Texas, 1866. The war is over. Holding on to what's left will take everything they have.
Gerry and Robert Croft were fifteen when their father moved them across the Rio Grande to wait out a war that would have used them up and given back nothing. Now they're nineteen, their father is buried in Mexican ground, and they've ridden three hundred hard miles home to the ranch he built with his own hands out of the caprock country. What they find is a place coming apart at the edges — fences down, the herd thinned by four years of drift and theft, and the bones of butchered cattle bleaching in the arroyos. The land their father bled for is being used by men who never asked: hungry rustlers in the breaks, Comancheros trading guns and stolen stock north to the Comanche camps, and a band of Confederate renegades who decided the surrender was for other men.
The brothers have a few things in their favor. A foreman who worked for their father before they were born. A one-eyed rider, a Tonkawa tracker who moves through the breaks like weather, and a hard old neighbor who might be an ally if the Crofts can read him right. What they don't have is time, money, or men enough — and the trouble only gathers as the dry summer wears on toward a winter the old-timers say will be the worst in thirty years.
Then a broken-down wagon appears on the south road. Tom McAllister is a builder bound for California with his family and his pride, and the Crofts need hands more than the McAllisters need to keep moving. They stay — to mend the wagon, then to mend fences, then for a season, then for reasons that have less to do with wages. Among them is McAllister's eldest daughter, Mary: seventeen, direct, unhurried, the kind of person who says exactly what she sees and listens like it costs her something. What grows between her and Gerry over a long Texas year is built the way the ranch is built — slowly, deliberately, one small completed act at a time — and when the winter finally breaks, there is a question waiting to be asked that has been answered since January.
Big Bob's Boys is a spare, clear-eyed Western about brothers and inheritance, about the men who would take a thing and the men who hold it, and about a country that is old and indifferent and asks of everyone exactly what it has always asked — which is everything they have.
Genre: Western
Gerry and Robert Croft were fifteen when their father moved them across the Rio Grande to wait out a war that would have used them up and given back nothing. Now they're nineteen, their father is buried in Mexican ground, and they've ridden three hundred hard miles home to the ranch he built with his own hands out of the caprock country. What they find is a place coming apart at the edges — fences down, the herd thinned by four years of drift and theft, and the bones of butchered cattle bleaching in the arroyos. The land their father bled for is being used by men who never asked: hungry rustlers in the breaks, Comancheros trading guns and stolen stock north to the Comanche camps, and a band of Confederate renegades who decided the surrender was for other men.
The brothers have a few things in their favor. A foreman who worked for their father before they were born. A one-eyed rider, a Tonkawa tracker who moves through the breaks like weather, and a hard old neighbor who might be an ally if the Crofts can read him right. What they don't have is time, money, or men enough — and the trouble only gathers as the dry summer wears on toward a winter the old-timers say will be the worst in thirty years.
Then a broken-down wagon appears on the south road. Tom McAllister is a builder bound for California with his family and his pride, and the Crofts need hands more than the McAllisters need to keep moving. They stay — to mend the wagon, then to mend fences, then for a season, then for reasons that have less to do with wages. Among them is McAllister's eldest daughter, Mary: seventeen, direct, unhurried, the kind of person who says exactly what she sees and listens like it costs her something. What grows between her and Gerry over a long Texas year is built the way the ranch is built — slowly, deliberately, one small completed act at a time — and when the winter finally breaks, there is a question waiting to be asked that has been answered since January.
Big Bob's Boys is a spare, clear-eyed Western about brothers and inheritance, about the men who would take a thing and the men who hold it, and about a country that is old and indifferent and asks of everyone exactly what it has always asked — which is everything they have.
Genre: Western
Used availability for Perry Comer's Big Bob's Boys