Winter in the Blood

by James Welch

  A rectangular piece of granite lay at the head of the grave. On it were written the name, John First Raise, and a pair of dates between which he had managed to stay alive. It said nothing about how he had liked to fix machines and laugh with the white men of Dodson, or how he came to be frozen stiff as a plank in the borrow pit by Earthboy’s.

  Teresa waved a scarf from the doorway of the shed. From this distance she looked big and handsome, clean-featured, unlike the woman I had seen the night before. She was wearing a white blouse and red pants. It must have been cool in the house, for she was wearing a sweater over the blouse. The white scarf followed the arc of her arm back and forth above her head. When we stood up, it disappeared and Teresa disappeared back into the house.

  Lame Bull threw the cigarette butt in the hole. “I don’t see why they can’t just bring her down here like your old man.”

  “Teresa has to make arrangements.”

  “What’s wrong with doing that after we get the old lady in the ground?”

  “He likes his money in advance—otherwise he’ll keep her in cold storage.” I jumped down into the hole and stamped on the cigarette.

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know, two, three hundred. We had to borrow money to get First Raise out.”

  “Jumping Jesus! You mean all that for a coffin?”

  “No, hell—you heard Teresa. They’ll make her up, put some lipstick and rouge on her, new dress maybe.” I nudged some dirt on the cigarette, then stamped it flat.

  Lame Bull put his shirt on.

  “It isn’t cheap,” I said.

  He buttoned the buttons deliberately. “That funeral parlor has one hell of a job on their hands.”

  I watched him walk off toward the house. His shirttail covered his behind. Before he reached the house, he stopped and looked off toward the corral, then the toolshed. He turned and glanced at a stack of bales in the alfalfa field to the east. He seemed to be surveying his property to make sure today and tomorrow would be worth it.

  I climbed out of the hole.

  It was going to be hot again, but from the southeast a few puffy white clouds were beginning to build up. It was hard to tell if they were coming toward the ranch. More likely they would sweep south over the Little Rockies. There was little chance of rain—it was the time of year when things grow stagnant, each morning following blue on the heels of the last, the sun rising, circling, falling day after day. Not like fall, I thought, with its endless gray, a time of dusk, with wind that cuts through your clothes and your skin, through the meat of you, until it reaches your bones, where it lodges itself. Not like fall, when the cold walks with you and beds down with you at night, never leaving you except for those couple of hours in the evening when the oil stove hums it out of your bones. A damned, ugly cold. Fall into winter.

  We shouldn’t have run them, I thought, it wasn’t good for them—

  36

  But it was getting dark and we still had to get them across the highway. So we had them racing full tilt down the hill into the valley, both of us swearing and swatting at their behinds with the end of our ropes. The wild-eyed spinster was stretched flat-out, running low to the ground like some ungainly antelope which the others chased. Behind them came the bulls, their short legs almost a blur in the dusk, their heads swinging from side to side, hooking the wind, and the bucking calves, the white of their faces, necks and underbellies almost dead white.

  Down in the valley they slowed to a trot, and Mose loped around them to open the gates.

  I had lost track of the cold in our wild rush down the hill, but now as we trotted across the valley floor toward the highway, I felt the wind sing through my clothes. The tops of my thighs were numb beneath the worn Levi’s and long johns. Tears rolled back away from my eyes.

  Mose skirted the cows and rode up beside me. He wiped his nose with his coat sleeve.

  “Okay, we’ve got to keep them moving—through this gate, over the highway and down through the other gate. Got that?” He tried to sound confident. “We’ve got to keep them moving. Okay?”

  “Roger,” I said.

  Mose was fourteen.

  It should have been easy. All of the cows had been through the routine before. They knew that when the weather turned cold and the sky gray, it was time to come in. After grazing the dry prairie grass, they were anxious to get at the alfalfa and bluejoint stubble.

