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Short Stories & Tall Tales
A Western Story
By Terrell Brown
Clay Hobbs was upset about the economy. The price of hay would go up a few cents a bale. He supposed that was good for someone up the line, but it was bad news for him. His business was raising beef, and if it had not been for Wendy’s and McDonald’s he’d have gone under. Under was right. He looked through the windshield at three or four cows and their calves grazing over a stretch of high ground ahead beyond the windshield. The meadows and flats where he had once cut most of his winter feed were flooded by the overflow of the once shallow lakes. The abnormal amounts of rainfall the past few years had had nowhere to go but down into the basin where this small ranch and neighboring ones had taken root and clung to the land tenaciously for a century of long working days for one generation after another. The ranch was mortgaged. He didn’t own anything anymore. What remained for him now was a lifestyle and the long hours of work and frustration bequeathed to him by father and grandfather and Cassie. He had Cassie, and she had him. Thank God for Cassie, he thought, finding it an odd thought, since he was, in his own estimation, a nonbeliever.
There was no money to hire a helper this year, so it would be him and Cassie feeding and checking the heavy cows and heifers together. She would have to drive while he cut the baling twine and tossed the flakes of hay off the back of the pickup to the bawling, hungry herds. He hated for her to be out like that so much, and her pregnant with their child, but what could they do? What could he do?
The government had determined that a country slowly submerging under heavy rainfall is not a disaster area and so does not qualify for relief. A real disaster would have been easy compared to six years of water that spread out over the country with nowhere to go. He and Cassie would feed together, that is if he could borrow the money to buy the hay. If so, one more winter and if it were a good year and he could get a good return for the calves in the fall, maybe they’d be sound enough to do it all over again. He didn’t mind for himself it was all he knew anyway but it would be tough on her, especially carrying the baby.
A coyote, gaunt and wormy-looking, trotted along beside the water’s edge ahead where the waters washed across a low place in the road. Clay stopped the car and switched the motor off, eyeing the coyote. He got out of the pickup, drawing the 30/06 carefully from its place in the gun rack mounted across the window behind the seat. He stepped up to the hood and leaned forward and adjusted the sights of the rifle slightly, taking his unblinking eye away from the glass of the scope as he did so. He took a match from his jacket pocket and bit down on the stick of it and squinted into the scope, easing the safety free in a smooth coordination of eye and hand. He eased down on the trigger and with the recoil and crack of the rifle the coyote pitched lifelessly into the edge of the water.
Clay peered at the coyote a few seconds through the scope to make sure he was dead. Fussy, his Australian shepherd dog, watched quietly with his front feet on the side of the pickup bed, barked a shrill, staccato bark, then dashed to the other side of the bed of the pickup to try and get a better look at the fallen prey beyond the high cab.
“You’re late, today,” Clay said, unhurried, to his dog. “It’s all over.”
He ejected the spent cartridge, checking the safety visually and with his thumb before carefully placing the gun back in the rack inside the cab. He stared at the water for a while as he stood by the open door of the pickup and for a very long time at the dead coyote. He didn’t have to check the coyote; he knew exactly where he had hit it. He did not have to shoot it. A wormy outfit like that couldn’t do any harm. Perhaps he’d put him out of his misery. Still, he knew he had shot the coyote for the wrong reason. He was mad, plain mad. A solitary man surely couldn’t fight the whims of nature, government and banks all at the same time.
For a moment he shut his eyes to try and shut out the water. “Oh, God!” he cried out softly, sadly, alone but for the dog, the water, the sun-drenched sky, the surrounding hills and ravines. It wasn’t a prayer. He wasn’t a religious man and hadn’t been in a church for years. There seemed to be no time and place in his life for such things. The flooded earth was his church, his home, his daily life; Cassie was his faith and his hope. Cassie… He thought of her and his heart filled with love and a momentary sense of peace. She was the faithful one. Clay rubbed his forehead lightly with his fingers, pushing his hat brim out of his way with a shove of a hand. He kept his eyes shut, soaking up the warmth of the late summer sun, the heat of summer that he loved. “Oh, God!” he said again. This time the words melted out of the center of him, a groaning that was like a prayer.
He climbed into the pickup and drove across the flooded place in the road and along the road to the white ranch house, which fortunately his father had built on a rise at the advice of his father who had been in the country since the late 1800s and had known its moods intimately, as a man may know his wife. The barn, though, was flooded and when Clay needed anything out of it he had to wear knee-high waders.
The dog stayed in the truck bed for a moment, then vaulted down to the dry ground and hopped gaily against his master’s pant leg. Clay entered the gate of the white picket fence that he had built and painted, for Cassie, to make the house seem like a home, and held the gate open for the dog to come in. He wiped the bottoms of his boots on the blade embedded to one side in the step and went inside the screened-in porch where the hats and coats and rubber boots of the men who’d worked on the ranch had been kept through three generations. His mother had always left the bucket of whey on this porch that she made cottage cheese with.
