All the previous chapters can be found here.

I got baptized in the Pecos River, which runs down through New Mexico into Texas and carves the Loving-Reeves County line. I was wearing Walmart flip flops and a white bedsheet with a head hole cut out. It was 102 degrees out that day, so the whole congregation took a plunge with me to cool off.

I got excommunicated from the Cowboy Church of Loving County, Texas just over a month later. Hell, it might have been an even forty days. So far, I've been excommunicated three times, and there'll be more, I know. The church can't get enough of me, it seems, because they keep finding reasons to welcome me back. And I keep slipping up. We all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but especially me.

I want to tell you the still-unfolding tale of my time with the calf wranglin', pig scramblin', foot washin' ranchers of the Cowboy Church of Loving County. There's intrigue, horror, romance and revelation. It's all here. But first, I feel it's only right to provide some context. A little history.

When I arrived in Loving County, the church had recently come under new management. An oilfield technician named Denny Colsmith is the semi-permanent interim pastor of the congregation. Has been for two years, and probably will be for some time. Before Denny, a fella named Reverend Willie led the church. He and his wife built a makeshift chapel next to their rodeo and boom, you've got a church. Reverend Willie pastored the church for nearly three decades before it was revealed that he was a kiddy diddler. Once one child spoke up, the others did too. Like locusts, when you see one, you know there's more coming. Apparently, he had kept it quiet by telling the kids that God would send buzzards to peck out their eyes if they ever told on him.

There was a congregational meeting to determine Willie's fate, during which it was decided that only God could judge him. After that meeting, Willie went on a walk of prayer and penitence with two of the elders, Dan and Garth. They walked and they prayed, and Reverend Willie expressed his remorse to the elders and to God. And then he was promptly struck down by a wicked red bolt of heat lightning, which punched a bullet-sized hole in the top of Willie's head. They buried him in an unmarked grave out back of the chapel, where Reverend Willie's widow, Mama G, now grows her championship watermelons.

Willie's long-secret wickedness and sudden departure from this earth left the church shaken, to say the least. The congregation's response was not despair or dissolution, however, but a renewed fervor for the straight and narrow, and a newfound misanthropy. Man can be possessed, tainted, twisted by the devil, so God's people must be vigilant. The church keeps a watchful eye on outsiders like me. If I'm not careful, I might end up struck by the kind of heat lightning that leaves a bullet-sized hole in your head.

4/10/2021

My first excommunication stung, as you might imagine. It was snake day at the church, which meant that Jesus was in town. Jesus is not the Christ, but rather an eccentric Hispanic gent that would drive down occasionally from his New Mexico home to provide a measure of safety at events involving venomous snakes. See, due to a global antivenom shortage and the scarcity of emergency healthcare in the open ranges of West Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, Jesus took it upon himself to become a sort of high plains drifter-cum-savior by slowly immunizing himself to the venoms of native North American snakes. Not only is Jesus now impervious to the effects of venom (rattle, coral, copperhead, cottonmouth) himself, he can treat others for their snake bites with a quick and dirty blood transfusion, in a pinch.

As the legend goes, Jesus saved the lives of the entire McCorney family when a summer flood lifted a nest of water moccasins from the Pecos River and into the McCorney’s family room. Mrs. McCorney managed to get herself and her snakebit kids all the way to Mentone, Loving County’s only town, where they broke into the cafe to use the telephone. And so, in the dead of night, through beating rain, Jesus flew into town on his souped up Indian Scout Bobber and dripped his blood into the McCorney’s veins while they huddled in a booth at the Mentone Cafe. This was about eight years back.

So Jesus rolled in one Sunday morning, hawking up thick brown gobs of Red Man spit. He charges a pretty steep retainer (and 75 cents on the mile) these days, so snake day doesn’t come but once a year for the Cowboy Church of Loving County. Denny Colsmith, the church’s head pastor, is also the church’s head snake wrangler. After a brief but fiery homily about how the devil tricked Eve in the garden of Eden ― the moral of which was that the devil is wily and that women are weak of mind ― the Brewster trio got to their instruments and began a-playing. Eric plays the guitar, June plays the guitar but more womanly, and Ed also plays guitar but he sings too. During a rousing rendition of “Blessed Assurance,” Denny produced a pair of rattlers from a wicker basket and began parading them around the front of the chapel. Everyone clapped, hooted and hollered.

