go, for the roots would sniff out the well bore, converge on it and choke it. And not a few of the mills were the old wooden tower Eclipse models with soft metal babbit bearings that needed weekly lubrication, for years the special dread of every cowboy on the ranch. These, Habakuk told Slike, should be replaced with steel-tower, back-geared rigs, which, with their working parts enclosed in a metal helmet, only needed fresh oil once in a blue moon. But Slike said they would have to make the Eclipses last and only when one wore out “tee-total-tot” would they think about replacing it.

  At the end of his survey Habakuk told Slike there was enough work on the ranch to last ten windmillers fifty years and that he couldn’t do all the work alone, especially if he had to replace the babbit bearings in the old Eclipses. He’d have to remove the big eighteen-foot wheel and two-hundred-pound head from each one, a two-man operation, melt the old babbit out of the head and pour in new. He had to have a helper or even two. Slike nodded and said he’d get him one—somebody. He had Rope Butt in mind but Rope, who was twenty-eight at the time and saw himself as a deep-dyed Texas cowhand, balked.

  “I like Habakuk,” he had said, “but not enough to be a mill jockey. I won’t do it. I’d sooner quit than do it. Whyn’t you pick that kid come in the gate last night?”

  There had been a gangly kid looking for work, and Slike’s impulse had been to send him home to his mama, and he had done so, telling him brusquely, in his hot, nasal voice, to hit the grit, but on second thought he might do for windmill work. Barely enough muscle on him to help Habakuk, but he’d develop. He was skinny but probably strong like most ranch kids.

  “How old you think he is? He still around?”

  “I’d say fifteen, sixteen. No, he ain’t still around after you told him a pick up his hat. But I can guess where he’s at, probly. Spose he went home again. He’s at the Crouch place out past Coppedge’s Twenty Mile. Kind of a solitary place. Big old stone house and a lot a weeds. There’s him and some brothers and sisters.”

  “Well. Ride over there in the mornin and see can you git him back on my side a the pen. What’s his handle?”

  Rope Butt said, “Name’s Ace. Ace Crouch. He’s a likeable kid.”

  “If he can fix windmills with Milkbeak he’ll be plenty likeable to me.”

  It was around that time that Rope Butt had written his first cowboy poem, twelve lines that took four hours to compose. It was burned into his memory.

  Ridin’ ol’ buddy down the draw

  I seen a cow jaw

  but it had a flaw

  it was broke in two

  could fix it with a screw

  and some glue.

  That cow jaw made me think

  of my uncle Leon Sink

  he wore out four saddle in his life

  and four wife

  once he give me a pocket knife

  it cut like stink.

  The next morning he rode down to the Crouch place. The kid, Ace, had been pleased and excited at the thought of going to work, and he did not seem disappointed that the job was windmill repair assistant under a man who twisted the language into Dutch pretzels. Rope could understand why. The Crouch place was run-down and lonesome, the grass overgrazed, the fences mended and mended again into knots and bobtail ends, the cows scrawny and yellow-backed with maggoty infection. There was a windmill near the house, an aged wooden tower that he bet had seen plenty of emergency repair. Though it worked, it screeched horribly from lack of grease and a dozen other ailments. Rope thought that an instructional course in windmill repair for a member of the family would be a boon to the Crouch ranch.

  But while Ace was getting his things together, old Mr. Crouch, who had a face like a gizzard and showed in his every gesture and word that he came down hard on his sons, bargained over young Ace’s labor, insisting that three-quarters of the boy’s pay had to come home.

  “I’m givin up the work he could be doin here. We need all the help we can git.” He waved his hand vaguely. “Anyways, what does he need money for if he’s got board and lodge? Just spoil him, y’know?”

  Rope smothered the impulse to say that the kid might want a new shirt or a pair of pants that wasn’t holed and patched, that he might appreciate boots that fit or even that he might want to put some money aside for a new saddle or a horse or a down payment on a house should he get married in a few years, and remarked instead that he guessed Mr. Crouch would have to ride over and speak to Slike about the kid’s pay. The way it worked usually was that a hand drew his money and it was his, for he had done the work that earned it. Just then the kid came
charging out onto the porch with his change of raggedy clothes and an ancient kack that looked as though it might have been used by the Spanish conquistadors when they passed through.

  “Your dad needs a talk with Mr. Slike about the money arrangements, first,” said Rope Butt, feeling sorry for the kid, who was clearly crazy to get gone from home that minute.

