by Lisa Wingate
My father didn’t want me to make the trip to the ranch by myself. The look on his face told me why. He was silently worried that I’d get to the low-water crossing and have a breakdown—the emotional variety, not the automotive kind. He wouldn’t say it, of course. The low-water crossing and everything tied to it were taboo subjects. Rather than mention what was really bothering him, he tried to talk me into the back of the truck by saying there was no sense in wasting gas, there was plenty of room for me, and Mimi would probably like some female company. Mimi was already in the back seat, holding her hand over her nose to filter out the auto-shop aromas of must, dust, and fifty years of axle grease. Frederico was patiently holding open the pickup door, waiting to help me in, as my father and I engaged in debate.
“You can ride up front with us,” Willie offered and started moving a pile of beef jerky wrappers, work gloves, smashed soda cans, tools, and greasy shop towels.
“No, really, I’m fine,” I insisted. The last thing I wanted to do was revisit the low-water crossing trundling along between my father and Willie, or Mimi and Frederico. “My Durango is right in back of the shop. I’ll see you all at the ranch.” I started mentally calculating the time it would take me to go around the long way, so as to avoid Caney Creek altogether. I didn’t want to be reminded that, on a calm day, it was a harmless-looking little trickle of water, both serene and beautiful. I didn’t want to pass the tree line of the Hash-3 or see my father’s house in the distance, and across the field, the tiny stone cottage Danny and I had lived in when we weren’t on the road trying to make it big. I couldn’t predict how I’d feel, passing those places again. In one way, that life seemed like it was never real, and in another way, it seemed like yesterday.
My father, as always, read my mind. “Well, listen, sis, you might want to go around the back way, all right? There’s pretty good potholes in the ol’ crick road.” Old creek road—my father’s attempt at a harmless euphemism. Normally, he would have just called it by its name, Caney Creek Road. He was afraid even that would upset me. “And don’t hurry, neither. We’re gonna do a little sightseein’ ourselves on the way.” He pulled out his pocket watch and checked it. “It’ll take us probably … ohhh … thirty minutes to get out there.”
From inside the truck, Willie gave Dad a confused look but didn’t question him. No doubt he knew that the Barlinger place was only fifteen minutes away.
“All right, Dad,” I said, and hugged him. He held me tightly, as if I were setting off on a long journey rather than driving a few miles out of town. A lump rose in my throat as he kissed me on the top of the head. In the hospital, he always did that before he left for the night.
“I’m glad you’re here, Pug,” he whispered, then let me go, cleared his throat and rubbed his mustache, and climbed into the truck.
I headed out to the car, wiping my eyes and swallowing a spiny cocklebur of mixed feelings. It burned and prickled on the way down, a partly warm, partly painful sensation. On the one hand, it was good to be here, to make my dad happy. It was probably the best time to have come. With everyone so preoccupied with the movie, my return had barely even caused a ripple in the Daily radar.
On the other hand, I felt like I was walking on thin ice, just waiting for the moment the fragile surface would crack and I’d fall through into the raging current beneath. Sooner or later, no matter how far I drove to circumvent it, the low-water crossing on Caney Creek would rise up and find me. I would cross paths with Brother Harve, Miss Beedie, Otis Charles, Miss Lulu, or someone else from the congregation of the little African-American church just beyond the crossing, and we wouldn’t know what to say to each other. In the space of an instant, we would all relive the day when one lapse in judgment, one five-minute delay for brisket sandwiches, one warning not heeded, one in a string of immature marital arguments, one time I shut up and gave in when I shouldn’t have, led to the loss of not only the man who drove into the water, but the man who tried to pull us out—a beloved son, good father, treasured nephew, faithful church member, public servant. A good man who was just doing his job, on patrol on a bad night, bringing out the road cones to block off the crossing so no one would drive through it. Only someone already had.
It wasn’t like we didn’t know better; that was the worst of it. We knew that creek, that crossing. Old Mr. Fuller warned me about it again, frowning from behind the counter at the Buy-n-Bye, as my husband hunkered in the rain outside, putting enough gas in the truck to get us home. In the trailer, the horses kicked and squealed impatiently, restless in the storm, tired from the long trip.
