“Oh, he did, he did. But I was in the same goddamn war. Listen to me, I want to make a long story short. Don’t ever take your eyes off Smitty. He’s dumb like a fox. Cut Smitty a little slack and he’ll take her all.”
They drove back out toward the ranch. “I wish I could have found a way of staying in this country,” said his father. “But any fool can see it’s going nowhere. Still, you look at it and it just makes you think, What if? You know what I mean?” Joe was so startled by what for them was a rare intimacy that he looked straight down the road and waited for his stop. He thought he knew exactly what his father meant. What if.
Joe’s father dropped him at the Overstreet headquarters, next to the tin-roofed granary and saddle shed and bunkhouse where Joe would live for the summer. He leaned over and gave Joe a hug. Joe felt his great body heat and smelled the strong and heartening aftershave lotion.
“Well, son,” he said, “it’s time to whistle up the dogs and piss on the fire. Have a good summer, and keep an eye on things. You make a hand and they’ll have to use you. Then you can watch. Think of it as being yours someday and you’ll watch fairly closely.”
“Tell Mom hi for me.”
“In particular,” said his father, “the hay ground. If they aren’t changing water three times a day they’re lying to both of us.”
All of Joe’s father’s quirks, including this one of not listening to him closely, only made Joe love him more. He loved the motion of his father, the bustle, the clear goals he, Joe, could not always understand. After all, he was the only father Joe would have and Joe seemed to know that.
3
Joe was over at the headquarters of the Caywood Fork the next day to get his orders. It was first light and the big riverine cottonwoods that hung over the somber headquarters buildings seemed to hold the last of night in their dense foliage. He had no car for the summer and he’d had to walk. The dogs barked at his arrival and Otis Rosewell came around from behind the saddle shed leading a horse. Joe walked over to him and stopped. Rosewell gazed at him. Finally, a small smile played over his lips.
“Must be tough around your camp,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your old man.”
“Yes, he is,” Joe conceded, wondering in dismay if he was failing some test of loyalty. But he thought Rosewell had extended a small gesture of amiability and he didn’t want it to slip away. It could be a long summer.
“Do you know how to run a swather or a bale wagon?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Can you fence?”
“Sure. And I can run a backpack sprayer, you know, for malathion or whatever.”
“Well, most of the fence on your old man’s place is falling down because he never took care of it and because it was fenced poorly in the first place. But I imagine he thinks it’s perfect and I want you to make his dreams come true because my yearlings are pouring through the sonofabitch like water. Get yourself a pocket notebook and start walking that fence. Pull it up when you can and rebuild it where you have to. Knock out that old crooked cedar and put in some steel. You can get a sledge, stretcher, pliers, post pounder, and staples in the shop and you can use the old Ford to haul it around.”
“I’ll get started today.”
“That’s right. And you’ll never finish. Now let me tell you something else. You was sent to us. If you don’t care to put in an honest day’s work, that’s your business. I ain’t going to hang over you. I work for Mr. Overstreet.”
Joe built fence for twenty-one days before he took his first break. He went down all the boundary fence and had five strands of barbed wire on stays sparkling from staple to staple. Where the rotten cedar had given out there were new green-and-white steel T-posts and the soldierly order they gave to the rise and fall of boundaries helped Joe see how his heritage lay on the benign face of the county.
About halfway through his fencing assignment, Joe reached a high divide between two drainages, Crow Creek and Nester Creek. A thousand years of wind had blown all the topsoil to Wyoming and it was just bare rock on top of the world where old barbed wire sang like an Aeolian harp. Otis came up and helped him with this stretch of fence. They started to build jack fence, then changed their minds and dynamited post holes for half a mile until the line pitched down into the woods and was easy again and beyond the eerie sound of the steel strings above them. There was pleasure in working the ratchet on the fence stretcher, watching the wire rise, tighten, and sparkle in the light through the trees, sing in the wind, turn at the corner posts, or drop out of sight over the crown of a hill. Joe was going all round what would one day be his.
On the twenty-first day, he was fencing the bottom of a narrow defile. Cattle had grown accustomed to escaping here by lifting the poles that were meant to hold the bottom wire low. Joe was sewing the fence to the earth along the floor of this cut with a post every ten feet when he was visited by the daughter of the owner, Ellen Overstreet. He had watched her covertly ever since he first got there, mostly when she was riding out through the ranch in the front of a flatbed truck with Billy Kelton, a neighbor Joe hadn’t spoken to since a boyhood fistfight almost ten years before. Without any thought of Ellen herself, Joe would have loved to take her away from Billy, who looked so complacent in the truck, lariat hanging in the rear window and his blue-eyed gaze remote under a tall-crown straw hat. It was a grudge.
Joe’s first thought was that her timing was perfect. He was dark from the long exposure to sun and the muscles of his arms were hard and defined from driving posts and stretching wire. Ellen was a rangy brunette with startling gray eyes.
“What’s the point of this when my dad is going to own it all anyway?” she said with a bright smile.
“I’m getting paid. And I’m here to tell you your dad will never get our place.”
“You’re getting paid. Otis says you can work or not work, it’s no nevermind to him.”
“Well, it is to me,” said Joe, letting the red post pounder tip over and drop with a clang.
“One way or another, Otis says. He doesn’t care.”
“You can’t go by Otis,” said Joe. “If he knew anything he wouldn’t be here.”
“Otis has been with Daddy since we ranched at Exeter Switch.”
“It’s not Otis’s fault he isn’t smart.”
Ellen sat down in the deep bluestem and began pulling up the russet pink flowers of prairie smoke, making a bouquet in her left hand and blowing ants off the blossoms.
“Daddy says you’re in military school in Kentucky and you’re that little bit from graduating and going to Vietnam.”
“Only I’m not going to Vietnam. I’m going to college in the East. I’m studying art. Is that for me?”
He reached out for the bouquet of prairie smoke blossoms and she handed them over with a shrug.
“Why aren’t we going to Vietnam?”
“Because we aren’t supposed to be there in the first place. Everybody knows that.”
“Not everybody knows that. A lot of my friends can’t wait to get there.”
“Well, you’ve got the wrong friends.”
“You better not let them hear your Vietnam theory. I know one or two will fix your little red wagon. We believe in freedom. Y’know Billy Kelton?”
“Yeah, I know Billy.”
“Well, he plans to go quick as he can get shut of school.”
“That’d be about right for Billy.”
“Did you know he was top five saddlebronc rider in the Northern Rodeo Association two years in a row?”
“Nope.”
“He’s about as pretty a hand with rough stock ever come out of these parts.”
“That should just chill the Vietcong,” said Joe.