The Tie That Binds(56)
“No,” I said. “Some ways it’s worse.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t like it.”
That was always Doub. He had that big house and all that irrigated corn, but he complained worse than any wheat farmer will. A wheat farmer will tell you how he’s lost his crop five times to dust, flood, drought, hail, and rust before he finally admits that he’s harvested it. But I have never understood what Doub had lost. Maybe his perspective.
Anyway, I bought the rodeo tickets and went back to collect the others to go up into the grandstand. The seats were in the center section high up under the roof. We climbed up the aisle steps past all the people we knew, stopping to talk and joke some as we worked our way towards the seats. Edith, I recall, was especially lively that afternoon. It made her feel good to be among all the people, and everyone felt it, enjoyed seeing her, was glad she was happy; it was like she left a wide ripple of pleasure behind her. The women along the aisle took her hand, and the men slapped Lyman neighborly on the back.
When we reached the seats I settled Mavis and the Goodnoughs in their places with cushions to sit on, then I went back down to help with the calf roping. I had agreed to run the roping barrier, but that was all. I wasn’t going to rodeo anymore myself; at thirty-nine I was at least four years of marriage past the time when I still had thoughts of being a cowboy. Besides, I didn’t want to break my neck bucking off some horse or bull and leave Mavis to bury me. I had doubts about how much spadework a pregnant woman would do. The way I figured it, she would probably only plant me a foot under, then the dogs would dig me up and chew my toes and chase one another for my arm bones. The thought didn’t appeal to me. I was satisfied to watch somebody else break his neck while the people in the stands applauded.
The rodeo started as usual with the grand entry. A bunch of guys and girls galloped their horses in figure eights in the arena, then there were some introductions so the rodeo marshals and the fair queens and all the notables could spur their horses forward and lift their hats to the crowd. Afterwards, the national anthem was blared over the loudspeakers; the cowboys held their hats, and the people in the stands rose up and sang; then the invocation was given by the Baptist preacher, who found enough cause to praise God for twenty minutes. When that business was finished, they all stampeded out of the arena and it was time for the first event, the bareback riding.
The rodeo went about as usual that afternoon. There were five or six pretty good young cowboys from different parts of the country, but only about two or three first-class horses. It was getting harder every year for a stock contractor to find good bucking horses; the horses weren’t as big—they didn’t have much of that raw plow-horse build anymore—so they weren’t as rank as they had been twenty and thirty years ago, which meant the scores weren’t as high, and I seem to recall only once when they had to open the gates and bring the ambulance into the arena. That was when this long-necked goosey kid from Valentine, Nebraska, stayed on his saddle bronc the full eight seconds. He was still on after the buzzer rang, riding with both hands now and hollering and still trying to hook his horse for some reason, while the pickup men kicked up beside him to take him off, but he didn’t seem to know how to grab onto one of them and get off. Then the trouble was they all got to racing too fast, and when they came helling up to the end of the arena the pickup horses knew enough to stop but the saddle bronc didn’t. He jumped the fence. I mean he tried to. I suppose he might have made it too, only there was a three-quarter-inch strand of cable strung along the top of the fence posts to discourage any steeplechasing or impromptu fence jumping; so at the last second the horse decided to stick his big raw-boned head under the cable like he thought maybe he could snake through that half foot of empty space between the cable and the top fence rail, like maybe he thought he was some form of circus lion doing the hoops in the center ring. He didn’t make it; he slammed to a loud, solid stop. Meanwhile, the kid from Valentine sailed headfirst over the horse’s neck and ran his face up against the steel cable. The cable didn’t give a lot, but his face did. They called the ambulance in and rode him off to the hospital to rebuild his nose and sew up his cheek. Afterwards some of the cowboys were riding the pickup men pretty hard about losing a horse race that it appeared they were going to win. Until it came down to the wire, that is. The pickup men felt kind of foolish about it.
“Hell,” one of them said. “The knothead wasn’t even trying to turn his horse. He acted like he never saw fences in Nebraska.”
“Well, you introduced him,” somebody said.
“That’s a fact,” he said. “I doubt he forgets it.”
I stayed down there in the arena for the duration of the rodeo, drinking warm beer behind the chutes with the boys and running the barrier for the calf roping when it was time for that event. It wasn’t anything onerous. I had to string the rope barrier across the open-ended stall when the roper had his horse backed up inside it, then check to see that the horse didn’t break the barrier before the calf was released from the near chute. If the barrier was broken I was supposed to wave a red flag at the judge. I did that twice when a couple of boys got antsy and couldn’t hold their horses back. The judge looked over at me from the center of the arena where he was watching the dallying and saw the flag, so the two boys got ten seconds added on to their times. The times weren’t anything to blow about anyway. Booger Brannon, a big heavy-set cowboy from south Oklahoma, won the calf roping with a nineteen-seven. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have placed.