The Cadence of Grass (20 page)

An intense clerk in green surgeon’s scrubs appeared and impatiently wanted to know if they were going to buy a bird.

“We’re unsure,” Evelyn said.

“We’re just test-driving them,” said Natalie. “How’re you fixed for hamsters?” When the clerk left without a word, she added, “We check the fish.”

Glittering creatures sailed through a bubbling world, a price list fastened to the glass currently being scoured clean by a morose catfish whose industry Natalie found “demented.” “You’d be surprised how much company even one fish is,” she said, “Just in case you’re thinking you might be alone for a long time. For vim and vigor, I always recommend an aquarium. They’ve proven effective in keeping mature women from jumping at the wrong guys.”

Suddenly a look of alarm crossed Natalie’s face. With a conspiratorial widening of her eyes, she subtly indicated a new customer with a gesture of her chin. Evelyn saw a rather pretty brunette examining a revolving rack of pet-care pamphlets, and was trying to recognize her when Natalie leaned over and whispered, “That’s Paul’s parole officer. They’re having them a big time. You’re only young once,” she added, giving a tower of sacked cat food a sardonic hump.

Evelyn handled this revelation with minimal falsehood; at every stop in the pet store, she stole evaluative glances and would have had a lighter heart if Geraldine had been as ugly as a mud fence.

Outside, the snow hit them in the face. The wind abated briefly and the snow descended in clouds. At the car Natalie nearly spoiled everything by saying, “You know, I hope, that Paul really loves you. With all his heart.”

“It’s sad when someone like Paul elects to go on living.”

“He must have his reasons,” said Natalie. “Just give him another chance to be a husband.”

“Paul does great on the side. It’s when he’s in the middle of your life that his real deficiencies emerge.”

Natalie just looked mournful. “I struggle to make a life with a very strange man, yet I have plenty of bounce left. I want a cockatiel.”

“I just wish I could recover the years I spent in the arms of Mr. Rent-a-Dick.”

“I wish you could too. Now, who gets to talk to Mama?”

“You take her. I’ll talk to Bill.”

Evelyn didn’t go to the ranch until the snow quit and a low, lead-colored ceiling descended halfway down the Gallatin Range; the Crazies were completely obscured, but the Bridgers stuck clear through the top like Shangri-la. Finding Bill wouldn’t be hard. All he had to do was roll out feed with the Hydrabed truck, spooling last summer’s hay a half ton at a time. Or if he had cattle in farther pastures, he would haul the bales with the tractor, cut the strings and roll them down the hill. Evelyn liked to be there for that, liked watching the cows form in along the luscious scroll of green, vivid and anomalous against the winter landscape. Once a few calves came, the ravens could begin their late-winter stroll, maintaining a discriminatory air even as they poked about in the afterbirth. As the season progressed, calved-out cows, bags swinging, shadowed by new offspring, joined the line up behind the truck, several green-headed from crowding the unraveling bounty of alfalfa.

A snow fence protected the last of the road into the house, and a berm of packed and drifted snow rose to the west. The road itself was dry, as were bands of ground in the ranch yard where the spruces blocked the wind. The cows lay down in the afternoon sun behind the shelter belt and a flash of moving water could be seen in the watergap behind them. High above, on a ridge of sagebrush and prickly pear, deer trails spiderwebbed toward the river. All life was submerged, but there.

Evelyn found Bill in the corrals working on a waterer. He had the float out of it and was rewiring the heating element. He knelt on the concrete slab surrounded by tape, screwdrivers, sidecutters and insulated pliers. Knowing Bill, the breaker was still on and he was dodging various shocks while he worked.

“Oh, golly,” he said and stood up, not all the way at first, and smacked his hands against each other. His coveralls were unzipped to his chest, and his face was mottled with exertion.

Evelyn reached out and gave his sleeve a little tug.

“Evelyn,” he said.

“Who fed while you were gone?”

“I seen to it.”

“I could’ve done that.”

This didn’t warrant, and perhaps didn’t deserve, any reply at all. “Well, you could throw in now, Evelyn. Had a panel go over during the night where I’d put some first-calf heifers that was springin’. Then the waterer boiled over and made just an ice stump here where I had to beat half it off with a tire tool to fix it. Still ain’t fixed.”

