by Molly Gloss
She stood down beside the mule and dispiritedly bunched her skirt, pulling it up under the belt so her long shins in black stockings were bared above the boot tops. She stepped her boots unwillingly into the sucking mud and pitched a noose of rope around the steer’s big horns. He kept up his steady complaining. She backed out of the mud and tied off the rope to the saddle horn of the mule, backed him up slowly until it was taut. The mule squatted back hard until the saddle tried to stand up on its pommel, but the big steer stood sullenly in the wallow, eyes bulging, neck twisted over by the pull on its horns. Lydia put all her own weight on the rope too, planting her feet and yelling at the mule, but the steer stood where it was. Finally she went into the trees and got a stick. She slogged out into the mud again and hit the steer hard across the nose. It bellowed in surprise and eyed her, white-edged. She yelled at the mule and the rope twanged tight a couple of times, but by then the steer’s eyes had glazed again and it stood glumly in the mud, unmoving.
“Damn you!” Lydia said suddenly, harsh and loud.
She hit the steer’s head again, swinging the long stick in flat and hard between the eyes, a cracking blow. The steer rocked once, silently—for a wild moment she thought she might have killed it—then it lurched ahead suddenly in the mud, bellowing and slinging its horns, hurling mud and slobber in a short, spattering flurry.
Lydia staggered quick out of the mud herself, grabbing along the rope for Rollin. She flung a leg up over the mule’s back and held on to the saddle, hanging half off it while the mule sprang out of the way of the steer’s short, mad lunge. The mule had never been inclined to buck, but the rope pulled around under his tail when the steer staggered past him, and he snorted wildly, put his head down and bucked up his back. She would have stayed on him if she’d had both stirrups, a solid seat. But she was hanging off the saddle clumsily and his one stiff-legged bounce shook her off. She hit on her back and got up quick, scrabbling around to watch the steer. He kept bellowing and hooking his horns, trying to get loose of the rope, but he stood in one place, cross-legged and swaying, as if he hadn’t figured out yet that he was unstuck from the mud.
Lydia got shakily on the mule again, setting her boots well in the stirrups. Then she sidled up along the steer’s shoulder. Rollin was set stubbornly on keeping away from the slung horns, she had to pull his head up hard, twisting the reins, kicking him, to get him in close enough, and then she leaned out, grabbing warily for the rope. She tried five or six times, reaching in and out, before she got the rope loose of the steer.
By then her mouth was aching and full of blood—she had bit her cheek, jarred her teeth, when Rollin had bucked her off. She sat on the mule, rocking and keening a little, and feeling the inside of her mouth gingerly with her fingers, while she watched the steer staggering off irritably across the grass. She had a piteous impulse to go home. She would have liked to leave the big dumb steers standing around the chimney basin and ride Rollin away now, with her handkerchief inside her mouth stopping the blood. She did put the handkerchief in her mouth. But then she got the pails and walked slowly, bitterly, down to the other spring. After a while she walked with the bloody handkerchief wadded up in the pocket of her sweater, but the taste of blood stayed in her mouth, and a sourness, from that moment standing scared and frozen facing the mad steer.
Evelyn Walker was sitting on the dry leaves at the edge of the Owl Meadow, with the two boys climbing on her, when Lydia walked up the long timbered hill the fourth time, lugging water.
“I have brought you a lunch,” Evelyn shouted to her. She held up a sugar sack.
Lydia let out the water into the chimney and came to where Evelyn sat, in the striped shadow under the maple trees. Her mouth was stiff but she smiled and deliberately kept from telling about it. “Evelyn, I hope you didn’t walk up from your house that long way.”
Evelyn’s face looked pink and happy. She had spread a cloth on the leaves and she brought sandwiches out of her sack, and radishes, milk in a mason jar, and a chocolate cake wrapped up in a clean towel. “We had a good ride, don’t worry. We drove the wagon as far as we could get and then we unhitched and all three of us rode Judy up the hill without a saddle and we’ve only been waiting a little while for you.” She gestured, and then Lydia saw her placid white mare browsing with the cattle.
