When Davey's Uncle Eph, a bankrupt entrepreneur, arrives with a scheme for selling wild ponies, Davey unexpectedly learns the reason his mother left Texas
Excerpt
We finished supper and sat on the front steps in the cool shade,
watching shadows stretch over the patch of grass my father was trying
against all odds to grow in the adobe soil. A Ford V-8 station wagon
trailed dust past the trading post and turned down the hill toward the
school. We didn't often see a strange car at Klinchee. We were far from
any main road.
"Now who's this, do you suppose?" Pa said as the station wagon rattled
over the cattle guard.
"It looks like Uncle Eph's old crate," I said. Uncle Eph was my mother's
brother, one of many but always her favorite. He had come to visit
several times before she fell sick, something none of her other brothers
had done, and he was the only one she had corresponded with, even at
Christmas.
"I think you're right."
"He's got somebody with him."
"Maybe he brought Muffie, though it doesn't seem likely. Funny he didn't
let us know he was coming."
Muffie was Uncle Eph's wife, a big square-faced woman who wore loose
dresses that fell straight from her shoulders to her ankles. She had
taken up religion late in life, along about the time Uncle Eph got out
of the oil business, and she had turned batty. When we took my mother
home to Texas to bury her, all Aunt Muffie wanted to talk about was
tablecloths. She kept trying to pin Pa and me down as to how many
tablecloths my mother had owned and whether they were for family,
company, or show. It was not something either of us had given thought
to.
Uncle Eph unfolded out of the car like a carpenter's rule. He was a big
man, taller than my father and fifty pounds heavier. Uncle Eph had the
hands of a wrestler which he had been in his young days, when he had
joined a traveling carnival and taken on all comers without ever, he
said, having been thrown. He dressed like a movie rancher, Tom Mix or
Buck Jones, in high-heeled boots, tight twill pants, a two-tone shirt
pulled taut over the belly, and a white ten-gallon hat.
My mother used to tease him about his costume, pointing out that their
father, my grandfather, had been an actual rancher and mostly wore bib
overalls and common work shoes, with a straw hat to keep off the sun.
Uncle Eph said that kind of garb might have been all right for his
daddy, but in these modern times a man had to dress his part to get
ahead, had to announce by the way he dressed what manner of man he was
and what in general his line of work might be. And who knows, he added,
maybe if the old man had dressed for what he was - a landowner a
gentleman, an officer and hero of the Confederate Army - instead of like
just another sodbuster, he might not have lost the ranch way back then
and he, Uncle Eph, might have had a stake to work with instead of having
to scratch every which way for every last dollar that ever came his
way.
I ran down to the car. Uncle Eph picked me up and swung me around.
"Well, Davey," he said, "you just won't stop growing, will you? I can't
hardly lift you no more. Keep shooting up like you are and before long
you'll have just as much trouble as me fitting into a itty-bitty car
like this. I been sitting all scooched up for so long I wasn't sure my
joints was still working."
A short fat man came around from the passenger side. He was dressed like
my grandfather in striped bib overalls, a blue work shirt with sweat
circles under the arms, and dirt-crusted work shoes. The floppy brim of
a big straw hat shadowed his face.
"Will," Uncle Eph said, "I want you to shake hands with Mr. Smart, best
damned judge of horseflesh you'll ever hope to meet. Mr. Smart's from
Oklahoma."
"How do," Mr. Smart said. He shook hands with me too. His hand looked
and felt like a lump of biscuit dough ready to be rolled out.
"I suppose you brought Mr. Smart with you because of the horse auction I
mentioned in my letter," Pa said as we hauled suitcases up the walk to
the house.
"Damned tootin'," Uncle Eph said. "What you said about them horses just
set my brain afire. I got hold of Mr. Smart fast as could be and jumped
in the car. We drove straight through, not to waste a minute. Surprised
you didn't see it yourself."
"See what?" I asked.
"Why, opportunity, boy, opportunity."
