SELDOM HEARD, by Dian Malouf

Dallas designer, artist, and author Dian Malouf writes about South Texas in the precise and lively manner of a brush country quail searching for water in a parched terrain.  Instinctively, shrewdly and with unerring accuracy.  Seldom Heard is the second in her highly enjoyable collection of interviews with South Texas ranchers (Cattle Kings of Texas, her first, was published in 1991). This book is a rewarding and informative work about a rare group of inimitable characters who are vanishing from view just as surely as the Native American Lipan, Spanish conquistadors, and Mexican vaqueros disappeared many years ago.

Dian Leatherberry Malouf is a true daughter of the Texas brush country.  Born and raised in Hebbronville, Malouf’s collection of 25 or so interviews with ranchers, both male and female, Hispanic and Anglo, mostly all descendants of pioneer “cow people,” is at times hilarious, touching, sad, frightening, wistful, and quite often, downright inspiring.  With names familiar to any south Texas native—Armstrong, Bruni, Killam, East, Palacios, Regan, Benevides—these tales of doggedness (and occasional “cussedness”) are national treasures. Malouf is to be lauded for capturing the stories of “ranchers, ranchos, and rumors” that are as pungent and gratifying as a gulp of brackish windmill water under a hot, August sun.

For the sake of disclosure, and to my pleasant surprise, I discovered that my uncle, Tom Martin of La Campana Ranch, has his own chapter in Dian’s book.  I regret that she was not able to interview Tom’s father, Thomas Jefferson Martin (my maternal grandfather), as well. Here was a south Texas cowman as proficient, tough, and eccentric as any of those Rolls Royce ranch hunting cars Dian writes so entertainingly about in SELDOM HEARD. His passing, and of those before and since, reminds us of all the great, ornery, resilient individuals who made this part of the world so distinctly what it is today. They were rough as mesquite, spiky as barb wire, enduring as the caliche soil. I once wrote in a novel, “If it don’t sting, bite, tear, poke, burn, kick or maim – it ain’t from South Texas .” And if reading SELDOM HEARD don’t bring even the slightest tear to your eye from either flat-out laughter or soul-stirring delight, then clearly, you ain’t reading another remarkable book by that very fine writer Dian Malouf.

William Jack Sibley is the author of the Texas Institute of Letters-award nominated novel, "ANY KIND OF LUCK".  A fifth-generation Texan, he lives on his great-grandfather’s south Texas ranch.