The Cadence of Grass (25 page)

Evelyn interrupted in order to ease the tension for her beloved. “These aren’t choices that concern us, Paul. This is Bill’s ranch.”

“I got that part,” Paul went on, “but this is a beautiful piece of land, and, unless I miss my guess, it isn’t doing one percent of its capital value by running cows on it. That’s like sitting on an egg that never hatches, know what I mean?”

Now things were even more dire. She looked out the windows made oval by encroaching ice and giving onto an increasingly featureless snowscape. She could see the tracks where Paul had driven away, but light snow drifting in the wind was slowly filling them.

She got up, put on her coveralls and found Bill down in the old sheep shed where he was pouring out grain and medication for the small bunch of locoed calves who’d followed close behind and were trying to upend his bucket. Bill was slow to acknowledge her arrival, and she felt it. Mortified, she turned her attention to the calves who had begun to outgrow the dwarfish faces the poison weed and its alkaloids had given them. They’d become tame with all this hand-feeding, but in the end they’d go on the truck with the others.

Evelyn’s father had devised many ways of turning her into Bill’s hired hand—for reasons best known to him—and had similarly resolved that Bill would never fail no matter how many small ranchers were devastated by the steadily failing cattle economy. They would call it a partnership. To spare Bill an excessive awareness of his financial plight, he appointed Evelyn as bookkeeper, and she regularly went to her father seeking financial assistance for the ranch. Evelyn began to wonder about her father’s generosity. For a time she believed he was trying to acquire the place, which proved not to be the case. Instead, Sunny Jim required Bill to do some estate planning. “You’re over seventy,” he said. “Let me help you draw up a will.” When they finished, they put the document in a safe-deposit box in Harlowtown with Bill’s high-school diploma, his grandfather’s spurs and a pair of moccasins alleged to have belonged to Gall. Despite that she had been entrusted with the key and had good reason to suspect the ranch would one day be hers, Evelyn never once considered looking.

Today there was an evasive bustle in Bill’s movements as he hung the grain bucket on a nail and headed into the corral with the cows closest to calving, giving Evelyn a good view of the back of his coat.

“Scram’s got a wire cut,” he noted with unusual indifference as he and Evelyn crossed the barnyard to the corral where the horse stood by himself, with a back foot tipped up. Having already been scrutinized once, a thing not every horse likes, Scram watched warily as Evelyn came up for another inspection. She picked up his back foot and rested it heel-up between her knees, the old blood rough between her hands. It was quite a slice, showing white inside, but since it didn’t seem there were cords cut, it wasn’t crippling. She led him to the hydrant, washed out the wound with water and then poured hydrogen peroxide into it. The bubbling of the wound made him jerk his foot. Then Evelyn wiped it clear, smeared in some Furazin and wrapped it.

“Idiot,” she said, and led Scram back to the corral while thinking that Bill could turn into a bitter old man in trying to mind her business for her, but this was an excessive reaction to someone being untalkative.

To Evelyn’s great relief, Alice Whitelaw never stayed over when she came to visit and was careful she spent as much time with her daughter as with her husband of long ago. She’d seen Paul around the place, and Evelyn was anxious to avoid conversation that might entail any elucidation of her own marital status. Alice Whitelaw reserved most of her matriarchal concern for Stuart, “—the most
whole
some, earnest, steady young man” she’d ever met.

“But, Mother, evidently not the right fellow for Nat.”

“Oh, but dear, I know you’re going to miss him.”

“He’s not going anywhere. He’s doing fine at Eco Fizz.” Evelyn was completely exasperated by her mother’s crooning lament, but soon that tone would change.

“So
many
years have passed since my days out here. I was just a girl, but I have never been out of touch with Bill.”

Evelyn wasn’t about to ask something crazy—such as, were she and Bill in love?—and mostly wanted to snap her fingers and move this thing along. She thought her mother’s leaning across the hood of a pickup truck to have a heart-to-heart was an affectation.

“But my God! He lives like a dog! Did
I
live like that? I must have.”

“I’m not sure I know wh—”

“Surely I had furniture!”

“Yes, you must’ve had furniture,” said Evelyn dully.

“I suppose that wallpaper in the house was always there. What is it, flocked? And I do hope it wasn’t you who supplied that
swag
effect over what passes for a dining room table. I told Bill the only thing that was keeping him from falling into the
cellar
was that greenish linoleum!”

“Could it be that in thirty years your standards of comfort have gone up?”

“I am the same person,” her mother said levelly, “I have always been.”

“I don’t think so,” Evelyn said.

Alice Whitelaw straightened up from the hood of the truck and, with a preoccupied air, got into her Buick Riviera and drove away. It was the first of many things to go wrong.

“What
did
you say to Mother, Evelyn?” Natalie was driving slowly alongside a car dealership, trying to see if there was anything she wanted to buy. She just wanted to be outside. She’d spent days on end chasing the channel changer until general disgust had set in.

“God, Nat, I just
blurted
. I’ll have to go straighten this out somehow. Mama was talking about how she was the same girl who married Bill, and I said that I doubted it.”

“Oh.” She was staring right past her sister, out the window. “See anything you like?”

“They’re all covered with snow. What are they?”

“Audis. Maybe she thinks she
hasn’t
changed.”

“I’m sure she does. And I’ve just got to get over my irritation and apologize. It’s not her fault she’s an airhead.” A small truck shot past, Hey Culligan Man! on its tailgate.

“I like the idea of all-wheel drive. I want to blast through this shit with German power. I hate winter. I hate it here. I wish to be saved by Germans.”

Evelyn just looked at her. “Wait till the snow melts before making your choice.”

