The Cadence of Grass

by Mcguane, Thomas

  “Your father felt very strongly about the sanctity of marriage. He desperately wanted to see yours restored. And he was very fond of Paul.”

  “Sanctity?”

  “That will do, Evelyn.”

  “Reconciling with Paul for the purpose of liberating assets? I don’t know.”

  “Only I suppose if the rest of us should fall on hard times. Natalie nearly reduced to groveling as it is.”

  Evelyn felt sick. “Mother, aren’t you worried about being with that many strangers? It’s not such an easy time for you, you know. But Alaska—”

  “Right now, Evie, it is so very hard to be among familiar things. Of course I dread being with all those unknown faces, but if I can get over that, maybe I can begin to handle the rest of my life. Sometimes people get on these cruises and it’s all widows. And they have a refrigerated compartment for people who die en route.”

  “Ugh!”

  “Under normal circumstances, Alaska would seem just awful, but I need a change.”

  Evelyn had come to the house hoping to talk her mother out of plans that, with Paul’s deluxe luggage, promised to be unstoppable. She found her courage touching, even though she knew the risk was real: a boatload of party animals hoping to meet the Eskimos; whale watchers with expectations aroused by Disney Studios; drifting, affluent boozers with alluring staterooms. She also felt a childish fear that her mother might return indifferent to her previous life and, especially, her own daughters. In fact, should her mother find real consolation, Evelyn would be, for all practical purposes, an orphan. She was ashamed of this thought that wouldn’t go away. Detachment. That’s what her mother wanted; and if her reaction to widowhood was a solitary vacation, shouldn’t she and Natalie simply admire her readiness? And be happy when she didn’t come home in the ship’s refrigerator?

  “Mother, I never realized you were interested in Alaska.”

  “Well, I haven’t been uninterested in Alaska.”

  “But I don’t see any books or any—”

  “As I said, it’s not an abiding interest,” Alice said patiently.

  “Why not the Caribbean is I guess what I’m trying to say?”

  “Can’t you just picture those types?”

  “It’s practically winter up there. This doesn’t seem like the time of year to go that far north. Anyway, my thought would be to have some purpose in mind.”

  “For what?”

  “For the cruise.”

  “Darling, I would appreciate it if you addressed me less sharply. I do have a purpose in mind, and that is to collect myself.”

  “Which I say could be done more comfortably in the Caribbean.”

  “Evelyn, I don’t wish to go to the Caribbean. I don’t wish to be cheek by jowl with the characters who are drawn to beaches and loud clothes, and that music which is just beating on things.”

  “And what about people who’re drawn to Alaska, in their plaid shirts and down-filled whatever. . . .” Evelyn was too exercised to go on.

  Her mother gazed at her in long affectionate thought. She smiled. “Are you asking if I am hoping to meet someone?”

  “I’m not ruling it out.”

  “Evelyn, I don’t like it when you girls are devious. And no, that is not why I’m going. I’m very fragile just now, and I need a change. If I should find myself shipboard with excitable, harmless people or ninnies, I would be in frightening distress.”

  “I understand.”

  “You don’t understand. I have spent forty years under a certain roof.”

  “Perfectly aware of the outer world,” said Evelyn, meaning to speak volumes with this suggestion whose impact was not easily seen.

  “Perhaps.”

  Upstairs, the piles of Alice Whitelaw’s clothing had seemed like the breastworks of a fort.

  Evelyn rode up on a crippled bull standing out in a field of frost-killed mule’s ear and mullein, one swollen foot tipped up behind.

