horses before loading them back into their respective trailers.
Part of how Joshua and Kelly apprized each other was through horsemanship. Both of them were favorably impressed. Kelly took particular note of Joshua’s quiet humility. He wasn’t a braggart or a show-off. Kelly liked that. She also thought that he had a remarkable vocabulary for someone without a college degree. Joshua felt himself drawn to Kelly like no woman he had ever met before. He felt blessed to have found a young woman who was a fellow Christian, and with whom he had so many things in common. And seeing Kelly astride her horse, handling him so expertly, greatly impressed Joshua.
Joshua’s next short duty day was the following Friday. It was Kelly who had suggested a rendezvous. As well-educated Christians, they both disliked the word “dating,” since both properly saw their meetings as courting for marriage. As Kelly put it, “I never get beyond the ‘howdy-dos’ unless I think a man is fit for marriage.”
They met for dinner at Jaker’s steak house. The attire there was casual, so both Joshua and Kelly dressed up only to the extent of wearing freshly laundered jeans and nicer shirts.
Two items of clothing never seemed to change, regardless of Kelly’s wardrobe: a brown and black horsehair western belt from Deer Lodge, and her embroidered brown suede horse logo baseball cap. Whenever she wasn’t wearing the baseball cap, she habitually carried it clipped on a mini-carabiner on a belt loop—the same carabiner where she carried her key ring. She refused to carry a purse.
When Joshua noticed that Kelly wore no makeup, his estimation of her went up immensely. Here at last was an honest-to-goodness rancher’s daughter with no pretensions, even when out on the town for a dinner and talking about marriage. There was something about Kelly that Joshua couldn’t pin down. It was something beyond her smile and her figure. It was also something beyond the common ground that they found in their faith in Christ. Joshua couldn’t say just what it was, but she definitely had it. And whatever it was, Joshua was thoroughly smitten.
They nibbled on salad while waiting for their steaks. Kelly filled Joshua in about her family’s history: Her father, Jim Monroe, had been raised on a cattle ranch a few miles south of the whistle-stop town of Raynesford, which was fifteen miles southeast of Great Falls. The “town” consisted of just a post office, a church, and a few houses. The eighty-acre ranch straddled Big Otter Creek. It had thirty-seven acres of hayfields. It also included an adjoining 320-acre seasonal grazing permit in the Lewis and Clark National Forest. The grazing permit land stretched up toward Peterson Mountain. This was a ten-year renewable lease. The Monroe family fenced the leased land just like their deeded acres. From a practical standpoint, the only difference was that they couldn’t stop anyone from using the 320 acres of Forest Service land for hunting, and they couldn’t build any structures on it.
As the second-born son, Jim was not in line to inherit the ranch, so he enlisted in the Army. But while he was off on active duty, his elder brother botched running the ranch—incurring too many debts and mismanaging the livestock, which cost the lives of five calves.
When Jim was released from active duty, his brother declared, “I’m just not cut out for raising cattle. I want to go into sales. What do you say I sign the ranch and livestock over to you, in exchange for an informal note for $100,000, with payments only in the years that you turn a profit, plus hunting on the ranch for life, plus all the beef I need for my family for life?”
The deal was sealed with a handshake, and no papers were signed except for the quit claim deed on the ranch. The ranch was paid off in 2007. Kelly’s uncle, who lived in Rapid City, still came each November for elk season and to collect an aged side of beef.
Kelly asked, “What about your family?”
Joshua began, “My great-grandfather Watanabe immigrated from eastern Japan to Hawaii in 1890. He was a farmer. In 1927 he moved to eastern Washington, in what is now called the Tri-Cities area, near Kennewick. My grandparents and great-grandparents were spared the ignominy of being placed in an internment camp during the Second World War. Only Japanese families who lived in the Coastal Exclusion Zone were required to relocate.”
Kelly nodded, and Joshua went on. “There was a great irony in this, though, since the family farm was just twenty miles east of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where plutonium was produced as part of the Manhattan Project. But very few people knew that the plutonium used in making the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki came from the Hanford site. Most of the locals didn’t find out about that until the 1950s.”
He laughed, and continued, “So now, seven decades later, I’m entrusted with the maintenance on MIRVed strategic nuclear missiles that are capable of wiping out millions of people in a matter of minutes. And for all I know, those warheads include plutonium that was originally processed just twenty miles from where I grew up.”
Kelly nodded again, and said, “That’s doubly ironic.”
“It also shows you that we are living in the greatest nation on earth. In almost every other country, immigrants get treated like dirt. Here in America, any citizen who is willing to learn English, study, and work hard can be successful.”
Kelly smiled and nodded. Then she asked, “Tell me about how you got Shirley.”
Joshua leaned back in his booth seat and said, “On my first leave after getting reassigned to Malmstrom— that was right after I got promoted to E-4—I told my folks how bored I was and how I missed being in the saddle. I basically begged my dad to lend me one of his Bashkir Curlies. He breeds them, you know. He said he wouldn’t
Kelly cocked her head. “Permission?”
“Let me explain a recent change of policy. Traditionally, once you became an E-3 with three years of service, you could live off-base. But last year, as a cost reduction measure, anyone who was unmarried that was E-4 or below was required to live in on-base dormitories. Under the new policy, you can’t live off-base until you become a staff sergeant. That’s an E-5. So I guess I’m the ‘exceptional exception,’ because of Shirley. But I had to get permission from my squadron commander. He was willing to approve it, after my NCOIC vouched that I had, quote, ‘exceptional maturity and potential for commissioning.’”
Their steaks and baked potatoes arrived and they dug in. Kelly was pleased to see that Joshua asked only for a glass of iced tea with his dinner. Their conversation shifted to religion and they spent a half hour discussing Christian doctrine. They were in full agreement on Calvinist principles except for the issue of election. Kelly believed in election, but Joshua held to free will.
“Someday, let’s do a Bible study,” Kelly suggested. “We’ll take a concordance and go through each instance where the words ‘chosen,’ ‘predestined,’ and ‘elect’ are used. There are a
Joshua countered, “So when I was twelve years old and I recognized that Christ is the Son of God and I asked for forgiveness of my sins, that wasn’t
“No, I believe that what we have is the
Joshua grinned. “You are a woman of powerful conviction.” After a moment he added, choosing his words carefully, “We may have a minor difference on election, but when it comes to the other aspects of God’s guiding hand, I believe that nothing happens by chance. I want to make it clear that I am courting you for marriage. I don’t believe in flirtations or trifling relationships. I wouldn’t be sitting across from you right now unless I thought that you were someone worthy of marriage. And we wouldn’t be having this conversation if it wasn’t God’s will.
Kelly threw in, “My point, exactly.”
Joshua’s first visit to the Monroe ranch came a week later. The ranch house had been built in the 1970s,
