Keep the Change

3

Joe was over at the headquarters of the Caywood Fork the next day to get his orders. It was first light and the big riverine cottonwoods that hung over the somber headquarters buildings seemed to hold the last of night in their dense foliage. He had no car for the summer and he’d had to walk. The dogs barked at his arrival and Otis Rosewell came around from behind the saddle shed leading a horse. Joe walked over to him and stopped. Rosewell gazed at him. Finally, a small smile played over his lips.

“Must be tough around your camp,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your old man.”

“Yes, he is,” Joe conceded, wondering in dismay if he was failing some test of loyalty. But he thought Rosewell had extended a small gesture of amiability and he didn’t want it to slip away. It could be a long summer.

“Do you know how to run a swather or a bale wagon?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Can you fence?”

“Sure. And I can run a backpack sprayer, you know, for malathion or whatever.”

“Well, most of the fence on your old man’s place is falling down because he never took care of it and because it was fenced poorly in the first place. But I imagine he thinks it’s perfect and I want you to make his dreams come true because my yearlings are pouring through the sonofabitch like water. Get yourself a pocket notebook and start walking that fence. Pull it up when you can and rebuild it where you have to. Knock out that old crooked cedar and put in some steel. You can get a sledge, stretcher, pliers, post pounder, and staples in the shop and you can use the old Ford to haul it around.”

“I’ll get started today.”

“That’s right. And you’ll never finish. Now let me tell you something else. You was sent to us. If you don’t care to put in an honest day’s work, that’s your business. I ain’t going to hang over you. I work for Mr. Overstreet.”

Joe built fence for twenty-one days before he took his first break. He went down all the boundary fence and had five strands of barbed wire on stays sparkling from staple to staple. Where the rotten cedar had given out there were new green-and-white steel T-posts and the soldierly order they gave to the rise and fall of boundaries helped Joe see how his heritage lay on the benign face of the county.

About halfway through his fencing assignment, Joe reached a high divide between two drainages, Crow Creek and Nester Creek. A thousand years of wind had blown all the topsoil to Wyoming and it was just bare rock on top of the world where old barbed wire sang like an Aeolian harp. Otis came up and helped him with this stretch of fence. They started to build jack fence, then changed their minds and dynamited post holes for half a mile until the line pitched down into the woods and was easy again and beyond the eerie sound of the steel strings above them. There was pleasure in working the ratchet on the fence stretcher, watching the wire rise, tighten, and sparkle in the light through the trees, sing in the wind, turn at the corner posts, or drop out of sight over the crown of a hill. Joe was going all round what would one day be his.

On the twenty-first day, he was fencing the bottom of a narrow defile. Cattle had grown accustomed to escaping here by lifting the poles that were meant to hold the bottom wire low. Joe was sewing the fence to the earth along the floor of this cut with a post every ten feet when he was visited by the daughter of the owner, Ellen Overstreet. He had watched her covertly ever since he first got there, mostly when she was riding out through the ranch in the front of a flatbed truck with Billy Kelton, a neighbor Joe hadn’t spoken to since a boyhood fistfight almost ten years before. Without any thought of Ellen herself, Joe would have loved to take her away from Billy, who looked so complacent in the truck, lariat hanging in the rear window and his blue-eyed gaze remote under a tall-crown straw hat. It was a grudge.

Joe’s first thought was that her timing was perfect. He was dark from the long exposure to sun and the muscles of his arms were hard and defined from driving posts and stretching wire. Ellen was a rangy brunette with startling gray eyes.

“What’s the point of this when my dad is going to own it all anyway?” she said with a bright smile.

“I’m getting paid. And I’m here to tell you your dad will never get our place.”

“You’re getting paid. Otis says you can work or not work, it’s no nevermind to him.”

“Well, it is to me,” said Joe, letting the red post pounder tip over and drop with a clang.

“One way or another, Otis says. He doesn’t care.”

“You can’t go by Otis,” said Joe. “If he knew anything he wouldn’t be here.”

