The Pastures of Beyond (14 page)

My feet weren't the only things around that had been altered by the war. So many of the old horses I'd come home to see had aged out during my absence. Sleepy, BK Heavy, Yellowstone, Roany, Spade, Badger, even the cranky colt I'd broken and named Brown Bomber after Joe Louis, every one of them was gone. Paddock told me they had all died of old age, but I suspected he had sent them down the road to be made into chicken feed. Had I not gone to war, I'd have fought for them, made damn sure they lived out their days on the ranch they loved. Whingding and Bright, the King Ranch horse Paddock had given me, were still around and were fixtures at Yamsi. Bright came up to the fence and nickered to me, but Whingding snorted, which was about all the real welcome I got. I hadn't been home ten minutes when Buck drove up in a new Chrysler and wanted me to open gates for him. The routine was the same, but I learned from the old man just how much the country itself had changed, although I had come home hoping things would be the same as I had left them.

For one thing, the Indians had sold out their reservation to the government for a national forest. It would not be long before the traditional grazing permits would be crowded out in favor of the recreationists. Down in California, folks were selling out their homes in an inflated market and paying such high prices for Oregon ranches that ranch kids had no chance of buying out their parents and were moving to town in record numbers.

And wages! When I'd left for the war, I was getting thirty dollars a month, thirty-five if I rode colts, and forty if I rode spoiled horses. That was more money than I knew how to spend. Now if I took a job with some absentee Californian, I could get four hundred or even more, but a good Visalia stock saddle would cost me over a thousand. What disturbed me more was that the out-of-staters were plowing up native grasslands, planting grains and grasses that wouldn't survive a summer frost.

Even the people were different. I walked down the main street of Klamath Falls looking for familiar faces, but so many of those who had left for high-paying wartime jobs had never returned. And the ranchers I'd known since I was a boy? Gone now, and their houses either in ruin or occupied by strangers. For those who still toughed it out on the land and stayed home, maybe hoping that one day their kids would come back, their lives would never really be the same. Take our neighbors, the Brighthausens, for instance.

Longer than I can remember, there were Brighthausens living east of us on the edge of the desert, and most folks, before the war, grumbled at the thought the family might be there forever. The old man had raised a passel of little Brighthausens on other folks' beef, and I never rode that country for strays without feeling Brighthausen eyes on the middle of my back.

Back in the twenties, when other ranchers got pickup trucks, the Brighthausens stayed with horses. Folks said that the kids were raised with so much pine pitch on their britches they couldn't be bucked off, and for several years they furnished stock for the rodeos, big, rank horses raised on lava rock and strong grass, horses that mostly only Brighthausens could ride.

It took World War II to drive a hole in their ranks. There were Brighthausens that died heroes on the beaches at Normandy, and Brighthausens that died at Iwo Jima. Then old lady Brighthausen froze to death while out feeding cattle. After the war ended there were only two left: the old man, Lester, and his boy Jim.

The army had given Jim an education, and he came back to the Oregon country driving a good, if experienced, pickup truck, all ready to work the land as it had never been worked before.

It must have been a shock to old Lester to see that truck bouncing along over the old narrow wagon road from town, but the biggest shock of all came when Jim climbed out of that cab and walked toward the house with a beautiful, longhaired city girl by the hand.

“Pa, I want you to welcome my wife, Julie,” Jim said, but the old man was so flabbergasted all he could do was stare. Then, without a word of greeting, he turned and walked away.

Lesser folks than Jim and Julie might have gotten into their truck at that point and driven away, but they stayed on, for Jim's love of the land was strong as was Julie's love for her husband.

Months went by, and Julie's cooking was so good the old man developed a little potbelly, and his pants sagged to the point where his Levi's wore out at the cuffs instead of the knees. He talked to Jim, but his disappointment in Julie kept him mean. As they sat at the dinner table, the old man would talk obliquely, telling about a neighbor who had married a city woman. “She never would close gates, thet woman. Let the bulls in with the yearling heifers one time, an' man, those heifers died like flies tryin' to birth those big calves.”

