“Then go with him,” she replied.
“I will.”
“I guess I really made a mess of things with that paper and all,” Ray said.
Jeanette allowed herself some motherly pride. “It wasn’t your fault. I called your English teacher and she said she thought your paper was so good, she put it up on the school Web site. I guess anybody could have made a copy of it. Whoever e-mailed it to that fossil hunter, though, has to be a damned fool. If I ever find out who it was, I’ll kick his tail.” When Ray and I just stood there, grinning at her, Jeanette said, “You two got work? Get to it.”
We got to it, loading the big truck with hay so we’d be ready to feed the cows in the morning.
Ray was in a talkative mood. “It seems like there’s us and then there’s the rest of the world,” he said as we grunted the hay bales onto the truck. “I mean, Mike, how come it seems like we think one way and nearly everybody else thinks different?”
“Like what?” I asked.
“At school, it seems like all I read is where everybody else in the country can’t wait for Washington, D.C., to solve all their problems. Out here, we just want to be left alone and look after ourselves. Out there, they murder each other, take drugs, the girls get pregnant without marrying or anything, seems like they’re just mad at each other all the time. I think I’d hate it out there.”
“Well, it’s not quite that bad, Ray,” I said. “But I guess it seems that way sometimes on television or in the papers.”
“But you were out there, Mike, and now you’re here. Why is that?”
I thought about Ray’s question before I answered. Finally, I said, “I came here because I was tired of being around people who were messed up, one way or the other. I saw a lot of people dead for no good reason but that was my job as a homicide detective. Then I worked Hollywood and I think that really soured me. I mean there’s worse things than murder, trust me. When I started to think my head was just as messed up as the people I was working for, I knew I’d better cut myself loose. That’s why I ended up here.”
“I’m glad you’re here, Mike,” Ray said.
“Me, too, Ray.”
“Mom says Dad thought the world of you.”
“Did she? Well, I thought the world of your dad. Your mom’s tops in my books, too.”
Ray smiled at me and I smiled back. Then we went back to work. That was the way of the county. Work, always work, and more work. A philosopher I admire said there was no water holier than the sweat off a man’s brow. If that was so, sacred water was not scarce along Ranchers Road.
4
We had ourselves a quiet night. No serial killers came calling and, though I kept waking up, all I ever heard was the yip of a passing coyote answered quickly by Soupy’s warning bark. The sun rose with some wispy clouds hanging around which gave our hills, meadows, and buttes a faded amber glow. I trooped on up to the turnaround. Jeanette came outside, regarded me gazing with pleasure at her property, then said, “Sleep OK?”
“Yep, considering.”
I didn’t have to say the “considering” was our murdered bull and the cut fences. The Square C was in trouble but what kind, neither one of us yet knew.
“Let’s get ’em fed,” she said and so we did while Ray slept in a bit. He was a teenager, after all.
We headed into the Mulhaden pasture where we’d brought in our cows during the winter to keep them nearby. This was the last of our hay but, because the winter had stretched on for so long, Jeanette thought we’d best use it and let the grass have a little more time to get going. The pasture was named for a family of Mormons who’d settled the land just after the Civil War. The name was all that was left of their legacy other than a grave of one of their children. It wasn’t too far from my trailer and every so often, I tended to its little headstone which was inscribed Nanette Mulhaden, 1867. I’d looked her up at the library in Jericho, our county seat. She only had the one year on her stone because she’d only lived three months. Poor little pioneer tyke. We ought to honor those pioneers in this country more than we do. We owe a debt to them that we’ve mostly forgotten.
Jeanette hooked a bungee cord to the steering wheel and put the big truck in idle, then climbed in the back with me. Soupy trotted behind as the truck made its way and we threw out the hay as the cows and calves got up and crowded in. When I first started cowboying, Bill Coulter taught me to pay attention to what calves did when they got to their feet. Healthy calves usually took a moment to stretch, he said. If they didn’t, best look to them. That morning, all the calves stretched, signs that both humans and cow mamas were doing our jobs. On the way back in, I said, “Is there anything prettier than a morning in Montana?”