D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February
2008
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Voice of a Ranch Woman Fourth in a Series |
Showing Your Love All the Time
A rancher's wife talks about her husband, his family and love that doesn't need Valentine's Day gifts.
By Linda McDonald, as told to Victoria Tester
This first-person reminiscence is excerpted from recordings of Linda Nielson McDonald at her home on the McDonald Ranch. Established in 1903, the McDonald Ranch is among the five oldest continuously working ranches in Grant County. Linda McDonald, born in Moab, Utah, in 1942, is the wife of Jerry McDonald, the son of Jonnie McDonald and Evelyn McCauley. These recordings re a collaboration between McDonald and author Victoria Tester, whose book Miracles of Sainted Earth (University of New Mexico Press) won the nationally recognized Willa Cather Literary Award. Their efforts mark the beginning of a project by the two women to record and publish a book of oral histories of ranch women in southern New Mexico.
"Look around, look around, it's not as cloudy as you think! Open up your eyes, open up your eyes!" Jerry will tell you that out when you're working cattle. If you're rounding up cattle you need to be able to see 'em, and you need to be looking around and seeing what's going on.
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Jerry and Linda McDonald, who together
run one of the oldest continuously working ranches in Grant County. |
I'd been out helping him enough that he'd told me that a few times, and so one time the chicken got out. It was out here in the yard, and Jerry was trying to get it in — which is unusual because usually I was the one getting the chickens in.
Anyway, he was out trying to get that chicken, so I opened up the door and yelled, "Look around, look around, think like a chicken. Think like a chicken!"
Because he was always telling us, "Think like a cow! Think like a cow!"
Maybe it's a man thing, or maybe it's a cowboy thing. But I learned it from my dad, too — don't be asking too many questions.
Jerry wants you to pay attention to what's going on. Don't be saying, "Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that?"
He'll just say, "Look around. Pay attention."
I think it's good to teach people to be observant, rather than have somebody tell them what's going to happen.
But when you're out working with the cattle he'll go, "I want that cow, the red one."
And you shout, "They're all red!"
Jerry pays real close attention to things that are going on around him as far as nature's concerned. He's always paying attention to the moon and what phase it's in.
And, according to the old ranchers that I've talked to, when the moon is laying on its back, it's holding up the moisture, but when it's tipped up on its side, it's letting the rain out. So it'll rain.
He's always watching the sun to see where it is in relationship to Cooke's Peak. He's out in nature all the time and he's paying attention to what's out there. He was raised that way. When you learn things when you're a kid, you're just better at them.
Jerry didn't do this so much when I had the babies, but he started paying attention to the fact that babies seem to be born more during the change of a moon. The nurses in the hospital verify this, because they say you go a long time and there won't be any babies, then all of a sudden there's lots of babies. And as well as babies being born, the calves being born. You'll have a cow have her calf, and a lot of times it's on the change of a moon.
But anyway, our daughter-in-laws, he's made believers out of them. They'll call up and say, "When's the change of the moon?" They could look on their own calendar but I think they like to humor him a little bit.
He'll say, "It's gonna be on such and such a day, you're gonna have that baby, and if you don't have it then, it'll be the next change of the moon."
Jerry watches all the animals. Just over the hill here is a den of kit foxes. He'll come in and tell me, "Well, they're back. They've come back." I don't know where they go but they must have several homes. And he'll watch those kit foxes. "Well, there's two little pups."
He watches the coyote tracks, and if the coyotes cross the road they usually go to the bathroom on the road, and he calls that "their calling card."
Saturday I met a huge bull snake coming up my hall. It got away from us and we don't know where it is in this house. I've been carrying my square-tip shovel every place I go here. So Jerry goes off to Granny's and I ask, "You're gonna leave me here in this house with that snake?"
He just doesn't say anything — he just walks off.
Anyway, what are you going to do — are you going to move to town?
My dream when I was a young girl was to live in Ireland, where there weren't any snakes. Then I moved down to this place. Those guys on the rodeo team — who told Jerry I'd make a pretty good wife — should have bet how long I'd live in this snake-infested country instead of in this "pile of rocks."
The snakes never end.
I think this is kind of typical of cowboys — that they live out in nature, and they want us to learn to cope with it. It helps us become tougher, so that we can deal with things we don't think we can deal with.
We learn how to deal with what we have. We learn how to use a shovel. We learn how to use a crowbar. And we learn how to survive.
At first I got my feelings hurt a little bit, but Jerry doesn't get tied into all these holidays. The most special things he's given to me have been the things he's found out in the pasture. Things that he thinks I would like, because I have all this junk in this house — all these "antiques." So if he finds an old coffeepot, or an old piece of wood, or a rock he thinks is pretty, he'll bring it in and give it to me.
