Between Pommel and Cantle

This is Slim, and he isn’t, his circumference nearly his height, five feet four inches. Now that all the ranch hands from the first half of the century are gone, Slim Pinkston is the most famous cowboy in the county. It’s Saturday morning and sunny, cold, November. Slim has parted and oiled his hair flat in the style of another time, and he just opened the door to me and the prairie wind that pushes me into the room but doesn’t disturb his hair, and still he gives the wind a round of cussing and shuts the door to the dim little frame house where he has lived as a bachelor for some years since he and his wife split up. The home is orderly in the way I’ve come to expect from lone ranch hands, the order deriving from objects arranged tightly against walls as if there were but one way to set out a room, and things, like the prairie itself, a little weathered and dusty but not cluttered. The furniture seems set down in some permanence like an outcropping of pasture rock: here a grayed doily and there a plastic flower gone off its color—the presence of a woman not yet disappeared entirely, and it’s these remnants that make a bachelor cowboy’s house lonely. I’ve never heard a Chase County pasture-man so express it, but I think they are drawn to things that never seem to move far from the permanent, from the eternality of birth, death, cattle coming and going, from storm, fire, injury, heat, cold.

Slim offers the living room sofa, but I ask to go to the kitchen, where chairs are closer, coffee near, and memory of good times is. We sit down to the small, bare table, oilcloth-covered, Slim with cigarettes and ashtray, and, for most of the time that we talk he keeps fixed on the ashtray as if it held what was left of his past, the ashes of his hours spent between pommel and cantle.

Of the family names in the county from the days of early white settlement, most are gone, but Pinkston isn’t, and countians know the name and the moniker Slim, but not many know his christened name: Dudley. The Pinkstons pick up sobriquets like sticker weed (Windy, Brownie, Chub, Bud, Mutt), but his brother Phill has never caught anything more than an extra consonant. Slim says of himself (only) that he is over seventy. I know that he and his son and Phill run ten thousand cattle on forty thousand acres, much of it on the east side of the county where he has ridden the pastures from Jacobs’ Mound to Matfield Green since he went to work for the Norton brothers in the thirties. Although never the largest nor the grandest here, the Norton Ranch has become a touchstone of the old ways, a classic not like the Duesenberg places around Matfield but more like a Model T truck.

Will Norton was the boss, a good man but a poor-riding cowboy, and Slim says: He had a lot of knowledge. He could talk to you about religion on down. He could weld in fire—blacksmithing—could make you anything out of metal. When he was a boy he made a gun to shoot his teacher with. Never did a course. I still have a fence stretcher he made. Him and his brother Ed could lay up rock wall too. Full-blooded Irish, and they told Irish stories all day. Always bachelors, till Ed up and married late in life.

Slim stares at the ashtray, in some sadness I think, and answers more out of duty than desire; he’s not going to lose himself in the past as others do because he’s somehow beyond it, as if watching it from a distant ridge: he’s here and it’s there. He’d be happier if I stood up and disappeared with what’s left of the morning so that he could get on to Emporia, but he sits doggedly, decently, and awaits my questions as one does the second page of an exam to be passed along.

His voice is granular, a gullet full of creek-worn flint, and deep, the sort you used to hear from some villainous gunslinger in a 1930s B western, yet his face is open, the kind you’d ask to see your child to school. In my first days in the county, I often heard about Slim, and almost always after his name came an appositive, a real cowboy, carrying respect and distinction from the western-store, all-hat-no-horse cowboys who only dress the part as they understand it played by country singers. But if your notion of a cowhand is a sotto voce Gary Cooper, tall and slender, in a buttless walk down a dusty street, then you’ll likely take Dudley Pinkston for a washer-dryer repairman. Yet Slim is a cowboy in the manner here: laconic, of some gentleness, almost introverted, a character shaped by the bovine nature of the animals he spends his days with. A cowboy may love his horse but his essence comes from the slow beasts he cusses.

His speech, like many others’ here, is a relic from the Appalachians. Slim says: My dad was a cowboy—I guess you’d call him that—until he got crippled. His horse hubbed him, ran him along a bob-wahr fence and tore up his leg, and then he cut up the other leg on a corn-sled knife, then he fell off a horse and broke his hip. When I can remember, he was purta near all crippled up and couldn’t ride. I learned cowboyin from the Nortons. They ran mostly Texas cattle brought up to Bazaar on the train in April. Steers wasn’t these yearlins of nowdays people want because they’re tender—then they was three or four years old and still not any wider than from my wrist to elbow—skeletons with tails—but they’d put on four hundred pounds in a season. Them Texans shipped us the horns and we put the body under them. We’d drive them up toward the Jacobs’ Mound pasture, ten, twelve miles. The train these days don’t even stop at Bazaar—don’t stop in the county. The cattle get trucked right into the pastures, and most of the boys are bringin their horses in by trailer. Nowdays we just drive them from section to section and later on down to the pens to be hauled away. Ain’t as much horse work here anymore. Hell, these cattle comin up to us now ain’t never seen a horse before, and they get crazy. Then, we used to send them straight to the packin house, but now they go to a feedlot for finishin. We never had much of this cow-calf business.

