The Cadence of Grass (7 page)

Clanging over the cattle guard, she passed Bill’s little frame house behind the orchard and saw his sleeping horses switching flies, and only shifting slightly at the passing of the truck, heads, rumps, prop work of legs, all asleep in the sunshine. Kingbirds spaced themselves along a stretch of barbed wire, while a crowd of young starlings raced the truck before swarming off into a chokecherry thicket whose leaves had curled from frost. When she passed the last hill on which their pinwheel brand was marked with white rocks, her house stood in an angle of warm shadow, an insignificant shape under the chambered upper stories of the black river cottonwoods. While the cooling engine ticked under its hood, she tried to take in her happiness and decided it might consist of nothing more than living by herself. Sometimes it was loneliness, sometimes freedom.

She quickly carried her groceries inside, throwing open a few windows, then resumed her trip to Bill’s house, made distant by his discards: metal drums he planned to cut up to hold stock salt and range minerals, tires, sprayer tanks, a set of bedsprings, defunct farm machinery, feed sacks, old batteries, a broken wheelbarrow and a camper top that had lost its windows. Evelyn stopped at Bill’s house, where even more of his horses—Who, Scram and Matador—observed her before going back to eating, pulling hay through the bars of a steel feeder, and she recalled her father’s frequent exclamation, “Good God, he’s got another horse!” Bill didn’t answer her calls, and so she assumed he would be down around the barn. She unloaded his groceries in the kitchen and started thinking about Paul again because a package of ground round had reminded her out of the blue that Paul’s hero was Ray M. Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s. “Life is dog eat dog and rat eat rat” was his favorite Kroc quote, not exactly Emersonian in spirit. “If my competition was drowning, I’d put a hose in their mouth.” Paul used to say that hamburger was where the rubber met the road in the cattle business, and that Ray M. Kroc was the ultimate trail boss.

From the kitchen she could see her own unmade bed and loved the innocence of its disarray, rumpled on one side, taut on the other. She thought with near glee of waking early and alone, birdsong coming through the window and no reason to make the bed. She went back outside and walked toward the barn. This would be a fine day, one of the last, to work her young colt, Cree.

Standing in the bad light of the barn under the hay mow, with saddle stands back in between the disused draft horse stanchions, Evelyn searched through the bridles that seemed, in her view, to be festooned from too few pegs, so that in hunting through for the short shanked Kelly Brothers grazer, all she could find were snaffles, Argentine bits, a cable tie-down, offside billet straps, cinchas with broken strings, detached go-betweens, old steel stirrups that Bill said were cold enough in winter to “freeze the nuts off a riding plow,” a coppermouth John Israel, a gag bit, an Easy Stop, a knockoff of a Garcia spade, boot tops made into saddlebags and a chain twitch with a handle from a World War II foxhole shovel. Just when it seemed hopeless, Bill walked by and said, “That colt of yours has dug him quite a hole.” Pigeons flew out from under the roof of the barn, wings colliding with the eaves like broken fan belts.

“If you’d of left my stuff alone, I’d have him saddled.”

“Red Wolf’s been in there.”

“Right. You feel like turning some cattle back for me?”

Evelyn carried her saddle and blanket out to the colt, who had indeed pawed up a considerable mess. She brushed him and handled him a little, but Cree shied back when she threw the blanket up near the base of his neck and slid it down into place to make his coat lay flat. She kept the offside stirrup on her own side when she put the saddle up because he looked like he was getting ready to fly back. Cree was coming good, but he was quick to spook. When Evelyn was on his back, she still couldn’t open gates and if someone handed her anything, he was liable to bolt. As she pulled the latigo, she felt behind the cinch ring to make sure it didn’t roll up some skin and pinch him. Then she fastened his girth and led him around a bit until he quit the little skittering toe dance and let her bridle him. He kept his teeth closed at first until she gently slid her thumb up against the base of his tongue. Evelyn pulled his nose next to her, went around and did the same on the other side, then led him a few feet from the nearest thing it would hurt to be bucked off against and stood up in the near stirrup, feeling him line his body up straight to take the weight, and swung aboard, discovering all over again that it was the very best place to be, and they jogged toward the cottonwoods where Bill and his kelpie dog, Cow Patty, were bringing in some black-bred heifers from a stand of reed canary grass where they had nearly disappeared. From Cree’s purposeful little shuffle she could tell the young horse had already happily seen the cattle and felt as if he might have business with them. The scattered glimpses of shifting cattle began to solidify under the movements of Bill and his dog, until a small black mass moved gradually toward the overhead gate of the pen. Then a piece of irrigation dam flapped up from one ditch, and Cree bolted gustily for forty feet before stopping and staring it down. Evelyn nudged him with her spur, and he reluctantly started off where the last of the cattle were skipping past Patty, who lay on her belly at the gate. With her intent black-and-brown face, she seemed to be counting them in.

