by Robert Greer
I found myself thinking about fly-fishing and the patience and persistence I knew it took to become an expert at the sport. I was good at it, darn good, but nowhere near expert. Reflecting on Spoon’s words, I thought about my tendency to be quick on the draw when it came to hooking a fish, especially a lunker, aware that my often-errant quickness had less to do with a lack of technical skill than with mere restraint. “So what ever happened to your friend Coleman?” I asked.
A curtain of sadness spread across Spoon’s face. “Got killed one day durin’ a search-and-rescue mission. Never had a chance. A twelve-year-old boy with a machine gun came up at him outta the bottom of a sampan we
were searchin’.”
Spoon stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Always told myself Coleman shoulda been more prepared for the situation, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t expectin’ no twelve-year-old to be a killer. Don’t never forget that preparation’s as important as patience and persistence when it comes to most things in life, TJ. If a man’s gonna survive, he best understand that.”
Spoon set his Coke can aside and swatted at a winter-hatch deerfly that had been buzzing him. “Just as important to remember that persistence can be a double-edged sword sometimes—that it can get you into trouble just as quick as not.” He rubbed his neck and smiled. “Especially when it comes to women.”
I smiled back, wondering what adventures or misadventures Spoon might have had with women. I waited, eager to hear him out, but he went mum all of a sudden, and since I had no intention of telling him about my own failures in that regard, the conversation petered out.
During our first subzero hard winter freeze, Spoon and I spent most of the day tossing cake to hungry cows. We’d just finished running a cottonwood break, and I’d cut my snow machine’s engine near the break’s open end. Spoon coasted up next to me, engine off, and scooped up a ball of snow. He packed it lightly with both hands, stood up, and tossed the snowball into the wind. When the snowball broke apart, twisting away on the breeze, Spoon tilted his head back and sniffed the air. “We better get back to headquarters,” he said, slipping back down into his seat.
“After a couple more runs,” I said.
“Not today. It’s gonna dump.”
There was a cloud bank to the north, but the sky was otherwise clear. I could even see wisps of smoke rising from the chimneys in the foothills.
“We’ve got time,” I said.
Spoon shrugged and started his machine. “You’re the boss.”
It took us close to thirty minutes to return to headquarters, pack up our sleighs with another load of hay and cake, and get back out to the cows. By then a slate gray ceiling of snow clouds hovered over the valley floor. A stiff twenty-miles-an-hour wind had the cattle tightly bunched. We rode along the edge of the huddle dropping feed, the noise of our snow machines echoing on the wind. I noticed Spoon continually checking the sky as the smells of gasoline and cottonseed permeated the air. When we dropped the last of our feed, I waved for Spoon to head back for one more load.
“Last run,” I hollered, bringing my snow machine to a stop.
Spoon shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he shouted, pulling even with me. He turned and eyed the cattle.
“We better move these twenty head into the cedar grove and move out quick.”
Seconds later the first wet flakes of snow dusted my snow machine’s warm engine bonnet, and tears of water streamed down its side. By the time we finished moving the cattle into the trees, snow was coming down in steady sheets, blowing sideways, cutting into our faces like the sharp edge of a knife. Soon ground blizzards kicked up, peppering us with icy pellets of snow, and in no time our eyebrows were frosted cauliflower stubs. The wind became so fierce that we could barely make out the cattle that were less than a stone’s throw away, huddled side to side and head to butt in a solid block.
Pressed to do something or likely freeze to death, we ditched our feed sleighs and tied the two snow machines together with a four-foot rope. Spoon pulled me from my machine, hollered, “Get on the back,” jumped back on the lead machine, and took off at full throttle. It took us nearly an hour to travel the three miles back to the house, with Spoon skillfully threading his way around treacherous frozen irrigation ditches and eight-foot gully drop-offs all the way. Most of that time he stayed hunkered on his knees, leaning into a thirty-miles-an-hour wind, trying to keep it from blowing us both into an icy open grave. By the time we reached the bunkhouse, we were both plaster casts of ice and snow.
