Dr Eliot answered for himself, ‘I’m part of a USDA surveillance program. Until further notice, you cannot sell any cattle from this herd. I’ll report my findings to the Department and they will contact you shortly. Meanwhile, I have some suggestions for you and your family. We aren’t sure whether, or how, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease among humans is related to BSE.’ Sander was walking toward the house and heard Dr Eliot warn him to dispose of any beef in the freezers.
Inside, Jo said, ‘Is that Dr Craig’s truck?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Who’s that with him?’
‘Some English guy. Where’s dad?’
‘Taking up some grass in the front yard so I can have an herb garden. Allie went to the grocery store for me.’
Sander walked out the front door. He heard Dalton grunting on the side of the house opposite the driveway. He walked around and saw the sod was cut from the base of a pin oak. The tree was about ten inches in diameter, one they had been talking about trimming back because the branches scraped paint off the eaves when a hard wind blew. It now leaned away from the house at a forty-five degree angle. Dalton’s head was down, both arms straightened against the trunk, pushing the tree. With each shove, the tree swayed and groaned.
‘What’re you doing?’
‘Your mamma wanted to keep this if we could,’ Dalton panted. ‘But I dug down and saw its roots are heaving the foundation.’ He took a rag from his back pocket and wiped his forehead. ‘It’s got to go.’
‘Did you cut the roots going under the house?’
‘Yeah. Let me take care of this. What’s up?’
‘We need to talk. Seth was just here.’
‘Let’s go inside,’ said Dalton. ‘I need a drink. It’s hot today, huh?’
‘I guess.’ Sander let his dad walk past. ‘Give me a minute to get the guys working on something else. I’ll be right in.’
When Dalton disappeared around the corner of the house, Sander looked up to the top of the tree. It was about thirty feet tall, a healthy canopy, and he hated to see it leaning. He looked at the hole his dad had been straddling. The roots were severed on the house side. The axe lay in the grass beside a shovel. He circled the oak and rubbed his palm on the bark, cold to the touch and moist. He felt sorry for the tree. Or something. He felt deeply sorry for something.
He crouched under the trunk on the leaning side, braced it on his shoulder and stood up. A rapid series of pops and great clods of red dirt came out of the hole. Sander walked a few yards with it, then dropped the tree to the ground and went inside.
Dalton said, ‘Your mom told me Seth had an Englishman with him.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Fee! Fie! Foe–’ That’s all Dalton could get out before he looked at Jo and started laughing again.
Sander was glad to see him in such a good mood. He hated to spoil it, but waiting with this news wouldn’t help matters. ‘We’ve got a problem with the herd.’
‘What is it?’
‘Something called BSE. It’s a brain disease. Seth thinks those heifers have it. The fella who came with him is some sort of expert. He’s working for the USDA.’
‘The Englishman?’
‘Yeah, dad.’ He let go a barely perceptible smile. ‘The Englishman.’
‘Well, you’ve got to be able to handle this sort of thing.’ He pulled Jo to him with both arms. ‘I have herb gardens to plant!’
‘It’s serious.’
‘Trust Seth,’ Dalton told him. ‘Whatever he says we need to do. Vaccinations or what?’
‘No. There’s no treatment.’
‘So we’re gonna lose the heifers?’
‘All but one are nearly dead already. The um ... This fella says the USDA will be in touch.’ Sander shook his head. ‘The whole herd is quarantined.’
‘Do what?’
‘It’s the feed. The protein supplement, there’s evidently something in the supplements I ordered from over there.’
‘It gave this disease to the whole damned herd?’
‘I don’t know. They don’t know for sure. It’s just what he said.’
Jo sat with them and Sander told everything he’d gleaned from Seth and Dr Eliot, but there wasn’t much more to say. When he got to the part about the meat in the freezer, Jo spoke up.
‘There’s nothing wrong with that meat. Did you tell him we’ve been eating it and there’s nothing wrong with us? There’s nothing wrong with that meat.’
