Chapter 4
Wyatt Pruitt quit Boone’s crew on a Tuesday and asked me for work by Wednesday breakfast.
I hadn’t gone looking for him. He came up the drive in his own truck before six, engine still running, like he hadn’t committed to shutting it off until he heard what I had to say.
“I heard you’re hiring,” he said.
“I haven’t advertised a thing.”
“Didn’t have to. Consuela mentioned you’d need hands once the fence closes off your side proper.
” He had his hat in his hands, turning it by the brim, a nervous habit I remembered from years of watching him work cattle steady and calm and never once look nervous doing it.
“I’ve been with Boone six years. I’d rather work for somebody who counts her calvings right than somebody who’s good on a horse trailer photo shoot. ”
Deacon Marsh came out of the equipment shed behind me, wiping grease off his hands with a rag that had given up being useful for that purpose sometime around the Clinton administration.
Deacon had worked this place longer than I’d been married to it, first for my father and then for me, and he had opinions about most things he mostly kept to himself, which made the ones he did say worth hearing.
“Wyatt’s steady,” Deacon said. “Good with the breech births. You could do worse.”
“I know what Wyatt’s worth, Deacon.” I looked at the boy.
Man, he was thirty-one, but he’d been sixteen the first summer I taught him to read a cow’s udder for calving signs, and one stubborn corner of my head still filed him under boy.
“You understand what you’re walking into.
Half this operation’s still finding its feet.
I can’t match what Boone was paying you, not yet. ”
“I know what you can pay.” Wyatt set the hat square on his head. “I’d still rather be paid less to work someplace that isn’t standing on a stage saying ugly things about the person who built it.”
“What’d Boone say when you told him?”
Wyatt looked off toward the county road a second, jaw working like he was deciding how much of it to repeat.
“Said I was making a mistake. Said the Teague name was going places, and I was throwing in with the half that was going to shrink.” He shrugged, small, more tired than angry.
“Might be right about the shrinking part. Didn’t feel like a mistake, walking out of that barn for the last time.
Felt like the first clean decision I’d made in about six months. ”
There wasn’t much to say to that. I shook his hand, told him to report to Deacon at five-thirty the next morning, and watched him drive off down the county road toward a house he still shared, for now, with a wife who according to Consuela had heard the whole hot-mic business secondhand from three separate people before lunch the next day and had opinions of her own about the Teague operation losing good hands to pride.
Reyes came the following Tuesday, quieter about it, just showed up at the equipment shed with a duffel bag already packed like he’d known for a week he was coming and had only been waiting on the nerve.
Two more after him inside the month, both men I’d known by name my whole life without ever once employing, men who’d worked Boone’s side of the operation since before the fence, who came up my driveway one at a time in their own trucks with the same careful, apologetic set to their shoulders, like they were crossing something bigger than a property line.
I didn’t celebrate any of it. Every hand who crossed the new fence line to my side was a hand who’d looked at eleven years of my marriage from the outside and decided which half of it they trusted to still be standing come spring.
That wasn’t a compliment. That was a verdict, delivered one truck at a time, up my driveway, and every single truck that pulled in felt less like a win and more like another brick pulled out of a wall I hadn’t decided I wanted to see fall.
Consuela caught me watching Reyes unload his duffel from the truck bed that first morning, standing a little too long at the kitchen window with coffee going cold in my hand.
“You look like a woman watching a funeral, not a hiring,” she said.
“Feels a little like both.”
“He’s not dying, Roz. He’s just working for somebody who pays him on time and doesn’t ask him to smile for a camera he never signed up for.
” She took the coffee cup out of my hand, poured it out, poured a fresh one.
“Let yourself have this one clean. Not every good thing that happens this season needs a asterisk on it.”
I didn’t answer that, mostly because I didn’t believe her, and Consuela had known me long enough not to push a point I wasn’t ready to take.
Deacon found me at the equipment shed a few days later, going over feed orders with a calculator instead of the usual back-of-envelope math, because the numbers had changed enough that guessing wasn’t safe anymore.
