It was past the middle of the morning before we had a real breakdown, but when it came it was a good one. Three cows got to crawling on top of one another in the chute and busted one fence to smithereens. Once it was busted there wasn’t anything we could do but stop and fix it, and that took till nearly dinnertime. So when we went up to eat we hadn’t even finished with the cows, and had all the calves and yearlings to work that afternoon. We ate quick and started in again, in the white heat of twelve-thirty. I was loggy, too full of ice tea and pie, and it got me into trouble. We had the crowding pen almost empty, just one old cow left in it. She was a thin line-backed hussy, with one horn broken off and a long string of foamy slobber hanging from her chin; nothing we could do would make her take the chute. We surrounded her and finally she stuck her head in like she meant to go. When she did I run up behind her to shut the gate. Then she turned back through herself like a bobcat and went charging down the west wall of the pen. As she went by me she threw out a big cracked hoof, and I spun away from it like I had from a thousand others. Only I spun a fraction too slow, and it caught me on the hip. All I felt was a shove, and a splat on my chaps. When I tuned in on things again I was outside the pen, sitting with my back against the red plank railing of the scales, and Granddad was wiping my forehead with a piece of wet cotton he had got from one of the vets. Inside the pens the dust was still swirling.
“You all right, son?” Granddad asked me. He poured some cold water over the cotton and rubbed my head. “She kicked you into the fence,” he said. “You skint your head a little on the pipe.”
He seemed to think I would survive, because he handed me the cotton and went back to the head of the chute. My head was throbbing a little, but my hip wasn’t sore. While I was trying to make up my mind to get up, Mr. Burris came and knelt down by the water can to pour himself a drink.
“Boy, you caught a lick,” he said, smiling at me. “That woulda killed an old man like me.”
I didn’t feel very talkative, so I just nodded and gave a kind of sickly grin. He sat there a minute, trying to be friendly, but neither of us could think of anything to say. Finally he put the lid back on the water can and left, and I got up and went back to the crowding pen. I knew the cowboys would be on me for a week if I quit work because of a little skint head.
And I could have worked anywhere but in that crowding pen, heat or skint head or not. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon, hellish hot weather, and all of us were sweat and dust over sweat, and more sweat trickling through the fresh coat of dust. Little branches and creeks and streams of sweat ran out from under our shirtsleeves and hatbands, and there were dark muddy brown spots in the circles of dirt under our eyes. The pen was like a sand pile with a monstrous fan in the bottom, blowing the sand up into our faces; then when it got so high the hot south wind blew it back down our necks. We were working the heifers by then, all of them scary as antelope and about as wild. Lonzo had got his hands on an electric hotshot, and the way he was jobbing the heifers could have got us all killed; it just made the cattle spin and kick that much worse. After about an hour of sucking in dirt and spitting mud I got sick to my stomach, and while we were bringing in a new penful of calves my dinner came up in a burning gush, most of it through my nose. I gagged and gagged, and my head kept throbbing, the sweat that stung the raw place just making it worse. I started to go back in the pen, and then I thought fuck it and went to the house, the weak trembles so bad in my legs I was afraid I was going to flop in the path, right there in the red ants and chickenshit.
When I hobbled in the back door, Halmea was in the kitchen rolling out a piecrust. She took one look at me and came over and grabbed my arm.
“Honey, you’s white as a sheet,” she said. “Sit down heah.”
“Leave me alone,” I said. “No wonder I’m white, you got flour all over me.”
“Okay,” she said, turning me loose. “Go splat on de flooah, see who picks you up.” I saw her brush her hair back with one hand, leaving a white streak of flour across her forehead. I went on up the stairs and flopped on my counterpane, feeling sick and sleepy. My room was hot as a cookstove, and in a little while I came out of a doze, lathering in a pool of my own sweat, my head about to crack open. In the white, still heat I could hear the cattle bawling from the lots. I thought how much better it would have been if we’d ridden that day—at least, riding, there were breezes along the ridgetops, and the sweat cooled as it trickled down your ribs. In the bed it was close and sticky. I dozed again, still conscious of the oven of heat, and the constant pulsing in my temples. Then I looked up and Halmea was in the room; she was setting something on my little bedside table. I saw her through a dozy haze, standing over me, the white band of flour on her forehead moistened with sweat and running a little. She said something that I didn’t understand, and stooped to feel my forehead with her cool hand. When she stooped I saw part of her breasts. I didn’t say anything, and in a minute she left the room. I raised up and found a big glass of sweetened lemonade on my table, the sugar just settling to the bottom. The cold glass was sweating, and the lemonade was pale, full of thin chips of ice. I sat up and drank it slowly, sipping the sweetened juice and spitting the white seeds across the room in the direction of the wastebasket. Then I fished out the thin, melting slivers of ice and sucked them one at a time, to make them last. I thought how much nicer it was to be drinking Halmea’s lemonade than to be chowsing cattle in the dusty pens. Halmea was good about some things; she was good, period. If she was in the mood she would take care of you whether you wanted her to or not. Right then I liked her as well or better than almost anyone I knew. As I sucked the ice, I thought of her in my room, remembering the white on her forehead and the dark slope of her breasts against her seersucker dress. When I had finished the ice I let the sugared water in the bottom of the glass slide over my tongue, and then I sat the glass on the table and slept again, a longer, cooler sleep.
