Thomas McGuane - Crow Fair - Stories

Peter said, “Where is everybody?”

“Gone.”

“Is that what you did, Mom?”

“I had to. We lost the place to the bank. I liked it where I was. I had horses.”

“Don’t you wish you’d gone to college?”

“I got an education, Peter, that’s what matters. And now I can send you to college. Maybe you can go to college in California, near Pop.”

“Where did your brothers go?” Mary understood that Peter would have liked to have a bigger family.

“Here and there. They didn’t stay in touch.”

“Did you ever try to find them?”

Mary didn’t say anything for a moment. “I did, but they didn’t want to stay in touch with me.”

“What? Why’s that?”

“They had their reasons.”

“Like what?” Peter could be demanding.

“They didn’t like what I did for a living.”

“What’s wrong with working at the bank?”

She thought for a moment. “Well, a bank took away our home.”

Peter said, “I still think it’s totally weird. They’d better not be there.”

Mary glanced over from the wheel, smiled a bit, and said, “It was a long time ago, Peter.”

She watched him as he looked out the window at the prairie. She thought that he was beautiful, and that was enough. It didn’t hurt that the car was big and smelled new and hugged the narrow road with authority. She said to herself, as she had since she was a girl:

“I can do this.”

Szabo didn’t like to call the land he owned and lived on a ranch — a word that was now widely abused by developers. He preferred to call it his property, or “the property,” but it did require a good bit of physical effort from him in the small window of time after he finished at the office, raced home, and got on the tractor or, if he was hauling a load of irrigation dams, on the ATV. Sometimes he was so eager to get started that he left his car running. His activity on the property, which had led, over the years, to arthroscopic surgery on his left knee, one vertebral fusion, and mild hearing loss, thanks to his diesel tractor, yielded very little income at all and some years not even that — a fact that he did not care to dwell on.

He produced racehorse-quality alfalfa hay for a handful of grateful buyers, who privately thought he was nuts but were careful to treat his operation with respect, because almost no one else was still producing the small bales that they needed to feed their own follies. They were, most of them, habitués of small rural tracks in places such as Lewistown or Miles City, owners of one horse, whose exercise rider was either a daughter or a neighbor girl who put herself in the way of serious injury as the price of the owner’s dream. Hadn’t Seattle Slew made kings of a couple of hapless bozos?

Szabo was not nuts. He had long understood that he needed to do something with his hands to compensate for the work that he did indoors, and it was not going to be golf or woodworking. He wanted to grow something and sell it, and he wanted to use the property to do this. In fact, the work that he now did indoors had begun as manual labor. He had machined precision parts for wind generators for a company that subcontracted all the components, a company that sold an idea and actually made nothing. Szabo had long known that this approach was the wave of the future, without understanding that it was the wave of his future. He had worked very hard, and his hard work had led him into the cerebral ether of his new workplace: now, at forty-five, he took orders in an office in a pleasant town in Montana, while his esteemed products were all manufactured in other countries. It was still a small, if prosperous, business, and it would likely stay small, because of Szabo’s enthusiasm for what he declined to call his ranch.

It wasn’t that he was proud of the John Deere tractor that he was still paying for and that he circled with a grease gun and washed down like a teenager’s car. He wasn’t proud of it: he loved it. There were times when he stood by his kitchen window with his first cup of coffee and gazed at the gleaming machine in the morning light. Even the unblemished hills of his property looked better through its windshield. The fact that he couldn’t wait to climb into it was the cause of the accident.

The hay, swathed, lay in windrows, slowly drying in the Saturday-morning sun. Szabo had gone out to the meadows in his bathrobe to probe the hay for moisture and knew that it was close to ready for baling. The beloved tractor was parked at the foot of the driveway, as though a Le Mans start would be required once the hour came around and the moisture in the tender shoots of alfalfa had subsided, so that the hay would not spoil in the stacks. Szabo, now in jeans, tennis shoes, hooded sweatshirt, and baseball cap, felt the significance of each step as he walked toward the tractor, marveling at the sunlight on its green paint, its tires nearly his own height, its baler pert and ready. He reached for the handhold next to the door of the cab, stepped onto the ridged footstep, and pulled himself up, raising his left hand to open the door. Here his foot slid off the step, leaving him briefly dangling from the handhold. A searing pain informed him that he had done something awful to his shoulder. Releasing his grip, he fell to the driveway in a heap. The usually ambrosial smell of tractor fuel repelled him, and the towering green shape above him now seemed reproachful. Gravel pressed into his cheek.

As he lay in recovery, the morphine drip only prolonged his obsession with the unbaled hay, since it allowed him to forget about his shoulder, which he had come to think of not as his but as a kind of alien planet fastened to his torso, which glowed red like Mars, whirling with agony, as soon as the morphine ran low. It was a fine line: when he wheedled extra narcotic, his singing caused complaints, and he got dialed back down to the red planet. Within a day, he grew practical and managed to call his secretary.

“Melinda, I’m going to have to find somebody for the property. I’ve got hay down and—”

“A ranch hand?”

“But just for a month or so.”

“Why don’t I call around?”

“That’s the idea. But not too long commitment-wise, okay? I may have to overpay for such a limited time.”

“It is what it is,” Melinda remarked, producing a mystification in Szabo that he ascribed to the morphine.

“Yes, sure,” Szabo said. “But time is of the essence.”

“You can say that again. Things are piling up. The guy in Germany calls every day.”

“I mean with the hay.”

Melinda was remarkably efficient, and she knew everyone in town. Her steadiness was indispensable to Szabo, who kept her salary well above temptation from other employers. By the next day, she had found a few prospects for him.

The most promising one, an experienced ranch hand from Wyoming, wore a monitoring ankle bracelet that he declined to explain, so he was eliminated. The next most promising, a disgruntled nursery worker, wanted permanent employment, so Szabo crossed him off the list, ignoring Melinda’s suggestion that he just fire him when he was through. That left a man called Barney, overqualified and looking for other work but happy to take something temporary. He told Melinda that he was extremely well educated but “identified with the workingman” and thought a month or so in Szabo’s bunkhouse would do him a world of good. Szabo called Barney’s references from his hospital bed. He managed to reach only one, the wife of a dentist who ran a llama operation in Bozeman. Barney was completely reliable, she said, and meticulous: he had reshingled the toolshed and restacked their large woodpile in an intricate pattern — almost like a church window — and swept the sidewalk. “You could eat off it!” she said. Szabo got the feeling that Mrs. Dentist had been day-drinking. Her final remark confused him. “Nobody ever did a better job than Barney!” she said, laughing wildly. “He drove us right up the wall!”