HEWEY AND THE WAGON COOK
Chuckwagon cooks were expected to be contrary. It was part of their image, their defense mechanism against upstart young cowpunchers who might challenge their authority to rule their Dutch-oven kingdoms fifty or so feet in all directions from the chuckbox. Woe unto the thoughtless cowboy who rode his horse within that perimeter and kicked up dust in the “kitchen.”
The custom was so deeply ingrained that not even the owner of a ranch would easily violate this divine right of kings.
Even so, there were bounds, and Hewey Calloway was convinced that Doughbelly Jackson had stepped over the line. He considered Doughbelly a despot. Worse than that, Doughbelly was not even a very good cook. He never washed his hands until after he finished kneading dough for the biscuits, and he often failed to pick the rocks out of his beans before he cooked them. Some of the hands said they could live with that because the rocks were occasionally softer than Doughbelly’s beans anyway, and certainly softer than his biscuits.
What stuck worst in Hewey’s craw, though, was Doughbelly’s unnatural fondness for canned tomatoes. They went into just about everything he cooked except the coffee.
“If it wasn’t for them tomatoes, he couldn’t cook a lick,” Hewey complained to fellow puncher Grady Welch. “If ol’ C.C. Tarpley had to eat after Doughbelly for three or four days runnin’, he’d fire him.”
C.C. Tarpley’s West Texas ranch holdings were spread for a considerable distance on both sides of the Pecos River, from the sandhills to the greasewood hardlands. They were so large that he had to keep two wagons and two roundup crews on the range at one time. Grady pointed out, “He knows. That’s why he spends most all his time with the other wagon. Reason he hired Doughbelly is that he can get him for ten dollars a month cheaper than any other cook workin’ out of Midland. Old C.C. is frugal.”
Frugal did not seem a strong enough word. Hewey said, “Tight, is what I’d call it.”
Doughbelly was by all odds the worst belly-robber it had been Hewey’s misfortune to know, and Hewey had been punching cattle on one outfit or another since he was thirteen or fourteen. He had had his thirtieth birthday last February, though it was four or five days afterward that he first thought about it. It didn’t matter; Doughbelly wouldn’t have baked him a cake anyway. The lazy reprobate couldn’t even make a decent cobbler pie if he had a washtub full of dried apples. Not that Old C.C. was likely to buy any such apples in the first place. C.C. was, as Hewey said, tight.
Grady was limping, the result of being thrown twice from a jug-headed young bronc. He said, “You ought to feel a little sympathy for Doughbelly. He ain’t got a ridin’ job like us.”
“He gets paid more than we do.”
Grady rubbed a skinned hand across a dark bruise and lacerations on the left side of his face, a present from two cows that had knocked him down and trampled him. “But he don’t have near as much fun as us.”
“I just think he ought to earn his extra pay, that’s all.”
Grady warned, “Was I you, I’d be careful what I said where Doughbelly could hear me. Ringy as he is, he might throw his apron at you and tell you to do the cookin’ yourself.”
It wasn’t that Hewey couldn’t cook. He had done his share of line-camp batching, one place and another. He could throw together some pretty nice fixings, even if he said so himself. He just didn’t fancy wrestling pots and pans. It was not a job a man could do a-horseback. Hewey had hired on to cowboy.
He appreciated payday like any cowpuncher, though money was not his first consideration. He had once quit a forty-dollar-a-month job to take one that paid just thirty. The difference was that the lower-paying outfit had a cook who could make red beans taste like ambrosia. A paycheck might not last more than a few hours in town, or anyway a long night, but good chuck was to be enjoyed day after day.
Hewey was tempted to draw his time and put a lot of miles between him and Doughbelly Jackson, but he was bound to the Two C’s by an old cowboy ethic, an unwritten rule. It was that you don’t quit an outfit in the middle of the works and leave it short-handed. That would increase the burden of labor on friends like Grady Welch. He and Grady had known each other since they were shirttail buttons, working their way up from horse jingler to top hand. They had made a trip up the trail to Kansas together once, and they had shared the same cell in jail after a trail-end celebration that got a little too loud for the locals.
Grady was a good old boy, and it wouldn’t be fair to ride off and leave him to pick up the slack. Hewey had made up his mind to stick until the works were done or he died of tomato poisoning, whichever came first.
It was the canned tomatoes that caused Doughbelly’s first real blowup. Hewey found them mixed in the beans once too often and casually remarked that someday he was going to buy himself a couple of tomatoes and start riding, and he would keep riding until he reached a place where somebody asked him what to call that fruit he was carrying on his saddle.
“That’s where I’ll spend the rest of my days, where nobody knows what a tomato is,” he said.
For some reason Hewey couldn’t quite understand, Doughbelly seemed to take umbrage at that remark. He ranted at length about ignorant cowboys who didn’t know fine cuisine when they tasted it. He proceeded to burn both the biscuits and the beans for the next three days. Another thing Hewey didn’t quite understand was that the rest of the cowboys seemed to blame him instead of Doughbelly.
Even Grady Welch, good compadre that he was, stayed a little cool toward Hewey until Doughbelly got back into a fair-to-middling humor.
