Vacquero, Ride On: All the Pretty Horses

Abstract

Begun as an aborted screenplay that no film company wanted (“Cities of the Plain” in the Cormac McCarthy Collection at Southwest Texas State University), The Border Trilogy opens with a runaway cowboy picaresque kin to Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn. At sixteen John Grady Cole and his father Wayne attend his mother’s father’s funeral, the rough Grady patriarch unnaturally groomed in death. A headstrong actress, John Grady’s mother went missing when he was an infant, but now “she” owns the ranch and wants her boy in school, so he splits on horseback with his granddaddy’s satchel full of personal effects—clean shirt, socks, toothbrush, newly acquired razor and shaving brush—wearing his daddy’s blanket-lined ducking coat. Little does this teen cowboy know what all he’s leaving, but one thing is certain: a gender disruption has fractured generations of postwar ranching families, the women quitting a working man’s world for social life in cities like San Antonio, the theater and dinners out, courting and finer things. Not everyone thinks a cattle ranch in west Texas is the second best thing to dying and going straight to heaven, the family lawyer explains the Cole divorce and his mother’s control of the ranch. “She dont want to live out there, that’s all.”

Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!

—W.B. Yeats stone epitaph