ustxtxb_obs_1956_11_28_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

The Shearers With their horses at a walk behind the herd of goats, George and the hired hand, Anselmo, heard the motor of the shearer’s truck down at the gate. The shearers had pulled through and stopped. They were arriving earlier than they had counted on at the ranch, and George popped the reins and yelled at the goats to hurry them on, feeling that he should put forth extra effort now. In a moment Ben Avila’s big red and yellow truck came around the corner of the field, and in back standing up were the shearers with their turned up hats and their bandanas whipping in the wind that made them peer ahead slant-eyed. Following close behind the rocking truck was the little shearing rig ‘ moving along smoothly at a fast clip. The goats trotting in a bunch through the fresh morning jostled against each other, and their hooves pounding steadily on the dry ground was like the roar of rainfall. Their silken long hair was curled and shone a blazing white above its shadows as their backs swung in the rapid pace. From the mass of goats came continual sounds of snorting, and glimpses of jerked horns. As they approached the lot, George saw his grandfather cross the pen in his hurrying stumbling booted gait with his hands held out from his sides, and throw open the gate. His grandfather squinted at the goats a minute and then lurched away to another task. George saw his Stetson bobbing in the dust. When George and Anselmo had penned the goats they walked around to the big shearing barn made of corrugated tin. \(The barn was used for little besides shearing; as a rule the doors were shut tight and tied with baling wire. Occasionally George would go there alone when his grandmother had said, “George, run out to the shearing barn and get me a few onions for dinner, will you?” He would unwind the baling wire and open the great doors. It would be dark inside, smelling of onions and potatoes lying in the damp ooze on the chill cement floor. His eyes would grow used to the dimness and he would see the motes swimming in the sunlight and the daylight showing around the flap windows, all down now, their prop sticks lying in the dry dung and dust outside. The sun of the winter noon would come through the halfopen doors, spreading warmly on the floor, and he would squat down and pick the good from the bad. With the trees scraping the tin roof outside in the wind, and with no one aboutusually there would be only his grandmother and grandfather present anywhere among the deathly barns and pens and fields and buildings of the homesteadGeorge would feel alone, and then his head would swim, and he would forget where he was. The place would Today the doors were thrown back and wired against the walls. The shearers had driven the shearing rig straight into the barn, and each stood off to himself as he worked from the fishing tackle box that carried his clippers. The pick-up boys had tied a piece of string to the ear of the collie dog and were laughing over it. The flap windows along the walls of the barn were propped open and from the inside, which was only pleasantly shaded now, and freshened by a breeze, the outdoorsthe hay rick, the distant field of tan cane stubble, the Mexican shack-looked very bright and distinct. “George, you want to come! with me?” his grandfather said.1 He followed his grandfather along the outskirts of the pens and learned that he was going to kill the mutton goat for the shearers. They moved slowly and said nothing, and along the way George noticed leaning against the roots of a tree a castaway disk from some plow his grandfather had used in the past …. His grandfather roped the young goat and had George hold it by its slim smooth horns while he tossed the rope over a branch. The goat was docile for a ‘peribd. then lunged frantically, and was passive again. They hung it by its hind legs, and as it bleated and tossed in the air, trying to hold its head up, its eyes staring Winston Bode wildly, his grandfather made a crude jab with his knife. The blood flowed and sparkled as water does, and was brilliantly red. Later George touched one of the goat’s open orange eyes that looked no different from before, and the clear surface was as sticky as jelly. He had half expected the goat to blink. He touched an eye again … George felt at ease as he went through the gate into the back yard, passing the familiar velvety black washpot with the cold ashes heaped beneath, passing t h e gleaming milk bucket turned upside down over the post of the fence that divided the yard from the garden. In the garden, under the low leaves of the fig tree motte, the cats were playing with arched backs and flying tails. The radio was playing inside the house. Here George’s chores were light and pleasant when they came, and there was no question of doing the wrong thing as there was among the barns and stock. He passed through the house which was