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Howdy. My name is Hollis Brummett. I am 67 years old and I ran cows on this place for forty-four years, same as my daddy did before me. My knees quit before I did, so these days I lease the grass to a neighbor and keep four horses and a milk-pen calf that thinks he is a dog. I never wrote a poem in my life until January of 1997, when my wife Louise talked me into driving out to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. I sat in the back for three days and never said a word. On the way home, somewhere in Utah, I asked Louise for a pencil. I have been writing ever since, mostly at the kitchen table at five in the morning, which is when a rancher's head is clearest and the coffee is best. My granddaughter Kaylee, who is in college in Lubbock, typed these up and made the page for me over Easter. She says I can change it myself now. We will see. Some are funny and some are not. All of them happened, more or less. Louise says less. |
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The Horse That Wouldn't Load I had a sorrel gelding, and I called him Buttermilk. He'd cross a swollen river and he'd stop as smooth as silk. He'd read a cow's intentions 'fore the cow had made them up, But show him a stock trailer, and he'd bawl just like a pup. We tried him with a bucket, oats and sweet feed, mixed just right. He ate it off the tailgate, and he stood there half the night. We tried a rope behind his hocks, and two men pulling hard. He set all four feet like fence posts and he drug us round the yard. We tied a gunnysack across his eyes the way the old men do. He stood there like a statue till the neighbors come to view. We loaded Lester's mare in first, to show him it was fine. He watched her with great interest, and he never crossed the line. By sundown I was whipped, and I'd said words I shan't repeat. I saddled him and rode him into town on his own feet, Some twenty miles of bar ditch and of blacktop, hot and slow, To see the vet about his teeth, like we'd set out to go. And there behind the vet's place sat the vet's own trailer, wide, With the back gate hanging open and some hay piled up inside, And Buttermilk looked at it, and he pricked his sorrel ears, And walked right in that trailer like he'd done it all his years. I've studied on it since, and here's the most that I can say: A horse will load most any time. It just won't be your way. So if you own a sorrel horse with notions of his own, Don't argue. Ride him into town. The vet can haul him home. |
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Calving in a Norther The radio said flurries, and the radio was wrong. The norther hit at suppertime and blew the whole night long. I found her in the shinnery, a first-calf heifer, down, Two miles from any shelter and eleven miles from town. I knelt there in the sleet with her. The flashlight quit at three. Some words I said were prayers, and some weren't fit for company, But the Lord was out there in the wind, and He's heard worse, I'd judge, For just about the break of day that calf began to budge. He came out limp and steaming, and he lay there on the ground. I rubbed him down with burlap and I swung him round and round And cleared his nose and hollered some, and then I heard him cough, And his mama raised her head up, and she went to licking him off. I rode home with him on the saddle, draped across my knees, His mama at my stirrup, bawling in the sleet and freeze, And Louise was at the window with the coffee on the stove, And she didn't ask me nothing. That's how you know it's love. Now folks will ask what ranching pays. I tell them, not a lot. Some years the rain don't come at all; some years the calves get bought For less than what it cost to raise them. I won't say that isn't true. But I've seen a backwards calf stand up at sunrise. How about you? |
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Louise's Roses Louise put in her roses in the spring of 'fifty-three, The year that we were married, by the well house, near the tree. The wind come down from Kansas like it does, and took them all, And she put them in again that June, and lost them in the fall. She built a fence of tin around them, and the wind took down the tin. She stacked a wall of caliche rock and dug the roses in. She hauled them water by the bucket through the drought of 'fifty-six, When we sold off half our cattle and the creek was dirt and sticks. And I'd tell her, "Honey, this ain't rose country. Let them go." And she'd tell me, "Hollis Brummett, this ain't cow country, you know, And you're still out there every morning." I'd have nothing more to say, So I'd go and get another bucket, and we'd both go on our way. Well, it's forty-six years later, and the roses by the well Are taller than the well house, and they're blooming. I can tell You now I've changed my thinking. There's no such thing, I guess, As rose country, or cow country. There's just people who say yes. |
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The Tuesday Table ~ Before the Interstate ~ Advice to a City Cousin Where I'll Be Reciting
If your church or cattlewomen or 4-H club would like an old man to come say a few poems, write me. I don't charge anything but supper, and I'll drive a hundred miles for a good pie. |
