Swirls in rotten lace curtains made curious monster faces in the early morning sunshine. Patches of light shone that through their monster eyes and mouths as Tawny lay still in the earliest flickers of consciousness.
She stretched, sticking her arms out of the covers.
A yawn escaped, releasing frost into the chilled air, causing her to pull the old patchwork over her head.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
Why does this always happen? It’s an old stove. I can hardly expect it to hold the fire!
Why hadn’t she added wood when she had come back in just a couple of hours earlier? The old stove was a rusted rectangle that bore the mark of a stove meant for hardier women than were even alive now.
Tawny liked to think of herself as tough.
But the constant failure of the stove and her aching arms from the early morning calf-pulling mocked her now. It made her know she wasn’t “all that”, as she and her friends at school used to say.
She knew she wasn’t like those women in the 1800s who came out here with their men, had babies while on the trail, and then mounted back up and rode on.
Tawny had come back from pulling the calf while the rest of the ranch still slept.
It was Thanksgiving Day, and most had planned a more relaxed schedule for the holiday. She had returned, exhausted and aching, to the embrace of the feather mattress on her small wooden bed that her dog, Maggie had kept warm.
This country out here had a way of slapping anyone down. It didn’t matter if it was a man or woman. It had its own way of reminding those strong enough or foolish enough to try living out here, how small they were – how tired and tiny they really were.
But for Tawny’s part, she stayed here, like some supplicant to a god who was angry with her. And she continued looking for it, for herself within it, determined she would find the answers to all the questions about herself out here, somewhere in the Sage.
Tawny’s small, socked feet risked the cold and poked out from under her patchwork quilt. It was one her mother made her and bore the signature of a skilled stitch master. The quilt was topped with a lambskin cover. The quilt had gone with her everywhere and was especially comforting when she was sick with the flu or deeper things that ached in her heart. The lambskin cover was something she had made by a Mexican sheep rancher nearby and she used it on frigid nights to ward off the cold.
Outside, a horse nickered and pawed at a metal feeder. The burners and grinders on the feed mill coughed and roared to life, signaling that Tuck was already there to begin grinding corn for the small feed lot.
In a few more minutes, Fancy would be there.
Fancy was 50ish, little and tough. She was as dependable as the Oklahoma wind and about as abrasive. This morning, she’d most certainly be cussing and trying to start her feed truck in the cold. She’d be pissed that it wouldn’t start and even madder that she had to be there at all. Tawny knew too well that if she wandered over to greet her, just how it would go. Fancy would growl a “hello” and then she’d say, “I don’t even know why I still do this anymore. I’d rather be curled up on my couch watching Jeopardy with my dog.”
Tawny sighed and tuned her ear to the noises that had been the concert by which all her days started for the last four years on this sprawling Oklahoma ranch.
She shoved her feet into old, dirty white slippers, ragged and chewed on the edges by her dog, Maggie. She looked at the pathetic slippers, then over at the dog.
“Maggie, nothin’ got by you when you were a puppy, did it?” The Red Queensland, now an adult, curled tighter into a ball in the corner near the stove. She feigned sleep to avoid being put out into the icy morning wind. Tawny had let the dog sleep when she had been called out earlier – a choice that she would not make again, considering the cow attack. The young woman shuffled by the dog toward the stove.
Maggie opened one eye to see if her mistress headed for the door. The dog knew the words that might come next. She had heard ‘em thousands of times.
“Git up you, get outside.”
But Tawny shuffled past the door and the strawberry roan dog closed her eye again, smacked her lips a couple of times and sighed, safe in her warm ball a bit longer.
Soon enough though, the dog knew, in the way dogs keep thoughts, that the two of them would be out in the wind and snow. They’d be shoving hay off the flatbed. Finally, the two partners would rest and share a chunk of sticky-roll in the warmth of the pickup.
Tawny bent, gathered her long, wavy, chestnut hair and pulled it behind her, out of the way.
She jerked open the small door to the stove. Sparks leapt and floated in the blackness inside the small stove when she tossed in a fresh log on the dwindling coals. The rich, dark scent of burning tamaracks tickled her nose. An impatient poke with the tongs touched off embers and a small flame licked around the edge of the new cedar log.
“Heat up you, old bitch.”
She turned her back to the stove, waiting to feel the first warmth and glanced at the framed juris doctor degree on the wall.
She smiled, wondering why she hung it there. It seemed to taunt her so. It was nothing but a painful reminder. Yet, there was something about it that she needed to see. Maybe if she left it there, she’d be able to figure out what made her feel so…something.
Was it guilt?
Tawny tilted her head sideways back and forth as if she could force discernment out of her brain, then returned to the task at hand. The feeling changed depending on the day. She’d begun giving up on figuring herself out.
She thought of the day she had decided she would not do what everyone thought she would – go into law and then winced at the memory.
She wondered now, four years later, if she would have had the courage to shuck it all and head out to this ranch. She couldn’t decide if the years on the ranch had made her harder or softened her a bit.
She knew she was better for coming here. But she also was beginning to admit she had, indeed, left behind some unfinished business. It wasn’t about being an attorney-but something more personal that she had needed to complete.