  It was deep-sleep night, the bunkhouse rattled with snores and stinking of cowboy bean farts when Rope was awakened by the sound of the door sighing on its hinges, a few stumbling steps, something eased down to the floor—the squeak of leather indicated a saddle—and a tired sigh. Somebody had come in and was going to sleep on the floor. He couldn’t think who it was—Habakuk van Melkebeek, the only one missing, was out in some pasture with his bedroll and chain tongs. Then a new thought came to him; the windmiller might have taken a fall and dragged himself in for medical attention.

  “Habakuk?” Rope said softly, “that you?”

  “It’s me, Ace. Ace Crouch.”

  “God sake,” said Rope, sitting up and fumbling for the light string.

  The kid was a wreck, his nose swollen to twice its earlier size, his lip split, both eyes black and a gash in his forehead that would leave a white scar.

  “Your dad do that?” said Rope.

  The kid nodded. “He did, but I got the best of it. I got out a there and he ain’t goin a bother me no more. Any money I earn, it’s mine.”

  “Good,” said Rope Butt. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

  “I wanted to but don’t think I did. I hit him on the head with the shovel and it made a sound like hittin a kettle and he fell down. He was cussin and half up again when I took off.”

  “Glad a hear that,” said Rope Butt. “They come down hard on kids that send their daddies to the happy huntin grounds. I’ll take you out to Habakuk in the mornin. He’s out with one a them damn old windmills. You got a bedroll?”

  “No,” said the kid.

  “You lousy? You got lice?”

  “No. We was poor but we wasn’t dirty.”

  “Well, now you’re in a place where you will be poor and dirty. Long as you ain’t lousy, you are welcome a take my old bedroll. I got a new one couple months ago. Never throw anything out. Old one’s kind a thin but it’s comin on good weather so you won’t freeze. Payday, you’n go into Woolybucket and get you a new one and a tarp.”

  “Thanks,” said the kid. And that was that.

  In the morning Rope took him on out to the canyon pasture and they found van Melkebeek, attired as usual in clean striped overalls and ironed white shirt, wrestling with a stuck cylinder valve. How he managed to iron his shirts out on the prairie no one could figure, and there had been long bunkhouse discussions on the possibilities, ranging from helpful nearby widow women to an ironing board and sadiron among the windmill gear in the truck. Habakuk was glad to see young Ace, and said, as though the boy had been working with him for years, “Hallo, Ace. Ik ben Habakuk van Melkebeek. We do some work. I think you are een goede werker, ja? Lot of work in a windmill job, lot of digging. Big deep holes she don’t fall over. Anyway, this well right here, she was never cased and now she got een hole in her water column. And so we pull it. Good you come.”

  “How the hell you keep so neat, Habakuk?” said Rope, looking at the white shirt. By God, he thought, it does look ironed. He looked around the camp, not trashy with discarded sardine tins and bottles like most, but rigorously tidy, not a scrap of junk in sight. A spare windmill vane, weighted down with stones, was laid out on two packing boxes to serve as a table. Habakuk’s bedroll was stowed in the truck cab and he had dug a fire pit and lined it with stones. A bubbling coffee pot sat over the hot coals.

  “Water. Always around water, so put soap and water in bucket, put dirty clothes in bucket, drive around, like a washing machine, get all clean. Easy. Dutch people like clean. Waar of niet waar?”

  “You got a sadiron out here too?”

  “Ja, sure. Shoe polish, razor. O.K., now, Mr. Ace, we got work to do. I got a checklist for every mill, says what’s wrong. We are fixing mills one by one.” He looked at the kid. “Payday you buy a new skirt.”

  “Skirt?”

  “Ja, skirt.” And he plucked at his shirtsleeve.

  “Shirt,” said Ace. “Mr. Melkebeek, that’s a shirt. Girls wear skirts.” And he sketched an imaginary skirt around his knees and twirled. Rope Butt got the sudden good feeling that the kid had a disposition to make everybody his friend. It must have gone against the grain to whack his old daddy with a shovel.

  Habakuk laughed. “Anyway, een overhemd. Shirt, skirt. You get what you like.”

  Habakuk’s checklist was formidable, drawn from his early weeks of inspection, which included checking a tower’s girts and braces, its bolts; examining the wheel from rivets to hub; noting helmet bullet holes; inspecting every part of the furling device, the vane and tailbone; cautiously testing the strength of the wood platform and looking underneath for wasp and bee nests. The oil collector, the gears, the pitmen arms, plugs and cotter pins called for close scrutiny. He was thorough.

