8. Ranger
Chapter 8
Ranger
I’d lost myself in the subtle click of the tagger and hooves on dirt. We were a few days into tagging the new calves and Miles and I had found a stride. It felt like old times, working long days under the bright blue sky until every muscle in my body ached from the effort.
There was little to do in prison and even less if you wanted to stay out of trouble. Most of my days were spent working out, trying to stay strong, knowing that I would be coming home to some of the hardest work there was. The rest of my days were spent in the library working for pennies. But it helped pass the time and I was thankful to have a distraction on the hard days.
The months leading up to my release were some of the hardest. Every day dragged by for what felt like an eternity. I leaned on the visits with Miles and Callie Rose. On remembering what the fresh air smelled like. The quiet sounds of the main house first thing in the morning, when I was the only one awake and had the entire world to myself. How the colors of the sunrise melded into one another. Oranges, yellows, and reds painting a striking canvas above my family’s land. My sister’s laughter and my best friend’s smile.
Every fucking day I clung onto those memories like they were the air in my lungs and the blood in my veins—the only things keeping me alive.
When shit went down, my first thought was hoping I survived long enough to be in this very moment with the dirt beneath my feet surrounded by the only place I wanted to come back to. Then I was out. No more time left to my sentence. No more days to count down to.
Freedom .
Hunger clawed at my stomach as I lifted my knee from the calf’s shoulder and watched him trot off toward the herd.
“Ready for lunch?” I asked Miles, dusting the dirt off my jeans.
“Yeah, man. I’m starving.”
We made our way to the main house where I pulled out all the fixings for turkey sandwiches, arranging them in an assembly line of sorts so Miles and I could take turns grabbing all the ingredients.
When he reached for the mustard I scowled. “Man, I don’t know how the hell you can eat that shit. It’s rank.”
He smacked the bottom of the bottle and squirted the mustard on both slices of bread. “No, you just don’t have good taste. Mustard is by far the superior condiment. Even your sister agrees.”
“What?” I glared at him. Callie Rose had never eaten mustard in my presence. She told me she hated the stuff just as much as I did.
“Yeah. While you were gone, I convinced her to try it one day on her sandwich and now she eats it all the time.”
“Wait.” I held up my hand. “You’re telling me that while I was in prison, you corrupted my baby sister and brainwashed her into liking mustard? Fucking bastard.”
He laughed before raising his mustard-laden butter knife at me and said, “I did not corrupt her. I merely showed her the error in her ways. I opened her eyes to the joy one has when they use mustard on their sandwich.”
“Oh my God.” I shook my head, feeling completely betrayed. “Just make sure you brush your teeth after you eat that foul shit. I don’t want to have to smell it all day.”
He snorted. “Like you have a nose good enough to smell mustard on me from that far away.”
“Dude, it fucking stinks!”
Miles just shrugged before he piled up the turkey and cheese and we headed out to the front porch. We both sat in the rocking chairs my grandpa had made for him and my grandma. The walnut had held up over the years with only a few dents and scratches that made them all the better in my opinion.
The sun was straight overhead in a cloudless sky that surrounded the rolling green hills of my family’s land. My mind brought me back to that night thirteen years ago. The night that almost stole this land from me.
Something heavy sat in my chest and my voice sounded thick as I spoke. “Hey, man. I don’t think I’ve ever told you how much it means to me that you took care of this place while I was away. I don’t think I’d be sitting on this porch right now if it weren’t for you stepping up.”
Miles just smiled at me like it was no big deal that he’d put his life on pause to make sure Callie Rose and I had a home while I was gone. “This ranch might have your name on it, brother. But this is just as much my home as it is yours. There was no way in hell I’d let us lose this place. Not as long as I had air in my lungs.”
He was right. Miles had grown up on this ranch with me. I still remembered the first day I met him. I was nine years old when my father had taken me on a fishing trip to the lake when this scalawag-looking boy came barreling through the trees onto the shoreline. He was barefoot and covered in dirt, wearing only jean shorts that were cut off at the knees. He used a stick and an old rusty hook as a fishing pole that I’d thought would break the first bite he got.
But he ended up catching the biggest bass of the day and from that moment forward, we’d been best friends.
He lived with his dad who worked the night shift for a road construction company and he didn’t have a clue where his mom had gone off to. His dad never liked to talk about it. So he spent most of his days on the ranch with us, learning from my dad what it meant to be a good rancher.
