as in so many of Kelton’s novels, the reader catches the sough of “The Times They are a Changin’.” Independent cattlemen are giving way to “syndicates, Yankee bankers, English money, and all that.” The best of the cowboys live by a democratic, egalitarian code in which independence and honesty are valued more than any numbers that can be indited on a ledger, but their ranks also include chiselers, thieves, and the usual run of cowards, including one wretch who utters what, to Kelton, is that most self-damning of all statements: “There ought to be a law.”
The strike fails. The cowboys lost, as one supporter explains, because “we cheapened what we stood for when all we could agree to ask for was higher wages. We should have talked about dignity and freedom; those things count for more than money. Money’s soon spent, and when it’s gone it leaves no mark. But when a man loses dignity, that leaves a mark on him that stays.”
The camp cook, unwilling to leave his post, tells the reluctant leader of the strike, “We’re comin’ into a time when the individual don’t count for much, Hitch. You’d just as well get used to the idea.” To which Hitch responds, “Stand back and take it like a sheep? No, Trump, even if we lose, we need to fight and kick all the way to the slaughterhouse.”
But they do lose. Consistently, throughout Kelton’s major novels, the principled men who embody the classic American virtues kick all the way to the slaughterhouse. Kelton’s work has an elegiac quality, but he is not merely a mourner of things lost. “People think ranch life has been an island of stability in a sea of change,” he tells me. “It’s not that way. Without innovation it wouldn’t have lasted. The big trail drives that started after the Civil War were an innovation. Fences were an innovation. We have a far better marketing system than we used to have: driving cattle to Kansas is a pretty hard way to get to market. Nowadays we have country auctions scattered around small towns. A fellow has got a local market. On the other hand, there’s a lot more regulation than there used to be. We’re getting to be smaller and smaller cogs in bigger and bigger wheels.”
Kelton resists the temptation to write happy endings for men who do not accommodate themselves to the times. He is too honest, too much his father’s son, for that. “My dad told me the history of a lot of the ranches and ranch operators in the Midland-Odessa country,” says Kelton. “He knew most of them and cowboyed for a lot of them in his youth. No matter how funny Dad’s story was, it usually tended to end on a sad note. Invariably the rancher seemed to have gone broke eventually and lost it all.”
Ranching, he says, “isn’t always a good living, but it’s a good way of life.”
Another of Kelton’s memorably stubborn Texans is Wes Hendrix of The Man Who Rode Midnight (1987), with its rare contemporary setting. Wes is a wizened seventy-seven-year-old rancher who looks “more like Gabby Hayes than John Wayne.” Developers have Wes’s ranch in their sights, for it stands between them and their vision of a man-made lake that will flood the town with “recreational tourism” dollars. Even in those pre-Kelo days there is an inevitability to Wes’s failure; no matter how fiercely Kelton’s cowboys resist, they are “old men brittle like the dried-out stalks of last year’s corn, no longer able to bend, standing futilely against the winds of time that one day soon must break them.”
“My primary theme has always been change and how people adapt to it or don’t adapt,” says Kelton. Seldom in American history has the capacity for adaptation been tested as severely as it was during the desolating (and desiccating) drought that parched West Texas in the 1950s—the event that inspired The Time It Never Rained. “I could never have written it without my experience as a reporter,” says Kelton. “That drought was my daily running story as an agricultural writer for seven years.” He describes those who persevered through the long dry spell as “tough, resilient, and almost militantly independent.”
The Time It Never Rained is a great novel, and I do not limit that appraisal with the constricting adjective “Western.” Literature is as at home on the range as it is on the quad, and a Texas novelist doesn’t have to be surnamed McMurtry to commit it.
The book’s subject is a Jonah-like rancher named Charlie Flagg, a “broad-shouldered man who still toted his own feed sacks, dug his own postholes, flanked his own calves” on middling-sized acreage. Flagg lives by a simple credo: “I’m not sayin’ any man is wrong because he doesn’t pattern himself after me; what anybody else wants to do is his business, not mine. I just want to live by my own light and be left the hell alone.”
But as a band of militantly independent longhairs once sang, sometimes they just won’t let you be. As the drought stretches from months into years, Charlie’s neighbors beg, lobby, and eagerly accept feed, checks, and hay from Washington. Charlie resists, telling the almsmen, “That ain’t the way I was brought up, or you either. . . . We was taught to believe in a man rustlin’ for himself as long as he’s able. If you get to dependin’ on the government, the day’ll come when the damn federales will dictate everything you do. Some desk clerk in Washington will decide where you live and where you work and what color toilet paper you wipe yourself with. And you’ll be scared to say anything because they might cut you off the tit.”
His contumacy is not rewarded. The other ranchers resent him for acting “like our own consciences talkin’ to us, tellin’ us how far we’ve strayed from what we believe in. Nobody likes his conscience naggin’ at him.” His son reproaches him as a relic, and a selfish one at that. Everything he has worked for turns to dust and blows away. Arid year follows arid year, yet still Charlie hangs on, selling off his cattle and buying lowly goats, cutting loose the Mexican family with which he has a complex and evolving relationship, and always rebuffing offers of government aid.
“I have heard Charlie described as a mythical character representing old-fashioned ideals of rugged individualism and free enterprise,” Kelton has said. “To me, there was nothing mythical about him. He was real.” (“My mother was convinced that Charlie was my father,” says Kelton.)
Kelton is no didact; he shuns the easy political point. The Time It Never Rained is not an Ayn Rand fantasy of a superman vanquishing his inferiors. Charlie is a man out of time, a ghost of an earlier America whose survival is uncertain in the brave new world aborning. He is an anachronism whose adherence to a vanishing code both dooms and ennobles him. He is, we may be sure, a Democrat of the Grover Cleveland stripe as displayed in Cleveland’s message upon vetoing a $10,000 appropriation for seed grain to Texas during the drought of 1887: “Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.”
Kelton has described his own politics as “very independent,” which he translates to “very conservative though liberal in the racial area.” The legendary 10th Cavalry of black “Buffalo soldiers” was stationed at San Angelo’s Fort Concho, and Kelton has written of racial conflict and the beginnings of understanding. Yet he never ascribes modern attitudes to 1880s cowboys.
In Wagontongue (1972), Isaac Jeffords, a black cowboy in post–Civil War West Texas, is part of a ranching crew but apart from it as well, taking his meals on the wagontongue, aware of the unbridgeable gap between himself and the white men he rides with. Isaac and Pete Runyan, a skilled white cowhand who resents blacks, make a perilous journey together. They do not, as they would do if this were a movie of the week, become wisecracking ebony and ivory partners, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, but they do come to realize that each is a man, capable, possessing a certain dignity. The last thing Pete says to Isaac is, “I ought to’ve killed you a long time ago. You got a head as hard as a rock; you won’t listen to a damn thing a man tells you. You’re uppity, and you got a mean streak in you a yard wide. But I’ll give you one thing: you ain’t nobody’s pet. If there was any way you could bleach that black hide. . . .”
To which Isaac responds,
