The Round-Up

Rafael Morales had ridden two days down out of the high country to see a thing his father did not understand the point of, which was men getting paid, or hoping to get paid, for work they did for wages every other day of the year.

His father was Guadalupe Morales, who had come north from Sonora in 1869, the year the rails met, and had spent his life in the yard by the river coupling cars and greasing journals and going home each night with the iron smell in his clothes that never quite washed out. Guadalupe had wanted the same for his sons, steady work and a roof and the yard, and it was Rafael who had gone the other way, to horses, the way a man goes toward the thing his hands were made for whether it pays or not. He had been a buckaroo in the Smoke Creek country to the north for close to twenty years now, and he had come down to Reno for the Fourth of July because the town was holding its first round-up and half the outfits in the north had sent men.

They were calling it the Nevada Round-Up. There were banners strung on the fairgrounds fence and a new grandstand full of people in their summer clothes, and a good part of the noise that morning was for the soldiers, the ones who had come home that spring from France and were given seats down front and pointed out and clapped for. Rafael watched a young man in a stiff uniform lift his hand to the crowd and let it drop like the arm was heavier than it used to be. The war had taken boys off the ranches too. Two off his own outfit. One of them had come back.

The word buckaroo was the town’s word, and it was really his people’s word worn down by other mouths. Vaquero. Rafael had learned that before he learned to read, from an old man named Silvano who had ridden for the big Californio outfits when California still felt like Sonora, and who had drifted into Nevada in his old age with nothing but his saddle and the knowledge in his hands. Silvano had taught him the long braided rawhide reata, sixty feet of it, and the slow patient way of it, letting the loop live in the air before it came down, and the making of a bridle horse over years and not months, and the spade bit that a horse carried light once it was trained right and was a cruelty in the hands of a man in a hurry. Rafael was not a man in a hurry. That was the one thing the ranches had never been able to teach anybody who did not already have it.

He had brought his own gear because a man did not borrow gear. The reata he had braided himself over three winters. The bit was silver-mounted, the conchos hammered by a saddler in Elko out of dollars run through a die, and he had bought it a little at a time across four years, the way his father had bought the lot the family house stood on, a payment when there was a payment to make. In the grandstand shade a man from a Reno paper was writing things in a notebook and calling the riders cowboys, and Rafael let it go. He had been called worse and by better.

His father had come down too, which surprised everyone, and sat now in the shade at the end of the grandstand with a blanket over his knees though it was July, seventy-two years old and gone small, watching the horses with the flat patience of a man who had spent his life around machines and did not see that a horse was so different from one. Guadalupe had never once told Rafael he was proud of the buckarooing and never once told him he was wrong to do it. He had only said, the one time they spoke of it plainly, that a man in the yard knew what his day would be and a man on a green horse did not, and that he had crossed an entire country to buy the first kind of day for his children and could not for his life understand a son who would trade it back. Rafael had not argued. You did not argue a thing like that. You lived the other way and let the living be the argument.

His sister Rosa had come out to watch, forty-three now and stout and unimpressed by most things, married to a man who worked the ice plant, and she had brought Rafael’s boy with her. Eddie was five. He sat on the top rail of the arena fence with Rosa’s hand fisted in the back of his shirt, and he watched the horses come out of the chutes with his whole face, and Rafael understood, looking at him, that the boy had already decided something the way Rafael had decided it at that age, and that Guadalupe was going to lose another one to the horses and there was nothing to be done about it. Rosa caught his eye over the boy’s head and made a face that meant the same thing. She had raised half the family. She knew how it went.

The roping was in the afternoon, when the light came flat and hard across the track and the dust hung. Rafael sat his horse at the head of the arena and felt the animal settle under him, a good short-coupled bay he had made himself over four years and would not have sold for the price of a house. The steer broke and he let it run its length before he moved, because that was the whole of it, the waiting, the loop turning up over his head unhurried while the crowd made its noise somewhere behind the dust and the boy on the fence held his breath. Silvano used to say a man throws the loop he has already thrown a thousand times in the dark of his own head. Rafael had thrown this one all his life.

He put the loop where he meant to put it. The bay sat back and the rope came tight and sang once, low, the way good rawhide sang, and the steer swung and stopped, and the dust rolled on past them both and out over the rail. Somewhere in it Eddie was yelling in a voice that had not broken and never would sound like this again, and Rafael, holding the tension, keeping his horse honest on the rope, did not turn to look at his son yet. He kept his eyes on the work. There would be time to look. He held the line taut and steady in the settling dust and waited for the man on the ground to run in and do his part, the way the whole thing only ever worked, one man holding and another coming on, and the town on its feet for something his family had been doing before there was a town to watch.

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