2.
Granddad’s hand on my shoulder woke me. The yard was shadowy with twilight, and at first I thought I had slept on through the night. “Don’t you want some supper, son?” he asked. He was sitting on the thrown-back quilt that lay across the foot of my bed. From the mask of muddy dust on his face I knew he had just come from the lots. “Get up an’ wash an’ eat a bite,” he said. “You’ll feel better.” His voice was tired and slow, but powerful with feeling, and he lifted one of his stubby hands from the quilt and ran it through his stiff dusty hair. I looked out the window, into the evening. Three scissortails were chasing a raggedy-winged old crow across the sky. The horizon to the west was still rosy, but the sun was long gone for that day. Granddad stood up, and I saw that the sweat of the long day had soaked through his Levi’s and darkened the leather of his wide, hand-made belt. “Pretty evenin’, but it was a shitter of a day,” he said. “Hud and his momma ought to be in before too long.” He left, and I sat up in bed, tired from sleeping too long.
By the time I got downstairs, full dark had come to the plains. I stood on the back porch a minute, smelling the grassy evening smells of the country. Jesse and Lonzo were eating when I went in. They were too worked down to do much more than nod. Halmea came in with a stewer full of cold apricot preserves. “You alive, or is you a ghost?” she said.
“I bet his appetite’d be the last thing to die,” Granddad said. I was pretty hungry, but I didn’t feel like talking. Lonzo was so tired he kept dozing off with his coffee cup halfway to his mouth, and sloshing coffee on his wrists. He stumbled off to the bunkhouse right after supper, but me and Jesse went out and set on the cellar while Jesse smoked.
“You pretty tired?” I said.
“You better believe it,” he said. “I can’t take work like I used to, Rodeoin’ so long got me outa shape for anything else. I’m too tired even to sleep. Maybe if I sit here a minute I can get up the energy to go to bed.”
“How is it rodeoin’?” I said. “Isn’t it pretty excitin’?”
He lit another cigarette a
nd shook out the match. “For a while it’s excitin’,” he said. “Then it just gets to be work. It ain’t like workin’ out here, plain cowboyin’, but it’s still work.”
I was hoping he’d go on and tell me about some of his high times, but he didn’t seem like he wanted to talk. Jesse was that way. Whenever I was just aching for him to talk, he wouldn’t say two words. It was when I’d just as soon be quiet and think that he thought of so many things to tell. I guess we coulda been wonderful friends if we coulda got together at the right times a little more often.
We sat on the sloping stone roof of the cellar and were quiet. The moon was above us to the southwest, like a round white slice of pear. I could hear rock ‘n’ roll music from the kitchen radio, just loud enough that I could enjoy it without especially listening. In a few minutes the light clicked out in the kitchen and I heard the slap of Halmea’s loose sandals on the concrete of the back porch. She stopped in the yard and stood in front of us, still tapping one foot to the turned-off music.
“You-all come play me some checkahs,” she said. “Some marble checkahs. Come on, Lonnie, you fresh outa anything to do.”
“Okay,” I said, standing up. “Sure, I’ll come clean your plow.” She asked Jesse to come too, but he stomped out his cigarette and shook his head.
“I couldn’t even see the marble holes, I’m so tired,” he said. The three of us walked out of the yard, down the trail toward the bunk-house. The trail was a pale rope of light between the dark patches of weeds. The old cows had been driven back to the pastures, and there was no bawling that night, just the singing crickets.
“Last time I played checkers was before my Grandpa died,” Jesse said.
“I enjoy playin’ dis Chinese,” Halmea said. She was afraid of snakes, walking so close to me that she stepped on my heels about every yard or so. “I gets tiredsome workin’ all de time.”
We weren’t even to Halmea’s cabin when I heard the roar of a car on the dirt road. “Whoa,” I said. “Guess who’s comin’ now?” I could almost see Hud gunning the Lincoln over the graded road. Granny would be sitting up straight as a poker in the seat, waiting to tear into us.
“I might know,” Halmea said. “Be no checkah playin’ tonight. I bettah least get de coffeepot on.” She turned and started quickly back toward the house.
“Maybe the operation will slow the old lady down a little,” Jesse said. “Make her ease up.”
Up the trail, Halmea heard what he said, and her quick deep laugh came back to us through the darkness. “She didn’t have any operation,” I said. “It was all just in her mind to begin with. She complained so much Granddad decided to send her down for a put-up treatment. All they did was put her to sleep and take a few fake stitches. She’s no worse off than she’s ever been.”
“Well, I’ve heard ’em all, now,” Jesse said. “I sure nough better get some sleep.”
