Improbable Fortunes. Jeffrey Price

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from a ranching family that only produced women—which was why her father, Calvin, insisted that Skylar change his surname to Stumplehorst. After Calvina’s mother and father passed, Skylar was sitting pretty. Calvina bore him four daughters, who, like their mother, treated him like the uncouth yokel he was.

      “I call the shots out there.”

      “Prove it.”

      “All right, I’ll take him.” Stumplehorst regretted that statement immediately, but before he could say another word, Sheriff Dudival threw down three bits for his coffee and walked out.

      That afternoon, Sheriff Dudival drove Buster up to the ranch before Skylar could change his mind. Rearing up above the massive timber gates were twin wrought iron rampant colts. They had been copied from the handles of the famous pistols—between them were the letters S-T-U-M-P-L-E-H-O-R-S-T.

      “Cain’t ah just stay with you at the jail, Sheriff?”

      “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time for that later.”

      As they pulled up the road to the house, Buster could see three of the Stumplehorst daughters hanging laundry in the front yard. Hope, Faith, and Charity were fine examples of sturdy Lame Horse Mesa girls, but it was Destiny Stumplehorst, Buster recognized from the rodeo, who had him in her enthrall. She was in the corral brushing out her mare, Maple, who was named after the syrup and not the tree. Both Maple’s and Destiny’s ponytails had the same tight braid. Destiny had a constellation of freckles across her face as if she had held the wrong end of a can of Rustoleum. Buster had become, since living with the Svendergards, quite adept at imagining what people looked like without their clothing, and he imagined Destiny might just have the best figure of any girl in town, but there was more to his admiration than merely the physical. He liked the meticulous way she combed out her horse’s mane and tail. He liked the way she wore a red bandana in her hair to keep it clean. He liked the way she chewed gum in little inconspicuous movements like she was biting the inside of her cheek thinking about something important. Then, without warning, she turned and looked right at him. Their eyes met, and Buster quickly slumped down in his seat.

      “What is wrong with you?” the sheriff said.

      “Nothin’.”

      “Come on now. Sit up. This is no way for a gentleman to make a first impression.”

      At the head of the driveway stood Skylar and Calvina. Calvina’s father, Calvin Stumplehorst, was one of the most admired men in Vanadium. At nearly 450 pounds, he had to have extra-large saddles custom made by the Botero Leather Company in Valencia, Spain. In a bar fight, he would use his stomach to knock his opponent to the floor and then lay on them—like the famed Flat Rock in Arches National Park. Calvin Stumplehorst was the one who had put money into the refurbishing of the IOOF, the International Order of Odd Fellows. He was the one who had organized the building of a rodeo arena. He had three mistresses, one Chinese, one Mexican, and one albino. He had an extensive collection of Red Skelton records that he would listen to in the tack room and laugh and laugh until tears rolled down his florid face. It was said that Calvin Stumplehorst, until he got himself a bellyful of cancer, could eat a whole mule deer by himself in one sitting. After they removed his stomach and reattached it to his small intestine, his oncologist told him that if he ever ate anything larger than a Le Sueur pea, it would be the end of him. He followed his doctor’s instructions and lost 250 pounds. No longer the imposing figure that he had once been, he adapted to the person he now was. He took up the writing of poetry and chronicled in verse every aspect of the ranch and the land he loved. Some of his stuff made it into the local newspaper because he owned it. One poem was submitted to The Paris Review along with a contribution for $2,500. It was published in the fall edition of 1961. It went like this:

      This is my damn house / This is my damn broke-down tractor / This is my damn dog / This is my damn horse / This is my damn rock / This is my damn ranch

      But in the end, even being the poet laureate of Vanadium was not satisfying for a man of such Herculean appetites. And so, one Saturday night, he put four pounds of short ribs in his personal crock-pot with a bottle of red wine, a can of tomato paste, three onions, fresh thyme, and two bay leaves from his garden. In the morning, he saddled his favorite swayback pony, took one last ride around his property, and went to International Order of Odd Fellows where he hung an oil painting of himself that he had commissioned. Then he returned home, ate all the short ribs, retired to the tack room, put on a Red Skelton record and, unlike Socrates, died an exquisite death.

      As big a life as Calvin lived, his eldest child and inheritor of his lands, Calvina, lived a small one. You could see it in her face, which was pale and indistinct. It was less a face than it was a grave rubbing. When she was a teenager, Calvina had been sent off to Uncle Hebron in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. He was a General in the Salvation Army. There, she was indoctrinated in the ways of sobriety, piety, and parsimony. She saw firsthand what a profligate lifestyle could lead to—drunkenness, venereal disease, illegitimacy, and hopeless destitution. Now, as the baroness of the Stumplehorst Outfit, many of the Army’s principles were embedded in everyday Stumplehorst life. They prayed twice a day in the outbuilding once used to house the Red Skelton collection, now a house of God. No music or television was allowed. The girls were given a dollar a week of spending money. Skylar was given $4.75. Everyone in the family had to carry the traditional Salvation Army Little Black Book—and account for every penny spent. Calvina inspected each and every one for discrepancies on Friday nights before Evensong. And lastly, the children were not sent to the public school. Calvina taught them at home from a curriculum sent by mail from the Thessalonians Home Study Course of Oxford, Mississippi.

      The Stumplehorst family had twelve hundred irrigated acres bordered by a worm fence that was laid out by old man Stumplehorst in the 1940s. Four hundred head of Angus meandered across the wavy grass like black holes; quarter horses raised for hobby, neat rows of chicken coops and swine pens, and twenty acres of planted vegetables. Not even the fashion designer Ralph Lauren in Ridgway, Colorado, had a ranch like this. And he had money. The Stumplehorsts didn’t have money. They had the US Government.

      When Calvina’s father died, so died his distracted way of managing the ranch. She immediately sought out the government programs that had always been available, but never utilized by her father whose interests, as previously noted, were elsewhere. In short order, she cobbled together a dizzying network of subsidies that increased the Stumplehorst Ranch’s financial wherewithal six-fold. A rancher needs land to graze cattle. By enlisting in the Federal Land Lease Program, she was able to add four thousand acres to the ranch—allowing them to build a bigger herd. And while she was at it, she might as well avail herself of the government’s Risk Management Insurance Program that made it possible to hedge volatility in the beef market. She also helped herself to a USDA Rural Development Subsidy, which paid for the irrigation and soil preparation of their new organic squash and lettuce business. Her husband, Skylar, who was no Andrew Mellon, but a reduce-the-size-of-the-government Republican nonetheless, was uneasy with her high finance shenanigans and told her so.

      “Tell me something, Skylar,” she’d said, when he balked. “If you saw a dollar laying there in the middle of the road, would you, or would you not, pick it up?”

      b

      Calvina Stumplehorst took one look at the patrol cruiser coming up the driveway and saw the boy in the front seat. It was obvious that Skylar had not told her about his conversation with the sheriff.

      “What’s this about?”

      “It’s nothing,” Skylar said, trying to cast it off. “It’s a kid I said I’d let work here for six months.” The tumble of that deviated syntax set off alarm bells for Calvina. Her eyes narrowed. A partial truth, or worse, a lie, was being told.

      “Is

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