The Cadence of Grass (5 page)

By this time, Evelyn had sunk full length into the couch, and the only thing that moved were her extremely attentive eyes. She was afraid that if she moved she would make some sound and lose a word or two and that was just out of the question. She had long wished to know about all the disappeared horses of the surrounding hills.

“Robert’s horses were quick, and the only safe place around them was on their backs. They was quiet in a herd of cattle and had the lightest noses in the West. It always looked like he’d put high-volt lights in their eyes. Robert showed them all the little connections between what he asked them to do and their jobs, and it was so pretty the way they’d look for a cow. O. C. Drury hauled cattle as a sideline, and he hated to haul Robert’s calves. Invariably, he’d arrive in the ranch yard mid-October and Robert would start whining, ‘O. C., anyone can see I’m so shorthanded just now. You want to catch up old bay and help me bring these cattle in? We’ll sort ’em off right here and now and call this year done.’ O. C. didn’t want to do it, in fact his blood ran cold. But he
had
to. So, he’d climb up on old bay or old sorrelly who’d know right then and there this wasn’t Robert Wood: one false move and the wreck was on.

“Back to Mother’s Day, I let Robert sleep through the night and by the time I woke, just before sunup, I could smell his fire and coffee. Then in a bit I heard Leo’s voice and knew the two of them throwed in and was layin’ a plan. I made something decent for the three of us, mostly just to buy some time in the hopes Robert would quit this idea to bring his broncs off the bench with just me, him and Leo, a small fellow out of Sonora who listened to this kinda like polka music when he was homesick. Hair fell in his face in bangs, hard, square hands, and no sense of humor. Couldn’t read nor write but he had a perfect memory. If you lost something, could be a week ago, he’d walk straight to where you put it down.

“Robert Wood was just an old puncher who’d outlived his day. Thought the Old West could be brought back if they’d just quit dammin’ up water to make alfalfa. He hated alfalfa and would go a long way out of his way to keep from seein’ it. I suppose he was seventy-five years old ’cause I seen in the papers when he died about ten years ago he’d made ninety or better. Wore a Stetson right out of the box, no crease, no nothin’. He wouldn’t wear a straw hat in the summer, said it was a farmer’s hat.

“Robert said, ‘Here is the deal. We’ll go up the switchback together to the bench and when we get there I’ll ride around and see if I can’t stop them.’ The right place to get their attention was that big earthquake fault, you know, where we seen that lynx last summer, which no man could cross with a horse. That slope beyond it could’ve been a good escape route for those mares. ‘And
hide
in the brush and don’t show even the end of your nose else they’ll see it. Then you two get around them mares and start ’em home. I’ll make sure they come back down the trail. When they get down to the flat
somebody
will have to get outside these horses and thataway turn ’em into your corrals. I hope you don’t mind me borrowin’ your corrals.’

“Ev, you’ve seen that crack in the ground. It’s a long way to the bottom. I really doubted Robert would turn those horses there. Wild horses and canners like these just as soon jump it and break their necks, whereas a horse and rider would never do such a thing. I guessed it would end there and we’d turn ’em down off the bench and lock ’em up at the neighbors.
Then
we’d have time to get a proper crew together.”

Evelyn started to speak, but thought better of it.

“When the horses got out on the flat, somebody’d have to ride out around that wild band, outrun them on broken ground, turn them into the corrals. And I wondered how all of this might look to Robert, who kind of despised our horsemanship. I mean Robert Wood worked for the Hash Knife, the N Bar, the Pitchfork, the Matador. And sure always rode a
finished
horse, but it had to be tough as whang leather or he just wouldn’t have it around. Horse needed to stand up in that bridle and
look
for work.

“First off, we had to get crooked old Robert on his horse. He led his sorrel mare out of the pen behind the scales and tied her to a plank of the chute. She was a little sickle-hocked, which I’m sure he preferred, and she had good withers, short pasterns, kind of coon-footed, low-croup cow-horse look to her, ears pricked forward, even whickered at him quick as she seen him.

