Tamarack River Ghost (3 page)

“I have an interview with Mr. Ramport,” he said.

“And your name?” she asked. Josh wondered why such a good-looking young woman would work at a place like this.

“It’s Wittmore, Josh Wittmore,” he said as he removed his hat.

“Have a chair. I’ll tell him you’re here.”

Josh sat down and picked up a copy of the
American Cattleman
and began paging through it.

“Mr. Ramport will see you now,” the young woman said, smiling broadly. She pointed to the door to the left. Josh hesitated for a moment.

“Just go right in,” she said. She had a pleasant accent, a soft way of speaking, different from the folks up in Wisconsin, where he was born and raised.

Inside, he saw a middle-aged man dressed in a business suit and wearing a bolo tie with a longhorn head. They exchanged names and shook hands.

“So, you’re looking for work?” Mr. Ramport asked. He was all business. No small talk.

“Yes, I am,” Josh said.

“And why is that?”

“Fellow’s got to eat,” Josh answered.

“Good answer. You know anything about cattle?”

“Some. I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin.”

“Hell, they aren’t cattle you got up there. They’re cows. Out here we got cattle, about ten thousand of ’em, last count. And every damn one of them is better eatin’ then those skinny milkers you got up there in Wisconsin.”

Josh laughed. “I expect you’re right about that.”

“You know how to ride a horse?”

“Been a while, but I do.”

“You’re probably wonderin’ why I’m not asking about your previous work. Tell you the truth, I don’t wanna know. I don’t care if you just got out of jail, your wife kicked you out, or your last boss fired you. Don’t matter. If you can do the work, that’s all we ask.”

“Well, I do need the job,” Josh said.

“OK. If you’re willing to work for $7.50 an hour, you’re hired. You’ll be on probation for six months, and then we’ll talk about stuff like benefits. No benefits while you’re on probation. Check with Stephanie when you go out; she’ll have you sign a couple of things to get you on the payroll.”

As it turned out, Stephanie was the young woman he’d met earlier. She pushed a couple of pieces of paper in front of Josh and watched while he signed them. “Don’t forget to print your name under your signature,” she said. She had the nicest smile. Josh wondered if she was married, checking for a wedding ring on her left hand. Just as quickly, he removed the thought of starting anything with Stephanie. He had other reasons for finding work at the Lazy Z.

“When you go outside, you’ll want to look for Amos,” she said. “He rides a big white horse, and he’ll show you the ropes, so to speak.” She lowered her voice. “It’s Amos that really runs this place—and, by the way, you don’t wanna get on the wrong side of him.

Outside the headquarters office, the smell and the dust rolled over Josh again. He pulled on his hat, adjusted his glasses, and glanced around. Through the dirty haze he saw a skinny, weathered cowboy astride a big white horse. Josh held up his arm. The rider slowly moved the horse closer to Josh.

“Name is Josh Wittmore,” Josh said when he reached up to shake the rider’s hand.

“Amos,” the man said. His voice was rather high pitched, almost feminine. “I’m foreman of this operation. You get hired?”

“I did.” Josh was taken aback for a moment by the foreman’s less-than bosslike voice.

“Know anything about feedlots?”

“Nope.”

“Can you ride a horse?”

“Yup.”

“Good. Let’s find you something to ride, then.”

Amos swung around in his saddle and yelled, “Charlie, go fetch this guy a horse, and slip a saddle on it. Pick out an easy one—don’t wanna put him in the hospital his first day of work.” Amos laughed at his idea of a joke.

In a few minutes, Josh was astride a little bay mare, name of Daisy.

“Tell you what,” Amos said. “You just follow behind me and keep your eyes and ears open, probably the best way to learn how this operation works.”

“What all goes on here?” Josh asked.

“Well, it’s pretty simple. We haul in a bunch of feeder cattle, heifers and steers that have been weaned from their mothers and maybe grass fed for a season. Some of ’em weigh six to eight hundred pounds when they git here. We feed ’em for six months or so and send ’em on to market. Most of ’em will be twelve to fourteen hundred pounds when they leave.”

Josh was making mental notes, trying to be careful to ask questions a new worker would want to know, but not so many questions that he might arouse suspicion. Amos kept on talking without any prodding from Josh as they slowly rode down one of the dusty, manure-strewn lanes.

