by Robert Greer
We started back down the hill, staking out our levee, setting wooden stakes every thirty feet. By the time we hit the meadow below, a dull ache followed the curvature of my spine. It was close to noon when Spoon, looking agitated, said we needed to get back up top. We started back up the hillside, counting our stakes as we went.
Halfway back, Spoon said, “I’ve got a Crow comin’ to dig a shallow well and help us set a pump.”
At the top of the grade a tall, rail-thin Indian was standing near the Cat. He’d driven a pickup in from the backside of our ranch, I later found out, trespassing his way across a neighbor’s land. His skin was scarred from acne, and he didn’t show any sign of recognition until Spoon was within a couple of feet of him.
“The pipe’s in the cart,” said Spoon, looking the man square in the eye.
A contraption for shallow-well drilling sat bolted cockeyed to the bed of the Indian’s pickup, looking as though it might topple any second.
“Pull your rig over here,” said Spoon, pointing to a level spot near the headwaters.
The man hesitated and shook his head. “Too dangerous.”
“Don’t run chicken on me,” said Spoon. “You won’t need to move it more’n twenty feet. And you owe me, or have you forgot?”
“Then we’re even?” the man asked.
“Even as you ever get in life,” said Spoon.
The man pulled his rig over to the spot Spoon had pointed out, and after a few minutes of leveling, cranking, and adjusting his drill, he started a hole. He hit water at about twenty feet, but Spoon made him drill to forty. He then drove casings into the hole, set the pump, and was done an hour later. When he started to permanently cap the well, Spoon walked over.
“No need for that,” said Spoon. They said something to one another in a whisper. The man gave Spoon a nod, got back into his rig, and headed down the backside of Willow Creek grade.
Minutes later, Spoon started back down the front of the hillside, following our stakes and cutting a right-of-way with the Cat’s blade. I walked along in the track, inhaling the scent of diesel fuel and sage, squaring things up with a shovel. Spoon ran the Cat in low, carving a four-foot-wide path between our stakes all the way down the hill to the open eight-hundred-acre meadow below, never taking out a single stake. A narrow hillside scar was left in the Caterpillar’s wake. He turned the Cat on a dime and started back up, digging a trench with the backhoe at the Cat’s other end. I followed with the shovel, leveling, squaring, and smoothing the overspill. We stopped close to sundown about halfway up the grade. Spoon assured me that we could finish our irrigation trench, hook up the PVC pipe, and run our test water the next day. A fine mist had settled over the valley as we began our slow walk home. All the way there I couldn’t help but wonder and worry about whether my dad had any inkling of what we’d been up to.
The next morning we started at dawn. Dew covered the faded yellow Cat, and it shimmered in the sun.
“We’ll finish today,” said Spoon, glancing skyward. He hopped up into the Cat’s cracked leather seat and started the engine.
We trenched our way back up the grade through a stand of rough timber into a warm-spring glade, and finally back to the mouth of Willow Creek. Hours later Spoon scooped out his last bucket of earth in the warm afternoon sun as I padded up a final berm of dirt around the water source, rounding off the edge. My back muscles felt as tight as case-hardened steel, but when I straightened up, rubbing my side, and looked back down the grade, following the levee until it disappeared into the hay meadow below, all I could do was smile.
“Nothin’ to do now but hook ’er up,” said Spoon.
I watched Spoon jerry-rig a generator and battery system to run off the engine of the RD6. He mounted the whole thing with floodlights, explaining that with a little diesel fuel, his makeshift generator could run twenty-four hours a day. “There’s plenty of water up here. Enough to guarantee we’ll get two cuttin’s of hay. Plenty for feed—plenty to sell,” he said with a grin.
An hour before sunset we sent our first trickle of water downhill. Fifteen minutes later there was a steady stream.
“Better any day than some temperamental damn creek,” said Spoon, slapping the side of the Cat. “We’ve tapped the source.”
“No question,” I answered, watching the water roll.
“Next we’ll ditch out the south pasture, then the west-end flats,” said Spoon, breaking into a quick, satisfied grin.
But then as suddenly as the grin had appeared, it was gone. “Ain’t quite figured out how to break it to your pa yet, though. I might need a little help with that.”
