Eagle Bumps/One-Step Men

What a glorious Sunday morning this is. It’s sixty-two degrees here in California with a cool breeze wafting through, kissing the stucco and glass of houses erected six feet from one another. It’ll do; this Sunday I’m okay with that. I told my Children (before they were adults and I hope they still believe it) that Sterners don’t get goose bumps on their flesh. In our Family we get eagle bumps. This cool morning has peppered my flesh with them.

Eagle bumps and cars swishing by on Highway 44 a few blocks south of here remind me of a Sunday morning in Wyoming in 1990 when I was involved with picking up a swather my stepdad, Glen, had purchased from an old sheep rancher named Jake. He was quite a character. Actually they were both characters (as if I’m not). Jake pointed up to the sky and suggested I count the eagles circling there, riding the currents, searching for prey or maybe just roller-coastering the wind.

Counting circling birds is one of those undertakings easier said than done. I kept coming up with fourteen, a number which doubled ol’ Jake over, bent at the waist and laughing his ass off every time I said it. Glen was aggravated by our intercourse. A one-step man, he wanted to get the swather back to his ranch so we could grease ‘er up and begin cutting his hay and alfalfa. Jake ignored his interruptions, wouldn’t listen to Glen’s dickering over the price of the machine, until he had finished schooling me on the art of counting swirling objects high in the sky. “Ya gotta mark a bird with yer eye,” he instructed, “Don’t blink; one blink and ya gotta start all over. Follow that bird and count ‘em off. You’ll get ‘er right every time.

There were fifteen eagles circling that day. Jake winked at me from his crinkly weathered face and reported that, at this time of year, eagles would always be found in pairs. To Glen’s consternation, this statement began the next step in Jake’s majestic bird tutorial. We had to find the sixteenth eagle. Glen gave up his dickering for a moment and, using his one-step man’s predator eye, found the bird perched on a telephone wire across the old washboard gravel road. “There ya go!” Jake laughed, coughing a bit between puffs on his Marlboro, “Ya got a good eye, son.”

Glen thanked him and attempted to one-step his way back into dickering. “You’re asking $1600.00 for that swather. It’s a John Deere, just what I’m looking for. I got fourteen one-hundred-dollar bills in my pocket here and Tom along to drive ‘er away.”

Jake continued to ignore him, chuckled and asked me what I was looking at. I was watching crows on the telephone wire with the lone eagle. They were caw-caw-cawing, hopping from side to side on the wire, raising all kinds of particular hell with the eagle. Never mind numbers, I was mightily impressed with the crows. I figured the eagle could easily take them down one chomp at a time and wondered why it didn’t. “Countin’ crows on a wire is a whole different barrel o’ fish,” Jake chortled, “Mark yer bird by a tall tree in the background, somethin’ that’s not movin’ or likely to move. Keep at it, you’ll get ‘er, kid.” I was forty years old and felt pretty good being referred to as a kid by this seasoned veteran, master of life and its living.

The morning dragged on and, around noon, Jake’s wife came from her country kitchen with egg salad sandwiches and a pitcher of lemonade. She was a taciturn woman, plump and composed in her flower-print Sunday dress and white apron with black cows wandering all over it. Standing next to her tall and lanky husband, they reminded me of the number ten. In the Olympics of Life that’s the number I would assign to them. “Fifty-five years this good woman has put up with me!” Jake quipped between bites.

Birds, jumper cables, and the art of cutting hay were the subjects of conversation during lunch. Glen knew better than to dicker during a country meal. Mrs, Jake (I never did know her name) went into the house to “freshen up”. She took the lunch dishes with her and soon emerged without her cow apron, pecked a kiss on Jake’s cheek and departed without a word in the couple’s ten-year-old Oldsmobile. “Off to sew quilts and gab with the church ladies; now we can have a beer,” Jake reported with a crinkly wink.

The afternoon wore on while Jake regaled us with stories of animal rights groups and the death of lambs. “They say there’s only two pair o’ matin’ eagles left in Wyoming,” he laughed while pointing a gnarled finger into the wild blue yonder. “Them feathered folks sure got a lot ‘o company. Must be from other states, maybe Colorado and South Dakota.”

“I’d like to get that swather home before dark,” Glen added hopefully, “Tom’s a city man. He’s never driven one, might drive off the road in the dark.”

“You’re in for a treat,” Jake said to me as he walked over to the machine. “That there’s the steering wheel but ya only use that to trim ‘er up. These levers here are the left and right turns o’ the machine.” The hunk of green steel, all belts, pulleys and grease zirks he was referring to reminded me of a Frazetta rendition of an iron dragonfly from hell.

“Like I said,” Glen put in, “I got fourteen one-hundred-dollar bills here. My hired man (that was me) has some money saved up. He has three kids to feed all by himself. I’d sure feel bad if I had to borrow money from him to buy the swather.”

“Come back another day if you have to,” Jake replied nonchalantly. “I expect some other lookers. I got prospects but you might get ‘er after all. You’re my closest neighbor and Tom here can drive ‘er ten miles down that ol’ dirt road. Anybody else’ll have to pay freight.”

“Ah hell,” Glen carped, extending a hand toward me. Upon this prearranged signal, I took the ten twenty-dollar bills Glen had given me at breakfast from my shirt pocket and handed them to him. He folded them into his wad of C-notes and handed them over to Jake.

Jake ambled off to the barn to get the owner’s manual and parts list for the twenty-year-old machine. Glen frowned at me. “You ‘n your damned birds just cost me two hundred dollars.”

Ol’ Jake died of cancer a couple of months later. I imagine he knew that was coming when he spent a day in the wild expanse of his Wyoming front yard dickering and telling stories with Glen and me. What a gift such knowing is. I’ll never be a one-step man, too easily amazed and sidetracked by the subterfuge of their meandering tales and asides. Out-dickered and usually paying the asking price, I am pleasantly lost in the where of the sixteenth eagle, the orneriness of crows, explaining eagle bumps to my GrandChildren.

I do my best to keep promises and did so in the case of Jake by never telling anyone about the hundred dollars he poked into my shirt pocket before I mounted the cockpit of the swather monster. “Don’t tell him,” he said with a nod toward Glen who waited impatiently in his truck to follow me home in the dark. “You do somethin’ nice for those kids o’ your’un. Don’t tell them neither.” I went with them to see a movie at the Cowboy Theater in New Castle a week or so later. We enjoyed a steak dinner at the Cowboy Café and had enough money left for everyone to buy some goodies at the 7-11, then drove fifty miles laughing and singing down the dirt road to our home on Skull and Crossbones Road.