“I get half or we go to trial,” Stuart practically sang.
Judge Slater, who’d barely peeked up from his papers during Natalie’s speech, said in the gingerly tones of one avoiding an explosion, “There seems to be plenty here to go around.” He extended his palms upward toward the ledgers and documents in a scooping motion. Clearly, he was hunting the exit.
Natalie shouted: “You have any idea what this guy spent on the adult channel? Forty-eight bucks to see Lewd Trooper three times in a row.”
Slater was gone. Natalie made a face of hideous detestation at Stuart. “Bad cop busts barely legals?”
By the end of the week, a chinook had started to blow and the temperature rose sixty degrees in four hours, turning the corrals into a sea of mud. Dirty water backed up into the barn where the cows had tramped snow into icy ridges. Bill and Evelyn dragged straw bales to make a dam around the head catch in case they had to pull a calf, then they saddled their horses and pushed the cows out of the mud into the closest pasture. The new calves, thrilled by the sudden warmth, played crazily as the sun flattened the snow.
Evelyn was glad to be back on a horse and sat for a long time in the hard south wind watching calves overcome by the wish to meet each other, while the cows, after a spell of absorbed eating, grew fearful of losing track of their babies and abruptly lumbered around the herd, each lowing among the crowd for the only acceptable calf. Part of Evelyn’s thrill of watching cattle from horseback lay in observing the distinct personalities in what at a glance seemed anonymous: the contented young mothers, the belligerent matrons, the bad mothers who wished they’d never had this calf, the poor milkers whose abraded udders pained them, the cows who seemed to know their calves were sickly and would not live. Some viewed the horsemen as the enemy and hurried their calves away, while others seemed to recognize the drivers of the hay truck in another guise. And on certain occasions Evelyn felt less herdsman than predator, protein viewing protein. In this game, the poor milker, the indifferent mother, and the mother who was also a grandmother were slaughtered alike. At the end, there were no exceptions. Man must dine. But Evelyn was tired of man.
When the chinook stopped blowing, it stayed still for two days. Skies were clear and the cattle scattered out to look for patches of bare ground, old grass and a change of diet. Bill and Evelyn took their horses into the summer pasture, Evelyn riding her colt Cree, crossing drifts until the Crazy Mountains arose like a silver wedding cake to the north. From there, the water courses, tree lines on a white expanse, made spindly courses to the Yellowstone. The Bridgers could be discerned, as well as the bench of Sheep Mountain, the low-humped Deer Creeks and, to the south, the blue crags and high, dark canyons of the Absaroka. This was altogether too much for the colts, who kept trying to turn toward home and were afraid of the crowds of deer at the bottom of every snow-filled bowl. Evelyn was aware of a great weight lifting off her as they rode along. The notion of not ever going back made her smile and think of the trail: Texas to Montana and never once turn your horse around. Her happiness began to be felt by Cree, who looked eagerly in the direction of their travel while Evelyn made plans with Bill for next year, the following year, the next five and ten years. A three-mile cross fence was in the wrong place and should be moved a half mile to the east. Springs needed to be improved, salt grounds moved, pastures rested, loafing sheds built. Somehow the money must be found for the tractor they coveted, a four-wheel-drive New Holland that would let them bale wild timothy for the horses. From the ridges, they could look down into their small valley and see flocks of pigeons trading between the barn and hay sheds, wings sparkling in the brilliant light.
That night, Paul beat her.
He arrived at suppertime, already upset, and sat in Evelyn’s front room with his coat on. “Rural peace,” he said spitefully. “I wish I had a taste for it.” Evelyn had already decided that she would try not to see him anymore, but she knew not to expect too much of herself and, because he was somewhat crumpled, decided to at least allow him to speak before explaining that their separation must resume.
He was clutching his cell phone.
