by April Smith
The boy’s pale eyes flicked from Cal to the station wagon.
“You can follow me, I guess.”
“Thanks,” said Cal, and offered his hand through the window.
The boy shook it uncertainly. Cal took a deep breath and addressed his first potential voter:
“My name is Calvin Kusek,” he announced. “And I’m running for state legislature.”
—
Jo paid attention. Her mother had stopped peeling beets and turned up the radio. Jo recognized the low, mesmerizing voice of the man who came on during breakfast and sometimes on a religious program that Mama would instantly turn off.
“I thought you hated that guy,” Jo said.
“He’s giving the weather,” Betsy replied shortly.
“Friends, this is a spring storm that could be historic,” Thaddeus Haynes was reporting. “Yep, the word over the wires is ‘historic.’ They’re predicting heavy rain and snow for the Black Hills and high winds with gusts up to sixty miles per hour. There’s a ‘no travel’ notice in effect from Sturgis to the Wyoming state line…”
“Is Dad in Wyoming?” Jo asked anxiously, trying to remember her maps.
“No, dear, he’s on his way south,” Betsy assured her. “He’s going in a different direction. He’s fine.”
“There are reports of pea-sized hail already moving in from the west,” Thaddeus Haynes went on. He sounded serious. “A bunch of storms—”
They lost power and everything went dead: the radio, the lights, the telephone. With a sigh the whole house shut down, instantly seeming to become ice cold, absorbing the dull daylight so there was now no difference between the roiling outside and the safety of the rooms within.
Betsy peered through the window. “We’d better get the hay inside.”
The beets stayed put in the sink, leaving the white enamel streaked bloodred. Outside the temperature was falling and dark thunderheads were building fast. Jo got the chickens in the henhouse and moved the sheep and goats to their pens, while Lance and Betsy forked hay into the truck, then unloaded it in the barn. They got two stacks in before the rain came pelting down.
Thunder and lightning broke above them.
“Best we can do for now,” Betsy said, as they secured the barn door and headed for the house.
“The man on the radio said it’s going to snow,” Jo said. She was always reminding her parents about important things.
Betsy glanced at the sky. “This’ll pass. I don’t believe anything that lying blowhard, right-wing egomaniac Thaddeus Haynes says. Bet you a nickel all we get is rain.”
Lance turned his freckled face up and water spilled from the brim of his cowboy hat. “You really don’t like him do you, Mama?”
“I don’t appreciate it when people puff themselves up and try to scare other people so they’ll look like big men.”
“You don’t like him because his elephant made poopy in our front yard!” Lance shouted with glee, and ran madly through the mud, stomping puddles.
The generator wouldn’t start, so for supper they had Wheaties and milk. Betsy put the children to bed while it was still daylight, excited by the prospect of a night alone without any means to do useful work. She owed a letter to her sister, Marja. By flashlight she located the typewriter in the closet.
Like many things from childhood, the machine seemed so small out here in the prairie; her life in New York far away. Six weeks ago Marja had written to say their father had died of a heart attack while taking a nap. “He was in his chair with the blanket pulled up,” she wrote. “I tried but he didn’t move.” Albert Ferguson was already buried, she said. It was too late to come home.
Betsy’s heart had broken open, and she begged Marja to move out west, but her sister refused to leave the city. “I’m doing fine,” Marja wrote. “Mrs. Zajac has been a great help, and everyone at the institute has been kind.” As their correspondence had quickened, Betsy rediscovered a compatible soul. Distance seemed to bring them closer: more trusting, more willing to confess, and this Betsy did in her letters typed on the Olympia—how secretly alone she felt because nobody in South Dakota really understood her except her one real friend, Stella Fletcher. The other gals thought she was too tall, too thin, too bossy. Somehow, too fancy. Betsy was aware when she was not included in private occasions, like the bridal fitting for Joanie Ostenberg’s youngest daughter. “Out here they say alfalfa and cows grow slow. Maybe it’s the same with people,” she wrote drily. Marja answered that Betsy was too good a person for people not to adore. “Stick it out,” she wrote. “The cows will come home!”