“Better go around the long way around, Puggy,” Mr. Fuller said, moving lazily to the deli case. I’d ordered a couple of sandwiches, because after all evening on the road, Danny and I were starving. “Gully washer like this, the water’ll be over the low-water crossin’.”
“Might be,” I agreed, squinting toward the window, watching the rain slash splinters of water on the glass. I waited, leaning drowsily against the Icee machine while old man Fuller pulled a hunk of brisket from the deli case and made our sandwiches. He always takes forever, I thought. I shouldn’t have ordered anything. But it was late, and Danny was mad because he’d missed his calf and hadn’t won anything, but I’d placed in the barrel racing. I was hoping the brisket sandwiches would cheer him up. He honked impatiently as Mr. Fuller took out a butcher knife. The metal caught a flash of lightning, then sliced through the beef, juice oozing out over the cutting board, dripping onto the floor. …
My body rushed into the memory and my mind turned hazy. I felt water all around me. The brisket juice turned to blood. I tasted it dripping into my mouth, blocking out the air, choking me.
The horses were screaming, thrashing desperately against the trailer. I felt the seatbelt tight against my throat, the water swirling over my legs, sucking the truck downward. The floorboard shifted, metal groaned, a tree limb pushed through the window, scratched my face. The seatbelt slid free. Danny hollered something over the rushing water. I grabbed the tree limb, tried to pull myself up.
The horses kicked and struggled, their voices a chilling, terrible sound. The truck lights blinked, then fizzled. Everything was impossibly dark. The seat jerked sideways, slamming my head against the side of the truck. I screamed for Danny, felt the force of the water separating me from the vehicle, dragging me through the window with the branches. Something in my arm snapped and I screamed again. I couldn’t hear Danny or the horses. I couldn’t hear anything but the water, terribly cold, impossibly fast, wicked and determined, filled with debris. I couldn’t feel anything but wave after wave of pain.
I saw a flashlight beam just before I lost consciousness. …
Blinking hard, I pushed the sensations away, brought myself back to the alley, to a sunny summer day without a drop of rain in sight. It’s the past, I told myself. It’s over. It happened. Let it be. But my eyes burned. I felt it as if it were yesterday. Danny was mad about the sandwiches. The last thing he’d said before driving the truck into the current on the low-water crossing was that if I hadn’t waited around for stinking barbecue sandwiches, we would have gotten there before the water topped the pavement. If, if, if …
Let it be. Let it rest. Let them rest. I tried to banish the memory as I left Main Street and circled the long way through the hills on roads that were familiar, a part of me like the lines on the palm of my hand. As the scenery passed, I relived the memories of places I’d worked in the summers, cutting and hauling hay with my father, combining oats, working to help neighbors bring in cattle for vaccinations, worming, weaning, and sorting. They were good memories, those mornings we rose early and loaded horses or tractors in the cool predawn air. I slept on my father’s shoulder while we drove to wherever we were going. When we got there, the sun would just be coming up, and we’d go to work. We’d ride horses, or drive tractors, or load hay wagons all day, then go home hot, and tired, and dust covered, but it was all right because we were with Dad. Anything Dad did, we wan
ted to do.