Evelyn followed the cattle into the pen and swung the gate shut behind her. The heifers had quickly gathered around a bale of hay in the center, and Bill was off to one side on his spavined, thoroughpinned old cow horse Avalanche, leaning one elbow on his saddle horn and his face in his hand. Evelyn walked several circles, jogged, long-trotted for a few minutes and eased into a lope. The first thirty or forty saddles, Cree was wont to bog his head when he broke out to gallop, but those days were gone, and he could lope out smooth now from a walk or any other gait and change leads just with a weight shift in the stirrups. He packed his head with his face enough forward that at morning or evening Evelyn could see the light through the walls of his nostrils as if he had fire around his face. He felt good in the broken-mouth bit she now suspected Bill had tricked her into, for she could see the Kelly Brothers in the mouth of old Avalanche, who generally went around in a US Cavalry bit whose shanks had been mended with a pair of harrow tines.

Cree loved to work cattle but was also thoroughly afraid of them. When he was a green colt, Evelyn took him to the sale yard to be around cattle in the winter. The state livestock inspector scared some steers he was trying to clip to check their brands, and they ran right over poor Cree, who skinned up his legs trying to climb over a Powder River panel. He was a nicely made colt with a butt that was closed right down to the back of his knee with muscle, feet set nicely under him and a pretty slope to his shoulder and withers. He had tight, round hoofs at the end of moderately sloped pasterns nicely domed around the frog that took a size-aught shoe and never split out a nail or chipped when he was barefoot, but left a rounded, nearly burnished edge. Evelyn liked to step back from him after he was saddled. He looked like such a little cow horse, though he wasn’t so little and at three, tipped a thousand pounds on the Fairbanks Morse cattle scale whose wiggling floor and clanging weights gave him new doubts about the state of the world.

Cree kept one eye on the dreaded cattle, and when one or another picked its head up to look at him, its face dusted with alfalfa particles, he gained speed. Evelyn just sat deeper and let him run it out. When at last the edge seemed to be off, she slumped down and let him stop.

“I think that ring-eye’d look at your colt,” Bill said.

“Don’t see a ring-eye.”

“It’s just rubbed off around her left eye, got a little ridge of hair between her shoulders, mud two inches up her left ankle, frosted ear tip and low headset to her tail, peeled brand. Between the flattop and the bonnet.”

“Oh, yup, got her.” Evelyn twisted in her saddle to study this particular heifer. She saw what Bill liked, something in the way she glanced at the horse from her place by the hay bale, gentle and alert. Evelyn walked her horse toward the cattle, and they began swinging to the far side of the hay to better watch the horse. With all these faces looking at him, Cree seemed lighter on the ground. One high-headed, slant-eyed yearling took this moment to lope around them, and it was all Evelyn could do to keep her colt from bolting for the gate. Despite Cree’s intermittent losses of nerve, Evelyn was able to separate a heifer. Once the yearling was driven off by itself and the herd was well behind him, Cree’s confidence returned. The cow ran to the left and he followed easily with her, then stopped as though chilled. When the cow headed the other way, he rolled smoothly through his hocks, turned around and rated her speed. At this point, deciding she was in earnest about returning to the herd, the cow ran straight at the colt and made a series of wild dodges that carried Evelyn around the pen, running, stopping, sliding as though on skates, feeling all the while the ambition rise within her shy young horse as he discovered new ability at every jump. When the cow gave up, she reached down to pat his neck, then rode him away. The cow went back to feeding. “That will do,” said Evelyn, lifting the gate latch from her saddle and swinging it aside.

