by test
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I spend this morning like most others, tending other women's flowers, weeding and working their sprawling, terraced beds and lawns. I separate the bearded irises Lizzie Turner, the last commander's wife for whom the six room rock house was built in 1860, brought with her from England when she came over as a girl of fifteen. I prune and mulch the twelve antique rose bushes Grandma Alba Giddry, the first and last of the Giddrys to actually spend the majority of her life on this land before dying on it, brought from her family's farm in Maryland.
A narrow slate-lined stream runs across the front of the house and down the two terraces where it fills an irregularly shaped concrete and rock pool built late in life by Old Man Appleton who bought the place from the U.S. Government after the Rangers moved westward. The water filling the channel is kneedeep and full of water lilies ordered from a fancy East Coast catalogue by Fannie Appleton, the old man's fourth wife who was a "frivolous girl" according to Grandma Alba's brief written history of the ranch. The water filling the pool stands ten feet deep and is full of thick, billowing clouds of algae. I have not drained or cleaned the pool since Wil and I did it two years ago. It wasn't so bad last year and I didn't think much about it, but with the warm winter and spring, the algae has more than doubled.
All the water originates crystal clear from a spring enclosed in a small rock building to the north of the front porch. In the summer the water feels cold and in the winter it feels warm, but it is a constant sixty-four degrees. San Augustine grass, undoubtedly planted by another ranch wife, spreads out from the channel and the pool and has crept through the compound's rock wall to the fields. After working in the beds, I trim the grass inside the walls with a red push mower so that it is thick and low. Canna lilies, planted by Wil's mother in the sixties when they used this place for entertaining, grow in clumps around the pool. I have let them multiply and am careful not to get the mower blades too close to the new broad leaves. This year, for the first time, their tall yellow and red heads peek up through the holes in the collapsed platform under the pecan tree where the rope swing still hangs.
After I finish mowing, I kick off my stained tennis shoes, peel off my clothes, and jump in the pool. I don't mind this water and its darkness. Underneath the algae and the layers of rich silt on the bottom I know there is only dirt-stained concrete and smooth-washed rocks. I swim with slow, sloppy strokes up and down the pool which measures three feet shy of Olympic length from the dam to the slate stream. I swim until my body adjusts to the cold. I float on my back with my eyes closed, letting the reflections of pecan and live oak leaves slide over my wet skin, letting the water drift over my body until I have the desire to curl myself into a ball, drop to the bottom, and sleep forever, then I get out. I put only my T-shirt back on, slip my feet into my shoes bending down the heels, gather up my grass stained socks, plain cotton underwear, and khaki
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shorts, and pull the mower behind me up to the barn where I store it in one of the horse stalls with other lawn tools, rakes, hoes, three hand-fashioned pickax heads from the Ranger days.
I deposit my clothes in a white five-gallon bucket in the breezeway connecting the mainhouse to the bunkhouse and peel off my T-shirt. The bucket is overflowing since it's the end of the week, and the T-shirt threatens to topple the whole mess over until I rearrange it.
I am turning into a vegetarian, not necessarily out of choice or out of lack of meat. I have two deer, one shot by Wil's oldest brother, one by mine, cleaned and packaged in neat white bundles, lying in the deep freeze out in the old tack room. I have ziplock bags of dove and quail shot by me. The freezer also contains pounds of deer sausage, hamburger meat, a side of beef ribs, and one snow goose, an annual gift from a south Texas banker Wil operated on for appendicitis. I like all of these things, have cooked them fried or broiled or barbecued, but I see no sense in thawing and marinating and cooking any of them just for me. I have squash and okra and pole beans aplenty in the garden behind the bunkhouse and I have had decent luck keeping the pillbugs and leafy mildew off my lettuce. Unlike preparing meat, preparing vegetables requires no thinking. You eat them raw with a sprinkle of lemon for dressing or boiled, and that's that.
In the kitchen, I put a pan of water on to boil and skin and cut two 1015 onions into chunks. I slice three strips off a piece of salt pork, and only when the water is boiling do I remove a bag of snapped green beans from the freezer and add them to the pot with the onion and bacon. They are last season's, but were frozen right after picking and snapping, so will taste vine-fresh as long as they don't have a chance to thaw out. While they cook, I go to my room at the back of the house and put on jeans, thick socks, a white button-down worn so thin and smooth I can feel through the fabric the warm midday air stirred by the ceiling fan.
I eat the beans with a glass of chilled water from the fridge and leave the dishes in the sink for later. I am trying to break the habit of washing after every meal so that I will not be continually using the same plate, bowl, spoon, fork that sit in the dishdrainer.