I could still see Kemp, too small and stringy to pick up a bale of hay, grabbing the wires and dragging the bales to the trailer, because he didn’t want Dad to think he couldn’t help. That was the year Mr. Hill, who owned the Hilltop auction barn, had his second heart attack. My father took over his hay crop and took on auctioneering three nights a week. Kemp and I survived on concession stand hamburgers and Wacky Wafers, but we didn’t mind. We played on the top of the tall bleacher-like seats around the auction ring until we were dirty from head to toe, sweaty, smelly, and exhausted. Aunt Donetta wanted us to come stay with her after school started in the fall, but Dad wouldn’t hear of it. He knew Kemp and I would do our homework up on the top bleacher, then eventually spread the saddle pads, or horse blankets, or an old slicker, curl up in a fine layer of dust, and drift off. The rattle of the auction call, the sharp cries of the bid spotters, the plaintive cries of weanling calves separated from their mothers, the occasional tap of the gavel would sing us off to sleep like a lullaby. We’d wake in the morning, having been driven home and put in bed without knowing it. Once in a while, if we were lucky, Dad would need us in the hayfield the next day, and we’d get to miss school. Assignments can be made up, after all, my father insisted, but a hay crop waits for no man. …
The sheen of good memories settled over the road, and I rolled down the window, let the warm breath of summer flow over me, took in the scents of cedar and juniper, prairie grasses and caliche dust from the road. The thick, sturdy leaves of live oak trees rustled slightly in the breeze as I passed under their yawning arms. I remembered their music. How many times had I lain down in their thick shade and drifted to sleep listening to them sing? The sound of them, the feel of them was home. It was shelter and comfort. Peace. Relaxing in my seat, I let the drive be what it was—a journey through a place I loved and memories I’d kept packed away, like a box of mementos forgotten in the back of a closet.
By the time I reached the heavy piled-stone corner posts that marked the boundary of the old Barlinger ranch, now the Anderson-Shay project, I felt good. The day was bright, the sky an endless blue that seemed filled with possibilities. On the horizon, the hills basked in the uneven light of sun and shadow, dotted with live oak groves and scrappy cedars, feathery mesquite trees and squatty thickets of the prickly pear cactus that gave shelter to jackrabbits and roadrunners and, as my father had always warned us, rattlesnakes.
Ahead, a fencing crew was repairing the tumbledown gateway, the laborers cleaning old mortar from the limestone blocks and putting them back together like giant puzzle pieces, while a crew foreman ran a string from one guidepost to the next and squinted down the line, checking for plumb. I recognized the crew boss. Pearly Parsons had been building fences for as long as I could remember. When he finished here, this gateway would be ready to go another hundred years, and the fence would be as straight as an arrow, as tight as a fiddle string. The posts would be so even you could use them to count the seconds as you drove past.
My father admired Pearly, even though Pearly was rumored to have only made it through the sixth grade in school and did most of his fencing math by a system no one understood. My father said that if Pearly wanted a post hole four feet deep, and he ran into a rock at three feet six inches, he didn’t cut off the post, he broke up the rock. More than once, when people made jokes about Pearly’s hand-written advertisements on the bulletin board at the café, my father confronted them. He said that any man who thought less of Pearly because of his lack of education had only to look at one of the fences Pearly built. Those fences would be there long after the achievements of most men had faded away.
Pearly himself thumbed his nose at the educational issues. The cab of his flatbed truck and his ads at the café always read:
Pearly Parsons, PHD
Post Hole Digger
Fencing, welding, post drilling
The harder the ground, the bigger the shovel
Every fence true and straight
Fair prices
Nothing wasted
It was a good motto for life, my father said. When we complained that a school assignment was too hard, whined that we were being picked on, or said we couldn’t do something, Dad quoted Pearly Parsons. The harder the ground, the bigger the shovel. …
I stuck my hand out the window and waved at Pearly as I turned into the driveway. Pearly tipped his hat without taking his eye off the string.
Ahead, the old Barlinger headquarters looked more like a construction site than a ranch. The cavernous limestone home that had been the site of haunted houses, teenage parties, and more double-dog dares than I could count was now surrounded by scaffolding. A painting crew was scraping window frames and eaves as a workman in white coveralls carried new panes of glass to the wide double doors. A drilling truck was at work on the well, and high atop the third-story roof, a chimney sweep in a black stovepipe hat stood against the sky, slowly moving his brush three stories up and down.
As I drove closer, I could see that the barn and corrals had also been cleaned and repaired, and behind the old orchard, areas had been leveled for new construction. The extent of the work was awe-inspiring.
Passing by the house, I considered the almost frenzied effort to reclaim what the grass, and the mustang grapevine, and the mesquite thickets had all but absorbed into the land. The money and sense of purpose involved here were staggering. For years, everyone in Daily had assumed that the remnants of the once-grand Barlinger ranch would remain in financial limbo until finally falling beneath the grass and the brush and disappearing altogether.
