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This story, which is a true one, goes back to the days of oxen—a time and a tempo in which people
could stand beneath the boughsAnd stare as long as sheep and cows.
could stand beneath the boughsAnd stare as long as sheep and cows.
could stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep and cows.
Many a man and boy, and many a woman and girl too, had a strong affection for oxen reliabilities bearing such names as Old North and Crump, Tom and Jerry, Bigfoot Wallace and Jim Bowie, Bully and Blackie.
Take Old Samson and the rollicky crew that drove the freight train he helped pull. It wascarrying supplies west from Jefferson on the Louisiana line. The wagon to which Samson was yoked happened to be loaded with bacon and barrelled whiskey. One day he went lame. The next morning a bullwhacker suggested that he be shod with bacon rind. Accordingly the rinds were cut off two sides of salt pork and put on Samson for shoes. While he was being held, the ingenious whacker suggested Samson would feel more at ease in the strange footgear if he had a dram. A quart bottle was filled out of a barrel and poured down Samson’s throat. “Well, sir, that old ox licked out his tongue and smacked his lips and went against the yoke. For a while, with his new bacon-rind slippers and morning dram, he was as frisky as a young colt. He tried to pull the whole load by himself.�
Some drivers of oxen were more noted than the most noted oxen. Not long after Texas joined the Confederacy, a youngster named Tim Cude went from Live Oak County to enlist in the Army. Although he was only sixteen years old, his way with oxen was a community wonder—especially the power of his voice over them. It was a voice young and lush, but strong, without the gosling quality. He did not charm theoxen by whispering—horse-charmer style—in their ears.
Brindle and Whitey were his wheelers, Sam Houston and Davy Crockett, the leaders. They were steers of the old-time Texas Longhorn breed, and they could pull a log out of its bark. When Tim commanded them, they would go to their places to be hitched to wagon or plow. Tim was partial to Brindle, and when he put a hand over the ox’s head, the ox would often show his pleasure by licking out his tongue. The four oxen were the last inhabitants of the little Cude ranch that Tim told good-by when he left to fight the Yankees. He was an only child. He did not realize what emptiness he left behind him. He seldom wrote to relieve it.
Months after Appomattox, his mother and father learned that he was still alive at Lee’s surrender. Tim Cude was a mature man now, strong and rangy with a full-grown beard. More months, then a year, then two years, dragged by, and still Tim did not come home, and there was no word from him. At first his father and mother talked with high hopes of his coming. Then, gradually, they came to saying little, even to each other, about his return. They still nursed a hope,but the heavy conviction settled down on them that Tim must be among the many other boys in gray who would never come back home. Their hope grew gray and secret, without confidence. The days went by as slow as laboring oxen walk.
In the late spring of 1867 Mr. Cude put a few beeves in a herd going north. Six months later the owners of the herd returned and paid him the first money he had seen in years. The aging couple needed the money to buy necessities with, but Mr. Cude had a hard time persuading “mama� to go with him down to Powderhorn on the coast for the purchases. “Tim might come while we are gone,� was her only argument. Mr. Cude’s argument that, if he came, he would stay until they got back, had slight weight with her. She wanted to be there. Mr. Cude would not argue, not even to himself, much less to her, that Tim would never come, but he often reasoned gently that it was better for them both to be resigned.
It was in December before Mrs. Cude finally consented to go. They took a load of dry cow-hides with them, and as the oxen pulled them south at the rate of about two miles an hour, theywent over their plans again and again for spending the money.
The plans cheered them. They would have plenty of real coffee now, instead of tea from parched acorns and corn, and a new coffee grinder that would do away with the labor of pounding the grains in a sack with a hammer. Their old coffee mill was absolutely worn out. They would get sacks of flour and have real flour bread. “You remember how Tim always likes flour gravy,� Mrs. Cude said. She would have enough calico for three new dresses and a sunbonnet, besides a tablecloth; he would have new boots, new hat and breeches, and percale for sewing into shirts. “I’ll get some blue for Tim,� Mrs. Cude said. There would be a new plow for the cornpatch and lumber for a gallery to the frame house, so hot in the summer.
