“If you ever wind up with the place,” said his father, “don’t have your horses over here in the spring because it’s heck for locoweed. And larkspur too. So don’t be putting cattle in here before the grass is really up. In 1959 I took a whole truckful of saddle horses to the canners that got locoed right in this exact spot. But whatever you do, even if you graze it flat and the knapweed and spurge cover it up and the wind blows the topsoil to Kansas, don’t let that old sonofabitch Overstreet get it. He tried to break me when I came into this country and he darn near got it done. We get along okay now but his dream is to make his ranch a perfect square and this is a big bite out of his southeast corner.” He stopped and thought a moment, staring persistently in front of himself. “And if the worst should happen and I am gone and he gets it from you and makes it square, don’t let him get the mineral rights. I can see something like this happening with the land, but if he gets what’s underneath he’s cut off your nuts and it’s the Pope’s choir for you, kiddo.”
Joe loved the place but he didn’t expect or really want to end up on it altogether. If Joe was satisfied by the land in which the ranch was situated, and he loved it pretty much wherever his eyes fell, he never quite understood what that had to do with ownership. Right now it was enough to feel his father’s passion for the place and try to speculate about how he went on owning something with such deep satisfaction when it was so far from his home on that golf course in Minneapolis. Joe puzzled over the passion with which his father had made a new life there. His father golfed with enthusiasm in his Bermuda shorts, pounding the ball around the fairways with hostile force, the terror of caddies, shaping the land with his clubs, playing through lethargic foursomes with menace and accumulating large numbers of strokes through his enraged putting. They called him “cowboy” in a way that genially suggested that his skills were not suited to civilized life.
As Joe followed his father down the mile-long slope to the main spring he tried to absorb the plain fact that his father meant that this would one day be his. This was not precisely a soaring thought. He really wondered how he would put his heritage in play. He found the future eerie and he already wanted to paint.
The spring lay at the base of the long slope, in a grove of small black cottonwoods and wild currant bushes. It came out of an iron pipe and poured into the end of an old railroad tank car whose thick steel plating and massive rivets made an indestructible water hole that couldn’t be trampled into muck the way an undeveloped spring could by cows who stayed thirsty and wouldn’t travel to feed, beating the grass down where they lay in diminished vigor. Joe’s father explained all this to him and made it clear that it was he who had hauled this great railroad tank up the mountain and developed the spring, wheelbarrowing gravel to the trench and laying the collector pipe one blistering summer in the 1940s.
“But it was worth it,” he said, “because every cow who ever came here since then got herself a good long drink of cold water.” This made the home on the golf course seem even sadder to Joe, the dawn cries of the foursomes on Sunday even more depressing than he had remembered. The hillsides around Joe and his father were speckled with contented-looking Hereford cattle and their spry calves. His father’s satisfaction was a simple one, complicated only by the distance his success had produced.
The horses were lathered when at the end of the day they were turned out once again, white lines of sweat gathered at the outlines of the saddles. The horses ran back into their pasture, stretched to shake from end to end, celebrated liberty by rolling in the dust, jumping back up to shake and stretch again. Then they jogged over the hill and out of sight. Joe’s father changed in the bunkhouse, and when he came back, carrying a brown briefcase, he was a banker again in an olive green summer suit, a striped tie, and a dapper straw hat.
2
Joe rode with his father in a rental car to visit his Uncle Smitty and Aunt Lureen. They were his father’s brother and sister. It was late afternoon and Lureen would be home from her teaching job. Smitty could always be found at home.
“This is what you call a social obligation,” said his father.
“Oh, I like them, Dad.”
“They’re all yours, son, at least for the summer. I like Lureen and I suppose I should like Smitty better than I do. He’s my brother, after all.”
The house was three narrow stories tall, with sagging porches on the two upper floors; it was clapboard and painted a pale green that stood out against sky and telephone wires. The scudding spring clouds moved overhead rapidly. When Joe looked at the house, its cheap simplicity reminded him of his modest family origins of city park employees, Democratic party flunkies, mill workers, railroad brakemen, mechanics, grocers, ranch hands. It forever fascinated him that such unassuming people could have been so mad with greed and desire for fame or love. Joe’s father was the first and only member of the family to take on the notion of landholding. One uncle had written passionate letters to aborigine women in care of the National Geographic. A cousin had lost his dryland farm in a pyramid scheme. A locket his grandmother had worn all her life contained the photograph of a man not known to the family.
Smitty and Lureen were in the doorway, Lureen in a brown suit she had taught in, and Smitty in the checked shirt and beltless slacks that seemed to suggest well-earned leisure. He looked like a commuter.
They got out of the car and Joe’s father stormed up the short flight of steps with insincere enthusiasm. He hugged Lureen fiercely and pumped Smitty’s thin arm with comradely fervor. Joe stood back smiling until it was his turn for the hugs and handshakes. It was well known that Smitty had great reservations about Joe’s father but they didn’t show until he greeted Joe with a suspicious squint and wary twitching of his eyebrows.
The visit was a raucous parade behind Joe’s father, who thundered through the rooms, refusing Smitty’s suggestion of a drink and Lureen’s of tea. He borrowed the telephone for a quick call to the bank in Minnesota, then hung up the phone conclusively as though his conversation with the bank had been the end of his conversation with Lureen and Smitty.
“Junior’s got to go to work,” he said, gesturing at Joe with his straw hat. He bobbed down to kiss Lureen goodbye, then shot his hand out and let Smitty walk over and shake it. “We’ll call you Christmastime!” he thundered and got around behind Joe, pushing at his shoulder blades until the two of them were out on the street and a very strained Smitty and Lureen were waving at them. “You can’t have a drink with Smitty without having to go his bail that night.”
As they drove, his father said, “Can you imagine a grown man living off his spinster sister like that?”
“I thought Smitty had some problem from the war,” Joe said.