Summer Winds (13 page)

“If we get a dry week, we can still round-bale and sell it off for cattle hay,” I reasoned.

“Not worth
that.
Oughta just lay it down,” he said, wanting to let it mulch the ground or get carried off by the wind.

“It’ll look like hell, it’s a fire hazard, and I intend to get a second cutting this year so I’m not laying down the first.” Perry followed me into the house as I sat the sack down on the counter.

“Don’t know what condition I’ll be in by then,” he groused in reference to Bo and exited seconds after arriving, demonstrating his nervous state.

I put the groceries in the cabinet and glanced at Cash, who sat at the computer ignoring both of us. She’d trudged the fields front to back all day, taking photos of birds and wildlife and loading them into her computer. Once Perry left, she beckoned me to her screen, where she flashed images that looked like a
National Geo
exhibit.

“You have a good eye,” I said over her shoulder, being careful not to get too close or too intimate. A large male redbird seemed to be looking right at us, and in another shot, a squirrel swung to its next tree, captured mid-leap.

“I recognize beauty when I see it,” she said, turning to look at me.

I ignored the obvious compliment. “You should think about doing it professionally. You can’t buck hay for the rest of your life.”

My tone was crisp and I could tell from her expression she didn’t like the frosty distance, but I was getting better at it.

Like all plainswomen, I could compartmentalize things when I needed to. That was how Bea Benegan could have a husband lying at home drunk and still tell customers at the dry-goods store that he was a good man. Being able to compartmentalize is how Betsy Kendall could know for a fact her husband Hiram was having an affair with a gal in town and still swear to anyone who would listen that her family was blessed. And that’s how I could wall off my heart, ignore the longing, and tell myself that I had absolutely everything in life I needed.

That’s what compartmentalizing could do for a woman—allow her to function and go on living.

❖

The sun finally came out and, a few days after that, the land began to dry. When it did, the intensity of the heat created a world of steam. We were heading toward the Fourth of July, muggy and hot and resigned to the fact that summer was upon us. The ground dried up enough that the haying equipment could get across it, and Perry unlocked the huge equipment barn and began tinkering on the John Deere, then drove it out and hooked up the hay cutter. He waited until the dew was off the grass and the mid-morning sun was at its peak before he fired up the tractor and began to cut. We were weeks late in getting our first cutting, which would mean a late September second cutting in a race with the first frost.

I loved the haying cycle. Tall golden stalks falling over as the tractor chugged up and down in rows, like soldiers of the sun laid to rest in the fields, their ending was the beginning of winter nourishment for the horses and cattle.

By the time the last acres of the day had their haircut, a thin orange band of sky was disappearing below a mass of dark purple clouds, creating a glow that concealed all but the tractor lights guiding the big green machine over the remaining acreage.

I looked up to see Perry walking across the field and the tractor still traveling along the backside of the east pasture. “Getting your money’s worth with Bo.”

“That’s Cash.” Perry turned his head and spat on the ground.

“Where’s Bo?”

“Family emergency.”

I said nothing. Family emergencies only tended to happen out here when the work got backbreaking.

“Be back in the morning,” Perry reassured me of Bo’s absence.

I stayed up waiting for the tractor lights to shut off and finally, around midnight, they did. Cash came up to the house hot and dust-covered from the field-dirt flying up at her. She gave me a wave and a quick hello before disappearing into her room. I heard the shower crank on and the sound of water streaming down. Shortly thereafter, the bedsprings made one loud bounce and then not another sound.

I smiled, thinking she must be exhausted, and I was pleased with myself that I’d gotten us both back on track. Good for her and good for me. The nonsense that had been going on in my head would never make it to my heart. I had created an intelligent detour—keeping everyone’s mind on the work at hand.

The next morning Cash and Bo, back from his faux-emergency, took turns driving the tractor that dragged the circular tines of the hay rake over the fallen grass, fluffing up neat rows of prairie hay ready for the baler. The moist heat took its toll and the workers looked spent. I drove out at noon with sandwiches and iced tea for everyone, as I often did during hay season, and served it on the truck tailgate. Cash was all grins, having apparently gotten a good night’s sleep. Bo looked hung over and Perry was just plain grouchy.