“Pa, that's enough!” Jim would admonish, and the old man would shut up for a time, but gates were an obsession with him, and sooner or later he would tell how that city woman had left a gate open and let the steer calves they had weaned for shipment back out with the cows. “Don't know how thet man put up with thet woman. Musta cost 'im hunnerds of dollars in lost weight gatherin' those cows and separatin' those calves again!”

Before the war, Jim had captured a little bay mustang he named Buttons, and broke him gentle. Though older, Buttons was still around the place, and Julie soon learned to ride. Very often, when Jim needed help to bring in a bunch of cattle, it was Julie he took along with him, and left his pa behind. Jim loved the sight of his pretty wife galloping beside him, tinywaisted and straight in the saddle, her long black hair streaming behind.

Despite his concern about gates being closed, old Lester never made things easy. His gates were simple wire gates with loops for latches, and when they were tight, it took a strong man or a wire stretcher to open and shut them. In order to keep Julie from riding the vast reaches of land she was beginning to enjoy, the old man took to tightening the gates so that even Jim grumbled about them.

Evenings, after Julie had ridden, the old man would drive out in Jim's pickup to check the gates as though determined to find one she had left open. Little by little, he tightened them so that soon Julie had no place she could ride alone.

October came; night frost settled in the hollows and turned the aspen leaves to gold coins. Julie rode long days with her husband gathering cattle off the ranges and came home exhausted, but somehow able to turn out a hot meal for the two men.

The gathering was only half done when Jim broke his leg riding a colt, and a pregnant Julie and the old man had to finish the job while Jim healed. There were times when old

Lester seemed almost ready to talk to her in more than monosyllables, but always his jaw would set hard and he would look off steely-eyed into the distance. Sometimes when Julie had to go through a gate alone, the old man would ride miles out of his way to see that the gate was properly closed.

Most of the cattle had been brought in off the ranges, and the first snows were settling on the mountains, when the old man devised a plan.

At the edge of the field which held the gathered cattle was a gate to end all gates. It had eight barbed wires, all so tight they sung like a harp in the autumn wind. The cold had caused the wire to contract even further.

It was all old Lester himself could do to open that gate, let them through, and close it again. One cold day they had passed through the gate and were riding the range together when Lester sent Julie to check on a hidden spring for cattle, and trotted back to the gate to add even more tension to the wire.

Finding nothing at the spring, Julie and Buttons trotted to the rendezvous point where she was to meet the old man. Old Lester lay flat on his back on the ground. As she approached, he raised his head weakly. “Miss Julie,” he said, using her name for the first time, “I reckon I'm hurtin' real bad! Be a good girl an' trot on home fer help.”

Wasting no time, Julie kicked Buttons into a gallop and pounded down the trail toward the ranch. Besides the old man's health, she had one worry, just how she was going to open and close that holding-field gate.

Once Julie had disappeared on her errand of mercy, old Lester rose to his feet, brushed the pine needles from his coat, and mounted his horse. As he rode on after her, he hummed a happy little tune. At last he was going to catch his daughterin-law in the act. She might open that gate, but there was no way in hell she could get it closed! He would arrive just in time to turn back the cattle as they streamed out the gate to freedom.

But as the old man trotted out of the pine woods, he reined up his horse. Something was wrong! Her tracks led through the gate, but the gate was closed. Julie had outsmarted him. She had tied that gate up tight with her bra!

Chapter Fourteen

R
OSE HAD WRITTEN ME ONE BRIEF LETTER
when I was in France, and she seemed to struggle over what to say. She was in nursing school in San Francisco and missed her horse. There was a postscript I hardly noticed at the time, but it contained something of far more import than anything else in the letter. She said that quite a few folks from the reservation had been down to stay with her.

I might have known that Rose's family wouldn't give her up to a career without a fight. All that time overseas I had thought of Rose as a nurse, and used to search for her face in every busload of army nurses that went by.

I hadn't been home long when I passed one of her uncles on the streets of Chiloquin and asked for news of her, but he just stared at me and went on past as though he had never seen me before.