Denny pranced around with the snakes for a few prolonged minutes, occasionally staring them in the eye and telling them off. He shouted how his faith would protect him from the fangs of the evil one. This is the spirit of snake day. Snakes represent the devil, obviously. Snakes are also said to smell fear, and won’t attack the unafraid. Therefore, if you have faith that you won’t be bitten, you won’t be scared, and then won’t be bitten. I am going to ignore the irony of inviting the devil into the midst of the church, but the congregation as a whole seemed pretty gung ho about having the snakes around. Some of the more spiritually bold church members approached the front to receive a snake from Denny, held it briefly, blabbered a prayer, danced around a bit, then handed the snake off to someone else.

I was not unafraid. Being a new convert and a new Loving County resident, this was both my first snake day and the first time I’d ever seen a rattlesnake in the flesh. But my hesitance did not go unnoticed, and I was summoned to the front of the chapel amidst cheers (for me) and jeers (for the snakes). I put on my best “on fire for the Lord” face and held out my hands to receive the serpent. The big problem with fear is that your bodily response isn't exactly under conscious control. My hands were really sweaty, slicker than a greased up piglet. So, yeah, I dropped the rattlesnake.

As soon as it hit the floor, the rattler took off, eyes on the ankles in the first pew. A scramble ensued, congregants falling over each other to get out of the way, the Brewster Trio still strumming up a storm in the background. To my credit, I acted pretty quick, grabbing the snake before it got to anybody else. As my hand clamped down on the rattle, the little devil whipped around and planted its fangs in my upper arm.

The pain was immediate, like I’d been branded with a hot iron. The snake was still thrashing when I handed it back to Denny. I could feel my throat tightening up already. It’s hard to say if it was from the venom or the panic, because the symptoms are surprisingly alike, but I started dry heaving and the room spun like a two-stepping drunk. Through the ringing in my ears, I heard Denny say that God is a healer, and that faith is stronger than poison. Then my body, mostly numb now, hit the floor.

The last thing I remember before passing out was Jesus leaning over me, rolling up his sleeve and saying, “Don’t sweat it hombre, I got you.”

I haven’t seen Jesus since.

Three days later, after most of the symptoms had subsided, I was in the Mentone Cafe sipping a coffee that tasted like cigarettes when Denny Colsmith approached me. He and the elders had decided it was best if I didn’t come around the church anymore, because of (A) my apparent lack of faith, and (B) my clumsiness, and (C) he had the safety of the congregation to take into account and surely I’d understand.

Before leaving the Cafe, he said, “Thank God for Jesus, ya know.”

4/16/2021

The events of my first reinstatement into the Cowboy Church of Loving County, Texas are very boring, but I will tell them nonetheless.

It was a Saturday, and I was out on my little plot of land just off Highway 302, reclining under a tree that’s barely a tree, when I heard the clopping of approaching hooves. I’d been spending the day just watching tumbleweeds bounce and float and tumble across the cracked fields, having just recently discovered that tumbleweeds are real and not a stereotype of southwestern America invented by cartoons. I got to my feet and dusted myself off to greet the approaching stranger.

It was Mama G, astride a horse of epic proportions, leading another smaller animal behind her. Two horses, I thought. We had a conversation that went like this:

“Dos Equis,” I said.

“Huh?”

I pointed to the two horses. “Dos Equis.”

“Dos Equis means two X, not two horses.”

“Oh.”

“Watermelon?”

Mama G leaned forward in the saddle and stretched out her hand, holding a thick pie slice of the darkest, reddest watermelon I’d ever seen. It had a bite taken out of it, its blood glistening on Mama G’s chin. I politely declined. She spat a seed behind her.

As a reminder to the reader, Mama G is the dethroned matriarch of the Cowboy Church of Loving County, Texas. Being Reverend Willie’s widow, she is still accepted in the church, albeit coldly. She took another sopping bite of the watermelon and dropped it in the dirt at my feet. Her horse chomped into it immediately, its eyes peeling open wide like an addict.

She motioned for me to climb aboard the little horse at her rear, and when I protested that I didn’t know how to ride a horse, she said, “It ain’t more than sitting.” Two hours later, my ass would say otherwise. I could hear a million of my potential future children scream in anguish as their possible lives were winked out of existence by the hard leather saddle.