  They’d left Bill’s house early after a coyote breakfast, which Bill defined as “a piss and a look around.” She remembered that before leaving he’d stood staring at his woodpile in thought, then gone back inside for some vet supplies he put in the saddlebags on his bay gelding. “That motley-face bull’s got foul foot,” she told him, and together they went back to the bull. Bill took down his lariat, moved his cigarette from the corner of his mouth to the front, cracked a kitchen match into flame with a thumbnail, cupped it around the tip, took a deep inhale of smoke and roped the bull. After tightening his loop, he let the lariat hang while Evelyn swung her rope and threw a trapping loop in front of the bull’s back legs. Bill winked through the smoke in approval, wrapped his lariat around the saddle horn and rode off slowly, rope tightening until it pulled the bull forward and his back feet tripped Evelyn’s loop and he was roped. Bill rode forward, looking over his shoulder as the bull slowly toppled onto its side. While his horse kept the rope tight, he half-hitched his lariat on the horn and dismounted; the bull watched his approach with a rolling white eye, slammed its head on the ground and gave up.

  Bill knelt and touched the swollen foot, feeling around the joint. “Not quite to the tendon sheath,” he said, “but the toes’s all swollen apart.” He held the syringe up to the sky and filled it from a short white jug. “Poor fella,” he said, “abandoned like bones at a barbecue.”

  “Is that LA200?”

  “Nope, plain ole oxytetracycline. Don’t treat these and it infects a whole pasture. Red Wolf wouldn’t like that.” He swept the flies from the indentation along the spine and gave the bull his injection in the hip. “We’re gonna have to do this several times,” he said. “Funny deal, dry year like this. Supposed to bring sulfa boluses, and didn’t. Forgot to, I guess.”

  Evelyn watched him peel back an eyelid and feel under the jaw of the increasingly relaxed bull. She’d watched him closely since her childhood. Now Bill Champion was old, but straight and lean and, when the narrow slits of his eyelids so revealed, the owner of the bluest ice blue eyes. He always had his hands all over his animals, and when something caught him by surprise like this foot rot, he seemed to doubt his own care. Likewise, he watched Evelyn continuously. Today he told her to shorten her reins, sit straight in her saddle, get her heels down in the stirrups and look to where she wanted to go before directing her horse there. “Sometimes they can tell just from your eyes.”

  Now they gathered more cattle for shipment. Bill liked to leave as soon as you could “tell a cow from a bush,” so it was still dark when they trotted out of the corrals. They were desperately trying to beat the first real winter storm, after which shipping and pregnancy testing would become infinitely more laborious and wretched. One day, Bill alarmed Evelyn by leaving his good bay gelding behind in favor of a green colt—“He needs the experience”—which blew up five minutes into the work, dropping his head between his forelegs, then squalling and bucking through wind-bent junipers. Bill managed to ride him to a standstill, and the drive went on. Evelyn rode her reliable bald-faced bay, Crackerjack, and kept her canvas coat un-buttoned from the exertion. Her horse surveyed his land through a forelock that fell over his eyes. “That colt made you ride pretty good,” said Evelyn, who seemed even taller wearing spurs and chink chaps, her hair pinned up under a Miami Heat ball cap.

  Bill had a sour look on his face, and a band of old sweat ran halfway to the crown of his hat. “I was all over him like a cheap suit.” This urgent race with the weather helped Evelyn forget that this was the most depressing day of her year, the separation of the calves from the cows and the shipment of the calves to faraway feedlots.

  Evelyn rode along behind the herd, absently untangling Crackerjack’s mane with her free hand, reins slung loose from the other, and looked mournfully at the gamboling calves. Several times, an old cow who’d been through this before wheeled around to challenge her horse before losing conviction and joining the herd headed downhill to a certain future.

