Cowboy Cousins

Reading Sam Irwin’s terrific story about mounted cowboy shooters in this issue reminded me of a tale I’m probably going to get in trouble for sharing. When my wife was a kid she and her sister had, depending on how you look at it, the good or the bad fortune to grow up cradled to the bosom of a large extended family. Two aunts, both a bit older than my future mother-in-law, had reproduced early and often. So by the time the girls were about eight and six there were two big households full of boisterous teenage cousins nearby to get lost amongst. And operating on the assumption that, since her sisters had a total of nine children between them they probably wouldn’t notice a couple more, my future mother-in-law leaped at the chance to ship her little pair off on a regular basis. As luck and the vagaries of natural selection would have it though, the family with most of the girl cousins was miles away in Natchez; so it was with the Currys—a household full of boys that Ashley and Becky spent most of their time—living under the feet of their Aunt Frances, in thrall to their older cousin Lacy; and in heart-pounding fear of Lacy’s four brothers and their epic skill with a lasso. Because the Currys were cowboys. Real, rodeo-riding, steer-wrestling, calf-roping, truck-winning cowboys. The family owned a cattle company, so all four of the Curry boys—Mark, Charles, Bentley and David—had grown up around cattle and on horses; and by the time they were in their mid-teens all four of them knew more ways to subdue a steer than Wild Bill Hickok. So the regular appearance of a couple of calf-sized girl cousins in their midst presented a golden opportunity for target practice. Lassoes whirling, Charles and David would line up Ashley (eight) and Becky (six) in the fenced front yard. “GO!” one of them would bellow and like frightened rabbits, the girls would bolt. Ever chivalrous, Charles and David would give them about ten seconds’ head start before slinging the first rope. According to my wife, the only real chance for escape was to sprint, ducking and weaving, for the gate which—this being a working farm—had a cattle guard to keep cows out of the yard. And as anyone who has ever scraped their shins falling through a cattle guard knows, it is very important to know where you are putting your feet. Fear, as the saying goes, gives you wings, because Ashley developed a fail-safe technique for hotfooting it across that cattle guard without so much as breaking stride, putting herself beyond the reach of the ropes and leaving her little sister a sitting duck. Because at six, Becky was possibly more intimidated by the cattle guard than she was by the lassoes; and always made the fatal mistake of slowing down to teeter across the bars. And the boys would strike. Time and again as Becky hesitated, a rope would come snaking down from the sky and the next thing she knew her chin would hit the ground and she’d be sprawled in the dust with the rope cinched around her ankles and two hollering teenagers bearing down to hawg-tie her. This experience probably has a lot to do with my wife going on to become a Mississippi state champion hurdler. I’m not sure what it did for Becky, although she did go on to play basketball for LSU, so maybe it sharpened her footwork. Ah, childhood. My wife’s tales of growing up in rural Louisiana in the seventies always make my own upbringing seem bland and overprotected by comparison. Every boy wants to be a cowboy, right? But as a kid I was allergic to horses, and the closest I ever got to actual cowboy-dom was one of those outfits that comes with a plastic hat, fake chaps and a cap gun. I remember as about a seven-year-old, spending hours in the backyard with a rope trying to lasso a tree stump. And failing, so it goes without saying that my own sister stood about as much chance of being lassoed as she did of being struck by a meteorite. But country kids had it different. More skinned chins maybe. But also more freedom; more excitement; and probably more fun. As Sam says in his story, “We have cowboys here, too.” It’s a good thing, because childhood would be a poorer place without cowboy culture—or better still, a couple of big, kind-hearted cowboy cousins—to inspire it.