I put on a pair of hiking boots that sit outside the kitchen door and walk to the barn where I retrieve a camouflaged swivel bucket out of another empty horse stall and Wil's .3006 from the gun locker. I have replaced the bucket's short handle with a piece of long, soft nylon rope, and have lined the inside with thick black foam so its contents make no noise. It holds no turkey calls, no boxes of bird shot, no cleaning knives, but one Nikon 35 mm camera, a telephoto lens, half a box of 165-grain Federal bullets, a heavy pair of ear protectors like old stereo headphones, and one brown oat bag from Hargroves.
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I walk out the compound's back gate and down the narrow dirt road wash-boarded from erosion and disuse. I pass two creek beds that run only with the spring rains. I pass the granite outcropping where Wil shot a five-foot rattler and the crumbling chimney of the first Ranger outpost whose plank walls cut from the Lost Pines near Bastrop burned to the ground within six months of being put up. I climb through the barbed wire links of the gap gate leading to the Klein grass field.
Midway down the field and back towards the ridge, I set the bucket down on a flat, gray rock near a stand of Spanish oaks and remove the feed bag, which I attach with clothespins to a cedar bush fifty yards away near the edge of a small half-dry stock tank. I have used the bush before. There are several mangled limbs jutting out from it and small pieces of other bags scattered among the twigs and limestone shards and thin grama grass. But this is not what I'm here for. I like to sit out in the fields, the gun across my knees, camera in my hands, and wait for something. Sometimes it is the way the sun hits the Mexican hats and black-eyed Susans. Sometimes it is a wall of blue-black clouds rolling in over the ridge. Sometimes it is a heron flying low from the San Saba and lighting in the tank. And sometimes, like today, I am not in the mood to wait and I take practice shots at the bag.
I wear the ear protectors and even with them the first two shots are loud and echo through me. A large red and white Purina checkerboard marks the center of the bag and I usually try to take it out a few squares at a time if I'm using a gun like this one or a .22 that makes a small entry hole. Unlike a .22 bullet, though, these explode on contact leaving an exit hole the size of a roadside diner saucer. Looking through the telephoto lens, I can see the splintered cedar branches through dime-sized holes in the bag. The shots hit four squares to the right of where the scope's cross-hairs were and a little high. I adjust the scope with a small screwdriver, turning the knob on the side four clicks to the left, and take two more shots which are still high, but more or less on target.
When I'm not in the mood to sit still, I also resort to taking photos of the shot-up bag to finish off a roll. I have at last fifty or sixty good bag shots and Virginia wants me to sell them at the Armadillo Bazaar in Austin this fall. She says people will buy them for thirty or forty dollars if I mount them, but they're still sitting untouched, scattered over the long oak table in the attic. Bags again
st cedars, live oaks, Spanish oaks. Bags against prickly pears, spiky yuccas, soft caliche rises. Bags all stages of shot-up. In the photos, it doesn't matter if the scope or my aim is off, nobody knows the difference.
When we moved here a little over five years ago, Wil helped me turn the attic of the bunkhouse into a darkroom so I could do freelance work. The high, peaked, tin-roofed attic is an addition from recent history. Before, it was no bigger than a crawl space and was the domain of the women. The ceiling had two
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trap doors in it and when the Indians caught the roof on fire, the women poured buckets of water out the trap doors to put out the flames. In 1856, Susannah Whidbee, fresh-arrived from South Carolina, took two arrows in the chest but would not come out of the opening, just demanded more buckets until the fire was out. She died on the solid attic floor that still shows the deep burn marks.
I shoot the last two bullets in the clip, reload, and set the gun over my knees again, taking off the ear protectors. The world always seems incredibly quiet right after I shoot, but today I hear the cattle in the field next to this one and the soft rumble of cars on the Ranch Road on the other side of the cattle. I take several photos of the bag and of the shadows the thick, isolated clouds leave on the tank's surface. I add a few more holes to the bag and in the silence that follows, I hear a noise in the brush behind me and turn on the bucket's seat. A man in a summer straw hat, a short-sleeved khaki shirt, jeans, and boots walks my way down the trail. I look through the telephoto lens at him, not so much to take his picture, but to read what the dark official-looking patch on his breast pocket says, to see who he is, what he's made of.
''May I help you?" I call out for lack of anything better to say.
He stops and the way the shadow from his hat falls halfway across his face, I can't tell what he's looking at. "Hope so," he answers. "I'm Cotton Ledbetter, the game warden."
I can't think of what a game warden would be doing out here in the middle of the summer, then realize he's staring at the camouflaged bucket and the gun in my lap. I eject the clip and set it down beside me.
"I promise not to shoot, Mr. Ledbetter," I joke as he comes closer, "but would you mind telling me how you got in here?"