“You ever have anybody come back two summers in a row?” Cash said under her breath.

“I guess we’ll see, won’t we,” I said, and she smiled.

“Maybe I’ll become the town photographer. Easier work, I’m thinking,” she said.

“Yeah?” Perry moved in and grabbed two sandwiches. “Most things you’d shoot in this town you’d just want to go ahead and bury.”

“You are in one pissy mood, Mr. Waits,” I said.

“Porky Pig’s gotta get out of my bunkhouse,” he whispered hoarsely. Bo came around the corner and snorted as if he had a major sinus infection. “Jeez-Louise!” Perry said to no one in particular and went off to eat his sandwich out of earshot.

“How’s it going, Bo?” I asked. Cash pulled her camera out and took a shot of Bo’s big battered knuckles reaching into the pile of sandwiches. He turned to look at her.

“Mind if I get a shot?” she asked while snapping it.

He shrugged but seemed pleased. In fact, he stood a little straighter. “Those boots green?” he asked, in a tone that seemed to indicate even his country-boy sensibilities were appalled at the hue.

“Nope, brown,” she said of her bright green boots.

“Look green.” His face was puzzled.

“Must be the light. Lean up against the truck,” she ordered, and he posed for her. For a moment, I felt a pang of jealousy.

“You give me a copy of that?” he asked.

“You bet.” She sacked the camera, grabbed a sandwich, and headed back to the truck.

“She married?” Bo asked casually.

“I think she’s dating some guy back home,” I replied.
Why the
hell did I say that? I don’t know that she’s dating anybody. Well,
it’s important for Bo not to get the wrong idea about her. Cameras
do that, create a personal relationship where there is none. I could
vouch for that.

❖

Two days later, the Fourth of July dawned intensely hot. I looked out the back window to observe the hay baling that had been underway since midday, allowing the noon sunshine to evaporate the morning dew and prevent mold setting into the bales. Perry drove the tractor with the baler on it, Bo drove a smaller tractor with a forklift on the end, and Cash, wearing gloves on her nearly healed hands, hoisted the squares up on the loader fork until she had a stack twenty-four wide. We used to stack them on a wagon, but it was twice the work unstacking them in the hay shed. This way we loaded once and the tractor went back to the hay barn and the lift hoisted them to the top of the stack. We used more gas but saved on hired hands.

Grabbing the binoculars off the shelf, I focused on Cash. She looked tan and muscled and beautiful, but tired. I checked my watch.

She’d been at it for three hours. I felt a surge of energy and the desire to get out and do something physical.

I jumped in the truck and drove down to where she was standing in the field. Hopping out, I swung a gallon thermos into her hands.

“You take a break. I’ll handle it for awhile.”

“No, no. I’m fine. You can’t do this. I mean…well, I’m bigger.”

“Only in your mind,” I said dryly.

When Bo pulled the tractor in front of me, I grabbed hay bales off the ground. Making an extra effort, I swung eighteen bales onto the forklift before Cash, who refused to rest, could handle twelve, bucking the second row as if I were tossing pillows and not sixty-pound squares. I wanted to collapse onto the tailgate and pass out, but my pride had the best of me. I grabbed the iced tea and slugged down a glass, standing tall and acting like I wasn’t even tired.

I caught Cash out of the corner of my eye watching me with a big grin.

“What’s the problem?” I asked in a businesslike tone.

“Don’t get her riled.” Perry shook his woolly head. “Things are tough enough around here on a good day.” For the first time he glanced down at Cash’s feet. “Where’d you get those green boots? You look like a damned leprechaun.”

“They were my grandfather’s. I adored him,” Cash lied, straight-faced.

“Didn’t know that.” Perry looked embarrassed and hurried off.

“You’re getting your money’s worth out of those boots,” I said.

“Not easy being green.”

After several hours I was panting but trying to hide it. By a quick count, I estimated that we’d hauled and stacked about half the bales on the ground. I used a walkie-talkie in the truck to call Perry and tell him we were trading out so that Bo could stack for awhile and Cash could drive. She protested but I said it was only fair. Down deep, I thought Bo had taken advantage of her good temperament, letting her do an unequal share of the work.

