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Outside Magazine, August 2004
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El Último Vaquero Habla Español (The Last Cowboy Speaks Spanish)

By Nick Reding


A FEW MONTHS LATER, RENÉ and Nicanor came down out of the Sawtooths, crossed the prairie, and landed back at Faulkner's place. They spent Christmas 1999 and New Year's in the California alfalfa fields for the ewes' birthing season. By Easter they were back in the mountains, this time working alone in separate camps. But not before René met Kellye Whiteman.

"I was the first gringa he saw," Kellye told me, laughing as she recalled the day they met in Gooding's farm co-op, where Kellye was picking up a cup of coffee on her way to work at the Diamond M Ranch, where she branded cows. "Even with that beard, he looked like a scared little boy." The attraction was immediate, however, and a week later, when they met again at the Lincoln Inn, a steak house and bar where Kellye used to sing karaoke, they spent the night in her trailer on Nebraska Street.

Kellye was 38 at the time—René was 22—with blue eyes and bright blond hair. She was tall, five foot nine to René's five-six, and her pale skin was interrupted from right knee to hip by tattooed tiger stripes. Originally from Granseville, Idaho, Kellye had moved to Gooding in 1993 after stints in Oregon and Alaska, so that her daughter, Kelsey, could attend the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind. (Kelsey was 13 and in the second grade; she was born with cerebral palsy and, as an infant, had suffered seizures that left her deaf and mute.) Kellye's son, Bryce, was 17; she'd taken him out of high school the previous year to homeschool him after catching him smoking pot. Kellye had called the police, and Bryce had been busted for possession of marijuana paraphernalia with the intent to use, an offense for which he was on probation for nine months.
Men like René and Nicanor take a huge gamble to come to the U.S. And when their suffering ends in disappointment, there are only two options: Go home or keep gambling. René had come too far to go home.

To put Kellye and René's age difference in perspective, consider that René's mother is only 19 months older than Kellye, a fact that didn't bother René during a sporadic, intense courtship that lasted the entire nine months he spent back in the Sawtooths. Whenever it looked like his herding route would take him close to a logging road, Kellye and Kelsey would drive out, and the three of them would ride René's horses and hike to gather the rams. Kelsey taught René some sign language, and Kellye taught him some English. Both Kellye and René describe those months as some of the best of their lives.

For René, there was something else: One day, Kellye gave him an engraved silver pocket watch. It was the first thing anyone had ever given him. Whenever René thought about Kellye's kindness, it made him cry. He took it as a sign that the world he'd been so unprepared for had suddenly given him a larger gift: a woman he loved, an answer to the crushing loneliness, and (just maybe) a way out of his contract. In July 2001, 15 months after they met, René voided his deal with Western Range and married Kellye, an occasion she commemorated with a tattoo above her heart of a chile in a sombrero and sunglasses. The newlyweds set up house in her trailer. René, it seemed, had finally made it to America.


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