‘I didn’t, mamma. I’m assuming the people from the Department will tell us what to do next.’
‘And we can’t sell any until they do,’ Dalton said. Then he asked, ‘Are there any others showing symptoms of this thing?’
‘Not that I saw.’
‘How much will it cost to test the whole herd?’
‘There’s no test. That’s what Dr Eliot says. I figure there has to be. I want to talk to the USDA people and find out what they know.’
Jo came to bed sometime after midnight. Dalton stared at the ceiling.
‘What did God say?’ he asked her.
‘Nothing. Either He wasn’t listening or I made Him mad. I sort of blamed Him. Still do.’
‘Is that wise?’
‘It’s Him or my boy.’
Sander and Allie had retired to their bedroom after dinner. She had more questions than he had information about this thing. He patiently repeated ‘I don’t know’ until she’d exhausted nearly all avenues.
She asked, ‘Is it my papa’s fault?’
‘Partly.’
‘Is it your fault?’
‘Yes.’
Jo and Allie were on eggshells the following morning. Neither knew what to say to her man. They weren’t even talking much to each other. Jack Loren from the USDA showed up as they finished breakfast. He brought another man along who evidently spoke for the higher-ups at the Food and Drug Administration, but had no business card.
Allie invited the men in and sat them at the dinner table. They said they’d each have a coffee, but no food. Sander excused himself briefly to dismiss the hands who’d shown up for work and were mumbling in a tight circle at the yard gate. He asked Javier to stick around until the last hand arrived for the morning and tell him he had the day off as well.
Back inside, the FDA man was passing out brochures on Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, called CJD, even though this guy insisted on pronouncing it ‘Yay-kub.’ It was, he said, the human version of what was happening to the cattle, transmissible through BSE infected beef. The text was stupefying in its naked horror. Insomnia, personality changes, blindness, dementia, memory failure, involuntary muscle jerks, and coma. The progression marched onward like time itself and there was no cure. Everyone died. This was meant, Sander concluded, to scare his mom into disposing of three freezers of meat. It had another purpose in Loren’s orderly presentation, to be revealed momentarily.
Jack Loren said, ‘We will need those infected heifers for autopsy.’ Then he asked Dalton, ‘Do you have livestock insurance for the rest of the herd?’
Dalton looked to Sander, who nodded. Thus, Mr Loren began addressing Sander. ‘They won’t pay for disposal. I know. I used to be an underwriter. It’s alright, though. The Department will conduct that operation in the name of public health. The USDA will pay you fair market value for the beef by weight, but nothing for breeding stock value or loss of profit. That’s where your insurance should kick in.’
Jo said, ‘Wait a minute. You can’t waltz in here and tell us, just tell us that we have to ... You can’t just destroy the whole herd.’
‘Yes ma’am, we can. But you don’t want to do it like that, under government order. I’ll tell you why. If you’re properly insured, you’ll recover your investment in the herd sires and brood cows. Dr Craig says you’ve stored semen and we have no reason to believe it presents any threat. We’ll expunge the BSE from your land, destroy the culprit feed, and there’ll never be a USDA ban or recall on Grant Beef. From the timeline your son provided to Dr Eliot, it seems you haven’
t sold any potentially contaminated meat so far this year – that would be cattle over the age of thirty months.’ He turned to Sander, ‘Have you?’
‘No.’
‘Good. The disease normally doesn’t show itself or, as far as we know, become transmissible until after three years of age. That’s probably why you have so few symptomatic cattle. After we dispose of the present stock, hopefully you can start again.’
‘How do you know there’s any more sick ones, then?’ Jo demanded.
Mr Loren thought out his response before speaking. When he did, he addressed everyone, Allie included, and he decided to go back to his point regarding the future, instead of arguing scientific jargon with them. He was well trained.