dark and clean and coolly restful, and at once he caught its well known smells. In the front yard his grandmother was watering the flowers. She was sprinkling the red and yellow zinnias and cannas with pink elongated blooms that grew along the walk. His grandmother was standing poised and unmoving as she held the hose, and she was singing a hymn in a high quiet effortless voice, with a reverence that George heard in her only when she was singing such a song. “Don’t you want something to eat, George?” she said. “Let me fix you some preserves and bread or something. We’ll have a late dinner today.” While the pink soft looking cannas were teasing and eldsive, even to see, the zinnias with their closely-bunched little petals making a rough round flower exuded a biting dry smell that went with their harsh appearance. “Has Ben got as big a crew as he had last year?” his grandmother asked. She had her thumb over the end of the hose to make the water spray out, and as she shifted it, the fine jets peppered across the canna leaves. A humming bird was hovering over the hydrant as George went to drink from it. The deep, green bunch of grass growing up around the pipe was wet and stung his hand. It had the hot reek of Bermuda grass in the sun. It was high noon. Thirsty as he was, he held his mouth over the faucet for a long breathless moment with the sun blazing on his closed eyelids. The water seemed fresh from underground. The back gate slammed in the violent way that it had because of its big spring, and George saw two small Mexican boys walking away with buckets of water they had drawn at the back of the house for the cook. The muscles in their thin arms were tight, and their rigid backs were bent to one side. They were barefoot and bareheaded, and their pants ‘dragged through the dust they kicked up along the way. Out at the shearing barn they had begun-to shear. George heard the hollow. Tattling of the machine and the Mexicans’ whistles and calls and the bellowing of the goats in the pens, and he hurried away in excitement Dust was rising over the big pen next to the barn where they were working with the goats. The men were whistling, shouting, slapping their legs with rope and beating with rocks on the tin roof of the low-lying goat shed. The goat shed and the barn glared as tin does in the heat of the day. From the barn came the continuous whirr of the shearing ma! chine. Now and then a shearer busy in the shady interior drifted past a window. In the pen, the collie was running loose-jointedly among the confused, fleeing goats with its long-haired tail held high, and, as it swerved, wrenching out hoarse inflamed barks. Anselmo had his hat off waving it at the goats as he closed in on them with his legs wide apart. His black hair was wild from being pressed uncombed by the hat, and his forehead with its red mark from the band was covering with sweat. “Hah there!” he said as he jumped savagely before a goat running from the bunch. The other Mexicans drove forward with him, cursing and waving their arms. Anselmo seemed different when he was with his own race. As George walked before the open end of the barn the heat and the roar from within so addled him at first he could make out nothing but movement and noise of the men, goats, and machines. The stooping sweating Mexicans in their undershirts AUSTIN By a slight wrench of mythology, one could describe the Department of Music at the University of Texas as a phoenix, the main difference being that the department was destroyed, not by immolation, but by lack of appropriations. But like phoenix, it has arisen from its ashes, from a pitiful total enrollment of 40 in 1938 so exalted a height that for 1956 its graduates alone numbered 680. From the late ‘thirties, when studies of music literature and history had to be carried on under cover of the college of Arts and Sciences, the department has advanced to so independent a state that it now offers a Ph.D. in musicology. From twenty years ago, when tension between local music teachers and the faculty was severe, the relationship between the two camps has reached a state of such placid cooperation that music schools throughout the country may well stare in envious disbelief. And from a mere handful of teachers, the faculty has expanded to in were working swiftly over the goats, whipping the shears under the shorn mohair. They worked from either side of the looselybuilt vibrating machine that powered the clippers. The silver jointed rods were immaculate, shining with oil. Raising up, a shearer walked over to the cab of the Ford and rummaged for an oil can. There in all the noise his pocked face looked tired and wooden. A boy with shrunken brown eyes moved Ms clipper slowly over the neck of a goat. The veins in his arm were bold and tender looking, and his curved wrist that shook from the sawing of the clippers was covered with sweat. The clippers buzzed and the blood ran rapidly from the goat’s neck. The