Faraway Horses Read online

  The talent was mostly local kids, tap dancing, singing, or playing musical instruments. During the auditions, there was a girl ahead of us tap dancing. She had her long blond hair all done up in curlers, and as she was dancing this little routine, the curlers started falling out of her hair almost in time with the music. I was just a little guy, and I thought that was the neatest thing. I couldn’t imagine how they had done those curlers up so they could fall out in perfect time like that, and how she didn’t run out of curlers until the dance was over. The girl was so embarrassed she started crying. I wondered why in the world she would be crying after such a nice performance.

  When Smokie and I did our rope tricks, I had to stand on a box. I was a bit of a runt in those days, so my dad made a cube out of plywood and painted it white, and I stood on top of it. If I didn’t, I was so short my rope would hit the ground when I spun it.

  We did rope tricks like Wedding Rings, the Merry-Go-Round, Ocean Waves, and Texas Skips. During the commercial break, the judges were talking about who they were going to award first place. Our family was kind of huddled together, and I remember hearing the judges say, “Let’s give it to those Idaho cowboys from Coeur d’Alene.” And they did. They awarded us first prize for the talent show that night. I don’t remember what the prize was, but the name “The Idaho Cowboys” stuck. From then on, we were billed as “The Idaho Cowboys, Buckshot and Smokie.”

  By the time I was six or seven, Smokie and I joined the Rodeo Cowboys Association, now called the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA), and had started performing at local rodeos around the country. Most of these shows were little “pumpkin rollers” that didn’t amount to much, but they were a big deal to us.

  A rodeo performance in Spanish Forks, Utah, in 1971. From left: Ace Brannaman, Buck, bullfighter Tim Oyler, and Smokie.

  My dad changed jobs quite a bit during this period, but most of the time he was working for himself in his saddle and boot repair shop. He worked around our roping career so he could haul us to rodeos. The money that we made all went into his pocket, so the trick roping was kind of his job, too, or so he looked at it.

  Our mom was quite a seamstress. She’d buy material and make us flashy outfits like the singing cowboys used to wear on stage and in the movies. I still have some of them. Other than a couple of pictures and some really nice memories, they’re all I’ve got left of her. I wish I could have known her as an adult.

  In 1969, Smokie and I performed at our first indoor rodeo, a big one called the Diamond Spur Rodeo in Spokane, Washington. We had done trick roping at quite a few amateur rodeos, and we were getting to where we were fairly well known in northern Idaho and eastern Washington, but we were just starting our professional careers elsewhere.

  It was a Thursday, the opening night of the rodeo. I looked into the coliseum from the back gate and saw eight thousand people in the grandstands. It was the biggest crowd I had ever seen, and I was very nervous. There were horses of every color moving in and out—it seemed like chaos at the time—but everyone knew where they were going. For a little kid who had barely been outside the Idaho panhandle, it was an amazing spectacle.

  The rodeo clowns were getting their jalopy-car act prepared near one gate, while the barrel racers were blasting up and back along one of the handling chutes. Then the announcer started giving his introductions for the evening performance, and through all the confusion I heard, “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Idaho Cowboys!”

  The plan was that Smokie and I would gallop into the arena on our pintos, make a full circle, do a sliding stop in the center, and then stand up on our horses and begin spinning ropes. When we made our grand entry, I had no time to be scared. Smokie took off first. He tipped his hat and made his circle, and I was right behind him. I got about a quarter of the way around when my mare Ladybird decided she was going to save us a lot of time. Evidently she thought making a full lap was pointless. She cut hard to her left and took me right out toward the center of the arena.

  I was pulling as hard as a seven-year-old could pull. My brother looked across the arena at me, wondering what in the world I was doing while I looked right back at him wondering what I was going to do. About the time I got to the center of the arena, Ladybird slammed on the brakes and ejected me over her head. The world seemed to disappear as I did a complete somersault in the middle of the arena, then darned if I didn’t land on my feet. And not only did I land on my feet, but I still had my rope in my hands. I stood there completely bewildered, amazed that I wasn’t dead. I looked up at a now dead-silent crowd for about two seconds, and then began spinning my rope. My legs were shaking like Elvis doing “Blue Suede Shoes.”

