Keep the Change (2 page)

“If you ever wind up with the place,” said his father, “don’t have your horses over here in the spring because it’s heck for locoweed. And larkspur too. So don’t be putting cattle in here before the grass is really up. In 1959 I took a whole truckful of saddle horses to the canners that got locoed right in this exact spot. But whatever you do, even if you graze it flat and the knapweed and spurge cover it up and the wind blows the topsoil to Kansas, don’t let that old sonofabitch Overstreet get it. He tried to break me when I came into this country and he darn near got it done. We get along okay now but his dream is to make his ranch a perfect square and this is a big bite out of his southeast corner.” He stopped and thought a moment, staring persistently in front of himself. “And if the worst should happen and I am gone and he gets it from you and makes it square, don’t let him get the mineral rights. I can see something like this happening with the land, but if he gets what’s underneath he’s cut off your nuts and it’s the Pope’s choir for you, kiddo.”

Joe loved the place but he didn’t expect or really want to end up on it altogether. If Joe was satisfied by the land in which the ranch was situated, and he loved it pretty much wherever his eyes fell, he never quite understood what that had to do with ownership. Right now it was enough to feel his father’s passion for the place and try to speculate about how he went on owning something with such deep satisfaction when it was so far from his home on that golf course in Minneapolis. Joe puzzled over the passion with which his father had made a new life there. His father golfed with enthusiasm in his Bermuda shorts, pounding the ball around the fairways with hostile force, the terror of caddies, shaping the land with
his clubs, playing through lethargic foursomes with menace and accumulating large numbers of strokes through his enraged putting. They called him “cowboy” in a way that genially suggested that his skills were not suited to civilized life.

As Joe followed his father down the mile-long slope to the main spring he tried to absorb the plain fact that his father meant that this would one day be his. This was not precisely a soaring thought. He really wondered how he would put his heritage in play. He found the future eerie and he already wanted to paint.

The spring lay at the base of the long slope, in a grove of small black cottonwoods and wild currant bushes. It came out of an iron pipe and poured into the end of an old railroad tank car whose thick steel plating and massive rivets made an indestructible water hole that couldn’t be trampled into muck the way an undeveloped spring could by cows who stayed thirsty and wouldn’t travel to feed, beating the grass down where they lay in diminished vigor. Joe’s father explained all this to him and made it clear that it was he who had hauled this great railroad tank up the mountain and developed the spring, wheelbarrowing gravel to the trench and laying the collector pipe one blistering summer in the 1940s.

“But it was worth it,” he said, “because every cow who ever came here since then got herself a good long drink of cold water.” This made the home on the golf course seem even sadder to Joe, the dawn cries of the foursomes on Sunday even more depressing than he had remembered. The hillsides around Joe and his father were speckled with contented-looking Hereford cattle and their spry calves. His father’s satisfaction was a simple one, complicated only by the distance his success had produced.

The horses were lathered when at the end of the day they
were turned out once again, white lines of sweat gathered at the outlines of the saddles. The horses ran back into their pasture, stretched to shake from end to end, celebrated liberty by rolling in the dust, jumping back up to shake and stretch again. Then they jogged over the hill and out of sight. Joe’s father changed in the bunkhouse, and when he came back, carrying a brown briefcase, he was a banker again in an olive green summer suit, a striped tie, and a dapper straw hat.

Joe rode with his father in a rental car to visit his Uncle Smitty and Aunt Lureen. They were his father’s brother and sister. It was late afternoon and Lureen would be home from her teaching job. Smitty could always be found at home.

“This is what you call a social obligation,” said his father.

“Oh, I like them, Dad.”

“They’re all yours, son, at least for the summer. I like Lureen and I suppose I should like Smitty better than I do. He’s my brother, after all.”

