The Last Ranch (22 page)

Other than the town of Hot Springs renaming itself Truth or Consequences after entering a national promotion by a television quiz show and winning the right to do so, Matt didn't find much to laugh about in 1950. Soon after the historic event, locals shortened the name to T or C, which made it a little less onerous to some but still decidedly oddball at best.

In spite of it being a tough year, Matt was by no means unhappy: he had a beautiful wife who was an incredible partner and wonderful mother, a healthy and astonishing baby boy who brightened Matt's day with amazing smiles and giggles, and a once deplorable excuse of a father who'd transformed himself into a doting and kindhearted grandfather. In part, Matt figured he had little Ginny to thank for it.

Even with everything okay on the home front, little else prompted lightheartedness in Matt. Fighting in Korea cast a gloom over him every time he listened to the radio news or read a newspaper. And the iron curtain that had descended over eastern Europe half convinced him that another world war was imminent.
It depressed him that schoolchildren were being taught to hide under their classroom desks if and when the Soviet nuclear bombs fell. Finally, the drought he'd hoped would ease by year's end only deepened and intensified.

National radio news reporters called it a Texas drought and focused their stories there, but as always nature paid no heed to the state boundary lines drawn on maps. Throughout the year with no summer monsoons, no hoped-for late fall moisture, and only bone-cold, dry winter days, locals began griping that the Texans should have kept the damn drought to themselves.

The income from Matt's military disability and Patrick's Rough Rider pension barely covered the basic necessities, and when the water well at ranch headquarters dried up, Matt borrowed cash to drill a new one, which put him into debt to the bank with no reliable source of earnings on the horizon. Additionally, the cost of feed kept climbing. But he was forced to keep some livestock on the ranch or risk losing his agricultural property tax reduction, which would result in a much larger tax bill that they could ill afford.

1951 came hot, dry, and marked by pale-blue, cloudless skies. The ground was so desiccated it had sunk in spots from a lack of moisture, forming shallow, bowl-shaped indentations in the dusty pastures. Summer rolled in but the rain clouds never did, and the relentless sun fried what little grass was left and baked the ground into hardpan. Hot gusts whipped through the cottonwood windbreak, stripping leaves and sapping moisture from the thirsty trees.

Autumn and winter brought no relief, and Matt began to wonder if young Kevin, now on steady legs and constantly on the move, much to the consternation of his mother, would ever hear the sound of live water running in the stream bed by the corral. If
he hadn't sunk a deeper well, the place would have been unlivable. Without water there was nothing of value to the land. The truth of it was driven home by an exodus of small ranchers on the fringes of the Tularosa moving permanently, lock, stock, and barrel, off their land into town.

Al and Brenda at the Rocking J were doing a bit better than that, but not by much. The wells on the west slope of the San Andres foothills still produced steady water, which he'd leased to a large producer who was running a small cow-calf herd across a twenty-five-thousand-acre pasture on the Jornada. Along with Al's occasional job driving a livestock truck, it brought enough in to pay their bills. They were staying put.

With no cattle to work, Matt went to the Roswell livestock auction and picked up three good-looking geldings at rock-bottom prices and trained them with the hopes of eventually selling them as cow ponies. He also took on occasional work as a wrangler on what once was the vast old Bar Cross Ranch that covered a forty-mile stretch of the Rio Grande and enclosed the rugged Fra Cristobal Mountains in the northern Jornada. The size of the outfit and the terrain required cowboys on horseback—not in pickup trucks—to bust cattle out of the thick bosque or haze them out of narrow slot canyons and off precarious rocky shelves. That necessitated running a remuda for the cowboys during both spring and fall works, a job Matt truly enjoyed.

Hoping for a break in 1953, the drought only worsened, and during the summer Matt took a job as an assistant horse trainer for a rich California doctor who dabbled in racing quarter horses at the Ruidoso Downs racetrack in the Sacramento Mountains. Matt liked the job but hated being away from Mary and Kevin, and he returned home vowing never to be gone that long again,
although the money he'd earned paid off the bank loan for the water well.

