That Old Ace in the Hole. Annie Proulx
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in esoteric martial arts; in his hands a stick was a lethal weapon. In Woolybucket County he presided over certain legal rites, heard confessions, arbitrated disputes, observed the community, knew when a family was in difficulties, and he guided the errant back onto the path, sometimes forcibly.
Hugh Dough disliked politics and it galled him to run for office. For many years he had run against Tully Nelson, a six-four bully who, after his last defeat, moved thirty miles to sparsely populated Slickfork County where he was handily elected, and hence a rival sheriff Hugh Dough also disliked teenage punks, and thought the best deterrent for a young hoodlum – the younger the better – was a night or two in the county clink. He had once locked up the state’s attorney’s bespectacled nine-year-old son, whom he caught throwing rocks at a dog chained to its doghouse.
“How’d you like it, then, was you chained up and some four-eyed little bastard come along and start peggin rocks at you? Believe I’ll have to educate you.” And he handcuffed the kid to a bicycle rack in front of the courthouse, snatched off the kid’s glasses and put them on his own blinking eyes, saying, “Now let’s us pretend I’m you and you’re that poor dog,” picked up a small stone and hurled it. It caught the kid on the upper arm and set off shrieks and blubbering that brought heads to the windows. A few more stones and the kid was hysterical.
“Guess I will have to lock you up until you quiet down,” he said and dragged the bellowing child into the jail, kicked him into a cell. Of course he paid for it later, as the state’s attorney was a formidable enemy.
“Ain’t that the squeeze of it?” said the sheriff on the phone to his sister Opal.
“At least you got the satisfaction,” she said, and in the panhandle satisfaction of grievances counted for something.
Perhaps the most irritating of his duties, aside from chasing down old ladies’ reports of strangers on the highway, was keeping a balance in the ongoing feud between Advance Slauter and Francis Scott Keister, two ranchers of opposing personalities and ranch philosophies and styles. What puzzled Sheriff Hugh Dough was their lack of kin recognition, for the Slauters and the Keisters had intermingled generations back when both clans lived in Arkansas. Old Daniel Slauter had married Zubie Keister in 1833, and although she was only the first of his five wives, she bore him five of the thirty-two children he claimed to have fathered, and a marked Keister look – long ringy neck, circled eyes, spider fingers and bad teeth – had entered the Slauter genes. Later more Slauter-Keister crossings further marred the stock.
Advance Slauter and Francis Scott Keister had loathed each other since grade school (which old-timers called “cowboy college” in their sarcastic voices) when Keister, the product of an intensely religious upbringing, a 4-H leader and a Junior Texas Ranger, overheard Advance Slauter, muscular lout extraordinaire, say that he was screwing both his younger sisters and anybody who wanted a piece of the action should show up at the family ranch at six A.M. with a quarter in hand and tap on Ad’s window for admittance. Hugh Dough had sniggered knowingly, later inspired to do his own homework, but Francis Scott Keister was outraged on behalf of pure girlhood. A terrific fight followed, broken up by the principal. Both boys refused to say what had started it. In fact, Ad Slauter was entirely puzzled by the attack. So the feud began and had persisted over thirty years, each man coming by turn into the sheriff’s office to report the latest atrocity. Sheriff Hugh Dough would hear the complainant out and take notes, file them in the two voluminous dossiers of increasingly sophisticated criminal misdemeanor. The assaults were mostly rock-throwing and name-calling until high school when both wangled broke-down old hoopys to drive. Now buckets of paint were thrown, tires shot out, windshields broken. When Francis Scott Keister went to the Wichita Falls stock show with the 4-H group he bought a custom-designed bumper sticker that read I AM A PIECE OF SHIT and pasted it on the back of Slauter’s car. Ad Slauter responded, on the family vacation trip to Padre Island, by visiting the marina store where he stole three aerosol cans of expandable flotation foam and he used them to fill the engine compartment of Keister’s vehicle. He signed Keister up for subscriptions to gay pornographic magazines (“Bill me later”). Keister released black widow spiders on Slauter’s windowsill. Slauter poured sixteen gallons of used crankcase oil on Keister’s front porch.
