Earl sprayed the wound with antiseptic, pressed a cotton ball over it, and jerked the cow’s head around so Dill could reach the other horn. Roddy looked away while Dill sawed, but the sound of it, the saw working its way through hide and bone, was worse than the sight. This time, Dill, who rarely made a mistake, cut too deep.
“Shit,” he said. “We got a bleeder. Get the iron.”
Roddy swung around the chute, hauled a branding iron out of the propane flame, and carried it back to Dill. Dill grasped the long, rusty handle and touched a hot corner of the iron to one bleeder, then another, until he thought he had them all cauterized. The cow dropped her jaw and bellowed. White lather foamed from her pink mouth. One small vein began to bleed again, spurting red.
“You want a hotter iron?” Roddy asked.
“No,” Dill said. “Let ’er go, Earl.” He took a step back. “The best thing now is just to let her settle down. That last one should stop on its own.”
Earl slacked up on the nose ring and let it fall to the ground. The cow whipped her head from side to side, flinging blood and stringy white saliva. Roddy and Dill jumped back out of the way. Earl released the cow and hazed her out the gate.
“What you want to do here,” Dill said, “is molest ’em as little as possible. That’s the kindest thing. Just get ’em in and out as fast as you can.”
The manure at their feet was powdered white with snow, and the snow was spattered red with blood. Roddy looked down at his boots, where the blood had dried in perfect dark coins on the lighter brown leather. He looked up as the next cow hit the head catcher and Earl slammed it shut with a clang.
They worked cows all morning, and by lunchtime, the mountains had disappeared under a low ceiling of gray. Snow covered the fields all around them, with gold straw stubble and wild oats spiking through. Roddy heard the weaned calves bawling for their mothers. The falling snow muffled sound, and the calves seemed far away. The path to the barn had been churned into clinging mud and manure. It struck Roddy that every other thing he saw, every roof, every truck, every blade of grass, had, in just so few moments, turned white.
Inside the barn, he removed his hat, slapping it on his pants to knock the snow off. Lunch was spread out on a sawhorse table, and two or three wives were dealing out plates of dessert and pouring paper cups of coffee.
“Hey, look who’s here,” Dolly McReynolds, a pretty woman with tight-curled silver hair, called out when she saw him. “I’d better run on up to the house and build some more sandwiches. This won’t be nearly enough!” She handed Roddy a paper plate crowded with two thick sandwiches. “You think that’ll get you started?”
“Ought to,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”
“You do that,” she said. “Henry,” she said to the next man, “how the hell are you?”
Roddy managed to balance his teetering plate and carry it to a half circle of straw bales set up around a smoking kerosene heater. All the ranchers traded help, but it always amazed him that they helped McReynolds wean and cull his cattle for sale in the fall. It always took a full, long day, sometimes more, to get all the cows tested, inoculated, doctored, or dehorned. Everybody liked to say McReynolds knew about as much about cows as a goose knows about Jesus—and still, his cattle weighed out better than any in the valley. Roddy had ridden his horse over because McReynolds and his dad were friends, but he suspected all the others came for Dolly.
One by one, the other men filled their plates and joined him. Dill sat down with a groan and spat tobacco juice at the stove. He’d taken off his hat, and his yellowing white hair and beard made him look like an old terrier. He pulled a wrinkled blue handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the snow and ice from his face.
“Hell of a deal,” he said. He leaned back behind the straw bale and spit out the rest of his chew. “In the old days,” he said, “we used to graze all the cattle right out on the sage flats. Then, when it came time to work cows, we just drove ’em into town. Worked ’em right there in the stockyards, and when the train came, we just bought ’em a ticket. Remember that, Earl?”
Earl nodded. Roddy thought the two men must be roughly the same age. Earl moved like a younger man, but people treated him with the kind of respect they’d give if he were the oldest. He stood taller than Dill, but he sat bent over with his shoulders pinched in around his chest. Dill took a bite of his sandwich and went on talking.
