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X-Mas

I knowed something was wrong. I could feel it in the air. I could tell by the way the cattle was acting. The sheep was acting funny too, but you can’t tell nothing by sheep. Sheep area always seeing something that no one else sees. Show me a man who listens to sheep and I’ll show you a man who spends all his time building fences.

Now, a horse is sensible, except when it comes to another horse, and Bob had his neck out and his ears up like the sheep did. I looked over where Cletis was riding Sweetpea, and him and Sweetpea looked like Bob. I always thought Cletis and Sweetpea looked a lot alike anyhow; both of them got that close-eyed, long-faced look like they was better than what they was doing. Cletis must be fifty, near as old as me, and he ain’t never been nothing but a pick-up hand, working at four or five different ranches. He’s a good one, the only one I ever use, and he could foreman if he wasn’t always right.

Me and Cletis had been out since daylight checking the stock. Folks think it don’t get cold in south Texas and it don’t until everybody thinks it can’t and then it does. A norther blows in and freezes everything. Sometimes it freezes into ice and when it don’t the wind is so cold you can’t tell the difference. Why, I’ve seen snow. It’s usually gone by midday, but folks and animals suffer when they’re not prepared for it. That’s why me and Cletis was out. We was moving the stock out of the wind and feeding them so they didn’t suffer none.

When we was done I was ready to load up the horses, get in the truck, and head for the house. The heater in the truck hadn’t worked in four years but it was out of the wind. But Cletis stood around like he was sniffing the air. “I got me a funny feeling,” he said.

“What kind a funny feeling?” I asked him.

“If I knew that it wouldn’t be funny would it? It’d just be a feeling. Like frozen ears is a feeling.” Cletis wasn’t born more than fifteen miles from where I was, but he was in the Army once and he thought that made him smarter than anybody. Shoot, all he learned in the Army was how to march. He told me so himself. “Cletis,” I sometimes say to him, “since you was in the Army, march down to the corral and close the gate.”

“Let’s run by the hunters’ trailer,” I said, but there wasn’t nothing at the hunters’ trailer, not even a hunter, ‘cause it was Christmas day and they was all home sitting by the fire watching football.

“You think we ought to check the first house?” Cletis asked. Cletis was in the Army and he thinks he knows more about duty than anybody. “Cletis,” I sometimes say to him, “there’s more to duty than killing rattlesnakes.”

“I reckon we have to,” I said. I don’t know why he asked about the old house. It was way back in Whiskey Rock Canyon, and in the opposite direction where I wanted to be. It was the old first house on the ranch, a two-room bare-wall cabin with whatever shingles and floor the wind and rats hadn’t gotten. It never had running water or electricity and the only heat was from the old fireplace, but sometimes during deer season on a rainy day hunters would duck into it for a couple of hours, which was about all a body could stand. And sometimes wets drifting through the country looking for a job used it to get out of the wind. They never bothered nothing, but Mr. Hasslocker didn’t like them staying there. He was afraid they’d steal something or eat one of his cows. Shoot, I ain’t never seen a wet that wouldn’t put a banker to shame when it come to honest. But we was supposed to run them off.Them was our orders.

I pulled up in front of the cabin. We couldn’t see no smoke from the chimbley or nothing, but we both knowed somebody was in there; a house with somebody in it just don’t feel like a house that’s empty. Even a horse knows that. And, whoever it was, we was going to have to turn them out into the cold. And on Christmas day. I turned and looked at Cletis. “Your Spanish is better than mine,” I said. Cletis grew up talking Tex/Mex like me but pretends he forgot how in the Army. “Tell them to vamoose.”

“Tell them yourself, you’re the foreman.”

The only time Cletis remembers I’m boss is when there’s something he don’t want to do. So I got out of the truck and walked over to the door and shoved it open. There ain’t never been no doorknob but the doorjamb is warped and friction keeps it closed. I stepped in and it took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dimness and all I could see was a pile of rags in a corner. Them hunters is all coat-and-tie folks in the city, but when they come out here they wear the raggediest things they got and when they get tired of carrying them, they just drop them wherever they are. 