“It’s never going to melt. I want a new car. Tell them to blow the snow off. Get on my cell phone and tell them we’re circling the block and will buy anything they blow the snow off of.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Me too! This weather makes me snack day and
night
. I’m getting a huge ass, and with Stuart gone I can’t have some new guy facing a wall of cellulite.”

Evelyn sighed. After dropping Natalie off at home with an armload of car brochures, she drove to their mother’s house. The visit proved especially painful because Alice was her usual cheerful self, and Evelyn had to bring the insult up all over again in order to apologize for it. Alice brushed it aside. “I know you’re upset with me.”

“No—”

“Evelyn, you are, and I accept and understand it. But think of what I’ve been though. I know I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’ve waited a long time to see my Bill again, to see him like this. And he’s just as dear to me as he was when he was eighteen. I never understood whether I was right to have married him or not. I knew there were too many mouths at our table, and my mother and father practically pushed me right out the door before there was a
chance
we’d marry. But after your father’s death it all came back, how Bill wouldn’t budge, how on a ranch you don’t budge or the ranch and the land will beat you, so you don’t budge and then all the rest of life beats you.”

“You must think Bill’s beaten.”

“I think he’s been beaten for a very long time.”

“Maybe if you don’t know it, you’re
not
.”

“You of all people know how the ranch stayed afloat.” She adjusted her voice to a complicitous murmur. “Your father was a hard man. Maybe bad. I can live with that. He certainly didn’t mind ruining people—but if he was bad, he had a good streak. He made sure you girls went out to the ranch often, from an early age. You spent more time while you were growing up with Bill than you did with your father.”

Alice had touched upon something for which Evelyn was thoroughly grateful, her often fabulous girlhood, and she was happy to recall even her most outlandish cowgirl posturing, the barrel-racing mania of her adolescence. As with her mother, it lasted until the appearance of a charismatic male of whom she had yet to rid herself and who had presently, if only in the urgencies of the flesh, rekindled the possibilities.

Evelyn, at least, knew why Bill wouldn’t budge, for she had long seen into the congeries of belief that abided him through illness, injury and failure. Bill’s piece of ground was a mystery machine that, like soil and weather, occasioned vigilant respect. She unconditionally realized that cattle, buildings, fences—the “improvements”—were stays in the face of general impermanence even as they shared as a principal characteristic the ongoing likelihood of dying or falling down. Alone of her family, Evelyn understood horses and their use, and also that however far back in the legends of horsemanship Bill’s talents reached, they were most definitely his gamble against eternity. Perhaps he kept cattle so that the horses would have something to do. If by some now vanished compact he had gotten children by Alice Whitelaw, Evelyn believed that it was only right that at least one of those children should understand his faith.

Had she pursued these intuitions, she might have seen that Bill would have to do something about Paul.

Evelyn moved all her belongings to the ranch and turned her apartment over to Paul. Where else was he going to live, she asked herself in rhetorical indignation as though responding to querulous busybodies. He’d saved nothing of his quondam executive’s salary, and his last remaining stake was whatever he shared, as Evelyn’s husband, of the ranch when Bill was gone. He sold his Crown Victoria too and bought a pathetic gray Chevette that looked too short for his legs. But it gave him some walking-around money, as he said. Which is what he did: walked around and talked to Majub on the cell phone. Because of the accumulated tensions of recent months, Paul felt he was losing his flexibility and so he signed up for Pilates at the community center. Natalie paid for the lessons on the grounds that any money spent on good health was money well spent. There was also the feeling that getting rid of lower back pain would allow him to put his best foot forward while interviewing for jobs, should he be reduced to that, God forbid.

They were all—Alice, Natalie, Evelyn—living under new restrictions due to Stuart’s lawsuit, which had frozen the distribution of proceeds from the sale of the plant. Stuart had managed to stay on at Eco Fizz, and his popularity with both the workers and the new owners positioned him to manage the company. The few times he’d been spotted by family members, he was wearing a dark suit and a top coat. This hardly seemed like Stuart at all.

The calves by now were coming in a steady stream. Bill was staying up for night-calving so Evelyn fed in the morning while he slept, picking up hay with hydraulic arms in the bed of the truck that held big round bales like spools of thread until she lowered them with controls on the dash, cut the twine and rolled out a ribbon of alfalfa. Its miraculous aroma of the previous summer unfolding in the winter air attracted a parade of cows and calves bawling with impatience. Early sun laid an annealed glaze over the snowfields. Tractors could be heard starting at various distances throughout the valley, and a school bus made its solitary way along the base of foothills. Evelyn had so disliked school that even this distant yellow shape still depressed her, all these years later. She went up to Bill’s house and cooked breakfast for them both.

The season was changing at last.

Broad community interest followed news of Paul’s arrest for parole violation. Only the general fascination he had aroused in himself as a company executive and ersatz man-about-town could explain why the newspaper gave the hearing such attention. He was charged with refusing to meet with his parole officer, Geraldine Cardwell, who not only initiated the charges but also, in high dudgeon, issued sweeping statements as to how she stood as a “firewall” between criminals and society. What turned out to be a coup for the paper, given a repressed atmosphere that played hell with getting sex on the page, was Paul Crusoe’s testimony in a crowded, unventilated courtroom. He admitted that he had grown fearful and weary of the sexual obligations imposed upon him by Miss Cardwell, causing the crowd to gasp in delighted disapproval. Trying to restore his relationship with his estranged wife against desperate odds had grown ever more difficult beneath the constant pressure to “service” his parole officer. Arms stretched low at his sides, a renewed vision of jail in his head, the supplicant offered motel receipts and a vague offer of “DNA evidence.” Under Geraldine’s quiet gaze and in a small, frightened, victim’s voice, he said, “I didn’t know where to turn, Your Honor. I was afraid that if I requested a new officer, somebody on the parole board would exact revenge. This could happen even now! These people look out for each other in ways that might surprise Your Honor!”