by Robert Greer
“Name’s Koffman. He’s a bigwig at Acota Energy. The oil and gas folks.”
“And coal,” Spoon said insightfully. “So what was his mission out here?”
“He wants our coal.”
“And people in hell want ice water,” Spoon said with a smile.
“It’s not funny, Spoon. Koffman hinted to my folks that he got the Demasters to sign off on leasing their coal rights to Acota. I think he was probably telling the truth.”
“He’ll need to lease more property than that to make any kinda minin’ proposition pencil out for a big company like Acota. Trust me.”
Pondering how Spoon could possibly know how much leased land Acota needed to run its operations in the black, I said, “He’s batting .333. He’s got one ranch out of the big three in this valley. In baseball terms, he’d be considered a slugger.”
Spoon frowned, and a rock-solid serious look crossed his face. “But this ain’t a baseball game, TJ. Out here in the real world, it’s generally all or none. You’re right about one thing, though. Koffman’s got his foot in the door, and that’s a problem.”
Then, without asking me how I knew so much about the discussion between Koffman and my parents, Spoon stroked his chin thoughtfully and said, “I’m guessin’ that right now Koffman’s only scratchin’ at the dirt, lookin’ for a way to unearth a bone. That’s the good part. The bad part, unfortunately, is that he’ll keep on diggin’.”
“If Koffman and his Acota people come in here, they’ll turn the place into a zoo,” I said angrily. “It’ll stink like a power plant, and everybody knows the grazing will never be the same, regardless of what Acota says about reclaiming the land.”
Nodding in agreement, Spoon said, “Then we won’t let ’em.”
Thrilled at Spoon’s response but concerned that he didn’t fully appreciate the gravity of the situation, I said, “Dad ended up mentioning Korea to Koffman before he ushered him out of the house. You know he’d never do that, especially in front of my mom, unless he was truly upset.” I was well aware that Spoon and my dad had occasionally shared their combat experiences with each other, but the surprised look on Spoon’s face told me he hadn’t realized that I had paid any attention to those chats.
“I see.” Spoon drummed his fingers on the overstuffed leather chair he’d salvaged from a flea market and restored. He seemed to be storing up what I’d just told him for discussion at a later date. Looking up at Malcolm as if he expected the old five-point buck to offer a bolt of wisdom, he said, “So what we’ve got when it all shakes out is an energy company hungry for the coal underneath your land, and your pa soundin’ like he’s preparin’ to go into battle. How’d your ma respond durin’ the talk with Koffman?”
“I think she would’ve tossed him out of the house on his ear if she’d had her way.”
Spoon, who’d been partial to my mom since the first day he’d set foot on the ranch, said, “Tells me all I need to know right there.”
“There is one other thing,” I said tentatively. “Koffman talked as if he planned to use me as a bargaining chip. Claimed I had a right to the decision making when it came to the ranch.”
“He’s a smart one,” said Spoon, shaking his head. “Devil’s kin generally are. Sounds like he knows how to separate blood from money. You got any idea what the annual royalties would be on the coal Acota could dig up off this place?”
“Not really, although Koffman mentioned hundreds of thousands.”
“I’d say he’s on the light side,” said Spoon. “If he could get you and your folks wranglin’ over the potential earnings, he’d have a fightin’ chance of winnin’ his little game. Maybe not right now, but somewhere down the line. Especially if you go off to college, earn yourself a couple of low-profit-margin degrees, and decide this land here’s a better investment than your education.”
“No way in hell!”
“I know that, TJ. But like it or not, the life that’s out there waitin’ for you really don’t. Like they say, shit happens. Sickness, agin’ parents, a wife, a family, kids.”
I flashed Spoon as defiant a look as I could muster and shook my head. “I’d sooner die than lose one acre of this land.”
I was as stitched to the land as my dad. I’d walked, driven, or ridden every acre of our place on horseback. I’d seen it blanketed by snows and parched in drought. I’d brought some of my townie classmates from Hardin out to Willow Creek for show-and-tell as a third-grader, proudly showed them several fence posts I’d helped my dad set, and, with the aid of a ladder for access, even started one of our tractors for them. Willow Creek was as much a part of me as my skin. I couldn’t imagine giving up a single clump of earth on the place to anyone, especially Koffman.