“I should look for those heifers.”

“Don’t like that sky.” It was low and gloomy, and off to the west hung a ragged curtain of something darker.

“How long has this thing with Mama been going on?”

Bill inspected the band inside his hat. Evelyn knew it said Ajax Western, Clayton, New Mexico. “Fifty years,” said Bill. Evelyn found this news dizzying. What else had she not noticed? What else was she wrong about?

She thought for a long moment, then asked, “Who’s shod?” She could at least do the work in front of her.

She was going for these heifers; some wouldn’t be able to have their calves without help, and the idea of them torn open by their own offspring in a winter storm was terrible. Besides, Bill would head off for them in the dark if something didn’t happen now.

“Cree and Scram. Scram’s got borium stickers. He’d be better on the ice. Don’t even think about taking Cree. He’s far too green.”

“Fifty years.”

“Fifty-one at the end of next month.”

Scram, a big claybank gelding with withers like a fighting bull and the rather primitive head of a Civil War cavalry horse, was twelve hundred and thirteen pounds of plain suspicion. No matter how many times he’d seen a saddle or bridle, he snorted like a locomotive all over again. Evelyn once asked if he was a bronc, and Bill said, “He
thinks
he’s a bronc.” He would stand humped up under the old Connolly saddle, ears backed alongside his head, front feet skittering from side to side and the lead-shank bone tight to the hitching rack. From the time he broke him, Bill said he’d never be a falling-down or rearing-over horse. “Once I seen that, I knowed he’s foolin’ with me.” The few times he blew up, it was all in one place, never bogged his head, never spun. Bill let it run through him, fed him eleven miles of hill and now, he “couldn’t buck a straw hat off the saddlehorn.” Nevertheless, Evelyn always noticed the concussion of his coal black hooves on the pounded earth when he was trying.

As Evelyn hunted for him in the willow thicket, carrying her halter, she recalled the time Bill roped a bull, and Scram, staring down that straight Plymouth cordage rope, slid eighteen feet through shale before the bull tipped over. But he was no pet; to catch him you had to corner him, and, if he got his pivot foot behind you, he’d whirl and be gone. Once that started, it was best to look for another horse.

Scram watched her approach from his hideout in the golden willows. Through agility, guile and murmurings, Evelyn was able to lay a hand on his shoulder; an electric shiver went out from the spot her fingers touched his skin. Then her hand was over his neck to catch the halter from the far side and lift it into place. “So,” she said, “now we make beautiful music together,” then led him through the snow to the saddle shed; treading his hot, nervous feet while she saddled him, he reduced the ground to mud. Evelyn brushed away the little pocket of snow in the groove at his croup, then undid the witches’ knots in his tail while he gazed about in worry. She gave him an old red-and-gray Navajo that was well molded to him, and when she threw the saddle over his withers, he jumped straight up, then froze when the offside billet fell against his side. He was selling this as the worst hour of his life, especially when Evelyn reached way under to catch the cinch and ran several loops of the latigo through the rigging. She tightened him up all round, ignoring his posturing, slapped the ground seat noisily. When she grabbed the horn and pulled the saddle back and forth to check the fit, he humped up so much the front and rear of the saddle were clear of his hide.

“Oh, my,” said Bill to his horse. “The Indian feller got holt of you.”

“Do you believe this?”

“I’m more worried about the weather. Find ’em quick and get back. Six, all black-hided.” When Scram sighed, Bill cheeked him at the bridle and said, “He’s ready.”

Evelyn got on, just boot tips in the stirrups until she felt certain the present good-natured prancing didn’t become more enthusiastic, and the two of them loped off toward what looked like approaching night. Bill watched them go. Evelyn told herself she was heading even farther away from convenience stores and dealerships, fraud protection, exclusive passwords and travel coupons. She felt free.

