February 12, 2004

For the first time in 30 or 40 years, Mid-West Feed Yards in San Angelo failed to send an Ace Reid calendar in December. Hard for an order buying and yardage firm to justify the price of a six-inch ruler on an outfit as low on volume as mine is today, much less an embossed collection of cartoons.

Months are not all that important, anyway. So it's said, old Felipe, who lived and died on the Aldwell ranch South of Sonora, dropped a rock in a five-gallon bucket each working day. My maternal grandfather opened his saddle house door to reach his records. Used an old saddle blanket to erase the blue chalk marks. His entries opened: "Sheared 1600 sheep spring of '27," or "Fourth clip of unsold mohair stored fall of '34."

Jose, who worked for the ranch over 40 years, never owned a watch or a calendar. The infamous Angel, the witch doctor, camped on the big draw in the Stage Stand pasture all one long winter without a timepiece or a scrap of paper. Angel cut notches in his tent pole in the middle of the day to count the days. Claimed he knew by mid-day if he was going to charge a full day's work. Angel's books were perilous to audit, as the yellowjacket wasps he fed syrup in the summer hibernated in his tent in the winter.

In the lawless era of unpapered aliens, the old ranch worked deep interior Mexicans too simple to notch a stick or drop a rock in a bucket. Every first of the month, we bought cashier's checks to send the payroll home, less the few dollars of personal items the men drew for tobacco and toothpaste. Paid whatever they presented, be it a notched stick or crude pencil marks on the flap of a carton of tobacco.

Big ranch bookkeeping problems arose after shearing capitans stopped counting sheep off the shearing boards, relying entirely on the metal tabs or checks given the sheep peeler for each sheep. Required further difficult mathematical challenge to triple the ram count to pay extra charge for those big brutes.

Every spring at Goat Whiskers the Elder's sheep peeling and woolie stampede, it took more time to audit the counts than to load and freight the wool to the Mertzon wool house. Whiskers carried a big handicap, entering as an engineering major from Massachusetts Institute of Technology matched against a gent who might have been allowed to go to grade school after the cotton harvest ended in the fall and before the shearing season began in the spring.

Put another way, the match was a school of fractions and decimals against a school of hard knocks and slim margins. Whiskers carried a slide rule in a scabbard; the capitan packed a grimy sack of metal checks. Shearing cost 30 cents a head. Closest the two accounts ever came to agreeing was a difference of 20 sheep on a harvest of over 3000 head. Whiskers refused to split the difference. After advancing the capitan five hundred interest-free, unsecured dollars and giving him six additional mutton goats to feed his crew, the victor stalked back into the house, muttering over all the world's incompetent shearing crews and bookkeepers, and adding flaming slurs aimed at surveyors, bankers and school teachers.

Whiskers used green ledger sheets and filled his accounts with precise lettering. His brother, the Big Boss, kept his inventory on his glove or the flap on his chap pocket. My contribution to the Boss's system ranked somewhere between the dates carved on flat rocks by early explorers and Daniel Boone recording a bear kill by carving the notation on the bark of a tree. However, I brought a shoe bag back from college with six empty pouches to use as a filing cabinet. The glove box and the sun visor in the pickup stored the rest of the paperwork.

In those times, checks were stubbed on the pasteboard backing of free counter checks. I don't remember having a copy of the financial statement at the bank. After registering for the draft, my only government business was filling in the agriculture census every 10 years and doing a short form for the IRS every April.

I miss having a new cartoon of Ace's every month, but honoring the four seasons is accurate enough to run a bitterweed ranch. The few tally books and a couple of ballpoints the feed mill sent compile the perks to start 2004. One field of accounting I keep current is the rainfall. Don't need much more than the back of a glove to cover the whole year.

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