PART 1: THE GATE THAT WOULDN’T OPEN
After my husband died, my own son locked me out of our 450-acre cattle ranch in Wyoming, and he told me through a gate speaker that I could come home once I signed the place over to him. So I pulled my truck off the road, unwrapped my turkey sandwich, and called the one man Walt had made me promise to call.
That morning I’d driven forty minutes into Jackson for mineral blocks at the feed store and a bag of groceries from Smith’s. By the time I turned up our road, the sun had cleared the Tetons, and the milk was going warm on the seat beside me. I leaned out the window of the old Ford and punched in the code Walt had chosen the day he installed the keypad. The little light on the box blinked red.
I tried again, slower, thinking my thumb had slipped. Red again. Then the speaker crackled, and my son’s voice came out of it. “I changed it, Mom,” Dale said. “Please don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
“Open the gate, Dale,” I told him.
“Not until you’ve signed. Jenna and I talked to a lawyer in Jackson, and we found you a lovely place in Casper. Sunrise Meadows. Nurses, a dining room, a view. Once you sign the power of attorney and the transfer papers, you can come in and pack your things.”
I thought I’d misheard him. “Transfer papers for what?” I asked. “The ranch, Mom. Grant Whitlock has a buyer for the creek meadow and the south pasture, and Dr. Pruitt wrote a letter saying you’ve been forgetting things. You left a kettle burning in February. We can’t sleep for worrying.” I had left that kettle once, after spending the whole night in the barn with a heifer that couldn’t deliver, and I’d opened every window to air out the kitchen and laughed about it by breakfast.
My name is Ruth Calloway, and I was seventy-seven years old that April morning. In 1971, Walt and I borrowed from his father and bought 450 acres of sagebrush and bottomland north of Jackson, with the Tetons standing over it as if they’d been hired to guard it. We raised one son, Dale, and more bottle calves than I could count, the last of them sleeping in a box beside the woodstove. Walt hung that gate himself in 1983, galvanized pipe with a horseshoe welded to the top rail, and I could see the horseshoe from my truck.
Walt died on the fourteenth of January, in the barn at dawn, with a bucket of grain in his hand and the horses already nickering for it. His heart, the doctor said, quick as a snap. Dale and Jenna drove down from Idaho Falls for the funeral and never really left. They took the guest room. Dale began walking the property with a clipboard and a measuring wheel, and a man in a tan suit started turning up with orange survey flags. I told myself my son was grieving his father in his own way, and I even thanked him for taking an interest.
Then Jenna’s voice came through the speaker, sweet as pie. “Ruth, it’s for your own good,” she said. “Whitlock’s buyers close on Friday. The sooner you sign, the sooner we can all stop worrying.” I told her I had never once in my life signed a paper because somebody was worried. She said I was tired, and the speaker clicked off.
I put the truck in reverse and backed away from the gate until I reached the old cottonwood where Walt used to leave the stock trailer. Through the bars I could see a long line of orange flags marching across the creek meadow, right past the spot where we’d buried Walt’s good horse, Biscuit. Dale’s silver Silverado sat at my porch as if it had always lived there.
I shut off the engine, rolled the window down, and unwrapped my turkey sandwich because my hands needed something to do. The coffee in my thermos was still hot. Across the road the gate stood shut, the horseshoe catching the light, and beyond it the mountains went on being white and indifferent. I chewed without tasting a thing.
Then I remembered an evening in December, at our kitchen table. Walt had been thin since his heart scare in October, and he hadn’t touched his stew. “Ruthie, promise me something,” he’d said. “If the day ever comes that the code stops working, don’t argue with Dale. Don’t sign a thing. Go sit under the cottonwood and call Hank Tillman.”
“Why on earth would the code stop working?” I’d asked him, laughing. Walt didn’t laugh. He looked out the window toward the gate for so long that the stew went cold in front of him. “Just promise,” he said, and I did, because in fifty-one years I had never once managed to refuse that man when he used that voice.
Hank Tillman had lived east of us for fifty years. He was eighty-one now, a widower, and he and Walt had shared a branding crew, a fence line, and more silences than conversations. If Hank told you he’d be there at sunrise, you could put the coffee on at sunrise. I found his number in my phone under “Hank (fence)” and he answered on the first ring.
“Ruth.” He didn’t say hello. “Dale’s changed the code,” I said. For a moment, all I heard was a clock ticking somewhere in his kitchen. “He said it would be spring,” Hank said at last, and a screen door slapped behind him. “Who said?” I asked. “Walt. Stay where you are. Don’t sign anything, don’t let that boy see you cry, and don’t go near that gate with a temper. I have to get something from my shop.”
“What on earth is in your shop?” I asked. “Not my shop,” Hank said. “Walt’s gate, Ruth. He left you something inside it. I’m bringing the torch.”