  Wednesday morning it started snowing before sunup;
they sorted off the calves amidst the deafening bawl of the cows. When they had divided the steer calves from the heifers into two pens, a rank cow with a single twisted horn grown close to her skull knocked a panel over and they had to sort them again. The big double-decker tractor trailers came down the long lane and circled, one backing up to the chute and the other standing by. Bill had positioned the chute so the early sun wouldn’t be in the cattle’s eyes when they loaded them. The brand inspector—a small man with iron gray hair, a green State of Montana jacket and worn-out cowboy boots—arrived around eight with a bag of doughnuts and a thermos of coffee, and they commenced the business of weighing the calves, taking them onto the wobbly old scale in drafts of tens and twelves. Evelyn stood with the cattle buyer, resplendent in bright Nocona boots and 40X Resistol with the latest crease, as they slid the weights around, taking turns but each watching the other’s hands until the brand inspector came inside and wrote in his book. Bill strode about with a white fiberglass pole, moving the calves here and there as needed as each scale load of confused calves was emptied into adjoining pens and the entire calf crop had been weighed. There was a cloud of steam above the shack, and a stormy sky building overhead in ledges of gray. Evelyn looked at one black calf, curled up on the ground trying to sleep, as if pretending none of this was happening. The buyer woke him with the toe of his boot, and he jumped up and scrambled into the trailer.

  By the time all two hundred had gone up the aluminum ramps into various chambers against the roar of the cows and the steady rumble of diesels, Evelyn was covered with manure and had a heavy heart. The truckers stripped off their coveralls and climbed into their cabs in clean clothes. The dark wall that had been ascending in the western sky had overtaken them and it began to snow. Bill paid the brand inspector for his services and, holding the weight tickets between his fingers, raised his leathery face to Evelyn, studied her for a moment and said, “We had a good year.”

  The bawling of the cattle made conversation impossible. Evelyn tipped her head toward the noise, her excuse for cutting it short. Bill bumped her on the shoulder with an open hand, then turned to make his round of gates and latches, to nail up stray planks on the alleyway that led to the squeeze chute where tomorrow it would be determined which cows had started a new calf for next year. The old dry cows with numerous calves behind them over the long years would be slaughtered. Evelyn was going dancing tonight; tonight she would dance this all away.

  She drove off in her little car, its floor a jumble of vaccine bottles, paper coffee cups, baler twine and hair elastics. She drove down the mountain foothills and then, still north of the modest skyline of the city, she turned east toward the stockyards. She followed a semi loaded with round bales until she’d passed the corrals, then parked in front of the café, an encouraging place where cattlemen and hippies could be found sitting at the Formica counter listening to Otis Redding under a sign for Black Cat Stove Polish. Various bits of advice were posted, including No promises about eggs “over” or “scrambled.” And If you have a fork, you don’t need a spoon to stir your coffee. And one really caught her attention: Kill or remove ants on counter. Here was a spot for Red Wolf, she thought, then added, Now I’m doing it. A young man tried unsuccessfully to catch her glance, but without returning it she realized the time for such things was not so far away.

  She saw how hard it was snowing and tried to imagine that the calves were better off in the trucks. She ate her breakfast in silence, then drove downtown in weather so lowering the streetlights seemed decapitated. This was when you could discover if your preparations for winter were adequate, and if you were ready for the restrictions of movement and light that were about to be upon you. The snow was blowing up against the front of a travel agency, obscuring the words “holiday” and “foreign currency” on its sign.

  With an almost military sense of purpose she made her way through several shortcuts, from which occasional pedestrians appeared or disappeared, coats and scarves drawn across their faces. Her friends Violet and Claire, ambitious beauties, had a small shop on Main Street, Just the Two of Us, that, despite its high prices, Evelyn loved for its rarified sense of exotic couture right next door to an old saddle shop whose owner was their landlord. Evelyn doted on the interior of this silly boutique with its endless chalk white walls and racks of clothes in an arrangement impossible to understand. The owners looked out over their treasures in conspicuous separation from the big old-fashioned cash register to which they hoped to repair often enough to avoid eviction by the saddle maker, who, at the first of the month, came sniffing around for his check. Claire—lips pursed and breathing through her nose in concentration—held a dress abstractly to Evelyn’s shoulders. “Thank goodness,” Violet said in her surprisingly deep voice, “you don’t have a big bosom. Big bosoms make good clothes look stupid. Big bosoms are basically rural.”

