Wade Colter walked behind the bucking chutes, past the stock contractors and the boys rosining their gloves, to the wall of faded photographs where the sun slanted in through the rafters. He went to the fourth one from the left. He wiped the dust from the glass with his sleeve and read the typed card beneath it aloud. “Elmer Rutledge. World Champion Saddle Bronc Rider. Cheyenne, nineteen sixty eight.” The arena, which had been full of the sound of boots and cattle, went still. I am Elmer Rutledge, eighty years old, and I stood by the fence in my pressed Wranglers and my good hat, with a heavy silver buckle that had been rubbed smooth by fifty years of my own thumb.
In 1968, I was twenty two years old and as skinny as a fence rail, and I climbed on a horse named Dynamite at the Cheyenne Frontier Days, in front of eleven thousand people, and stayed on for eight seconds that felt like eight years. I won the world title that afternoon. I rode for twelve more years, broke my back twice, and in 1980 I hung up the saddle and went to work for a feed store. The buckle was given to me by the fellows in the stands, who passed a hat. I wear it every Saturday.
An old stock contractor named Dub Hanley, who had been leaning on the rail with a toothpick in his mouth, pushed off the fence. “Elmer,” he said, in a voice like gravel in a bucket. “I was holding the flank strap on Dynamite in Cheyenne. I would know that buckle in the dark.” The young cowboys behind the chutes had stopped what they were doing and taken off their hats. A pretty barrel racer put her hand to her chest. A boy no older than fifteen leaned out of the gate, wide eyed, and whispered, “Is that the real Elmer Rutledge?”
A heavy silver buckle on a worn belt gave one retired feed store clerk a night at the chutes to bring a young bronc rider back to the dust in Fort Worth.
I gave my terms with a slow grin that I had not used in years. “Wade, I am not going to be sore at you. You are a good hand, and you thought an old man had bought a buckle at a pawn shop. I would only ask that you saddle up a horse for me. Not a bronc. A good gentle gelding. I would like to ride once around this arena before the show starts, in front of the grandstand, and I would like you to open the gate for me. That is all I want.”
Colter took off his hat and held it against his chest with both hands. His voice came out rough. “Mr. Rutledge, I have been riding broncs for six years,” he said. “I have a poster of you on my bunkhouse wall. I read about you in a library book when I was twelve.” He shook his head slowly. “I stood here and told you that no cowboy over seventy gets a free seat behind the chutes. I told you that you were bothering the riders.” He looked at the dirt floor. “I would give back every dollar I ever won to take it back.”
But the humiliation was too raw for him to bear standing still. Colter, in a flash of panic, reached out and snatched the silver buckle from my belt, then wheeled and ran for the stock office at the end of the alley, shouting that he had to check the serial number. He took five strides. Dub Hanley swung out of the rail and filled the alleyway with his long frame. Two cowboys with their hats in their hands stepped across behind him, and the barrel racer planted her horse broadside in the gap, and the boy of fifteen scrambled onto the fence.
Colter slid to a stop in the dust with the buckle in his fist and every eye in the chute area on him. Nobody spoke for a long moment, and then Dub Hanley took the toothpick out of his mouth. “Son,” he said, softly, “that belongs to the best rider I ever saw. Put it back where you found it.” Colter looked at the silver. Slowly he walked back to me, got down on one knee in the arena dirt, and threaded the buckle back onto my belt with his own two hands, and then he stood up and tipped his hat.
The consequences were handled as cowboys handle everything, with a few quiet words and a good horse. That night, Colter saddled a sorrel gelding named Biscuit and held the gate. I rode one slow lap around the arena, in the lights, with my hat in my hand, while the grandstand stood and the announcer read the card from the wall. Colter took the card down afterward, framed it in better glass, and hung it at the entrance. He asked me to coach the young riders on Thursday nights, and I said I would.
In the name of my wife Loretta, who passed in 2014, I started the Loretta Rutledge Fund. It pays for medical bills and rodeo school tuition for injured and young riders, in Tarrant, Parker and Johnson counties. In the first year we paid the hospital bills of nine injured cowboys and sent twenty two kids to rodeo school. One was a sixteen year old girl from Weatherford who had lost her father in a ranch accident, and who rode her first bronc to the whistle and cried into the horse neck.
On a Saturday night in October, I leaned on the fence behind the chutes, in my good hat and the silver buckle, and watched the boys get ready. Colter came and stood beside me with his glove in his hand. “Mr. Rutledge,” he said, “I draw a rank horse tonight. Any advice?” I thought about it for a moment. “Keep your chin down, son,” I said. “Spur him from the point of the shoulder. And when the whistle blows, remember who is watching.” He grinned, nodded, and climbed over the rail into the chute, and I took off my hat.