As grown men both Francis Scott Keister and Advance Slauter ran cow-calf cattle operations but there were few similarities beyond the fact that both men’s cows were quadrupeds. Francis Scott Keister was a scientific rancher, methodical, correct, progressive. He had been born in Woolybucket and was belligerent and aggressive about being a “panhandle native,” loathed all outsiders.
Keister lived with his wife, Tazzy, and only child, fourteen-year-old Frank, a lanky boy with wing-nut ears and broom-handle neck. He often told him to go help his mother in the kitchen as he was no help with machinery or cows. Their house was large, of the style called “rancho deluxe,” the only building on the ranch not made entirely of metal. His corrals and catch pens were of enameled steel in pleasing colors. The machine shop and calving barn were heated and well-lighted, freshly painted every year. His handsome Santa Gertrudis cattle displayed rich mahogany coats and backs as level as the ground they trod. Ninety-four percent of his cows dropped a calf every spring. He kept meticulous breeding records on complicated computer charts. The heifers were artificially inseminated with semen from champion bulls, turned out on newly sprouted winter wheat in the spring, carefully moved from pasture to pasture during the summer. Keister supplemented the grass with soy meal, beet pulp, molasses, sorghum and sweet-corn stover, corn, cottonseed hulls, beet tops, cannery waste, anhydrous ammonia, poultry packer by-products (including feathers), peanut meal, meat meal, bonemeal, lint from the family clothes dryer. To this smorgasbord he added a battery of growth stimulants including antibiotics and the pharmaceuticals Bovatec and Rumensin, as well as the implants Compudose, Finaplix, Ralgro, Steer-oid and Synovex-S. At eighteen months his big steers were ready for market and he received the highest prices for them.
Ad Slauter, in contrast, lived in a dwelling constructed around an old bunkhouse dating back to the 1890s, part of a massive ranch that had belonged to a disappointed Scottish consortium. He had added slapdash additions and wings to accommodate his large family of ten girls. He was an advocate of arcane home remedies. When five-year-old Mazie, playing hide-and-seek, chose a bull nettle patch in which to hide and emerged shrieking and clutching at her calves, he urinated on the burning welts, telling her it would take the sting out, until his wife came at him with a broom. Turpentine and cold coffee was, he said, good for a fever, and drunks could be made sober if they ate sweet potatoes.
The Slauter ranch was shabby and run-down, with sagging fences and potholed roads. He ranched as his father had, letting his mixed-breed cows, mostly picked up at the cattle auctions in Beaver, Oklahoma, take care of their own sex lives. Cows preferred to nurse their calves for six or seven months, not become pregnant as rapidly as possible, and Slauter thought they knew what they were doing. They wandered where they would and were half-wild by the time of fall roundup. He bought small, young bulls every five or six years for a few hundred dollars. Only fifty-five percent of his cows produced a calf each year. Because they ate only pasture grass supplemented by baled hay in winter, they took a long time to put on enough weight for market, twenty-eight to thirty months. Curiously enough the two men’s ledgers balanced out at almost the same figures, for Keister’s operation was costly and his heifer mortality rate high as the champion bull semen made painfully large calves.
Hugh Dough dreaded to see either of the combatants pull up in front of the courthouse, but especially disliked Francis Scott Keister, whom he regarded as a rigid straight arrow who made too much of things that didn’t concern him.
The sheriff’s office had five dispatchers. They were all big, placid, middle-aged women, and not one of them understood how to separate the inconsequential from the urgent. Myrna Greiner did not hesitate to call at three A.M.
“Sheriff, I thought you ought a know we got a report that a black panther is tryin to break into Minnie Dubbs’s kitchen. She can hear it a-growlin and a-scratchin at the door.”
“How does she know it’s a black panther? Did she see it?”
“She says she can tell by the noise it’s makin. Plus she looked out that little