A week after his homecoming, and a week before leaving for his wrangler job at the old Bar Cross, he sat with Mary on the veranda in the still summer night.

“I don't see how we can keep going like this,” he said, looking out into the darkness, which suited his sour mood to a T.

Mary reached for his hand. “Except for when you're gone, Kevin and I are quite happy here.”

“Sometimes I think I'd sell this place in a minute if the only potential buyer in the universe wasn't the US Army.”

Mary laughed. “You'd have to shoot Patrick first.”

“Probably,” Matt allowed. “But you're here alone too much.”

“It does get lonely at times,” Mary admitted. “But Brenda and I visit back and forth as often as we can, and Kevin and Dale are as close as brothers. They're both very smart little boys.”

“Wildcats when they're together,” Matt countered.

“That too.”

“I'm missing too much of him growing up when I'm away,” Matt grumbled.

Mary squeezed his hand. “Are you complaining?” she chided jokingly.

“Not me. How about we pack some gear and trek to the line cabin in the next day or two? I haven't checked on our high pastures for months.”

“I'd love it. So would Kevin.”

“Good.” The moon crested the Sacramentos, casting light on the dead cottonwood at the edge of the windbreak that his grandfather John Kerney had planted seventy-some years ago. With thick boughs bent low to the ground at a tilt, it had an almost
eerie appearance in the moonlight. “I'm going to cut that dead tree down for firewood,” he announced.

“Don't you dare,” Mary warned. “Kevin loves that tree. He calls it the witch's tree. I often find him there, especially when Dale comes to play.”

“Has he fallen out of it yet?”

“Once or twice,” Mary admitted. “His only injuries have been a bruised knee and wounded pride. He now has strict orders not to climb above the first branch.”

“Then it's unsafe,” Matt said, remembering his boyhood friend Jimmy Potter, who'd died in his arms after falling out of a tree in the Las Cruces bosque after climbing it to inspect an eagle's nest. It had been a nightmare that haunted him for years. “I'm cutting it down.”

“Can't you just trim it so he can't climb any higher?”

Matt mulled it over. The last thing he wanted was to argue with Mary about a dead cottonwood, or spoil the fun Kevin might have sitting in the branch of the tree with his best pal. “I'll take a look at it tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Mary said, pondering if it was time to voice the plan she'd hatched during his absence. She decided to do it. “I don't think it's fair for you to be the only one working to keep everything together. I can contribute too, you know.”

“You already do. This place would fall apart without you.”

Mary waved off the compliment.

Matt was undeterred. “Did you discover the Spanish gold hidden at Victorio Peak while I was gone?”

For years, until the proving ground closed the range, treasure hunters had scoured the nearby mountain looking for gold and jewels allegedly buried by the Spanish.

“I'm being serious,” Mary retorted. “I want to go back to teaching, and we can really use the money.”

Matt opened his arms to embrace the vast, moonlit basin. “Teach where? There are no more schools on the Tularosa, because there are no more families with schoolchildren living here to teach.”

“I know that,” Mary replied tartly, unwilling to let Matt get off dismissing her idea so sarcastically. “I've been thinking that I could teach in T or C, live there during the week, and come home on weekends.”

“You'd leave Kevin here with me and Patrick?” Matt asked disbelievingly.

“No, he'd come with me.”

“Then I'd never see the two of you at all. Besides, who'd look after Kevin while you're teaching? You can't carry him off to school with you. And even if you could, I can't afford to rent a place for you to live.”

“Didn't I hear you say earlier that we couldn't keep going on like this? If the ranch isn't making us a living, why stay? Wouldn't it be easier for all of us to live in town until the drought ends? Then we can come back and pick up where we left off.”

“Patrick isn't gonna move to town,” Matt predicted emphatically.

“So much the better if he stays here,” Mary replied. “He already said he wants to.”

Matt looked at Mary suspiciously. “So you two have already talked this over, have you?”

“Don't make it sound like I've been going behind your back,” Mary retorted.

