INTRODUCTION
In several ways The Good Old Boys is a very personal story to me. Shortly after I began writing it, my father—a cowboy and a rancher all his life—suffered a stroke. My brothers and I took turns staying with him in the hospital. To help pass the long hours, I encouraged him to retell many of the old stories I remembered from boyhood.
Parts of The Good Old Boys were written in longhand on a note pad while he slept. Though few if any of his stories actually were incorporated into the novel, their infectious color and spirit became the heart and soul of it.
Writing the book was therapy of sorts and helped me come to grips with the personal tragedy. The first chapters were difficult. The words came slowly and painfully, and much of the opening section was written over and over again. Suddenly the dam broke, and the story came pouring out, much of it unplanned and seemingly spontaneous, from some deep part of the subconscious. I would stare in amazement at words on the paper, wondering where they had come from.
The Good Old Boys is probably the closest I have ever come to writing from sheer inspiration. Hewey Calloway and the other characters took hold of the story like a cold-jawed horse grabbing onto the bit, and about all I could do was hang on for the ride.
Few people except other writers ever completely understand when I tell them about fictional characters becoming so real that they take over the narrative almost by force and carry it off into directions of their own. This has happened to me many times, but never more so than with Hewey, Eve and the Calloway boys.
To some degree the novel was drawn from life. Hewey Calloway, the footloose cowboy, was derived from several I knew in my boyhood. I simply moved them back about thirty years in time. My father, Buck Kelton, was foreman of the McElroy Ranch near Crane, Texas. Cowboys frequently came to the ranch looking for a job. In the 1930s they were likely to be driving a battered old coupe, but in spirit and outlook they were no different from the horseback Hewey.
For the characters of Walter and Eve, Hewey’s brother and sister-in-law, I borrowed more than a little from my grandparents, the Bill Keltons, who went to the Midland area about the time of my story and took up a homestead. Granddad worked “outside” for cowboy wages because the homestead would not make a living for the growing family. That homestead served as model for the Calloway place, though for story purposes I moved it south into Upton County.
In real life, as in the book, freighters used to camp in a little grove of hackberry trees below the house, bringing their horse and mule teams up to water at my grandparents’ windmill. Granddad would not accept payment for the water, but the freighters usually left some feed at the campgrounds. Mornings, Dad and his sisters would pull a little red wagon down there and pick up the feed for the family’s own horses and milk stock.
That grove of trees still stands north of Midland at the edge of a highway built along the same lane the freight wagons traveled eighty years ago.
Snort Yarnell, Hewey’s free-spirited sidekick, owes part of his existence to a Midland cowboy known as Bellcord Rutherford, truly a legend in his own time. Unfettered by society’s ordinary restraints, Bellcord lived by his own rules and changed those rules as easily as he changed his socks. A little of Snort’s character is also drawn from the great steer roper, Bob Crosby, whom I once met on a front porch during a rodeo in Midland when I was ten or twelve. I could not have been more awed if he had been president of the United States.
The only character drawn entirely from real life, however, is Boy Rasmussen, the senile old drifter who serves as a harbinger of Hewey’s future. Basically, the only major change I made was in the name, and in moving him back to 1906. The prototype for Boy used to drift by my grandparents’ little ranch, a grizzled old man hard-used by life. He rode an old horse as hard-used as himself. He would bum a meal, and perhaps a bed, before moving on. Granddad always treated him as an old friend, while my grandmother tried to feed him on the open porch, from the upwind side.
As a boy, I thought him a romantic figure, riding free as in the horseback days of old. Years later, looking back, I could see the pathos of his aimless chuckline-rider existence. As in the book, he died a few miles from my grandparents’ place, a heart attack killing him as he stepped down from the saddle to open a gate. He had lived his life alone, and he died alone, out on the prairie.
The Good Old Boys was written on two levels. On the surface it is intended to be a humorous and good-natured look at West Texas country life of that period. Most reader comments have been about the humor. But on another, less obvious level, I wrote in sadness, a lament for a less-pressured time and a simpler way of life that had died, as my father was dying.
Hewey Calloway tries to live a life that is already out of its time. He attempts to remain a horseback man while the world relentlessly moves into a machine age. He tries to hold to the open range of recent memory even after that range has been cubed and diced and parceled by barbed wire. He lives in an impossible dream, trying to remain changeless in a world where the only constant is change.
Though the story is set in 1906, the problem of dealing with change has intensified with every succeeding generation. Technological and social upheavals have outpaced our ability to adjust. We find ourselves under constant challenge to come to terms with a new and sometimes frightening world we cannot entirely understand.
Hewey is regional, but his problem is universal.
Hewey, like all of us, faces the necessity of painful choices, knowing that every choice will bring sacrifices. He knows, as we all know, that we cannot have everything we want in this life. To fulfill a wish we often must give up something of equal or nearly equal value. Hewey feels drawn to the life his brother Walter has found: a home, a family, a piece of land that is his own. But to have these he knows he must give up his freedom to go where he pleases, when he pleases, to travel his own road without considering the needs of someone else.
He cannot have it all; nobody can.
In this respect, Hewey Calloway is all of us.
ELMER KELTON
San Angelo, Texas
The Good Old Boys copyright © 1978, 1985 by the Estate of Elmer Kelton
The Smiling Country copyright © 1998 by the Estate of Elmer Kelton