The house was three narrow stories tall, with sagging porches on the two upper floors; it was clapboard and painted a pale green that stood out against sky and telephone wires. The scudding spring clouds moved overhead rapidly. When Joe looked at the house, its cheap simplicity reminded him of his modest family origins of city park employees, Democratic party flunkies, mill workers, railroad brakemen, mechanics, grocers, ranch hands. It forever fascinated him that such unassuming
people could have been so mad with greed and desire for fame or love. Joe’s father was the first and only member of the family to take on the notion of landholding. One uncle had written passionate letters to aborigine women in care of the
National Geographic
. A cousin had lost his dryland farm in a pyramid scheme. A locket his grandmother had worn all her life contained the photograph of a man not known to the family.

Smitty and Lureen were in the doorway, Lureen in a brown suit she had taught in, and Smitty in the checked shirt and beltless slacks that seemed to suggest well-earned leisure. He looked like a commuter.

They got out of the car and Joe’s father stormed up the short flight of steps with insincere enthusiasm. He hugged Lureen fiercely and pumped Smitty’s thin arm with comradely fervor. Joe stood back smiling until it was his turn for the hugs and handshakes. It was well known that Smitty had great reservations about Joe’s father but they didn’t show until he greeted Joe with a suspicious squint and wary twitching of his eyebrows.

The visit was a raucous parade behind Joe’s father, who thundered through the rooms, refusing Smitty’s suggestion of a drink and Lureen’s of tea. He borrowed the telephone for a quick call to the bank in Minnesota, then hung up the phone conclusively as though his conversation with the bank had been the end of his conversation with Lureen and Smitty.

“Junior’s got to go to work,” he said, gesturing at Joe with his straw hat. He bobbed down to kiss Lureen goodbye, then shot his hand out and let Smitty walk over and shake it. “We’ll call you Christmastime!” he thundered and got around behind Joe, pushing at his shoulder blades until the two of them were
out on the street and a very strained Smitty and Lureen were waving at them. “You can’t have a drink with Smitty without having to go his bail that night.”

As they drove, his father said, “Can you imagine a grown man living off his spinster sister like that?”

“I thought Smitty had some problem from the war,” Joe said.

“Oh, he did, he did. But I was in the same goddamn war. Listen to me, I want to make a long story short. Don’t ever take your eyes off Smitty. He’s dumb like a fox. Cut Smitty a little slack and he’ll take her all.”

They drove back out toward the ranch. “I wish I could have found a way of staying in this country,” said his father. “But any fool can see it’s going nowhere. Still, you look at it and it just makes you think, What if? You know what I mean?” Joe was so startled by what for them was a rare intimacy that he looked straight down the road and waited for his stop. He thought he knew exactly what his father meant. What if.

Joe’s father dropped him at the Overstreet headquarters, next to the tin-roofed granary and saddle shed and bunkhouse where Joe would live for the summer. He leaned over and gave Joe a hug. Joe felt his great body heat and smelled the strong and heartening aftershave lotion.

“Well, son,” he said, “it’s time to whistle up the dogs and piss on the fire. Have a good summer, and keep an eye on things. You make a hand and they’ll have to use you. Then you can watch. Think of it as being yours someday and you’ll watch fairly closely.”

“Tell Mom hi for me.”

“In particular,” said his father, “the hay ground. If they
aren’t changing water three times a day they’re lying to both of us.”

All of Joe’s father’s quirks, including this one of not listening to him closely, only made Joe love him more. He loved the motion of his father, the bustle, the clear goals he, Joe, could not always understand. After all, he was the only father Joe would have and Joe seemed to know that.

Joe was over at the headquarters of the Caywood Fork the next day to get his orders. It was first light and the big riverine cottonwoods that hung over the somber headquarters buildings seemed to hold the last of night in their dense foliage. He had no car for the summer and he’d had to walk. The dogs barked at his arrival and Otis Rosewell came around from behind the saddle shed leading a horse. Joe walked over to him and stopped. Rosewell gazed at him. Finally, a small smile played over his lips.

“Must be tough around your camp,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your old man.”

“Yes, he is,” Joe conceded, wondering in dismay if he was failing some test of loyalty. But he thought Rosewell had extended a small gesture of amiability and he didn’t want it to slip away. It could be a long summer.

“Do you know how to run a swather or a bale wagon?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Can you fence?”

“Sure. And I can run a backpack sprayer, you know, for malathion or whatever.”