A thousand feet of sandstone bluffs used up all the prancing, and the river was winding below them like a silver snake. Evelyn never lifted a rein and immediately had the feeling that Scram knew exactly where the cattle were; once they started toward the crest, she could see fine snow streaming off the lip in the north wind. She tied her scarf around her face and urged Scram up the steep hundred yards that remained, a wall of serviceberry brush forcing a tortuous route. At the top, they were met by terrific space, a thousand-mile prospect of three great mountain ranges under speeding clouds, and the spindly trail of a railroad. Good God, thought Evelyn, six heifers? The wind had pressed the trees around them into a crooked wood of stunted trees, now a haunting, boreal chorus.

Like a trail of water most visible to cattle, there was a pattern in the steadily descending side hill of wild cottonwoods, some broken away by a small avalanche. At the base of a low cliff the wind no longer blew, but snow fell heavily on lichenous rock, a trampled salt trough and a patent mineral feeder with a windvane whose axle made the most plaintive noise. Scurf pea tumbled across the flats, scattering its seeds. The heifers had paused here before moving on north, slightly shielded from the weather by the falling away of the country to the east.

It was necessary to turn into the storm along a drift fence as the ground grew more sloped and shaley. After several hundred yards, it was a relief to come upon an old sheepherders’ cairn that she recognized. Only now could she admit that she’d been turned around. If the sky were clear, she’d see the Belts from here, but the storm had confined this place. In the clouds of shifting snow, the breakouts of light and the groans of winter, Evelyn could hear the cattle above her in a stand of sere juniper. So she encouraged Scram to make a climbing curve around the trees to keep from driving the heifers away into even deeper invisibility. She wanted them to flee toward home thinking they’d invented the idea. Scram got right onto the plan, which turned out to be unavailing as the heifers saw them and bolted high-headed into the driving gale. To try to gallop around them when she couldn’t see the ground beneath her required a heart-stopping leap of faith, but Scram knew the heifers were escaping, and he electrified the tentative touch of Evelyn’s spur into violent acceleration that started between her knees and rushed back into Scram’s lowered hindquarters. Ledges of brush—just dark shapes—disappeared behind her, an explosive gait that was not interrupted until Scram had jumped over things he alone could see. She’d forgotten the sting of snow and hard cold wind. Indeed, she had little idea of anything in this moment of absolute stillness atop a stopped, heaving horse, until she gazed around her into the astonished faces of six heifers. Their final bid for escape was answered by quick floating turns as Scram sent them ambling home, Evelyn rocking along to the creak of an old saddle while Scram assumed his businesslike, shuffling walk. As her eyelashes gathered a cloudy fringe of snow, she turned everything over to her horse; he seemed to know there was a trail here somewhere.

Upon reaching the corrals the heifers bucked and cavorted jubilantly. Why had they been sent away? They were so grateful to be home. Bill closed the gate with a nod as Evelyn noted thin pine smoke from the chimney and considered the warmth inside the house. She wrapped Scram’s reins around the pipe rack and unsaddled him quickly; he was still dry under the blanket, and at his paddock, he dropped the bit from his mouth and wheeled to his hay feeder without waiting for a pat.

“Where were they?”

“It’s hard to say. I couldn’t see a thing, but Scram seemed to know where we were.”

“Well, the waterer’s fixed. The float was jammed and cross-pin bent. I had to drive it out and make another one.”

“Those things are nothing but trouble.”

“Beats spuddin’ a hole in the ice every time you need to fill a bucket.”

“Ice,” said Evelyn. “Whose idea was that?”

“Sonja Henie.”

“Do you need any help?”

“Don’t think so.” He couldn’t face her. “I don’t look for nothin’ with the cows. Haven’t had to pull the first calf. I might get the neighbor kid to help at night when the heifers start springin’ regular. No problem walkin’ them heavies in. They been there before.” Bill was a great cattle nurse, one with foresight, sorting tasks ahead of time, feeding, calving, grafting a twin to a cow who’d lost her calf, knowing which neighbor had an orphan to spare, salting in the right places, cleaning corrals, controlling flies, branding and doctoring, breaking, weaning, shipping, culling and picking sound replacements or appropriate bulls, holding birth weights and weaning weights in his head for every cow, avoiding panic, anger at the agricultural economy and, worse, the inexorable feeling that he was going backward and living in a country all too happy to watch him drown in a job that probably didn’t exist anymore.