  The crowd went nuts. Little did they know I had fallen in you know what and had come out smelling like a rose. Smokie couldn’t believe it. I’m sure that seeing me fly through the air, he felt he was going to be the sole heir to the vast Brannaman family fortune of nine milk cows with pitifully small udders.

  Every night from then on, the crowd would whisper in anticipation of this brilliant gymnast/trick roper who was only seven years old and could jump off a galloping horse at thirty-five miles an hour, do a flip in the air, land on his feet, and do rope tricks.

  I never did that little trick again. It’s funny how once in a while things can really go wrong yet they work out right in spite of you. I’ve done a lot of things in life that have worked out in spite of me, but I’ll never forget the Diamond Spur Rodeo, and how one of the best performances of my life was an accident.

  Buck working his rope and the crowd at a Special Olympics demonstration in Butte, Montana.

  Smokie and I had chores to do at home, including milking a handful of cows every morning and night. We had a milking machine, which sounds as if it would have made the work easier, but it was a two-boy job carrying all that milk to the house a tub at a time. Afterward we had to run all the milk through an old-fashioned cream separator. The separator had about two hundred parts, and we had to sterilize each one of them every single time we ran milk through it. That was quite a job because we milked those cows every day and night. Maybe that’s why I don’t drink milk anymore—I figure it might give relief to some poor little kid not to have to produce milk for me.

  In the evenings after we finished milking, we’d practice our rope tricks. Smokie was a better roper than I was in those days. He could do the Texas Skip better than I could because he was taller and it was easier for him to jump through a vertical loop. But he didn’t like to practice quite as much as I did, so when we were little guys, if he wasn’t playing the games I wanted to play, I’d threaten to go practice my rope tricks. And if he wasn’t practicing when I was, well, that was a good way to get a whipping from Dad for not putting out enough effort. That’s the secret of how I could pretty much get Smokie to play whatever I wanted to.

  We had a little round Black Angus bull we used to breed a bunch of milk cows with. Sampson was his name. He liked to hang around us, and he became pretty friendly.

  When my paint mare, Ladybird, the horse I did rope tricks off of, became pregnant and I couldn’t ride her, I got Sampson broke to ride. I had a heck of a time keeping the saddle on him (the bovine mouth isn’t exactly designed for a snaffle bit), and Sampson kept rubbing the headstall off.

  Still, everything worked out fine. I trained Sampson so he’d bow down to let me climb on and off, which became important because I was small in stature and Sampson kept growing. I’d take him up in the mountains, and even after Ladybird had her foal, I kept riding him.

  Buck performing blindfolded atop Ladybird at the Diamond Spur Rodeo in Spokane, Washington.

  I’d been riding Sampson for nearly a year and a half when my dad butchered him.

  Dad didn’t even warn me. It was as though he saw no need to talk to me about whether killing my pet was okay in my mind. It just happened. And what’s more, he made my brother and me help.

  Of course it affected me, but with my father you knew better than to show you were up
set. To have shown any emotion would have upset my dad, and he would have taken it out on me.

  So my dad made us help butcher my friend. And I ate Sampson, too, because I didn’t want to suffer the consequences of not eating him.

  Lots of things happen to little kids, but that’s the sort of thing you never forget.

  By the time I was eight, we had moved from Coeur d’Alene to Whitehall, Montana. Dad rented a Quonset hut with a brick front on Main Street and opened a saddle and repair shop. My mom worked in a restaurant about fifty miles away in a little town called Ennis.

  Smokie and I walked home from school for lunch every day. After we ate Mom would take us back to school on her way to work. This meant in the afternoons, we’d be coming home from school to spend a few hours with Dad, without Mom around, after he got home from the repair shop.

  When she dropped us off at school, I’d tell her how scared I was to be home alone with Dad. I was afraid of doing something wrong, afraid of getting whipped. Smokie was a little tougher and had a thicker hide, but I was Mom’s baby. I’d beg her not to leave me, and every day she’d cry.