Then I made out a girl, and a boy was standing in front of her kind of protecting her, and he was saying something to me that I didn’t understand. “Cletis, get in here,” I yelled.

“What’s going on?” Cletis asked when he got inside. He palavered with the boy for a while and then he turned to me and said that the boy was apologizing for being in the cabin but they couldn’t find no other place and the girl was having a baby.

“Baby?” Sure enough, there was a little old baby wrapped up in what was either a flannel shirt or the stuffing out of a sleeping bag. “What is it?”

“Boy.”

“Don’t that beat all that they’d walk out of Mexico with a baby on the way.”

“They ain’t from Mexico,” Cletis said. “They’re them kind of people that nobody wants and everybody keeps running off. Salvadories or something lie that.”

“Well, they come to the right place to get run off,” I said. “There ain’t no place for them here.” Cletis acts tough because he was in the Army, but I knowed he wasn’t going to throw no woman and baby out in the cold, and he wasn’t going to say much if I didn’t. He turned and walked out the door. “Where you going?” I asked him.

“I’m going to chop some wood, you dumb horse jockey. The baby’s blue from the cold, and the mama’s teeth are chattering.”

I followed him out and picked up the chips and got a fire going and helped him carry in wood and then we kneeled on the floor because it was too cold to sit, and tried to thaw out. “Look at them shoes,” Cletis said. They weren’t really shoes, they were them kind of sandals them folks wear.

“How far you reckon they come?” I said.

“A far piece,” Cletis says. “But not as far as they got to go. There ain’t no home for folks like them.”

“What about the baby, ain’t there no place for him?”

Cletis give me one of them Army looks that’s supposed to mean he has seen something I ain’t. I threw some more wood on the fire and got it to going where we could stand back a ways and let it warm up the room. I watched the mama and daddy in the firelight. They was scared, you could see that, but kind of brave too. I guess you’d have to be to come as far as they had.

It got warm enough that the mama unwrapped the baby a little and I could see him. Leastways, I could see his head. He wasn’t much to look at. His eyes was squinched closed and his mouth was puckered like life needed a bit more seasoning to suit his taste. And his hands was knotted up with a fist full of nothing. I didn’t look at him long. When it comes to babies, give me a pig ever time. Some folks like lambs but a newborn lamb looks spindly and all legs. A pig is handsome from the time it’s born until it’s near a year old. With human’s it’s the other way around. They’re borned ugly and some of them never et pretty. “Hey, Clete, ain’t much to look at is he?”

“He looks like a baby,” Clete said, but he hadn’t never seen a real baby before neither. Like me all he’d seen was foals and calves and lambs and things that already got hair on them.

Then the baby began sticking his tongue out and his face shriveled up and his fists started to shake and he kind a bleated. His mama shook him around and held him close and I got scared. “You think he’s gonna die, Clete?” I hadn’t never doctored nothing but animals except for that time a bull near stepped Cletis’s ear off and I sewed it back on him. And he held a mirror and complained the whole time that the seam wasn’t straight. His ear does pucker a little but he always wears a hat anyhow and the only time you can tell is when he gets a haircut.

“He made it this far didn’t he?” Clete said, and I knowed he was ‘thinking about all them miles them folks had brought that baby to be borned in this pace. That kid shore had him some tough parents. You have to wonder if they didn’t think there was something wrong, them coming all this far and still not finding no good place for a baby to be born.

“What do you reckon will happen to him? He ain’t one of us and folks are always gonna be wishing he had stayed where he belonged and not come trying to take away what’s rightfully ours.”

“You can’t never tell,” Clete said. “When you’re little like that, you can be anything.”

“Here we are looking at this little baby that don’t look like nothing appetizing; wouldn’t it be something if he growed up to be somebody? Why, he might go back wherever he come from and be a leader of his country. And you wanted to run him off like he wasn’t nothing better than a wet.”

“I didn’t want to run him off,” Cletis said.

“You shore would have if Mr. Hasslocker told you to, you would. Why, you could a gone down in history books as a bad man.”

“What about you?” Cletis said.

