Black Angus

by Newton Thornburg

  Whit was still snuffling, but at least he was able to look at Blanchard, to nod now and then. And finally Blanchard got up and pulled the boy with him, put his arms around him for a few moments as they stood there together, and almost cried himself when the child hugged back, hugged desperately. Across the living room, in the kitchen door, Blanchard caught Susan watching them, caught her for just a moment before she turned away, her look stricken, maimed.

  “Before you go,” Blanchard said to his son, “I want you to do something for me.”

  “Sure, Dad,” the boy said. “What?”

  “Tell Tommy that you were wrong, that’s all. Tell him we’ll all be together again soon. Okay?”

  Blanchard was not able to get Susan alone for almost an hour, either by her own design or because Whit and Tommy maintained such a close and uneasy vigil over both of them. But finally he caught her out on the front porch, where she had gone to watch for her father’s arrival. It was getting close to noon.

  “Can’t wait, huh?” he said.

  She got out a cigarette and lit it. “I just want to get it over.”

  He told her that it wasn’t too late to change her mind and she countered that it wasn’t too late for him either.

  “You can still come with us,” she added.

  “I’m not sure you realize how dangerous this is.”

  “The hell I don’t.”

  “It could become a wall between us. And the longer it’s there, the harder it’ll be to knock it down.”

  “I’m not putting up any walls,” she said.

  “But you are.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Everything’s been said.”

  “Whit’s not very happy about going.”

  “Well, of course not. He wants you to come with us.”

  “Maybe he wants to stay.”

  “He hates it here, and you know it.”

  “Do I?”

  “You should.”

  “Tommy’s going to be lonely.”

  At that Susan raked him with a look of contempt. “Maybe you’ll have to take him with you nights from now on. Maybe you can find him a whore, too.”

  Blanchard realized she was only trying to get back at him, not ridicule Tommy. Nevertheless the comment left him speechless. He lit a cigarette too and for a short time joined her in her vigil, watching the blacktop where it first came into view, at the crest of the farthest hill.

  “After we get the hay up—the first break we have—I’ll come see you,” he said.

  “First things first.”

  “Naturally.”

  She turned to him, her eyes suddenly, unexpectedly, red. “Just in case you become forgetful while we’re gone,” she said, “I still love you, you know. And Whit loves you. And we’ll be waiting every day for you to come and be with us. Take care of us.”

  Blanchard took her in his arms and as a sob broke from her he felt it entering him, a common wound. He was slow to speak for fear his voice would break, and when he tried finally, it did break.

  “Please don’t go,” he got out, “Please, honey.”

  She pulled away from him, forcefully, and ran down the few steps to the lawn and started around the house, waving for him not to follow. And he understood. He knew she had to get all the cold armor back in place, shining and impervious, ready for daddy.

  The doctor arrived at a quarter past one o’clock, making do with a Ford LTD sedan that was probably the largest car he had been able to rent in Springfield, but still an embarrassing come-down from the Cadillac Fleetwoods he was used to and which he bought new each year, barely breaking them in before trading for the next model. And as always, except when he played golf, he was wearing a custom-tailored suit, this one a three-piece gray pin-stripe that decorously proclaimed both his affluence and his conservative good taste. Blanchard often asked himself if he would have disliked the man so thoroughly if he had not been Susan’s father, and the answer invariably was affirmative, for Doctor Ernest Adams Tidewell was easily the most grossly self-enamored man Blanchard had ever met. On the night of the doctor’s wife’s death from cancer six years earlier, Blanchard had tried to offer him sympathy and condolences, and was rewarded with a view of the abyss.

  “Don’t bother,” the doctor had advised him. “A surgeon sees a lot of death. And anyway Margaret and I weren’t all that close. She would have been happier with a less successful man.”

  Blanchard almost said, “How about congratulations, then?” But he bit his tongue and walked away, wondering how much of the doctor’s tainted blood flowed in his wife and son.

  Over half the artwork in the doctor’s house was devoted to portraits of himself, oil paintings and drawings and photographs, one even by the incomparable Yousuf Karsh. And the doctor thought nothing of sitting under one of them meticulously filing his fingernails while he made ex cathedra pronouncements on politics, art, sociology, anything, for there was nothing he did not know, nothing on which he was not an authority—all one had to do was ask him. His self-contentment was such that Blanchard could not even imagine the man rising from bed in the morning as any normal person would, feeling tired and beaten and foul-spirited, but rather as a television actor in a sleeping pill commercial, stretching contentedly, smiling, glowing as he rises to conquer another day.

  And this one too he conquered, but benevolently, even smiling now and then at Blanchard, asking about this and that on the ranch, how things were going—did he see a break in the cost-price squeeze, was there any light at the end of the tunnel, did the new tax shelter laws help or hurt?—all this while Blanchard and Tommy loaded the car with Susan and Whit’s luggage. Finally the doctor took Blanchard by the arm and gently walked him off a sufficient distance so they would not be overheard and proceeded to offer him all the financial help he needed—in getting out from under the ranch, in getting on his feet again, in Saint Louis. Blanchard thanked him but said he didn’t need any help, that cattle prices were coming back and that he would make out all right, it was just a question of time. The good doctor smiled coldly at that, said he was happy for him and that if things didn’t work out as he expected, the latchstring was always out in Clayton. Blanchard said he would keep that in mind.