‘Doing it my way, voluntary destruction of the herd, keeps this out of the papers. The Grant name is untarnished and you build back up. If we come with an order, it’s public record. News stations will run clips from England, cattle stumbling around just like your sick heifers. And this information?’ He held up one of the CJD brochures. ‘This will be in every grocery store. Nobody will care that this herd is destroyed and the feed supplement isn’t used anymore. They’ll never buy Grant Beef again. Every ranch in Texas will be cut to the bone. The nationwide beef market will suffer.’
‘We watched it happen in Britain,’ said the other man. ‘They couldn’t give away their meat for free.’
‘We get it,’ Dalton said.
Allie squeezed Sander’s hand.
‘Look,’ Loren said, ‘I’ve come to help in every way I can. We don’t want our beef suppliers going out of business. We can leave you with a presumptive diagnosis today, in writing. Get it to your insurance company. They’re going to tell you that governmental action isn’t covered by your policy. Give them my card as well. Tell them it’s not a governmental action. The herd will be put down for humanitarian purposes. I’ll support you on that. If they won’t go for it, our Risk Management Agency will explain to your company, in detail, how little help they’ll get in future crop claims if they don’t step up to bat here. We have strings to pull.’
‘Get rid of the beef you have on hand. Please,’ added the other man.
Nobody had anything to say, so Loren asked, ‘Can we take the feed?’
‘Yes,’ Sander told him.
‘Where did you buy it?’
Allie said, ‘Dixon True Value,’ and rattled off the address and phone number.
‘And the infected heifers?’ asked Loren.
‘Take them,’ Sander said.
‘We’ll send a truck.’
He told them the eight animals would be gone that afternoon, as would all the feed identified as having originated in Britain. A truck followed Loren and the other man to the Sandoval store, where Jaime was given five minutes to peruse a USDA order for seizure of his stock in overseas cattle protein supplements. He handled one brand only and had no other buyers for that particular supplement. He kept a single pallet in reserve, in case the Grants ran low. This one pallet was loaded and gone by the time Allie called him to explain.
Sander’s face was numb. He and his parents sat and listened to Allie on the kitchen phone. None of them had anything else to say to one another, so he decided to walk down and check the mail. He would add the newest bills to the paperwork he put off from yesterday, and compose a form letter to Argos and all their other buyers.
He was thumbing through the stack on his walk back up the drive when he came upon the distinctive parchment and gold embossing of The Paulson Gallery. Sander couldn’t remember the last time he had any correspondence with Scott Jacob. What, he thought, could the man want now? Inside was a check made out to him for $3,100, the memo on which read, ‘untitled, charcoal.’ When Sander looked in the envelope for some explanation, he found a small handwritten note:
My goodness ... I had no idea! More, more.
SJP
p.s. – should I continue to deal through Jason?
Sander ran into the house, bounded up the stairs and began hurling stuff from the closet in his studio.
From the doorway, Allie said, ‘What the hell, Sander?’
He kept pulling out boxes until he could reach the back shelf. His recent artwork was there, just as he had wrapped and taped it. He pulled down the bundle and tore the paper from it, then closed the door on Allie before spreading it all out on the floor. How many had he done? Counting would do him no good. Nobody had been in that closet since he packed it full, he was sure. Was Jason passing off work under his name? He gazed absently at the far wall where his supplies sat atop cardboard boxes, some of Allie’s things there now, and his eyes fell upon the wrapped wedding gift from Jason. His mother must’ve moved it in here from his dresser.
Sander looked back down at the charcoals scattered before him and knew exactly which one was missing. It was the angriest piece of the bunch, a Herculean man clinging to the side of an ark as it rose upon a wall of water, and it had not been among the rest when he last saw them. He flung open the door and ran back downstairs.
‘When did Jason bring that wedding gift?’
‘What?’ said Jo.
Dalton answered, ‘He came by during the reception. Around six or seven, I guess. Right as I was getting into the shower.’
‘You left him alone in the house?’
‘No. I sent him out to find you.’
‘I never saw him, dad.’
