by Robert Greer
Brown eyes gleaming and with an obvious buzz, Spoon walked over to the rug and saddle-blanket pile. In the dim light and under the spell of the rum, he looked taller than when he’d first sat down, but in truth he was no more than five foot eleven, a couple of inches or so shorter than me.
“You shouldn’ta let the moths get to this one,” he said, tugging at the corner of the blanket I’d straightened out earlier. “It’s a pretty rare turn-of-the-century Navajo weave. Without the holes, it would bring eighteen hundred bucks, easy.”
“I’ll talk to my dad about it,” I said, eager for Spoon to finish his story.
He fanned the blanket out on the floor, sat on it, and, legs crossed Indian-style, making sure his boots never touched the decaying wool, cleared his throat and continued, “There’s an all-black town in Kansas called Nicodemus. Three days short of turnin’ twenty-five, I met an old woman sellin’ sweet corn at a roadside stand outside town. Her silver hair hung to the small of her back in two long, thick braids, and it was pretty obvious from the way her teeth clicked together when she talked that she wore dentures. Dentures that were too big, ’cause the old woman’s face was fixed into a constant smile. While we dickered on the price of the corn, I mentioned my name and told her I was tracin’ my roots. She said she’d known my granddad, even laughed and called him a woolly headed rascal with a fancy for Indian women, finally mentioning that he’d married a Cheyenne woman who had the charm.”
I frowned, unfamiliar with the term.
With an index finger Spoon spelled out c-h-a-r-m in midair. “My grandmother could see things,” he said with a wink.
When I still didn’t comprehend, Spoon threw up his hands and rolled his eyes. “She could see into the future, TJ. Don’t you know nothin’ at all?”
“Oh, sure,” I said, nodding as Spoon readjusted himself on the rug.
We finished the last of the Bacardi a few minutes later, and I told Spoon he could sleep in the bunkhouse that night.
“No need for me to move in there,” Spoon said, looking toward the darkened corridor that led to the old bunkhouse. “This pile of blankets’ll do just fine.” He patted the blankets, sending ribbons of dust into the air.
I left him sitting on the rug, pulling off his boots, proud that I’d been the Darley who’d made the decision that, at least for the time being, Spoon would stay.
As I walked back to our house in darkness, I found myself wondering what it was that drove a man like Spoon, and then wondering even more what it was that drove me. Spoon seemed intent on tracing down his roots, and I expected that in the long run he most certainly would.
I, on the other hand, had no real sense of what I was chasing. I’d finished high school more than a year earlier and passed up a scholarship to study agriscience and geology
at the University of Montana, choosing instead to help at the ranch. In some ways, I knew I was hiding. Hiding from moving ahead and running headlong into life’s
necessary but often untidy decisions. Hiding from the fact that I would always be Jimmy Darley’s athletically gifted but far-too-bookish kid brother.
Spoon seemed to know clear enough who he was, but not where he’d come from. I knew precisely where I’d come from, but far too little about who I really was, where I was going, or who I might become. My mom had always dreamed I’d become a veterinarian. Dad’s greatest hope, it had always seemed to me, unlike the hopes and dreams he’d had for Jimmy, was that I’d simply be self-sufficient.
As I paused and gazed skyward, I wondered how many enemy soldiers Spoon had killed during Vietnam and if his odyssey to find his roots and connect with his soul was simply a way of staving off some terrible darkness in his past, the same way I was likely doing by holding the future at bay.
When I looked back to see if the lights inside the tack room were still on, the windows were dark. I could make out the shape of the fur-sided old building easy enough as moonlight reflected off its corrugated metal roof, but there was no hint that anyone was inside. Yet even in the darkness, I could feel Spoon’s presence, imagine him breathing, see his incisive, deep-set eyes and weathered brown skin. He was there all right, and I had the strange sudden sense that he’d become a guidepost for me.