“Well, most of the fence on your old man’s place is falling down because he never took care of it and because it was fenced poorly in the first place. But I imagine he thinks it’s perfect and I want you to make his dreams come true because my yearlings are pouring through the sonofabitch like water. Get yourself a pocket notebook and start walking that fence. Pull it up when you can and rebuild it where you have to. Knock out that old crooked cedar and put in some steel. You can get a sledge, stretcher, pliers, post pounder, and staples in the shop and you can use the old Ford to haul it around.”

“I’ll get started today.”

“That’s right. And you’ll never finish. Now let me tell you something else. You was sent to us. If you don’t care to put in an honest day’s work, that’s your business. I ain’t going to hang over you. I work for Mr. Overstreet.”

Joe built fence for twenty-one days before he took his first break. He went down all the boundary fence and had five strands of barbed wire on stays sparkling from staple to staple. Where the rotten cedar had given out there were new green-and-white steel T-posts and the soldierly order they gave to the rise and fall of boundaries helped Joe see how his heritage lay on the benign face of the county.

About halfway through his fencing assignment, Joe reached a high divide between two drainages, Crow Creek and Nester Creek. A thousand years of wind had blown all the topsoil to Wyoming and it was just bare rock on top of the world where old barbed wire sang like an Aeolian harp. Otis came up and helped him with this stretch of fence. They started to build jack fence, then changed their minds and dynamited post holes for half a mile until the line pitched down into the woods and
was easy again and beyond the eerie sound of the steel strings above them. There was pleasure in working the ratchet on the fence stretcher, watching the wire rise, tighten, and sparkle in the light through the trees, sing in the wind, turn at the corner posts, or drop out of sight over the crown of a hill. Joe was going all round what would one day be his.

On the twenty-first day, he was fencing the bottom of a narrow defile. Cattle had grown accustomed to escaping here by lifting the poles that were meant to hold the bottom wire low. Joe was sewing the fence to the earth along the floor of this cut with a post every ten feet when he was visited by the daughter of the owner, Ellen Overstreet. He had watched her covertly ever since he first got there, mostly when she was riding out through the ranch in the front of a flatbed truck with Billy Kelton, a neighbor Joe hadn’t spoken to since a boyhood fistfight almost ten years before. Without any thought of Ellen herself, Joe would have loved to take her away from Billy, who looked so complacent in the truck, lariat hanging in the rear window and his blue-eyed gaze remote under a tall-crown straw hat. It was a grudge.

Joe’s first thought was that her timing was perfect. He was dark from the long exposure to sun and the muscles of his arms were hard and defined from driving posts and stretching wire. Ellen was a rangy brunette with startling gray eyes.

“What’s the point of this when my dad is going to own it all anyway?” she said with a bright smile.

“I’m getting paid. And I’m here to tell you your dad will never get our place.”

“You’re getting paid. Otis says you can work or not work, it’s no nevermind to him.”

“Well, it is to me,” said Joe, letting the red post pounder tip over and drop with a clang.

“One way or another, Otis says. He doesn’t care.”

“You can’t go by Otis,” said Joe. “If he knew anything he wouldn’t be here.”

“Otis has been with Daddy since we ranched at Exeter Switch.”

“It’s not Otis’s fault he isn’t smart.”

Ellen sat down in the deep bluestem and began pulling up the russet pink flowers of prairie smoke, making a bouquet in her left hand and blowing ants off the blossoms.

“Daddy says you’re in military school in Kentucky and you’re that little bit from graduating and going to Vietnam.”

“Only I’m not going to Vietnam. I’m going to college in the East. I’m studying art. Is that for me?”

He reached out for the bouquet of prairie smoke blossoms and she handed them over with a shrug.

“Why aren’t we going to Vietnam?”

“Because we aren’t supposed to be there in the first place. Everybody knows that.”

“Not everybody knows that. A lot of my friends can’t wait to get there.”

“Well, you’ve got the wrong friends.”

“You better not let them hear your Vietnam theory. I know one or two will fix your little red wagon. We believe in freedom. Y’know Billy Kelton?”