Black Angus

by Newton Thornburg

  Within a short time Ronda was asleep, lying with her head on his shoulder and her every breath blowing coolly through the hair on his chest. For him, however, sleep would not come. Vampirelike, his mind rose to raging life in the darkness and silence. He thought of Susan and how totally he had betrayed her, betrayed her not only in her own home but in their child’s very bed, almost as a symbolic act, a calculated negation of the relationship that had produced the child in the first place. But even more he thought how strange it was that he felt no remorse or regret over the betrayal, only a kind of awed sense of wonderment at the fickleness of men, the moral resilience of the species, for he knew through experience and observation that his reaction was the norm, that a sense of guilt was among the rarest of human emotions, that men and women daily rationalized everything from petty rudeness to brutal crime without batting an eye or missing a meal. And in this case, the “crime” after all was only sex, a natural act, an act of love, and thus actually the antithesis of crime. So he felt no real guilt over it, nothing in fact but a slight sense of puzzlement at its intensity, how deeply he had felt he loved the girl, at least then, joined, one.

  But his mind wandered in that direction only briefly, for what really mattered to him lay outside the bedroom’s open windows, in the land stretching out from the house in every direction, moonlit fields where even now his cattle were grazing in the cool night air. Six hundred acres it was, almost a section, almost a mile square, woods and pastures and streams and hills, and all of it his in his mind, his in spite of the mortgage and bank loans against it, his simply because of all the sweat and muscle and heart he had put into it over the years, the fields he had cleared of brush and rock and then reseeded, the ponds he had built, the barns and corrals he had repaired, the fences he had put in, the endless postholes dug laboriously in solid rock; and his too because of the cattle, the cows that had been calved right on the place during his first two years, wet, shaky, spindle-legged things which their mothers kept moving each day, hiding them in the tall spring grass just as they in turn now were hiding their own young. And he tried to think what it was the ranch meant to him, why losing it would somehow be like dying, and he realized that had been his reason for coming here in the first place, as a choice of life over death, because he had come to believe that the world he inhabited—the comfortable suburban house and the posh downtown office building with its smart satellite bars and restaurants—was not real, that the real world was in between those twin poles of home and work, and that that particular world was dying, was a wasteland, a wilderness of crime and poverty and misery, and there was nothing to be done about it, no act of individual or government will that seemed able to reverse or even slow the process of its dying, nothing at all one could do except possibly recognize the invalid paradox of his existence, that each day he commuted through the valley of the shadow, that his route to life was via the fields of death.

  At the time, however, all of this was only a vaguely held notion of his, a sense of something out of joint, a reality he perceived more in retrospect than when he was actually there and part of it. Then, his main perception had been of a frustration and anger he could not comprehend, knowing only that he hated to get out of bed each day, hated to go to the office and hated what he did there all day long, and then hated going home to an evening of television or a cocktail party or some movie or play that Susan simply had to see. In fact it had gotten to the point where the only times he seemed to enjoy himself were on field trips related to the ag accounts he handled, days spent with farmers and ranchers who used Ambor nitrogen fertilizers or Gardner animal health products and from whom Darling wanted to get testimonials for use in future trade magazine ads. And Blanchard had not failed to feel the vast difference between himself and these men, their solidity and vitality and, yes, happiness. They seemed to know something, to have something, that he did not. So finally he had begun to talk to Susan about it, this difference, and about his general dissatisfaction—only to learn that she was no less unhappy than he, was increasingly disenchanted with the agency and advertising and even Saint Louis, which she called an old river whore, a hustler with terminal V.D. He had known Susan was bitter at having been passed over for the job of broadcast department chief when that position had opened up. But that was not her problem, she insisted. Rather it was the same as his, a fundamental discontent with their way of life, all the busyness, the pressure, the lack of time and quiet in which to repossess their souls. And so they had begun, casually at first, to read the farm listings in the Sunday paper and then later they started to send away for farm catalogues, even though they had no money to speak of, somehow managing every month to spend their entire combined salaries. And of course Susan’s father would not have considered funding an enterprise that would have taken his daughter farther away from him than she already was.

  It was then, unexpectedly, that Blanchard’s mother died—and just as unexpectedly left him seventy thousand dollars in her will. Widowed in 1943, she had owned and operated a small dress shop in Bloomington, Illinois ever since, often working from nine to nine each day while Blanchard and Tommy had been left in the capable hands of old Emma, a stout Polish housekeeper who was more than happy to serve as their surrogate mother as well, and finally as Tommy’s alone, after Blanchard left for college and then marriage and what he had thought would become a career.