“Otis has been with Daddy since we ranched at Exeter Switch.”

“It’s not Otis’s fault he isn’t smart.”

Ellen sat down in the deep bluestem and began pulling up the russet pink flowers of prairie smoke, making a bouquet in her left hand and blowing ants off the blossoms.

“Daddy says you’re in military school in Kentucky and you’re that little bit from graduating and going to Vietnam.”

“Only I’m not going to Vietnam. I’m going to college in the East. I’m studying art. Is that for me?”

He reached out for the bouquet of prairie smoke blossoms and she handed them over with a shrug.

“Why aren’t we going to Vietnam?”

“Because we aren’t supposed to be there in the first place. Everybody knows that.”

“Not everybody knows that. A lot of my friends can’t wait to get there.”

“Well, you’ve got the wrong friends.”

“You better not let them hear your Vietnam theory. I know one or two will fix your little red wagon. We believe in freedom. Y’know Billy Kelton?”

“Yeah, I know Billy.”

“Well, he plans to go quick as he can get shut of school.”

“That’d be about right for Billy.”

“Did you know he was top five saddlebronc rider in the Northern Rodeo Association two years in a row?”

“Nope.”

“He’s about as pretty a hand with rough stock ever come out of these parts.”

“That should just chill the Vietcong,” said Joe.

Joe wasn’t really paying close attention. Almost the only thing he and Ellen had in common was that they were both being dunned by the Columbia Record Club. He was trying to see what she had in the way of breasts. If she hadn’t wanted that noticed, she could have bought the right shirt size.

“Otis said you really know how to work.”

“He did?” Joe practically sang.

“That seems to mean quite a little to you.”

“Not really.”

She scrutinized him. He was at a loss for words. The very sound of air seemed to increase. She took a deep breath. “What bands do you like?” she asked.

“The Stones. What about you?”

“The Byrds.” On the word “Byrds” he sensed his opportunity and reached to take her hand. It felt small to him, though it was hard to notice anything more than the nervous energy pouring back and forth between them. He would have liked to announce that he was going to kiss her or that he was attracted to her, which he was. But anything which contained much meaning would have subjected him to overexposure. Nevertheless, for things to continue, it was necessary that he express something about the moment. He said, “Oh, wow.” To his immense relief, “Oh, wow” was very acceptable. Ellen Overstreet seemed to melt very slightly at these less than eloquent words. “I mean it,” Joe added and took the other hand.

“What are you taking?” she breathed, her face angled down at the ground between them.

“Algebra, History, Spanish, English. What about you?”

“Soc. Home Ec. Comm Skills. Phys Ed.” Joe wasn’t thinking so much about her courses. He could tell that she was looking to him for leadership. That he knew next to nothing, probably no more than she, didn’t matter because he had arrived from out of state and his real background was lost behind this ripped T-shirt, these new muscles, and this tan. He drew Ellen to him and kissed her. Feeling the hard line of her clamped lips, he realized that Ellen was ready to be kissed but didn’t know much more than to lean face forward. It might take all summer to get those lips open.

They went on kissing. A couple of times, she had “thoughts” as she called them that made laughter burst through her nose. Joe waited grimly for these “thoughts” to pass and went back to the awkward business of kissing and hugging. He had numb spots from the rough ground, and any attempt to get “more comfortable” as he explained it, that is, to lever Ellen into a reclining posture, failed miserably. Finally, she detached herself and got up.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Joe. We’ll have to do something one of these days.”

“That’d be great,” he said, quite certain he knew what she meant by “something.”

“Like maybe we could ride on Saturday.”

“Oh, wow.”

When she started to leave, he gave her the peace sign. His best friend back at school, Ivan Slater, said day in and day out you could get familiar with strange girls faster by using the peace sign as a greeting than any other way.

But Ellen, seeing his raised fingers, said, “Two what?”

Joe just shook his head.

“The two of us?” she said. “Oh, you’re sweet!”