“Remember the suppers?” he said. “I remember Dolly used to drive out and serve a spread from the back of her station wagon. She put out a hell of a meal.”
“Ribs,” Earl said.
“Hell, yes,” Dill said. “We had ribs the size of my hand.” He held up his hand to demonstrate.
“Bet they had more meat on ’em,” one of the other men said.
“And less dirt,” Earl said. Roddy saw him grin for the first time all day.
“That’s true,” Dill agreed. He laughed along with the other men.
Sitting close to the heater, Roddy began to warm up in the dark, drafty barn. The greasy smell of kerosene rode over the barn smells, and the light was dim, hazy with dust and hay chaff. Outside, driving snow slanted sideways in a luminous white curtain. He was staring out the doorway when Cynthia walked in.
She stopped to brush the snow from her coat and her hat. Her face was flushed from the cold, and strands of damp hair clung to her cheeks. She shook her head and the hair fell straight. At the table, she picked up a plate and started to join the women who sat behind the table with the kids. But Dill called out to her.
“Hey,” he said, “come over here. We got worlds of room.”
He slid over to make space on the straw bale beside him, and when Cynthia sat down he swung an arm up around her shoulders.
“I thought you were comin’ down to the chute to help us out,” he said.
“Just got here. I had school this morning. Dolly asked me to come lend a hand.”
“Well that’s all right, then,” Dill said, grinning. He gave her a pat on the sleeve and stood up. “Well,” he said, “some of us have got to work for a livin’.” He looked down at Cynthia. “Come on down when you finish your dinner. I’ll put you to work.”
“Okay,” Cynthia said. But her dad shot a look at her. He shook his head. It was such a slight movement Roddy didn’t think anyone else caught it. But Cynthia did. She ducked her head and stared down at her plate while the men stood up, stretching and complaining. Roddy stopped at the doorway and glanced back. Cynthia sat staring at the stove, a stunned expression on her face. She seemed more surprised than hurt, like a small kid who’s been slapped for no reason.
Roddy walked back toward the chute with the other men, wondering what Earl Dustin’s look meant. His daughter was not to work at the chute, that was clear. There were one or two wives, and an old-time rancher, Millie Baxter, who worked along with the men, but it could be that Earl disapproved.
Roddy relieved Earl at the head of the chute, where he didn’t have much time to think of Cynthia. In the back of his mind, he hoped she might turn up, but whatever Earl’s reasons were, they kept her away. It was only early afternoon, Roddy guessed just half past three, but the light was already fading when they ran the last cow through.
The vet packed his kit and drove away, and the kids cleaned up around the chute, picking up empty syringes and vials of serum. They threw the sawed-off horns over the fence for the dogs. Dill wiped his dehorning saw and wrapped it carefully in its towel. He tucked it under his arm, and they all walked down to watch the cattle truck pull out. They reached the loading chute just as the driver switched on his headlights. The long twin beams shot out in yellow shafts, filled with white, twirling snowflakes.
Inside the truck, the calves stamped and bawled. Across the corrals, their mothers’ frantic voices answered, low and hoarse, like someone leaning on an antique car horn. Some mourned in long, plaintive cries. But others were demanding. They ordered the calves to come back—as if the calves had only strayed under a fence
wire where the mothers couldn’t reach them. It would be a day or two before they stopped bawling. By then the calves and the old or dry cows would have been trucked as far as feedlots in Missouri. The men lit cigarettes or pinched chews of tobacco and leaned against the corral rails. They raised their voices to be heard over the bawling cattle.
Roddy was always relieved when the truck pulled out and the cries of the cattle stopped. With an expulsion of air, the driver released the brakes and the truck ground into gear. The forty-foot trailer swayed down the rutted dirt lane, pulled up with a squeal of brakes, and lumbered onto the hardtop.
