Edwina McCauley Manning

The Completed Circle

Edwina McCauley Manning

The other Manning called home Monday, April 30, 2012

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            I knew Wina before I knew Edwina McCauley Manning.

First surviving child of Mary Effie Wilmeth McCauley and Halpin McCauley, Wina was the elder of the first cousins of my life. Never loud, never calling attention to herself, Wina was one of my favorites. 

The fun memories were perhaps the first … the house at the mouth of the Mangus, the family gatherings, the ties to Grandma and Grandpa, and that little guttural laugh that was hers.

In retrospect, she got the laugh with its mannerism from Uncle Hap. I think she was most like him of the kids. The nearest thing I ever heard that even resembled an expletive from her was how she would start a sentence if she disagreed or had a strong opinion about something.

“Well, now I’ll tell you what …” she would say. The last times I saw her I would be smiling at her waiting for the outpouring of logic that would come next. Then she would laugh.

Dick

Wina married Dick Manning at the little white Presbyterian Church at Cliff, New Mexico. It was the same little church we all knew as kids. It was where we went to witness important events in our lives.

            We celebrated baptism and weddings and gathered for funerals. By the time the latter accelerated, though, Dick and Wina, Uncle Hap and Aunt Mary, and most of that McCauley clan had dispersed to Deming and elsewhere. The whole relationship with them would never be quite the same except when we were with Grandpa and Grandma. They kept us together.

            Dick was Dick. He became an outright cult hero to a wide swath of defenders of the American West. People either loved Dick or they didn’t.

            Dick never really worked for anybody but himself. He was so independent I think he’d change positions in an argument just to keep it provocative, keep it insightful, and to extract logic that nobody quite understood.

He gravitated to the other dynamic elder male in the clan, my uncle, Howard Wilmeth. It was he who formed a similar bookend of cult hero worship among his own peers. Together, they formed a huge block of attention, and the intrigue and the esoteric ramblings that emanated were profound.

It was during those mighty discussions they either enjoined allegiance or antagonism. It remains that way to this day.

            Dick was Dick and … Wina was always there.

            By the time we gathered to honor Dick at his funeral, the little white Presbyterian Church had moved up on the point just south and west from its original site. If attendance didn’t match the biggest of recent year services, the states of vehicle origin did. Plates from nearly every western state and even a Canuck from the wild rose country had responded to the loss of a revered one of their own.

            “Where are all these people from?” the locals asked. “And, who are they?”

            ‘They’ had come from across the sage brush battlegrounds to honor Dick. They had come with ties, and wild rags, and different styles of hats that were all removed to reveal white foreheads …Westerners!

Representing him … representing both of them was Wina. She sat there stoic and clear eyed while other … grown men …were overcome with emotion.

            Her Place

            In time, Wina may well become more mysterious than Dick to those who thought they knew them best. There are many stories yet to be concluded.

Their life had so many twists and turns that it took them both to hold it together. Dick could not have done it alone. Wina may have tried.

            Wina was the flex that disallowed that life to fly apart like a coiled spring. When they had debt fighting legal battles, she hunkered down and made it work. When times were good, she remained level headed and staunchly conservative and thrifty.

It was never about her, but it could be described as always about them.

I have memories that could suggest the grander story, but two stories stand as markers of the real Wina. The first was when we still hunted as a family.

For years, we would gather at the mouth of the Mangus. Long before sunup the house would be lit up and voices could be heard inside.  Hap would be holding court around the breakfast table and discussions would spill out of the kitchen in every direction.

Often, we would draw to assign hunters to different vehicles.  Hap would normally describe where the best ‘hunts’ could be expected. That logic would come from where he had seen a deer yesterday or where he had killed one 40 years ago.

We would then climb aboard and scatter to those great places that exist so vividly in memory. I was lucky when I was teamed with Wina.

Some time in the middle ‘60s she had come into the possession of a brand new Winchester Model 100 .308. She was so proud of that rifle. We were all infatuated with it. There she would be without any gear to speak of, but she’d be holding that neat little rifle.

On one of those hunts, Wina’s character was clearly revealed. We crossed the river at the mouth of Road Canyon and walked from there. We had a lunch, but, as usual, we never took water. We would drink if we found water. If we didn’t … we didn’t.

All morning we hunted. We saw deer, but nobody got a shot. We ate lunch on a slope in the Moonhull drainage just over the saddle from the head of Cherokee. Wina was asked how she was doing.

“Do you think you are up to rimming out and hunting on west before we turn back?”

“Sure,” was the short answer.

            As we spread out, I watched her climb out through a rocky chute as tough as anything anybody faced. Shortly, she and I both heard rocks rolling and the sound of a deer leaving. The deer, a buck, ran to a point and looked directly back at her.

I know she saw the deer, but she never raised her rifle. When the deer finally left, she watched its departure, and, then, continued her methodical climb up the steep chute. Nothing was ever said, but, she had no intention of killing that deer.

In fact, I don’t think I ever heard that rifle discharged. But, if you wanted to go hunt a deer … hunt it in the toughest of all conditions … there Wina would be holding her little .308. I wonder now if the gun was even loaded. She hunted … just to hunt.

The other memory is similar. Kathy and I had come home from California, and, for reasons I don’t remember, we diverted from Springerville and drove east on 60. We stopped in Quemado to eat. We walked into one of Quemado’s finest and there sat Dick and Wina.

“Well, lookee’ here,” was our remark. “What are you guys doing?”

“Waiting for you!” was Dick’s counter. “Where the heck have you been?”

After greetings, we sat down and had the best visit. All four of us were at good places in our lives.

“Seriously, though, why are you in Quemado?” I asked.

“We’re hauling gold,” Wina responded. “It’s right here.”

With that, she disappeared from sight under the table and came back up straining holding the biggest gold ingot you could imagine. She dumped it with a thud in the middle of the table.

“Yea, I’d say …”

Kathy and I looked around to see who might be watching this crazy scene playing out at the corner table. Wina and Dick were nonchalant.

It turned out they were making ‘a run’ to Canada to sell the gold they had recovered, refined, and poured at their mine in Mogollon.

“They like the purity of our gold,” Dick explained about the buyer. “They always give us the best price.”

“What do you want to eat,” he continued as unpretentious as if the gold had been salt and pepper shakers. “Let’s order!”

We ate. We laughed and we talked, and hugged when we parted.

Some things are planned … other things just happen.

And, now

Granddaughter, daughter, sister, wife, mother, and … on now to great grandmother, Edwina Manning has run the race … fought the good fight … and is cherished in our memory.

Dick had the spotlight … Wina had Dick … and Dirk … and Kim … and the admiration of all who knew her. This circle has concluded, and that is comforting and reassuring.

Kim, Dirk … Darlene, Darrell, all the family … God bless you.

And, to Wina from your primos …adios, prima nuestra … gracias por todos los recuerdos … nos veremas pronto …”

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “Well, now I’ll tell you what … we’ll miss her.”

THE WESTERNER SEZ...I missed the funeral because of a Congressional Forum on the proposal to lock up 600,000 acres around Dona Ana Co. in National Monuments.  This environmental junk is costing me way too much.