This excerpt is Part 4. It has some elements many of us can identify with.
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An estranged son comes home to visit, not work
BY ROY WENZL
The Wichita Eagle
MAY 29, THE SAUBLE DRIVEWAY -- David Sauble stood hands in pockets, intending to lift not a finger.
Family members he'd been estranged from were cutting iron pipe with torches, making new corral gates to preserve the ranch where he'd spent 50 years.
A 2-year-old boy, blond hair sticking out from under a cap, drove past, vigorously steering a toy John Deere tractor, battery powered. He wore the determined look of a tractor cowboy. Cameron Hayes, the great-great-great-grandson of the Sauble who founded the ranch.
David could see his mother and sisters and his own daughter Lorie carrying bags of food and cooking pans between houses.
David stood beside his wife, Barbara, wearing a dress shirt. He looked at the men, and the men looked at him. They teased him, gently.
"What are you gonna do here dressed like that?" asked Jerry Otto, David's son-in-law.
"Supervise," David said.
The men nodded, grinning at the old country boy joke. They did not press it. David's daughters had left him years ago over his Jehovah's Witness faith. His faith had bettered his life, he had said. But his daughters had left, and the rest of the family had sided with them.
In his home in Taos, N.M., eight days before, he'd talked about the split and cried off and on for four hours, talking about this place, these people, how they'd broken his heart. But he had decided to show up, for half a day, and say hello, while attending his wife's 40th high school reunion in Florence this Saturday before Memorial Day.
He and Barbara still cared about this family, he had said. He had begun to reach out in the past year to his parents, his daughters, to rekindle ties.
But he would not work for work week, he had said. No. He'd given 50 years. David walked over to Galen Carpenter, his brother-in-law, who'd run with him as a teen.
"You gonna do anything here, Sauble?" Galen asked.
"Nope."
David walked away a few steps, hands in pockets.
The men kept working. David wandered. This way. That.
Galen took a drag on a cigarette, watched David walk around doing nothing. David looked uncomfortable. Trapped, even. He had come to say hello to these people, but they were all working.
Galen grinned. Among country boys, doing nothing on a work day is a country boy sin.
For eight years, as the silence between David and the rest of he family lengthened, Galen had vowed to love David like a brother, as always. He'd called David at least once a year. Swapped stories, and nagged:
"Come home sometime."
Galen smoked his cigarette and watched David. David had been one of the toughest cowboys in the Flint Hills, daring enough to rope an angry bull in an open pasture and wrestle him into a trailer. Smart enough to fix anything, including gates. A cowboy from hat to boots.
David had cared about this ranch as much as anybody.
Galen thought he still did.
David wandered over to Patrick Henry Sauble, his dad. They hadn't seen each other in months, hadn't seen much of each other in eight years. Pat stuck out his hand.
"You finding enough iron pipe to help these guys?" David asked.
"No," Pat said. "And you of all people would know where it is. Where'd you hide it?"
"Buried," David said.
He walked away.
And wandered around.
David and Barbara walked up the driveway to his sister Susan's house, a minute's walk from the stone house where David grew up.
They walked past corrals where he'd broken horses.
Susan and her husband, Dennis Hague, had given David's daughter Mary Ann "asylum," David said, after Mary Ann left at 16 because she didn't want to be a Witness.
David still felt disappointed about how the Hagues had "interfered." But he went in their house now and said hello. He had said in Taos, eight days before, that he had begun to try to rekindle family ties, though nothing could be like it was. He had even begun to call his daughters again, had seen them at Thanksgiving. Now, he entered his sister's house.
Other family came to the house, too. David's mother, Mary, stopped to help her distraught great-grandson.
Cameron's mini-John Deere tractor had stalled on the driveway slope. The boy cried. Mary helped him get going.
Inside, David sat on a barstool, Barbara beside him. They watched Sauble women prepare a meal. Barbara began to pitch in, making cookies.
A door opened, and in walked Mary Ann. With her was her husband, Dan, and her 10-month-old son, Elijah. They'd come from Lawrence.
Mary Ann still rejects the Jehovah's Witness faith, but she blames herself for splitting the family. When she saw her parents, she went straight to them.
David took his daughter in his arms, and they melted into each other and hung on.
The Sauble women watched. Tears welled in David's eyes. It was a long time before they let go, and then Mary Ann hugged her mother.
Dennis Hague came in a few minutes later. David teased him.