“Good,” said Bill.

They rode through a big pink patch of cheatgrass, and detoured around some lilacs that indicated a vanished homestead cabin while Evelyn awaited the inevitable comment.

“He was great,” said Bill Champion.

“But what?”

“It could be you’re riding him a little tighter with your left leg, I dunno, seems like it’s a little easier for him to go the other way. I’m not saying it’s so, I’m saying think about it. Maybe you’re not turning your own head as good that way and he’s feeling it especially when that cow gets a little bit behind your left shoulder. I was sure pleased you let that cow pull you from place to place, seems like you were a little ahead of him with your spurs last time, just a hair. Also, when he gets to feeling doubtful, go on ahead and just drive up to your cow and see if you can’t sink the hook that much more. I noticed once or twice you did that, he started to melt real pretty like he was a hundred percent ready for anything she wanted to throw at him.”

“What if you’re wrong about my left leg?”

“I could be, I sure could be. In that case you’re gonna have to bump him from the other side and make him give you that rib. Either way he has to bend identical either direction or he’s gonna get beat by that cow the first turn around or the hundredth. It’s there. But don’t get me wrong, you got you a good scald on your colt today.”

Natalie had an interest in cooking that was unshared by her sister, Evelyn, despite the same patient training in a household that tried without success to be conventional. Oddly, Natalie disliked cooking while Evelyn—with a lifelong history of fallen cakes, loaves and soufflés, overcooked meats, congealed sauces and mushy vegetables—enjoyed it tremendously and was a scourge to her guests. She also loved to eat, especially food that had been prepared by other people. So, when she was invited to lunch by Natalie, despite a feeling of indeterminate dread, she accepted, arriving early and standing in the brisk new fall air in front of the tiny house that Stuart had built for them, the tiniest bungalow in a book of home plans, now surrounded by orderly evergreens and a small bed of flowers. She had taken this pause like some forensic diner to identify specific familiar food items—cold veal, gnocchi salad and, she thought, pumpkin soup—that she could already smell from the partially opened kitchen window. Natalie’s refrigerator, unlike the stark cold box in Evelyn’s house, would be bursting with cheese rinds, five kinds of mustard, melon parts scattered over five shelves, identical milk cartons at different degrees of fullness, cooked chicken halves, bits of meat wrapped in foil for possible dog visits, browning parsley, cellophane and cardboard boxes no longer containing garlic, Italian jug wine as well as pyramids of root vegetables from the back garden she disliked as cordially as cooking. It all seemed to stand for the wish she had for a life rich in people, for social luxury instead of a gruesome snack box for Stuart and herself.

Evelyn walked into a hallway so abbreviated her eye was at the level of the fifth or sixth step of a steep staircase, and a mere pivot revealed the living room, whose little brick fireplace had, upon its mantel, a photograph of their provider, Sunny Jim Whitelaw, with his accustomed scowl. There was a compact bookcase with a series of “chicken soup” books, some form of chicken soup for everyone and everything, except for the chicken itself which, in Evelyn’s view, most needed consolation. “We’re eating out on the porch!” came Natalie’s voice from the kitchen, and there Evelyn found a table laid, a white cloth, a plate of large tomato slices and Spanish onions in malt vinegar, tall goblets next to a wrapped bottle of Fumé. Evelyn sat down and looked at the low glare of cold sun beyond the winterized confines of the porch, frost-curled green ash leaves scratching at the glass. Evelyn lifted a goblet with its satisfying knock of ice and water within and thought how pleasant this was and how close to success many unsuccessful lives were, and how rare were genuinely sordid existences outside books and movies. Her sister and Stuart were an unsuccessful couple, not as Evelyn and Paul had been, but because Natalie was obsessed by what she perceived to be the hidden advantages of others. While Stuart was gentle and kind, Paul claimed he was simple enough to hide his own Easter eggs. Stuart’s remark at her father’s death—“That’s the best news I’ve had in years”—made Evelyn think there might be another side to him.