Now, she only wanted back the relationship she once shared with her father that was ruined by her decision.
She understood why it was a surprise to everyone, even her, she was choosing the ranch instead of this other life as an attorney. Understanding that, though, did nothing to dull the pain of the way her father had reacted.
“Just go ahead and do it. You’re so bull headed you’re gonna do it anyway.” It was a phrase she had heard her whole life from Dad and she had expected it. But she had not expected him to be as truly angry as he had been.
Four years and they had not spoken since she had told him, told them all, about her plans to leave behind the massive amount of effort and expense toward that law degree and go back to the ranch.
Her boss now, Dwight Morris, had the largest holdings in oil and land of any of the clients of a law firm where she had been interning. Back then, he used the firm primarily for contract dealings for his ranch and drilling company.
She’d seen Dwight Morris at the firm before and had drawn up a contract for the man’s large drilling business. He had come in on a Friday shortly before her graduation from law school.
Tawny remembered seeing him in the board room that day. She had poked her head into the office and greeted him with, “How many acres are ya buying now Mr. Morris?”
“Not a purchase,” he ran a hand though thinning, white hair and continued. “Need to write up a contract for a new herd manager.”
“Huh?” Tawny leaned back, her eyebrows raised.
“A herd manager,” he repeated. “Someone who manages my cow-calf herd.”
“I know what it is.” She stopped herself for a second when she heard herself interrupt the older man. “I’m just surprised ole’, Jim isn’t it? I’m surprised he didn’t stay. Guess he looked like a lifer there to me.”
“Yep, sorry ‘bout that. What, with seeing you here all the time dressed in your short skirts and all, well, I forget you were raised on your dad’s place. I forget you know cattle.”
“Know about it? I lived it my whole life until…”
“Yeah, I know about your dad’s trouble.” He didn’t make her continue. “Anyway, Jim’s mom got bad so he went to stay with her in town to take care of her, ‘cept I can’t see him doin’ that kinda thing.”
“Yeah, me neither. How’s he gonna pay for his all-nighters at Roy’s Place?” She laughed but noticed her joke did not have the same effect on Dwight. So, she changed her line of questioning.
“So, you hired anyone? Is that what the contract’s for?”
“Nope, just wanna change up the idea about what someone gets, if they will come and make a life there. You know, give em something to make em stay.” He tapped the shiny table gently, soundlessly with a dry, crusty finger. “It was my dad’s place you know and will always be in the family – what there is of it anyway.”
Tawny sat silently, but a storm raged within her in that moment, on that day.
With all five fingers, as if playing a piano, Tawny tapped her knee, bare and tan in a pen-striped skirt. There was more silence and then she said the thing that seemed foreign to even her.
“How ‘bout me?”
The old man’s light blue eyes widened, crowding the sagging skin above them and making it fold over his lids, red and inflamed.
Tiny purplish lines fanned out from his bulbous nose and announced, without compunction, his love for expensive scotch. He tilted his head and tapped his gnarled old thumb on the table.
“Thought you were going to be here?”
“Yeah, that’s what everyone thinks, but maybe not.”
“Is there a problem?”
“Oh, no. They do want me to stay. I just miss it.”
Dwight looked around the room, as if suspecting this was a set up and then settled in his chair a little deeper.
“Tawny, you know there’s really no money in that kind of work. It’s hard, cold, hot and lonely work.”
She nodded.
“Uh huh-I’ll take it.”
“Well, I don’t know about this. I been doin’ business with this law firm for more than 25 years and to take their star performer might make for bad relations.”
She said nothing. She only studied the table in front of her.
He looked hard at her, curious about her, wondering why she would give this up, the money and chance at success, just to go back and work on a ranch.
The two sat in the room, the hum of the air conditioner the only sound between them. Dwight broke the silence.
“OK, let’s do this much. Just drive out there and I’ll take you around the place. We’ll talk then.”
She reached for him and grasped his hand in hers.
“I’ll be there this weekend.”
Looking back at it now, the trip that weekend had been nothing but a technicality for her.
For Dwight Morris, it was a chance to realize she was serious, and so after a long ride around the huge ranch, he hired her. She was to begin after her graduation, after she told her family “what she’d gone and done,” as Mr. Morris had said.
“I’m almost scared of what people will say to me,” he said and laughed a bit.
That day came. Tawny learned in a way she would not soon forget that telling him had, indeed, been difficult. But hearing his response was even harder.
“I didn’t send your sorry ass to law school so you could be a damn, worthless cow puncher.” He walked out the door and her mother followed him with one hand on his shoulder and the other shaking her finger at her daughter.
“I don’t know what you’re thinkin’ sometimes Tawny,” Marzella Coulten had said as she trotted after her father out the door. “I just don’t know.”
A lone white tail buck sniffed and pawed the spot in the shadow of the Gloss Mountains, where the scent of a man lingered. His ears flicked, one forward, one back and each brushed his massive rack. The buck looked around for what had left the scent. He scratched the place in the snow and sand with a sharp hoof and revealed the corner of a dark blue bag. The buck flashed his tail, a warning sign to his does.
