Tall in the Pickup Truck

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE LAST COWBOY by Jane Kramer; Harper & Row; 148 pages; $8.95

The plight of the cowboy in the age of computer ranching is a familiar story. Journalist Jane Kramer nevertheless manages to refresh the tale with a selection of tactful though telling observations and details that, with allowances for scenery and idiom, remind one of Jane Austen at Mansfield Park. "Onion was ornery and bucked a lot and enjoyed kicking over the chair that Henry, at six, climbed to mount him. It took a while for them to arrive at the abusive, affectionate arrangement that Henry later claimed was so instructive to them both."

In Henry Blanton's Texas, abuse and affection are two sides of the same paternalism that cowboys and their rancher bosses have always traded in. It is the style the world got a look at in the carrot-and-stick politics of Lyndon B. Johnson. Henry Blanton is an alias for the 40-year-old cowpuncher whom Kramer selected to sit for her portrait of yet another vanishing American. Although he is foreman on a 90,000-acre Panhandle ranch, Blanton is entering his middle age with a hatful of failed promise and a headful of bourbon. "He moved." writes the author, "in a kind of deep, prideful disappointment. He longed for something to restore him --a lost myth, a hero's West. He believed in that West, no matter how his cowboy's life, and the memory of his father's and grandfather's cowboy lives, conspired to disabuse him."

Without that pride in an idealized past and in his skills with horse and rope, Henry is little more than just another underpaid and overworked hired hand. Still, he can say, "You won't see none of us giving up our freedom to join no union." That freedom includes the right to drive over rutted roads in a pickup truck with a Winchester racked in the rear window, a bottle under the seat and a horse trailer bouncing along behind. Henry also knows that if he and his buddies get a little wild, his honcho will smooth things out with the law.

The past, present and future seem to have conspired to keep Henry Blanton in a permanent state of arrested development. Burdened by an impossibly demanding sense of manhood, the brutal economics of cattle raising and a changing world in which his wife wants to take an outside job, Henry wraps himself in nostalgia. He dresses in black, restores his grandfather's chuck wagon and watches westerns: "Henry, deep in his bedroll, shoring up courage against the river's dead, called on John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Glenn Ford. Especially Glenn Ford. He was convinced then that for 'expressin' right,' as he put it, there had never been a cowboy to equal Glenn Ford."

Blanton is knowing in the uses of loneliness. He suffers pain and disappointment without the crutch of self-pity There are always whisky and opportunities to commit mayhem in the name of cowboy justice. When a cow in Blanton's charge is gang-raped by three bulls from a neighboring ranch, Henry and his boys fall on them with castrating knives. But when Blanton's boss breaks a promise that could lead to a measure of financial independence, Henry submits in proud silence.

Cowboys, as someone said, don't cry. But their wives do. As Henry grows more remote, Betsy Blanton grows more depressed. "I'm tired of grieving when no one's died," she tells her preacher She seeks an answer to her problems in literature. "She tried a novel called The Bell Jar, which was shocking to her and difficult to understand, and when she returned it, asking for another, the librarian said that as far as she knew The Bell Jar was the only serious book about grieving women the library had." Instead, Betsy finds solace in Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet.

Jane Kramer, who originally wrote The Last Cowboy for serialization in The New Yorker, sets Henry and Betsy Blanton in a determinist context of history, geography and economics. Her sympathetic sketches of modern cowboy life are framed by facts -- about beef consumption (Americans ate 27 billion lbs. of it in one year), ranching technology, federal meat-grading standards and the quirks in Texas law. Cattlemen, for example, don't have to fence their animals in. Farmers who want to protect their crops have to fence cattle out. Kramer achieves the intended effect: to show the American cowboy riding off, not into a glowing sunset but into a haze of statistics.

Excerpt

"Henry looked at the sky, embarrassed.

That's what I keep telling Henry--sign something,' Betsy said quietly. 'It seems to me he ought to be a little cautious, seeing as how Lester is always taking advantage of him. I mean, the phone's always ringing, or that radio gadget in the truck, and there's Lester saying, "Henry, do this, do that." And it's not ranch work. It's Lester wanting someone to help him clean his swimming pool, or fix his roof, or run over to the feedyard and make sure those Okie calves he keeps trading on the side are getting the right feed.'

Henry glared at her. 'Seems to me a man's handshake ought to be enough. My Granddaddy Abel never signed no contract. My granddaddy always said a man's word should be his contract, and that's what I do believe, and that's what any cowboy believes, and'--he took a long drink--'that's how I'm going to live.'

'Your granddaddy couldn't write.' Betsy said. 'Those old cowpunchers--they shook hands so as not to embarrass each other.' "

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