“I went around to see Stuart,” he began, eyes ablaze with indignation. “He’s looking quite spiffy in my old office. He’s got people coming and going with armloads of paper. He’s got a phone ringing off the hook. He’s got my old secretary doting on his every need. He’s got his little girlfriend working down on the shop floor and a movie poster from Down to the Sea in Ships on the fucking wall. He’s got this whole hearty manner like a sea captain. It is to puke over.”
Instead of the intended picture, Evelyn imagined a Stuart unbound.
“I told him about my arrangement with Majub as a liaison man. I realized that you don’t find companies you can sell every five minutes. I told Majub that. I told him I need something to carry me between sales, to keep gas in the Chevette, for Christ sake.”
Evelyn could smell the liquor on his breath.
“But Majub is like, ‘Finders fee, period, and don’t ask again.’ When I tell him I can’t live on that, he tells me not to get my panties in a wad. So my proposal to Stuart is why don’t I go on calling on some of my old customers, kind of earn my way, use my own car and so on, can’t be anything but good for one and all. And Stuart says no. When I ask for clarification, he spells it for me: N-O. You believe this? I go straight over the top of his desk, and next thing I know he’s got goons dragging me out into the alley, where I receive unnecessary roughness at their hands. You have to understand, these are my former employees.”
Evelyn’s heart did pull somewhat toward Paul, but she thought she should be candid with him, despite the tight look of his face, the wildness of his eyes, and tell him how in her own view he was merely bringing trouble upon himself. The first blow astonished her with its ferocity. He had not beaten her before, and she was not expecting it. Soon he was knocking her through the furniture with such fury that she wondered if he meant to kill her. Curled on the floor, her head muffled in her arms, there was a sudden lull during which nothing could be heard at all. Then she heard Paul say, “Okay, Pops, I’m going,” and looked up to see Bill training his Winchester on Paul’s head, his finger through the trigger guard, his face the same expression of unemotional focus he bore when he cut the worms out of an old bull. After glancing toward Evelyn to see if she intended to intervene on his behalf, Paul laughed without humor and went straight out through the door.
Before Evelyn could explain the situation, which she badly wanted to do, Bill was gone too. Evelyn almost expected to hear a shot, but it never came.
She hardly slept. Her bruises were such that if she drifted off, moving or rolling over, pain awakened her again. Anxiety that she could have been so vulnerable ran through her like voltage, her life turning into one jagged question after another. She was ready to run, not from Paul or the place itself or her family, but from her own abasement. Around four, she gave up and went into the kitchen. From there she could see light from the barn, which meant Bill was pulling a calf. Evelyn began to feel some relief from her self-hatred as she imagined the calf’s craving for oxygen. Then after filling a thermos with coffee, she put on her coveralls and went out to face Bill. The snow danced in the halo of the barn door.
He sat on an old car seat that he had arranged for just such vigils. An unhappy young cow was secured in the head catch, and Bill was half asleep. He said nothing as Evelyn handed him a cup of coffee and poured herself one. She sat down next to him and they watched the cow, a pair of tiny black feet projecting from her rear.
“Hadn’t moved,” he said of the feet. “How are you?”
“I’m all right, I’m fine.”
“I don’t think that calf’s comin’ on his own. I kinda dozed. Nothin’ don’t happen, I’ll pull him. Drink this coffee first, though.”
“Okay.”
“I hate to use that puller, but I can’t get at this one.”
“I’m so sorry about what happened.” Here was the disease again, and Bill sai
d nothing at all. “For what little it’s worth, that never happened before.” She knew this was just one more side of the same thing, embarrassment where rage should be. There was nothing censorious about Bill’s quiet. He never took on other people’s questions, and he always knew what to do next.
He put his cup down and got up, attached the calf puller to the protruding legs, looping its chains above both fetlocks, fitted the breech spanner to her hips, made sure the ratchet on the cable drum was pointed in the right direction, then slowly turned the crank. Once the cable had tightened, Bill tried to time his downward press to the cow’s contractions.
Finally, the calf was drawn out in its glistening caul, sliding forth in a tumble of afterbirth. The mother clanged against the restraints around her head, and Bill pulled the calf around to the side so she could see it, wet and luminous, then wiped the membrane away from its head and seal-bright eyes. “A little bull,” he said.