“Well I am quite filthy for picnicking,” she said, sighing. At the spring she had rinsed out her sore mouth, washed mud and blood from her hands, but the dress was spattered with mud and the steer’s yellow slobber, her skin and clothes smelled of cattle and sour fear-smell.
Evelyn said solemnly, positively, “Well you are cowboying, and liable to be dirty because of it.” The boys stood coyly behind her, peering at Lydia across their mother’s shoulders.
Lydia rubbed the sore palms of her hands on the front of her skirt and smiled gingerly, with her sore mouth. She had not thought of herself, before now, as cowboying. “The truth is, I am half starved,” she said. She sat down stiffly on the ground and when Evelyn handed over one of the sandwiches she ate slowly, chewing on the side of her mouth that was not raw.
“I believe I must have about all of them,” she said tiredly, watching the steers crowding up to the water. “I have not seen any but cows and calves since yesterday morning.”
“Fifteen,” Evelyn said. She put a sound of assurance in it, as if she’d named a grand number.
“I think I’d be advised to let back six of them,” Lydia said ruefully. “They’re last year’s calves I think. You can see they’re small yet. I would get more for them at three years old when they’ve put on their full weight.” She had got this from Evelyn’s husband when he had ridden up to the Owl Meadow with her, behind the two steers from Carroll Oberfield’s. On that occasion he had shown her a little of driving cattle, riding along one side of them and then on the other to keep them headed right, and he had managed to tell her half a dozen useful things about the ranching business without bringing up her inexperience at all.
“If there are nine, I won’t be discouraged,” she said firmly. “That’s enough to see me another year without starvation. Only I suppose I shall be on bad terms with ground corn before then.” She smiled grimly.
Evelyn had Charlie in her lap now. She smiled, but slow and irresolute, while pressing her cheek against the crown of Charlie’s head. She might not have known what response was called for. Then she said, “Claud Angell never had many cattle, I guess,” as if it were a reassurance.
They passed the milk back and forth. It was tepid, thick. It left a yellow skin inside the emptied mason jar. They broke the chocolate cake also, and fed pieces of it silently to the two little boys. Lydia licked her long fingers. “Oh, I have an awful love of sweets.”
“You are so thin,” Evelyn said, shaking her head, smiling as if she were shy.
Lydia looked down at her hands and turned them, looking at the lean wrists. “I used to stand in my shift, sideways to the mirror, and press my arms to my sides. My arms were thin as sticks, and still are, but when the fleshy part was flattened I thought they looked decently rounded.” She smiled, belittling that girl she had been.
Evelyn began to redden. “I used to wish I had some thin, but Mike likes plumpness, I guess, so I had better keep what I have now.”
Riding up to the Owl Meadow, Mike Walker had behaved in a thoughtful way, faintly sympathetic, as if he had made up his mind finally that she was not a man who was scared, but a woman who wasn’t. Lydia had got to like him rather better since then. She said, keeping her smile, “He loves his Evelyn, I believe.”
Evelyn hid her pleased look behind Charlie, who was climbing out of her lap and onto Junior’s back as he lay on the grass watching bugs.
After a while Lydia said, thinking of it slowly, “My mother said I would put on weight when I was full grown, but I never did. She is well filled-out herself. I look like my dad, I guess. He always was thin, even before he was sick. His mother, my grandmother Bennett, was thin too.”
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sp; Evelyn seemed to consider; Lydia saw a solemn look come in her face. “I take after my mother,” she said slowly. Then she said in a low voice, “I am going down there after Mike takes the cattle out. He is taking me and the boys to Alicel and leaving us until the spring.” She looked at Lydia. “Mike always has taken me down there to have my babies, there being no woman nearby here if I had a trouble.” Her face began to redden again. “I told Mike he could get you to stand by me now, but he was already set on leaving me at my mother’s.”
Lydia pulled her shoulders in a little and kept a stiff smile. “Shall I not see you then, until spring?”
“Oh! I hope you’ll go down with us as far as Summerville anyway. You said you would ride out in the fall for your groceries, we can go that far in each other’s company, can’t we?” She gave Lydia a shy sideward look. “Will you miss me very much? I do hate leaving.”
