They were heady days. Not so long ago, company stock was splitting with audacious regularity, making thousands of employees millionaires, at least on paper. My boss was said to be the richest man in the world. Such riches, of course, come at their own price – everyone within my realm worked around the clock to make it happen, and we all, to a person, led exceedingly narrow lives. Summon the collective memory, and it is a blur of unaccounted-for days and nights spent before the chromatic glow of a monitor, solving problems that seemed mere intellectual games – riddles to occupy the mind, a kind of cotton-candy entertainment. At times it seemed the ultimate absurdity that I should be paid for what seemed to amount to little more than killing time.
But time only plays dead, and is forever on the move, whether we are aware of it or not. Turn your head, look up, look down, and your hair is thin and gray, and you wonder where the days, weeks, months, and years went. Whenever I awakened to this life in absentia, I was struck by another reality. It is impossible to feel truly alive working ninety hours every week encased in a glass building. Through some mysterious process – fueled by low-grade but long-standing anxiety – I came to associate misery with smallness (microcircuitry, for instance), and happiness with vastness, with wide-open spaces.
I had found a panacea for my malaise in the geographical center of Texas, a half-hour’s drive from my parents’ house. Walking the perimeter of hay fields and groves of hardwoods, I’d decided that a ranch was where I could accumulate real-life experience to balance the virtual existence in which I had so long immersed myself. Raw land. All it needed was to be lived on; beyond that, it merely needed some livestock and, of course, someone to look after it while I was away.
My parents had happily taken up the task of finding a contractor to build a small house, and a ranch hand who could not only manage cattle, but operate a bulldozer. With a small lake and a few scattered ponds, two-hundred head of cattle could easily live off the hay produced by irrigated fields. But the lake and ponds would first have to be carved out of the earth. Dad soon had the man with the résumé – a young local fellow who had run cattle on a large area ranch. He not only knew how to operate a D-6 Caterpillar, but how to maintain the famously temperamental machine. He was, as Dad said, “a church-going man.” Church-going had a meaning which was not lost on me: a Texan incapable of harboring impure thoughts like avarice, and stubbornly devoted to a near-obsolete work ethic. It was an ethic stipulating that only the owner’s cattle would be allowed on the property, and payment would reward work actually done. To my way of thinking, a church-going man’s mind was guided by the large, visible gears of simple virtue. Such a man’s instincts demanded that he not take advantage of an owner who spent his workweek in Houston.
The first time I ever laid eyes on Clyde Pierson, he was walking up the lane with my father, a short-billed NASCAR cap pulled down over his head, forearm shielding his eyes from the leveling late-afternoon sun. He was carrying a feral hog trap, a metal cage used to snare indigenous swine that tear up pastureland with their tusks in search of subterranean insect life.
Dad made the introductions, smiling down on us as we shook hands. Clyde had already put in his first week of work, Dad said. In that time he’d mended the north fence, cleared and burned a mountain of brush, set a dozen hog traps. Two of the creatures had been snared that morning. In spite of this one memory, I can recall no distinct first impression of Clyde himself. He was merely a redneck who was said to know what he was doing, attended an evangelical church, and didn’t talk much. I figured such a guy didn’t have much to say.
Over the course of a month, in which I’d taken off work to move into the new house, Clyde appeared to live up to his billing. We picked out a dozer and had it delivered. Work on the lake commenced. In that time I saw him driving to and from Sunday services at the Church of Christ, just a couple miles down the road. Wednesday night was Bible study, Thursday night he drove the kids to choir practice. He and I didn’t have a lot in common, but proximity and isolation guaranteed that eventually we’d come to know each other well.
Clyde was proud of being from the small town of Franklin, Texas. He was also proud of never having been on an airplane, and claimed never to have wandered more than a hundred miles from his front porch. “Never left Texas,” he liked to say.
But he had a past. One morning while the dozer idled, he told me how he’d had a run-in with the law some time ago, before he was “saved.” He lit a cigarette, pulled it from his mouth. “Spousal abuse,” he grunted.
“So you were charged?”
“But never indicted,” he said emphatically as he stared down at the coal of his cigarette, as though he were speaking to it. “I was drunk. Cops came out to the place and I fired a twelve-gauge into the air.”
Later in the morning, a guy from the satellite TV company came out to install a dish. He finished up just in time for lunch. I made Clyde and myself a sandwich, then began flipping through the channels until I came upon an episode of South Park. Clyde put his sandwich down and groaned.
“Not a fan?” I asked.
“Show’s the most sacrilegious thing I ever saw.”
Out of deference to my employee’s religious sensibilities I moved on to CNBC for a stock market update.
“This is where your paycheck comes from,” I murmured.
Clyde shrugged. “Whatever.”
That afternoon, I got a call from the office. I had to be in New York City by noon the next day. Cursing under my breath, I packed a bag and headed out to tell Clyde. I could see the yellow dozer through the trees moving mournfully, like a lumbering elephant whose entire universe is contained within its immediate task, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It took some yelling and then some waving to get Clyde’s attention. He finally stopped the dozer and hurriedly but carefully extinguished his “cigarette” with a wetted thumb and forefinger. Then he killed the engine.
“That’s not a cigarette, is it, Clyde?” I said.
“A little something a cousin has growing on the back forty,” he replied as he hopped down, appearing resigned to the fact that he had just lost his job.
“I don’t want to see my Cat tumbling into the lake.”
“I don’t either, Mr. Braswell,” he mumbled.
“Insurance companies don’t see it as their responsibility to replace equipment destroyed by an operator who’s high. Submit a $50,000 claim, they demand a drug test, and I’m stuck with a note on a dozer that doesn’t run.”
His head bobbed in agreement as he gazed down at the ragged tops of his sneakers.
“I’d be tempted myself,” I said, now feeling a little sorry for this underpaid religious hypocrite. “I mean, I can’t imagine the monotony you must live with…” Then, holding up a finger to mark a change in subject, I added, “Look, I’ve got to go to New York. I’ll be back by the weekend.”
Clyde suddenly lifted his gaze and pretended to be put out by this, as if I were indispensable to the operation. How was he going to get along without me? Then he pretended to give up and just let me take off on this silly junket.
“Give my regards to Broadway,” he hollered cheerily as he climbed back on the Cat.
In New York, I put out a small fire with a big client, and by the end of the week I was back in Houston, just as I’d planned. From there, I drove up to the ranch to find Clyde in the kitchen in the midst of replacing the hood-vent over the stove. Looking up from his work, flathead screwdriver prying the sheet metal from the cabinetry, he appeared outraged.
“You owe me a hundred thirty-eight dollars and forty-four cents,” he barked.
“What happened?”
“When you left last Monday you had the stovetop burners going full blast.”
“What?”
“Nearly burned the place down. I came by a couple hours later for a drink, and the paint’s curling off the metal… You’re lucky you got me around, Mr. Braswell!”
Lucky, indeed. But after Clyde left, I discovered that my curiosity – along with my skepticism – was piqued. I stepped up to the stove, turned on all four burners, and just let them go. Even after burning for about thirty minutes, I discovered that the hood became warm, but never hot to the touch, much less, hot enough to burn the paint.
I rationalized, however, that maybe conditions had been different when Clyde allegedly saved the day; perhaps something flammable had been on the stovetop when I left. I couldn’t say because I couldn’t remember. Soon, gratitude overwhelmed uncertainty, and I found myself muttering, “Thank God for Clyde.” It’s been said that the two saddest words in the English language are “if only.” If only I knew then of the trouble that lay in store. If only I could have grasped the significance of this imminently forgettable episode. But such is the nature of the gravest trouble: it so artfully poses as benevolence.