Alice Whitelaw brought so many covered dishes to the ranch that Evelyn and Bill worried about gaining weight, and since she periodically checked their housekeeping or did it herself, they became conscious of their sloppy habits and began doing things they had never done before, such as hanging up their coats.
Bill looked on all this with quiet amusement. Sometimes, as Alice marched around laying down the law, he remembered her as the slender girl of their courtship, that night in the Martinsdale Hotel, when she said, “Cowboy, I can beat you to the floor anytime you want to try.” Time, he thought, all it is is time. All it will ever be.
Stuart and Natalie settled their differences without a trial. After Stuart announced his engagement to Annie Elvstrom, things went quickly. They would be married in Two Dot in June. Since Natalie did not want Miss Elvstrom living in her house, now grown sacred in memory, she kept it and compensated Stuart right down to the penny. She was currently angry at Paul for saying, when she’d announced her plans for a face-lift, “Quick thinking, Natalie,” and she seemed to be acquiring a lot of hard-to-pin-down ailments including chronic fatigue syndrome, Epstein-Barr, seasonal affective disorder. She bought a light box and put travel stickers on it. Bought a cute little Audi. Sideswiped a parked car while chasing the first robin of spring.
Nobody had seen Paul for a while, and reports were scanty: he was a stamp collector, a ham radio operator, a car salesman; he’d been spotted at the Guns Galore emporium out on the interstate. Violet and Claire at Just the Two of Us assured Natalie that they had seen a section of State Road 287 with Adopt-a-Highway signs with Paul’s name on them. Donald called Evelyn to say he’d bumped into him in Helena but was in drag, testifying against a restrictive farm bill, and thought better of striking up a conversation.
Then, after a month or so, Paul began paying visits to Evelyn, but with Bill there, these remained formal. Evelyn didn’t want him on the ranch at all, and she distrusted herself in the face of his narcotic appeal. She was never unaware of the bruise on her soul, and wished he’d fall in love with anybody else.
Paul felt he was making better headway by turning his considerable skills on Bill, who never wasn’t watching him. Despite that, Paul found numerous ways of being useful, running parts and supplies out from town, revealing some surprising mechanical abilities and, more important, filing for cost-sharing and farm subsidies, which entailed hours of tedious paperwork. He began to persuade Bill that the burden of the ranch on Evelyn’s modest estate could be alleviated through imaginative forays, even beyond tapping into the federal subsidies which of late were the only real crop. Appealing to Bill’s fear—some by nature, some age-related—of being a burden, particularly on Evelyn, was a rich vein in terms of gaining Bill’s acceptance.
In observing his reliable alertness, Paul failed to understand its purpose. He explained that he was facing a difficult, very important decision that might also produce opportunities for Bill but that he had decided to leave it, if not to chance, then to Punxsutawney Phil’s forecast on Groundhog Day. When it was reported that the rodent had indeed seen his shadow, Paul packed his bags and left without further explanation.
Bill’s vigilance was rewarded when Paul called from Medicine Hat, Alberta, quite late at night. Paul was at his best and made what he clearly thought was a great case for Bill to lend a hand in bringing a boat into the States duty-free. “I knew you’d come through,” Paul said, prematurely celebrating his loss of respect for the old coot. Then after supplying the operator with further coins, he gave Bill his instructions. “It may be coming a little late in life, Pops, but I’m going to show you how the big boys make money.”
Evelyn drove Bill to the bus station, an errand she would recall for the rest of her life, as though Bill had borne the shame of her beating upon his own shoulders, believing him to be headed off to his neglectful daughter in Miles City.