  Tommy had been brain-damaged during delivery, a breech birth that occurred just two days after the government notified their mother that her husband, Captain Robert Blanchard, Sr., was missing in action and presumed dead, shot down over Nazi Germany in the B-17 Flying Fortress he commanded. Blanchard had a vague memory of the man home on furlough once, mostly a pair of gray, sharply creased trousers breaking over knees which stood at eye level. That was all he had, and he figured that was about all his mother had too, a few memories, plus enough government life insurance to start a small business. So it had never occurred to him to question her commitment to that business, just as it had never occurred to him that she would leave much of an estate behind her. But she had. And Blanchard had used it, what was left after taxes, plus the small equity he had in his Creve Coeur house—used it to buy the ranch and his foundation herd, to find for all of them, himself and Susan and Whit and Tommy, a way of life outside the rings of death and guilt and boredom, a life of honest work and earned peace.

  And now he had—ashes. He had a missing wife and son. He had debts he could not pay. He had fields of cattle he could not sell. He had nothing really except Tommy and the cool firm flesh still pressed against him in the dark, the soft breath still singing in the hairs of his chest. Gently he worked his arm and shoulder out from under her and got up. He found his cigarettes and lighter on the bedtable and padded out through the bedroom’s screen door onto the catwalk that ran along the front of the house. Lighting a cigarette he gingerly edged one buttock onto the old wood railing and sat there trying to see his cattle in the darkness, on the broad hill as it fell away to the distant road. And only as his eyes grew more accustomed to this new darkness, somehow different from that inside the bedroom, was he able to make them out, most of them clustered in the trees near the front pond but a number of others scattered across the field, grazing the moonlit grass. And as subtly as a virus invading one of his body’s cells, Shea’s idea crossed his mind, and crossed again. Of course he would not do it, could not do it, simply because he was not a criminal. But he did have to admit finding a certain appeal in the idea, an intriguing symmetry of practicality and poetic justice, paying off the sanctimonious Gideon through crime. It was a symmetry he would have to do without, however, because he was what he was, one of Shea’s irredeemable middle-class pissants.

  Behind him the screen door squeaked open and then she was next to him, naked as he was.

  “Come back to bed,” she said, putting her arms around him. “You need your sleep. I’ll give you a massage.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Not if you’re putting up
hay tomorrow. You should be in bed.”

  “I’ve got things to think about.”

  “Like what?”

  “Bang’s and bank notes.”

  “It’ll work out.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “You’ll find a way.”

  “Shea’s way maybe.”

  “No, not that. I won’t let you.”

  “Why not?”

  In answer she laid her face against his back and hugged him tighter.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally.

  Blanchard turned slowly in her arms. And he kissed her again, lightly at first, then as he had earlier in bed, as if he were only now discovering the act. Then, placing his hands under her buttocks, he stood and lifted her onto his body, and her legs locked around him. Carrying her that way, he went back into the bedroom. This night he did not care if he ever slept.

  6

  By ten the next morning, Blanchard, on the small Ford tractor, had begun raking the mowed fescue into windrows. Behind him came Clarence on the baler, and behind Clarence the haybucking crew: two teenage boys throwing the bales up to a third who would stack them on the huge lowboy wagon pulled by old man Russell in his air-conditioned cab tractor, one of the few in the county. As Blanchard moved back and forth past the crew he felt a touch of sympathy for the youths, knowing what hard and dirty work haybucking was in the ninety-degree heat. But he also knew that as teenagers they were happy just to have a job, so it was a feeling he was able to live with. In no way did it lessen the pleasure he took in raking the hay, which was probably his favorite of all the jobs he had to perform on the ranch in the course of a year. Where baling was slow and noisy and tedious, with the old machine breaking down often enough to require the expert mechanical hand of a Clarence, raking was fast and simple, somehow similar to sailing, that clean and quiet, with the neat, endless windrow forming steadily behind, like a wake of grass.

  In addition it was a job that required almost no thought, leaving his mind free to flow in other directions. But on this day it seemed that every direction led only to a dead end, some problem immune to solution, so he concentrated on the hay itself and the windrow, trying to make it as perfect as he could. It was only when he completed a round and passed Tommy sitting in the the shade of the pickup that he would break his concentration, wave back at him or make a face, smile, somehow acknowledge the joy his brother exhibited each time he went by. And then for the rest of that straight-away, before he had to turn, he would find himself thinking of Tommy and what it would do to him if they lost the ranch.

  For thirty of his thirty-four years his brother had lived with their mother and old Emma, who had given him probably as much love and care as any one person could have. Nevertheless his life had been a severely restricted one, toys and television and playing in the park when the normal children were in school, with the result that when their mother died and Blanchard and Susan had brought him to Saint Louis to live with them—Emma having announced that she herself had to be cared for, and would soon be entering a Catholic nursing home—Tommy had seemed not just retarded but stunted, crippled by life as much as by birth. As such, he had been a considerable factor in their decision to leave Saint Louis finally and to buy the ranch, because they had believed it would offer him a freedom almost no other environment could. And from the outset he had proved them right. The sudden, almost limitless space, the animals and machinery and activity, and of course being in a family with Susan and Whit and Blanchard—all of it must have expanded his world like a nuclear reaction. Almost immediately he had begun to come out of himself, losing that timidity which at times had seemed almost paralytic. He became like a child, eager and tireless, playing and watching and dreaming through the teeming days. And he had gone on that way, improving steadily until the past year, when it must have become obvious even to him that things were not as they once had been, that all the early zest and happiness had slowly gone out of all of them. So he had changed too, acquiring a look of anxiety and bewilderment, even as he helped Blanchard or played with his tote bag toys. Nevertheless he was still better than when they had first come to the ranch. If he were to lose it all, however, if he were to have to leave his six-hundred-acre world, with his beloved Blackie and Kitty and Spot, Blanchard had no confidence that his brother would survive the experience without slipping back altogether into that small, dark, fearful world he had left behind in Bloomington.