My father had once told Kemp and me that only a miracle could bring the place back to life, but apparently the miracle had arrived. Who could have predicted that the little girl from the trailer house down the road would win a TV talent contest, make big-money friends, and come back to reclaim the homestead that had been left for dead?
Drifting through the barnyard, I looked for my father’s truck or signs of Nate and Justin Shay. There seemed to be nobody around but the work crews. Apparently, my father and Willie hadn’t made it there yet. There was no telling where Nate and Justin Shay had ended up. Maybe they were lost somewhere in the backcountry. Once you were a mile or two out of town, all the roads looked the same and only half of them were marked.
Movement by the barn caught my eye. I parked the car and climbed out, then walked around the corner. A black truck with monster tires and a ridiculous airbrushed paint job touting The Horseman was parked near the corral gate. I remembered it vaguely from my not-quite dream last night. Beside the truck, Nate and Amber Anderson stood shading their eyes, looking at something in the corral. Squinting into the sun to see what was happening, I moved closer. The corral gate was open, and in the pasture beyond, several horses bolted wildly from fence to fence, cavorting and kicking up their heels. From the look of things, they’d just been let out the gate by Justin Shay, who stood seeming somewhat bemused in his K-Mart cowboy getup.
I had a bad feeling one of the horses was Lucky Strike. He was running up and down the far fence alone, gliding over the ground on the long, graceful strides of a Thoroughbred, covering the rough terrain at a blinding pace, completely oblivious to rocks, mesquite bushes, jackrabbit holes. No doubt he’d never seen a barbed wire fence, either. An alarm bell rang in my chest as he skidded to a halt just before crashing into the corner, then did a ninety-degree rollback and dashed up the side fence whinnying and snorting, head high and nostrils flared. The other horses caught up to him finally, and he wheeled and kicked, then started running again.
Justin Shay stepped away from the gate, moving into position to head off Lucky Strike when he turned the next corner.
“Hey, don’t … get back!” I hollered, but my voice was lost in the noise.
Amber screamed and covered her mouth as Lucky Strike barreled toward Justin, who seemed to be under the mistaken impression that a cowboy hat waved in the air would stop a twelve-hundred-pound racehorse, running wild after h
aving been turned loose in a pasture, probably for the first time in his life.
“Justin, watch out!” Nate’s warning carried into the field. Scaling the fence in a move worthy of an Olympic athlete, he ran across the round pen with Amber and me only a few paces behind. Lucky Strike saw us coming and shied away at the last minute, missed Justin, and left him in a cloud of dust next to the fallen cowboy hat. Spitting out a string of profanities, Justin jumped up and down on the hat, picked it up, and ring-tossed it into a tree, then cussed when it hung on a branch and wouldn’t fall back into his hands. He looked around for something to throw at it.
“Leave it,” I said. “You’ll stir the horses up even more.”
Ramming his hands onto his tightly packed abs, he glared at me. “This is idiotic!” he roared, stabbing a finger into the air. “That horse isn’t trained. He attacked me in the corral, and then when I ran out the gate, he nearly mowed me over.”
“You shouldn’ta opened the gate,” Amber muttered. Being a country girl, she probably knew that if a very large animal wants to get out badly enough, it’s not going to care whether one itty-bitty human is standing in the way.
Justin opened his mouth and raised a finger to defend his position, then gave me a bewildered look and said, “I just came out here to show Amber and Nate the horses.” He flailed a hand impatiently in the direction of the gate. “When Willie was here yesterday, he just opened some gates and shook a bucket, and they came in.”
“I don’t imagine Lucky Strike was in the round pen at the time.” Judging from his current behavior, Lucky Strike wasn’t the docile, come-to-the-bucket sort.
“Well … no he wasn’t in the corral yesterday.” The faraway image of Lucky Strike running wild reflected off Justin’s mirrored glasses. “But I didn’t know he was going to, like, mow me over. I told him to back off.”