After three days of culinary torture, those tomatoes didn’t taste so bad to the rest of the hands. For Hewey, though, they had not improved a bit.
Like most outfits, the Two C’s had two wagons for each camp. The chuckwagon was the most important, for it had the chuckbox from which the cook operated, and it carried most of the foodstuffs like the flour and coffee, lard and sugar, and whatever canned goods the ranch owner would consent to pay for. The second, known as the hoodlum wagon, carried cowboy bedrolls, the branding irons and other necessities. It also had a dried cowhide, known as a cooney, slung beneath its bed for collection of good dry firewood wherever it might be found along the way between camps.
Like most of the cowhands, cow boss Matthew Mullins was a little down on Hewey for getting the cook upset and causing three days’ meals to be spoiled. So when it came time to move camp to the Red Mill pasture, he singled Hewey out for the least desirable job the outfit offered: helping Doughbelly load up, then driving the hoodlum wagon. Hewey bristled a little, though on reflection he decided it had been worth it all to dig Doughbelly in his well-padded ribs about those cussed tomatoes.
The rest of the hands left camp, driving the remuda in front of them. Doughbelly retired to his blankets, spread in the thin shade of a large and aged mesquite tree, to take himself a little siesta before he and Hewey hitched the teams. A little peeved at being left with all the dirty work, Hewey loaded the utensils and pitched the cowboys’ bedrolls up into the hoodlum wagon. He could hear Doughbelly still snoring. He decided to steal a few minutes’ shut-eye himself beneath one of the wagons.
The cowhide cooney sagged low beneath the hoodlum wagon, so Hewey crawled under the chuckwagon. His lingering resentment would not let him sleep. He lay staring up at the bottom of the wagon bed. Dry weather had shrunk the boards enough that there was a little space between them. He could see the rims of several cans.
Gradually it dawned on him that those cans held the tomatoes he had come to hate so much. And with that realization came a notion so deliciously wicked that he began laughing to himself. He took a jackknife from his pocket and opened the largest blade, testing the point of it on his thumb.
Hewey did not have much in the way of worldly possessions, but he took care of what he had. He had always been particular about keeping his knife sharp as a razor. A man never knew when he might find something that needed cutting. He poked the blade between the boards, made contact with the bottom of a can, then drove the knife upward.
The can resisted, and Hewey was afraid if he pushed any harder he might break the blade. He climbed out from beneath the wagon and quietly opened the chuckbox. From a drawer he extracted Doughbelly’s heavy butcher knife and carried it back underneath. He slipped it between the boards, then pushed hard.
The sound of rending metal was loud, and he feared it might be enough to awaken Doughbelly. He paused to listen. He still heard the cook’s snoring. He began moving around beneath the wagon, avoiding the streaming tomato juice as he punched can after can. When one stream turned out to be molasses, he decided he had finished the tomatoes, at least all he could reach. He wiped the blade on dry grass, then on his trousers, and put the knife back into the chuckbox.
Whistling a happy church tune he had learned at a brush-arbor camp meeting, he went about harnessing the two teams.
Doughbelly rolled his bedding, grousing all the while about some people being too joyful for their own good. Concerned that the cook might notice the leaking tomatoes and the molasses, Hewey hitched the team to the wagon for him while Doughbelly went off behind the bushes and took care of other business. He had both wagons ready to go when the cook came back.
He had to fight himself to keep from grinning like a cat stealing cream. Doughbelly stared suspiciously at him before climbing up onto the seat of the chuckwagon. “Don’t you lag behind and make me have to wait for you to open the gates.”
Opening gates for the wagon cook was almost as lowly a job as chopping wood and helping him wash the cookware, but today Hewey did not mind. “I’ll stick close behind you.”
For a while, following in the chuckwagon’s tracks, Hewey could see thin lines of glistening wetness where the tomato juice and molasses strung along in the grass. The lines stopped when the cans had emptied.
Hewey rejoiced, and sang all the church songs he could remember.
As he walked past the chuckwagon to open a wire gate for Doughbelly, the cook commented, “I never knowed you was a religious sort.”
“Sing a glad song and the angels sing with you.”
Hewey knew there would sooner or later be hell to pay, but he had never been inclined to worry much about future consequences if what he did felt right at the time.
He helped Doughbelly set up camp, unhitching the teams, pitching the bedrolls to the ground, digging a fire pit and chopping up dry mesquite. Doughbelly mostly stood around with ham-sized hands on his hips and giving unnecessary directions. The cowboys came straggling in after putting the remuda in a large fenced trap for the night. They were to brand calves here tomorrow, then move camp again in the afternoon. Hewey had never been able to keep a secret from Grady Welch. They had spent so much time working together that Grady seemed able to read his mind. He gave Hewey a quizzical look and said, “You been up to somethin’.”
Hewey put on the most innocent air he could muster. “I’m ashamed of you. Never saw anybody with such a suspicious mind.”
“If you’ve done somethin’ to cause us three more days of burned biscuits, the boys’ll run you plumb out of camp.”
The camp was thirty miles from Upton City, and even that was not much of a town.
“All I done was dull ol’ Cookie’s butcher knife a little.”
Copyright © 2020 by Elmer Stephen Kelton Estate