He smiles slightly from a few feet away and I can see his face is as deeply tanned as mine, despite the protection of the hat, and shows the same fine lines around his mouth and eyes as mine does, lines from approaching age, from too many days in the sun.
"You mind telling me what you're shooting at?"
I point behind me to the bag.
"Mighty big gun for target practice." There's no accusation in his voice, but his eyes dart from me to the cedar bush to the field around the pond looking for game.
"I'm adjusting the scope."
"Isn't it a little early to be gearing up for deer season?"
I toss him the screwdriver, then the clip, and he looks startled as I stand up and pitch him the gun. "It's shooting high and to the right."
I toss him an emergency pair of ear plugs out of the bucket, the soft kind that don't do much good with larger guns but are better than nothing, and put on my own. He takes two shots, aiming at the center of the bag, adjusts the top
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knob, takes two more, adjusts, and finishes the clip, handing the gun back to me.
I put the box of shells back in the bucket and case up the camera and lens.
"Aren't you going to check it?" he asks.
"No. You're the game warden."
"Look," he calls after me as I get the bag, with its four new holes almost perfectly centered, off the cedar bush, "I don't mean to intrude on whatever you're doing here, it's just that I heard those shots from the road, and I can't quite ignore something so loud, now can I?"
"I guess not." My voice hasn't quite thawed. I bunch up the bag around the camera to keep it secure and start for the house. "You still haven't answered my question. How'd you get in?"
"Walked."
"From where? The road?"
"The main gate. Would you like me to carry that?" He points to the bucket and the rifle.
"No. I'm balanced this way. How'd you get in the gate?"
"I have every legal right to be here . . ."
I cut him off. "I'm aware of that."
We walk for a bit in heat, our bootsteps crackling on the rocks.
"I climbed over the gate," he tells me as we get in sight of the house. "We have codes and combinations for most of the places around here, but yours isn't on file anywhere."
"That's because there hasn't been a game warden on this property," I tell him in a repetition of something I've told a thousand times before, "since 1973 when two convicts escaped from the McCulloch County Jail and the wardens helped in the search. They found the men half-dead from dehydration in Tom Green County three days later."
He opens the gate and follows me into the barn where he puts the gun in the locker while I take the camera and lens out of the bucket.
"Man down the road told me this is the Appleton place. Guess you must be one of them," he tells me in the side yard where the slate stream makes a twofoot fall to the first terrace. "Sure is a pretty place."
I nod my thanks, then add, "No Appleton's lived here since 1907."
"Well, Ms. I'm-no-Appleton, I'm all out of small talk then."
I look at him to see if he's joking, but there is no smile in the lines around his eyes. "I'm Kitt Giddry."
He offers his hand and I shake it, matching the strength of my grip to his.
I offer him a glass of tea, and while it's brewing we sit on the porch and watch the early evening set in. He tells me he's thirty-four, never been married, recently returned from ten years as a forest ranger and fire fighter in Wyoming.
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He tells me he got the name Cotton when he was a kid and it stuck, even when his hair turned from a shocking white to a darker blond in the eighth grade. I don't laugh when he tells me his real name is Sidney, and he doesn't ask for any details when I tell him I'm a widow. I serve the glasses of tea with mint sprigs courtesy of Fannie Appleton's predecessor, Molly. Apparently, Old Man Appleton had a propensity for frivolous women. I offer to drive Cotton to the gate but he says he can make it just fine. I give him the gate code, but ask he not enter it in whatever files they keep.
"Just remember 1934 backwards," I tell him.
"What happened then?" he asks, stepping down off the porch.
"Not much."
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Swimming over the top of the algae is one thing, diving through ten feet of it to unscrew the drain plugs is another. Not a way I like to spend my Saturday mornings, which are usually reserved for an extra pot of coffee and several loads of laundry. I can only drain the pool six inches, a foot at the most, before diving down to plug it again. The algae has to be soft and wet for the water shooting out the high pressure sprayer nozzle to do any good.
I fall into a rhythm of shoot and drain, shoot and drain, and when the green plastic watch on my wrist reads noon, I have four feet done and the water is down to ankle deep at the shallow end closest to the house. I don't stop for lunch. By one o'clock I have cramps in my hands from holding the nozzle trigger down and tie it with my shoelace. By two, the six-inch drains clog with old tree branches, oak leaves, pecans. I stand in the mud on the other side of the dam and jam a broom handle repeatedly into the holes until they clear, only to have them clog again before three when the pool holds only knee-deep water black with sludge and silt. I have given up on the power sprayer and have moved from picking branches out of the sludge and throwing them over the dam to throwing entire cement shovels of sludge over when Cotton Ledbetter calls a hello from the other side of the rock fence.