“It was just painful to watch him saddle this horse. He threw the Navajo up all right, but when he lifted that old slick-fork saddle, we felt how it hurt him and yet knew we ought not to help. He bridled her up in a little grazer bit and led her around to the front of the chute. He threw one rein around the horn and wrapped the other around the corner post of the loading chute. She stood all right—I mean, he’d dare her not to stand—but that wasn’t no kid’s horse, bad as anything he’d force O. C. onto, nose blowed out and white around her eyes. Cross a horse like that and she drives you into the ground like a picketpin.

“Then Robert walks around to the holding pen, squeaks the old gate open, goes inside and next time we see him, he’s crawling up the chute, out the end and onto his horse. She snorted and backed away and he hung down around her neck to catch his other rein. When he sat up in the saddle, he had both reins plaited through the fingers of his left hand and just lifted his hand about three-sixteenths of an inch and she sat down on her hocks and backed clear across the ranch yard in a cloud of dust. Then he straightened up, threw her some slack and she stood square to the world, ready for work. Had of been O. C. his ass’d be over the granary. I rode a dun gelding I’d broke and was hopin’ Robert’d tell me what a great job I’d did, but he didn’t say
nothin’
.

“Up we go single file and I stay to watch Robert. His shoulders were back and he sat ramrod straight in the middle of his saddle, boots plumb home in iron oxbows, reins hangin’ soft over the side of his left hand. In the other hand he’s got a string with a knot for every mare. He turned real slow in his saddle and give my Mexican a good hard look. It wasn’t long before we were on top. When Leo loped out to the west and made a little dust, I could see Robert was gonna quit worryin’ about him. Leo made a big ride around the horses, which had wheeled up to watch him, and only began to disperse and feed as the circle he made came to seem too grand to concern them. By the time I rode back to the far side of the bench, Leo was closin’ in my direction and two miles off, them horses began to drift away. There was sixteen horses, and about ten of them was pretty uniform-looking sorrel horses that looked kin to Robert’s mount. The remainder was nothin’ but dog feed with Roman noses and big hairy feet. They’d hurt your eyes. My old man sent thousands just like them on the train to Owens Brothers in Kansas City. The good ones went to the Boer War and the Frenchmen ate the rest.

“The first part of our plan to come apart was where we’s gonna ease ’em on out of there because they plumb took off. In two jumps they was smokin’ across the flattop and our horses caught that gust off of them and liked to get out from under us. Leo had to pull his mount in some hard circles to keep him from buckin’ with him, and mine had his head in my lap to where I’d liked to broke something over it, but pretty quick I had the best of him and he’s looking straight through his bridle like a gentleman. Leo was foggin’ it about a mile off, a big cloud of dust driftin’ away like a grass fire.

“It was pretty clear there was no smart way to turn ’em down the road even if Robert had been prepared to do so, but he was nowhere in sight. So the best we could do was throw them off the slope ahead and scatter them out among those little ranches along the river, where they would just play hell with the alfalfa. Them farmers would just shoot ’em down.

“That’s where everything changed. Robert broke out of the brush on his horse way past that crack in the ground, his sorrel mare comin’ out in a flurry of sage and greasewood cracking off in the air around her. Them broncs froze at the
sight
of her. They could either leap that crack and fly past him, or Robert could jump the crack himself and turn ’em toward my house. It was my corrals or the alfalfa; it was that simple.

“Presently they came boilin’ back and we whooped and hollered. Leo took down his slicker and got them bunched up once more toward the trail where they
did not
want to go and Robert’s yellin’, ‘Drive ’em, boys!’ till they advanced his way like a bright-colored little cyclone tryin’ to break right around him. We almost lost ’em right there. Robert stretched up over his mare’s neck and she closed on that crack just burnin’ a hole in the wind, and when she reached it she soared up into the air, Robert easing back into the saddle with his stirrups pushed out in front toward the landing he hoped they would both make.”

At this, Bill stopped and went across the room to the fireplace, where he rapped the grate with a poker to make the cold ashes fall through.

“I can still see that black hole in the ground, which was really s’posed to be Robert’s grave, but that old man floating beyond its grasp, that smart old mare reaching her long beautiful legs for the far shore. Leo told me he thought she’d been in the air for an hour.