Lydia didn’t know what she ought to answer. She looked out at the cattle fixedly, without noticing them at all. “I have never been inclined to loneliness,” she said finally, but it had a sound in it that embarrassed her—something like a child’s balkiness.
She had never attended a birth, only her own fruitless miscarriages—and the truth was, she had had a vivid dread of being summoned for Evelyn’s confinement. She didn’t know where the quick, small grief came from now. It was unexpected, inexplicable.
31
20 Sept Went down to Summerville on the 18TH leaving the goats w Mr Whiteaker & Mr Odell and riding down w Walkers. The weather has held dry and in the Valley the air was heavy & warm, the colors of things dull & sooty. Mrs Bird at whose house I stayed a night last Spring received me offhandedly w/o surprise or curiosity, so I straightaway lost any little self-satisfaction brought down from the Jump-Off Creek. Mr Walker had sold my few cattle w his own when he went out to La Grande on Sat last, and got as good a price as might be, but when I had shoed the Mule and bought Groceries I found I could not afford to shoe myself and went directly back up the Ruckel Rd, was glad enough to see the poor little House again, as Town tired and discouraged me. I shall not see Evelyn Walker now nor any other woman until the Spring, and must harden my heart not to be Lonely. I did cry a little to see her go, and she cried hard. The little boys shed tears too, for the only reason that their Mother cried! Rose will freshen before long I think and I have promised the Kid to them if it is born healthy and still alive in the Spring. O I did spend a little money w/o thought of usefulness, bought a baker’s dozen of jonquil and plan to plant them w the Larkspur, as those colors will be bright together and say Farewell to Winter!
32
They loaded the thirty steers at the Goodman Station and rode in the smoking car down to La Grande. They had used to drive the cattle down on horseback, but it was more trouble than it was worth trying to keep a bunch of half-wild steers together on the shoulder of the overland road with those eight-mule freight wagons going past them in both directions in a steady traffic and the steers shedding a pound each, for every jittery mile. It was cheaper, they figured, to leave the horses and the dogs with Jim Stallings at the station and ride the train down.
The UP rail line followed the rise of Meacham Creek from just west of its junction with the Umatilla River up to the Kamela Station on the old Oregon Trail, maybe forty miles of slow climb through the north end of the Blue Mountains and five stops between on the long grade. After that the rails ran downhill to La Grande, snaking along the Railroad Canyon from the summit. When they had passed Kamela, the trees began to thin, standing together in sparse bunches with brown grass matted between, and at intervals they began to see the stubble of a few marginal wheat fields, and cattle standing idly inside wire fences. Finally there was a place where the train came out onto a treeless bluff and below them the city was spread out straddling the rail line. Smoke rose up from it, brown, seeping into the gray underbelly of the clouds.
Tim scraped a little clean place on the window glass and looked out. He was wound-up. He still tended to feel anxious when he got among so many people. It was something he should have gotten over by now, it was something a kid would feel and he hadn’t felt like a kid in a long time. But there it was. He looked out the window and shifted his seat slightly and rubbed the armrest with his thumb. He didn’t know if Blue got unsettled at all, coming down to town—he hadn’t ever brought it up with him. Alongside of him, Blue smoked a cigarette, holding it with three fingers and sitting back inside the crown of smoke.
They were left off at the station ahead of the steers, and had to stand around waiting by the squeeze chutes and the pens, holding their shipping papers, until the cattle cars were put on the siding. There was another wait after that until the railroad cowboys got around to unloading the cars and writing down a corral number on their papers. Then they went to find a buyer they knew.
The streets in the workingman’s district were muddy, lined with seedy huts and warehouses and freight docks where the mules stood wet-necked and the warehousemen loaded the long wagons or tied the loads down or stood in the mud together smoking and talking. Sweeney had a barn and a jumble of pens at the dead end of one of the streets. He was tallying sheep at a squeeze gate. They stood and waited until the last woolly went through and he had written the number in his book. Then he looked around at both of them.
“Whiteaker,” he said, after he had thought about it. “And Odell.” Sometimes he wouldn’t remember their names from one time to the next. But he had always dealt with them in a fair way. They hadn’t gone to anybody else for four or five years. He stuck his hand out now and they each shook it.
