“I didn’t mean it that way. You took that trouble from the cow as good as any man twice your size.”
“You’re a bad liar.”
“I’m not trying to lie.”
Her look is soft and she tells him to fish into the coat on the back of the door and bring what’s in the front right pocket. He finds the fifty and hands it to her.
“I know it’s not much, but please take it.” She sounds annoyed.
“Don’t mind about all that.” He steps back from the bed, from the money.
“If it wasn’t for you, I might still be up in that field.”
“Just doing my job. Not even that well, to be honest.”
“Give me a break. You saved my life, Ray.” Her stare is fierce. “And now you’re up here helping us. It’s too much.”
“End of season, we’ll worry about making it right.”
She glares at him, and he knows stubborn women enough to bow his head. He pats her hand. “I know you’re good for it.”
He spends the rest of the day mending fences. Every little bit, he stops to notice the line of juniper posts running straight as buttons down a shirt and he takes it as a sign that he might, maybe, be worth more than a bent fucking penny.
11
SUSAN GOES OUT IN the white dawn, hunting sign. There are muddy footprints. There is Ray’s car. There is the near-empty fifth behind the shed.
A canopy of wings overhead pierces the sky. Head back, she stares up.
Quickquickquickquickquick. Her heartbeat pulses to match the ancient staccato sound. Nothing else matters. She holds her breath, shuts her eyes tight. Thank you. Then they are gone, heading north to Wyoming and beyond.
“Those sandhills are beauts.” Ray’s voice startles her.
“I was looking for you,” she stutters, “but I couldn’t find you.”
“What’s doing?”
Look him in the eye. Ray Stark and his sad eyes. Ask him. Now.
He will bite his lip and spit. He will tell her to try and rest. He will say that Jackie’s the one who needs help.
She is about to offer, she’s working up to it, but maybe she has been standing there not talking for too long—Kelly says this happens—because Ray jumps in first, says he has to get down to the lower field.
“I haven’t been down to the lower field in a while.”
It isn’t what she meant to say.
“There’s a doe down there, stuck on the fence,” he says. “I’m gonna see if I can spring her, but hell, I haven’t done this in a long time.”
It’s her fault. He can see that right away. Her feet melt into the ground.
“Come along?” he asks.
She nods. Yesyesyesyesyes. Years ago, she had waited months for him to ask her that question.
They load tools into the truck. Ray grabs the Ruger from the mudroom, just in case, which makes her stomach whirl around. Dad taught her how to shoot that gun when she was eight: Put your feet apart. Steady your body. Never lock your elbows. Find your aim. And always, always, keep your eyes open.
Dad had close relations with his weapons; the Ruger, forty years old, a gift from his own dad, was relied on and cared for and babied. Some Sunday afternoons, he would disassemble the gun on the kitchen table. From a tackle box would come a little wire brush, soft shammy patching, bluing, and an eye-dropper bottle of oil. He’d work the oil down into the hammer, rock it back and forth with his thumb, squeeze the trigger and rock back again, and then he would hold it to his ear and rock it back and forth until he heard a clear deep click, a beautiful click, the sound of a blackbird’s warble. He’d mess with that gun for more than an hour; she wasn’t expected to ask questions, to do anything more than watch.
She will never shoot that gun again.
Ray always has known how to ask a question and he tries to get her talking, but she doubles back on him.
“No, you tell me how you are.”
“I’m OK, I guess.” He keeps tapping the steering wheel with his middle finger and rubbing his hand through his stubble. “It’s strange not working for the sheriff. I guess it’s got me a little sideways.”
“I know what that’s like.”
But it’s like he doesn’t hear her. He points.
“There she is. Dumb fucking luck.”
The top strands of barbed wire trap the doe’s hooves like they’re caught in a twist tie. The animal doesn’t move at the sound of the four-wheeler. She hangs from the trap, her face in the mud. Her body is splayed against the fence.