  It was dusk, that time of day the light plays tricks on you, when you think you can see better than you actually can, or see things that aren’t there. The time of day your eyes, ears, nose become confused, all become one gray blur in the brain, so you step outside your body and watch the movie of a scene you have seen before. So it seemed, as I cut back and forth behind the herd, that I was somewhere else, not far, a hawk circling above or a beetle tracing corridors in the earth below the stamping hooves.

  We pushed them through the first gate, up the incline and onto the highway. Screaming and swearing, we flailed at the stragglers with the ends of our ropes. The cows clattered on the hard surface of the highway, milling, circling, shying. My eyes watered in the gray wind until Mose seemed a crystal motion, no more or less distinct than the smell of fresh crap or the squeak of leather. The cows were spooked by the sound of their own hooves on the unfamiliar asphalt. The bulls swayed behind them, tensely, waiting to see which way the herd would move. We struck at them, but they wouldn’t move without a direction.

  Suddenly the spinster raced headlong down the incline. The other cows plunged after her and the bulls began to lumber across the highway.

  It should have been easy. All we had to do was get them through the gate, close it and push them back a ways, away from the highway. Then we could go home to a plateful of meat and potatoes, and drink hot coffee, and tell First Raise all about it. He would listen and be pleased that we had done our job, surprised that we had done it in one day. And he would tell us how to be smart, how he had charged the white man from Dodson twenty dollars to kick his baler awake, “One dollar for the kick …” By now the light was almost gone and these thoughts were as real to me as the cows bunched up on the incline.

  But the spinster wouldn’t go through the gate. She stopped before it and lowered her head. I could see only the bulk of her back in front of the others, but in my movie I saw how she was standing, legs spread and stiff, head cocked to one side, the skin on her shoulders rippling in spasms as though she were trying to shake off a horsefly.

  It was at this instant that I felt Bird quiver beneath me and gather his weight in his hindquarters. Then I saw the small shape of a calf break from the herd. I barely had time to grab the saddle horn before Bird leaped forward, chasing the calf along the fence line. We stayed on the shoulder of the highway, keeping the calf between the barbed wire and us. Mose yelled but I couldn’t stop. With one hand I pushed with all my strength against the saddle horn; with the other I pulled back on the reins until I was standing, my legs stiff against the stirrups which were forward around Bird’s shoulders. I couldn’t raise his head, I had no strength, and so I clung helplessly to the horn.

  Through a prism of tears I saw the searching yellow lights, the gray whine of metal, and it was past me, a scream of air whipping the hat off my head, the stinging blast against my face.

  I couldn’t have seen it—we were still moving in the opposite direction, the tears, the dark and wind in my eyes—the movie exploded whitely in my brain, and I saw the futile lurch of the car as the brake lights popped, the horse’s shoulder caving before the fender, the horse spinning so that its rear end smashed into the door, the smaller figure flying slowly over the top of the car to land with the hush of a stuffed doll.

  The calf stopped at the sound of collision. Bird jolted down the slope of the shoulder and I tumbled from his back, down into the dark weeds. I felt my knee strike something hard, a rock maybe, or a culvert, then the numbness.


  37

  The black pickup roared by me. Teresa moved her hand in my direction but she wasn’t smiling. I couldn’t see Lame Bull, but I knew that he too would be serious, even grim.

  A faint movement in the air had started up, coming from the east, not enough to stir the cottonwood leaves, but enough to chill the sweat which ran down my rib cage. Dust from the road drifted toward the graveyard. There was one grave I hadn’t looked at yet. It was marked with a white wooden cross just tall enough to stand above the weeds which grew up around it. Although I couldn’t see it, there would be an unpainted wooden border around the grave. A circle of Styrofoam hung from the top point of the cross. From the bottom of the circle, pointing down, a piece of wire wrapped in green, and, below that, a faded paper flower barely visible in the weeds. There was no headstone, no name, no dates. My brother.

  I put the tools away. I could smell rat poison in the shed. It had always smelled of rat poison.