That night I had driven to a café on the highway for supper when I saw Rose herself. She came out of a bar and, for a moment, stood swaying in the full glare of my headlights. She held on to the hood of my pickup for a few seconds for support, then got into the backseat of an old car. The car roared off into the darkness before I had a chance to make myself known. Her face was puffy with bad health, and my heart near broke with the sadness of it all.

The next time I saw her, she was lying on the sidewalk in front of the general store. It was broad daylight, and folks were stepping around her as though she didn't exist. I picked her up in my arms, loaded her into my pickup, and took her to a motel, where I bought her a room and left her fully dressed and snoring on the bed. She was beyond recognizing me. I had believed in her dreams of becoming a nurse, and the collapse of those aspirations affected me with a depression as though her dreams had been mine. I found out later that her relatives had moved in with her in San Francisco and had partied so hard that Rose had been locked out of her apartment. It wasn't long before she gave up and came home.

The ranch seemed to be running pretty well without me, and my sojourn in the army had made me focus on getting an education. In June of 1947 I enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, and was soon caught up in a world new to me.

The one thing that kept me from being homesick during my college days was the abundance of rodeos in California, but they were now different from those I had known before. Rodeos were getting to be big business with big purses. The competition was fierce and the cowboys hungry. No longer was the arena filled with big awkward ranch kids like myself. The new rodeo cowboys were often short in stature and super athletes. Many of them had never been on a ranch. To get into condition, they pumped iron and did roadwork. Instead of riding for pure joy, contestants entered several rodeos at once and rushed from one show to another by fast cars or light planes.

Time was, when a cowboy signed up for a rodeo he rode in parades up Main Street, danced with local girls at the fairgrounds, and mingled with the townspeople. Now cowboys rode their rough stock or roped, and a half hour later were on their way to another show. Big, long-legged cowboys like me could seldom compete successfully with the upstart competitors who had brought a professional slickness to the sport. I could pay my entrance fees and ride to the best of my ability, but what good was being in seventh place?

I was beginning to understand why my uncle objected to my interest in rodeos. For me, it would never be a paying proposition, and he knew that when I didn't. Rodeo was becoming big business, but with an increase in prize money came inflation of expenses. There was a jump in the cost of travel, medical expenses, and insurance. My uncle made a telling point with the question, “Who the hell is going to take care of you if you get crippled for life?”

Local ranch cowboys who came to town for a Fourth of July rodeo, hoping to take home some prize money, found it hard to compete with full-time professionals who rode a hundred broncs or bulls a season to their five or six.

I had ridden a few rodeo broncs in the army, but now, as a civilian, it was time to face reality and quit. I missed the thrill of setting down on a saddle bronc in a chute, hearing the crash of the angry bronc's hooves against stout planks, measuring off my bronc rein to match the horse, feeling the old familiar tightness of the saddle between my legs, the total concentration of getting ready, the soaring of that first jump out of the chutes when you felt the horse was never going to hit the ground again. I even missed the wake-up call of pain from old injuries as I rode, the jolts and twists, the trickery of a bronc trying to outwit you and put you down. I missed the roar of the crowd if you lucked out and managed to ride a tough one, or the silence, laughter even, or groan when the bronc won. I missed the thunder of hoofbeats and the feel of the pickup man's heavy muscles beneath his shirt as he galloped alongside, and the firmness of the ground as you swung down, safe at last, your ten-second ride finally over.* I missed the furtive glance back at the judges when you wondered if you missed keeping your spurs in the horse's shoulders that first jump, or if you had disqualified by touching the animal with your free hand.

I had saved a few dollars during the war, and to keep my mind off my failure as a bronc rider, I blew my savings on a Speed Graphic camera and some good lenses. I gravitated to being a rodeo photographer on weekends. This gave me access to the arenas, and created new friendships. I was bound and determined to take better rodeo photographs than anyone else, so I developed a technique of lying flat in the arena and shooting with a low camera angle. I took the risk of being run over by bucking horses and gored by bulls, but the low-angle shots gave greater elevation to the bucking pictures.