But tonight, by the light of a kerosene lamp, Betsy had good news. Her fingers hit the keys, excited to tell Marja about Cal’s first run for the legislature. How proud she was that he’d been asked and said yes, that he wanted to do something right for the county. Despite the hardships, they’d fallen in love with this way of life and wanted to preserve it. She wished only that Marja could see her niece and nephew! They were growing up just fine into such responsible—
Betsy had to stop. It had become too cold to type. Gale-force wind was battering the farmhouse with such strength she expected it to come right through the walls, blow the lamp over, and start a fire. Now the tumult had quieted, but Betsy knew the storm wasn’t over. She could tell by the drop in air pressure that something more was coming their way.
As if by the extraordinary ESP that binds mother and daughter, Jo had heard her thoughts, and was already standing in the shadows of the doorway with a blanket clutched over her nightgown.
“Mama,” she said gravely, “it’s snowing. We have to get the calves.”
Alarmed, Betsy looked outside. “Put newspaper down,” she said quickly.
“I’ll go with you,” Jo insisted.
“No,” said Betsy, pulling on her boots and taking the heavy duster from its hook near the door. She’d heard horrific stories of children being lost in blizzards and frozen to death just yards from the house. “You and Lance build up the fire. Get hot water going.”
There were four calves in the pen that were less than three weeks old and needed to be brought inside. The others were strong enough to stay with their mothers. Jo and Betsy understood, in terms of monetary value, that Ruby, the little red one whose birth the children had witnessed, and whom they claimed for their own, would be the least worth rescuing.
Jo was pleading and her eyes filled with tears. “Please, Mama! Please get Ruby. He’s small right now but Lance and I are going to raise him special.”
“Honey, I’ll try.”
Betsy opened the door to a blast of arctic air and wet, heavy curtains of snow blowing sideways. She gripped the icy banister with fur-lined leather gloves, but the tips of her fingers were already frozen and she slipped down both steps into a foot of powder. The woolen scarf whipped off her face. Instantly her mouth and eyes and nose sprang with water that turned to ice. Senses completely disoriented, she probed for the right side up of the world. The wind knocked her with a punch and she tumbled down again, afraid of being buried in the drifts that marched capriciously across the yard, changing shape, exuding snow-smoke, lost to her children, until she was able to turn herself around, toward the pens, the flashlight good for just a few inches in the menacing dark.
Holding on to the fence as the wind tried to pry her away, she moved hand over hand to the gate, hammering with a rock to get the frozen latch open. The cows were huddled close together. She ran the light over their shining eyes. Was it right to pull the calves from the sheltering bodies? She wished she had a lifetime of experience to know. Instead she sensed Jo watching anxiously from the window and that was enough to cause her to shout against the wind and shoulder between the heavy bodies of the cows to find their babies. A few minutes later Betsy kicked the front door open with Ruby limp in her arms. His ears and tail were frozen solid. They put him in the bathtub, which Lance was filling with warm water.
“Don’t use soap or the mother won’t recognize the smell
and take him back,” Betsy warned, pulling off her hat in the stifling heat of the bathroom.
“Oh, Mama, thank you,” Jo cried.
A quick embrace, then Betsy went to save the other calves.
—
The following morning, a hundred miles away, dawn was tender and the day looked fine when Cal left the home of the Democratic chairman of Fall River County in Ardmore. He’d turned out to be a Norwegian-born, potbellied piano teacher in his seventies. Stored inside his barn was a full-sized, hand-carved carousel. Truth be told, he said, he’d given up on politics. All he cared about was finishing the carousel before he died, that’s it. Cal couldn’t argue with the sentiment, especially since the next registered Democrat was thirty-five miles away. The visit was over the night he arrived, except for a hamburger supper and a camp bed.
“Don’t give up,” said the wife when he got into the station wagon that morning. A former schoolteacher, she could still command. “You’ll find it livelier at the restaurant in town. Everyone and his brother goes to breakfast.”