We stood together waiting for the tractors to return. The wind whipped tarps, our hair, and our shirts, slapping us into awareness of our own filth and fatigue. Unable to hear above the roar of machinery and the intense wind, we merely grinned at one another.

She was pulling her weight. More than pulling her weight. In fact, she was working harder than Bo and smarter than Perry. Cash Tate was turning into a hand.
Buck would be proud.

When I looked up again, the shutter snapped and she’d captured me, dirt and all, in her frame. Before I could complain, she shouted,

“Smile, Ms. Stanwyck. Big Valley is nearly hayed.” I realized she and Donnetta must be sharing information I wasn’t privy to, and despite that, she made me smile. Snap. She had me again.

Cash turned her attention to Bo crawling down out of the cab, his huge back end in full view, then Perry loping across the field.

She swung her camera lens toward them. Click. Click. Click. She had captured us all.

By late evening I’d left Cash in the fields working alongside the men to finalize the harvest. Everything was nearly wrapped up and I came in and took a long soaking bath, just to relax my muscles, which were admittedly twitching from my showing off this afternoon. I had to smile thinking about the ridiculousness of my behavior and how I would pay for it in body aches tomorrow. Trying to get a jump on pain, I took wine and some glasses out on the porch, thinking that women, wine, and horses all seemed to go together.

Perhaps all were a gamble, and ranchers were the biggest gamblers on the planet, most depending on God and good luck for their survival. I sat down in one of the rockers, enjoying the anonymity of night as Cash staggered up, unable to see me observing her.

“You worked hard today,” I said quietly out of the darkness.

“I would have fainted but I’m too damned tired to get back up,” she said of my startling her.

“Normally we have a Fourth of July feed, but the haying got in the way of that. We can probably see the celebration in town from here.”

“I’m not crazy about fake fireworks.” She sagged into a rocking chair a few feet from mine and I contemplated what non-fake fireworks might be. Perhaps fireworks of the human kind, and I was certain Cash could generate those. I reached for the carafe on the table between us and poured the pale liquid into a glass, then handed it to her.

“Kool-Aid?” She looked suspicious.

“Wine.”

“Thank God. I thought I’d joined an AA work camp.” She slugged down the small glass and held it out. I poured her another.

“Some people sip it,” I said slyly.

“Those people have never spent ten hours next to Bo’s armpit and Perry’s spitting chaw into the wind.” She pointed to the stains on her shirt. I chuckled. “So was your husband a…regular guy?”

“Why are you so interested in that topic?”

“It’s a piece of your history, of this ranch’s history, that’s all,” she said, but I felt she was interested for other reasons, like wanting to know who someone like me would sleep with.

“By ‘regular guy’ you mean was he like Bo and Perry?” She didn’t answer and I knew that’s what she was curious about—were my tastes local. “He died when he was so young that it’s hard to say what he would have turned into.”

“So he was the love of your life?” Her voice came softly from the shadows. Maybe she was able to ask such personal questions because it was dark and she didn’t have to look in my eyes.

“We were only together four years.” I avoided answering her directly. “He died when I was younger than you are.”

“Must have been hard to go on out here alone.”

I poured myself another glass of wine and we sat listening to the comforting cadence of the cicadas as they filled the air with a palpable buzz and the runners on the rockers creaked patiently against the porch boards, summoning secrets. “It wasn’t so much about loving him, although I cared for him. It was simply that he was here, present, alive. And then in a matter of minutes he wasn’t.

When I came back from the funeral, a kind of eerie quiet seemed to have spread across the ranch. He was the last of three generations of laughing and fighting and toiling and then nothing. They were gone, existing only in my memories. Every time I took a breath it echoed like wind in a tunnel. I promised myself I would never hurt like that again.”

“How do you make good on that promise?”

“It’s where I put my focus. I choose to focus on things that don’t hurt.”

The hum of the tractor motors filled the night air as the big tires rolled across the field out to the equipment shed and the green monsters’ lights went dark. We could just make out two dim figures trudging toward the bunkhouse.