Seeing Buffalo

by David Rogers

Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

part 1

The envelope was empty, except for the check for five thousand dollars. I stared, checked the words again — thousand, the name of the bank, commas and decimal points, the signature. It looked real. I looked in the envelope again and found it wasn’t empty after all. A small piece of paper, folded in thirds, slid out. I unfolded it, fingers a little shaky for reasons I did not want to think about just yet. We need to talk, said the note. It was signed W. The same W whose name was in the upper left of the check. My aunt, Willa James.

I had absolutely no idea why she would send me a check for any amount. Too many ideas what she might want to talk about.

Still, dollar signs with lots of zeros are persuasive. Envisioning five-thousand dollars worth of them, when you’re a broke college student, a soon-to-be former — temporarily, at least — college student, is even more persuasive. So I reluctantly decided to give Aunt Will (in the family, we dropped the final a) a call.

* * *

“Your father is... not okay,” Will said. I called her from my dorm room. It was finals week, spring semester, and I had no idea what I would do with the summer. Or the fall, or the rest of my life. All I knew, or thought I knew, was that I was not coming back to school, at least not for a while.

I was completely without enthusiasm for any more school. It was the end of my sophomore year, and in fourteen years of formal education, no one had explained to me the secrets of existence. I had, however, been encouraged to read Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell and Albert Camus. Therefore I thought a lot about Meursault, the main character in Camus’ The Stranger. When asked to explain his actions, Meursault can or will say only, “It was because of the sun.” That story seemed to say a lot about human nature, motivations and the purpose — if there was one — of life.

So I may not have responded to Aunt Will’s revelation with what she considered appropriate dismay. Not that it was much of a revelation. My father was usually not okay.

Will tried again. “Your father is not well, Thomas. Are you listening to me?” Nobody called me “Thomas” except members of my family, and then it usually meant they were mad at me. The rest of the time and to everyone else, I am Tom.

“I heard you. I’m just not sure what you want me to do about it.”

“Exhibit some empathy, for a start,” Will said. “Not to mention curiosity.”

“I have empathy up to my eyeballs. Not that it helps. I mean, when has he ever been well? If it’s not money problems, or a woman, or booze, or getting fired from another job, it will be something else.” Since my mother divorced him when I was nine, my father’s life had been a study in chaos. “As for curiosity, I have that in droves, too. Like why you sent me a check for five thousand dollars.”

“That got your attention, did it?”

“I assume that was the point. So what’s the crisis?” I asked.

“As I said, your father is... not himself, these days.” Before I could say what immediately popped into my mind — that not being “himself” was likely an improvement — Will added, “I need you to come home and look after the farm.”

That was not the answer I expected. I was prepared for a request to bail my father out of jail — again — or pay off someone whose car he might have crashed into while driving drunk, but my father had mostly managed the farm on his own. At least, he did so if your definition of “manage” was very modest, limited mostly to not driving the tractor into the creek or burning down the barn.

“Dad can’t do it?” I was starting to think he might have had a heart attack or contracted a fatal disease. One more immediately fatal than the disease of alcoholism, which of course is deadly enough.

“Ernest has gotten religion.” Will said it in the clipped, disapproving tone she reserved for vegans, Democrats, and family members who had serious lapses in judgment, such as my choice to attend a small private liberal arts college in the northeast after I graduated from high school. Will thought I should be off to the state university to pursue a degree in business “like sensible people.”

“I don’t see—”

But she had gotten a start and was not going to let up. “He started going to church last fall. At first, I thought it was harmless and might actually do him some good. Not that I expected much. Ernest has tried it before, and it never took for more than a week or two. He’d have a big Saturday night and be too hungover to get out of bed on Sunday. Or a new obsession took over, like hunting or painting or reading or the pottery project, and he would forget all about church. Before this, it was mountain climbing. Start with Kilimanjaro and work his way up to Everest. That was the plan.”

My father was named for Ernest Hemingway, whom my grandfather admired, but Dad had never read a single Hemingway novel till he discovered The Sun Also Rises when he was forty. After briefly considering going to Spain to run with the bulls, he had decided to take up big game hunting instead. He went out west, allegedly to bag himself a grizzly and legal concerns be damned. I was never clear on all the details, but he ended up pawning his hunting gear to go bar-hopping in Boulder. At least he was not eaten by a bear.

Six months later, when he got out of jail, he came home with grand, apocryphal stories to tell, and he was determined for a month to learn how to carve bear statues out of solid logs with a chainsaw. He did not lose any limbs or digits in the attempt, so, on the whole, I considered the bear obsession a relative success.