  They returned to the car. Susan kissed Tommy good-bye, and Blanchard kissed her and Whit. And then they got into the Ford and the doors were pulled shut and the car moved away, going very slowly all the way down the hill, almost as if the doctor wanted to protract the scene, make it last for all of them as long as he could.

  Blanchard’s appointment at the Rockton bank was for two o’clock, so he had to hurry, making a quick lunch for himself and Tommy and then washing up, changing into a clean shirt and slacks. He got out the folder containing his financial documents and put it in his old attaché case. Then, instructing Tommy to stay near the house, he left for town, driving his old Chevy Malibu instead of the pickup.

  Rockton was only nine miles away, most of that distance via the highway, the main route running south from Springfield to Arkansas and beyond. But main route or not it was still just a two-lane blacktop that obligingly went straight up and over every hill it came to, which made it something of a challenge for all the truck drivers who used it and for whom time was definitely money. Coming downhill they would accumulate speeds of seventy and eighty miles an hour, a terrible and beautiful momentum they were loath to surrender to anything except gravity as they climbed the inevitable next hill. So any automobile drivers in their way, especially any foolhardy enough to obey the fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit, often wound up being steamrollered by eighteen-wheel K-Whoppers and Peterbilts.

  This day, as he drove the short distance very fast and very carefully, Blanchard again found himself thinking of three men who had not done so in the past couple of years, ranchers like himself, men who had either been so bedeviled by financial worry they had not noticed the behemoths bearing down on them from two directions or else had seen them and simply did not care. And he understood. He had been
a rancher for almost five years himself now, working in a way that big-city union laborers and salaried white-collar workers simply would not have believed. So he could understand how it might feel after a lifetime of such work, to see it all going as year after year one went on producing his only product at a loss and thus had to live on equity, borrowing from the past against the future. He could understand their inattention as the great trucks roared down upon them.

  But once again he himself made the trip safely. He drove around the quiet square to the bank, where he parked and went in. And as always in the summer the place was glacial, its thermostat set at a scrotum-shriveling seventy degrees or less, which ironically had to be at least ten degrees cooler than the bank was kept in the dead of winter, posssibly, Blanchard thought, because the management misunderstood the energy crisis, thinking it a crisis of oversupply. But then he really knew better, because “management” was the astute J. R. Gideon, a mean little weasel of a man, a born-again Baptist who liked things done his way in Rock County and was able to see to it that they were.

  When he had first come to the area and bought the ranch Blanchard had gotten a thirty-year mortgage through the bank. And ever since, to buy cattle and equipment and time, his indebtedness to Gideon had grown steadily. As Susan enjoyed pointing out, only their furniture and clothing were unencumbered by a Gideon lien. Blanchard was often hearing of other ranchers getting extensions on their loans at the bank, and he saw no reason why the same courtesy could not be accorded him. That at least was the purpose of the meeting today, on his part anyway. For Gideon he imagined it was otherwise—to receive at least partial payment on the largest note, the one secured by Blanchard’s cattle and totaling almost twenty-six thousand dollars, with accumulated interest due of over four thousand dollars. Unfortunately Blanchard did not have the money, only the cattle, of which only the yearlings were marketable. And even if they sold at the current market top of forty cents a pound, he would not have been able to cover the entire note, let alone the added interest. So, once again, he needed time.

  “He’ll be a few moments,” Gideon’s secretary said. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  Blanchard did as she suggested, angling his long frame into one of a row of plastic tube-steel chairs. And he rifled through the few magazines available: Christian Life, The Watchtower, Reader’s Digest. He picked up some flyers for coming farm auctions, wondering whether his own would soon be added to the list. Free Lunch, they read. All sales cash. Auctioneer: Billy Ray Diddle.

  When Gideon finally granted him an audience, Blanchard went in and sat down next to the banker’s desk, not missing the fact that the man had not gotten up to greet him or shake his hand. Irritated, Blanchard got out a cigarette and lit it, just as he had the first time he met the banker, but innocently then, not knowing that he would buzz his secretary and tell her to bring in an ashtray, which he did again, now. The woman hurried in and placed the object on the immaculate surface of the desk as if it were a cow-chip. Blanchard thanked her, in vain. She departed without looking at him.

  “I forgot you don’t smoke,” Blanchard said.

  “Or drink.”

  “Good habits for a banker.”

  “For any man.”

  Blanchard’s rejoinder, “Or old woman,” went unspoken, and for some reason he could not think of anything else to say, just sat there for a few moments smoking and sweating while the tiny banker steepled his hands, leaned back in his swivel chair, and pondered. On the credenza behind him were framed photographs of himself and his family: wife, children, grandchildren, all immaculate, all not smoking, not drinking. Above them hung a large reproduction of Sallman’s ethereal portrait of Jesus and on either side of that simulated wood plaques bearing verses from the Bible: For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God . . . Whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.

