Ordinarily I wouldn’t want to read a book written by anyone who spent five years as the editor of SHEEP AND GOAT RAISERS’ MAGAZINE. (Call it a prejudice on my part and I won’t waste time trying to correct you.) Unless that editor is West Texas novelist Elmer Kelton, winner of seven Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America and the man voted by that society of professional scribes as the greatest writer of Westerns ever.
His newest book in paperback is SIX BITS A DAY, a reference to the amount of money paid as wages to Texas cowhands in the late 1880s. As boss man C.C. Tarpley never tires of reminding his hirelings, “I’ll raise you someday when you’re a cowboy.”
The novel is a prequel to one of Kelton’s most popular books, THE GOOD OLD BOYS, published in 1978. That one introduced us to Hewey Calloway, an easy-going waddy whose great ambition in life is to have no ambition whatsoever. The year is 1903 and technology is becoming a threat to Hewey’s meandering way of life. A sequel followed 20 years later (THE SMILING COUNTRY), set in 1910 when the Old West was fast becoming a bittersweet memory.
SIX BITS follows Hewey and his kid brother Walter as they leave their family home in East Texas to roam west and see the elephant. They fall in with a pair of drovers who turn out to be rustlers and who abandon the brothers to the mercies of the cattle’s real owner. Not without difficulty, Hewey convinces old man Tarpley that he and Walter are innocent, and the rancher offers them jobs.
Hewey helps a Texas Ranger named Tanner capture one of the cow thieves and all seems to be going well when the rustler busts Tanner over the head and decides to chase the horizon. Months later, word gets around that the thief has returned, so Tarpley sends Hewey to San Antonio to pay for, lay claim to and drive home a small herd. Hewey, to keep Walter away from a not-unattractive waitress with whom he’s smitten, forces his brother to accompany him.
Kelton was raised on a ranch where his father worked and he knows the ways and personalities of cowboys. His best books are not driven by gun violence and vengeance — few of the cowboys in SIX BITS even own pistols, and the ones who do leave them in a saddlebag. This novel, like its protagonist, is laid-back. It wanders along with mild curiosity to see what’s in store from day to day, and when I reached the end, I smiled, closed the book, and laid it down on my lap where it stayed for a while.
If the Old West had really been just the way it’s usually pictured – wild and wooly – we’d still be interested in it, but we hope it was actually as Kelton tells it. We can still thrill to Billy the Kid and the Dalton Gang, but Kelton’s low-key cowboys are the fellas it’ll do to ride with. –Doug Bentin
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