“We’ve got thirty steers if you’re buying any,” Blue said.
“Sure. Sure. I’m always buying. I could get over there and have a look at them in a couple of hours and if you come by here in the morning I’ll have a price for you. That be all right?”
Tim ducked his chin. “How are prices holding up?” he said. “Are they getting any better?”
Sweeney was a redhead with bright blue eyes and colorless lashes. He looked at them unblinking. “Well you know prices are low, but they haven’t gone down in a while. I believe maybe things have leveled out. They’ve been getting twenty-five, twenty-six cents for wheat. That’s up a little from what it was. But you heard about the fires we had. Burned up a few thousands acres of wheat and rangeland I guess.” He shrugged up his shoulders. “That might be why the price is gone a little higher. That’s always the way it works, sad to say. I heard you had a dry summer up there too.”
“It was dry.”
Sweeney nodded. He looked over at the sheep and then back at them. “You got a pen number for me?”
“One-eight,” Blue read off the papers.
Sweeney nodded again and wrote it down in his book. “Well, okey-dokey,” he said. “You come over tomorrow and we’ll settle up. I think we can come to fair terms.”
They shook his hand again and went back down the street. It began to rain a little, pocking the wooden walks. When they used to drive the steers down, they’d put the horses up at a livery, leave the dogs tied in a stall they paid a horse price for. Now they only had themselves to put up. They carried their kit bags through the rain, along the wet wood walk to the Bullshead, which was a saloon that rented beds in an upstairs loft and sometimes on a pay night sold space on the floor between the beds. There was a cleaner place nearer the railyards but the man who owned it had seen something or been part of something in the Klamath Indian Wars and he wouldn’t rent a bed to Blue.
When they had paid for the beds, they stood together at the Bullshead bar, drinking beer the color of cat’s eyes. Tim leaned on his elbows to take the weight off his bad knee. The long time sitting in the train had made it stiff.
“I need to eat something,” he said, without looking at Blue. The beer was cold. It made a cold puddle in his belly. He had used to drink all night without bad effects. But he had gradually gotten so he couldn’t drink on an empty stomach without feeling sick right away. For a long time now,
coming down to La Grande in the fall, he had been getting drunk out of habit and without taking any satisfaction from it.
“Don’t puke it up later,” Blue said, letting out his slow, soft grin.
Tim went alone down the street to a cafe and sat on a stool at the counter. He set his kit bag down under his feet. There wasn’t anyplace to leave it at the Bullshead without having it walk off, so he had to pack it around with him. He ate eggs and a pork chop and bread, and washed it down with coffee. The cook had a heavy hand with the bread but it had been a while since he had eaten eggs or a pork chop, and the coffee was good, strong and fresh. He wished for something sweet afterward, but from where he sat at the counter he could see the chocolate cake sitting on a plate in the kitchen, and the flies crawling over it, so he paid and went out without trying any.
It had stopped raining but it was near dark by now and the low sky looked blue-black, the color of a new gun. The air didn’t smell like rain, all he could smell was the refuse in the runnels along the curbing, and coal smoke, and a fish and grease smell from the cafe. The street in front of him went away straight until it arrowed to a point and disappeared. He looked down it. The foothills lumped up brown behind the arrow point and behind them the bluish mountains were cut off under the low sky.
The Bullshead was crowded and noisy and Blue had gone from there. Tim went to the bar and drank a single beer slowly. He figured he knew where Blue was, there was a whore he liked to go to over in the Old Town. In the wild railhead towns, when they had been pretty young, they had used to walk along in front of the cribs, he and Blue, walking stiff as roosters, looking sideways at the whores standing in their shawls in the open doorways. Sometimes they had even turned and walked back along the row of doors eyeing the women a second time until they’d picked two who suited. That seemed like a hell of a long time ago. The woman Tim had lately gone with had a house on an alley behind a produce seller. The cowboy who had showed him the house the first time had said he didn’t know if she made her living whoring or if she had other work besides. She had clean brown hair, a placid face, and so he had gone back there when he was in town, and when he had a little money. Blue had been seeing the same whore once or twice a year for five or six years. One of her children was dark-skinned, had a wide slow smile.