  Evelyn stood in manure-covered boots, the dress hand-pinned to the shoulders of her ripped, blue-plaid, snap-button cowboy shirt.

  “I hadn’t heard that,” she said, spotting something else entirely, a black dress whose cut in back Evelyn thought might moderate her overly defined shoulder muscles, something about its little straps, their closeness to the neck, the perfect seams curving toward the hips like arrows, the detailing! She pointed. “That one, I think, if it fits.”

  “There goes my suggestion,” Claire said with a pretended pout, letting the dress she’d held against Evelyn fall over her arm.

  “I just have hunches.” Evelyn held the weightless thing at arm’s length before her. After cowboy shirts, jeans and boots, it looked exciting. “I could get somewhere in this,” she said. Claire and Violet stared at this odd remark as Evelyn took the dress back to the changing room. What kind of coat would it take in weather like this? Certainly her Carhartt stockman’s coat, stained with veterinary products, was not it. Tonight, she’d find out. A bearded man in a stadium coat was watching Violet and Claire present various items—scarves, a chain purse, a makeup kit, blouses, a beaded top—with ferocious coquetry and a stream of commentary as to their merits. Evelyn changed into the pretty black dress and by bouncing on the balls of her feet made it fall down over herself and into place with reassuring emphasis. Admiring herself in the mirror, she drew the dress up high on her thighs and said to the mirror, and its imaginary occupant, “Will that do?” Tonight she would dance in feral vigilance. She’d find some guy and forget the poor calves, went the plan.

  Claire turned to Evelyn, her blue eyes piercing beneath her peachy eye shadow and a new no-nonsense look. She said, “And?”

  “I like it,” said Evelyn.

  The bearded man seized this opportunity to slip away, the door to the street swinging shut behind him.

  “You should. So killer.” Claire started replacing the goods that were evidently wasted on the departed shopper. “I love the big cough as he goes, like ill health prevented his buying something. . . . What’d the calves weigh?”

  “They weighed like lead.”

  “Turn any back?”

  “We locoed eight.”

  Claire made a clucking sound and said, “You can feed ’em out of that, but it takes a couple of months. I had twenty one year and by April they looked like show calves. We took them to Billings Livestock and sold the shit out of them.”

  Together they moved to the ornate cash register, which stood in nostalgic disuse next to the electronic box for processing credit cards. Violet, despite her blazing makeup and avant-garde clothes, managed to sound wistful. “When the federal government let the meatpackers concentrate, they ruined it for the little producer. That’s why we moved into town. P.S. I don’t miss the wind. But Evelyn, I wish you would let your nails grow.” Her brow was furrowed.

  “There’s no time to grow my nails. I’ve got to get me a little tonight. I haven’t had it in such a long time.”

  Violet looked worried.

  “I see a lot of guys, Evelyn. You want a loaner?”

  “Uh, no. You miss a bu
nch if you don’t find ’em yourself.”

  The bar was beyond the city limits, in an industrial-looking building, where a large number of cars and pickup trucks were parked in the snow with little sign of life around them except a desultory shoving match between two bearded men wearing baseball caps. Nothing came of it beyond flattening a circle of snow beneath their feet.

  Evelyn was soon inside dancing and tossing down drinks between partners, amidst shouts of “Party hearty! It’s beer thirty!” She danced with a ponytailed man wearing hospital scrubs who wouldn’t speak to her, then a college student in a lumberjack shirt and with a smooth empty face, then a rather clean-cut youngster in khaki pants and a blue chambray shirt who described himself, with startling precision, as “a Reno-trained slot machine consultant.” Apart from the disorienting blaze of lights and electrified music, and the disturbing spectacle of the lead singer’s stalking movements up and down the stage at either end of which were snow-filled windows, there was a rather peaceful anonymity, and the black dress continued to thrill her.