“What can he say?”
“Things neither of us wanna hear,” said Spoon. “Especially since we’re usin’ his old Cat for a generator.”
We started our walk back down the hill, Spoon carrying a shovel, I dragging a rake. Thin, wispy clouds drifted by, looking like campfire smoke rising in the evening air. As we walked, the lone spur on Spoon’s right boot jingled out a lopsided cadence.
I didn’t see the horse and rider until I heard the sound of hoofbeats twenty yards away. My dad brought his horse, Smokey, to a halt a few feet from the irrigation trench as Spoon and I continued walking his way.
Very deliberately, dad dismounted, and once he was on the ground Smokey took a long, slow drink from the new ditch. In the level glade the ditch ran more slowly than at the top, and the water seemed to simply meander by.
“Somebody went to a hell of a lot of work to run this trench,” my dad said, eyeing Spoon pensively before locking his gaze on me.
I forced a smile, hoping it would ease what I suspected was coming, but it failed to break his cold, hard stare.
“You two should’ve put more effort into makin’ sure I wouldn’t know what you were up to,” he said, staring at the water as if he expected it to stop.
“I had to drag TJ kickin’ and screamin’ all the way,” Spoon said, coming to my defense.
My dad paced back and forth along the trench in broad, measured steps. He was clearly nervous, walking ground he hadn’t walked, much less seen, in years. He looked around the clearing, scanning it slowly as if he somehow thought he needed permission to be there.
“What if the sky opens up and we break this drought?” he asked. “What good is a penny-ante unpermitted levee to us then?”
Spoon answered quickly. Once again he seemed to know the question before it had been asked. “We can cut back the pump from its current flow of five hundred gallons a minute to as low as fifty if need be, but we’re in for a low-water mark around here for three, maybe even four years.”
“You’re sure of that?” asked my dad, challenging Spoon with his eyes.
“As sure as my name’s Arcus Witherspoon.”
Deep in thought, my dad walked over to a stand of quaking aspen, then back to the spot where Jimmy had drowned. The tree closest to him was thirty feet high. Elk had antler-notched the trunk just above my dad’s head. He picked at the trunk, snapping off a piece of bark. His eyes looked sad and uncertain. “These trees were no more than saplings twenty years ago,” he said with a sigh. “Seems like you can’t hold back somethin’ when it decides it wants to grow. Come over here and I’ll show you somethin’,” he said, motioning for us to follow.
We crossed a dry creekbed and walked over to a small island between our new irrigation ditch and Willow Creek.
In the middle of the island, a half-ton boulder jutted out at us.
“This boulder must sink down pretty deep,” said my dad. “Time was, it was mostly covered by water, sittin’ in the middle of the creek. Now it’s out here by itself. Guess it’ll never move.”
“It might not be stuck down as deep as you think,” Spoon said.
Looking at my dad, ashen and trembling, it seemed like he was staring directly down a pipeline to the past.
Dad stared at the boulder for a while, then put his shoulder to it, trying to move it by himself. When the boulder didn’t budge, Spoon and
I offered a hand. The three of us struggled with the rock for what seemed like an eternity until finally a circle of dirt broke around the base, and we all stepped back, out of breath.
“We can try it with the Cat,” said Spoon.
“No,” said my dad. “All it needed was a little loosening up. Movin’ it can wait.”
Dad walked over to Smokey and gathered up the reins. “Did I ever tell you about my dad’s cattle empire?” he asked Spoon, looking as if he’d suddenly just shed a lifelong burden.
“Nope,” Spoon replied.
“Well, maybe I’ll fill you in when we get back to the house.”
We started walking down the hillside three abreast. After a while my dad handed me Smokey’s reins. I felt the big, sometimes stubborn gelding plodding along easily behind me, warm breath from his nostrils pushing us ahead.
We left that boulder there, and to this day it stands as a landmark or a headstone. Probably a little of both. My dad later brought the Cat back down the hill, and nothing more was ever said between the three of us about the levee. The incident inched us all a bit closer, but not so close that my dad and Spoon were on the same page. They’d simply made it to being in the same book.