“I expect you would. And I expect Mr. Koffman probably knows that too. Knows and understands that you, your ma, and your pa are a solid brick wall he’ll need to knock down. That’s why you can bet he ain’t in this all by his lonesome. You got folks who support you—so does he.” Spoon eyed the hundred-year-old three-gray-hills Navajo rug that covered much of the room’s wide-plank flooring. “Count on it.”
I found myself thinking, as we both stared at the rug that had been destined for the scrap heap before Spoon’s arrival, how it always came down to Spoon knowing things. He’d known the value of the rug the instant he’d seen it, although to my knowledge he was neither a rug merchant nor a collector. He’d unrolled the rug in front of my mom one evening a few weeks after his arrival and suggested to her that it was valuable enough to warrant an appraisal. After a week of prodding, she’d convinced my dad to take her to Billings and have it appraised. I’d tagged along. When the appraisal had come in at eighteen thousand dollars, it had taken her most of the drive home to recover from the shock. She’d insisted on our return that Spoon keep the rug in his quarters, arguing that since Spoon had found the diamond in the rough, he should be the one to enjoy it for as long as he was here.
I wondered how far Spoon could see into the future and whether he mostly only saw things that would turn out badly. When I thought back to the Black Baldy twin he’d saved by grafting and the blizzard he and I had outrun the previous winter, it sure seemed that way. But for some reason I didn’t want to accept that the visions he had, especially the ones that affected me, always had to be visions of darkness. If he could envision darkness, he could surely envision light. It only made sense as far, as I was concerned, and I hoped his premonitions would take a step in that direction.
“So what’s our next move?” I asked finally.
“’Fraid the next move’s up to Koffman.”
“Think he’d pull something underhanded?”
Spoon shrugged once again without offering either a yes or a no.
“How bad will things get?” I asked, hoping Spoon’s insight might help me prepare for whatever Koffman and Acota had to offer.
“Can’t say. I’ll think on it. For now, why don’t we call it a night?” he said, looking like someone trying his best to put a name to an unpleasant odor.
“Okay,” I said, feeling defeated. Without another word, I turned and left.
As I headed back toward our house in the misty darkness, I had the feeling that Spoon knew more than he was admitting, but I couldn’t be sure. I wasn’t the one, after all, with the ability to see the future.
Seven
Despite my fears and Spoon’s reluctance to predict how and when trouble might hit, the rest of the summer went by smoothly, except when we lost a couple of first-calf heifers in late July to what Spoon and my dad were certain was a wolf, an animal that the state Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department claimed was long gone from our region. Dad filed a report with the department, and Spoon even supplied the authorities with a plaster cast of a partial print of the phantom heifer-killer’s paw. But no one took either Spoon or Dad seriously, and soon the possible wolf killings became just another rangeland myth.
By the time August and the first anniversary of Spoon’s arrival rolled arou
nd, Spoon was up to his elbows researching his roots. He’d discovered that for years he’d lived under a serious misconception, thinking his paternal roots could be traced back to a 9th Cavalry buffalo soldier who had served a stint with Kit Carson at Fort Garland, Colorado, around 1879, before mustering out of the army and heading west to Montana Territory to seek his fortune. The soldier had supposedly settled first in Billings before moving on to the Bozeman region and settling in what is now known as Paradise Valley.
After numerous trips to Hardin, sometimes accompanied by my mom, who seemed insistent that Spoon solve his lineage riddle, excursions to dozens of libraries, off-the-beaten-track ranches, county courthouses, and school district headquarters, and even visits to a couple of county sheriffs’ offices, including those in Butte to the west and Glasgow and Wolf Point to the north, the story of the wandering buffalo soldier unraveled. It fizzled to an end with an eighty-five-year-old former Bozeman county clerk who now lived in a small cottage on the Milk River just outside Glasgow, a town about three hundred miles northeast of our ranch. Spoon learned that her parents had actually known the former buffalo soldier and that the gruff, ebony-skinned mountain man, who’d kept to himself and lived alone in the Gallatin National Forest near Pine Creek, had never been married or fathered any children.