  “I can’t make the payment,” Blanchard blurted.

  “Can’t?”

  “That’s right. I need an extension.”

  Gideon opened a folder on his desk and examined the top document, a loan sheet, as if he were not already familiar with its contents.

  “Last year’s calves,” he said. “You’ve still got them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Long yearlings by now, ain’t they?”

  Blanchard nodded. “Seventy of them.”

  “Why don’t you sell ’em?”

  “Prices are going up. I’ve got a lot of grass. I figured it’d be better to wait till fall. More weight and a better price.”

  “Well, how much could you pay on the note? In addition to the interest, naturally.”

  “I’d rather extend the whole thing, interest and all. Say, till mid-October.”

  “The whole thing, huh?”

  “If I can.”

  Gideon looked at another page in the folder. “How about your mortgage payment? Falls due in July, I see here. You gonna be able to make that?”

  “No problem,” Blanchard lied, knowing he would probably have to sell cows to make it.

  “You still have a hired man?”

  Blanchard said he did, and Gideon made a face, as if the information caused him exquisite pain.

  “Lots of men I know run whole sections by theirself,” he said. “With their wife and kids pitchin’ in of course.”

  “My wife isn’t that strong. Or my son either.”

  “Oh? I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Blanchard said nothing for a time, waiting. Gideon took out a handkerchief and began to clean his glasses. Blanchard dragged on his cigarette and exhaled. The little man’s mouth tightened and he lifted his hand, waving the smoke away.

  “What if cattle prices go down in the fall?” he asked.

  “I don’t think they will. Nothing I read suggests they will.”

  “Nothing you read, huh? And what do you read, Mister Blanchard?”

  “In regard to cattle prices? The Farm Journal, The Cattleman, newspapers.”

  “Tell me, do you ever read the Bible?”

  Blanchard felt a sudden chill, one the tireless air conditioner had not caused. But even for money he found he could not just sit there and be bullied. “Not for market information, no,” he said.

  Gideon smiled thinly. “For any information?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “You guess?”

  “I know.”

  “Well, that’s a pity. The Good Book can be a great help, especially in time of trouble.”

  “You extend my note, Mister Gideon, and I just might not have a time of trouble.”

  Again the banker steepled his fingers and pondered. But this time he finished by shaking his head, slowly, regretfully. “I don’t know,” he said. “Frankly, I’m not sure you’re a good risk, Mister Blanchard.”

  Blanchard said nothing for a few moments, trying not to show the alarm he felt, the fear.

  “And why is that?” he said finally, putting out his cigarette.

  “Well, it ain’t just the debt you carry. Many farmers here abouts carry fairly heavy obligations, and I go along with ’em if I can. It depends on the man.”

  Blanchard’s fear was turning into anger now, a pinpoint of heat, rage, building inside the cold. “Does it now? And in what way don’t I measure up?”

  “Oh, I don’t want to go into all that.”

  “Do it anyway.”

  Gideon shrugged. “Well, let’s just say it’s intangibles—things like attitude and reputation. Now if I was ever to see you and your wife in church—any church—well, that’d be in your favor. ’Cause I’d figure then you probably was a sober, God-fearing Christian gentleman, and that’s a good thing for a farmer to be. But when I hear a man in debt—in my debt–when I hear he gallivents and carouses around, well, it has to have an effect, don’t you think so?”

  Blanchard was on his feet now, feeling sick with anger and disappointment. He longed to tell the little prig to go screw himself, but he knew that would only give him rea
son to call in the entire note.

  “How much?” he said. “How much do you want?”

  Again Gideon shrugged, the soul of generosity. “Oh, say a fourth, plus the interest. Say ten thousand.”

  “Ten thousand,” Blanchard repeated.

  “Yep.”

  “What if I can’t make it?”

  “Oh, we’re not hardnosed here, Mister Blanchard. We’ll give you thirty days before taking any action. Give you plenty of time to sell them yearlings.”

  “I see.” Blanchard stood there nodding like a fool, as if he were trying to understand some difficult road directions.

  “And the same amount every June first till you pay it off,” the banker was saying. “That sound fair enough?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “You do that.”

  As Blanchard left the bank the midday heat was like a wall falling on him, and he found himself breaking into a prickly, chilling sweat as he reached his car. He did not have ten thousand dollars. He did not have one thousand. He had enough to get through the summer, that was all, living and operating expenses, nothing more. And as for selling the yearlings, that was the last thing he wanted to do just now, for then he would have known exactly where he stood. He would have known he could not make it.

  5

  When Blanchard got back to the ranch he found Shea sitting on the front porch with Tommy, both of them holding cans of beer. Noting his brother’s silly, lopsided grin, Blanchard asked him for his can and poured it out over the edge of the porch before giving it back to him and telling him to take it to the kitchen and throw it into the trash. When he was gone, Blanchard turned on Shea.

  “That was pretty stupid,” he said.

  “What harm could it do? A can of beer?”

  “He’s retarded, remember?”

  “So?”

  “So he has a hard enough time dealing with life sober, let alone drunk.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Don’t do it again.”