"I thought you guys drank beer during work week," David said. "Where's the beer?"
"Just a rumor," Dennis said.
Mary Ann came to David again, and they melted together again.
The Saubles gathered to eat. Amanda Hague stepped out of the house to negotiate with her son, Cameron, who wanted to play tractor cowboy instead of eat.
The men sat at one place, and the women sat at another, which is what some country families do on work days.
David sat beside his father.
The men argued, and David joined in.
Galen said silly golf-playing migrants to his state of Arizona had ruined Arizona's future, wasting billions of gallons to water golf courses in a state beset by drought.
Dennis argued, with a straight face, that watering golf courses changes the atmosphere of small ecosystems -- and brings rain.
Galen rolled his eyes, glanced at David, who grinned.
"Of all the silly things Hague ever said, and Hague has said a lot, this ranks as the silliest," Galen said. "Man, you can get quite an education on this place."
"Yeah," David said. "But take a lot of it with a little salt."
"To heck with the work out there, Hague," Galen said, getting up from his stool. "I'm going fishing instead."
"Good," Dennis said. "I'll tie a rock around your neck, and you catch them on your way down."
After the meal, David stayed in the house for half an hour.
But after he hugged Mary Ann again, and his other daughter, Lorie, and after he'd held Elijah for a long time and let Elijah grab at his mustache, David Sauble walked out into the yard.
He stood with his hands in his pockets.
His boyhood friend Galen cut pipe with a torch. His boyhood friend Dennis hauled pipe and drove a truck and worked.
David watched them.
Then he took his hands out of his pockets.
For the next day and a half, David Sauble worked until his hands got sore.
He saw his sister Susan carrying a stepladder and rope from one place to another.
David took the ladder to lighten her load.
When friends showed up and gleefully dumped 10 live catfish on the ranch porch for a fish fry, David got out pliers and a knife and cleaned every one of them. Some of the fish weighed 5 pounds, and it was a hard, messy job. Pat came out of the house, carrying a vodka and tonic, and pronounced it a job well done.
David helped everyone.
Talked with everyone.
He did not do nearly as much work in this week as Dennis or Galen did. But he gave something beyond a hand, and they looked at what he did with surprise and relief, and even a small measure of hope.
False hope, maybe. Americans are suckers for happy endings, his French professor daughter Lorie would say the next day. The Sauble story might end more like a French movie, with no one sure what had just happened, or what would happen next.
But even Lorie said it was nice to see her dad on the ranch.
And to see what he did.
On the second day, David drilled holes in a massive hedge gatepost to rebuild a gate at the corral.
He stood atop an overturned tub he used as a stepladder. He twisted heavy iron screws into the holes with a heavy crescent wrench.
POP!
An iron screw broke as he twisted it.
He stepped down, picked up another screw. Soaked it in oil.
He squirted oil into the hole he had drilled.
Then he twisted and twisted and twisted the screw with the crescent wrench, his big forearms straining. He twisted the screw tight.
"This will teach me to bring gloves," he said.
He held out his arms, big and strong like Pat's arms. His hands looked red, and his forearms looked scraped and scratched.
"Look at me," he said.
For one day and a half, for far longer than he had intended, David Sauble worked beside his kin.
"You set that gate years ago," his father told him, walking by. "I guess there's nobody better to reset the gate now."
David looked at him. Nodded, briefly, to accept the compliment.
He stepped off the tub, and wiped his face on the sleeve of his dress shirt.
Amanda Hague sat on her mother's back porch, looking out over the wide green valley that her great-great-grandfather David Sauble had settled 148 years before.
The Saubles don't have a sure-fire plan to keep running the ranch, Amanda said.
Her own parents live here now, and help Pat every day they can. But beyond that, all the family does is get together once a year, and work for a week to keep the place from falling in.
And they hold on to hope that one of the children they bring along will one day fall in love with sunlight and grass and water, and cows and calves and Miller's Spring. And become a cowboy, once and for good.
All through work week, her 2-year-old son, Cameron, had driven his plastic tractor around the yard.
"Who knows?" Amanda said. "Maybe it'll be my son. He sure likes that tractor. And he loves to come here."
She looked out over the wide valley. The soybean field in the bottoms and the grass and the trees on the bluffs had turned everything a rich, dark green.
It had been so much fun, she said, to gather and mend fences and fix gates and share meals. The family really comes home to become family again.
Uncle David had come, she said. And restored something lost.
"Maybe now we can fix everything."