Later, as we thawed out in the cherry glow from the tack room’s fully stoked potbellied stove, I watched heat shadows dance around the room. As we tried to stroke some hint of circulation back into our feet, Spoon moved his partially thawed eyebrows up and down out of sync.
“I told you it was gonna dump,” he said.
Those were the only words he spoke to me until twenty minutes later, when I got up to leave, he said, “See you in the a.m. ’bout six.”
The storm lasted three full days. We lost twenty-five mother cows, a couple of quarter horses, and twenty tons of hay as the valley struggled without power for nearly a week. My dad called it the devil’s work and cussed at the sky. In the spring, when we’d feel the money crunch from a shortage of calves, I knew he’d curse the blizzard even more.
Two weeks after the storm, during a fifty-degree mid-January teaser thaw, my mom came home from church and announced to my dad and me that she was certain Spoon had the gift of clairvoyance.
“How else could you explain him knowing in advance about the storm, or that we’d lose exactly two horses, or that our electricity would be out for precisely thirty-three hours?” she asked.
“A blind man could’ve predicted that snow,” grumbled my dad.
My mom looked at him as if she wouldn’t have expected him to understand. From then on, whenever she passed out the daily work chits, she’d ask Spoon if he expected bad weather or good.
When spring calving season arrived, our cows had no problem births, thanks in part to Spoon’s encouraging efforts, and we never pulled a single cow. I watched Spoon sweet-talk twelve-hundred-pound cattle, slapping them affectionately on the rumps when they refused to move when he wanted them to. Sometimes he even whispered in their ears. His specialty was coaxing cows in labor, pleading with them to deliver while down on his knees, looking at them eye to eye. When I told him he should have been a vet, he said, “How do you know I ain’t?”
One blustery March afternoon, we were walking a wind-cleared meadow of stubble hay, double-checking cattle ear tags and brands, when Spoon again seemed to know much more than I could have guessed. Like my mom, I began to believe in his ability to see the future. Federal Land Bank had sent my dad a past-due mortgage notice a couple of days earlier, and since then we’d been busy tallying up the exact number of cattle in our herd. The ground wasn’t quite frozen, and our boots left shallow imprints in the grass as we worked.
“Your pa worries too much,” said Spoon, who I was certain knew nothing of the bank notice. “Don’t conjure up monsters and they won’t eat you in your sleep. Tell myself that every day.”
“He’s doing the best he can,” I said, surprised at how quickly I came to my dad’s defense.
“Things’ll smooth out,” said Spoon.
We walked on in silence, weaving between cattle to an open, sunny spot in the middle of the meadow.
“See that cow over there? She’s gonna twin,” said Spoon, stopping in his tracks to point out a Black Baldy who was scratching her rump on a sagging corner post. “And the one next to her, the Brock, she’ll lose her calf. You any good at graftin’ a calf?”
Aware that grafting was a way of fooling a cow into mothering a calf that wasn’t her own, I said yes. I hadn’t grafted a calf in years because my dad called the process witchcraft—for him, grafting was a time-consuming, bloody mess that never seemed to work. Spoon claimed, however, that the secret to grafting was simply knowing what to do ahead of time and sticking to i
t.
That night, after the Black Baldy had twins and the Brock delivered a stillborn calf, I watched Spoon drag the stillborn carcass to the calving shed and skin it from one shoulder to under the tail. Using a nail for a needle and baling wire for thread, he sewed the dead calf’s skin over one of the Black Baldy twins, then ushered the grafted calf out into the corral. The mother of the stillborn sniffed the grafted calf from head to toe, licking at the awkwardly fitting coat. After a few minutes of indecision, she finally let the calf begin to nurse.
In silence, Spoon walked back into the shed and started cleaning up. He brushed bloody clumps of cedar chips from the floor into a single pile and tossed them into an oil drum by the door. Next he raked fresh cedar chips in to fill the voids. Finally, he covered the floor with a new layer of cedar, threw what remained of the calf carcass into the drum, and walked over to me with a smile. I looked at the spot where he’d worked so feverishly to graft the calf. Footprints were the only evidence of his work.
