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Show H but a straw hat, which I disliked, and hightopped farmer shoes which I hated. I blamed my father, naturally (who else can a son blame?) but at the same time I knew he hated being trapped into being a farmer as much as I did. I could see his yearning in his low-crowned Stetson crisp as crackers and white as milk, in his fancy shirts and gleaming brown high-heeled boots. Those were his dress-up clodies, not a farmer's, and neither was his neat black wicked-looking mustache. But plowing or planting he wore shoes like mine and an old Stetson, limp and sweat stained. Only his gloves were the best he could buy, fancy stitched, an extravagance in die diirties. And I could hear his yearning in the stories he told of buying cattle in Texas, of the .38 special on a .45 frame which he had carried in his saddle pocket and had once shot a deer widi, of that winter when it was so cold that the cattle's ears and tails froze stiff, and some of them bumped their tails and they snapped off like dry dead branches. So there in the corn chopping weeds I dreamed of the wild West where men were men, I dreamed of how it would have been had my father not gone broke and I dreamed of how it would be again. For hanging clean and oiled in the tool shed were three big old heavy saddles, and down in die pasture along die creek were three young white-faces with their calves, the start of a new herd. Thus, when my father set a day for branding the calves, Sunday so that it wouldn't interfere with die other work, I felt like a holiday coming up better than Christmas. I was thirteen then. My older brother Henry and I brought in the stock and separated the calves from the dams, six of them including three from the milk stock; and right after Sunday dinner we mixed the creosote dip, got out the irons and dehorners, built a fire and were ready. "All right," said my father, tossing a rope to Henry, "go get you one." It's hard for me to think of my father as old, and I didn't then, although he was over forty, middle-aged. Even with my grandfather dead he was still sometimes called Young Bill, and he had a flat work-hardened body and stepped lightly. His hair was as long and straight and black as an Indian's, and when he smiled under that mustache he looked as youthfully rakish as the heller he'd once been. Henry resembled him closely, without the mustache, but wasn't as brown and was an inch taller and a fine high school quarter- 230 |