“You’re going to need a real foreman,” he said. “Not me filling in around the edges of everything else.”
“You’re already doing the job.”
“I’m doing half the job and pretending the other half doesn’t exist because you haven’t asked me straight.” He wasn’t looking at me when he said it, which was as close as Deacon ever came to saying something that cost him. “Ask me straight, Roz, and I’ll do it right.”
“Deacon Marsh. Will you run this outfit as foreman, full title, full pay, starting today.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He almost smiled. Almost. “Wasn’t hard.”
“Don’t call me ma’am. You’ve known me since I was seventeen.”
“Boss, then.” He picked the calculator back up, already moving on to the next number, like the whole conversation had cost him nothing at all, which I doubted.
“Feed order’s going to run heavy this month.
New hands eat like new hands, and I’ve got four more mouths to plan for than I did in September. ”
“Can we carry it?”
“We can carry it. Tight, not broke. There’s a difference, and we’re on the right side of it.
” He set the calculator down long enough to look me full in the face, which for Deacon counted as making a point.
“You built a breeding programme good enough that four hands would rather take a pay cut than keep working the other half of this operation. Whatever else this season costs you, that part’s worth something.
Don’t let yourself forget it’s worth something. ”
I let him have the last word on that. Feed math had never once been worth arguing with Deacon Marsh. Neither, it turned out, was what my own work was worth.
? ? ?
I ran into Wyatt’s wife at the feed store the following Saturday, a woman named Dana who I’d known to nod at for years without ever once having a real conversation with, and she cornered me by the mineral blocks, direct as someone who’d been rehearsing the words a while.
“I want you to know something,” she said. “Wyatt didn’t leave Boone’s crew for the money. He took a pay cut. I want that said plain, because I’ve heard three different versions of this story already this week and two of them had him chasing a bigger paycheck, and that’s just not true.”
“I know it’s not true, Dana. He told me himself.”
“Good. Wanted to hear you say you know it.” She relaxed some, shoulders dropping half an inch, and reached past me for a bag of mineral supplement like the hard part of the conversation was already behind her.
“He came home that night and didn’t say much, which for Wyatt means a lot happened.
Took him two days to get the whole story out of him, piece by piece, the way you’d get a splinter out slow instead of yanking it.
He said watching that man stand up on a stage and say what he said, about a woman who’s fed half this county’s cattle through more bad winters than anybody wants to count, made something in him just quit.
Not dramatic. Just done. Like a rope finally giving on the strand that was already frayed. ”
“That’s a lot of trust for a man to put in a decision that cost him money.”
“Wyatt’s not complicated that way. He decides what’s right and then he does it, and the money sorts itself out eventually or it doesn’t.
I married him knowing that about him. Married him partly because of that about him, if I’m honest, even on the months it made the mortgage a little tighter than I’d have liked.
” She hefted the mineral bag onto her hip, done with the errand, done with the conversation.
“Anyway. Wanted you to hear it from me instead of from Patsy Ondrak’s version, which by the time it makes it around the whole feed store usually adds a dollar figure that never existed in the first place. ”
“Thank you, Dana. Means something, you taking the time.”
“Wasn’t taking time. Was setting a record straight.” She said it without unkindness, just plain fact, the same economy Wyatt brought to a cattle gate. “You take care out there, Mrs. Teague. Whole town’s watching, whether you asked them to or not.”
She went, cart wheel squeaking on the store’s old linoleum. A county this size runs on this kind of correction, one conversation at a time, neighbors setting each other’s records straight in feed-store aisles long after the loud version of a story has gone around twice.
? ? ?
The last of the four hands to cross over was a man named Sully Briggs, sixty-one years old, who’d worked Teague ground since before there’d been a Teague Cattle Co.
at all, back when Boone’s own father had run the place on a shoestring and a prayer, and his crossing hit different than the other three, quieter, heavier, coming from a man old enough to have earned the right not to prove anything to anybody anymore.
He came up the drive on a Sunday, no duffel bag, no nervous hat-turning, just Sully in his own truck, unhurried, a man settled into a decision he’d made long before he ever acted on it.