The next morning my dad and I stood on our front porch sipping coffee and talking. Steam rose from our mugs, evaporating quickly in the dry, crisp morning air.
“Graftin’ is a matter of luck,” he said, slowly swirling the coffee around in his mug. “Spoon’s a gambler who’s got a damn good relationship with luck. Remember, I hired him on a bet.”
Seconds later Spoon came walking toward us from the tack room in long, measured strides. His boots were caked with mud and a layer of dried blood. He tugged at his work gloves as he approached. He wasn’t generally very talkative in the morning, but when he stepped up onto the porch, the look on his face told me he had something important to say.
“Better think about a new way of irrigatin’ this spring,” he said, looking directly at my dad before scraping a clump of mud off the side of his boot. “We’re gonna have trouble with water for sure ’cause your irrigation ditches are way outta balance.”
My dad simply stared off into the distance.
Spoon cleared his throat. “Your water ain’t balanced,” he said, louder than before.
“You read palms too?” asked my dad, suddenly eye to eye with Spoon.
Spoon kicked a cake of dirt from under the heel of his boot. The dirt cartwheeled down the steps. “You’re outta balance, and we’re in for a drought,” he said matter-of-factly.
Dad clenched his teeth and covered his mug, trapping in the rising steam. “I’ve run water in every ditch on this place for more than thirty-five years, and I’ve never had a problem. I think I know what I’m doin’, Mr. Witherspoon. You can keep your fantasies to yourself.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard my dad use Spoon’s full last name.
They looked at one another, both ill at ease, for several seconds before my dad tossed his coffee out into the yard, turned, and disappeared into the house. He was back in a flash, waving Spoon’s job ticket in his hand. “You’re working motor pool the rest of the week, Spoon. Think it’s time you leave the ranchin’ to me.”
Spoon shrugged, stuck the chit in his hatband, rushed down the porch steps, and walked back up the drive.
Three
The problems with our hay meadows started late that spring. The Willow Creek runoff was a ghost of its normal self, and every irrigation ditch on the ranch ran close to creek-bottom dry. Only one ditch in ten had topsoil wet enough to grow a patch of weeds, and the berms along the edges were turning into granular mounds that sometimes blew across the hay meadows like pollen in the wind. Spoon and I rotated the cattle on what little grass we had, hoping to cut down on overgrazing, looking all the while for a runoff we knew would never come. My dad complained that without water it was only a matter of time before the banking bureaucrats fanned out like locusts and began foreclosing on land all along the valley floor.
The last ten days in April, I checked our Willow Creek headgate twice a day, only to realize that by day ten, even without us drawing a single drop at the headgate, the water level had dropped more than a foot. When the first of May rolled around, every rancher in the valley was whispering drought.
Late one evening during that first week of May, I was fly-fishing and getting skunked in a shallow Willow Creek pool normally filled with twenty-inch browns as mayflies rose from the water’s surface, drifting off in the dry twilight air. I heard a truck on the access road behind me and turned to watch Spoon bump toward me in one of our pickups with worn-out shocks, squeaking all the way. He pulled to a stop fifty yards short of the stream and shouted, “I’ve got a remedy,” from the cab.
“For what?” I called back.
“For the drought. Come take a look.”
I tugged at the suspenders of my hip waders as I walked up the creekbank and across a grassy slope toward the truck. Spoon was already fidgeting with the tailgate chain. The truck bed was filled with eight-inch-diameter PVC drainage pipe.
“If you can’t bring Moses to the mountain, you gotta find another way,” he said. “We’ll pump the damn water down from springs or the Willow Creek headwaters up in the hills.”
I laid my rod in the truck bed, shook my head, and eyed the surrounding foothills. “I don’t know,” I said, unconvinced.
“You’ll see,” said Spoon, slamming the tailgate. “You’ll see.”
The next morning, an hour before dawn, Spoon shook me from a hazy twilight sleep.
“What’s up?” I asked, blinking back fragmented dreams.