They stop and get out, quiet. Susan crouches beside the car but Ray slides in close to the doe.
“Easy, girl. Easy,” Ray whispers as he approaches. The doe doesn’t stir, doesn’t look at him. All the skittish in her drained away.
Her cousins and aunts and sisters and maybe even her babies, all of them would’ve seen her there and not been able to do a thing. Every night there’d been near a hundred deer coming down from the snow-clogged mountains to feed on pasture. The doe would’ve seen them, smelled them, and watched them go.
With the long pole, Ray tries to pry the wire below her hooves up and over. It won’t give. He tries again. Again it doesn’t work.
“Shit.” He throws the pry bar down.
Susan looks at the truck but her boots won’t move. Go. Jackie would get the gun. Jackie was always a better shot. This is penance. This is what you get. The doe’s skinny chest heaves, defeated, already done.
“You want the Ruger,” she says. It’s not a question; it’s defeat.
“Maybe.”
He takes wire snips from his pocket and, talking soft the whole time, easing up on the doe, he makes a cut in the fence. And just like that, the doe spins onto her side and hits the ground with a thud. She breathes mud.
Ray circles back to Susan and crouches beside her. She can feel him staring at her but she won’t look at him. She is focused on the doe. Get up. Get up.
And then the animal tucks those trembling legs under her and pops up on all fours. She looks around and stares at them like she knows she’s prey, and bounces off into the woods, her white butt rising and falling.
“Well that’s something,” says Ray. “See that, Sue? It ain’t all bad. You OK?”
“I’m so sorry, Ray.” She looks at the cuff of his jacket, at the broken fence, the edge of the woods. “About the other night. I’m so ashamed.”
“Sue? You going to tell me what you’re talking about?”
She looks at him then, really looks. She had decided all those years ago when he didn’t pick her that he wasn’t worth her time. She had been wrong. When Camila was pregnant, the only thing she could keep down for those early months were smoothies, and Ray made her one every day. He helped his gramps out on the ranch when his dad left. His mom had early dementia and was sent to an institution in Junction, and Ray didn’t talk about it but it was another thing to appreciate about him, that he knew something about loss. The guy can fix anything, make anything better. There is a yellow dot in his blue eyes like the sun on water.
“It’s my fault, about Jackie.” She whispers it into his canvas coat. “I was so out of it. I should’ve known something was wrong.”
“You didn’t set that cow running toward your sister. You’re all right.” He throws his arm around her. He smells like cigarettes and hay, like her dad used to smell.
“I should be helping. This is my land. Will you let me help?”
“Of course. I need all the help I can get.”
The next morning, Susan walks behind Ray, fence staples in her pockets. His footfalls touch the ground like flint against rock. He’s wearing the right clothes, flannel shirt, wide-brimmed hat, leather gloves. She forgot her hat; her sweater is too heavy. She tries to step inside his footprints but they’re too far apart.
After an hour of moving along fence line in the lower field, mending, the house disappears from view. The knife in her pocket, her dad’s old pocketknife, knocks against her thigh with every step: keep going, k
eep going. Chicken runs ahead, flushing swallows from the poplars, a blur of color in flight. The sun rises bright in a blue sky. The air is cool. The baby calves wobble in their shiny Pantene-brown coats. Snowmelt floods the ditch.
“It’s spring and we’re sprung.” The exclamation point in her voice is too much. It wasn’t as clever out loud as it sounded in her head.
“Whatever you say, Sue.” Ray squints at some rusted wire, his body collapsed to the task. “Will you string this out while I set this post?”
“Don’t you love being outside?”
“It’s better than a hole in the head.”
Susan pinches the skin on the side of her neck. If she had ever learned a prayer, she would say it now.
He asks for the fence staples and he asks for stringing wire and he doesn’t say anything else for forty-five minutes. This isn’t anything to take personally. Not really.