Cassie was in the kitchen cleaning surfaces and washing up pans after baking loaves of sweet-savored bread and cookies. The air of the room was heavy and warm and deliciously rich with the yeast aroma of the bread and cookies that she had lovingly made from scratch; with the subtle pine scents of the split rounds hotly crackling in the gut of the Home Comfort stove his grandfather had bought his grandmother one extremely cold Christmas and delivered in the bed of a horse-drawn wagon; with the tangible memories of the individuals who had lived and labored and rested here mingling indistinguishably with the absorbing character of the familiar furnishings and tools of the kitchen; with, now sweetly added, the love of Cassie that caressed and leavened his days as she bore in her body their child the fourth generation of his family that would occupy these rooms laid out and constructed inwardly of pine logs from the encompassing mountains.
Clay hung his Resistol on the huge rack of the stag deer that his father had killed and mounted over the seldom-used fireplace, because it lost too much heat through the chimney, and came back into the kitchen area without putting his slippers on. He rested his work-sculpted hands gently on Cassie’s waist and kissed her on the cheek. She wiped her hands on the apron his mother had always preferred to wear when she baked and rested them over his shoulders so as not to get flour or dough on his shirt and kissed him on the mouth. Her face bore that look he loved so much when she was warm and melted inside towards him. She could not explain her love for him. It was a mystery of the heart that always amazed her, and she knew he felt about her and loved her in the same way. It was truly a mystery, an unfathomable mystery that surely must come from the Lord.
“I love you,” she said tenderly into his blue eyes, into his very soul. He collapsed inside seldom did he do such a thing in his life into her love, into her wonderful hold on his heart. She had been thinking of him, her man, when he drove up.
“Yeah,” he said softly, “I know. I love you, too. When I drove up, that’s what I was thinking, that I wanted to tell you again.”
Cassie pulled her arms on around his neck, smudging the green shirt with the white flour and a spot of dough. She rested her face, with her dark and lovely eyes, in the cleft of his bronzed neck. He hugged her close and gently and kissed her on her soft, warm cheek, warm with the sweetness of a child.
“There’s no mail,” he whispered after a moment into her light hair drawn back in a loose bun. “Sorry. I wish there was something for you. You’ve been out here alone so long lately with not even a visitor.” He had a couple bills and a letter he didn’t want to open from the bank, but he never thought of them as mail. They were just bills; no call to trouble her about it. “Maybe we can go to town soon Saturday, I mean make a special trip, just for you and me.” He smiled, leaning back and searching into her eyes with his own heart. There was not another soul on earth he would say such things to, that he would talk to in that softened, vulnerable way. Cassie held his heart in her very hands, a helpless feeling he never minded feeling. He had no fear of putting his heart in her hands. It was a mystery.
“You’re mail enough for me today,” she said. She kissed him anew, a light and quick pecking kiss on the cheek. The toughness around his mouth softened. He kissed her on the lips, full of longing to envelope himself in her soul. If such were possible, he imagined he would crawl inside of her and snuggle up close against her heart. A stranger to their love might accuse him of wanting her to mother him, but what he as a man felt for her had nothing to do with mothering, but was a passion different from anything he had ever felt for anyone. Cassie was his prize in life, more even than the ranch and the country which he had loved forever. For though he had lived much under the wing of his grandfather and mother, his own father had been rough on him and demanding. Cassie was the true softness that came into his life, and even though he had the hard edge of his father he believed of himself that he would be a tenderhearted father. It was just that keeping the family ranch was very hard and made him hard. But he loved Cassie more than anything else and very, very differently than anything or anybody else in this world. For him, she was different and separate from everything else. Yet, her love for him and for the God she believed in that must surely exist because she existed and his own love for her amazingly seemed woven from the seamless robe, the fabric, of all life. As he struggled now in this dark time to save their home for his own child, all light in his life seemed to filter prism-like through Cassie. His grandfather was gone, and his mother; and, then, not so long ago, his father. This aloneness and the encircling water, and the bank and the government engulfed him in unrelenting trouble, and the wormy coyote had paid dearly for it.
Some things he knew. He knew he loved Cassie and that she loved him, and he loved this harsh land of his nativity. These two loves he knew, but they could not be compared to one another. They were both love, but not the same thing at all. Together, they were the two essential heartbeats of his life. First, there had been the land and the dream of Cassie; then, there had been the land and the real, alive and truly before him Cassie.
They separated and Clay pulled a chair out from the long, timeworn rectangular hardwood table covered over by a red- and white-print oilcloth and sat down with his forearm resting on the edge of the table. Cassie turned back to her pans in the warm, soapy water at the deep sinks.