Sometimes he'll find a horseshoe. He found one horseshoe he figured was left there by the cowboys when the Diamond A's had this country. That was a cattle company that owned nearly all this country down here.
So when your birthday comes, or it's Mother's Day, or something like that, you don't necessarily expect to get anything. If he gets you something, that's a pleasant surprise.
I think it's been a wonderful thing, because it's been teaching me and is still teaching me not to be thinking about myself and what I'm going to get.
I was comforted, too, when I talked to a friend of mine and she said, "Oh, Tommy and I quit giving each other presents a long time ago. Because people waste so much money trying to show their love."
That's just what it is — it's a waste of money.
Our daughter-in-law said, "I think Valentine's Day is the stupidest holiday. We should show our love to each other all the time, not just on that day."
That was very well stated.
Jerry is a McDonald and his mother was a McCauley, and our children have always been really proud of their Irish ancestry.
So when Matt got called to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, to Ireland, Jerry's sister took up a collection and paid for us to go to Ireland and pick Matt up off his mission.
Matt took us around to all the people that he had taught the Gospel to. In one place, this sister's husband had just baked a sweetbread, and I thought I'd help her butter the bread. So I was buttering that bread, and pretty soon she grabbed that knife from me, and she put butter on that bread about a half an inch thick.
That's just the way Jerry is. I thought, "You know what, I should have come to Ireland a long time ago. I would have understood that man so much better."
Because he's an Irishman.
He loves to feed people, and he wants them to have all they want to eat, and it makes him happy to do that.
So we do, we feed a lot of people here at the ranch.
Jerry's family left Ireland before the Famine. The McCauleys left from Carrickfergus in the 1700s, and the McDonalds left in 1833. Grandma Mary Ellen McDonald's husband left before she did.
We went to the place in Ireland where she sailed from, Dingle, in County Kerry.
She was so afraid of the water. She was scared to death of the water, but she knew that she had to leave, too. She would go down to the seaside and she'd go, "How will I know where to go? There's no stone wall to follow." Because there were stone walls all over Ireland.
Her husband had sailed over; then they sent two children with friends, and then she still had two children left. One of them was four years old, and one was only two.
She boarded the ship and set sail for Newfoundland and her two-year-old baby got sick and died. She had to bury him at sea. She could never even go back to the grave.
But she went on.
They lived in Newfoundland for 20 years and then they came to the Midwest, and from there the McDonalds came across, from Iowa.
Actually, Jerry's grandfather Jeremiah McDonald ran away from home because his mother had died — but that's another story.
I continue to love Jerry even more as time goes on. Jerry's the hub of everything that goes on in my life and on this ranch, because of his value system and the way he looks at things.
He has a talent — we've talked about this in our family a lot. Everybody he's around, he makes feel like they're important.
Then he starts expecting things of you. It doesn't matter if it's some teenager in his Sunday school class, or if it's one of his children, he just makes people feel like they can achieve things.
He's a very well-respected man in the community. People love him. They respect him and they look to him as a spiritual leader.
Of course, he came from a respected family. But he's kept that up.
In some ways, he's a real McDonald. But in some ways he was actually more influenced as a young child by the McCauleys as far as his character. I don't know if it was an inherited character, or if he learned it, because he spent so much of his time with his McCauley grandparents when he was going to school.
He does things different than his McDonald dad, Jonnie, did. When they're out working cattle, McDonalds never hollered. Now, if you weren't doing something right, they might run over you with their horse and get you straightened out. But they never hollered.
But the McCauleys did. Of course, the McCauleys had nine children, and when you've got that many kids. . . .
Jerry took that attribute. He hollers when he works cattle.
But Jerry doesn't get nervous and jittery in a serious situation. That's a McDonald trait. Like when Grandpa Jonnie McDonald's brother, Taylor, died, he said, "Well, I guess I better go check the water."
Grandpa Jonnie McDonald also had the philosophy, you do the best you can each day. Jerry also tells me, "We'll just take it one day at a time." That's a McDonald philosophy.
But if you asked Jerry whether he is more McDonald or McCauley, I don't know how he'd answer you.
You do what you are expected to do, you do what you are asked to do and you do it to the end. You don't quit. That's the McDonald way.
When we were at the Cienega and the ranch division was going on, they were wanting us out of there. I said to Grandpa Jonnie McDonald, "They want us out of there, Grandpa." And he says, "We said we'd get out the end of June, and we're gonna get out the end of June."
He didn't tell me, "Now you go home and hush." But the intonation was: "You go back down there and you sit there and you do what you've been expected to do." He wasn't harsh with me. He just said, "We'll get out when we said we'd get out."
Then I was in the 4H Club, and we were having some problems and I said, "I think I'll just quit. I'm not going to do this anymore." Grandpa McDonald came up here specifically to say, "You're not going to quit."
So I didn't quit.
That's been something that's been taught to our kids. You don't give up and you don't quit.