Except that she remembers Ray, a ghost of his younger self, when he was young and skinny and sunburnt, standing on the back of a trailer in this same field, haying with the rest of them. His smile used to creep into his face like a surprise. There was something solid, calm in him, that put people at ease. Before heading back to town, he used to kiss his gramps on the cheek, a rare gesture of love between men. She had thought she was cooler than him. It wasn’t until later, when it was too late, that it was clear she’d been wrong.
At the edge of the upper field, where the land is too hardpan at the surface to dig a post hole, an old rock jack has tipped over, the bottom support torn off. Ray kicks the bottom cross piece and spits. There’s a crosshatch of wrinkles by his eyes. He looks out across the field, his features hard; if he sees ghosts on this land, they aren’t friendly.
“You all got timbers in the barn?”
“I loaded a few up in the back of the rig before we left.”
He looks up, a smile tip-toeing in his eyes.
“Good thought, Sue.”
They talk about what lumber and nails can be salvaged and about the merits of narrowing the angle and should they fix what’s been done or rebuild it entirely of a new design. They decide to keep it, to resemble the way of her dad. Ray’s just being polite, including her in all this discussion, but it means everything to her.
“You miss working with your grandpa?” she asks. “Seemed like you liked working up here.”
“Long time ago.” He bends to his knees and begins to take off the old wire. His voice is tired. “We work hard, might get this done by lunch.”
They pull out rocks the size of gravestones. Sweat pours out of Susan. It’s hot dusty work with them both on their knees looping new wire, rebuilding. Chicken runs between them and around them, his tail high. The time passes quickly, the two of them working together steadily, and in a little over an hour, they’re done. They stand back admiring their work, and only then does Susan realize: she hasn’t thought about Kelly, about Wyoming, all morning.
“That looks all right,” says Ray.
“It’ll hunt.”
And then it happens. The smile creeps into his face, floods it, a gift. And she laughs and then he laughs too.
“This is the best day I’ve had in a long time.”
“Girl, you got to get out more.”
“I know.” But she doesn’t stop smiling. A thousand blue birds fly across the sky. She would give anything to hold onto this moment, to cast it in galvanized steel. Her hand finds the knife in her pocket and pulls it out, the sun bright against the blade.
“I want you to have this.” She holds it out to him.
“I can’t take that.”
“My dad always liked you.”
“Sue.”
“Please, Ray. You’re helping us so much. It’d mean something to me.”
Ray picks up the bone handle and admires the silver inlay. It’s solidly made in the way of old things.
“They don’t make men like your dad anymore.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
He holds her eye and nods, puts the knife into his jean pocket. The sun warms her back and the smell of sage rises from the ground to meet them.
12
AFTER A WEEK, IT’S clear that Ray Stark can show up mostly on time, that he’s still a nice guy. Their conversations about the herd are the best part of Jackie’s day. But whether or not he’s competent is hard to size from her bedroom window. That morning he’d told her that he looked forward to mending fences. No one thinks that.
Using an old mop handle as a cane, Jackie manages the hallway, the door, the porch steps, one, one thousand, two, two thousand, breathe, move, breathe, move.
Susan stands in front of the truck’s passenger door, her hands on her hips. Their dad’s old hat is too big for her, the felt brim almost to her eyebrows. Her face a scowl.
“The ditch road is too bumpy.”
They have been over this. Jackie needs to check the work; Dad would check the work. A person can lose everything on a slapdash style. Their dad had told her this, repeatedly, especially when looking at her math homework. Too often she would understand the concept but forget to carry the one, forget to check her work. And so an A minus would slide to a B. It had offended her that mastery of concept should be diminished by a simple sloppy mistake. Her dad, usually so quiet, usually so hard to read, had made himself and his disappointment absolutely clear: you have got to take more care. Jackie looks down at her bruised body and cringes.
“Come on. Load up, Chicken. We only have forty-five minutes before dark.”
Chicken’s tail wags and he jumps onto the back like his bones were made of springs.
