Her expression was sweet and tolerantly contented. Elinor was infer ested in the kid...enough.
Once Chancy’s mama calmly watched as Chancy was walking along the top of a picket fence. The kid was not yet even four years old! You know what a picket fence is? Yeah. And not quite four, Chancy was allowed to walk along the top of one?
Her mama said it was good for her sense of balance.
I have to admit Chancy did okay on that fence, and at that age! She never once fell off or ruptured her stomach or gouged her eye on them pickets, but none of us breathed until the stock man Bill just went over and lifted her right off the damned fence.
That was back before Bill was called Creep. He could still move about, back then.
It was Bill who directed the men, the dogs and the horses. The cats did everything their own way. Since Bill was in charge, he was the one that cut off the tops of the picket fence. He hadn’t even asked for permission. He was deadly serious and positive as he sawed the top of the picket fence flat. Nobody said nothing.
But when Bill was finished, the boss, Mel, asked real curious, “Why’d you do that?”
Bill said in a rough way, “Because.”
That was a Texas reply. It replied something but didn’t explain, and any half-brained jackass knew exactly why it had been done and he was not to push.
But Mel wasn’t that intimidated. He observed the fence while the squint-eyed, ready Bill watched Mel’s face. And Mel finally turned to Bill and nodded as he said, “Good job.”
When Chancy was little, the only one who actually watched out for her was Bill. Especially after her mother passed away. Elinor had just...quit living.
Four-year-old Chancy questioned putting her mother in that box. She asked Bill, of course, because her daddy was vacant minded. So it was Bill who said her mama was dead. The box was like an envelope and in it she’d be sent to God.
And then they put the box in the ground! Little Chancy was appalled. The whole crew had to do a lot of explaining. She pointed at the mound and questioned in distress.
Chancy would select a crew member, point to the new mound under the trees out there, and she would ask The Question. Whoever was pinned down would stumble around in his reply. They got together with Bill and were taught approximately what they should say. It was brief. And having said what they’d been taught, they waited—enough.
For a while, Chancy buried her dolls. The cats and dogs would not tolerate being buried. It was a terrible time for the crew. They did try to help the four-year-old to understand.
It was the minister who finally came out to the ranch. He told the child Chancy of life and death and made it simple and understandable. And—acceptable.
For Mel there was no such comfort. It was slow, but Chancy’s daddy gradually lost all interest in anything around him. That included Chancy. Mel’s mind was on beyond His grief was deep.
It was Creep that considered it all.
We saw a dog like that once. The lonely dog had been attached to a cow that went dry and was butchered for the meat. The dog never understood. He never did. And there was no minister to soothe and explain to the dog.
The crew made a rug from the hide and the dog lay on it sadly. He grieved himself to death.
That’s about what happened to Chancy’s daddy. After his wife died, Mel just wasn’t alert. He seemed not to be in touch with the world, or to care about anything. He was alive until Chancy was eighteen. Guess he thought that, by then, she knew everything she needed to know, and he just—quit living. He was a lot like that dog. ’Course he was human, but grief is with us all.
Creep sighed as his thoughts went on. Makes a man wonder why somebody like her mother could do that to a man. Pull him into her thataway so he can’t think of another woman. Just her. Makes a man think on women and wonder what it’d be like to care that much. I look at women around here and wonder why a man would think that way.
But then I’m past the itch.
So it was obvious that raising Chancy had been left up to the ranch hands. From age four, she’d been under their directions. They could stop her just because there were more of them directing just one female. They were stronger and they could be very sure she should not do whatever it was she was trying to do that was past her strength.
It’s probably because her mother died so young that Chancy never really understood that she wasn’t male. There was no woman around to influence her.
She never wore a dress. Her hair was cut so it didn’t blow in her face.
She could be very firm. Once she was out with Bill and his horse stepped into a hole. The horse went down and threw Bill bad. You should have seen Chancy take over!
She told Bill’s horse, “Stand there, or I’ll shoot you!”
Of course the horse understood her tone rather than—Well, he probably understood the threatening tone of her words, and he did stand still.
In the hospital, when Bill was back from being put together and in bed in a room, he looked like he might not make it. But he finally came out of the coma they’d had him in, deliberate. Right away, he asked Chancy with some foggy interest, “What would you’ve done if he’d bolted and you did shoot him?”
It was an odd question and not clear to anybody else, but Chancy replied instantly, “He’d have limped.”
All the crew loved her. Try as she did all her life, at eighteen she still was not even a part of the crew. She was not only incapable, she was female.
Interesting. Her daddy had seen to it that she did as her fair-haired, white-skinned momma had done. She wore sun block, a brimmed hat, long sleeves and thin leather gloves. She’d done that faithfully because way down under her skin, she was basically female. And she remembered her mother doing it. So Chancy kept that part as being like her mother. But she still felt that she was a part of a whole. In that place, the whole just happened to be male.
As Chancy had grown older, she didn’t get much taller after she’d adjusted to that twelve-year-old spurt of growth. All the crew fell in love with her, but she just went on treating them like family. She never saw a one of them as a man. Each was a good friend and helpful. They were almost kin.
And she tried her durndest to be like the crew. Tobacco chewing failed with her. She gagged. For once the observing males had been serious. They didn’t laugh. It was only when she wasn’t there that they exclaimed and shook their heads and laughed.
Her biggest trial was learning to whistle. Shrill whistling. She could whistle ordinary, but the guys could all do that ear-piercing one when they were herding cattle. They didn’t even. have to use fingers in their mouths. Try as she did, she could only bring out a little bladder-sounding squeak.
She could whistle a tune good enough, but she couldn’t whistle a loud sound worth a darn, and she was cursed with a female holler.
When she was about sixteen, one of the guys was rolled under his horse and ended up in the hospital. Tim had been squashed. Really pitiful. And Chancy visited Tim in the clean, white room at the hospital.
She’d been as concerned for him as for one of the wolf-ripped dogs. She held Tim’s hand. He was out cold and didn’t know it, but his, uh, maleness rose under the sheet.
The others of the crew watched her, their eyes amused and compassionate with the problem. That way, and out cold. Men are vulnerable.
If she noticed the problem, at all, she never seemed to.
While he was still in the hospital, it was a trying time for Tim. Beside being squashed, he had broken ribs. So he was helpless to move as she