Spoon Read online

  Spoon was right. Things were fine at Willow Creek. The fire at Four Corners had garnered not simply the state but the federal government’s attention, triggering exactly the opposite of what higher-ups at Acota had probably wanted. For six weeks after the fire, folks from the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, the Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department, and the US Geological Survey, along with high-minded and somewhat arrogant folks from the Environmental Protection Agency, mine safety, and other branches of government I barely knew existed, swarmed down on us like locusts. Seismologists claimed that the underground fire was out but added the caveat that they couldn’t

  be certain.

  When the authorities were done poking, prodding, insinuating, judging, pontificating, and gesticulating, word came down from the Montana governor’s office that there’d be no more coal mining in the Willow Creek valley during my lifetime, and although the words of bureaucrats and politicians take the long way to heaven, as my dad was fond of saying, I had the sense that strip-mining in our valley was indeed dead.

  Winter settled in hard, and when December fifteenth rolled around, the last day a room-and-board deposit would assure me a dorm room at the University of Montana, my dad and I were busy trailing fifty head of late-weight-gain steers back to headquarters to be shipped out the next day.

  As I watched Cody nip incessantly at a lagging steer’s heels, doing instinctively what he’d been bred and trained to do, my thoughts turned to Spoon. Glancing over at my dad, who sat astride Smokey, looking for all the world like a man bred to exactly what he was doing, I said in as firm and assured a voice as I suspect I ever had, “Don’t think I’ll be going off to Missoula next month. I’m thinking the best thing for me is to stay right here alongside you and work this land.” When I relaxed back in my saddle, it seemed that a lingering burden had finally lifted from me.

  It wasn’t my dad’s brief, deadpan response but his long, satisfied smile that surprised me. He never said, “I’m happy” or “You’re doing the right thing” or “You’re making a bad decision.” Nor did he offer a single platitude or one ounce of homespun wisdom. His only words were, “Your mom will be disappointed,” which he followed up with a question: “Mind tellin’ me what brought you to your decision?”

  I didn’t answer immediately. Instead, I looked around at the wide expanse of partially snow-covered ground

  surrounding me and off into the distance toward the snowcapped Rosebud Mountains. Spoon remained at the forefront of my mind as I thought through what some people in our valley were saying about him now that he was gone. Some claimed he’d been an apparition sent to save our land, that he was the one who had taken the battle to Acota and skinned its hide, and that he, rather than Bill Darley, deserved most of the credit for winning that fight. Some said he was a Medal of Honor winner who’d come to fight one last war. A few argued that he was simply a petty criminal who’d passed through on the run.

  I, however, knew the truth, and when I thought about him, quick and wiry, with his hair dragging his neckline and his eyes just about searing through your skin, all I could see was my friend. A man called Spoon who had a special gift he called a charm. A gift that he used to help me and my family rescue our lives and way of life before he moved on.

  The Triangle Long Bar brand, featured throughout Spoon and used by the Darleys, is an historic brand that dates back to the turn of the twentieth century and lives on at the author’s ranch in Wyoming.

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Writers’ Forum, in which an abbreviated and substantially different version of Spoon first appeared as a short story, and to The Davies Group, Publishers, who later published a longer version of Spoon in Isolation and Other Stories.

  I would further like to thank Kathleen Woodley for judiciously typing the manuscript, while at the same time managing my pathology practice, and Connie Oehring and Carolyn Sobczak for offering their keen editorial eye. Finally, I would like to thank Mary Hovland, Ann Hovland-Patterson, and Emma Patterson for historical information concerning Hardin, Montana.

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  Acknowledgments