Tales from the Journey of the Dead: Ten Thousand Years on an American Desert

19. Joe

208 19. Joe All life trembles in the brief, brilliant light of existence. Whether in horror or in beauty, whether in tragedy or in triumph, each life story from the Journey of the Dead reminds us how very solitary is our own journey through time. Though their bones have long since turned to dust, and their stone markings have faded under the relentless sun, ancient people understood that time was but the instant we occupy between twin circles of eternity. So too are all the tales from the Jornada but scratched glyphs on the surface of human history. I have come to a small, flat building on a dusty street in Truth or Consequences, hoping that one more story might provide a final lesson about the twin mysteries of time and timelessness. I have come to the apartment of ninety-three-year-old Joe Turner – no relation to Ted – who is the Jornada’s oldest living cowboy. He was twenty-one when he rode horseback from Oklahoma to the Jornada in 1930. He lived out on the Jornada’s open range from then until just a few months ago when his kids finally decided he had to move into town. I knock on the screen door, wait, and knock again, harder. A voice booms from inside, ‘‘Hello!’’ A moment later the screen door opens and a wiry, lean older man with glasses stands before me. He wears a western-style dress shirt and stovepipe-straight blue jeans. He is as tall and as skinny as a beanpole. Joe invites me in. The apartment’s living room is sparsely decorated . An ancient wooden trunk sits against a wall. Above it are three sketches of horses. Toward the kitchen is an ink portrait of a man in a cowboy hat sipping from a gourd-like cup. Near the trunk is a knickknack stand, its shelves full of snapshots of kids, babies, loved ones, and horses. Joe 209 Joe sits in a stu√ed chair at the end of a worn couch. Next to his chair is a table with a lamp. The base of the lamp is a gaudy sculpture of a porcelain cowboy riding a bucking porcelain horse. Although his hearing is poor, Joe is eager to answer my questions. He came from a large family. He was born in 1908 and grew up across the Red River from Marietta, Oklahoma. ‘‘One of the first things I remember was one day when me and my dad went to town on business,’’ he says. His father stopped to talk to a man outside the store. ‘‘The man had just set down a can of trash and a damn mouse jumped out of that can and went right up my leg! And I’m telling you, I never bucked so hard and high in all my life.’’ He pauses and laughs. ‘‘Gul dang, I can still feel him scratching going up my leg! Gul-dang almighty!’’ The father of six uses ‘‘gul dang’’ in most conversations, but anytime things get a bit exciting or rowdy it becomes ‘‘goddam.’’ Born with cleft palate, he doesn’t wear a mustache like Gene Rhodes did to cover the defect, and the scar where his upper lip had been crudely sewn together forms a jagged tear. Joe Turner knew the Wild Man, and he’s been around long enough to remember trading with the Mescalero Apaches. He played guitar at the dances up Rhodes Canyon where Flo met her husband-to-be Frank Martin, and he’s known Ben Cain since Ben was ‘‘knee high to a puddle-duck.’’ On the morning Trinity lit up the sky Joe was twenty miles away living at a cow camp on the Armendaris. Later he moved to Engle, where for years he ran a combination gas station, post o≈ce, store, and bar. Joe nods to one of the horse portraits that hangs over the old, handcrafted trunk. ‘‘I was a good rider, but anybody that rides a bronc gets bucked o√ once in a while. A man may say he didn’t, but he’s just full of bull. Ole Buck Smith was a good bronc rider, but by golly even he’d get bucked o√ once in a while.’’ After arriving in New Mexico in 1930, Joe and his brother prowled for cattle working for a rancher just west of the river. Joe then returned briefly to Texas to marry the love of his life, Grace Langford...