I slid the white envelope into the middle of the table. “That is the closing statement for Big Horn Surveying,” I said. “Six million eight hundred thousand dollars. I sold it in the spring, and I told no one, because I wanted to know how my family would treat a tired old man with a compass and a pickup truck.” Tara went pale. Cole looked at the envelope and then at his wife. His father, a quiet man from Powell with sugar beet hands, reached across the table, opened the flap himself, and read the first page twice. Outside, the wind came off the Shoshone River and rattled the porch screen.
Tara found her voice. “Dad, I was going to tell you about the card. I was going to pay it back.” “Twenty seven thousand dollars, Tara,” I said, and I laid the brown envelope beside the white one. “A side by side four wheeler from the dealer on Sheridan Avenue. Four nights at a hotel in Jackson Hole. A new set of tires. All of it on a credit card with my name on the front. Your mother would have asked me first, and I would have said yes to a good part of it. That is the part I cannot forgive, that you never asked.”
Cole turned to his wife slowly. “Tara, you told me your dad gave you that money for the trip. You said he insisted.” “I thought he would have,” she whispered. His father cleared his throat. “Daughter,” he said, “where I come from, we have a word for taking what a man would have given if you had only asked. It is not a kind word.” Nobody at that table moved. On the shelf by the window sat the brass compass, with the needle trembling toward the north, which is a hard direction to ignore when you are in the wrong.
A brass compass worn smooth by fifty years gave one daughter the weekend to bring her father back to the survey office in Cody.
I kept my voice level, the way I used to hold a line across a long field. “Here are my terms. On Monday you will sell the side by side and put every dollar of it against that card. The rest you will repay in monthly payments that I will set, and you will do it from your own pay, not from Cole and not from his parents. You will close the card in my presence at the bank. And you will tell the truth to every person at this table, once, plainly, tonight.” Tara nodded, and tears ran down her face. Cole took her hand, which I will always remember to his credit.
On Monday I went to the survey office on Sheridan Avenue, and a surprise was waiting. Every surveyor I had trained over forty years was there with coffee and a box of donuts. Word had traveled, the way it does in Park County. Gus Hollis, whose boundary line I had marked in nineteen eighty two, had driven in from his ranch with a pie. “Herb,” he said, “you never charged my father when the cattle got through. I figure we owe you one.” I laughed until I had to wipe my glasses, because nobody had told me, in all those years, that anyone was paying attention.
The money consequences were not mild. The side by side sold at a loss of four thousand dollars, and the hotel would not refund a single night. Tara took extra shifts at her job in town and gave up the vacation she had been planning with Cole. The parents of Cole made it known that they would not be lending a dime until they had seen a full year of honest work. It was the first time in her life that Tara had learned what a dollar weighed, and I think she came out of it a better and steadier woman than she went in.
I did not want to spend my days in anger, because Marjorie would have hated it. So I used part of the sale money to start a scholarship in her name at Northwest College in Powell. The Marjorie Ostergaard Fund pays tuition, boots and a surveying kit for any student from Park County who wants to learn the trade. The first winner was a girl from Meeteetse who had never owned a pair of new boots. When I handed her the tripod, she held it as though it were a violin, and I knew that Marjorie was somewhere smiling.
Cole came to see me by himself, on a Saturday, with his hat in his hands. He said he was sorry he had not asked questions, and sorrier still that he had let his wife carry a lie alone. I told him that a good husband does not ask for perfection, only honesty, and that he had shown more courage that night than most men do in a lifetime. Then I poured two cups of coffee and we talked until sunset about hay prices, old fence lines and what a man owes the woman who chose him. I believe we both left a little taller.
The following Monday, at six in the morning, Tara arrived at the survey office in work boots and a borrowed vest. I handed her a tripod, a hundred foot tape and a bundle of wooden stakes. “A line is walked one stake at a time,” I told her. “You do not skip the hard ones.” She worked the whole day without a break, and she measured the same corner three times to be sure. By evening her hands were blistered, and she was grinning. “Dad,” she said, “I think I finally understand why you loved this so much.”
That night I sat on the porch with the brass compass in my lap, the one that has been through every blizzard and rattlesnake in this county. The needle swung slowly and settled on north, as it always does. Tara came out and sat beside me and rested her head on my shoulder, the way she did when she was seven. We watched the lights come on along the river. “Dad,” she said, “what does it say?” I told her that a good compass does not tell you where to go. It only reminds you where true north is, and the rest is up to you.