Rightful Place

By Amy Hale Auker

From the Texas panhandle to the mountains of Arizona, Amy Auker has lived the cowboy life—as wife, as mother, as cook, as ranch hand, as writer. In fine-grained detail she captures the prairie light, the traffic on small farm-to-market roads, the vacant stillness of shipping pens when fall works are over. But she also captures the unmistakable westernness of the people and animals around her: the son who must get back on the horse, the husband who gives great gifts, the horses whose names and temperaments are as recognizable as family. Auker understands those who live in the sway of nature’s moods far off the main roads, and she commends them to us in luminous prose backlit by her own hard-earned experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780896728905

Amy Hale Auker

Amy Hale Auker writes essays, poems, and fiction while working for day wages on an Arizona ranch. Twenty years on commercial cattle operations in Texas cooking for cowboys, homeschooling children, and taking long walks have given her material for writing about a way of life that is alive and well in the heart of the American west. She lives in Prescott, Arizona.

Book preview

Waking Up

Turtle Mountain looms on the outskirts of Van Horn, Texas, where the school mascot is the eagle. A huge white V is painted on the turtle’s shell. As a little girl, when I still thought mightyeagles was all one word, I would gaze at the big V from the barren playground beside the football field. My father was the senior English teacher, and each spring he took the current class of almost-graduates to refresh the whitewash on the V. I begged to go. I wanted to see the boulders piled on the mountain and smell the caustic whitewash that burned the legs of the silly girls who chose to wear shorts on the yearly outing. But it wasn’t the painting of the V that attracted me as much as the opportunity to climb, to step over the desert until I could look away over the top of the town, a chance to get to know that mountain.

I never got the chance to climb Turtle Mountain. In that vast West Texas land, every mesa, every outcropping of rock, slick and tempting, every gully full of sand, every ridge of mountain with gray peaks and blue valleys called to me. I watched them flash past on Highway 54, turning in my seat to imagine myself standing on top of each highest point in succession, Guadalupe Peak looming in the north as the highest of all.

When my father left the confines of the classroom and leased a ranch north of Van Horn, I woke in the early morning hours to pull on work clothes in the dark. Long sleeves and jeans felt strange in the summertime, and my feet clomped clumsily in my boots. As we drove out of town, silence and the smell of coffee from the thermos cup filled the cab of the pickup. My favorite days were the ones when we checked or fixed fences. We rode our horses slowly, looking at each section of sagging barbed wire and at every cedar post. Even better was when we drove out to a stretch of fence and spent the whole day moving along it on foot, adding shiny stay wire and green steel t-posts to the weathered boundary lines. Daddy warned me constantly to watch for rattlesnakes and moved a bull snake from our path with a shovel while my heart thudded hard in my ears. From time to time he handed me the wet, heavy canteen, and I drank cool water that tasted of metal. In midday, we backed the pickup as far into the shade of a mesquite as we could and sat on the tailgate to eat sandwiches and fruit out of the cooler. At the end of the day, I hated pulling off my dusty