Before Honor, page 7
When he finished dressing and stood waiting for her to put the finishing touches on her hair, she would walk to him and say, “Well, all I can say is that you certainly clean up good, Clinton Wayford.” She would punctuate the remark with a kiss on the lips.
She had said those very words the last day he visited her in the hospital. He entered her room in his “business uniform,” and she looked up from her bed and whispered, “You certainly clean up good, Clinton Wayford.” She had long before lost the strength to walk to him, so he moved beside her bed and leaned down to kiss her lips. Two hours later, as she slept, her hand clasped in his, she gave a soft sigh, a sound he had
heard a thousand times over when she settled into his arms in their bed, and she passed away.
Slipping into the coat, Wayford eyed himself in a full-length mirror attached to the closet door. His fingertips lightly brushed over his forehead. A slight hint of red marked what had been a bump yesterday. However, the dark scab which covered the cut left by the sorrel’s hoof drew his eyes to it like a magnet. He considered hiding the cut under a bandage, but decided that would only emphasize the embarrassing injury.
He stepped back and let his gaze run up and down the reflection. The shirt, pants, and coat appeared clean and pressed; the boots gleamed with a glossy spit-shine. The hat held in hand was without spot or flake of dust.
So much for clothes making the man. He looked presentable, but he could not say he cleaned up all that well anymore. To his own eyes, he looked like an old man in khaki pants, white shirt, and coat. Except for less stoop in the shoulders, the image in the looking glass might have belonged to his father. Johnny Lee Wayford had appeared much the same the last time the rancher had seen him. Were the passing decades merely a slowly turning wheel that transformed a son into his father? Had Tom lived, would he have found himself gazing into a mirror one day wondering the same thing?
Turning his back on the reflection, he walked to a small rolltop desk pushed into the corner of the bedroom beside one of the two windows. He lifted a stack of bills from a drawer and removed the rubber band that held them together. A hasty perusal of amounts to be remitted and due dates while he sifted through the pile produced three bills which he placed into the inside pocket of his coat. The remainder he rewrapped with the rubber band and dropped back into the drawer. He picked up a checkbook from the desktop and added it to the pocket.
“Let’s go.” He snapped his fingers.
Vanberg heeled, walking beside his owner through
the house. Outside, the dog leaped into the pickup and took his place on the passenger side of the worn bench seat when his owner opened the door.
Wayford pumped the gas pedal once then twisted the key. The old Ford started without so much as a sputtered cough. In spite of the mounting mileage on the odometer, the engine purred as smoothly as the day the rancher had purchased the truck. He switched on the radio and shifted into gear.
Rather than the sports report he wanted, the Alpine station blared the sounds of something the disc jockey called “new country.” If the rock and roll guitars and drums filling the background were “new country,” the rancher concluded that he preferred old country. He was no great admirer of popular Cajun music—he feared that any band that employed an accordion, no matter that they called it a “zydeco,” would suddenly break out in a rendition of “Lady of Spain”—but it was far more ear-pleasing than this caterwauling.
He wondered whatever happened to the western in country and western music. Except for a few singers like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson—both good Texas boys—western was ignored by singers and musicians today.
The strains of an old Marty Robbins melody drifted to mind. Ignoring the singer on the radio, who proudly proclaimed his friendship with people in low places, Wayford whistled aloud while he imagined Marty once more singing about that cantina in the West Texas town of El Paso.
The sports came on by the time he covered the ten miles of dusty, washboard-rough, dirt road that led to Highway 166. While the announcer rattled off the Friday night losses by the local high school football teams, the rancher stopped at his mailbox and opened it. Nothing of interest caught his attention as he thumbed through an assortment of more bills and advertising flyers.
