Mary Forbes - The Man From Montana

He remembered a past he wanted to forget.

He dreamed a past he wanted to forget.

They had lived long enough in a house of mourning. Susie’s pictures everywhere collecting dust. The cottage sitting empty and cold. The summer trail riding business lying fallow.

A half decade of walking around in silence, fearing that one word, one name would break a heart again and again.

Silence couldn’t mend anguish. It couldn’t sew shattered legs and arms back onto a body. It couldn’t erase memory.

Tom knew.

Rachel Brant would change their lives and in doing so change her own. Ah, but she had her mother’s height, her eyes. And her father’s mouth and hair.

Yes, Miss Brant would discover the truth with these interviews. They’d all come to understand the truth.

Tom felt it in his gut.

Like when the VC waited in the trees above their trail.

The time had come.

Oh, yeah, Ash thought. He got the old man’s meaning loud and clear. Tom’s past. Like the Flying Bar T was Tom’s ranch. And Ash, the stepson aka hired foreman. Stop being an ass. Tom was there when your mother didn’t have two nickels to her name.

Ash had been two, his sister Meggie one, when their biological dad died in a chopper crash in some Vietnam swamp toward the end of the war. Six months later, their mother became Tom’s nurse. A soft-spoken woman with a broken heart that Ash couldn’t heal, no matter how hard he tried.

Yes, Tom had given his name as well as his heart to Ash and his sister. He loved them as he’d loved their mother, God rest her soul.

But not enough.

Not enough to change the deed of the land into a partnership with Ash when he turned twenty, twenty-five, thirty. Not even on his last and thirty-seventh birthday.

And now here was Tom again, deciding to give interviews to Rachel Brant, pushing Daisy into the “moving on” mix. Daisy was Ash’s daughter, not Tom’s.

And what the hell was the old man up to prodding Ash to rent Susie’s cottage to Rachel Brant? Not that he hadn’t thought it over, but still. That guest cottage was his. His money, his time had gone into its construction.

Tom might have final say in matters of the Flying Bar T, but not on the cottage. The thought rankled. Why, Pops? Why haven’t you changed the deed? Afraid I might cause a financial disaster with my nonexistent reading skills?

In school, Ash had endured countless methods designed to interpret the printed word. A few strategies had helped somewhat, others caused more confusion, and later there had been an adult support group in Billings.

In his midtwenties, because Susie had wheedled him to take a course, he’d worked daily with a tutor specializing in reading difficulties and learned a measured technique that, at the time, allowed him to decipher enough words for comprehension. A laborious and painful process which, over ten years, Ash let slide. Too damned difficult to fumble over on his own.

“To hell with it,” he muttered.

In the barn’s office, he grabbed the ear-tagging pliers and a sack of tags, then headed for the calving barn where his cows, his cows, were sheltered from snow, cold wind and frozen nights.

Concentrate on the animals. They’re what matters.

Rolling aside the doors, he stepped into the warm cavern. At the Dutch door closing off the hallways, he ordered the dogs to stay before wandering through to the cattle.

Large box pens ran up and down the perimeters while the interior’s free space spread like a rectangular field for the animals to take shelter.

This morning, the double rear doors stood open. With the milder temperatures, most of the herd huddled outside around feed he’d forked onto the snow and into the bins.

A pair of newborn Angus calves lay on fresh straw inside the barn. Twins. The cow’s rough pink tongue cleaned their wet coats. Lifting her broad black head, she eyed Ash.

“It’s okay, mama,” he crooned softly, walking toward the pair. He clipped tags onto the calves’ left ears, number one hundred and two and three.

He read the tags five times to make sure, though, oddly, numbers had always been easier than words. He studied the twins. Of the calves born so far, these two tallied forty-eight bulls. Good odds for beef sales.

“Dad?” Dressed in high-topped work boots and her red parka, Daisy came across the barn. “You mad at Grandpa and me?”

“No, honey.” Nothing I can’t deal with.

She dogged him out of the barn, into the herd. “Then why are you hiding out here instead of eating lunch with us?”

Ever the perceptive one, his Daiz. “I’m not hiding. Just checking to see if we have more calves. The pair in the barn were born in the last hour.”

“You think Grandpa’s wrong letting Ms. Brant interview him, don’t you?”

“Not for me to say what your grandfather can or cannot do. He’s his own person.”

“Okay, then you don’t want me helping with the story. I saw it on your face.”

“We don’t know anything about this Ms. Brant. She blew into town two weeks ago. My question is why? To write an old war story? What for? More to the point, why now?”

He pushed through the hulking cattle. Snow breezed into his face along with the scent of hay and hide.

Daisy trudged after him. “You can’t judge every journalist because of Mom’s death.”

“It has nothing to do with her death.”

“Yes, it does. You even said so when I wanted to write our high school column last September. The first thing out of your mouth was, ‘You want to be like that guy who killed your mother?’ Jeez, like I’d run out, get my license and crash a car into some innocent person, all for a story.”

He swung to a stop. “Your mouth’s getting way too brazen, young lady.”

She threw up her hands. “Argh! You’re impossible! No wonder no one wants to be your friend.” Wheeling around, red hair flying, she stormed through the cattle, back into the barn.

Ash watched her go. His heart hurt. His pixie-girl was on a fast track to independence and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do. Oh, yeah, he knew she had a flare for the written word. In first grade, she was already reading the scroll line on CNN.

That same year, Susie bought their daughter the first Harry Potter novel. The book had caused a horrible argument between Ash and his wife.

Bottom line: he’d felt the content too advanced for his tiny daughter with her missing front teeth. And Susie, eyes flashing, had retorted, “How would you know? You can’t read.”

Something had died in Ash that day.

Something of Susie and of himself.

She had hoisted his dyslexia as an obstacle flag in the road of their child’s education.

He hadn’t expected to feel inadequate in his marriage. But that day he had. He’d felt unskilled as a man and inept as a father. Later, Susie had apologized, but the words remained. Dangling in his ear for all time.

He stared around at the cows. Dim-witted beasts. Like him. Daisy was right; his friends were few. Caution learned the hard way.

Rachel Brant’s soft voice whispered through his mind. “You’re a kind man.” He shook his head. Hell.

The last damn thing he needed was another woman in his life. Daisy was his life. Tom. The cows.

Damn straight.

They were his life and they were enough.

On Wednesday, Rachel tapped her fingers on her Rocky Times desk. Should she call the Flying Bar T about the guesthouse? Yesterday, the greasy-haired manager at the Dream On Motel had sputtered about a month’s commitment. The thought of Charlie in that grubby room another night sickened her.

At two-forty-five, she called the ranch.

Tom answered and gave her Ash’s cell phone number. “He’s the one you need to talk to,” the old vet told her.