But Bill rode to the High Line. He had nothing but his coat, his gloves and his worn Open Road Stetson. In his pocket a wallet contained photographs of Alice, and of Natalie and Evelyn as children, and a pair of reading glasses with only one earpiece. He didn’t speak to the other passengers and stared out at the weary landscape emerging from snow as from time to time mountain ranges rose and fell in the distance and the bus followed the wet black road north. They went through some open country that reminded him of a twenty-thousand-acre pasture without a division fence in which he’d once tended cattle. Most of the time, he had been alone with a saddle horse and had slept on the ground. The crew boss left him food the first and fifteenth of every month at the shipping corrals, but Bill never saw him do it. He was eleven years old.
He looked out of the window at low cliffs, sage-covered pastures, fences poking out of snow and enclosing nothing. Ranches looked like remote fortresses in the distance, white crowns of snow, blue shadows of road cuts. He smiled to see Angus cattle strung out and feeding toward the horizon, willows growing out of flat panels of ice. The land was wired together with telephone and electrical lines, railroad lines and highways, as if it might otherwise drift apart. Every now and then, a treeless new subdivision showed up, looking much the same as a car lot. They passed yellow stacks of lumber and a sawdust burner at a prosperous little mill. A distant, vertical plume of smoke suggested a rare, windless day.
He changed buses at Great Falls and two hours later stepped off at Havre, where three men awaited him. One a sandy-haired fat man whose face reminded Bill of a cat’s. The beetle-browed man in an old sateen jacket advertising auto-racing products never once looked at Bill and spoke only French to the third, who was small, startlingly better dressed than the others and wore a long mackintosh over a sports coat. He looked like an Asian sort of fellow. The three of them drove Bill across the Milk River, where the man with the cat’s face pointed and said, “There’s your river, monsieur. That’s how you get back to the U.S.” Bill didn’t know what he’d been told, but now he was patient as a wolf, watching the three with cold absorption. The only snow left here was in the still-filled ditch forming an enormous white worm that raced alongside the car. The second man said something in French and gestured at a ridge where antennae bristled in every direction. The natty one replied in French, and Bill joined them in gazing up at the structures, some sort of border surveillance, he assumed. All he could make out from the signs was “Alberta 880.” At Aden, they crossed the border itself without pause, and it seemed to Bill that the men exaggerated their Frenchness to produce some sort of effect on the Canadian border officer. The small, well-dressed man held all the passports and handed the guard Bill’s driver’s license.
After a short drive, they turned into a road that was little more than tracks in the sod. Their headlights picked up the ridges and the gates through fences, but the well-dressed man was hunched over the wheel, cursing incomprehensibly as they pushed through miles of badlands. Bill could no longer determine what part of the middle of the night it was, mostly aware of the cursing that had been omnipresent since he got off the bus.
At length they struck a line of cottonwood trunks blazi
ng up into the headlights. Then Paul appeared in front of them, a jack-in-the-box shielding his eyes against the glare. Bill, the last to get out of the car, hardly took his gaze off him as he chatted with the others, apparently making the acquaintance of two of them for the first time but greeting the small and dapper man with familiarity.
“Where’d you learn your French?” Paul asked.
“At my mother’s breast.”
“Bill,” said Paul, “meet Mr. Majub.”
Majub shook Bill’s hand warmly and said, “How thoughtful of you to join us.”
While the men conferred, Bill examined the boat that was drawn up on the riverbank, an oversized wooden rowboat with iron fastenings bleeding through its gray paint. From beneath tarpaulins and cargo netting drifted a sweet odor Bill had never smelled before. A pair of oars rested in their locks, and a single thwart spanned the middle of the boat.
“I’ll row first,” said Paul, clapping his hands together as he climbed aboard. Bill got in and sat facing him while the men on the beach exercised terrific caution in keeping their feet dry as they pushed the boat into the flow. Majub caught Paul’s glance and held a finger under his eye and nodded.
Bill listened to the steady creak of the oarlocks as the bright bands of headlight receded on the bank. The current underneath made the subtlest throb, and Bill’s eyes grew accustomed to the dark so that he could discern the gloomy country around them, sandstone bluffs and hoodoos divided by the dusky gleam of the river.
The Cadence of Grass Page 21