Two
My dad, short necked and broad from my angle, with just barely sloping shoulders and a thick mop of sandy blond hair, identical to mine, was the do-it-yourself-or-not-at-all kind of person who had no use for hired men. He argued that most of them didn’t like their work and that any man who hated his work probably disliked himself even more. When I was ten, a hired man ran my dad’s best cutting horse into a snowbank and shattered her leg. Dad put the big mare down with a single shot above the ear. Later, another hand, a man Dad had known and trusted for years, stole the Willow Creek tally book during the summer, made a duplicate, clipped out a couple of pages for himself, altered our Triangle Long Bar brand, and shorted us fifteen yearlings at auction that fall. Dad broke the man’s leg with a branding iron when he found out, but he never got back the money the yearlings brought. So I knew I’d be up against it when I came to him with my recommendation to take on a new hand.
The mountain air was unusually humid the morning I asked my dad to hire Spoon. A late-summer fog had settled over the heifer meadow pond and along the lane leading up to our house, and from our kitchen I could see a group of five mother cows brushing against one another looking sleepy-eyed. I wondered how Spoon had slept and whether, during the unseasonably chilly night, he’d been forced to wrap himself in one of the moth-eaten Navajo blankets.
“He’s a con man,” my dad said as we ate breakfast. “Nowadays they almost always are.” He bolted down a spoonful of the cornbread he’d crunched up in a Mason jar filled with buttermilk.
“I don’t think so,” said Mom. “I’d at least give him a try, Bill.”
“So he can sucker punch us for five hundred a month plus room and board? No way.”
“He’d sure be a help with our second alfalfa cutting, and I could use a hand riding fence the rest of the year,” I said.
“We can do those things ourselves. No need hirin’ ’em out.”
I looked over at my mom. The look in her eyes told me not to push too hard. “Give him a trial, a month or two. It won’t break us, Bill,” she said.
“It’ll shove us a damn sight closer to the poorhouse, that’s all.”
“At least talk to the man,” I said, knowing that my dad’s assertion was really an exaggeration. “He’s willing to give us a try. That’s more than most locals’ll do.”
Dad flashed me a debate-ending stare, the kind he saved for those times when he’d reached his limit. “Local folks know what I pay and what I expect if they decide to hire on here. This ranch is laid out for family, not driftin’ ranch hands.”
When the thin, eight-inch scar that ran down his left cheek, a scar he’d had since Korea, turned salmon pink, the way it tended to do when he was about to lose control, I knew it was time to end the argument.
My mom walked over and smoothed down the collar of his rumpled chambray shirt. Her long, delicate hands, hands that matched her slender, graceful, athletic frame, slipped onto his shoulders, then down his arms, until they met his massive, weathered hands. Rubbing them gently, she said, “He’s an extra body, and he’s willing, Bill. The three of us can’t continue to manage six hundred cows. There’s no way we can keep running against the wind forever.”
Dad stirred his spoon slowly around in the Mason jar until the buttermilk and cornbread turned to the thick, gummy mixture he enjoyed. He drank half of it before setting the jar aside. “Does he know one damn thing about ranchin’?”
“He says he does.”
“We’ll see.” As he stood up and adjusted his belt, my dad’s right knee buckled, giving way as it did a couple of times a week. Before he could straighten back up, my mom had her arm hooked through his, and she began slowly walking him toward the door. “We’ll see,” he said again.
I winked
at my mom and followed.
Even with mom softening him up, my dad would never have hired Spoon if we hadn’t so desperately the needed help, and, of course, there was Spoon’s bet.
Spoon told my dad as part of their negotiations that morning, with my mom and I standing right there on our front porch as they talked, that he could cut a one-
hundred-eighty-acre field of alfalfa and tame hay, five-string-bale the cuttings, pick up the bales from the field, and stack them neat as a pin, all within twenty-four hours. My dad said it was impossible, insisting that the alfalfa couldn’t possibly even cure in that short a time, but agreeing just the same that if Spoon could come within four hours of the twenty-four-hour limit, he had himself a job. Spoon’s only requests before starting were that we give him five quart jugs of water, that he be allowed to start after dusk, and that we flood the field with light.
