Set in the contemporary West, Denver author Robert Greer’s “Spoon” is one of those novels that not only rings true but also grabs the reader by the heart and never lets go.
The year is 1991 and the place, Big Horn County, Mont. That fall, 18-year-old T.J. Darley is driving back from town to his family’s 14,000-acre ranch when he decides to stop and pick up a hitchhiker.
The hitchhiker is a big man, half black and half Indian, shoeless and wearing a $250 beaver Resistol cowboy hat. He did a stint in prison and served a Navy tour in Vietnam. He says he goes by the name of Spoon and is looking for a job as a ranch hand.
T.J. knows his family is struggling just to keep the ranch going and can ill-afford another hand. Yet he also knows they desperately need the help. So he persuades his father to hire Spoon, whose given name, they learn, is Arcus Witherspoon.
Lukewarm to his parents’ expectations that he go to college, T.J. envies Spoon’s self-confidence and his past adventures. He says, “Spoon seemed to know clear enough who he was, but not where he’d come from. I knew precisely where I’d come from, but far too little about who I really was, where I was going, or who I might become.”
So as he works with Spoon, T.J. finds himself listening to his advice that to survive, “preparation is as important as patience and persistence.”
Still, with times as hard as they are for ranchers, the lure of hard cash offered by Acota, a coal-mining consortium, becomes more tempting.
Tensions escalate and a few ranchers start to carry side arms. Talk of banding together begins to surface. But when a neighbor’s tractor overturns and the rancher is found dead, T.J.’s father fears the area is on the cusp of its “own little war.”
Even so, as hard as they’ve worked to build the ranch, and now with T.J. by their side, the Darley family is more determined than ever to hang on. It all culminates in a rip-roaring and thoroughly satisfactory climax.
Once again author Greer, a pathologist and University of Colorado professor of medicine, as well as the owner of a Wyoming ranch, brings readers a first-rate and thoroughly believable tale.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who also writes a regular column about new regional fiction.
FICTION
Spoon
by Robert Greer
$24.95