Working side by side, and sweating through an unexpected late-spring spell of heat over the next two weeks, we finished up the irrigation project. My dad cursed every rock and gopher hole as we worked while Spoon, ever on the lookout for rattlesnakes, killed more than his share. I enjoyed the uneasy peace between the two of them as we worked, but deep down I knew it was a peace that couldn’t last.
Four
A few days after wrapping up the levee project, Spoon, my dad, and I were setting a couple of brace posts at the southeast corner of one of our meadows, a meadow that had never produced the kind of hay it should have. Suddenly Spoon, who’d been acting a bit out of sorts all day, constantly looking over his shoulder as if something or someone might be gaining on him, looked up from his posthole tamper, eyed the ice blue sky, inhaled deeply, and said, more to himself than to me or my dad, “There’s trouble brewin’. I can smell it.”
Ever skeptical of Spoon’s odd pronouncements, even in the face of our levee success, my dad asked, “You worried we’ve got a new den of sidewinders we’re gonna have to contend with?”
Sounding somber and reflective, Spoon simply said, “I wish.”
Dad responded with a grunt and went back to wrest-ling the stubborn brace post. But Spoon’s pronouncement stuck with me the rest of the day, and the day after that—and I had a feeling that it had also resonated with my dad, even though he hadn’t shown it.
Driving along one of our south pasture irrigation ditches with Spoon a couple of days after his declaration of trouble and feeling amazingly self-satisfied, I watched water gurgle its way over rock and soil that had been bone dry for years. As we rolled slowly along in one of our vintage, never-say-die John Deere 3020 tractors, checking out the two-mile-long stretch of ditch for seeps and leaks, I had the feeling, in spite of Spoon’s prediction of trouble on the horizon, that ranch operations had reached a steady, manageable state.
That feeling of comfort disappeared when Spoon, looking skyward toward a bank of low-hanging clouds, announced in the same ominous tone he’d used the day we set the brace posts, “Things around here ain’t gonna stay all cotton fluffy like them clouds up there forever.”
Spoon hadn’t been in much of a clairvoyant mood—or, for that matter, much of a fraternizing mood—for over a week. He’d been to town for a couple of pieces of cowhide to repair an old, beat-up saddle, but in some sense he didn’t seem as usual. He’d been spending most of his free time in his quarters reading books, studying maps, and poring over county records he’d gotten from the county clerk’s office or checked out of the Hardin library. Once when I caught him with his nose in a pile of genealogy documents he told me that he had the feeling he was close to zeroing in on his roots once and for all.
“Didn’t realize you were in future-seeing mode today,” I said, watching the irrigation water work its way across an eighty-acre meadow of thirsty timothy and clover.
“Never really slip outta that mode, TJ. It’s just that things gotta have proper reflection.”
“So what are you seeing, specifically, about things here at the ranch, for instance?”
With a wink and a troubled smile, he said, “We’re all, every one of us here on the place, gonna get tested real soon. I’ve seen it kinda fuzzylike and jumbled in my head day and night for near a week. When I’m workin’ and when I’m dreamin’ the vision keeps comin’ back. Problem is, I can’t quite piece it all together as a yet. All I know is that our will’s gonna be tried. Yours and your folks for the most part, but I’ll be tested too.” He eyed the water in the ditch as if it were somehow a mirror to the future and nodded to himself.
“You sure?”
“As sure as I am that them puffy white clouds sittin’ overhead got themselves a bunch of dark distant cousins who’ll bring us buckets fulla rain. As sure as I am that a busted-up old bronc-ridin’ Crow from Hardin ’name a Saddlefoot who told me the other night I was part Arapahoe and not Cheyenne, like I’d always thought, is likely dead-center right about my heritage. And as sure as I am that I’m gonna have to look at new ways of tracin’ out my roots from here on out.”
Spoon’s tone let me know he was unhappy about wasting precious time following what had turned out to be a dead end.
“So when’s the rain coming?” I asked, aware that the forecast had called for clear skies all week.
“By this evenin’, TJ. By this evenin’ for sure. But for now we got sunshine and work to do, so let’s get at it.”
“Might as well,” I said, giving the old 3020 some gas and searching the sky for nonexistent signs of rain.