“We need to get started before your pa passes a job ticket my way,” Spoon whispered.
“I told you yesterday, we’ll just be spitting into the wind. There’s not enough water in Willow Creek, even at the source, to douse a campfire.”
“Not the way it’s set up now, usin’ gravity feed to flood your meadows, but there’s plenty of water if we pump it down from the foothills. Come on outside and see what I’ve got rigged up.”
I slipped into a pair of jeans and spread a dab of toothpaste on my thumb. Sucking the paste between my teeth, I inhaled the minty flavor and followed Spoon outside.
Years before, my dad had bought a cable-drum Caterpillar RD6 tracklayer. He’d been using it to backfill around a foundation the day Jimmy had died. The next day he had parked it in the machine shed and covered it with an oily tarp. I stumbled behind Spoon into breaking daylight to see the RD6 idling forty yards down the driveway, a dozer blade on the front. A backhoe arm and bucket swung from the Cat’s rear.
“Where’d you get the blade and the bucket?” I asked, astonished.
“Sometimes the Crows beat you. Sometimes you beat the Crows,” said Spoon, forcing back a grin. “Hop on; we’re goin’ for a ride.”
The stretch from our hay meadows nearest the house to the headwaters of Willow Creek was a two-mile uphill grade. On the way, dragging a load of PVC pipe behind us in a cart, Spoon told me he was going to build a pump-assisted headwaters diversion levee that would be capable of carrying water to every hay meadow on the ranch.
“You’ve got first water rights on the creek. I checked ’em out in Hardin,” he said.
I knew my dad hadn’t looked at our water rights in years, although he’d once carried every bit of water information concerning the place in his head, down to the precise hour we were required to pass our water flow downstream. Once he’d known every ditch rider and water engineer in the state, but times had changed.
“Does my dad know about your plan?” I asked.
“No.”
“He’ll blow a fuse.”
“Not if he don’t know,” said Spoon. “I figure the levee construction will take us no more than a coupla days, includin’ the spring development, the backfill, and settin’ the pump. He won’t miss us. Besides, it’s two miles back down to the house, and he can’t hear us, and your mom said she would help.”
“You conned her too?”
Spoon looked hurt. “She’s just gonna guide your pa’s work the opposite direction from ours. We’ll be done before he knows a thing.”
“He’ll can yo
u when he finds out.”
“I don’t think so, but if he does, won’t be nothin’ new.”
“What if he looks for the Cat?”
“I threw the tarp back over sixty bales of hay. Shaped ’em up to look like the Cat. I just hope he don’t hear us grindin’ our way up this hill,” said Spoon, easing the RD6 into a lower gear.
The backhoe bucket swung back and forth in a U until we were on a level spot a third of the way up Willow Creek grade. When we crossed the creek only a few yards from where Jimmy had drowned, I felt a lump in my throat, maybe even a little bitterness. In a sense, it was Jimmy who was shielding us from detection.
During irrigation season my dad had me handle all the high-country ditches; because of Jimmy, he rarely ventured up the grade.
I watched the creek’s low, clear water thread its way around a couple of boulders before knifing into an undercut along the bank and thought how, at that moment, Jimmy could have walked across the stream.
“We won’t have to worry too much about my dad coming up here,” I said.
Spoon didn’t respond until several moments later. He seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. “If you don’t face up to the shadows in your life, sooner or later they’ll block out all the light.”
During a normal spring runoff, the Willow Creek headwaters thundered unrestrained down the steep grade to the valley floor below. That day, we were greeted by the peaceful sound of a meandering brook. There hadn’t been snowpack in the mountains for over two months, and the water table was at a sixty-year low. Spoon pulled the Cat to a stop, then turned it around in a slow half circle until the blade pointed back down the hill. A thicket of greening willows followed the creekbed in a lazy S before folding out into the meadow below.
“We’re gonna run a four-foot-wide ditch all the way back down,” he said, shading his eyes and gazing down at the ranch below. Smiling as if he knew something I didn’t, he tossed a six-foot length of PVC pipe at my feet.