At eight thirty that evening, my dad had our two backhoes sitting catty-corner from one another at either end of the field, diesel engines humming, headlight beams on high. I’d centered a John Deere 350 Junior we used for cutting the grass around the house along the fence line at midfield with its lights on. Across from the tractor, fifty yards away on the other side of the field, I’d lined up my pickup and snapped on the headlights before racing to where my dad sat in one of the backhoes.
At eight forty-five sharp, Spoon pulled onto the northern edge of the brightly lit field in our red and green McCormick with duals, pulling a twenty-year-old swather and kicking up a trail of dust. He parked next to the backhoe my dad was sitting in. His face was wrapped in a white bandanna pulled up to within an inch of his eyes. In the glare of the headlights and with streams of dust rising in the air, he looked like a heavy-metal rock musician ascending in a dry-ice mist from below center stage to begin his act.
“Twenty-eight hours!” shouted my dad above the hum of the idling engines, looking up at Spoon. “Four hours are on me!”
“I only asked for twenty-four!” hollered Spoon. “But I’ll take the extra!” He nudged the tractor into gear. It lurched forward, clanking over a cattle guard before heading out into the field.
Spoon stopped for his second quart of water the next morning just before eight. By then three-quarters of the field had been leveled, and the freshly mown alfalfa was drying in the morning sun. When he cut the tractor’s engine, the air, which had been surprisingly still until that moment, was suddenly filled with a twenty-miles-per-hour hay-drying wind. Mulling over where the wind had come from, I listened to the sad call of half a dozen mourning doves looking down on us from the telephone wires along the county road.
Although I had stayed all night to watch Spoon, my dad had watched him for less than ten minutes before leaving. From the bed of my pickup, I watched as Spoon undid his bandanna and wiped the sweat from around his neck. Somehow Spoon and the tractor and the swather looked smaller than they had the night before, as if I were seeing them through the wrong end of a pair
of binoculars.
What if Spoon couldn’t finish? I asked myself. The way Jimmy couldn’t finish swimming across Willow Creek? My dad had told Jimmy not to try, warned him that no one could swim across Willow Creek at high water. But, just like now, he hadn’t been there when Jimmy had tried. Since then my dad’s victories had always seemed to be the melancholy kind that came from knowing he was right.
The tractor’s engine kicked back on, a loud belch of black diesel exhaust rose in the air, and Spoon’s bandanna was back over his face. Moments later a new row of alfalfa began dropping in the swather’s wake. The morning sun had heated the pickup’s bed to the point that I could feel the warm corrugated metal through my jeans. I stood and stretched, impeded momentarily by knotted muscles and calf cramps. The sweet molasses smell of freshly cut alfalfa filled the air as I watched Spoon continue. A little before ten thirty, when I backed the pickup from the field edge onto the county road to leave, Spoon was cutting the last row of alfalfa next to the quarter-
section fence. I stopped on the road, got out, and waved at him, crossing my arms back and forth above my head. I didn’t think he saw me, but when I eased the truck into gear moments later, “Shave and a Haircut” echoed from the tractor’s horn.
I spent the rest of the day repairing a broken headgate on our number four irrigation ditch and plowing under ten acres of dryland meadow we’d lost to gophers and sage. It was close to five before I got back to Spoon. He was midfield, baling four-by-six-foot bales of hay. I couldn’t imagine how the alfalfa had cured enough for him to bale, but it had, and I had the sense that he’d known all along it would. The wind kicked up, dusting my windshield with pollen as I bumped across the shallow tractor ruts Spoon had left in the freshly mown field. Spoon still had to stack the hay onto a flatbed semitrailer parked near the end of the field, but if he finished baling by seven I knew he stood a chance. It was then that I realized he was at least as determined as my dad.
By the time Spoon started stacking, it was nearly dark. A full moon, tractor and backhoe lights, and my pickup’s high beams were his only sources of light. He’d passed in front of me and nodded when I’d first switched on my lights, but he hadn’t said a word. The lowboy hay loader he was using had been around the ranch for close to thirty years. Metal grated against metal each time the loader uncradled another four bales onto the flatbed, and I wondered whether each trip back to the field with the temperamental loader would be Spoon’s last.