Mama G and I strode up to the front door of Denny Colsmith’s chic barndominium and dismounted. We hitched our steeds to the cedar post out front. The Colsmith’s home is noticeably fancier than the mean in Loving County. Apparently money is easy to come by when 40+ acres of oil-soaked prairie has been passed down for generations, which is the case with the Colsmiths. The problem for most residents of the county is that they don’t own land. The majority of land around is owned by oil outfits that operate out of Amarillo, or Houston, or God forbid Oklahoma City. Else, it is owned by Jack Blathers, the seemingly immortal tycoon of Loving County, whose name is spat from mouths like a bad sunflower seed. Mr. Blathers is hardly seen, or so I’ve heard, and he is rumored to have formed some sort of pact with the devil in exchange for oil and long life.

So anyway, Mama G waited outside while I knocked on the Colsmith’s door. I was promptly greeted by Denny’s youngest boy, Rhett, who gripped an ear of speckled corn like a baton in one hand and a little tin bucket of corn husks in the other. He wore a gray T-shirt that read, “You rocking with God?” and featured the silhouette of a hair-metal rocker with lightning bolts radiating out from his guitar. The boy was freckled all over. Face, neck, arms.

“We’s shucking corn,” Rhett said, leading me down the hallway toward the kitchen.

Every inch of the barndominium walls was jammed full of tacky cowboy and religious decor. “In this home we Laugh, Love, and Pray, and we don’t call 911.” That sort of thing.

When we entered the kitchen, Rhett announced, “That man is here,” and then took a seat at the little wooden table and resumed corn shucking.

Denny stood up from the table, setting down an unshucked ear of corn. He shook my hand and offered me a seat and some corn. I declined, my ass crying out in saddle sore anguish. I steeled myself and recited the phrase Mama G and I had rehearsed on our ride over:

“You can’t kick me out of the church just because a snake bit me.”

I’ll admit, I was nervous. While it didn’t mean all that much to me, I did want to be a part of the church. It was the only social organization of any kind in the county, and to be forced out was a sort of death sentence. I am also not a bold man, by nature. I am used to letting others have their way, but Mama G had explained how people round here don’t take kindly to wimps. I didn't want to be a wimp.

Denny nodded, pondering what I'd said. He rubbed an ear of corn absent-mindedly across his cheek. Finally, he announced that I could come back to the church if I wanted, and that he liked my style. I possessed, as he explained, a sort of X-factor the church may need. And that he regretted excommunicating me in the first place. I was back in. Yeehaw.

After Mama G and I had ridden back to my tree that’s barely a tree, and my thighs, back and tailbone had been thoroughly obliterated, she told me I could keep the little horse. Its name was Dingo Baby, and if I changed it the horse would mutiny and bite me before running off into the sunset. I considered not accepting the gift horse, because I don’t know a thing about animals, let alone an animal that is functionally equivalent to a motor vehicle. But I accepted it, resisting the urge to look in its mouth. If you’re in the Cowboy Church, you should probably have a horse.

As Mama G left, I wondered why she had come to see me at all? Perhaps we are both outsiders now, since Willie’s demise, and she feels some kinship. She’s a mysterious old lady, and if anyone has the X-factor, it’s Mama G. And I figure, if I have the X-factor too, that makes us Dos Equis.

4/23/2021

This chapter is not about my several excommunications and reinstatements from/into the Cowboy Church of Loving County, Texas. It’s about the true self and its infinite war with the false self; it’s about the best jello I’ve ever eaten; but most importantly, it’s about triumph over death.

I was on my morning ride with Dingo Baby, moseying along out by Highway 302 when I heard the hum of a small engine behind me. It was the female member of the Brewster trio, June, astride a sputtering four-wheeler. Strapped to the front bars was a pale pink mass I couldn’t quite recognize, and something similar was dragging behind the ATV. As she neared, I pulled Dingo Baby away from the road a bit, and June slowed and stopped in front of me.

The pale pink masses were pigs, dead ones. One was chained to the rear of the four-wheeler, leaving a miles long streak of black blood on the highway. She explained that two of the Colsmith pigs had gotten sick and passed on, and now the meat was tainted. June ran a little gelatin manufacturing outfit in a warehouse out back of the Brewster home, so she had offered to dispose of them for Denny.