Neither of his parents had the energy to wonder what had Sander so worked-up, and he didn’t stick around long enough for explanations anyway. He went upstairs and gathered the remaining artwork from the studio, carried it straight out back to the trash barrel and set it afire. He watched the thick paper turn to embers, then flaky ash, and he stirred it with a stick to make sure no scrap survived.
Instead of going back into the house for his truck keys, he straddled the tractor, pointed it toward the hill by the pond and shifted into high gear.
12
It was well after dark when Allie saw the tractor coming back toward the barn, its dim headlamps like two luminescent balls trundling across the field. She sat on the patio and waited. Sander killed the engine and slowly made his way toward the house, mumbling to himself until he noticed her sitting there at the edge of the light spilling from the kitchen window.
‘How long have you been out here?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
Her face was puffy and her eyes ringed in red.
‘It hurts me to see you crying, Allie, but I can’t really tell you there’s nothing to cry about.’ He sat beside her.
‘Good for you, then. Cause you missed the show. I ran out of tears.’
‘I’m sorry I left. It was all I could think to do.’
‘Be straight with me. You can do that.’
‘Yes. I can do that.’
‘Do you really talk to your dead grandparents?’
‘My grandfather. And his fathers, through him,’ Sander said. ‘And they talk back to you.’ It was somewhere between a question and an accusation, but she expected an answer.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘how you can tell somebody’s on the other end of a telephone line even if they aren’t saying anything? I used to take my sketchpad up there to the hill sometimes, sit with them and watch the herd in the sunset. There were whole afternoons we wouldn’t exchange a single word, but I knew they were there. Other days, I could feel them when dad and I worked the back pasture. A hundred yards away from the pond, I could sense them.’
‘And tonight?’
‘It’s like I forgot to pay the phone bill. Nothing. It wasn’t for a lack of waiting, either.’
‘Okay,’ she said. There was enough in those two syllables to tell Sander that his wife would only now begin to wrestle with this oddity. She did not know Sander like his mom knew his dad when they were married, and Allie could easily develop a different opinion on life with the Grants.
‘Why did you burn your drawings?’ she asked.
‘Those were things I never inten
ded anyone to see. I was working out stuff for myself the only way I knew how, stuff Roger had told me and things I’d learned about my own history. No real reason to keep them around, but–’ He interrupted himself, ‘Roger is the pastor at First Unitarian.’
‘I know who he is. Why now? Why did you have to burn the stuff today?’
He pulled the folded Paulson check from his pocket and handed it to her.
‘Jason took one without asking me.’
Allie glanced at the amount on the check and gave it back.
‘That’s a nice surprise. You didn’t answer my question.’
‘They weren’t supposed to leave here!’ He saw her jump and heard the echo of his own voice. He made an effort to calm himself. ‘There were things in those charcoals–’ he said. ‘I had been warned to stop. In a hateful, roundabout way, I think. Warned that I was upsetting a sort of balance. I told myself I’d destroy the drawings as I made them. But I got attached, and I just wanted to see them whole. They became a sequence in my mind, a single piece. I wanted to see it through, then I was going to get rid of them all. I swore.’
‘Warned by who?’
There were a couple of plain answers to that, yet Sander knew he could approach it from another direction, being honest without hurrying along her judgment.
‘You go to church,’ he said. ‘Do you believe there would be consequences if you stood up in Mass and started shouting that the Bible was wrong, that it deceived us?’
‘Yeah. I believe they would ask me to leave. Somebody might call the cops if I kept it up, I guess.’
‘Higher consequences.’
‘Oh. Atonement for our sins. Yes, that could be a pretty big one. I think it falls under blasphemy.’
‘What if you had proof?’
‘This is too much, Sander. I love you and I think you’ve gone through far too much today. I want you to talk to me, but you’re not making any sense, baby.’ She rubbed his forearm. ‘You need sleep.’
‘It’ll all look better in the morning?’
‘It’ll still be a big ugly mess in the morning, but we’ll deal with it. Jo gave me one of her back pills and said it would knock me out. You can have it if you want. I don’t need it.’
The Legend of Sander Grant Page 17