He placed the stack of mail on the seat beside him, checked for traffic, then pulled onto the two-lane highway, heading toward an imposing mass of rock to the east called Blue Mountain, which jutted over seven thousand feet into the air. On the radio, a sportscaster updated the latest Texas Rangers player negotiations. Last summer he had checked out a book on modern baseball from the Fort Davis library. The fortunes the major league teams made off television telecasts boggled the mind. Once he had sided with management when it came to player contracts. Now he hoped the players would stick it to the owners every chance they got. Any group of men who even considered replacing the solid crack of a wooden bat against a hardball with the ping of an aluminum bat deserved any and all misfortune that passed their way—and then some.
Fifteen miles later Wayford pulled to a complete stop to allow a small caravan of vans and recreational vehicles to pass before he pulled onto Highway 17. Although several of the drivers lifted a single finger from their steering wheels in a wave of acknowledgment, the rancher did not recognize a face or vehicle among the only traffic he had seen that day.
The drivers and their passengers were part of the steady trickle of nameless tourists who traveled through the region to see Big Bend National Park, which lay over a hundred miles to the south. These probably were fresh from a visit to Lajitas and Presidio down on the Rio Grande. Before moving on, they would stop to see the old military fort in town and drive out to take a look at the white domes and the massive telescopes they held at McDonald Observatory atop Mount Locke.
Wayford had heard many of his neighbors complain about the tourists. He brushed aside their complaints. The local paper once reported McDonald Observatory’s top year for visitors was one hundred thousand people. In a world filled with billions, that was no one. Besides, tourists brought tourist dollars into an area that had nothing to offer the average person except unusual scenery. Although a rancher’s pocketbook did not grow fatter off the tourist trade, many of the area businesses would dry up and blow away without that money.
He entered the town of Fort Davis from the south, passing the high school with its gymnasium and football field. He stopped at the triangular intersection with Highway 118 by the courthouse to let a pickup with at least five Mexican children in the back turn toward Alpine. In a town with a population of about six hundred people, Highway 17 formed Fort Davis’s main street. Businesses had sprouted on each side of the road. Most of the buildings appeared as old as he. As far as he could remember, they were.
Near the Limpia Hotel, he halted outside a white-painted cinder block building which housed the local electric company. He ordered Vanberg to wait in the pickup and entered the office to exit a few moments later with two bills remaining in his coat pocket. His next stop came a quarter of a mile down the highway at Ivan Sierra’s. Dogs were welcome in the cobbler’s shop. Vanberg hastened past his owner and went straight back to greet an old friend.
“How you doin’, boy?” Ivan, ten years Wayford’s junior, stopped his sewing machine and scratched the bird dog’s ears with both hands. When he looked up, he greeted the rancher with a wide grin. “And you, Clint? How are you doing?”
“Well as to be expected.” Wayford shook the man’s hand when he extended it.
“Reckon you heard about ol’ Elrod Hornsby by now?” Anticipation lit the bootmaker’s face.
The rancher shook his head. He knew that even if he had heard, Ivan would tell the story, embellishing it with every detail gleaned from the townsfolk.
Ivan’s grin widened. For the next thirty minutes he relished retelling how their mutual friend had returned late Tuesday night from a honky-tonk up in Pecos. In spite of his inebriated condition, the carpenter managed to safely execute the serpentine twists and turns of the mountain roads and pull into his own driveway. “Then it hit the fan. He slipped and fell flat on his face when he got out of his car—flopped down smack dab atop a fire ant mound. You could hear him hollering all the way down Marfa!”
The picture Ivan painted did not strike the rancher as humorous as it did the cobbler, who laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. Wayford once misstepped into a fire ant bed three years ago. By the time he noticed the mistake, the ants were in his left boot. They bit him a dozen times; his foot swelled so that he could not get the boot back on for three days after removing it to brush away the pesky critters.
Nor did Wayford find it funny that Elrod Hornsby was hospitalized in Alpine and that his wife threatened to divorce him as soon as he recovered. Ivan did; the shoemaker held his sides as he concluded the story. He was still chuckling to himself while he rummaged through a tin filing box to find the rancher’s bill.