I stood in the dark, listening to the sound of the car. I heard the pipes on the cattle guard rattle; Hud must have hit it doing about sixty-five. The car lights lashed against the trees in the back yard, and he hit the brakes and burned gravel right up to the gate. By the time I got to the car Hud had Grandma out and was carrying her through the back yard, her fussing ever step of the way. I loaded myself with boxes and kicked the car door shut; the radio was still on, but I would have had to set my load down to turn it off. Hud met me at the back door, his old self. He was chewing a toothpick to splinters, and his tangled black hair looked like it hadn’t been combed since he left.
“Time you got here,” he said. “Ma wants a nightgown outa one a them boxes; you better take it to her. She thinks she’s done a hard day’s work, sittin’ on her butt talkin’ a blue streak for three hundred miles.”
I stumbled on into the kitchen with my load, but I almost dropped it when I saw Halmea. She was bent over the kitchen table, crying, the tears running down her wrists and dripping onto the white oilcloth. I was so surprised I didn’t stop, I went on to Grandma’s room, wondering what in the world had happened to spoil Halmea’s good mood. Granny was sitting on the edge of her bed, fanning and talking out loud to herself.
“Sit them luggages down,” she said. “Get me my blue sleepers outa that yeller box. I got to get still befo’ this heat an’ all gives me a relapse.” She was tickled to death to have me to talk at. “Never in my life was I in anything like that hospital,” she said. “Them places is just one sin right after another. A person’d be better off just to stay home an’ trust in the Lord.” I wasn’t finding any blue sleepers, and I was wanting to go see what had happened to Halmea. Granny never let up. “One a them nurses, tryin’ to undress me bare as a baby with menfolks in the room, I told that hussy. Shame an’ disgrace.” I finally found a gray nightgown in another box, and I pitched it to her.
“Where I told you to look in the first place,” she said.
Halmea was still sitting at the table, wiping her eyes with a soggy paper napkin. She was holding her breast with one hand. When she saw me come in she dropped her hand and looked down. Every second or two her chest would jerk, like she had the hiccups. There was beans and meat on the table for Hud, but he wasn’t there.
“What’s the matter, Halmea?” I said. “You want me to go get you anything?”
She shook her head, her eyes filling up and her mouth quivering. “If dey was, it’d be a gun,” she said, her voice shaky. She wouldn’t say another word. I saw she just wanted me to get out, so I left.
There was a light flashing in the front yard and I went around to see about it. It was Hud, poking around under the hood of his convertible with the big flashlight. He was whistling “The Wabash Cannonball,” and fiddling with his fan belt.
“Here,” he said. “Hold this light a minute. I want to check them batteries.”
“Did you see what was the matter with Halmea?” I said. “She wasn’t crying when you-all came in, was she?”
“Let me have the light,” he said. When I handed it to him he suddenly shined it right in my eyes, so I had to turn my head. Then he slammed the hood with both hands.
“Naw, she wasn’t bawlin’ when I went in,” he said. “I gave her a little tittie squeeze. I guess you’re old enough to know how that is, ain’t you? A man gets to wantin’ a little chocolate milk.” He got behind the wheel and began to turn the engine over.
I walked around to his window, feeling helpless and mad at the same time. “Goddamn you,” I said. “Don’t you do that no more.”
He snickered. “Fuck off,” he said. “You ain’t got no private milkin’ rights.”
He leaned his head out the window and let his motor idle. Neither one of us said anything. “Let me tell you something,” he said in a minute. “I heard about this big cattle inspection you-all had today. Me an’ that Grandpa a yours is goin’ round and round one a these days, and I ain’t gonna be the one that get’s dizzy.” He threw the car in gear suddenly and whipped out onto the road. Before he drove off he laughed and gave me the finger.
I went to the Lincoln and drove it into its shed. Then I got out and set on its back fender awhile, trying to decide what to do about Halmea. I wanted to cheer her up some way, but I probably couldn’t manage it if I tried. It wasn’t such a dark night, but a lot of small clouds were racing beneath the stars like greyhounds, pushed along by the high south wind. I was half in the mood to go to Thalia, but I didn’t.
Finally I walked down to Halmea’s shack. It was dark inside, but I didn’t figure she was asleep. I stood in front of her door for a few minutes, hoping she would see me through the screen and say something. When I saw she wasn’t going to, I walked around to her window. Ever minute or so the moon would come clear between the sliding clouds, and the moonlight shone pale and floury over the shack wall and the whole ranch yard. Her bed was pushed right up against the window screen, and I could make out the whiteness of her cotton nightgown. Ordinarily it would have set me on fire, seeing her on a bed, but then I didn’t feel that way. “Halmea,” I whispe
red. I whispered several times, but I had to say it louder before she heard me.
“Who out dere?” she said.
“Me,” I said. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“What you want?” she said. She didn’t sound particularly friendly.
“Just to say much obliged for the lemonade,” I said. That hadn’t occurred to me till that minute, but it sounded good, “That was all.”
She didn’t say anything for a minute, and then she chuckled and rolled over. “Okay,” she said. “Much oblige fo’ you goin’ on about you rat-killin’ and lettin’ me sleep.”
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