My Grandpa, the Cowboy

I was 25 when my Grandpa Finch died, and he was 97. It seemed to me that he had been old for all of my life, and I guess he had. It wasn't like some people who grew older as you watched, Grandpa was just always old and slow and deaf, it seemed to me anyway. 

I remember when I was really little, Grandpa took me to the rodeo and bought me so many hot dogs and so much Cracker Jack that I was sick to my stomach. Every time the hot dog man or the drink person or the Cracker Jack boy came by Grandpa would say "Do you want some?" and I was just too scared of him to say no, so he would buy me some and I would eat it until finally I was sick. Even then I thought Grandpa was very old.

I don’t have many other memories of Grandpa until I was a teenager in the 60s, when he would come stay with us in Minnesota for several weeks in the summer.  He was so quiet you hardly knew he was there most of the time. He would stay in his room for a while, then take his cane and walk out through the back door to the yard, and sit for a while in the lawn chair and chew tobacco. After a while he would walk slowly, moving that cane before him, over to the big oak that had the wooden swing Daddy had put up for me when I had been younger. Grandpa would sometimes lower himself down to sit on that swing, or sometimes he would just stand there, leaning on his cane and spitting tobacco juice.

In time he would shuffle on around to the screened sun porch to watch the trees and the weather. Coming from the Utah dessert, he loved to see how green the trees and the grass were. I remember his standing in the sun porch watching one of our big violent Midwestern thunder storms. He would grin out at the storm and exclaim, "Damn, that's a fine rain!"

Grandpa appreciated rain because all his life he had worked to coax a living from the dry Utah land. Born in 1880, the youngest child of Mormon pioneers, Grandpa was a cowboy. When he was about twelve, his dad put him on a horse and sent him alone up Provo Canyon to live with his married sister and help with their ranch in Park City. That was the end of school for him.

When he came back to Spanish Fork as a young man, he was tall and lean, more comfortable on a horse than anywhere else. His mother had died, and he and his dad were batching it.  I’ve heard they  both spent much of their time in the local saloon.

One night, as my Aunt Kathryn told the tale years after his death,  Grandpa and some buddies heard about a church dance up at the Fourth Ward building. They decided to have a little fun and rode on up to the church hall--right through the door and into the midst of the dancers. My grandmother was there as a chaperone, a small redheaded woman who had worked in service for other families since she was eight. But she was feisty.

She ran right after the tall cowboy on his horse, shouting to him to stop. Hands on her hips, she yelled, “You boys get right on out of here! You can’t break up this dance!”

As I see it in my mind, Grandpa looked down at that little redhead and fell immediately in love.

In any case, they were soon married and moved in with the dad, where Grandma set about civilizing both of the wild cowboys.

Grandpa settled down to be a hard worker and they made a success, raising cows or sheep or hay or peaches, as the opportunity arose. They also raised five boys and two girls who all learned to work hard.

But I don’t think Grandpa ever went to church, and I think the saloon was still a favorite place to relax. When Grandpa came to visit us in Minnesota, I used to be embarrassed by his swearing and by the way he chewed tobacco, though he was very clean about it and never used it in the house. Also he drank coffee, and Mamma had to fix him some every morning, which seemed very wicked in our Mormon household.

Daddy used to take Grandpa for rides in the green rolling Minnesota farmland. Grandpa would stare out the window at the tall fields of corn and the fine red barns and big herds of dairy cattle grazing on the green fields. "Damn, this is a fine country." he would say, his face suddenly lighting up in a grin that spread from one huge deaf ear to another.

One summer day, Mamma had to be gone at lunch time and left me to give Grandpa lunch. I fixed him what was my most sophisticated lunch at that time--cottage cheese salad. He obligingly ate a bite or two, and then quavered, "I like a little sugar on my clabber." I got him the sugar bowl but felt greatly insulted, that he should call my elegant creation clabber. That same lunch time I remember him talking to me, something he rarely did. It was a story about driving the cattle somewhere, far away--it wasn't clear to me where--and something happening, something that sounded very exciting, involving guns and rustlers, something like the plot of a TV western, but the story rambled and his voice trembled. I really couldn't follow it.

Now, as I look back on that afternoon, I wish I had made the effort to listen to him. What could he have told me, if I had only asked, if I had only tried to understand? In the 1960s, my cowboy Grandpa was like a traveler from another planet, and I didn’t make much of an effort to learn about his world.