  I never really considered how hard that was on her, but I knew how hard it was on me. I was terrified. I hated for lunchtime to come. It seems funny that a little boy would be afraid of lunch coming, but that’s what lunchtime signified to me every day, five days a week. I was afraid to go home. I was terrified of my dad. For no reason Smokie and I could figure out, he was always angry. Whatever the reason, Dad was an angry man. There were days when he would come home and just beat us. He’d whip us with belts or riding quirts or anything handy, but always when Mom was gone. She never would have allowed it if she’d been around. She was our protector, but we were afraid to tell her.

  My folks did really love each other. Dad always drank some, but he wasn’t a real problem drinker while Mom was alive. He always had kind of a mean side to him, and it didn’t take drinking for it to come out. It was pretty much out all the time. We didn’t know the way he treated us was called abuse, because we’d never known anything else. It wasn’t life-threatening, at least not until after Mom died, but it was damn sure cruel.

  Nowadays Dad would have gotten in trouble with the law for what he was doing, but back then law enforcement didn’t have much to do with domestic problems. Besides, most people didn’t know what was going on. If I saw someone now treating his young boys the way Dad treated us, I think I might have to work him over.

  When I was a kid, I always wondered why my mom didn’t leave and take us boys with her, but in those days it wasn’t acceptable to leave a marriage. She wasn’t raised that way. Her parents were German immigrants who wouldn’t have thought very much of her if she hadn’t been able to tolerate even a bad marriage. It was a different time, and they would have blamed her, not Dad.

  I know she hated for lunchtime to come, too, because she’d have to say good-bye, and by the time she finished cleaning up the restaurant and got home, it would be late at night. Some days things were okay with Dad. He didn’t give us a hard time. But there were a lot of days when he’d holler at us, and we’d get whipped. It’s not that Mom didn’t know. I suppose she always knew what kind of man Dad was.

  There’s something that kicks in when a mother sees her children being abused. Maternal instinct takes over, and she can fight like a lion. But Mom was in a bad spot. Strong as she was, she felt trapped. She had no way to make enough money to support three of us, nowhere to go, and she was a long way from her family. I’m sure she could have given a hundred reasons why she stayed married. Maybe some of it was denial. Maybe she just didn’t want to believe that she’d made such a bad choice. There are a lot of things about my mom’s past that made her what she was, things I’ll never know, and if she were still alive, there are a lot of questions I would love to ask her.

  There was an afternoon that we came home from school when Mom was at work, and Dad was moving around, walking around the place, going in and out of the barn. I knew he was mad. It was only about a hundred yards from the county road to the house, and I wished we could take all night to get there. When he saw us, he immediately started hollering and swearing. One of us had left a gate open when we were doing chores in the morning. You know young boys, you know how forgetful they can be. They don’t mean to do anything wrong—a lot of times they just forget, or something makes their brains turn off.

  Anyhow, we’d left a gate open. Nothing really had gone wrong. One of our horses got into a pen with another horse, but they were geldings and they got along fine. It was really no big deal, just a matter of catching the horse and putting him back in his own pen. But Dad was so angry that we had forgotten to close the gate that he went into the barn and came out with his stock whip. The whip was eight feet long. I knew what was coming, and my little legs were just shaking.

  He told us to put our books down on the front steps. We were on the east side of the house in the backyard near Mom’s clothesline. I was wearing a short-sleeve shirt and a pair of lightweight pants. I remember looking at those clothes on the clothesline and wishing I had them all on at the same time to protect me from what was about to happen.

  Dad made us go over to a rail fence that ran around the house. He told us to hang on to one of the rails and stand there, and then he started whipping us with that stock whip. Once in a while the lash would wrap around my arm up by my shoulder, and it’d crack just like a .22 rifle. It hurt as if I had been shot, too. There were even places where it cut through my shirt. Granted, it probably wasn’t much of a shirt, but still, whipping a kid hard enough to cut his shirt meant you were hitting him pretty hard.