  I walked up to the house. The coffeepot on the back of the stove was still warm. A scent of perfume came from Teresa’s bedroom. I closed the door, then poured a cup of coffee. I thought of Yellow Calf. The bottle of wine that Lame Bull and I had started on the night before was nearly full. I tucked it inside my shirt and walked down to the corral.

  Bird did not fight me this time. He stood patiently as I cinched up the saddle and swung my leg over his back. The calf leaned against the far side of the loading chute. Beyond it, I could see its mother standing at the edge of the slough. She was looking at something on the other side.

  The cottonwood leaves were beginning to flash as I rode by the graveyard. I looked to the east. The clouds appeared to be moving up the valley, but they were still too far away to tell a direction. Overhead, a jet slid across the sky. I watched the silver glint until it glinted no more, leaving only a wispy tail to mark its course. A distant rumble caught up with us. Bird’s ears flickered, but he plodded ahead down the dusty road.

  I don’t know how they figure it, old horse, but one year to me is worth four or five to you. That makes you over a hundred years, older than that old lady, and you’re not only living, but carrying out your duties just like they trained you, beast of burden, though not a cow horse anymore.

  I tied the reins together and looped them over the saddle horn. As I swung down, Bird shuddered and nuzzled me in the ribs. His nose brushed against the bottle under my shirt.

  Now, old machine, I absolve you of your burden. You think I haven’t noticed it. You don’t show it. But that is the fault of your face. Your face was molded when you were born and hasn’t changed in a hundred years. Your ears seem smaller now, but that is because your face has grown. You figure you have hidden this burden well. You have. But don’t think I haven’t seen it in your eyes those days when the clouds hide the sun and the cattle turn their asses to the wind. Those days your eyes tell me what you feel. It is the fault of the men who trained you to be a machine, to react to the pressure of a rein on your neck, spurs in your ribs, the sound of a voice. A cow horse. You weren’t born that way; you were born to eat grass and drink slough water, to nip other horses in the flanks the way you do lagging bulls, to mount the mares. So they cut your balls off to make you less temperamental, though I think they failed at that. They haltered you, blindfolded you, waved gunnysacks at you and slapped you across the neck, the back with leather. Finally they saddled you—didn’t you try to kick them when they reached under your belly for the cinch?—and a man climbed on your back for the first time. Only you can tell me how it felt to stand quivering under the weight of that first man, dumbfounded until—was it?—panic and anger began to spread through your muscles and you erupted, rearing, lunging, sunfishing around the corral until the man had dug a furrow with his nose in the soft, flaky manure. You must have felt cocky, proud, but the man—who was it? surely not First Raise—the man climbed on your back again and began to rake you with his spurs. Again you reared and threw the man; again he dusted himself off and climbed back on. Again and again, until you were only crowhopping and running and swerving and the man clung to the saddle horn and jerked your head first one way, then the other, until you were confused and half-blind with frustration. But you weren’t through. There was the final step—turn him out, somebody said, you heard it—and you raced through the open gate, down the rutted road, your neck stretched out as though you were after a carrot, and the man’s spurs dug deep in your ribs. You ran and ran for what must have seemed like miles, not always following the road, but always straight ahead, until you thought your heart would explode against the terrible constriction of its cage. It was this necessity, this knowledge of death, that made you slow down to a stiff-legged trot, bearing sideways, then a walk, and finally you found yourself standing under a hot sun in the middle of a field of foxtail and speargrass, wheezing desperately to suck in the heavy air of a summer’s afternoon. Not even the whirr of a sage hen as it lifted from a clump of rosebush ten feet away could make you lift that young tired head.

  A cow horse.

  I took a drink from the bottle of wine in an effort to relieve the tightness in my throat.