When my dad died, Miles took it almost as hard as I did. We had our first fistfight as two angry teenage boys who needed to get out all the hate we had towards the unjust world. We pointed it at one another for a total of five minutes before Callie Rose started yelling at us and sprayed our feral spirits down with the water hose.
Every important memory I’d ever had was with Miles.
“And it’ll always be your home,” I replied. “I just wanted you to know how much I appreciate what you did, taking all this on by yourself. I know it wasn’t easy and there’s not a whole lot I can do to repay you for that.”
He rested his hand on my shoulder. “Just make sure I always have a chair on this porch and that will be repayment enough, brother.”
I smiled, feeling the heaviness in my chest dissipate. “That I can do.”
We sat in silence for a few moments before I leaned forward, my clasped hands falling between my legs.
“How’s Callie Rose’s orchard coming along?” he asked.
“It’s fucking impressive. She’s taken really good care of it and we were able to get all the wires set up last week, so she should be good to go for a while.”
“That’s awesome. I guess she has some pretty big plans for it, huh?”
“Yeah. She wants to eventually build a large barn to host wine tastings and maybe some smaller weddings. It’ll be a few years before she gets it up and running, but I know once she gets the vines healthy enough to produce wine, it’ll be a big hit.”
“I think she told me the closest vineyard is about an hour away.”
“She told me that too. All the biddies and fancy folk will love having a winery close to town. The perfect place for them to spend all that cash since there’s not a place to do it downtown. Joanne’s Tavern isn’t exactly the place those people want to spend their Saturday afternoons.”
Miles chuckled, extending his legs out so he pushed the rocking chair all the way back. “We’ll have to make sure Callie Rose puts a decent price on those bottles when she gets started.”
“Oh, I’ll make sure of that.”
Miles pulled his legs in and leaned forward to look at me. “Speaking of rich folk…Callie Rose told me about LeRoy being back in town.” His gaze was steady and I already knew the question he had before he asked it. “Why didn’t you say anything to me after she told you?”
I stretched my arms out and interlaced my hands behind my head before leaning back in the chair. With a deep breath, I tried to still the anger that always had a habit of immediately rising to the surface at the mention of LeRoy Cummings.
“Honestly, I just wanted to forget about it. I’ve avoided going to town ever since she told me last week because the thought of running into him makes me so damn angry, I worry about what I might do if I see him. It’s not exactly the state I want to be in, but here we are.”
Miles took a moment looking out at the fields before he turned back to me. “What do you think it will take to forgive him?”
“Forgive him?” I spat.
“Yes,” he answered, a shadow passing over his face .
“Why the hell would I forgive him? He put me away for ten years, Miles.”
“That’s exactly why you need to forgive him. He’s already taken so much from you. It’s been thirteen years since everything went down and you’re still harboring anger towards him. All that time you were away are years that you’ll never get back. If you stay mad at him, he will continue to rob you of your present and your future.”
“How am I supposed to do that? How am I supposed to let go of everything he cost me? All the years of my life that I missed out on moments just like this? Moments I lost with my sister?” My voice cracked. From anger. From sadness. Shit. I didn’t know anymore. The only thing I did know was that I was starting to lose the grip I had on my dignity.
My eyelids opened wide and my nostrils flared as I sucked in a deep breath, doing everything I could not to lose my cool. I was hanging on by a damn thread and the tension was about to snap it in two.
“I know. He’s a piece of shit elitist asshole who has never had to pay for the consequences of his own decisions. And I hope karma comes around and bites him in the ass one of these days if only to prevent other people from dealing with the fallout of his bad behavior. But forgiving him has nothing to do with him and I’m not saying it’ll happen overnight.” He pointed at the center of my chest. “It’s for you, Ranger. So that you don’t have to walk around with this chip on your shoulder for the rest of your life thinking that the world is out to get you or that people can’t be trusted. When you forgive him, you’ll be able to set all that shit free. ”
Free . The word clanged around in my mind. Such a simple word that had countless meanings depending on who you asked. For so long I attributed the word to the physical sense of not being bound to a cage. But maybe there was more to it. That what Miles was saying eluded to the deeper meaning. Freedom wasn’t just about being able to come home again and drive my truck downtown whenever I wanted.
I hadn’t realized that I’d built my own prison in my mind. Caged by anger and resentment. I tugged on the bars, but they just weren’t ready to come loose yet.
“I want that,” I whispered. “And I’m thankful to have you in my life to point out the fact that I need to work towards it. But I’m not there yet. I’m not even sure what it will take to get me there, but all I can do is hope that I will know when the moment comes.”
He clasped my shoulder again. “And I’ll be right by your side hoping with you, brother.”