  Dad was whipping us over our backs and down our legs when I saw a neighbor looking out of his ranch house at us. He didn’t know what to do, but I remember looking at him and wishing he was man enough to come over and stop what was happening.

  My dad was still hollering, cussing, and whipping us when the phone rang. He told us to stay where we were and ran into the house to answer it. When he came back out, his mood had changed. The phone call was from someone who wanted Smokie and me to do a TV commercial for Kellogg’s Sugar Pops. Dad was excited now. This was another chance for him to vicariously share the spotlight with us. He went from whipping us to being as happy as could be. At the time, we didn’t give a damn about a TV commercial, but we sure were glad the phone rang when it did.

  I’ve often thought it was by the grace of God that the phone rang that day and cut our whipping short, or we’d have gotten it a lot worse than we did. We went ahead and made the Sugar Pops commercial. The funny thing was they shot it in a town called Grace, Idaho. You know, there are so many little coincidences in life that make you wonder how God or your guardian angel or whoever it is protecting you can keep it all straight. You start putting all those pieces together years later, and it’s kind of surreal.

  * * *

  When I was eleven and we were living in Whitehall, Mom had a bad bout of the flu. She’d been in bed for two or three days, and Dad was trying to take care of her. When he gave her some soup, it never occurred to any of us that the soup would change her blood sugar level. During the night, she went into a diabetic coma, although nobody knew it. The next morning, Dad was worried. He came in, woke us up, and said, “We have to take your mother to the hospital in Ennis.”

  Mom was a big lady, all of six feet tall, and it took all three of us to get her into the truck. She was in terrible distress, and she couldn’t control her bladder. Dad and Smokie held her upper body to help her into the truck. I grabbed her legs and carefully lifted them in. Urine ran down over my hands. That really scared me. I knew Mom was bad. I knew it was awfully serious.

  Dad left us at home, took off with Mom for the hospital, and we went on to school. We worried about our mother all day and all night, but Dad never called. Mom was in the hospital for three long days, and during that entire time we never heard from him.

  Finally, on the morning of the fourth day, Dad came home. He just came into
the house and stood before us, and said, “Boys, your mother’s gone.”

  That was it. I was shocked. Mom had been in and out of the hospital so many times with her diabetes that I figured she’d come home, and we’d go on. But she didn’t, and we had to.

  * * *

  For Mom, trick roping had meant more than anything. It was the glue that held our family together. When Smokie and I did the Sugar Pops commercial, she loved it. The spot ran nationally, and we were dubbed “The Sugar Pops Kids.” Mom’s only moment in the limelight had been as a dance instructor at an Arthur Murray dance studio when she was a young woman, and she was elated that we were on national television. She would sit in front of the TV and pray that the commercial would come on.

  After Mom passed away, one of her nurses who went to the funeral told me that while she had been in a coma the entire time she was in the hospital, they had left a TV playing in her room. I guess they thought the constant voices and sounds would help stimulate her back to consciousness. Just before she died, our Sugar Pops commercial came on and Smokie and I were doing our rope tricks. As soon as the commercial was over, Mom passed away.

  I can’t help but think that she heard our voices, and maybe that was all she needed. Maybe hearing her babies one last time was her way of saying good-bye. I guess we all have our way of saying “I love you and good-bye.” Timing again. It just keeps showing up.

  With Mom gone, Dad changed for the worse. He had always been pretty rough on us, and it had gotten to the point where he’d been turned in to the law quite a few times, but he never did anything life-threatening while Mom was alive. The moment he told us she was gone, I knew life was going to get tougher.

  Within a year of Mom’s death, Dad had pretty much fallen apart. He really loved Mom, and losing his wife seemed to drive him over the brink. He drank heavily, and he just didn’t want to live anymore. He’d had a rough life. He had been a prisoner of war in Germany for over a year during World War II. God knows what they did to him—he never told us—but maybe he never got over the experience. To make matters worse, Dad had a near-fatal accident in Alaska, receiving a big jolt of electricity while working as a lineman. He was in the hospital for six or eight months. After he came home, he suffered from horrible headaches. They seemed to torture him for the rest of his life.