Another McDonald-McCauley philosophy is that you always look out for the underdog.
I'm keeping a record of things Jerry says, because that man has a way of putting things. He'll still come up with a new saying I haven't heard. Sometimes he makes it up; sometimes it's a McDonald saying; sometimes it's a McCauley saying.
He was talking about the skid loader, and to describe the boys' ability with the skid loader, he said, "Those boys can pick their nose with that skid loader." Can you just imagine?
About somebody: "You could run an elephant across the pasture with a slicker tied to its tail and he wouldn't see it!"
Jerry took his generator down to get it fixed and they weren't fixing it. So he called them up and said, "It's been there long enough to grow a new one!"
Or Jerry will say, "The grass is getting green. Gerry Billings and I were down on our hands and knees looking at it." That meant it was very short.
"You sick?" he told a friend of ours. "You might be able to find some horehound. It might not make you well, but it'll make you forget what you had."
Once I announced, "Buffalo meat is good for women, so let's be getting a buffalo." Jerry said, "We'll just get one skinny cow."
He said to David McCauley — they were going to work cattle — "You got to round up the kids and the cattle!" Because when the kids are young they get lost when they're out there working. He had to round me up, too.
"That gun would scatter fur over three zip codes. Can you hit the broad side of a barn when you're in it with that new gun?"
"He hits that jug pretty good, but he's never sick. Better than a flu shot!"
Talking about our grandson Foster being in bed: "Gravity grabbed him and he's in bed. Foster, get up, breakfast is ready. The Might Giant arises! It's a good thing you didn't get up all at once, the house would have fell on you."
"Getting ahead of Granny is like trying to smack a marble. It always slips out."
Poor Granny says, "I can hear a car comin'," and Jerry says, "No, you've got ticks in your ears."
Me: "Kristy and J.L. got us a flashlight that works when you shake it." Jerry: "Well, you'll get old and get palsy and it'll light right up."
Me: "I like these new shoes. I just wish they hadn't cost me $40." Jerry: "Well, you got the box with 'em, didn't you? That ought to be worth something."
Me: "They've got digital cameras that'll take pictures underwater." Jerry: "You'd have a big time in the bathtub."
Me: "Oh, here's an anti-wrinkle pill!" Jerry: "What does it do, make you go blind?"
The McDonalds are always making jokes. One time I was helping brand cattle and some way that calf got up and I was astraddle of it backwards. Then I fell off.
Grandpa was sitting over there on a five-gallon can laughing with his hat over his face, just laughing his head off. He didn't ask me if I was hurt; he was just sitting over there laughing, he thought it was so funny.
I didn't think it was so funny.
Sometimes their humor does have a bit of a bite to it, especially if you're the focal point.
One time, it was 1903 or 1904, Jerry's Grandpa Jeremiah McDonald's wife Mitchel Ann had gone to have a baby — Aunt Jane — and Jeremiah was there by himself. His wife usually trimmed his mustache, but he decided he'd trim it himself, and maybe he messed it up, because he decided to shave the whole thing off. He got to looking at himself in the mirror, and he got to laughing. He decided he'd go pull a joke on the neighbor who lived just over the hill here.
Grandpa Jeremiah got a suitcase, and dressed up as he would have if he was coming from Ireland. He went over there to the neighbor's and talked in this Irish brogue: "By Jove, I'm coming from Ireland. And I'm Jerry's brother" — or cousin, or something — "and I've lost my way. Can you tell me how to get there, to the McDonalds'?"
The poor neighbor actually brought him over here and showed him the place. He said, "I don't know where he's gone to. This is a fresh fire. He can't be very far."
Jeremiah McDonald had gone to a great deal of effort to trick that neighbor. He'd walked over there, and it was at least a mile and a half or so over there, and in the winter. He began to laugh, because he had totally tricked him, without that mustache, that he was his own relative.
It made the neighbor so mad he wouldn't speak to him for years.
The McDonald family kind of has their own language. Granny used to give the kids "spondooliks." Spondooliks is money.
But the one word Grandpa Jonnie McDonald used to use a lot was "bonjolips." I'd cook for the cowboys and I'd always have a dessert fixed for 'em, and he called dessert "bonjolips." And my son Bo, he was a clever little boy when he was growing up, too, and he would call a hamburger a "cacaronirooch."
The McDonalds have a lot of words that are their own.
I loved Jerry or I wouldn't have married him. I knew he would be a good father to children. But falling in love with him wasn't just a flash. It's been a gradual thing.
I do feel like the more you know a man, the more you live with him, and even though you know him and there are things that irritate you about him, you love him more and more all the time.
And the way we believe, in the Church, this marriage isn't just for this life. This is forever.
I told him one time, "Well, you're stuck with me, because this is going to go on forever!"
Hopefully it will, if we live worthy of that.