She said, “If you like, I could take you for a ride and show you how the jelly gets cooked.”

I thought maybe this was some sort of hillbilly innuendo, but the void behind her eyes told me June didn’t possess such guile. She’s the kind of person who has little to no interior life at all, I could tell. I felt bad for thinking it, but I knew it was true. In a way, I envied her. She knew no other alternative but to be her true self, like a child.

I agreed to her proposition, and rode home to stable Dingo Baby before hopping on the back of June’s four-wheeler. Twice we had to stop and re-attach the dragging pig. The front mounted pig, whose name in life had been Declan, kept its dead eyes trained on me the whole ride, those big beautiful black orbs searching my soul, sifting and weighing its contents, and finding me lacking. I felt sick to my stomach, not because of the brutality of it all, nor the proximity to death, but because I had spent most of the previous evening filling the void inside me with hint-of-lime tortilla chips and chunky salsa. Declan smiled at me, omniscient and mocking.

When we pulled up in front of the corrugated steel warehouse at the Brewster property, Eric emerged from a sliding door and threw the first pig over his shoulder like a fireman. I assisted June in dragging the other one inside, where I discovered an impressive horrorscape of rusted, leaking pipes, foaming vats of mysterious foul concoctions, and hanging corpses; it was a maze of death and chemistry.

Eric was already busy skinning and boning Declan the pig (i.e. removing the skin from the meat and the meat from the bones). He tossed the meat into a wheelbarrow to be dumped and burned, and the bones ran through a mulcher before being dropped into a vat of boiling water. The skin got a similar treatment, though the skin couldn’t go through the mulcher because it would jam up the thing. The skin was chopped by hand into more manageable chunks, then was placed into the same vat as the bones. June showed me the “Spinner,” which was just a concrete mixer with a souped up motor in it. The Spinner was used to centrifuge the boiled and treated solution to separate the fats and the chunky leftovers from the good stuff: the collagenous liquid that would then be concentrated down into a purified gelatin powder during a long process of cooking, spinning, and filtering. The whole process seemed hyper-complicated and I wondered at the Brewsters’ ingenuity. Perhaps they were not such simple folk after all.

Before I left that day, I saw Eric pick up Declan’s decapitated head and shove it snout first into a ten gallon bucket of grayish plaster. I didn’t understand what this meant at the time.

The following Sunday the church had a Quaker-style Potluck Prayer, where the congregation would gather around a long table out in the rodeo and eat and pray for several hours. Mostly it was just eating, but occasionally someone would feel moved by the spirit to say a few words, which was generally a prayer of thanks for food, friends, family, etc. These were happy times in the Cowboy Church. There was no fear of God’s wrath or the Devil’s wrath when we were sharing a simple meal.

When I finally made it to the dessert table, I saw it: a pink jello pig’s head, a candied apple held delicately in its gelatinous mouth. Its lips curved into a smile. It really is as they say: and yet a trace of the true self exists in the false self. Declan had achieved a kind of jiggling immortality, and from the void he mocked me.

4/30/21

I was excommunicated again, but briefly, for allegedly making eyes at a stable boy. As a special treat one Sunday, the church called in a detail of rodeo performers from a few counties over: Clowns for Christ. They were known for stilted bull-runs and various equestrian stunts and gags, as well as the generic jumping out of barrels and slap-assing of bulls that you’d see at any rodeo. But they would also sing Jesus songs and provide a religious narrative throughout the performance, which culminated in one of the clowns being strapped to a cross and waylaid by a charging bull with “SIN” painted on it in big red letters. There was some confusion amongst the more astute members of the Cowboy Church concerning whether the Clowns for Christ were making fun of the Christian gospel or giving an honest to God effort here.

Anyway, one of the clowns was hauling ponies out of the trailer for the youngsters to ride, so I watched him, hoping to learn a thing or two about horse-handling for Dingo Baby. I noticed that this particular Clown for Christ had a distinctive cylindrical bulge in the front of his breeches, and he didn’t take too kindly to my noticing. The clown produced his unit, which turned out to be an antique Colt .44 that he kept jammed in his jeans, and leveled it at my face. He fired.