A cow-calf operation keeps cattle year-round in the same pastures where they are bred, born, and raised. The rule of thumb is five acres for every animal, but that works only if the cattle stay in the pasture just from April to late summer. To keep them twelve months a year requires eight acres per beast to prevent overgrazing, diminished grass, and eventual erosion. And now there’s another potential danger called double-stocking, where twice the usual number of cattle graze for half the usual time, but many owners leave them longer, to the detriment of the land. Slim says: We don’t double-stock. It’s too much for the grass. They ain’t supposed to be that many animals out there. A lot of pastures now are in bad shape because of abuse like that.

(Now I’m remembering a rancher once lecturing me how the herds of buffalo ate and trampled the hills, but he didn’t mention that bison came only seasonally and some years not at all, so that their migrations let the vegetation restore itself in a cycle that sustained plant and herbivore. And, later, a prominent countian told me: Leave it to us, and we’ll eat the hell out of these pastures. Because of the extent of rangeland in the county, to eat the hell out of the prairie is to eat the hell out of the future, out of what has made and sustained life here since the tallgrass first arose.)

Good cowboys like the Pinkstons know the cycle must be served before the dollar, and nothing benefits the old turning so well as what might seem its great enemy. Every March, Slim and the boys go out with their firesticks or firepipes and light the forty thousand acres they oversee. We used to just ride along on horseback and break a wooden match so it don’t get hung up on top of the grass and strike it and throw it down. These days we use them farsticks that somebody around here come up with. Light the end and drag it along behind a pickup. A course, you better hadn’t ought to get that truck mard in, or else with that far behind you, you’re not in very good shape.

The firestick: six to seven feet of inch-and-a-half steel pipe, the lower dozen inches commonly bent to an obtuse angle like a hockey stick and stoppered by a threaded plug with a slit filed through, and the upper end capped. The cowboy fills the pipe with gasoline, lights the grass and ignites the pipe from it, and sets off trailing fire. Raise the pipe high, and the small flame goes out. The firesticks are homemade and more efficient than matches or weedburners.

When the Pinkstons burn, they leave neatly uncharred—if there are no vagaries of wind—cemeteries, right-of-ways, fences, outbuildings, and any adjoining land a neighbor wants left in old grass. But they don’t like that new problem, the Kansas Turnpike. If smoke blows across the interstate, these city boys’ll drive right on into it. They can’t see ahead, and then somebody slows way down, and there’s your wreck, and the insurance companies want to sue us. That highway used to be our pasture—now it’s a lawsuit out there. Slim stares at the ashtray as if it were smoky pasture, and he says, Back-burn all you want, get all the sprayer trucks and wet gunnysacks you want, and if that wind comes up sudden and changes, everything else don’t make much difference, and you’re just not in very good shape.

It’s past noon and he’s smoking faster as if to speed things up, but I can’t leave fire alone and I ask him whether he ever saw a steer trapped and burned, and no, he never did, and not a man or truck either, but you have to watch grass that hasn’t been burned or grazed for a year or two because that’s when fires get big. High grass is dangerous and overgrazed grass won’t burn worth a shit. We got other problems too, like lightnen—it’ll kill three or four head a year. It’ll whap them directly or they’ll get up against a fence and it’ll hit that, and then we lose our commission and the cattleman loses his steer. There’s rustlers. They stole four head last year, and it wasn’t no strangers because they knew our operation—went right in the pasture with a truck and knew when to go in.

Slim is mulling losses, and that slows the smoking. Three years ago I got throwed. A course I been throwed before but always off to the side. This time my horse turned end over end and me with him. Broke three ribs and stove me up so, it was a couple of days before I could get back on.

When I push away from the table he’s relieved, and we begin talking about pack rats in his shed, and then I ask whether he ever wanted to earn a living another way, and he says, I wouldn’t care about book work. I used to farm alongside cowboyin—plowin with mules. Did both durin the war, and I ask, do you like being a cowboy, and he thinks and says, I don’t know. As much as I ever did. It’s a way of makin money. Ride or farm, it’s not much difference to me. None of it’ll get you rich. A cowboy ain’t nothin but a hard hand, but they ain’t many tellin you what to do. Nobody much out in them hills, you see. Hell, Windy, my brother, couple years back, died out in the pasture. They found him out there and his horse by his side waitin. That’s how he went.

At the door I say that I hear he’s a pretty good fiddler, and he gives a smile, the first that morning, and says, Hell, I used to play over to Bazaar at the platform dances. They’d put some boards down in the summer and call us in. Square dancin, round dancin, a waltz, a schottische. Out would come some Sharp’s Crick moonshine, or else they was home brew—everbody made that in them dry years. They’d all pass the hat, and we’d get a dollar fifty maybe. But oh hell, we fiddled. I like music with a lot of bowin. “Irish Washer Woman”—now there’s a real crooked old tune.