I got a good eye for horses and cows and I ain’t often wrong about people, but it does seem hard to expect a man to cull kids. I bet there ain’t one in ten could look at that kid and tell whether he was worth keeping or not. I reckon we was all thinking the same  ‘cause the mama and daddy was looking at each other like they wondered what they had got themselves into. Cletis was staring at the fire and snorting like a bull that’s done sulled. I got up.

“Where you going?” Cletis asked.

“I’m going to take the horses back to the house and turn them loose. Then I’m going to see if I can rustle up some grub. I ain’t et, and I bet these folks ain’t neither.”

“Bring some water,” he said. “And something to heat it in, and some rags. And don’t tell nobody.” I didn’t even answer him. I ain’t stupid.

Well, dang if Mr. Hasslocker didn’t call when I was back at the house trying to get things together. Leave it to a man who lives in the city to worry himself on a cold night. Sometimes I think he worries more about the stock than I do. I told him we’d moved them and fed them. He asked if everything else was okay. I ain’t no hand at lying so I tried to haw around it and he kept on until I had to tell him there was a woman and a baby in the first house and they couldn’t leave. I didn’t say much about the daddy. I figured the less said about him, the better.

“They got no business with my property,” he said. “Soon as they’re able I want them out of that house.” He don’t take care of the house or nothing, and I bet he ain’t seen it in ten years. Shoot, he ain’t been on the ranch since spring shearing, but it’s his cabin and he can do what he wants to with it. And if he don’t want nobody in it, then there ain’t going to be nobody in it. That’s the law, I reckon.

I got together some pans that I didn’t mind putting in the fire and a whole bunch of can goods. And I took my blanket and the only clean sheet, and the bottle of wine me and Cletis was going to have with Christmas dinner.

When I got back to the cabin, Cletis and the daddy had chopped some more wood and moved it into the house, enough to last all night. Cletis had been talking to the daddy some more and he said they hadn’t had no fire because they didn’t have no matches, and that the baby’s name was Manuel, and they had been walking for more than a year.

I put some water in a pan and warmed it and the mama washed the baby and wrapped him up in my good blanket. She didn’t want to rip up the sheet so I done it for her, and showed her she was supposed to use it for diapers. She thought I wanted the baby and she handed him to him but I ain’t never changed no baby so I give him back.

After the mama and baby settled down for the night, I divided the wine into three pans because I forgot to bring cups. Me and Cletis and the daddy drank our wine, and ever once in a while one of us would throw a log in the fire. We sat up all night. We didn’t talk much because we was men and there wasn’t a whole lot to say. This wasn’t their place, never was and never would be. They might just as well turn around and go back where they come from for all the good they done.

I thought a lot that night about things I never had no cause to think of before. I thought about when I was a baby and my mama and daddy wondered what they had. I bet they never thought their son might grow up and be a foreman of a big ranch like this. Why, for all they knowed they could a been holding a criminal or a president, although I don’t think I’d ever made a president. My daddy told me, “You can show or you can shovel,” and he never had a lot of respect for folks that made a spectacle of themselves.

The next day three hunters showed up. Mr. Hasslocker had told them about the baby in the first house and they had to see for themselves. They all three had flat, white-washed faces and smelled like toilet water. One was a banker, and one was a lawyer, and the other got rich buying and selling companies he didn’t own. They warmed themselves by the fire and said what a fine looking baby it was, which was a lie, and how glad they was to see him, which was another.

They clowned around with the baby and made remarks about the mama and daddy and got to joking among themselves about how they ought to give the baby a present seeing as how he was born on Christmas day. They was just showing off, amusing themselves. The banker give him a dollar. “So he’ll never be broke,” he said. The lawyer give him a pocket can-opener, “so he’ll never go hungry,” and the other one give him one of them little radios who put in your ear, “so he’ll always know what’s going on.”

They looked at me and Cletis like we was too dumb to think of something funny to give him. We didn’t say nothing and they got to looking at each other like it was time to do something manful, and they went off to shoot them a trophy they could hang on the wall back in San Antonio.

Me and Cletis went back to work. That was the last I seen them Salvadories. I don’t know what happened to them. All I know is, something was wrong. From the beginning, I knowed something was wrong. Even the horses knew that.

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