Review by Ed Quillen
Rural Life – August 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Life with Pickle – Collected stories that first appeared in The Fence Post
by J.C. Mattingly
Published in 2001 by Mirage Publishing Co.
ISBN 0971043000
WHEN I DON’T LIKE A BOOK, it’s easy to find a vocabulary to express my displeasure. It’s poorly organized, or the writing is sloppy, or the research was wretched, or the characters are not credible — you get the idea.
But when I like a book, the right words are hard to find, and that’s the case here. After I write “wonderful,” “insightful,” and “humorous,” I can’t find much more to say. But I’ll try.
Pickle is the nickname given by the foreman to one Robert E. Dill, the protagonist of these tales. Fresh from Los Angeles and green as a cucumber, he hired on at a Colorado mountain ranch, and during the course of the 32 chapters in this short book, he turns into a pretty good hand.
San Luis Valley writer and rancher John Mattingly originally wrote these, about a decade ago, as monthly columns for The Fence Post (a magazine based in Windsor, Colo., whose motto is “Celebrating our Rural Lifestyle.”)
Mattingly has a great ear for dialogue — the badinage among the ranch hands never hits a false note, even though he does make that dialect of Blue-Collar English fit for family consumption. He makes animals — dogs, cows, birds, porcupines — into characters without sentimentalizing or anthropomorphizing. He even does that with hay-balers and pickups and other machinery, reflecting the fact that those cussed devices somehow do develop personalities.
But it’s the easy-going wit, along with Mattingly’s knowledge of cow-country ways, that makes this shine. The rancher goes by BT; his real name is Bertrand Shepherd, which he won’t use because he doesn’t want anyone to know he had an ancestor who once kept sheep. There’s Larry D., who “hated to cover any distance between any two points without either a horse or a pickup.”
There’s a half-hour errand in town that takes all day, and a rush trip to Kansas because that’s the closest place where there’s a used transmission for the tractor. Pickle meets Shalayla, who keeps a few goats, and romance ensues. In short, life’s ups and downs are delivered with good humor — and with so many sparkling word-play gems that I started getting jealous.
Indeed, the only way to give this book its due is to let it speak for itself, and once I reached that conclusion, I called John Mattingly and got permission to reprint a chapter, which appears below.
