12. Where You Go When You Need Quiet #2
The numbers are good. The Wilder Ranch operation is what a healthy working ranch looks like: not large, not flashy, just well-maintained and honestly run by people who have never stopped paying attention.
The hay is stocked. The water is reliable. The rotation schedule is working. The carrying capacity is slightly below maximum, which means there is a margin for a bad season without a crisis.
I have been writing comparisons to Promised Land Ranch in the margins all week without deciding to do so.
Wilder Ranch: water table reliable, two stock tanks plus the creek.
Promised Land Ranch: same aquifer, should be equivalent. I remember where the second stock tank is—east side, near the old windmill.
Wilder Ranch: six-pasture grazing rotation, forty-five days each.
Promised Land: Tommy has been using three pastures. I can tell from what he's described. The grass hasn't had time to recover.
Wilder Ranch: carrying capacity two hundred fifty head, running one-eighty. Margin intact.
Promised Land: running too many head for the reduced pasture. Feed costs are climbing because the grass isn't recovering. That's where the money is going.
The picture has been forming all week.
The debt is real, but it is not insurmountable. The ranch is not broken. The ranch is a working cattle operation that has been short-staffed and overgrazed for several years, turning a manageable situation into a crisis.
This happens all the time on family ranches when one person is carrying too much on their own.
Tommy has been carrying too much alone.
I close the notebook.
Tomorrow I am going to ask Jake if it’s time to go to Promised Land Ranch.
Tonight, first. Something needs to happen tonight before I make the ask.
I am not yet sure what it is.
Pete stops by the porch steps on his way out at the end of the day.
"Good notebook?" he says.
"Good notebook."
He looks at it. A lot of writing for someone who came here to learn the basics."
"I learn fast."
"Mmhm." He picks up his thermos. "Jake tells you about the time he drove the tractor into the creek?"
"No."
"Good story. Ask him sometime." He starts toward his truck. "He'll tell you it was the tractor's fault. It was not the tractor's fault."
He drives out.
I sit on the porch steps with my notebook, the late-afternoon light turning gold. I wonder about asking Jake about the tractor and the creek, what his face will look like when I do, and tomorrow.
I will know the right moment when it arrives.
* * *
Evening
Jake finds me on the porch after dinner.
Or rather, I am on the porch after dinner, and he comes out, which is a distinction without a difference at this point. We have been ending up in the same place at the end of the day for over a week now, and neither of us has said anything about it.
The porch has become a shared thing, the way the fence line became a shared thing, and the morning coffee became a shared thing, gradually, without announcement.
He sits in the other chair. The sky is doing its panhandle sky thing at this hour, orange at the edges, purple coming in from the top, the stars beginning in the center of the dark overhead where the last of the light has already left.
We sit in the quiet for a while. Long enough that it settles. Long enough that it becomes the kind of quiet you can speak into without it being too loud.
"Where do you go?" he says. "When you need quiet."
It is such a pointed question. Not what do you do or how do you relax. Where do you go? He is asking about the actual place.
I look at the darkening horizon.
"The piano," I say.
"The barn piano."
"Any piano. But the barn one is what I have right now." I look at my hands. "When I need the thing that's mine, not the session version, not the music that belongs to someone else's record, I sit at the piano alone, and I play until the room is empty enough."
"Empty enough for what?"
I think about it honestly.
"For whatever needs to come out," I say. "The song I've been writing for six months. The things that don't yet have words. The parts of a day that went somewhere I didn't plan for."
"Like last night," he says.
"Like last night."
He nods. He doesn't say anything about what happened last night. He just acknowledges that it happened, without making more of it than it is.
"What about you?" I say.
"The porch," he says. "Or the east fence line. Anywhere I can see the horizon all the way around."
He looks at the darkening east pasture.
"When I was pondering my life and if I chose the right thing by staying and needed to find myself again, I'd come out to this exact view. The land at dusk, the light going wide. It was always enough to steady me."
"Still enough?"
"Mostly." He looks at his hands. "Some things I used to know how to set down out here I've been carrying longer than I should."
I wait.
He doesn't say what those things are. But he doesn't make a joke either. He doesn't deflect. He lets the sentence hang in the air between us, incomplete, which is the version of honesty that costs more than the easy thing would.
"I have a drawer," he says.
The stars are fully out, with the Milky Way band stretching from one horizon to the other. The cattle settled, and the Panhandle silence that is not absence of sound, but too much space for sound to fill.
"Me, too. What's in yours?" I ask. "The thing."
He is quiet long enough that I think he won't answer.
Then: "Something I want that I haven't let myself want because wanting it requires making a choice and the choice affects people I love."
He doesn’t say what the thing is.
I don’t ask.
I understand what he means because I have the same kind of thing in the same kind of drawer. Not the same content, different drawer, different thing. But the same mechanism.
The wanting that stays put because taking it out means deciding, and deciding changes things, and changing things is terrifying when the current arrangement is safe.
"Mine is the piano," I say. "In public. For someone." I look at the dark. "Not a performance. Just playing the thing that's true in front of another person and letting them hear it."
"You've never done that."
"Not since I was nineteen."
His eyes find mine.
"What would it take?" he asks. "To do it."
"The right person," I say. "Someone who would receive it the way it was meant, not just take it. Just hear it and let it be."
Jake Wilder looks at me in the Panhandle dark and doesn’t say anything, and my breath catches, warmth blooming in my chest.
He doesn't say, "I would hear it that way."
He doesn't say, "I am that person."
He just looks at me with the face that shows everything, that has always shown everything since the first morning at the east fence in Tennessee, and I understand that he doesn't need to say it because I can already read it.
I look back at the stars.
We sit on the porch until the night goes fully cool. The cattle have been quiet for an hour, and there is no reason left to stay except that neither of us has decided to go in.
Eventually, we do.
I lie in the guest room and ruminate on the drawer, and what it would feel like to open it all the way.
Tomorrow, I am going to ask him to come to Promised Land Ranch if it’s time.
I already know he will say yes, as we discussed going before we came here.
What I didn’t know, until tonight, is that the yes is going to cost me something.
Not in a bad way.
In the way things cost you when they matter.