That news sent the normally upbeat Spoon into a tailspin that lasted until he received a postcard from the same woman informing him that she’d forgotten to mention during their meeting that, according to her now long-deceased father, the mountain man had had a friend, another former buffalo soldier who’d come to Montana Territory with him. The friend, to the best of her father’s recollection and now hers, had been killed in an avalanche in the Little Belt Mountains a few years after their arrival, but not before he’d befriended several influential northern Cheyenne tribesmen who’d seemed amazed by the buffalo soldier’s ability to pinpoint the elusive hiding places and winter trail routes and ranges of big game.
Spoon remained euphoric for days after the arrival of that postcard, floating on a sea of hope, convinced that he was as close to zeroing in on his heritage as he’d ever been. When he asked me one day to ride into Hardin with him to visit the courthouse and library to check out a lead he’d gotten from a Crow woman who’d given him information about the soldier killed in the avalanche, I jumped at the chance. The woman, Spoon told me, knew an old Cheyenne man who lived off the reservation in the town of Colstrip and supposedly knew intimate details of the buffalo soldier’s life and death.
As I waited on the front stoop of the bunkhouse, watching Spoon change out of a pair of muddy boots into his favorite pair of Luccheses, the boots he’d chosen the night we met, I sensed that Spoon was hanging his hat on an awful lot of hearsay and that he was setting himself up to be disappointed again. For Spoon, disappointment ignited a certain sullenness, a kind of reluctant bitterness that said to anyone observing him closely, I’ve been cheated. I’d seen that side of Spoon a year earlier, when he’d talked about his fight with the two Crows who’d tried to snooker him at cards, and two months earlier, the morning after we’d had our late-night talk about Easy Ed Koffman’s intentions. That morning, I’d seen Spoon and my dad talking just outside the machine shop. The pensive look on Spoon’s face and his animated gestures as much as said, Whatever happens, don’t let Koffman cheat you outta nothin’, Bill.
The eighteen-mile ride into Hardin in one of the ranch’s ever in-need-of-repair pickups took us from the green lushness of the Willow Creek valley up onto terrain that could only be described as desolate. The hard, barren land was wedded just below the surface to a lime precipitate of caliche that ran just above the water table. I thought about Koffman as we bumped along, aware that where there was caliche, there was certainly shale, and where there was shale, its geologic cousins, coal and oil, couldn’t be far away.
I’d always taken it to be a matter of happenstance that our ranch harbored so much coal. Spoon, however, had a different take. Once I’d heard Spoon suggest to my dad that our fortunes had to do with the fact that the fossils that had become our coal had met their fate by somehow getting segregated from their water source, while the desolate land we were now riding through, land rich in oil and razor-sharp shale, was in fact a far less densely fossilized area.
Despite his interest in the landscape, how it might have been formed, and its true source of precious minerals, Spoon had little use for the formal science of geology, and although he knew that I was fascinated by the science in a future-college-major way, he considered my textbook type of interest totally impractical. When I’d mentioned to him that perhaps the difference between coal being on our land and oil and shale being a greater part of the surrounding rangeland had something to do with the compacting and compressive events that had occurred during the pre-Cambrian geological era, he’d looked up at me, smiled, and said, “Don’t never pay to be too much of a bookworm, TJ. Livin’ in the real world always teaches you a whole lot more.”
In the end, I suspected, it didn’t matter how the minerals lying beneath the thousands of acres of Willow Creek grazing land had managed their way there, or for that matter what Spoon or I thought about their genesis. The bottom line was that most of the world, and Acota Energy in particular, would give its eyeteeth for the coal.
We rode most of the final leg of our trip in silence, Spoon drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and me eyeing the horizon and thinking about how to keep a foot in two worlds.