It took them five or six days to get down to Powderhorn, and then two days to buy everything and load the wagon. On the way back Mrs. Cude kept wishing they’d make better time, but the four old tortoise-stepping oxen never moved a foot faster. “Perhaps Tim came home today,� Mrs. Cude would say at the evening camp. “I dreamed last night that he came just after dark,�she’d say over the morning campfire, always burning long before daybreak. In all the dragging months, months adding themselves into years, no day had dawned, no night had fallen, that she had not made some little extra preparation for her boy’s coming home. In all the period of waiting, this was the first time she had not been there to welcome him. As she approached the waiting place now, the hopes of more than fourteen absent days and of more than fourteen absent nights were all accumulated into one hope. Perhaps Tim had come. Mr. Cude shared the hope, too, but it hurt him to see “mama disappointed,� and he never encouraged day-dreams.
At last they were only six miles from home. Christmas was only three days away. Then the oxen stalled in a mudhole at the crossing on La Parra Creek. For an hour Mr. Cude struggled and worried with them, trying to make them make the supreme pull. Mrs. Cude threw all her strength on the spoke of one wheel. Finally Mr. Cude began the weary business of unloading some of the freight and carrying it on his back out of the creek.
Then suddenly they were aware of a man, dismounted from the horse beside him, standing on the bank just ahead. Being down in the creek, they could not have seen his approach. His frame, though lank, was well filled out, his face all bearded, his clothes nondescript. In his posture was something of the soldier. Nearly all Southern men had, in those days, been soldiers. For a second he seemed to be holding something back; then he gave a hearty greeting that was cordially responded to.
“Those look like mighty good oxen,� the young man said, coming down, as any stranger in that country at that time would come to help anybody in a tight.
“They are good oxen, but they won’t pull this wagon out now,� Mr. Cude answered. “I guess they’re getting old like us. We been working them since before the war.�
The stranger had moved around so that he was very near the wheel oxen, which he faced, instead of the driver and his wife. His hand was on Brindle’s head, between the long rough horns, and the old ox, whose countenance was the same whether in a bog hole or a patch of spring tallow weed, licked out his tongue.
“I believe I can make these old boys haul the wagon out,� the man said.
“They wouldn’t do any better for a stranger than for their master,� Mr. Cude answered.
“There’s only one person who could get them to pull,� added Mrs. Cude. “That’s our boy who went to the war.�
“Did he know oxen?� the young man asked out of his beard.
“Oh, yes, and they knew him. They liked him.�
Then for a little while there was silence.
As Mr. Cude began drawing up his rawhide whip, again the offerer of help, pleading now, asked for a chance to try his hand.
“Very well,� Mr. Cude agreed slowly, “but every time you try to make ’em pull and they don’t budge the wagon, they’re that much harder to get against the yoke the next time.�
The young man asked the names of the oxen and got them. Then he took the long whip, not to lash the animals—for that was not the whip’s function—but to pop it. He swung it lightly and tested the popper three or four times, as if getting back the feel of something long familiar that had been laid aside. Then he curved thefifteen feet of tapering plaited rawhide through the air—and the ringing crack made the sky brighter. At the same time he began calling to the oxen to come on and pull out. He talked to Brindle and Whitey and Sam Houston and Davy Crockett harder than a Negro crapshooter talking to his bones.
The oxen, without a jerk, lay slowly, steadily, mightily, into the yokes. The wheels began to turn. The whip popped again, like a crack of lightning in the sky, and the strong voice rose, pleading, encouraging, confident, dominating.
The oxen were halfway up the bank now. They pulled on out, but nobody was talking to them any longer. No welcome of feast and fatted calf ever overwhelmed a prodigal son like that, initiated by four faithful old oxen, which Tim Cude received from his mother and father on the banks of an insignificant creek in a wilderness of mesquite. All the gray in the world was suddenly wiped out by sunshine, and all the mockingbirds between the San Antonio River and the Rio Grande seemed to be singing at once.
The oxen, silent and slow, kept on pulling down the road.