January 31, 2002

A friend who teaches at the University in San Angelo brought back a jar of sorghum molasses from Tennessee as a New Year's present. First time "sorghum" had been around the ranch in six decades. Brought back the smell of wood smoke from a cook stove. Brought back sorghum molasses spread on cornbread, which is "cawnbread" in our idiom.

One year during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Mertzon's supply of sorghum molasses came from across Spring Creek at Mr.James's mill. After the sun warmed his wooden barrels, the thick black syrup dribbled from the small bung into gallon jugs. Money changed hands, but I don't know how much coin. The coffee can for a cash register hung on a tree limb. Customers helped themselves. No sales tax, store license, or health certificate was needed to run the business.

The friend also brought a plastic sack of pulled pork barbecue with three jars of sauce for support. "Folks in Tennessee," he says, "scorn beef." African Americans in particular slur beef by calling it "cow." On one long-ago Christmas, he remembered his father taking him by a family party of farmers centered on butchering 21 hogs.

I couldn't imagine killing 21 head of hogs, but I sure don't have any trouble remembering killing five or six head. At the old ranch, the Big Boss fed barrows every summer to be ready to kill after the first heavy frost. Big brutes, all two of us cowboys and a couple of cooks could turn in a steel barrel filled with scalding ash water and drag onto a rock floor to be scraped. We stood for hours at a makeshift cutting table, cranking a sausage mill, wiping the black pepper and sage fumes from our eyes on our shirt cuffs. The heads had to be scraped just so for tamales and a concoction called "head cheese. And worst of all, the ground meat weighed to be sure the proportions were correct for the sausage.

But unlike other ranch work, we had plenty of company. The Big Boss considered 30 people a small party. He was more comfortable with a guest list, say, in the low 60s or perhaps over into 70 head. Once we started stuffing the sausages, the cooks quit to bake bread and fry big skillets of meat and potatoes.

On stage, the Big Boss drew a circle of chairs to hear his stories. For the benefit of all, he'd say: "See that boy over there cutting up meat? He's Monte, my oldest son. Can dance the 'Cotton Eyed Joe' like a minstrel player, juggle beer cans and shoot marbles on sloping ground, but he must have obtained his sense of balance from a brown bear as he can't ride a swinging gate to a turn, much less stay on a bucking horse." (In those days, cowboys who couldn't ride wild horses were a disgrace.)

Wasn't any way for me to shrink out of sight cutting up hog meat, or taking my turn cranking the grinder in the edge of the bunkhouse yard. After he'd take a drag off his cigar, he'd continue, "I am so unlucky it could be raining soup outside and all I'd have was a fork. Got another boy younger than Monte, named Walter. He doesn't want to do anything except study and go to school. Last spring instead of coming home to help halter break my colts, he took an exam to go to law school. Fine by gawd thing. Thirty by gawd head of colts to break and him wanting to study law."

Hog killing nights meant a raucous party. The butchering crew stayed to the side, so weary we looked as pitiful as the five hogs' heads staring at us from a cutting board. After we peeled off the last bacon slabs to hang in the smokehouse, we watched from afar as washtubs full of ice surrounded and covered 200 cans of the best St. Louis beer. We listened to the banjo player and the guitarist tune for the opening reel. Felt the music heighten the pitch of the crowd. Heard the timid and shy ones inspired by beverage alcohol howl and holler on the moonlighted scene. Saw booted feet and dainty slippers kick high off the concrete floor to the furious stroke of the pick against the strings of the banjo and guitar. And stood as left out as a hobo at the meeting of a brotherhood of railroad men.

My partners, dispossessed of the bunkhouse, rolled their beds under a brush arbor back of the barn. Next day, the last of the guests and all of the sausage and pork chops left for town. The cooks degreased the kitchen and wrapped the remainder of the meat for the freezer. The ones of us left at the ranch watched the cars depart for the city in flurries of dust to cross the big draw for town, validating Jose's name for the ranch — "El rancho de las colas de luz," or "the ranch of the taillights."