Luckily, I was already ducking in terror at the mere sight of the weapon, so the bullet whizzed straight overhead. Luckier, it didn’t connect with any human heads or bodies on its haphazard trajectory toward the bull of SIN, where it planted itself in the beast’s formidable rump. The bull of SIN did not die then, but later the sound of another Colt .44 shot rang out from the dark inner hold of a long steel trailer, signaling the departure of SIN from the earth.

As you might imagine, a kerfuffle ensued, the offending Clown for Christ was wrassled and wrangled, and he relayed how he had caught my wayward eye and believed me to be seducing him. Denny made a show of telling me off and banishing me into the abyss, and then the whole clown posse gathered their stilts, their animals, and their squeaky boots, and loaded up into the dusty trucks they had arrived in and squeaked away into the Sabbath night.

Once SIN was dead, and the Clowns for Christ had departed, Denny told me that I wasn’t really excommunicated. He just didn’t want to upset the clowns, because he didn’t know what they were capable of, violence-wise. But, he told me, that was strike number two. I could only assume The Cowboy Church of Loving County operated on a three strike system, but nothing they did seemed ordinary, so I’d have to wait and find out. What I knew for certain was that the eyes of Loving County, Texas were upon me.

5/14/2021

It was September, which meant it was cool enough to sit in the shade on a breezy day, but still hot enough to fry an egg on a bald man’s head, which old Stanley Milton liked to do as a gag. It was around that time that the Dans, Dan the Elder and his son, Dan the Younger, started rustling up trouble in the Cowboy Church of Loving County, Texas.

See, Denny Colsmith had never been officially ordained into a permanent pastoral position. He was chosen as the interim pastor because of some Godly qualities he possesses, which we’ll get into later, but the church was hesitant to establish permanent leadership after the Reverend Willie diddling debacle.

Dan the Elder and Dan the Younger would never have called it this themselves, but they led a Luddite revolution within the church, hoping to outlaw all written texts and the act of reading itself. The church would return to an entirely oral tradition. Some would claim that it was Dan the Younger’s illiteracy that spawned the movement, but the Dans insisted that the Devil could twist words written by man, while the Holy Spirit would speak through the mouths of God’s people. As evidence, they presented: (1) a communal church Bible in which the word “boobs” had been scrawled on several pages of Nehemiah; (2) a misprinting of a hymn, “There’s a Hill, Lone and Gay,” obviously the work of the Devil; (3) that the Apostles’ Creed says “I believe in... the holy catholic church,” which no one around here does. Of course, someone with some sense could have debunked this quote unquote evidence, but alas, this is Loving County, and I wasn’t about to stick my neck out, not with two strikes on me already.

I’ll admit, I did feel targeted by the policy changes. I had been called by some “a man of letters,” and now suddenly letters were a tool of the devil. Suspicious, but I also figured that what I did in my spare time was no business of the church, and so long as I didn’t rock the boat I could avoid further trouble. This was incorrect.

I had a lot of time on my hands those days, so I had been digging up old books and re-reading them to pass the hours, hoping to access some spark of myself that I had left behind in those pages. One day in the midst of the Dans’ Luddite revolution, when it was cloudy enough to walk without sizzling, I took a hike and found myself camped under a mesquite tree, reading Hank the Cowdog: The Case of the Deadly Ha-Ha Game. Unfortunately, Dan the Younger also found me camped under that mesquite tree, reading Hank the Cowdog. I don’t know how he found me, but the jig was up.

As it turns out, my crime was twofold. I was reading, which was outlawed under the new management. Secondly, animals are not supposed to talk, which as you may know is a major part of the Hank the Cowdog children’s series. In general, in Loving County, talking animals are shot on sight, unless the talking animal is an eagle, owl or some other revered bird. They are well-known sources of wisdom out on the range. In fact, Denny Colsmith was baptised by an eagle in the dirty creek behind his house as a child. The patriotic beast swooped down and picked little Denny up by the shirt, flew him over to the creek and held him underwater for a good minute before letting him up. This sacrament was witnessed by Reverend Willie and Denny’s childhood horse, Moses, both of whom confirmed Denny’s story before the congregation. Horses with Christian names also get a talking pass.