  You have grown old, Bird, so old this sun consults your bones for weather reports. You are no longer a cow horse. No, don’t think it was your fault—when that calf broke, you reacted as they trained you. I should compliment you on your eyes and your quickness. I didn’t even see it break, then I felt your weight settle on your hind legs and the power …

  I stopped to pick a burr from my pant leg, and I felt a dazzling rush in my head.

  But I have seen you when the weather turns, when the sun is so high it no longer warms the earth but hangs pale above the chill wind, and the swift clouds, and dusk, the dusk, dusk …

  “What use,” I whispered, cried for no one in the world to hear, not even Bird, for no one but my soul, as though the words would rid it of the final burden of guilt, and I found myself a child again, the years shed as a snake sheds its skin, and I was standing over the awkward tangle of clothes and limbs. “What use, what use, what use …” and no one answered, not the body in the road, not the hawk in the sky or the beetle in the earth; no one answered. And the tears in the hot sun, in the wine, the dusk, the chilly wind of dusk, the sleet that began to fall as I knelt beside the body, the first sharp pain of my smashed knee, the sleet on my neck, the blood which dribbled from his nostrils, his mouth, the man who hurried back from his car, his terrible breath as he tried to wrestle me away from my brother’s broken body.

  PART FOUR

  38

  “Hello,” he said. “You are welcome.”

  “There are clouds in the east,” I said. I could not look at him.

  “I feel it, rain tonight maybe, tomorrow for sure, cats and dogs.”

  The breeze had picked up so that the willows on the irrigation ditch were gesturing in our direction.

  “I see you wear shoes now. What’s the meaning of this?” I pointed to a pair of rubber boots. His pants were tucked inside them.

  “Rattlesnakes. For protection. This time of year they don’t always warn you.”

  “They don’t hear you,” I said. “You’re so quiet you take them by surprise.”

  “I found a skin beside my door this morning. I’m not taking any chances.”

  “I thought animals were your friends.”

  “Rattlesnakes are best left alone.”

  “Like you,” I said.

  “Could be.”

  I pumped some water into the enamel basin for Bird, then I loosened his cinch.

  “I brought some wine.” I held out the bottle.

  “You are kind—you didn’t have to.”

  “It’s French,” I said. “Made out of roses.”

  “My thirst is not so great as it once was. There was a time …” A gust of wind ruffled his fine white hair. “Let’s have it.”

  I pressed the bottle into his hand. He held
his head high, resting one hand on his chest, and drank greedily, his Adam’s apple sliding up and down his throat as though it were attached to a piece of rubber. “And now, you,” he said.

  Yellow Calf squatted on the white skin of earth. I sat down on the platform on which the pump stood. Behind me, Bird sucked in the cool water.

  “My grandmother died,” I said. “We’re going to bury her tomorrow.”

  He ran his paper fingers over the smooth rubber boots. He glanced in my direction, perhaps because he heard Bird’s guts rumble. A small white cloud passed through the sun but he said nothing.

  “She just stopped working. It was easy.”

  His knees cracked as he shifted his weight.

  “We’re going to bury her tomorrow. Maybe the priest from Harlem. He’s a friend …”

  He wasn’t listening. Instead, his eyes were wandering beyond the irrigation ditch to the hills and the muscled clouds above them.

  Something about those eyes had prevented me from looking at him. It had seemed a violation of something personal and deep, as one feels when he comes upon a cow licking her newborn calf. But now, something else, his distance, made it all right to study his face, to see for the first time the black dots on his temples and the bridge of his nose, the ear lobes which sagged on either side of his head, and the bristles which grew on the edges of his jaw. Beneath his humped nose and above his chin, creases as well defined as cutbanks between prairie hills emptied into his mouth. Between his half-parted lips hung one snag, yellow and brown and worn-down, like that of an old horse. But it was his eyes, narrow beneath the loose skin of his lids, deep behind his cheekbones, that made one realize the old man’s distance was permanent. It was behind those misty white eyes that gave off no light that he lived, a world as clean as the rustling willows, the bark of a fox or the odor of musk during mating season.