Hardin, a town of three thousand, moved slowly, and except for ranchers and tourists day-tripping their way into town looking for a respite from their visit to the Custer battlefield, or late-summer fly fishermen stocking up on that special fly they needed to take a trophy-sized rainbow out of the Bighorn, there was little other than July’s Little Bighorn Days that could send the town into a much higher gear.
Spoon pulled the pickup, with our Triangle Long Bar brand, more than a hundred years old, stenciled in black on the front doors, into an angled parking space a few buildings down from the Big Horn County courthouse. As he stretched and adjusted his Stetson, his right arm thumped me in the chest.
“Sorry,” he said. “Almost forgot you were there, you been so quiet. What’s got you so preoccupied?”
“Nothing, really,” I said, bending the truth, aware that for most of the last part of our ride I’d been thinking about something my mom had said the previous evening at dinner. What she’d said, although she hadn’t put it as bluntly as I’d been recalling, was that my time was up. I’d had over a year to explore every working facet of the ranch, and now that I could run the place on my own if it ever came to it, she expected that when January rolled around I’d take my reenergized body and mind and the 4-H scholarship I still had reserved for me off to the University of Montana to study geology and agriscience, as I’d always said I would.
“You’ll have a leg up on most of your classmates,” she’d said. “You’ll be older and wiser, with a full eighteen months of insightfulness on them.” The no-nonsense half smile she’d flashed had let me know that I had no more wiggle room.
When I’d looked to my dad for support, hoping he’d say, “Marva, I need the boy here,” he’d remained silent. He’d had no choice. Years earlier he’d made a pact with my mom that my education would extend beyond high school and the confines of Willow Creek Ranch and that, no matter the toll on the two of them or the cost, I’d go to college. It would be hard to go back on his word to her—we both knew that, and now that Spoon was there to help keep the ranch moving along on an even keel for the first time in years, I suspected my days at Willow Creek were numbered.
The sound of Spoon swinging his door shut and his probing “Sure nothin’s the matter?” moved me out of
my seat.
“Nope.” I jumped out of the truck, trying my best to feign excitement, and eyed the cloudless blue sky as a sudden warm late-summer breeze kissed my face. “Just wondering what kind of winter you’re in for.” The way I said “you’r
e” instead of “we’re” might at one time have given Spoon insight into what was bothering me, but since the search for his roots was pretty much consuming him, I was certain he’d missed the inference.
“Come on up to the courthouse with me.” As was his custom, whether he’d just stepped off a horse or out of a pickup, Spoon dusted himself off. “There’s always the off-chance you might learn somethin’ about your own ancestry while we’re there.”
I nodded and followed him up the steps of the boxy-looking art deco limestone building. Inside, the courthouse, last remodeled in the 1950s, was a rabbit warren of rooms. Dark wood paneling and walls painted an unappealing mud brown soaked up most of the light. Narrow territorial-style windows and maroon Spanish-tile floors, worn smooth from nearly a century of foot traffic, only seemed to enhance the darkness. The building’s saving grace was that it was cool and damp enough by virtue of its placement in the middle of a bank of water-seeking cottonwoods to make you forget that you lived in a place where the humidity often failed to reach ten percent.
I stopped to get a drink of water at the first-floor water fountain as Spoon headed for the clerk and recorder’s office. When I glanced through a window facing the street, I noticed Harvey “Cain” Woodson standing a few steps away from our pickup. Thinking little of his presence, since he was a common Hardin fixture and the four-term sheriff of Big Horn County, I turned and sprinted down the hall to catch up with Spoon.
I reached the clerk and recorder’s office, a room blessed with fifteen-foot ceilings and the only place in the building that seemed to have enough light, to find Spoon talking to Harriet Rankin, a plump, cherub-cheeked, auburn-haired woman in her late thirties. I suspected they’d met before during one of Spoon’s earlier trips to the courthouse, but I wasn’t certain. Harriet, whom I’d known all my life, was a close friend of my mom’s. As Spoon flipped through the pages of a massive four-inch-thick ledger, she smiled at me and said, “Haven’t seen you in a while, TJ. How are things out at the ranch?”