My dad showed up just before eight, his battered long-necked flashlight swinging at his side. Spoon topped off the flatbed’s twelve-foot-high hay crown at 8:22. He climbed down from the neatly stacked bales, puffy faced, his skin a muddy river-bottom brown. Hay welts crisscrossed his arms, and alfalfa pollen had stained his bandanna golden brown. Out of the blue he tossed me his sweat-stained hat, and I saw a three-inch ring of moist, caked-up salt circling the crown.
“I could use some water,” he said, out of breath. “Ran out a little before five.” He reached up onto the lip of the flatbed and handed me one of his jugs. I ran for my pickup to fill it from my thermos. When I returned, Spoon was lying on the ground on his back. He rested his head on a pillow of loose alfalfa. My dad stood a couple of feet away, leaning on one corner of the semitrailer; his flashlight, wedged between two hay bales, shone up into the sky.
“I figured you’d make it when I drove by about six,” he said, looking down at a motionless Spoon. “I guess I gauged it pretty close.”
Spoon didn’t answer.
“Five hundred a month and board,” said my dad.
“Six,” said Spoon, his voice floating up from the ground.
My dad hesitated a moment, nodded, grabbed his flashlight, and walked away.
Spoon raised himself and leaned against one of the semi’s tires. Resting his head against the greasy hub, he looked at me and said, “Pour that water over my face, TJ.” I smiled as I splashed water down over his head onto his face and into his ears.
“How about another jugful?” he asked softly, shaking his head back and forth like a wet puppy shedding water in the summer sun. Still smiling, I ran for the truck. On the return trip, the fact that we finally had some help began to sink in.
By Thanksgiving, Spoon was settled in. The old tack room and bunkhouse bore his stamp. He had stripped, sanded, and polyurethaned the floors to a golden, mirror-gloss finish. Several wood-framed Indian blankets hung from the tack-room walls, and a five-point antelope head, one I’d helped him hang, jutted from above the room’s potbellied stove.
He had a routine. He dutifully picked up his job ticket at six in the morning each workday and worked six days straight before leaving the ranch each Saturday night to go to town. My mom claimed he gambled. Dad said he drank. Whatever his vice, we hardly ever saw Spoon until midday Sunday, his one day off.
He and my dad didn’t talk much, and when they did, their conversations always had to do with work. Spoon usually ate alone. On those rare occasions when he did take his meals with us, my mom would
usually ease the tension, talking about the weather, growing blackberries, and canning, or recalling the times in New York when she used to dance. Spoon always ate fast, rarely looked up, and excused himself as soon as he was through. My dad did the same, generally leaving my mom and me there at the table to finish our meals alone. After one Sunday meal during which neither man had uttered a word, my mom offered a rare observation: “Spoon and your dad are like wounded hawks scanning the rock edge of a cliff, looking for a perch but never quite finding a safe place to land.”
After an unseasonably dry fall, winter hit quickly. Back-to-back snowstorms counterpunched the ranch, covering the valley with a two-foot blanket of season-changing snow. Spoon and I spent lots of our evenings in the old bunkhouse, mending tack and shooting the breeze. During the day we traveled our winter range on snow machines, dragging food sleighs filled with hay and supplemental cottonseed cake for the cattle.
One evening during early winter when the humidity and temperature had locked in at dead-even thirties, Spoon, seemingly in a reflective mood, told me about a man he’d served with in Vietnam. A friend of his who’d dreamed of returning stateside to become a wildlife illustrator.
“His specialty was drawin’ birds,” Spoon said as we stood sipping Cokes inside the bunkhouse, each of us leaning against one of the identical ninety-year-old steel-pipe saddle stands my granddad had fabricated and bolted to the floor. “And not just any birds, but what he liked to call diminutives—miniatures to you and me.”
Spoon smiled at the chance to be instructive. “The boy could draw anything, from birds to a tropical rain forest fulla bamboo trees. When I asked him one day how long he’d been drawin’, just after we came back from patrollin’ a three-mile stretch of river, he told me since grade school.”
Spoon looked skyward, assessing, calculating, frowning. “Takes time to meet perfection, TJ. Time, perseverance, and a whole lotta patience. My friend Willie Coleman knew that.”