“Ray’s doing a great job; everything’s going good.”
“I have to get out there. I have to see it for myself.”
“But I’ve been out there with him. I’ve seen it.”
If Jackie watches another news show, if she sits up in the old bed trying and failing to read through the stack of medical journal articles for her research proposal, if she snaps at Susan and then feels bad for snapping, if she thinks again about her dad and the mysteries of his life, if she does any of this for another minute she will officially be worthless. She needs to smell the sky and see the grass. “Sue. Please.”
Susan won’t budge until Jackie promises to tell if it hurts too badly and consents to only visit the near field. Two minutes into the drive Jackie is pushing up her sleeves, the sweat rising with each bump in the road, and the road is made of bumps, and the old truck spews exhaust. Her ribs are cracking deeper. The stiches in her belly pulling at the seam. Pain is only in the brain. She has no choice.
“You’re pale.” Susan tries to sound like someone with medical training.
“I’m fine.” Jackie holds onto her sides to try and keep her ribs from bouncing. “Watch the road; you’re too close to the ditch.”
The willow branches are redding up in knots. Red Indian paintbrush and blue larkspur pop on the hillside above the ditch. The first wildflowers of the season. If Jackie focuses on them, their bits of color, the pain is not as bad. It gives back, this place. Her body softens and she looks hard out the window, hard enough to imprint each section so that she can remember it later when she is alone in her room.
Susan talks about how she’s been mending fences and feeding out in the morning, like she invented the idea of hard work.
“That’s great, Susan.”
Brown meltwater flows fast through the irrigation ditch, coming down off Mount Baldy. The level might hold off a drought if there is one this summer. From this vantage, the fields are lush with the leavings of winter. The alfalfa is coming in green. A new calf runs and bucks; in just days on earth, its balance is already perfect.
Susan drives up close to the juniper staves, strung with strands of barbed wire. The posts Ray replaced, the ones that had gone to rot or were knocked clean by elk, run straight. A sign of planning and workmanship; a statement of time invested.
“It looks right, doesn’t it?” Susan turns to smile, the smack of I-to
ld-you-so smeared across her mouth.
“Keep going; let’s see to the rock jack.”
Everything looks fine. Except her idea of fine and her dad’s idea of fine might not be the same. There is the distinct possibility that she may not know enough to know what’s wrong, what needs to be done.
Jackie stares at the side of Susan’s face and wishes her friend Jean were sitting beside her on the seat instead. Her funny and thoughtful roommate in Denver would understand this feeling. She would know the right thing to say.
They had met the first week of medical school, staring at each other over a dead body. Anatomy class. Jackie can’t remember exactly what Jean said that day, or on any of the subsequent hundreds of days they spent together. It was more a tone feeling. She was the first friend Jackie had ever had where they had the kind of conversations that tangented and maneuvered through one exciting, endless subject after the next. The kind of conversations where the sort of person that Jackie had always wanted to be, hoped to be, seemed like a possibility. But now Jean is in Denver, living a life that could not be more different from the one happening here in this old, barely functioning truck.
The sun, tucked behind a thick cloud, casts a flat light. There is no shadow, just the gray world. Jackie leans her head against the cold window and stares outside, longing to see her father’s long legs walk across the fields toward them.
“Remember how if Dad found a nail in the rig after you’d been mending, he’d bring it home and lay it on your dinner plate?” Jackie says. “He wouldn’t throw away one lousy nail.”
“Those old horseshoe nails in the Folgers cans in the shed. I remember. The staples Ray uses are way easier.”
Dad’s hands were always red, like they’d been boiled. The rough of them as they threaded her hair.
“I hated mending fences.” Jackie stares at her fingernails, wide and short like his. Digging post holes, her teenage self used to dream about when she could drive away from this place. Being a doctor seemed like a noble enough cause that even Dad could get behind it. “‘Looks like an old lady made this fence.’ Remember how he’d say that?”
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