next shearer handed him a blackened can of bone oil with a daubstick in it. George saw Catarina whom he recognized from past years. Catarino was an old man, Ben’s father, they told him. He was a thick low man with bowed legs and an eagle’s beak nose which was part of the handsomeness he possessed that did not go with his age. He wore a white handkerchief around his forehead. Catarina let up a goat that dashed away on spindle legs, looking wild-eyed and stripped. Catarina called to one of the boys without turning, and unlooking put the washer in his bagging pants with his blunt balled hand. He moved off casually, as veteran unhurried workers do, to the back of the barn where the unsheared goats were held. He slumped over to catch one by the leg but the goat shied away ,and he grabbed again in. a brutal way and pulled the bleating nanny toward his stall. His legs moved doggedly as he dragged the goat along the floor as he would handle sacks of feed, and his rounded Mexican’s shoulders had a slouchy swagger to them. He was breathing hard by the time he reached his clippers and as he bent over to whip the thongs about the legs of the upturned goat , he grinned at George, seemingly over some joke. George responded, though he didn’t know what the joke might be. He noticed Catarino’s tivo front elude some of the finest people in the field. This last mentioned advance is dwelt upon longest by Dr. William E. Doty, dean of the College of Fine Arts and chairman of the Department of Music. Such noted performers as ‘cellist Horace Britt and pianists Dalies Frantz and Fernondo Liares are all first rate artists and first class guides for a student into their respective fields of ap Harris Green plied music. Joel Andrews can perform a similar service for him on the harp. John Boe could initiate him in the intricacies of organ and choral music. And such specialist teachers as Joseph Blankenship, Frank Elsass, and John McGrosso would be invaluable in instruction on the oboe, the trumpet, and the clarinet, respectively. CONTINUING, Dean Doty points out that Josephine Antoinne and Floyd Townsley, both of whom enjoyed distinguished New York careers, could train whatever voice the student had if he wished to go into either the teeth were gone. With sweat rolling from his chin, Catarina jerked the clipper arm and the clippers instantaneously began to work. He cut a clean swath down the swollen side of the goat. Beneath the stubble of pale white hair at the shorn strip the goat’s skin was pink. Catarino tossed the mohair aside and with delicacy moved the shivering clippers along the goat once more … The boys were standing in the wool sacks, catching the hair as the other boys tossed it up to them, and George’s grandfather and Ben Avila were talking as they sat near the door on a sack freshly filled … The shearing machine was silent and night was coming on as George went back to the shearing barn with his grandfather. \(His grandfather had sat at the I dining room table and written out in shaky flourish a check for Ben Avila, lifting his pen now and then to see what he’d writcarefully in one hand, stumbling purposefully through the rocks and loose wire and cow chips in the gathering twilight. At the camp where the men were lying on the bedrolls they had begun to spread one by one, where the boys off to one side were energetically throwing at the dipping bats, the cook’s fire had gone out and smoke was rising sullenly from the log ends. A shearer with his shirt unbuttoned and flapping was walking shiftlessly toward the brush. As Ben and George’s grandfather talked about shearing another year, a group on the bedrolls conversed lazily as they sprawled about smoking cigarettes. Somebody told a joke and a fat man went into high rolling laughter. The smell of the barbecue sauce and the goat the Mexicans had had for supper still hung in the air. George sickened a little from the peppered greasy smell. It was foreign to him. The shearers, now intimate among themselves, were strangers who camped on the ranch. With George wishing that his grandfather would finish his business, and the sheared goats stirring and chewing at the brush thrown in the pen that lay in the shadows of the shearing barn, Ben Avila wrote the date of the next shearing in a little book from a hardware store there in the bad light. organized the annual Southwestern Festival of Contemporary opera workshop or any \(vie of the department’s four choirs. And if he wished to lead, not follow, Alexander von Kreisler could teach him conducting. In the University Symphony, the fledgling would have one of the finest student orchestras in the country on which to ~ try out his technique. The student can be carried right up to the Ph.D. in musicology by such distinguished scholars as Dr. Fritz Oberdorffer, Dr. Richard Hoppin, and Dr. Paul Pisk. Dr. Pisk, whose services are in international demand as an editor and who is a composer in his own right, was a student of