Cowboy yarns and cuentos
Remembering Max Evans’ work, and honoring a tradition of Southwestern storytelling
THE HI LO COUNTRY 60TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION By Max Evans
University of New Mexico Press (2021, 157 pp.)
The funeral of Big Boy Matson opens this spare, wind-seared novel of the great sky country that author Max Evans (who died in August 2020) loved dearly. The bowlegged cowhands Big Boy worked next to, saddle-to-saddle on the ranches all his brief life, are gathered awkwardly at the gravesite in the tiny northeastern New Mexico town of Hi Lo, their big hats removed: “They stood stiff-jointed from all the blizzards, droughts, bucking horses, trail drives and hell-raising of their younger days. There weren’t many like them left.”
These men had endured the Great Depression as children, and fought in the war; they returned to land reclaimed from failed farms and surrendered to livestock ranches of many vast acres. When the novel opens, it is the late 1940s and thousands of cattle range the hills, the surviving inhabitants few and far between, and the lonely, two-saloon town of Hi Lo is already dying.
The Wild Cat Saloon is on the south side of the highway and directly across the street is the Double Duty: “The two places eye each other like two young herd bulls,” writes Evans. He portrays life in these dry parts as a fight, against the relentless wind, the unyielding hard labor, the periods of devastating drought and snowstorms, and the enduring wildness — both animal and human.
Big Boy’s violent, foretold trajectory is recounted by his best friend, Pete, another still-young rounder trying to make a go on his own small ranch. Pete admires the way Big Boy handles the intractable Old Sorrel horse he sells him and his rough, old-world sense of justice. The two fall for the same enigmatic married woman, Mona, who is slyly on the make — according to Josepha, who loves Pete and has waited too long for him to claim her in the forsaken neighboring Mexican town of Sano, “inhabited by the old and the
very young,” because everyone else has fled.
It’s a classic struggle, an impossible dodgy romance, but the conflict is really a Shakespearean internal tragedy, both for Big Boy, who is constantly prey to manly competition and can’t contain his “terrific reserve power,” and Pete, who is tormented by his loyalty to his friend yet he cannot do the right thing, although he knows what that is.
The land pricks and prods and tortures with its bluster and drought and storms, essentially driving the men crazy. Evans describes the fatal snowstorm: “As it lashed in icy fury it seemed to say: You can’t escape me. You have to face up to me. But I will win in the end.” The land takes them all down, except for the gentle, knowing Josepha, the one who can see ahead, the only one who gets out.
Evans’ 1961 novel — celebrated here in this 60th-year edition — largely sank upon reception, though it came
just after his successful literary debut with “The Rounders” (1960), which was hailed by a critic as “brief, salty, Mark Twainish in its vernacular, and as authentic as a Western saddle.” While “The Rounders” was made into an “amiable knuckle-headed Western” in 1965, starring Henry Ford and Glenn Ford, it took until 1998 to film the “The High-Lo Country,” because director Sam Peckinpah, who continually optioned the rights, could not get it off the ground during his lifetime.
Stephen Fears’ attempt, starring Billy Crudup, Woody Harrelson, Patricia Arquette and introducing Penelope Cruz as Josepha, is well worth revisiting.
Evans’ novel contains multitudes — vignettes of rare characters who once inhabited these forsaken hills, like the memorable wife of the general mercantile store owner, Rose, with her munificent breasts that always manage to weigh on the scales; the halfblind Dutchman neighbor and bean grower Abrahm Frink and his passel of children; and the hard-drinking, woodcarving local poet Levi Gomez. They all have their stories, “intermingled and welded into one lone identity,” which is the town of Hi Lo.
And ultimately, they all blow away.
CUENTOS AND POETRY By Enriqueta L. Vasquez 2021, 178 pp.
Stories from the Indigenous, Spanish and Mexican peoples inhabiting this shared land reinforce the message, says author Enriqueta Vasquez: We are still here.
Tales about picking piñon nuts in early fall after the chile has been gathered and the elk sliced, salted and hung on strings to dry in the warm sun; a marriage that brings together the local favorite and her far-flung big-city suitor family (“Los de Allá y los de Acá”); a deep, lifelong empathy between a rider and his blond-mane horse at the yearly fiesta race in La Madera (“Chamiso and Casimiro Ride Again”) and a strange relationship between a lightning-shocked young person and his special plant Yerbana (“Toques …”) are just some of the cuentos Vasquez chronicles here.
Of Purepeche/Tarascan heritage, Vasquez is a writer and Chicana activist (“Viva La Raza,” 1974, and “The Women of La Raza,” 2016), a former journalist at El Grito del Norte, in Española, and a longtime resident of San Cristóbal. She offers these plainspoken “platicas” and free-for-all “chisme” (gossip) as a way to counteract the digital glut of youth she sees, and which alarms her.
As she notes, the storytelling tradition in Mexico and South America existed before the written word, and after the Spanish “discovered” the Americas, their language blended with the Indigenous, giving way to a rich oral history. In these tales, she tries to render the language fresh and relevant to young readers especially.
There are the folksy and the fabulous “leyendas” of Mexico and tales of the “espanto,” or loss of soul when one has encountered one’s deceased relatives along the way of life. The cuentos tell of bad and good behavior, both cautionary and inspiring.