Chancy's Cowboy

Bill said in a rough way, “Because.”

That was a Texas reply. It replied something but didn’t explain, and any half-brained jackass knew exactly why it had been done and he was not to push.

But Mel wasn’t that intimidated. He observed the fence while the squint-eyed, ready Bill watched Mel’s face. And Mel finally turned to Bill and nodded as he said, “Good job.”

When Chancy was little, the only one who actually watched out for her was Bill. Especially after her mother passed away. Elinor had just...quit living.

Four-year-old Chancy questioned putting her mother in that box. She asked Bill, of course, because her daddy was vacant minded. So it was Bill who said her mama was dead. The box was like an envelope and in it she’d be sent to God.

And then they put the box in the ground! Little Chancy was appalled. The whole crew had to do a lot of explaining. She pointed at the mound and questioned in distress.

Chancy would select a crew member, point to the new mound under the trees out there, and she would ask The Question. Whoever was pinned down would stumble around in his reply. They got together with Bill and were taught approximately what they should say. It was brief. And having said what they’d been taught, they waited—enough.

For a while, Chancy buried her dolls. The cats and dogs would not tolerate being buried. It was a terrible time for the crew. They did try to help the four-year-old to understand.

It was the minister who finally came out to the ranch. He told the child Chancy of life and death and made it simple and understandable. And—acceptable.

For Mel there was no such comfort. It was slow, but Chancy’s daddy gradually lost all interest in anything around him. That included Chancy. Mel’s mind was on beyond His grief was deep.

It was Creep that considered it all.

We saw a dog like that once. The lonely dog had been attached to a cow that went dry and was butchered for the meat. The dog never understood. He never did. And there was no minister to soothe and explain to the dog.

The crew made a rug from the hide and the dog lay on it sadly. He grieved himself to death.

That’s about what happened to Chancy’s daddy. After his wife died, Mel just wasn’t alert. He seemed not to be in touch with the world, or to care about anything. He was alive until Chancy was eighteen. Guess he thought that, by then, she knew everything she needed to know, and he just—quit living. He was a lot like that dog. ’Course he was human, but grief is with us all.

Creep sighed as his thoughts went on. Makes a man wonder why somebody like her mother could do that to a man. Pull him into her thataway so he can’t think of another woman. Just her. Makes a man think on women and wonder what it’d be like to care that much. I look at women around here and wonder why a man would think that way.

But then I’m past the itch.

So it was obvious that raising Chancy had been left up to the ranch hands. From age four, she’d been under their directions. They could stop her just because there were more of them directing just one female. They were stronger and they could be very sure she should not do whatever it was she was trying to do that was past her strength.

It’s probably because her mother died so young that Chancy never really understood that she wasn’t male. There was no woman around to influence her.

She never wore a dress. Her hair was cut so it didn’t blow in her face.

She could be very firm. Once she was out with Bill and his horse stepped into a hole. The horse went down and threw Bill bad. You should have seen Chancy take over!

She told Bill’s horse, “Stand there, or I’ll shoot you!”

Of course the horse understood her tone rather than—Well, he probably understood the threatening tone of her words, and he did stand still.

In the hospital, when Bill was back from being put together and in bed in a room, he looked like he might not make it. But he finally came out of the coma they’d had him in, deliberate. Right away, he asked Chancy with some foggy interest, “What would you’ve done if he’d bolted and you did shoot him?”

It was an odd question and not clear to anybody else, but Chancy replied instantly, “He’d have limped.”

All the crew loved her. Try as she did all her life, at eighteen she still was not even a part of the crew. She was not only incapable, she was female.

Interesting. Her daddy had seen to it that she did as her fair-haired, white-skinned momma had done. She wore sun block, a brimmed hat, long sleeves and thin leather gloves. She’d done that faithfully because way down under her skin, she was basically female. And she remembered her mother doing it. So Chancy kept that part as being like her mother. But she still felt that she was a part of a whole. In that place, the whole just happened to be male.

As Chancy had grown older, she didn’t get much taller after she’d adjusted to that twelve-year-old spurt of growth. All the crew fell in love with her, but she just went on treating them like family. She never saw a one of them as a man. Each was a good friend and helpful. They were almost kin.

And she tried her durndest to be like the crew. Tobacco chewing failed with her. She gagged. For once the observing males had been serious. They didn’t laugh. It was only when she wasn’t there that they exclaimed and shook their heads and laughed.

Her biggest trial was learning to whistle. Shrill whistling. She could whistle ordinary, but the guys could all do that ear-piercing one when they were herding cattle. They didn’t even. have to use fingers in their mouths. Try as she did, she could only bring out a little bladder-sounding squeak.

She could whistle a tune good enough, but she couldn’t whistle a loud sound worth a darn, and she was cursed with a female holler.

When she was about sixteen, one of the guys was rolled under his horse and ended up in the hospital. Tim had been squashed. Really pitiful. And Chancy visited Tim in the clean, white room at the hospital.

She’d been as concerned for him as for one of the wolf-ripped dogs. She held Tim’s hand. He was out cold and didn’t know it, but his, uh, maleness rose under the sheet.

The others of the crew watched her, their eyes amused and compassionate with the problem. That way, and out cold. Men are vulnerable.

If she noticed the problem, at all, she never seemed to.

While he was still in the hospital, it was a trying time for Tim. Beside being squashed, he had broken ribs. So he was helpless to move as she came into his hospital room.

That she was there was bad enough for Tim, but she’d put her hand on his forehead to see if he had a fever.

He’d raise his one good knee. The crowding rest of his visitors, from the place, watched and bit at their laughs. But they were sympathetic. They understood.

Chancy never caught on at all.

And she was puzzled when Tim left them and moved to another ranch. But sometime later, she went to Tim’s wedding to a charming girl who giggled.

It was not the first time that Chancy had heard giggling but it was something she’d never really understood. She asked Creep, “Why did the bride giggle?”

Chancy was interesting but she was a nuisance.

Chancy was eighteen when her daddy died. He was just through. Apparently he figured Chancy was old enough and he was free to find Elinor, his lost love.

Chancy didn’t even cry because her daddy had been so withdrawn for so long that she hadn’t really known him well. She’d forgotten how he’d once been. It was too long ago.

It was the minister who explained love to her. Why her daddy had gone to be with her mother. Their love had been special.

Chancy was thoughtful about love. It was crippling, obviously. And she decided she’d never get entrapped in such a serious mess.

So it was about two years after Chancy’s daddy had been planted next to her almost forgotten momma, and Chancy had no inkling what would come of being in charge of the place.

Chancy could only remember a woman who sat on a cane chair that had a high back and woven armrests. Her mother had watched what Chancy did and smiled.

That was about all she remembered of her mother. She didn’t recall anything about walking on the picket fence.

So Chancy was then twenty years old. She’d taken her first two years of college by TV lessons. She was registered by mail and bought the books the same way. She sent in her computer assignments on time.

Chancy worked hard and she did well, but she wouldn’t go on campus. The older men had been determined that she should mix with other females who were her age. But she was stubborn. And she owned the ranch. She was their boss if she ever got around to realizing it. They weren’t about to mention it to her.