She was frail, and her face was wrinkled into folds of flesh so loose it looked like she was wearing the skin of an animal over hers and it was likely to slip off. She said Cal reminded her of a man named George McGovern, son of a Methodist preacher—which made him top drawer, in her view—executive something or other with the Democratic Party, who’d once passed this way. He had a trick: for each supporter that you meet, write down the name and pertinent information on an index card.
“I thought that was smart,” she said.
She reached into her apron pocket and gave Cal a dollar. He blushed with joy.
“My first campaign contribution!” he said, and kissed her gnarly cheek.
Cal took the dollar and her advice. Between the towns of Rumford and Edgemont, he ate breakfast three times. In spots like the Bison Café back home, you could usually find a coterie of farmers willing to listen to your spiel if you kept it short and sprang for a round of joe. The combination of Yale-educated aristocrat and down-to-earth cattle rancher was something they’d never seen before, and they were intrigued, at least by his moxie. As for the message, he’d gotten it down to just two words: politics matters.
“What goes on in the statehouse determines your farm income and your profits,” Cal would say, handing out his flyers, “the education of your kids, what your taxes will cost, whether or not we drop another atomic bomb. Politics depends on you, pure and simple. Who votes and who shirks it off, and I think that’s the way it should be. I believe in the good judgment of good folks like you.”
He continued to wind north through tiny hamlets and unincorporated towns, stopping people on the street, visiting a bowling alley, sale barn, Rotary Club, and veterans’ home, dropping in on a backyard rodeo, a body shop, a garden club meeting, even a ladies’ riding club that did square dancing on horseback, painstakingly keeping up the index cards he’d bought in a drugstore. He checked in at a motor court and placed a long-distance call to the Lucky Clover Ranch. When the operator said the line was busy, Cal didn’t put anything by it. He was just too beat.
He lay in bed and stared at the news. The local CBS station was reporting that as a result of Edward R. Murrow’s news show, See It Now, along with a damning series of articles in the Washington Post, Senate hearings had begun to investigate Joe McCarthy’s inflammatory statements and false accusations against members of the U.S. Army. The end of his reign of terror was in sight.
The second night of his campaign, Calvin Kusek slept very well.
13
It was dead cold in the room. The only sound was the shrill whistling of the wind, or two strands of wind, intertwining in a mournful duet. In the chill light of morning, Jo inched across the top bunk and pulled the shade aside to find the window frosted over and fringed by icicles hanging off the roof. The spring blizzard had been faster and bigger than anyone predicted. It left more than six feet on the ground and drifts that had been whipped into smooth white curves so high you couldn’t see the mailbox. The world was frozen in place, as if the spring season had been rolled back to January.
Downstairs it looked like a Christmas nativity. There were four live calves in the living room blinking their big eyes and looking bewildered. Little Ruby was lying in a cardboard box near the fireplace. Jo went and warmed up a bottle to feed him.
“One hundred twenty-four plus one hundred thirty-five equals two hundred fifty-nine. Right, Mama?” said Lance.
“Right,” came a faint response.
Betsy had no idea what 124 plus 135 equaled. She was lying on the couch with an arm over her eyes, an aching, limp sack of bones after carrying the calves from the corral to the house through the blizzard.
“One hundred thirty-five minus one hundred twenty-four equals eleven.” Lance paused. “Mama!”
“What?”
“You’re not playing the game!”
The game was to solve math problems using the numbers of the yellow ear tags on the calves, but all Betsy could think about was a scalding-hot bath.
Jo, kneeling by the little calf, said, “He’s taking the milk, Mama.”
“Wonderful.”
Jo stroked the soft reddish hide and scratched the white star on Ruby’s forehead, knowing that she shouldn’t feel the way she did, but this one was different, she was falling in love. It was Lance’s job to change the newspapers, which he did while grandly holding his nose. By some internal command, Betsy roused herself from the couch and made cornbread in the iron skillet over a cooking fire the way they did in Camp Fire Girls, dumping a can of beans on top, which they all declared to be the very best breakfast they’d ever had.