“Repairs on six halters and that old saddle of yours. Comes to forty-two sixty-seven, including the tax.” Ivan passed the bill to Wayford, who, in turn, pulled out the checkbook and paid the full amount.
Ivan placed the check in a drawer, then glanced down at the rancher’s boots. “What about your footwear? It’s been a few years since I fitted you for those. They need new soles or heels? Maybe I could interest you in a new pair? I got some mighty fine silver-gray ostrich in the back that’s just hurtin’ to be stitched into boots.”
“When you make a man a pair of boots, you make ’em too good, Ivan,” Wayford answered. “I’ll still be
wearing these the day they lay me in the ground. And they’ll look just as good as they do today.”
The boot smith grinned. “You’re a lying old bastard, Clint Wayford, but you say the right kind of lies.” Bidding Ivan good-bye, Wayford waited for Vanberg to receive a parting pat then returned to the pickup. A block to the north, he wheeled from the highway onto the dusty dirt streets of residential Fort Davis. He stopped in front of a yellow frame house with the door to a single-car garage open. A man lay across the fender of an ‘85 Chevy half-hidden beneath the car’s hood. While the rancher extracted another bill from his coat and wrote a check for a hundred and fifty dollars, the heavy set man in a hunter’s camouflage jumpsuit abandoned his repairs and walked to the pickup.
The rancher rolled down his window, shook the man’s hand, and handed him the check. “Sorry it took so long getting this to you, Manuel, especially since you dropped everything you were doing to come out and fix my pump.”
“There was no worry, Clint. I knew you were good for it.” The man tilted his head to the garage. “Besides, the winter’s been cold, and everyone in town is having car trouble. Haven’t stopped working since the first day of December. That Caprice belongs to one of Paul Moody’s hands. He hauled it in this morning.”
“Glad they’re keeping you busy,” Wayford said. Manuel Clancy, whose dark skin and black hair were inherited from his Mexican mother rather than his flaming-haired Irish father, was one of fifty all-around handymen who kept alive by taking on any job that came his way, whether it be filling in at one of the town’s service stations when an employee became ill or handling any construction or plumbing task that presented itself. “A lot of folks are havin’ a hard time findin’ work.”
“And you? How you getting along, my friend?” Wayford shrugged. “About as good as my git-along will let me git. I guess a man can’t ask for more than that.”
“He can ask, but he ain’t likely to get it,” Manuel said as the rancher started the pickup. “You take care, Clint. Thanks again for bringing this out. It’s appreciated.”
“Your help was appreciated. A man can’t water his stock if his pump isn’t working.” Wayford tilted his head in a gesture of farewell. “Remember to bring those kids of yours out to the Wide W when the weather warms up. I promised them they could go riding.”
“I’ll do that.” Manuel waved goodbye. “The boys won’t let me forget you said they could take out a couple of horses.”
The rancher smiled and tilted his hat again as he cut a sharp U-turn and headed back toward the highway. He liked Manuel almost as much as he had the man’s father. Wayford especially liked the three young Clancys. The boys, all under ten, were spirited and ready to try any adventure a ranch might offer. The day Manuel spent working on the pump, the brothers thoroughly explored the barn’s loft and found the calf pen. Wayford chuckled aloud as he recalled the three’s repeated attempts to ride whatever calf they could chase down. Given another day or two, they would have succeeded.
He missed having children around. The hardest thing about Mary living all the way up to Lubbock was that he never saw his two grandchildren except during Christmas holidays and for a week in the summer. He could not count the hours he had spent trying to figure out some way of being closer to those kids. Lubbock sat at the bottom of the Panhandle, and the Wide W was closer to Mexico than it was to the rest of Texas. There simply was no way to be around Frank Junior and little Elizabeth. That left the feeling that a portion of his life had passed him by, a portion he could never recover.
A block south of the Anderson School, he made a left into Sid Stilwell’s service station and stopped beside the regular pump. A young man, whose name always escaped the rancher, ran out and asked, “Same as usual, Mr. Wayford?”