Edward Koffman, known around Big Horn County as Easy Ed, was anything but what you’d call easy. He was a fidgety, rotund, always-on-edge squat of a man who seemed to constantly be looking over his shoulder as if for instruction. Koffman arrived at our house just after supper on the evening of Spoon’s prediction of rain, during the final stages of a violent thunderstorm that rattled the rafters and, as we discovered later, unhinged a twenty-by-twenty-foot section of metal roof.
Spoon, who very rarely ate with us, had joined us for supper at the insistence of my mom, who’d made her Big Horn County Fair–winning pot roast, roasted corn right off the cob, green beans, corn bread, and fresh apple pie.
Spoon and I were devouring second helpings of pie when my dad got up from his chair to answer the frantic knocking at the front door. He strode across the dining room, coffee mug in hand, mumbling, “Who on earth can that be?” and returned with Koffman in tow.
The russet-skinned, nearly eyebrowless Koffman was a man I knew well. Years earlier he’d tried to get me to befriend his son, a frail, sickly shell of a boy named Henry, with wide gaps between his teeth and the suffocated look of an asthmatic. I’d tried my best to forge a friendship with Henry—played basketball with him, called him Hank, as he’d insisted, spent time trying to teach him how to fly-fish. I’d even tried to teach him to run a tractor and baler, but his mind had always seemed to be elsewhere, lost in some fantasy-filled dream. When he’d died of leukemia several months after my final attempt at fly-fishing instruction, I’d had the sense that perhaps, like Spoon, he’d been able to see his own future.
For months after Henry’s death, Koffman had tried to use the fact that he and my dad had both lost sons to wheedle his way into the fabric of our family. But my folks, insightful and circumspect, understood the real reason for Koffman’s telephone calls, ambushes while they were in Hardin picking up supplies, and unannounced visits to the ranch. Regardless of his loss, and despite his clumsy attempts to mask his real reasons for trying to ingratiate himself with us, Easy Ed Koffman was a land-grabbing energy company scout, a coal, oil, and gas man of the rankest order. A man who some people in our valley claimed had cheated uninformed and unwitting ranchers out of their mine
ral rights and occasionally even their land. He’d snookered them not with a six-gun and the intimidating Old West skills of a land-grabbing bully, but with his well-honed New West skills as a corporate lawyer.
Normally calm and collected, my dad looked unhinged by Koffman’s intrusion. He sternly eyed my mom, who rose and flashed Koffman her best disingenuous chorus-line dancer’s smile. It was a smile she typically reserved for the busybody social-climbing church women whom she detested.
Aware that trouble might well be on the wing, I glanced at Spoon. The look on his face as much as said, Told you so.
Everyone remained silent until my mom said graciously, “Afraid you missed supper, Edward. But you’re welcome to have dessert with us. Have a seat.”
Koffman eyed what was left of the deep-dish pie on the table and sat down. “A man would be a fool to turn down an offer like that, and from the best pastry maker in the county.”
“Back-to-back county fair ribbons to prove it,” my dad said proudly, glancing at me and shaking his head as Koffman adjusted himself in his chair. “You know TJ, of course, but I don’t believe you’ve met Arcus Witherspoon, my hired man.”
“Nope.” Koffman stretched across the table, clasped Spoon’s hand, and shook it. “Mr. Witherspoon.”
Quickly slipping his hand out of Koffman’s, Spoon nodded and said, “Just Spoon.”
“Just Spoon it is, then. Pleasure.”
Koffman eased back in his chair as my mom slid the pie toward her to cut him a slice. “Big, small, or otherwise?” she asked.
“Small.” Koffman patted his more-than-ample belly. “Been trying my darnedest to cut back.”
“You can start again tomorrow,” she said, handing him a plate with a generous slice. “Coffee?”
“No. Don’t want to ruin the taste of the pie.”
As I watched the man who was the legal front for Acota Energy Corporation devour his dessert, I thought about Henry and wondered whether the boy who’d wanted to be called Hank had ever understood what his dad did for a living. Koffman and Acota were after energy, but, surprisingly, they weren’t after our ranch’s minuscule amounts of oil, its gas, or even its relatively plentiful shale.
