The Challenge(2)
Pattie had gone to nursing school while Anne and Pitt were in college. Bill was three years older and already working on the ranch. He and Pattie got married a year before Anne and Pitt. They had broken up for a while before that, and dated other people, but they married each other in the end. Pattie worked as a nurse for two years until Matt was born, and then became a stay-at-home mom after that. Her life with Bill was secure. Her family hadn’t had the means that Bill’s did, so she was grateful for the life he provided her and their two boys. She was the envy of her sisters, with a husband who owned a successful ranch, and she didn’t have to work. Her sisters’ husbands were ranch hands elsewhere in the state, as Pattie’s father had been. Both Pattie’s sisters had jobs, one as a teacher and the other as a secretary. Pattie was the success story in the family, married to a rancher.
Bill and Pattie’s relationship was occasionally stormy, unlike Anne and Pitt’s still-romantic relationship. Bill had a hot temper, and she had a fiery nature, but despite the occasional fights, Pattie and Bill considered themselves happily married. Pattie thought about having a third baby at times, and would have liked to have a girl, but the prospect of ending up with three boys made the idea less appealing. She had her hands full with the two she had. Matt had been much more mischievous and adventuresome than Peter when they were younger, and Pattie was constantly chasing after Benjie to make sure that he didn’t get hurt in the cattle barn, or chasing after the sheep, or hanging around the bullpen. He wanted to do everything his older brother did, and she spent a good part of her day checking up on him, worried about what he was up to, and often scolding him when she found him.
The two families went on vacations together every year. One of their favorite pastimes was camping, and the boys loved it. They provided an extended family for each other. Peter and Matt were always at one home or the other, with a slight preference for the Pollocks’ place, because Benjie wasn’t there.
Matt’s ambitions were very different from Peter Pollock’s. Peter’s future was set as the sole heir to the ranch. He would be the fourth generation to run it one day. He loved where they lived and the life of a rancher, and he watched his father carefully to learn from him.
Matt dreamed of city life. He was considered a computer wiz at school and wanted a job in the tech world one day. He knew who all the big players in tech were, and he was desperate to work for one of them when he graduated from college. He wanted to go to Stanford if he could keep his grades up, and then stay in California to work in Silicon Valley. It sounded abysmal to Peter, who loved the mountains and open spaces of Montana, and wanted to stay in the place where he was born. Matt couldn’t wait for high school to be over so he could leave.
Benjie said he was going to be a rodeo clown and ride the broncos when he grew up. He’d had a narrow escape from one of the bullpens the last time they all went to the rodeo. At five, he had once followed a clown into the arena, with a bull pawing the ground twenty feet away from him, all in the two seconds his mother hadn’t been watching him. She never let go of his hand at the rodeo after that. It was easy to believe he’d be a rodeo clown one day. That was not his parents’ aspiration for him, but at six, it was all Benjie dreamed of.
* * *
—
Tim Taylor was the third musketeer in Peter and Matt’s group of inseparable friends. He had faced greater challenges than Matt and Peter. His homelife had been less idyllic, and he was happiest when he was at either the Pollock ranch, or the Browns’. He was warmly welcomed at both. His parents were both natives of Montana from modest homes. His parents’ fathers were both ranch hands too, like the men in Pattie’s family.
His mother, June, had suffered a case of bacterial meningitis when she was pregnant with him, and survived it without losing the baby. But he was born partially deaf as a result of the high fever she’d had for several days. He wore two hearing aids, which helped. He had had extensive speech therapy, and although he still spoke with a marked speech defect, he managed well with the hearing aids, and lip-read and signed when necessary. After his mother’s diligent work with him, and a good speech therapist, he was at the top of his class at school and nothing slowed him down. He read voraciously, and had a passion for horses, as well as great instincts about them. He wanted to go to veterinary school, then come back to Fishtail and work with horses.
He was extremely adept at rock climbing, like a mountain goat, his mother said about him. She was proud of the progress he’d made. He’d finished eighth grade at the top of his class as usual, and wanted to take advanced placement classes in high school, to get into a good college. His friends were indifferent to his hearing impairment. He managed so well in spite of it, and he had a great sense of humor.
After working closely with him on his speech therapy in his early years, June had gone back to school and become a licensed speech therapist. She worked in the nearby town of Red Lodge, and was recommended by several doctors in the area and Saint Vincent Healthcare hospital in Billings. She thoroughly enjoyed her practice.
Her marriage to Ted Taylor rapidly became a casualty of Tim’s affliction. It had put a huge strain on their relationship, which had been on a bumpy road anyway. Ted was a proud man, who had grown up in intense poverty as a young man. His father had been an alcoholic ranch worker who’d died young, leaving Ted’s mother to struggle to make ends meet.