“This time, though, it appears to be serious.” Aunt Will said “it” the way others would refer to a diagnosis of cancer. Not that I was enthusiastic about most popular religious institutions, but if it brought some measure of peace and stability to my dad, that counted for a lot. “He’s not only been going to church every Sunday, twice a day and Wednesday nights, too, but he’s been donating money. Where he got it, I don’t know, probably sold one of the horses, and now he says he’s going on a retreat. With some church group.”

“So he’s not drinking? Not in jail? Not in the hospital?”

“No.” Her tone suggested any of those things might have been an improvement. “But this retreat thing, he won’t even tell me how much it costs. Which means it’s a lot, I’m sure.”

“Well, if it makes him happy, none of this sounds so worrisome,” I said.

“It will end badly,” Will snorted. “I’ve known my brother longer than you have.”

“Okay.” I was not about to argue the point. One reason I had chosen to go to college in another state was to put distance between me and my family, and that included mental and emotional distance. So I resisted forming an opinion regarding Will’s predictions of doom, plausible though they were. “I still don’t see why you need me to look after the farm.”

“The retreat is supposed to last over a month. About six weeks. And it’s somewhere in Canada. Plus, Ernest says he’s rethinking his whole existence and may never come back to his old life.”

Horseshoe Farm had been in our family for generations, as far back as two or three sets of great-grandparents. My grandfather had wisely left it to his daughter Willa, knowing nothing good would come of saddling Ernest with the ownership of real estate.

Willa was ten years older than my dad and thus helped my grandmother raise him. I suppose she felt some remnants of motherly instinct toward him. She had also inherited a fair sum of money and had done well enough for herself as an accountant and eventually as the CFO of a small real estate investment company.

So it was not as if Horseshoe Farm had ever been for her more than a hobby and a place to try to keep my dad out of trouble. Some of the horses were supposed to be descendants of Kentucky Derby winners, or some such famous race or competition and therefore pretty valuable, but I was happy to let Aunt Will keep up with all that business, too.

I could use the money, but I had no definite plans for the summer, which gave me a sense of freedom and potential adventure I was reluctant to abandon. “Well, okay, but can’t you get someone else? I mean, for five-thousand dollars, somebody ought to be willing to take care of the place for a while.”

“I thought you’d be glad of the opportunity.” Aunt Will sounded genuinely surprised by my hesitance.

“I didn’t come to college just to spend the rest of my life shoveling out horse stalls,” I said, omitting any mention of my current questions about just why I had come to college, other than to separate myself from my family.

“I know,” she said, “but it’s just for the summer, and what else have you got planned?”

She had me stumped there. Aside from a long bus ride to anywhere, I had made no specific plans. Other than not to be like my dad. A little voice said abandoning college would be a very Dad-like thing to do, but I wasn’t ready to listen to that voice just yet.

“There has to be someone else, though. Did you call Mom?”

If I was willing even to mention my mother, who had never gotten along with Aunt Will since before the wedding, that should have told her how much I didn’t want to come home. Especially to the farm, which wasn’t really home. I had lived for ten years in the suburbs with my mom before I came to college.

“No.” The acid tone was back.

“Okay, but—”

“I’ve looked, Thomas. I’ve advertised. Nobody wants the job. Nobody who even knows one end of a horse from the other, anyway. You know why.”

I did know. Horseshoe Farm had a reputation. People said it was haunted, or cursed, or just shook their heads and got quiet when you mentioned the place. My dad’s quirks had no doubt lent the farm some guilt by association.

“Yeah, but still...” I hedged. “Make it ten thousand, and you’ve got a deal.”

“Ten thousand dollars? You’re one high-priced farmhand, you know that?”

“I’m not a farmhand at all. That’s kinda my point.”

“Oh, listen to you, Mister Too-good-to-get-his-feet-dirty.” She was laughing. “Who do you think already pays your tuition?”

“My fairy god-aunt?”

“And don’t you forget it.”

“The whole summer, though... that’s gotta be worth more than five thousand.”

“Okay. Five thousand up front and the other five thousand at the end of summer. But you have to stay the whole three months, or three and a half, whenever school starts. No skipping out in July. You don’t have to tell me today. Just think about it, okay? We’ve got a week or so before anything has to be decided for sure. And you have to finish up at school.”

“Okay. I’ll think about it.”

“And don’t cash the check unless you’re taking the job,” Will said, using her accountant voice.

* * *

Proceed to part 2...

Copyright © 2021 by David Rogers