“I heard a shot,” she said reluctantly, “close by?”
“Coyote,” Clay said. “A wormy outfit, but I think I really shot him because I was mad about the water an’ all.” He looked down at his boots. There was some fresh mud still on the toe and he’d gotten some on the floor -- maybe the carpet in the living room, too. He grimaced, saddened by the careless habits he’d attached himself to during the years he’d lived alone on the ranch.
Cassie followed his glance to his boots and the mud on the roughhewn wood floor, scrubbing a pan. She smiled in her understanding of him. He had already begun to remove his boots and place them out of the way by a table leg.
“I’m sorry. I forgot again. I’ll clean that up and check out the living room, too. Don’t you do it, Sweetheart, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
“Are you feeling good, today?” he said, leaning back against the table again.
“Heavier, but I feel like it’s really going well. The baby has been moving a lot.” She paused in her work, which she seemed to enjoy right now, and touched her slightly bulging abdomen with the palms of both her hands.
Clay could smell the bread baking and the sweet, pungent aroma of sourdough covered with a cloth rising in a bowl on top of the refrigerator.
“Smells good,” he said. “I should have put my slippers on,” he continued, “but I was goin’ out again and had some things on my mind.”
“It’s okay, Clay. Don’t apologize anymore. I know,” she said, smiling again, to put him at ease and so he would know she knew where his heart was.
“You’re like the morning to me,” he said, “new and wonderful every day.” His feelings for her washed through him afresh. “I love you, Cassie,” he said. “There’s never been anyone else for me. Never.” His eyes moistened with the sensation of her presence in this room that was full with the memories of his life and his family.
A tear sought its way down her cheek as she glanced demurely over her shoulder at him. She bit her lower lip lightly to arrest the flow of tears. She smiled at him again and blushed warmly. “You’ve always shot coyotes,” she said, bucking up, defending him.
“Yeah, all my life,” he said. “But I should shoot him because he’s wormy and a threat to livestock, not because I’m mad at the world.” Clay tapped a finger on the oilcloth.
Cassie wiped her hands and came over to him. He shifted his Levied legs so she could sit down. She sat carefully, and easily, in his lap and pushed the dark hair by his ears back with her slender fingers and slipped her hand into the hair on the back of his neck. He’d left it a little long there for years because she liked it that way. Now she barbered his hair for him. But he shaved every morning, as a rule, for her. He warmed to her and hugged her gently and leaned over and kissed her through the apron, an absolutely silly thing to do were she not his Cassie.
He sobered after a little while, staring off through the clear glass windows in the west wall where he could see the warmth of the day and watch as a gentle breeze jingled the leaves of the aspens standing in the water along where his irrigation ditch to the garden was. The ditch itself, the garden area and the chicken house had the invincible waters of the lake lapping at them.
“I love you both,” he said to her, resting his hand on her apron front. He’d have to find somebody to help him feed, he thought -- maybe a trade of some kind with a neighbor. He couldn’t see how it could work, but he’d have to try, not that he had time to do other people’s work, either. He must have been crazy to think she’d be able to help him so late in the pregnancy. It was the trouble; the trouble made him crazy.
She smiled into his eyes, probably reading his thoughts, which she seemed easily to do. “Don’t worry, Clay. It won’t help. And I love you, too.” She kissed him on the forehead. “We can’t say it too often, you and me.”
“It’s just that I don’t know if I can keep the ranch for us, Precious. It’s not much ta give a kid, I suppose -- just work and water.”
“The water will go down on this ranch; the work never will,” she said, encouraging him. “Besides,” she added, “this land was good for you and it will be good for our child. You were never in debt before this trouble, and I believe we’re not going to lose the ranch,” she said confidently.
Clay’s heart lightened as his troubles dissolved before her faith, her faith in him. His mouth curled in a wry grin, his first for the day. “Practically need a motor boat to move cattle now,” he said humorously. “First thing we’d have to get our baby’s a pair of waders.”
“No we won’t!” she said, messing his hair up. Then after a moment, pursing her lips in that wonderful way she had, she combed his hair back in place slowly with her fingers.
“We’re in the Lord’s hands, Clay,” she said. “We’re in the Lord’s hands.” She shut her eyes and bowed her head down slightly, dropping her hands to be clasped tenderly in his. She opened her eyes and looked at him and he dropped his own head down a little. She shut her eyes again and he knew she was praying and, because he loved her so, he shut his own eyes and sensed the sweet beating of her heart. It seemed to him at that moment that it was a short step from Cassie’s heart to God. He kept his eyes shut, listening to her breath and the beating of her heart, his rough hands gently enfolded about hers. He loved her very, very much.
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