  But then that was life, Blanchard reminded himself. He would not likely come out of the adventure as the same man either.

  At the end of the field he carefully guided the tractor and rake through the corner and then the next one and started back, with the length of the field ahead of him. And as he bumped along, with the sun lying hot upon him and shimmering in the cut hay ahead, he suddenly saw himself back in Saint Louis, at Darling, sitting at his old desk in his old office, and for the first time that morning the windrow behind him wandered out of line, almost intersecting the one made on the last pass.

  At noon, as Clarence and the haybucking crew broke for lunch, Blanchard drove Tommy back to the house and threw together a lunch of leftover chicken, cold cuts, bread, and apples. Shea was in the living room. Still wearing only his chinos, he had set up camp in Blanchard’s easy chair, with the inevitable can of beer in one hand and the other plundering a bag of potato chips as he sat watching an Arkansas version of television news. Every so often he would whoop with laughter, and Blanchard did not have to wonder why, for he could well remember his own and Susan’s disbelief when they first came to the area and viewed the locally produced shows and commercials, especially those of car dealers who could neither resist the glamor of performing on television nor overcome their terror at doing so. It was a folksy terror, however:

  “Naow, y’all come daown and see us, heah? We gitcha a deal you jist cain’t not refuse, no way, no sir, no haow.”

  Blanchard did not bother to ask Shea to join them for lunch; the sink indicated that he already had more than taken care of his nutritional requirements for the day. There was a dirty skillet, the broken shells of a half-dozen eggs, an empty bacon package, an equally empty fruit juice pitcher, and half a loaf of whole wheat bread, which had been almost full that morning. As if to compensate for their guest’s prodigality, Tommy ate very little. He was too excited.

  “Boy, Blackie sure gonna have lots of hay next winter. He won’t be hungry, will he, Bob?”

  “No sir.”

  “He have all he wants to eat, all the time.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And them little guys, they sure strong, ain’t they, Bob?” He was much impressed with Russell’s teenagers, all smaller than he was but still able to throw the hay bales high up onto the wagon, often well over their heads.

  “Of course, they’re strong,” Blanchard said. “That’s why we hired ’em.”

  Tommy thought about that for a while, then he grinned, liking the idea. “That’s right. That’s why we hired ’em.”

  Blanchard got up to get a glass of water. Through the window over the sink he saw a car turn in at his gate down the hill, a car with a red domelight.

  “Sure enough, that’s why we hired ’em,” he repeated, going on into the living room.

  “Where’s your car parked?” he asked Shea.

  “Around the back. Why?”

  “Somebody’s coming up. The sheriff, it looks like, or one of his deputies. You better get upstairs.”

  “You got a point. Wonder what the hell they want.”

  “Yeah, I wonder.”

  Carrying his beer, Shea ran up the stairs so fast the house shook. Blanchard went out onto the front porch and lit a cigarette as the car pulled into the circle and stopped. The officer was slow getting out, a tall, heavy, balding man with the broad butt and potbelly endemic to his profession, evidently an occupational hazard. Hitching up his belt and holster, he came slowly up the short walk, grinning with his teeth. His eyes, hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, kept
their own counsel.

  “Howdy there, I’m Sheriff Hume,” he said. “Only been in office a few months, so there’s still lots of folks I don’t know.”

  Blanchard shook his hand. “I’m Bob Blanchard.”

  “Well then, you’re just the man I want to see.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, just some little old business, won’t take but a minute. I imagine you’re a purty busy man, with a spread like this.”

  “We’re making hay today,” Blanchard said.

  “That’s the ticket. Make it while the old sun shines, huh?”

  “I was just getting ready to go back out.”

  But the sheriff was not to be hurried. He hitched up his belt again and slowly looked about him, as if for some specific object. Evidendy not finding it, he turned his head and spat into the grass.

  “Uh, you know a man named Shea?” he asked.

  “Yeah. He’s an old friend of mine, from Saint Louis.”

  “He been visitin’ you lately?”

  Blanchard nodded. “He left the night before last.”

  “Oh yeah, I heard about that night.” The sheriff grinned again. “Understand he just about knocked down the whole Sweet Crick tavern.”

  “It was an accident. He’s a pretty big man.”

  “That’s what I hear. And I also hear he got his ass whupped afterwards.”

  “I guess that’s why he left.”

  “Wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Anyway, if he’s took off, then it’s out of my hands. I’ll just have to let some other peace officer somewheres else worry about him.”