Man from Montana

She could smell the story. Feel it in her veins. A hot, pulsing thing that would procure the career she'd vied for these past ten years. Will you finally be proud, Daddy? Will you think my journalistic skills are comparable to Mama's? God, she hoped so. At the crossroads Old Joe the baker had described, Rachel Brant stopped her rusty Sunburst and scanned the three desolate directions vanishing into the rolling Montana countryside: ahead toward the south, left going east, right westward-ho. Each road as long and gray as the next. Each banked in dirty plowed snow and flanked by fields covered in icy white quilts. The Flying Bar T lay west, toward the Rocky Mountains. Carefully, she picked up the curled, yellowed photograph on the passenger seat. Tom McKee in army green with his Vietnam platoon, a giant man dependent on a wheelchair since 1970. Tom, Purple Heart recipient, had lost his legs and left arm saving the ragtag remainder of his men from Hells Field. A battle that had been swept under the military's carpet for over three decades. She wanted to beat the dust from that carpet, make her dad proud. But according to the locals, Tom rarely came into town. His son was the McKee they knew. Midthirties and widowed, Ashford McKee ran the Flying Bar T and guarded his family's privacy like a jackal on a fresh kill. Ash. The man she had to get through to get to Tom. They said he resembled his father. Tall as a pine, silent as a forest. And keeper of the Flying Bar T gates. Tossing down the photograph, Rachel took a slow breath. We'll see. Stepping on the accelerator, she headed for the snowy peaks shimmering with sunlight, for the pine and forest man. She would get her story, come hell or Ash McKee. Beyond the fence lines, fields undulated over hill and knoll and into gullies. "I hope you're worth it, Sergeant Tom," she muttered. "I hope you're worth every shivering second Charlie and I have had to endure in this backwater hole." Ten days she and her seven-year-old son had been in Sweet Creek, Montana. Ten days in this godforsaken land of snow and bone-freezing temperatures. And in this final week of January, with spring still a couple months away, the warmth of her previous job in Arizona was a frosty memory. But all would be worthwhile if she got this story. Tom would be the last of seven vets she had interviewed over the years, Sweet Creek the conclusion to the no-name towns she and her little boy would have to pretend was home. Was it too much to hope Tom McKee would rent out his guesthouse as Old Joe said? Maybe. She had been living on hopes and wishes for years; might as well add one more. In a fenced pasture, she saw cows huddling around piles of hay on the frozen ground, while long-haired horses munched from bins in lean-to shelters. Evidently, the sunlight belied the eight below temperature. She turned onto the last stretch of road and saw a dark, writhing mass a quarter mile in the distance. Soon, the mass became a herd of Black Angus flanked by a pair of horses with riders: a man wearing a quilted navy coat and a deep brown Stetson, and a young woman bundled in a red parka and wool hat. Two black-and-white border collies swept back and forth across the road, instinctively herding any animal selecting a different direction. Rachel pulled behind the riders and tooted her horn; the herd's stragglers broke into a trot, tails aloft. The man scowled at her car. The woman--no, teenager-- smiled. Rachel recognized the girl from their meet last Monday. Eager to write a weekly high school column for the Rocky Times, Daisy McKee had come to the newspaper during the girl's forty-minute lunch break.A few words about her proposed column and she was out the door, rushing back to school. A nice kid and Ashford McKee's daughter. Rachel looked back at the manForbes, Mary J. is the author of 'Man from Montana ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780373248001 and ISBN 0373248008.