Anyway, I was caught. Dan the Younger, a grinning paperclip of a man, said something about strike three and I better start running, which I didn’t quite catch because I was already high-tailing across the summer-cracked plains. There were a few nearby oil wells that I thought I might could get lost in and hide out until dark, but I would have to cross a lot of open space to get there. I risked a look back and sure enough, Dan was chasing after me with a long-barreled shotgun, though where he’d been hiding it I don’t know. As I ran, it felt like one of those dreams where you’re running and can’t get anywhere. At times the ground seemed to shift under me, squishing and wobbling, grabbing at my feet. My knees shook like I was running on a waterbed. The cloud cover had dissipated and I could feel my skin start to steam. Suddenly, the earth dropped out from under me, sending me sprawling at the base of a giant yucca, which I clung to for dear life. I felt a rumble in the dirt below me, heard a noise like that giant rolling boulder from Indiana Jones, and spun around to see Dan the Younger sliding face first into a twenty foot sinkhole.

I got up, brushed myself off and made my escape. Dan the Younger didn’t die in the sinkhole that day. Some of the fellas from the church went and dragged him out, and mostly in one piece. When the earth opens up to swallow someone, people in Loving County tend to take that as a sign from God. Thus, the reign of the Dans was at an end, and my position in the church was somewhat solidified. Things went back to normal for a while, as normal as things can be around here. Due to my several brushes with death, a common prayer in the church for a time was for a continued hedge of protection around me. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I figured I needed all the help I could get.

5/21/2021

The first European to cross the Pecos River into what is now called Loving County was a 16th century Spanish Explorer named Antonio de Espejo. Legend has it, he climbed out of the Pecos, looked around at the oppressive nothingness, announced to his entourage that this was the devil’s land, and then hocked up a gob of dehydrated spit that evaporated before it hit the dirt. Centuries later, a former railroad man named John Pope attempted to construct a network of artesian water wells in the Loving County area. This venture failed, as you might have guessed. It wasn’t until the oil boom of the early twentieth century that Loving County really came into its own. The land, like its citizens, has a complicated history, rich and speckled like a quail’s egg.

Loving County has only one town: Mentone. That town has one gas station, one café, one post office, a courthouse and schoolhouse, both of which are mostly obsolete at this point. It has no bank, no grocery store, no theater, no doctor, not even a cemetery. But it has two churches.

This, as you might imagine, is a point of contention between the County’s few citizens. The little Baptist church is a cute white clapboard affair near the center of town, and has been around so long no one can remember who built it or when. Nearly two miles out of town, at the frontmost corner of Mama G’s property, is the Cowboy Church, constructed of scrap wood and sheets of corrugated steel. The Cowboy Church may be newer, less aesthetically pleasing, etc., but its congregation is larger and significantly more rabid. Theologically, the Baptists and the Cowboys are nearly indistinguishable, but don’t try to tell them that. The real difference between a cowboy church and any other church, no matter the denomination, is in the presentation. Cowboy services are often held outdoors if weather permits, with congregants seated on horseback, in the beds of dirty trucks, or on the rodeo’s fence-rail. Cowboy hats all around.

Anyone in Loving County who is not a member of either church is considered one of the ‘unwashed masses,’ which refers to the state of their souls and their bodies.

Twice a year, the Baptist and Cowboy churches square off in a friendly softball game, Loving County style. The exhibition is held in Mama G’s rodeo, and historically takes a full day, because of the pigs. See, Loving County style is basically normal softball, only instead of stationary bases for first through third, they pour enough water out there to make mud pits where the bases should go, then stick a pig in each one. The trick here is, despite being good natured and sometimes even overly friendly, a pig will still tend to take flight when a two hundred pound man comes screeching into its mud pit at full tilt. It’s a real hoot, is the general consensus.

Since this was my first game, I elected to sit out and watch. I posted up on the rodeo fence behind what was intended to be third base, but which ended up just an empty patch of mud after the second inning. Between the second and third innings, the pigs mysteriously congregated in the second base mud pit, to which the Baptists cried foul. They claimed that old Stanley Milton had lured the pigs out there with an offer of food, but no evidence could be produced, as the pigs had already eaten it.