“Well, they make it. And she sits down into her stop in a cloud of dust and confounds them wild horses who was turned into lambs with their ears hangin’ ever which way. Robert leans up with both hands on the pommel, deep slack of reins hanging under the sorrel’s neck, and he takes time to count off them mares on his string. Then we resume a very orderly jog down the ranch road gazin’ over the packed, hurryin’ backs of them mares who recognized they was back in Mr. Robert Wood’s remuda and was very well behaved. You could see they liked it. They wanted to be there. It was okay.

“When they was corralled, Robert says in his singsong voice, ‘That sure is a relief. I have to be honest, I was worried they’d give us trouble.’ He rode over to where he left his bedroll. ‘Bill,’ he said, ‘I was gonna ask your Mexican to cheek this mare while I slide off, but I’m confusing her with her mother. She was bad to paw at you when you got down. And one other thing, Billy, when you ask a green horse like yours to stop and turn, you need to start his nose first and just let him pour through. You got him handlin’ like
a plank
.’”

Bill threw his head back and laughed. Evelyn would have joined him, but she was still thinking.

There were things about her treatment of her husband that Natalie regretted, but they did not include the endless pains she’d taken to protect him from her father and his conviction that Stuart would never go anywhere at all. It was remarkable that Sunny Jim would have settled all his hopes on Paul, who at the funeral owned the driest eye in the house, and completely pass over Stuart, who was loved by the workers at the bottling plant while Paul was loathed as a treacherous and authoritarian opportunist.

Natalie was less proud of the fact that she was so unwilling to join Stuart at the things he loved. It was just that she found him so very, very tiresome. She felt she needed to leave sticky notes for him everywhere just to keep him on course. And she regretted her fury at his remark that her father was “gone but not forgotten,” which, it’s true, was delivered in a singsong that suggested Stuart had a streak of independence. After the funeral, she tried to bend a little and agreed to sail with him for a day at Canyon Ferry, where he kept his sloop on a narrow wooden dock over green water.
Miss Annie
had been named for a pretty girl at the plant on whom Stuart had a harmless crush. Natalie had never been sufficiently interested to ask about the name, and Stuart liked having the secret that he thought might be expanded, perhaps to an exchange of small kindnesses, if ever he took the real Annie for a sail.

Winter was almost upon them and snatching this warm day from such a short autumn was exciting. Natalie dangled her legs over the water with her omnipresent fat paperback while Stuart prepared the boat. He sponged the rainwater out of the bilges, pulled the sail cover off the main and let the condensation evaporate; he scrubbed bird droppings from the painted canvas deck, then rinsed it down with buckets of cold, fresh lake water that ran around the coaming and out over the transom. He was eager to “take the old girl out for a gallop,” as his easygoing father used to say.

No one of his in-laws would have understood such a thought, except maybe Evelyn with her horses. He found these people rather twisted, but he was far too mild to make much of it. He presumed it to be part of the Western Way. Most of the Whitelaws failed to appreciate Stuart’s quiet self-knowledge and would have been surprised at how often his idlest daydreams featured detailed accounts of their complete humiliation. He still resented the fact that Natalie had long ago forbidden him to sing any of the sea chanties he’d so painstakingly memorized. Once the decks dried and everything was in order, Stuart said, “Shall we sail?” And without a word, Natalie turned down a corner of her potboiler, got to her feet and stretched. “This will be very pleasant,” she said fretfully.

Stuart helped her aboard, then ran his eye around the inside of the boat, making certain everything was in order, fingers reaching out to touch white oak ribs, curves of cedar. Natalie picked a quiet spot in the cockpit so as not to be in Stuart’s way, made herself comfortable with her hands up the sleeves of an old sailing sweater. Stuart untied all the lines, coiled and stowed them in the forepeak, then walked the sloop the length of the dock, gave her a shove toward open water and jumped aboard. He let the main sheet run free while he raised the sail, putting the halyard on the winch and hoisting it tight. The boat began slowly to forge toward Confederate Gulch, a steady chugging sound against the hull as they worked their way across the vanished riverbed, whiffs of pine and barbecue, farm trucks in the distance and a dust cloud following a tractor. Stuart raised the jib, sat back in the cockpit with his hand on the tiller, looked over at his wife and said, “There.”