“I need ’er filled up,” Wayford answered while he stepped from the cab and snapped his fingers for Vanberg to follow. “If I left her here a couple of hours, you think you’d have time to change the oil and filters?”
“Shouldn’t take more than an hour.” The boy gave a nod as he lifted the hood. “I ain’t got nothing on the rack. I can get to it right away.”
“Clint!”
Wayford turned to find Sid Stilwell standing in the door of the service station. Sid had been three years behind Wayford in school, which made him sixty-two years old. He looked forty-two. He was one of those damnable men who appeared to age no more than a single year for every decade they lived.
The slender, handsome man had made the most of his good looks and charm. For most of his life, Sid had considered every female in five counties fair game. Rumor had it he was an accurate marksman, especially when it came to divorcees and newly widowed women.
That was until fifteen years ago when he ran headlong into Lucille Washburn, who was still wearing the black of mourning for her recently departed Edgar. One day whispers abounded about Sid’s car being parked outside Lucille’s house all of one night. The next day the whole county buzzed with the announcement of Sid and Lucille’s marriage before a justice of the peace over in Brewster County.
Since then, Sid had acted like a bird with a pound or three of salt poured on his tail. Not that the rancher blamed him. Lucille was a big woman—outweighed Sid by at least a hundred pounds—and had the temper of a demon belched straight from the bowels of hell. If it ever came to fisticuffs between the husband and wife,
Wayford knew who he would put his money on, and it would not be Sid.
“Clint, if you’ve got a minute, I’d like to talk with you.” Sid signaled him into the station’s office. When Wayford and Vanberg entered, Sid cleared his throat and began awkwardly, “Clint, I don’t like to press you or have to ask this, but...”
“But you were wondering if I’m ever going to get around to settling up my bill?” the rancher finished for him.
Sid released an over-held breath and nodded. Wayford pulled the last bill and checkbook from his pocket. “I thought I’d settle this today.”
An embarrassed smile moved across the service station owner’s thin lips. “You want me to add in your fill-up?”
“And an oil and filter change,” the rancher amended. “The boy said he could get right to it.”
Sid located a pocket calculator on the counter beside the cash register and did a tap dance on its keys with his fingertips. “That’ll total out at two hundred twelve dollars and forty-six cents.”
Taking a pen from a battered coffee can on the counter, Wayford wrote a check for the exact amount and handed it to the man. While Sid punched the cash register, the rancher tallied the money left in his checking account. Two hundred dollars remained for some unforeseen emergency—a small emergency. Two hundred dollars was not enough to buy a man a decent pair of boots today.
Wayford closed the checkbook and slid it back into his coat pocket. He would forgo the luxury of his usual Saturday night meal—chilis rellenos at one of the two Mexican restaurants in town. The five dollars the meal would cost could be better used elsewhere.
“Clint, you’re looking a little thin on those back tires.” Sid pointed to the old Ford. “You should think about replacing them.”
“Have any retreads?” The rancher could not call the tires bald, but it would not be long until he was riding on the steel belts.
“Not today. I’ve got some that are supposed to come in from Midland next week or so.”
“Save me a good-looking pair. I’ll stop in and have the boy put them on in the next couple of weeks.” Wayford moved toward the door. “I’ll be back before you close to get my truck.”
“Clint,” Sid said as the rancher opened the door, “I hope you don’t think I was being pushy—I mean about your bill. I would have let you ride longer, but what with the Republicans in office and all, times are hard.”
“It was your money, and you had a right to it,” Wayford answered. “Like you said, times are hard.”
“Damned hard,” Sid replied while the rancher stepped outside and started toward the old drugstore.
Wayford also wished Sid had let the tab slide for another month or two. Having another two hundred dollars in the bank would have eased the pressure. But a man had to feed the horses under the hood of his pickup as surely as he had to grain flesh and blood horses. Ranching without a truck to haul feed and grain would be akin to a cowboy trying to work a herd without a string of horses back when Amos Wayford first settled in the Bend.