The cowboys shrugged and said the game must go on, and that it was against the rules for a player to physically drag a pig to another part of the field, and so they had to stay put until the pigs decided to disperse of their own volition. So they played ball, with first, second and third base now huddled in the mud together in the middle of the field.

The Baptists went to bat, with Dan the Elder pitching for the Cowboys. The first batter knocked the ball into right field, but was tripped as he passed the pitcher’s mound on his way to first base, and at that point the game devolved into a lot of shoving, a little bit of slapping, and a good deal of rolling in the dirt. Only the pigs stayed out of the scuffle.

While I watched, amused, I felt a pair of dry lips snuffle at the back of my neck, followed by a gust of hot breath. I swiveled, coming face to face with Mama G’s old horse, whose name I’d forgotten. Mama G leered at me from atop the massive beast, holding a watermelon like a football under her arm. Mama G did not look healthy, and I told her as much. Her skin had taken on a gray pallor, and her wrinkled cheeks had sunken in, hugging her skull.

She nodded and said she knew she looked like death. She was dying.

She took a barehanded scoop out of the melon and slurped it down, told me to come see her at her house when I got free, but preferably soon.

Before I had the chance to respond, a mud-covered Baptist was yanking me off the fence by my shirt collar and dragging me through the dirt. When you find yourself stuffed facedown in the soft dirt of a rodeo, you might come to find that a lot of that dirt is actually not dirt at all, and that you should avoid breathing in or swallowing any of the suspiciously pungent and hay-filled dirt you might have gotten in your mouth.

5/28/2021

At night in Loving County, a whole universe of sound opens up: the yippings of coyotes, the howls of coyote packs, the panting of coyotes searching for water, distant gunshots that bother no one but me, sometimes the scrabbling of coyote claws against your door. It’s mostly a coyote noise-scape. But one night, not long after the piggy softball game turned brawl, I awoke to a scream. It was one of those long dramatic screams from deep in the chest that require real lung power, like maybe the screamer was an Olympic swimmer or a balloon artist. The scream was not one of physical pain either, as of a stubbed toe or a coyote attack, but rather an anguished cry of the soul. And it didn’t stop. I waited for a good five minutes, hoping this midnight crier would just up and cut it out. When the screaming didn’t quit, or even pause for breath, I figured I should probably go check it out.

I could tell the scream was a ways off, coming from the direction of town, which was also the direction of the church, so I started walking that way. As I followed the scream, it never once wavered. It just kept right on howling, getting louder as I drew near. I should mention that my humble abode is just over a mile from the Cowboy Church. Loving County can be stunning at night, visually speaking. It was a cloudless night and the stars lit up my path in a ghostly hue. If there hadn’t been somebody’s soulscream actively unscrewing my mind’s few remaining screws, I would have stopped to admire the sky.

Before I quite reached the church, I saw Mama G in the distance, approaching the church from the direction of her house. She was atop her horse, bareback, hunched over the beast’s meaty neck. It moved slowly, barely a walk, nearing the backside of the ramshackle chapel. I called out to her through the noise, and as I watched, Mama G slumped forward, her weak hands losing grip on the horse’s mane, and fell in a pitiful heap at the edge of the watermelon patch that was also her late husband’s unmarked burial mound.

I ran to her side, the soulscream growing louder with each step. It seemed to bypass my ears entirely, a psychic rather than sonic phenomenon, clutching at the cage of my sanity and shaking with hellacious force.

I prodded her shoulder, and in response she simply pointed toward the melon patch. I looked, and by starlight I saw one massive watermelon bedded down in a clump of leafy, coiled vines. It was overripe, its meat grown too fast for its skin. The pale, mottled green skin had split like a hotdog, forming a bloody red mouth, which drooled, juice dripping and darkening the soil underneath.

I clutched my head, the ungodly voice scraping against every lobe of my brain, and I stumbled toward the fruit. My vision tunneled, my knees shook, my head seemed to expand and contract like that plastic rainbow ball everyone had in the 2000s, but I knelt in the dirt and searched blindly for the melon's stem. I found it.

Snap! Then, silence.

My head righted itself, vision returned, and it seemed that perhaps nothing had happened at all. The scream was just a memory, maybe a dream. I picked up the watermelon and hefted it onto my shoulder. It was the size of a pig or a fat child. I helped Mama G to her porch and into a creaky rocking chair. She looked even weaker than last I'd seen. Her eyes were small and dim, nearly hidden behind the loose skin of her brow. She could have been a thousand years old.