Then there was no hope for it. They’d have to attack the snow. They suited up and trooped into the garage, where the winter gear had already been stored away.
“I wish Dad were here,” Lance said, heaving a man-sized shovel over his shoulder. “This is going to be a bitch.”
“A what?” Betsy exclaimed.
“He said we have to dig a ditch,” Jo snorted. She and her brother were laughing so hard, another minute and they’d have to unzip everything and run inside to pee.
Beneath the half-sun and grumbling clouds, the three Kuseks shoveled and shoveled in powder up to their waists. As it melted and refroze, the snow became granular and heavy, but by midday they had dug a path to the barn and corrals like a medieval passageway with steep walls. When Betsy went inside to get an aspirin for an irksome backache, she discovered the calves were chewing up an armchair, and they were returned to their moms, except for Ruby, who was still too weak. In the afternoon the sun came out and the temperature edged past freezing. They were able to put out the hay they’d shrewdly stored in the barn for the sheep, goats, and cattle, and to collect a basketful of eggs. The phone lines and electricity were still down, so there was nothing to do until nightfall except keep on cleaning out snow so the ground could dry.
The following morning the weather held and Betsy judged the snowfall in the hills would be soft enough to break trail, so they could check on the herd in the spring pasture at Bottlebrush Creek. She rode a mare named Misty and the children saddled up Sprite, a small chestnut mare with a blond mane and tail and outstanding confirmation who was Jo’s favorite, and Lance’s black quarter horse, Tex, and they rode behind the barn to the path Cal, Fletch, Randy, Hayley Vance, and the others had followed on that first branding day, but now the trees were bare and blue shadows crisscrossed the untouched snow, sharp as cutout silhouettes. Budding twigs were sheathed with ice that shattered when the crowns of their cowboy hats brushed the lowest branches, raining cold drops down their necks. Beneath a blanket of ice covering the creek, rills of running water worked to bring it down, to open up the crystalline surface to the sun; in a few weeks, the quiet pools would turn algae green and full of life.
The cooped-up horses bucked and tossed their heads, desperate to run. Their breath showed in the stillness of the woods, turning magical when microscopic bits of ice
would float in sparking veils across the bright arrows of sunlight that shot between the trees. It would be a slow incline upstream until Betsy and the children reached the upper pasture, but already they were high enough above the creek to be able to look down at the rapids where the rushing ice melt from the higher elevations overflowed the banks in shoals of dark gray mud, and that’s where they saw their first dead cow.
The trail the dead cow had taken from the pasture was visible in broken snow. They pulled the wool mufflers over their mouths and squinted at the icefall to see where the barbed wire fence was broken and she’d stumbled down the slope to rocks near the creek. The wind picked up sharply.
“I’ll take care of the fence,” Betsy told the children. Scanning the field, she saw small dark bunches of cattle in the distance. “They’re probably pocketed up near the draw. Go up and take a look. Stay together and do not go farther than the road.”
“Okay, Mama. Don’t worry,” Jo said, cross-reining to turn around. “We’ll come back for you.”
Betsy smiled and touched the brim of her cowboy hat in acknowledgment. It was the byword of the Kusek family, what they always told each other when they split up in open country. “I’ll always come back for you” was a lesson Betsy and Cal had instilled early on. You looked out for your partners and they looked out for you. You wanted to move cattle, but nothing mattered more than everyone getting home safely. Betsy had become more even-tempered: graceful, no-nonsense, and present, with little thought to hurrying. She’d learned to be quietly watchful like the dogs. Now she watched her half-grown children riding off, their horses kicking up snow, with satisfaction and pride.
She dismounted and removed the tools from the saddlebag. She put on her soft gloves. Starting at the top wire, she hooked the broken pieces to the stretcher. While others complained about fixing fences, on good days she liked being out there by herself, watching the snow slip off the pine boughs and the eagles ride the thermals in the sky. White-tailed deer eyeing her from the woods. This was not a good day. Looking down, she could see more dead cows in the creek bed.