Becky Crouch Patterson - The Ranch That Was Us

Becky Crouch Patterson is the author of the Texas best seller Hondo, My Father, a memoir of life with her folk-hero father, Hondo Crouch, who was a rancher, storyteller, humorist, and self-proclaimed mayor of Luckenbach, Texas. A textile artist for more than forty years, Patterson has sewn appliqud tapestries for many businesses and individuals. She is also a liturgical artist and designer and has created stained glass windows and furnishings for churches throughout Texas. She is the owner, with her sons Kit and Sky Patterson, of Stieler Hill Ranch, near Comfort, Texas, where Sky is an artist and Kit continues the familys 135 years of ranching. Patterson helps out with the activities of the ranch, including the Texican Single Action Shooting Society, the hunters, art workshops, and her husband Oscar Barraless horse training business.

Mama was a handful.

I knew this long before the day I stood in a forty-five-minute-long line at the crowded bus station in San Antonio to buy a ticket to Houston for one of the three hitchhikers Mama had picked up two days ago. Still, it brought the point home. The other two had been arrested that morning for fighting at Mamas house, which shed turned over to them for the night. We had even been robbed in that short time.

After losing pounds of adrenaline, we were left with just one hitchhikerthe one with only six fingers, who had previously worked for a drug lord in Colombia washing his cars. (In gratitude, he had washed mine with newspapers.) He turned out to be the good one.

Hector from Honduras had to catch a bus at 4:50 to make his connection with a Salvadoran down the line. Id spent all day arranging the meeting, but then Mama, who was in her eighties but hadnt slowed down for a minute, took charge. I should have left her in the parking lot, but shed already dragged the driver off the 3:30 Houston busnot knowing it was not our Houston busto wait for Hector.

Mama had gone inside. I found her scooting Hectors heavy bags across the floor with her feet, as if she was pushing a sick sheep through a meandering flock of woollies in a pen. Her doctor had told her never to pick up anything heavier than twenty pounds after some surgical repairs she had had, and she did get her purse down to four pounds after removing her hammer, screwdriver, hunting knife, furniture scrapers, and drill bits for T-posts. But she paid the order no mind. In fact, she still buys and carries dog food in fifty-pound bags, and this for a dog the size of a small piglet.

I patiently waited in line with another woman my age. She was buying a ticket for her eighty-four-year-old mother, who was behaving nicely, quietly sitting on a bench. Meanwhile, Mama had bustled her way to the front of the line. The aggravated ticket sales lady reprimanded her, saying that she was not allowed to cut in. But Mama wangled a ticket from her anyway, in her name and at a senior citizen price. Then, pointing to Hector, she said it was for him. The frustrated clerk said, Oh well, since youre all the way from Comfort, and made a new ticket.

All the way home I lectured Mama about her bad judgment in undertaking these hitchhiker projects, even if they were in the name of mercy. This was not the first time shed done this. Everything in life is either illegal or in bad judgment, she retorted. You just have to do what you think is right. Larry had blisters on his feet walking all the way to Amarillo. Besides, he had eyes like Kerry. Kerry, my brother, had agonized us with years of aimless hitchhiking. For his part, Larry, a hitchhiker from a project past, told me that Mama had the face of Jesus. The drifters down-and-out stories cut straight through to our sympathy, no question.

In the spring of 1981, Mama went into the Fredericksburg post office, where she disturbed another waiting line of silent customers. Who has that kid goat out in the truck? she loudly asked. All eyes turned to her commanding question. Thats my goat, Shatzie, a rancher answered. Its poor, an orphan. Im taking it to the auction. Can I have it? she asked. It was Eastertime, and she was thinking of an Easter Angora, not a rabbit but a goat, for her city grandkids in San Antonio. Cant get it to suck a bottle, said the rancher. I can get anything to suck! retorted Mama. Ill take it off your hands! More heads turned.

My boys were enchanted with their new pet. We raised that goat in our backyard on Prinz Street until it got bigger, smellier, and rowdier and ate all the flowers. Then Mama relieved us of it as easily as shed gotten it. She drove up in her truck to the Gillespie County Livestock Auction, the very one her father had started forty years before, with the pet grown goat standing proudly on her front seat, a place usually reserved for privileged sheepdogs. The livestock wranglers receiving stock got a big kick out of that. One of them said, Who was that?

That was Shatzie Crouch, daughter of the Goat King, another replied.

One Christmas morning, dressed in red silk and black wool, Mama drove up to the house at the ranch with a very rotten dead deer in the back of her truck. Shed noticed the buck on the highway days ago and thought maybe we could make somethingdoor or knife handles, cup hooks, buttons, jewelryout of the antlers. Mama was always a scavenger for creativitys sake.

I thought I could just roll it up into my truck, but it was too heavy, she explained. Johnny saw me from across the field and came to help me. She dumped it in our canyon with a warning: If you see buzzards, theyre just cleaning up your deer for you. Mama, buzzards arent here in the winter, I said. You didnt need to have that on your list of things to do on Christmas morning! When I commented on some blood on her hand as she was mashing away at the guacamole, she shrugged, Must be from the deer.

That New Years Day, Mama took in a helpless neighbor woman who was recuperating from migraine headaches and shoulder surgery. She turned her little two-room antique log cabin over to her for weeks, nursing her back to health. There the neighbor was, propped up on pillows in Mamas bed, in her sanctuary, in her room where she had her TV, books, and reading lamp, being waited on hand and foot with hot tea and even baths. Im going to stand by her through this, Mama stubbornly said.

My sister Cris and I were shocked, angry, and even a little jealous, protective of our mother, whose heart was too big for her own good. But Mama said she liked sleeping up in the attic, where you cant even stand up. She had to climb a steep ladder, and, at the top of the landing, she had to crawl over a pile of cut boards might need those somedayand a big ugly potted plant that she had been trying to bring back to life. Her chamber pot during the night was a cooking pot, which she emptied onto the pitiful plant. I feel like Im sleeping in a basket, she said of the crumbly roof overhead. I can still hear the taps, splits, chops, when they were making the cedar shingles. It lulls me to sleep.

Cris and I thought that Mama too often acted with no discernment, a little over the top. We worried about her energy limits, her spells, although she insisted that she was stronger than most her age.

Now, every day, over the subject that binds us, Cris and I cry to each other about what to do, knowing full well no ones going to tell Mama what to do. Our only resort is to report all this behavior to her doctor, to intervene for us perhaps. I get it. I get it. Im writing all this down, says the nurse on the phone. Incredible.