“We feed a mixture of corn, grain byproducts, and hay. Feed them critters quickly take a likin’ to. Got a lot of crossbreds these days—they seem to put on the pounds faster than, say, your Angus or Hereford. Some of these critters even got a little Holstein blood in ’em. Folks eatin’ their steaks and hamburgers don’t much care what the critter looked like, as long as their steaks are tender and juicy.” Amos laughed; it came out as almost a cackle.

Josh saw men on horseback, emptying pens and driving cattle to waiting semitrucks backed up at loading docks. Other men were driving tractors with feed trailers behind, augering feed into the troughs alongside the pens.

As Josh made his way with his new boss through the feedlot, he learned it covered some seventy-five acres. His eyes burned from the dust, and the smell of cow manure was almost overwhelming. When he arrived at the lot’s far end, he noticed a lazy little river running but a few hundred yards from the last pen. He could see its dirty brown water from where he sat on his horse, and could also see little gulleys, now dry, from where feedlot runoff had entered the stream.

They came up to the riders moving cattle from pens to the loading dock, where a cattle truck was parked.

“Wittmore, you work with these guys. They’ll show you what to do,” Amos said. He introduced Josh to the men and told them Josh was new and they should show him the ropes. Before he rode off, he eased his big horse in close to the little bay Josh was riding.

“If I hear one damn word from anybody that you’re screwin’ up or goofin’ off, you are outta here. You got that?” He looked Josh square in the
eye. Amos had small, intense black eyes, sunk deep in his tanned, wrinkled face.

“I got it,” Josh said, trying to keep his voice level and unafraid.

With that, Amos turned his big horse and trotted off. That was the only conversation Josh had with the foreman that entire first week, so he assumed he was doing OK. Each evening, he returned to his little motel room covered with dust and grime and smelling more like the feedlot than the feedlot itself. After the first couple of days in the saddle, his behind was so raw in the evenings that he could hardly sit in the chair to work at his little Toshiba laptop, where he jotted down facts and impressions.

Scarcely a day went by as he worked that he didn’t think about the young reporter who had been doing a story on the Lazy Z operation. He knew he’d better be careful and not ask any questions that went beyond what an employee needed to know to do his job and not go nosing around in places where he shouldn’t be.

At the end of his first week, he filed a story for the
Farm Country News
using the name Jed Walker. He hoped that the folks at the Lazy Z would never put Jed Walker and Josh Wittmore together and figure out they were one and the same.

Josh’s first story introduced his planned series, titled “Cattle Feedlot Situation USA.” He wrote: “American consumers like their beef tender and juicy—the kind of beef that is corn-fattened in a cattle feedlot where thousands of animals are crowded together, not a spear of grass in sight. One-third of the country’s beef is produced in feedlots like this, some of them with a capacity for more than a hundred thousand animals. If more people saw a feedlot, they wouldn’t enjoy their steaks so much.”

A week later, when he stopped in the Lazy Z office to pick up his paycheck, he noticed a copy of the
Farm Country News
on the counter. His story, with a generic photo of some other feedlot, ran on the first page and was topped with a big bold headline: “Is This What American Consumers Want?”

When Stephanie handed him his check, she pointed to the newspaper.

“You see that article?”

“Don’t do much reading,” Josh replied.

“Well, you ought to read it. This guy, Jed Walker, ought to be strung up.”

“Why’s that?”

“He’s out to do places like this in, close us down. Look at all the people who’d lose their jobs.”

Josh nodded in agreement and went back to work. His next week’s story was considerably edgier. He asked the occasional question around the feedlot, always carefully and never seeming to be nosey. And he had learned much. His article ran:

By Jed Walker

That juicy steak sizzling on your grill can be the worst thing you can feed your family, if it comes from an animal fattened at one of the nation’s major feedlots. Owners lace their cattle feed with antibiotics to prevent disease in the animals, something nearly inevitable when so many animals are crowded together in an outdoor environment where they wallow in mud and manure.

Numerous medical studies warn that antibiotic residue remains in the meat that people consume. Over time, people with various infectious diseases no longer respond to standard antibiotic treatment. Medical doctors are increasingly seeing “super bugs,” requiring new, more powerful antibiotics to control them.

