Save a Few for Lefty Too

By Bobby Neal Winters

We always pray for the victim. It’s easy.  They are sympathetic.  They’ve got tears rolling down their faces and snot coming out of their noses--or blood coming out of their noses. Or, there’s no crying, no sound at all and they are lying on the floor in a pool of their own blood.

Prayers aplenty, then.

But what about the villain? The bully? The traitor? Do we pray for them?

“Pancho and Lefty” is a song written by Townes Van Zandt.  It tells a story, and while others might differ in their interpretation--and that’s the wonderful thing about poetry, lots of room for interpretation--Pancho was an outlaw whom Lefty either assassinated or betrayed for payment.  I base this on the line “The dust that Pancho bit down south ended up in Lefty’s mouth.” (That could also mean Lefty was a song writer and wrote about it. You can be both a song writer and an assassin, but I digress.)

It continues to say, “The day they laid poor Pancho low /Lefty split for Ohio / Where he got the bread to go / There ain't nobody knows.”

We the reader are meant to infer some sort of causal connection here. The infamous Pancho, who is romantic and exciting, is dead and that shifty-looking Lefty just disappeared.

Lefty is either a killer or a fingerman.  He’s not dashing.  He’s not romantic.  He is not a hero or an anti-hero. He does his business and then runs from Mexico to Cleveland with his thirty pieces of silver.  

Cleveland for heaven’s sake.

Given all this, Van Zandt (through Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard in the most famous cover of the song) implores us to pray: “Pancho needs your prayers, it's true /Save a few for Lefty too / He just did what he had to do /And now he's growing old.”

Here, within a cowboy ballad, sung by a pair of country music’s outlaws, we find a seed of the gospel.

While Jesus was being crucified between a pair of thieves like Pancho, He called out, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  

I think we can assume Jesus was asking for forgiveness even of Judas.  

We can take Christ’s example and see Van Zandt applying it here between sinners.  Sinners like us.

I was once told that everything happens for a reason. I’ve meditated on that for at least ten years.  It has power.  

People have their reasons.

“[Lefty] only did what he had to do.” He had to because he needed the money.  It was either him or Pancho.  Pancho was going to die anyway. He was a bandit.  He deserved it.

So traitors have their reasons.

Bullies also have their reasons.  I’ve dealt with a few.  If you open up their heads, they have a justification for their actions.  Indeed, if you look deeply enough, they believe themselves to be the victim.

Humans are messy.

It is captured nicely in a song that Jelly Roll sings, ”'Cause I'm only one drink away from the devil /I'm only one call away from home /Yeah, I'm somewherе in the middle /I guess I'm just a littlе right and wrong.”

This all having been said, let’s not go too far.  In a lot of situations, there is clearly one party that has been wronged more than the other. Often they are the ones that I described in the first paragraph with tears rolling down their faces and blood coming out of their noses.

And this is where Van Zandt’s poetry gets it right.  They need our prayers, because they have been wronged, but the person who did it is also one of God’s children.  They need a few prayers to help with whatever made them do this.

And in the toughest situations, prayer is the only thing we have.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.