  He started young Ace out lashing blades in place with green rawhide strips.

  “When they are dry zo hard als staal. Need a hacksaw to cut.”

  Young Ace learned neatness from Habakuk along with windmill repair. He was a quiet, solid kid who worked like an ant and as time went along his shoulders broadened and his muscle thickened with all the digging, climbing, hauling and lifting and Habakuk’s savory cooking, for in addition to the clean white shirts and finicky insistence on windmill record keeping, Habakuk van Melkebeek had a taste for Indonesian curries and sambals, whose esoteric ingredients came to him in a large box each month. And always, at the end of every meal, he looked sternly at Ace and said, “Wij zullen afwassen,” and handed him a clean dishtowel.

  While they did the dishes Habakuk lectured on windmills.

  “Mr. Rancher does not like a high tower—he is afraid he has to climb up on it. But the higher the better. Turbulence near the ground, breaks up the windmill. If a mill is near a building it got to be high. Make it high. Never put a mill in a canyon. Bad downdrafts.”

  Two years after Ace Crouch started at the Cutaway Mr. Slike took on his younger brother, Tater, as a horse wrangler. At first Tater tried windmilling with Ace and Habakuk, but he was not impressed with the slender stream of water that issued from the pipe of a well they had sweated on for days.

  “Hell, I can piss fastern that thing can throw out.”

  “But you can’t do it for so long,” said Habakuk and knew that Ace’s brother would not make a windmill man. He sent him to Slike.

  Ace and Tater didn’t see much of each other except on weekends when it fell right that they went into town together. Ace had taken Tater to Murphy’s Dance & Saloon Hall where, at age fourteen, Tater experienced for himself what he’d only seen bulls and cows perform. Habakuk van Melkebeek never went to town, preferring to wash and mend and iron his clothes, read his Dutch newspapers and add up long columns of figures.

  Once, back at the bunkhouse, where he rarely slept, “How come you git so spruced up, Hab?” asked Ercel Dullet, shuffling cards like a dog scratching an itch. “You plannin on gettin married? I ain’t seen you with no lady, so sure it must be a whore you got in mind, right?”

  “Hell,” said Hawk Cream, “he don’t never go to the whorehouse, so how could he even meet one? Hab, what a you do to git relief? You just put a little windmill grease on it and jerk off?”

  They laughed, but Habakuk laughed too, and said mildly, “I don’t want no wife. I seen all I want about wifes.”

  It was not much fun to tease someone who laughed and stayed mild.

  “Ace, we got to put a good concrete apron around the tanks,” said Habakuk one day. “Cow hoofs can’t wear down in this sandy dirt and they get too long. Mr. Slike is worried. They come for water, walk on rough concrete, does their hoof good.” So they spent months pouring concrete.

  There ha
d been a second helper for a few months, Glen Corngay, but he couldn’t stand the intensity of work, he did not like curries, and he thought he knew a great deal about the world, windmills included. The end came in a freak accident.

  The wind had been blowing for days, a sand-laden wind that hissed against the big steel windmills and dulled the paint on the truck, ground the glass of the windshield. There was sand in their bedrolls, sand in the food that crunched between the teeth and at the bottom of their coffee cups tiny lunettes of sand. They pulled up to a large steel mill Habakuk and Ace had put in the year before. The flow had been weak from the beginning and Habakuk wanted to see how much it was pumping. Corngay was the first out of the truck and he walked toward the mill.

  “Corngay,” said Habakuk softly, “do not touch the mill, wind blows too much sand on it. No good. Static electricity.”

  But Corngay, shooting him a scornful look as if to say he wasn’t cowed by wind, sand or any metal tower, reached for the handle of the winch that worked the pull-out wire. His fingers never touched it. The electric charge built up in the mill by days of sand friction leaped the space and hurled him into the cactus.

  Habakuk laughed immoderately. “Hij heeft een klap van de moelen gehad. He’s had a klap from the mill.” To him each windmill had a distinct personality and it was clear that this one was ill-disposed toward the disrespectful.

  But then they were one down, for when he could stand up again, Corngay quit, staggering across the landscape toward the dusty ranch road where he might catch a ride.

  Although Habakuk never made a wrong move, Ace made quite a few and had his own accidents. He learned that the worst place to recover from a hangover is atop a windmill in blazing heat. But nothing happened as awful as the dismal end of a rancher miller on the ZZ Ranch up in Wireline on the Oklahoma border.