Some feedlot owners also regularly feed anabolic steroids as growth promoters to their feedlot animals. Steroid residue has also been found in the muscle, fat, liver, kidneys, and other organ meats of treated animals. Studies are beginning to show links between these steroid residues and human reproductive problems. Knowing all of this, the European Union has banned the use of animal growth promoters since 1988.

Next week’s story will examine in some detail the operation of the Lazy Z feedlot operation in Crumpet, Missouri, one of several feedlots operated by the Lazy Z corporation.

Bert Schmid sent Josh an e-mail after the second story. “Great story. Now we need some specifics about what goes on at the Lazy Z,” he wrote. “And we need some photos.”

For his third week’s story, Josh’s headline read: “Missouri’s Lazy Z Feedlot Cutting Corners.” This time he described conditions at the feedlot after a recent rain. “Cattle wallow in manure and mud, many with mud caked on their bellies and up their sides. The smell is nearly unbearable.” He described in detail how workers regularly used electric prods to move cattle and how each employee was required to carry one at all times. He wrote about water troughs contaminated with manure.

Josh managed to take several photos of manure pouring out of the feedlot and running into the dirty brown stream that overflowed its banks. One of the workers saw him and asked, “What in hell are you doing?”

“Just taking a few photos to send to my mother back home. She doesn’t know anything about cattle feedlots.”

“Well you’d better knock it off. Amos told me, ‘You take a picture around here, and you’re fired,’” his coworker said.

“Thanks for telling me. I didn’t know that.”

Now fully awake, after deciding that no one lurked in the motel parking lot with further intentions of doing him harm, he packed his bags, told the motel clerk that there was an illness in the family, and checked out. He didn’t bother to say that the window in his room needed a bit of repair. He also didn’t bother to tell anyone at the Lazy Z that they wouldn’t be seeing him anymore.

He tossed the brick into the back of his pickup, and he was soon on his way back to Springfield. When he passed St. Louis and entered Illinois, he quit checking his rearview mirror. For a time, he was sure someone was following him, but he finally concluded it was his imagination getting the best of him. Not until he entered his Springfield apartment did he finally relax. He got on his cell phone and called his boss at home, waking him up.

“Slow down,” Bert said in a sleepy voice. “Take a deep breath, and tell me what happened.”

When Josh finished telling his story about the brick and the broken window, and the message written on the dirty sheet of paper, he paused for a moment.

“Sounds like you did the right thing to get out of there. Imagine the guy who saw you taking pictures ratted you out,” Bert said.

“I suppose,” Josh said. “Glad to be outta there. I’m gonna stink like a feedlot for weeks. Gonna throw my clothes away. Can’t get the stench out of them.”

“It was a helluva good story you wrote,” Bert said. “And pretty fair pictures, too. We’re running the whole thing on the front page of our new edition. Jed Walker’s made quite a name for himself.”

“Yeah, right,” Josh said. “I left Jed Walker at the Lazy Z.”

Oscar, you been hearin’ what I’ve been hearin’?” asked Fred Russo, Oscar Anderson’s neighbor and longtime friend.

“How in hell am I supposed to know what you’ve been hearin’?”

“Well I was just wonderin’.”

Oscar had a puzzled look on his face as he reeled in his fishing line and tossed the bobber and hook baited with a small minnow back into the quiet waters of the Willow River Millpond.

“So, what have you been hearin’?” A soft September breeze riffled the millpond waters.

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘What you been hearin’?’” Oscar said, louder this time.

“About what?”

“What you said a little while ago.”

Oscar and Fred, both in their eighties and retired farmers, often fished together. The Tamarack River had long been their favorite fishing spot, but for the sake of variety, they chose other places as well. The Willow River Millpond was one of them. Here, they could fish from shore for native brook trout, talk about the issues of the day, and reminisce about earlier times.

“What I said was ‘Have you been hearin’ what I’ve been hearin’?’”

“About all I hear is the wind blowing through the willow trees, kind of a nice sound too. One of the sounds of early fall. I kinda like the sounds of fall. Easy to hear. Not like winter. Winter sounds are harsh on the ears.”