About a week earlier, my father had written to thank Uncle Eph for a
snapshot he sent of the stone on my mother's grave, which he'd bought
with money Pa gave him after the funeral. The photograph was blurred and
had been taken between the legs of a lot of people standing around the
grave. We couldn't read the words on the stone, but we were glad to know
her burial place was properly marked. In his letter, Pa told Uncle Eph,
mostly just to fill out the page, that Washington had ordered a
reduction in the number of sheep and horses on the Navajo Indian
Reservation, hoping to do something about the overgrazing that was
turning the reservation into a wasteland. With nothing to hold the soil,
wind devils now whirled where grass once grew as high as a horse's
belly. Most of the excess sheep were already gone, and thousands of
horses were to be rounded up and sold at a series of auctions, starting
in the part of the reservation that Pa was in charge of.
At the time he wrote, Pa thought of the horse auction only as an
interesting but harmless bit of news. He said later that he had failed
to take into full account who was going to read the letter. Uncle Eph
saw opportunity everywhere, and sometimes managed to grasp it. He had
once made a million dollars speculating in land and built the biggest
house Wichita Falls had seen up to that time. But Uncle Eph didn't know
when to stop. He put everything he'd made or could borrow into buying
more land just as the boom ended, wiping out both the million dollars
and the house.
Something similar happened when he turned to wildcatting. He brought in
a gusher about a day ahead of bankruptcy and started building a still
bigger house in Wichita Falls - one so big he claimed you couldn't
holler from one end of it to the other without a megaphone. When
Standard Oil offered to buy his leases for a sum in the millions, Uncle
Eph declared that he wasn't a man to deal with thieves. He was going to
develop his oil field on his own and keep the profits himself instead of
letting them flow into Rockefeller britches. Unfortunately, about the
time he and Aunt Muffie moved into their new house, Uncle Eph's second
well came in dry. So did the third. He went back to Standard Oil, but
before he could strike a deal his first well went dry too. Pa said poor
Eph's promising new oil field petered out quicker'n a mule could snatch
a mouthful of hay, leaving him with nothing but three dry holes and a
pocketful of debt. He and Aunt Muffie got to live in the new house only
a short time. By the time his creditors were through with him, he
wouldn't have been able to keep food on his table if my parents hadn't
sent him a few dollars every month.
Excerpted from Geronimo's Ponies
by Harold Burton Meyers.
Copyright © 1989 by Harold Burton Meyers.
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 1989 Harold Burton Meyers.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-933031-18-1
Winner of the first annual National Novella Award, administered by the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa and Council Oak Books, this work packs novel-length drama and characterization into its compact form. Told in the first person, it lets unfold a coming-of-age story that probes the relationships between truth and memory, family secrets and self-discovery. Davey Parker and his widowed father, who live on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona, are visited by Uncle Eph, Davey's mother's brother. Uncle Eph has a scheme to buy Indian ponies and ship them back to Texas: ``Texas parents would leap at the chance to restore their children to honest-to-God Texashood by putting them on horseback.'' Davey accompanies his uncle on this grand adventure, learning along the way about his mother and the dark secrets of her family. Honest, moving, and skillfully written.-- Linda L. Rome, Mentor, Ohio Copyright 1989 Cahners Business Information.
This first winner of a proposed annual novella competition, cosponsored by Council Oak and the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa, Okla., gracefully situates a classic theme--coming-of-age--in an unusual setting. During the Depression, a boy named David leaves his home on a Navajo reservation to travel with his uncle Eph through Texas. David admires Eph; adventurous and colorful, he is the only family member who was kind to his sister, David's mother, now dead. The opportunity to accompany Eph, who plans to use the journey to sell horses he and his partner have bought cheaply at auction, also provides the occasion for David's first meeting with his mother's kin. But David is to be disillusioned, as Eph engages in a series of petty deceptions--lying to the public about the value of his horses and presenting David with myths about his relatives. Both sympathetic and inconsiderate characters are drawn with equal wisdom. Meyers, a former editor of Fortune magazine, uses a confidently unadorned prose, successfully relying on his narrative to generate momentum. Novelist and short-fiction writer Jane Smiley ( The Age of Grief ) judged the contest. (May) Copyright 1989 Cahners Business Information.
