I’d been going out to the ranch almost as Gladys and Wiley’s only family by the time Dr. Olsson turned up asking if he could exercise his bird dog. He was new to the area, having bought himself a little cottage, but he hadn’t yet made any friends, though he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Far more interested in finding a place to run the dog, he was pretty deft at fishing out information about the local landowners, the location of creeks, who had a grain field, etc. He was certainly not fooling anyone, but Gladys and Wiley liked him and became, for a while, his only friends. Then he met my parents and they hit it off too, because really Dr. Olsson was the kind of solid fellow you couldn’t help but like. He had the look of a onetime football player, which he was, and despite plenty of sore joints he bounded around pretty well. Looking back, I think Dr. Olsson was no more than middle-aged. He first took a shine to me as a way of ingratiating himself with the grown-ups, I think, but maybe he actually liked me. He really seemed to give a damn about how I would turn out.
Gladys and Wiley understood me too, even enjoying my awful timing and geekish silences. They believed I was smart and knew how to work and that I would eventually find myself if I got out of town and away from my parents. While personally fond of my mother and father, they thought they lacked common sense in raising me and considered my mother’s thermal relationship with Jesus to be beyond the pale. “Jesus is your friend,” Gladys once told me, “but let’s leave it at that.” I later had a spell of poetry reading and in the poems of Saint Theresa found a new version of the Savior, who appeared as a sort of demon lover with all the tools of electrifying conquest. Saint Theresa can make Christ sound like a nine-battery Chinese vibrator. After that came Abelard and Heloise with their thrilling menu of mixed messages. I like to think it was otherwise with my poor mother, but God only knows what they taught her in Arkansas. She was certainly fixated and said of her own father, a crooked door-to-door shoe salesman, that he had “gone to hell with a broken back.” I’m pretty well over all this, I say, but there was a day when the flames danced just beyond the next hill.
So Wiley said, “I had several chances to try something else, but the land claimed me and I was grown old before I realized the land didn’t care about me.”
“How about Gladys?”
“Neither one of us. We’re like two ants crawling over it.”
I suppose this made Wiley sound like a pessimist, which maybe he was, but his day-to-day demeanor was that of a cheerful, optimistic man. This seemed to be the case with people who knew the score, even if it was not encouraging, as though encouragement were just a matter of being pressed into the unknown.
Gladys and Wiley assumed correctly that I was headed for college and that our encounters hereafter would be social calls only. Their new friend Dr. Olsson was nudging me in the direction of education too. Therefore, they would need new help, and indeed that had long been the case, though they had made do with tramps and jailbirds and schoolboys like me. As it was well known that ranch work was hard and underpaid, the pickings were slim, and many of the men they interviewed were, if experienced, broken down or, if inexperienced, not able-bodied. The only exception was a lanky, gum-chewing wise guy in a hot-rod Ford named Dale Brewer. A lazy, scheming, no-account ladies’ man, Dale would be the child Gladys and Wiley never had. They took him into their capacious hearts.
Once after school and during a late-spring snow, Dale and I were feeding cows from a wagon, tossing the bales out as we cut the binder twine. One bale had hit the ground still bound, and Dale got down to cut the twine. As he bent over to do this, an old swinging-bag cow butted him onto his face. Dale jumped up in a rage and screamed at the cow, “Someday I’ll be rich and you’ll be a thousand pounds of Sloppy Joes!”
It turned out to be true. Dale ended up with great wealth.
I was simply summer help, but Dale hoped to keep this job forever. I don’t quite know why Wiley and Gladys took to him as they did; he was an absolute menace around machinery, the only thing that interested him on the ranch, and he broke more than he could fix. We had a low-boy trailer that was in constant use hauling farm equipment in to the John Deere dealership for repair, usually on account of Dale’s neglect. The last summer I worked on White Bird, Dale had taken over the irrigation, resulting in terrible friction with the neighbors. Wiley declined to intervene or bank on his years of goodwill because he wanted Dale to learn for himself how the water was shared and apportioned; but Dale just argued with people, and eventually a ditch rider was assigned to us and everyone had to meet his expenses as he adjudicated every drop that came through the head gate. A ditch rider brings shame to the people of a watershed, a public announcement that the neighbors don’t know how to get along with one another. Once Dale had his share of the water, he did almost nothing with it, and the small amount of alfalfa that ought to have been irrigated dried up on the meadows. Wiley and Gladys just let it happen as part of the education of Dale. Instead of attending to the appropriate chores of damming and spreading water, Dale focused all his attention on a badger living in the middle of the alfalfa field that had made a great, unsightly burrow, in the mouth of which his striped face could be seen. One day Dale handed me an old J.C. Higgins rifle with iron sights and told me to shoot the badger. “I’d do it, but I’m nearsighted.”
Well, I tried and failed, both because of the wiliness of the badger, who after a few of my inaccurate shots, grew evasive, and because the old gun had probably never been sighted in; it seemed to me that the shots landed nowhere near where I aimed. It didn’t help my accuracy that the several glimpses I’d got of the badger had induced sort of an attachment to it, giving me the sense of trying to kill something which wished only to live.
Dale was quite furious at my failures and professed to be fed up with this badger ruining the alfalfa, alfalfa that was going nowhere for lack of water. He put poison at the mouth of the burrow without effect. He tried running water from the ditch toward the hole but ended up eroding part of the meadow. This finally came to Wiley’s attention, and he wordlessly shoveled the appropriate repair to the ditch bank, his silence betraying his dissatisfaction with Dale and maybe even with me. He walked off toward the house without speaking.
That night in the bunkhouse, Dale said that if we didn’t do something about the badger we were going to get our asses kicked off the ranch. I was so young and credulous at this time that I thought Dale knew something about badgers I didn’t, but now I still believe the problem was the lack of irrigation. Dale pulled a wooden box containing narrow, waxy red cylinders from under his bunk. He held up a stick of dynamite and said it had the badger’s name on it. “Wiley ain’t going to like this, but he’ll like it after that badger goes to the next world.”
Before breakfast the next day, we’d bundled several sticks around a blasting cap and led the fuse back across the meadow to a boulder we meant to get behind at the right moment. It was hot already and the sun was barely up, throwing white bands of light through the cottonwoods and willows along the ditch bank. We sat behind the boulder with a box of kitchen matches and took a last look around before lighting the fuse, which hissed and sparkled to our satisfaction before disappearing inside itself. It seemed to take such a long time getting to the dynamite that we stood up to see what went wrong just when the blast occurred, sending a wash of soil in every direction and throwing the badger nearly forty feet in the air, where it burst into flame and landed in the desiccated alfalfa, setting the meadow ablaze, a fire that quickly burned out of control. Despite the efforts of our extremely capable volunteer fire department, Gladys and Wiley lost much of their hay crop. In front of the firemen, and with an oddly contemplative expression on his face, Wiley knocked Dale senseless and allowed it was time for me to get ready for school.