Chapter 20 #2
“I think he’s trying. Trying’s not the same as arriving.
But it’s not nothing, either.” I looked at him a moment, this young man learning the whole shape of ranching from someone the county had spent months judging, and the protectiveness that rose caught me off guard, wanting to keep an innocence still intact, still able to ask a question that plain.
“Don’t let this operation teach you the wrong lesson, Marcus.
The lesson isn’t that good men do ugly things sometimes and get forgiven eventually.
The lesson’s that showing up, every day, in the small unglamorous ways, is the actual work of a life, and the flashy stuff, the microphones and the sponsorships and all of it, that’s just noise dressed up nice.
Don’t lose track of the difference, whatever else you take from watching this place. ”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“See that you do,” I said, and sent him back to work, watching him cross the yard with something that sat close to hope, against every reasonable expectation, for the next generation of whatever this county was becoming.
? ? ?
Sully retired from active fieldwork that spring, his sixty-one-year-old knees insisting on it after one hard week of calving-season crouching, and I drove out to his small place myself to make sure the decision changed nothing about his standing with the operation, plain, so there’d be no confusion about it later.
“You’re not losing anything by stepping back,” I told him, sitting on his porch with two glasses of iced tea his wife had brought out before retreating tactfully inside.
“Consulting rate, same as you’re making now, for as long as you want to keep advising the crew on the hard calls.
Nobody’s putting you out to pasture, Sully. ”
“Appreciate that. Wasn’t sure how you’d take it, me stepping back this early in the season.”
“I’d have taken it a lot worse if you’d pushed through and hurt yourself worse than a set of tired knees.
” I looked out at his modest yard, a garden bed already showing the first hints of spring green, a life built slow and steady over sixty-some years in this county.
“You gave this operation what it needed, right when it needed it, Sully. Buck Teague’s ghost ought to be proud of you, showing up like you did. ”
“Don’t know about ghosts. Know I did right by this place, though, the two years, well, the months, I suppose, though it feels longer, I’ve worked it.
” He sipped his tea, looked out at the same view I’d been looking at.
“Watched Boone come back around, this season. Wasn’t sure I’d live to see it, if I’m honest. Buck would’ve been prouder of that than of anything I did myself, probably.
Man spent his whole life hoping his son would find his way back to the actual work instead of the flash.
Died before he got to see it happen. Feels like something, getting to watch it happen in his place. ”
“I didn’t know you felt that responsibility. Watching for Buck’s sake.”
“Didn’t know it myself, fully, till just now, saying it out loud to you.
” Sully allowed himself a small, private smile, the satisfaction of someone who’d just put words to a thing that had sat unnamed in his chest a good while.
“Man carries more than he realizes, sometimes, without ever stopping to take inventory of it. Glad I got the chance to say this part out loud before I stepped back from the daily work. Felt like it needed saying.”
I stayed another hour, drinking tea and talking about nothing much, grateful for a man whose quiet dignity had steadied more of this operation, and more of Boone’s slow redemption, than either of us had reckoned until that porch conversation gave it words.
? ? ?
Marcus asked me, a few weeks after our first conversation about Boone, whether he could shadow me directly for a stretch, learning the breeding side of the operation rather than just the general cattle work Deacon had been teaching him, and I agreed, curious what a fresh set of eyes might notice about work I’d been doing so long I sometimes stopped seeing it myself.
“Why this,” he asked, on his first morning shadowing me, watching me check a pregnant heifer’s condition with the particular unhurried thoroughness the job demanded. “Out of everything you could do on this operation, why’d you pick breeding as your specialty?”
“Because it’s the part of ranching about the future instead of just the present,” I told him, running a practiced hand along the heifer’s flank.
“Feeding, fencing, doctoring, all of that’s about keeping today’s animals alive and healthy.
Breeding’s about deciding what the herd looks like ten years from now, twenty years from now, long after you and I are both done working this ground.
There’s something about that scope of thinking I’ve always found more satisfying than anything else out here. ”
“That’s a big way to think about cattle.”
“It’s the only way that ever made sense to me.
” I straightened, checked my notes, moved toward the next animal on the morning’s list. “My grandmother used to say a rancher who only thinks about this season is just a caretaker. A rancher who thinks about the next three generations is actually building something. I’ve tried to be the second kind, my whole career. ”
“You think I could learn to think that far ahead? Genuinely asking, not just being polite.”
“I think you already are, Marcus, or you wouldn’t be asking a question like that at nineteen years old.
” I looked at him, this earnest young man who’d wandered onto my operation half by accident and had, over the months, become something closer to a fixture than a temporary hire.
“Most people your age are still figuring out next month. You’re already asking about the next generation.
That’s not something I can teach you. That’s just who you already are, underneath the hat-turning and the nervous questions. ”
He went quiet, turning it over, and we finished the morning’s checks side by side, our boots the only sound in the straw.