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At the turning of the stair, directly on the wall in front of us, is yet another timepiece, an antique wall clock in a simple wooden case, hands as thin as pencil lines, trembling past the hour. The steady drone of the tractor goes back and forth, a rhythm of comfort and plenty, in harmony with the swaying of the pendulum of the clock and the roses on the wall, and the scent of baking piecrust blooming up the stairs—promising to fill you up, whatever your emptiness may be.

Seventeen

Herbert Laumann’s sick baby is up two or three times in the night, so they take her into their bed. She is finally asleep, a soft, warm weight on her father’s chest, when he is forced by the alarm to face the dawn. From the quality of light peeping underneath the Roman shades, he knows the sky will be clear. No rain.

Ambition, that indefatigable gear, gets the priority of the day turning in Herbert Laumann’s sleep-deprived brain. The priority is water. As deputy state director, the continuing drought in the eastern part of the state is first thing on his mind these days. It means he’ll keep on hearing complaints—from ranchers as well as his own district managers—because nothing has changed out here in the West in the past two hundred years. It is still the cattlemen versus the farmers in the fight for public lands and water, only now you’ve got the radical element mixed in.

Guys like Laumann are in the middle, trying to balance the politics of multiple use; doing the eight-to-five civil servant bit because it’s better to be wearing a shirt and tie and commute and have the weekends on the boat with your family than be driving a rig through alfalfa and timothy grass like your father did 24/7, cracked red hands blown up like balloons, the inhaler always in the bib pocket.

Being allergic to your life’s work is a tragedy.

Still in bed, he reaches for cigarettes and gets one lit without singeing his baby’s hair or waking up his still-fat and irritable wife. He does not have to worry about waking Alex. On the cusp of being a teenager, the boy could sleep until noon.

The first nicotine rush of the morning is like God’s own inhale before He blew life into the creatures of the earth. Laumann savors a divine pause. A lot of people would run from this FAN thing, afraid of becoming a target for extremists just for doing the job you were hired to do. There are lunatics everywhere; you have to stand up to them.

Laumann replays his triumph at the animal rights convention. It pumps him up, gets him going: how he ignored the intimidation of four hundred people booing and hissing and got up on that stage; how he put that punk away with the courage of a father defending his children, just as every day he goes into his office and defends our precious public lands. Those accusations of him allegedly buying horses and selling them—to a slaughterhouse? Bumbled paperwork! Never happened! A deplorable and false personal attack, he insisted to the crowd. Then, a brilliant diversion: He invited the whole rowdy bunch to go out to the corrals and see how the horses are treated. Understand the BLM is the good guy, doing the right thing. At the end? He got applause! And the punk, Fontana? Thoroughly deballed.

“Don’t blow smoke on Rosalie!” complains his wife without opening her eyes.

“You take her,” he replies.

Not even halfway out of his arms and the kid is screaming. The wife unbuttons her nightgown.

Laumann pulls a plaid wool shirt over his pajamas and goes down the stairs, which smell of the new navy blue runner. He likes the feel, like walking barefoot on a carpet of lichen. Already he has lit a second cigarette, hit the coffee machine, the weather station on a small TV, and picked up the newspaper, running his eye over the headlines. He has to focus on these things before the other thing, the uneasiness, kicks in.

He forces his gaze from the garden window. A cup of Irish vanilla, and he is at the computer, fully charged. He’ll send an e-mail to his district managers and drum up support for building