She asked me to help her eat, pointing to the watermelon. I voiced my confusion at her desire to eat a screaming melon, but she waved away my protest. I set the fruit in her lap, and Mama G produced a large pewter spoon from the pocket of her jeans. She dug an entry point in the thing’s apparent mouth and began scooping watermelon meat into her own tiny wrinkled mouth.

I asked her what was going on with her, and with the melons, and with Loving County in general. She stared at me for a few seconds, her head bobbing like a dry leaf in a breeze, threatening to snap at any moment. Then she asked me to write her will.

I reminded her that I am not a lawyer, but she snapped, “You know how to draw letters, don’t ya?”

That I could not deny, so I agreed.

She said, “When I croak, I don’t need a casket. Just drop me in a hole and pour some charcoal on me to keep the critters off. My horse should be set free. Unsaddle her and slap her on the butt, she’ll go. My house, my guns, and my collection of doilies, those go to my great niece in San Antonio. I want to attend my funeral. We’ll do it two days on, so I can organize my effects, and then afterwards I’ll die.”

She paused to spit a watermelon seed.

“And the church... it has to burn.”

6/11/2021

A land of oil and fire, cattle and coyotes, screaming melons and diddling reverends, miracles and curses, Loving County has always been a territory at war.

It is the only county in Texas to be incorporated twice. In 1893, a canal company out of Denver mysteriously produced the 150 signatures required to separate Loving County from Reeves, despite the area only having 3 reported residents in the 1890 census. Loving county was thus incorporated, though attempts to settle the area and construct canals were thwarted that year due to both flooding and drought, oddly enough.

In 1894, investigators from the New York firm of W.H. Abrams made the trek to Loving County to look into the suspicious incorporation petition of 1893. Upon arrival, they found only 3 residents in Mentone, Loving County’s singular town. The proprietors of the failed canal project had already skedaddled back to Denver, taking with them all evidence of the illegal county organization. The county government was in chaos, and by 1897, all remaining county officials had also skedaddled and Loving County was thus re-adjoined to Reeves.

The population waxed and waned through the beginning of the 20th century due to budding irrigation projects that were all promptly squashed by drought. Then, in 1921, the Toyah-Bell Oil company began drilling in Loving County, which would finally put Loving County on the map. By 1930, the population had grown to nearly 200, and productive oil wells had cropped up all across the area. Hell, who needs water when you’ve got oil?

In 1931, the county was reorganized, this time legitimately. The name Loving was passed down from a famed rancher, Oliver Loving, who was mortally wounded in a shootout with Comanches along the Pecos River back in the 1800s. Story goes: he was able to crawl for miles with his arms full of lead and leaking blood, only later dying of gangrene. No one talks about his life, but his death is legendary.

Loving County is, surprisingly, the first Texan county to elect a female sheriff. Edna Reed Clayton DeWees was first appointed in 1945, then elected and served for just two years. She never carried a gun, and arrested only two people during her post. She was more adept at dealing with varmint problems, her crowning achievement being the expulsion of a javelina infestation from the county’s school playground. The school would shut down in 1972, sending it’s two students to Winkler county.

Politics have always been a point of contention among the residents of Loving County, and elections over the years have been ripe with fraud. With a population under 100, if a few ballots were to somehow go missing it could really affect the outcome of an election. Or, for instance, when there are only 71 reported residents and 223 people register to vote, that could raise some eyebrows.

More recently, with the advent of the Cowboy Church, Loving County has turned its gaze from politics to religion, with mixed results. Reverend Willie's death was officially ruled “an act of divine justice.”

On one of my first nights in Loving County, some residents had gathered outside the café to stare at the full moon over Mentone, which some say can actually lift you off the ground because there’s not enough water around to tug on, so it’ll do its tide thing on you instead. It sounds crazy, but I swear I felt lighter on my feet that night than I ever have.

Loving has historically been one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, once boasting that not a single Loving County household lived below the poverty line. This is no longer true. In fact, most of the land is now owned by people who don’t even live in Loving County.

Many Texans consider Loving a ghost county. Its residents would disagree. I’m not so sure.

6/18/2021