“Well, haven't you?”

“And don't get sore at me for trying to help, Matthew,” Mary shot back. “Think about what I'm proposing: Patrick lives here, where he wants to be, looks after the place, and takes care of the ponies; Al and Brenda check on him from time to time and bring supplies if he asks, and we'll come out weekends and during school holidays.”

“It makes sense,” Matt admitted grudgingly. “But I already told you, we can't afford a place in town.”

“Yes, we can,” Mary countered. “I saved a good deal of money when I was in the navy and most of it has been earning interest in a bank since the day I arrived in Las Cruces. When I've offered in the past to contribute it to the ranch, you've always refused and urged me to save it for Kevin.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing, but now it's time to use that money for all of us. After we come back from the line cabin we're going house hunting in T or C. I want us to buy a place in town, and don't you dare give me any grief about it. Your mother did exactly the same thing for you when you were much younger than Kevin.”

Matt sighed. “Okay, I know when I'm outmaneuvered, outgunned, and utterly defeated.”

Mary smiled sweetly. “You'll never be defeated. And I bet you'll find getting a job or at least landing some regular work a lot easier once we're settled in town.”

“Speaking of work, what makes you so sure the schools will hire you?”

“What?” Mary asked, pretending she didn't understand the question.

“You heard me,” Matt prodded.

“Because they already have,” she reluctantly admitted.

“Oh, I see. What if I decide not to go along with this plan of yours?”

“I'll turn down the job and cancel our house hunting, but you won't have a very happy home life for the next year or two.”

Matt couldn't help but laugh. In some ways she was a lot like Emma, his strong-willed mother he still dearly missed. “You're tough as nails when it comes to getting your own way.”

“No, I'm very sweet, sexy, and obliging,” Mary corrected. She got up, settled down on Matt's lap, and kissed him long and deep to make her point. “Now take me to bed.”

Matt tickled her all the way to the bedroom.

***

T
he next morning in the barn after breakfast, Matt told Patrick he was going along with Mary's plan to move the family to T or C during the school year.

“It's best for Mary and Kevin,” he added.

“You're not selling the ranch to the army?” Patrick asked, relief showing on his face.

“Why would I do that?”

“I was scared you might, that's all. Just to be done with it and get on with your life. This place is about to blow away.”

Matt shook his head. “That's not gonna happen. This is more than just a place to live; it's our history.”

Patrick looked out the barn doors at the family cemetery on the hillside above the ranch house. “Except for memories and the folks we have buried here, right now it's not worth a bucket of spit to anyone but the government.”

“We're not selling and you'll be holding down the fort.” Matt
hung his pitchfork on a peg. “Will you be all right here on your own?”

Patrick smiled. “Don't you worry about me. When are you moving?”

“Before Mary's job teaching school starts.” Matt grabbed a cross-cut saw. “Help me prune back that dead cottonwood so Mary stays happy and Kevin can keep playing on it with his pard Dale.”

Patrick pulled on his work gloves. “It's about time you figured out that your wife ramrods this outfit.”

***

T
hey rode ponies to the cabin, Kevin with Matt gripping the saddle horn on Maverick, Mary astride Peanut, and with enough grub and water for an overnight stay stuffed into the saddlebags. The die-off of the last of the tall pines that once had sheltered the cabin was a sad sight to see, the branches bare of all but a few needles, the cones, picked over by jays, lying broken apart and scattered in the duff.

Matt figured the drought would soon kill all the remaining old-growth evergreens and the mountains would be bare of everything except scrub. The pretty high-country dell where Cal Doran had built the cabin now teetered on the edge of forever losing all its charm under a harsh sun with no comforting shade. He'd return in the cool of autumn and harvest the wood before it lost all its pitch.

Matt's last visit to the cabin had been in early spring. Since the day it was built, the cabin had never been locked, and upon arrival he spotted evidence of recent use, including fairly fresh tire
tracks, the cookstove ash box almost overflowing, and most of the stacked firewood used up and not replaced.