Roddy had expected Cynthia to be at the loading chute. He thought of looking for her at the house, but he didn’t want to get held up. If he was going to ride home, he needed to get started before it got any darker. He walked with the other men back to where they’d tethered their horses.
Just inside the barn, it occurred to him that Cynthia would be loading her horse. He broke off and cut over toward the trucks and trailers. He found Cynthia there, coaxing her horse into a brick-colored gooseneck trailer. He watched while she tied the mare and backed out around her.
“Hi,” he said.
Cynthia started and spun around to face him. But she recovered right away.
“Hello,” she said, almost swallowing the word. She cradled a bridle in one hand, looping the reins up over the headstall with the other, and gazed at him in total calm, as if she had all day to stand there. She looked at him as if he might begin to show her vacuum cleaners, or sell her a subscription. Roddy glanced away.
“I didn’t see you at the chute,” he said. “Just wondered how you were doing.”
“Fine,” she said.
Roddy let his gaze swing back. Snow was falling. Large, wet flakes, floating down like apple blossoms. They touched her hair and stayed whole for a moment. It seemed warmer now than it had all day.
“Why didn’t you come down to help?”
“My dad,” she said.
“What did he mean by that look?”
Cynthia swallowed. She stared at something in the distance, past his shoulder.
“What do you think it meant?” Her voice was sarcastic. But then she seemed to change her mind. “I don’t know, exactly,” she said. “He didn’t want me down at the chute. It’s unladylike. It’s okay for women to work cows at home, but not in public. I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me the rules. He expects me to know what they are.”
“It was okay when you were a kid,” Roddy said, remembering her out roping calves.
“It was okay for a long time,” she said. “Then one day, it wasn’t.”
She studied Roddy’s face to see if he understood. He still didn’t really understand, but he tried to look sympathetic. He felt sympathetic.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. She slumped, her posture so resigned she seemed years older.
“Do you think,” he said, “your dad would let you take that ride with me? Promised you a ride, as I remember.”
“No,” she said.
“Would you do it anyway?”
“No.”
“Could you give me a break here?”
She said no, but her lips tightened to hold back a grin, and Roddy laughed. “Jesus, it’s cold,” he said. The snow had let up, and the gray light around them had lost its warmth. Behind the mass of clouds covering the mountains the sun must have gone down. “I’d better get the hell out of here.” He explained that he’d ridden down from the ranch. The ride home wouldn’t be long, but it would be cold and miserable.
In the last reflected light, the color seemed drained from her face. He thought he’d better let her put her tack away and get up to the house.
“Take it easy,” he said, and turned to go.
He had passed the last of the trailers before he heard her call his name. He stopped and saw her come around the hood of a white pickup truck.
“Hey,” she called.
Roddy stood and waited for her to reach him. When she did, she seemed for the first time nervous.
“I lied,” she said and paused for a moment. “My dad likes you.”
“Why?”
“Football fan, I guess.” She smiled.
“No, I meant why did you lie?”
She stopped smiling. She looked down at her boots, caked with manure and sprinkled white with snow. Her hair swung over one eye.
“I didn’t want you to know.” She tipped her chin up at a defiant angle and looked right at him.
“Know what?”
“That I want to.” She swallowed hard, but her eyes never left his face. “That I want to go for that ride.”
Roddy smiled. “Great,” he said. He could have reached out and touched her smooth, pale hair, but he only nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll call you.”
“Okay.”
He turned and walked away through the snow toward the barn. He felt her standing by the trailer, watching him. He stopped to look at her again.
“Tomorrow,” he yelled.
“Tomorrow what?”
“I’ll take you for that ride.”
Only half of the trucks and trailers had pulled out of the yard. Roddy could have borrowed a lift from any of the ranchers, for him and for the horse, but he wanted to ride back.
He led his horse from the barn, swung up in the saddle, and turned down through the field the way he’d come that morning. Snow swirled around him, sticking on the pommel of his saddle and to the horse’s mane. The mountains before him in the east seemed to glow faintly pink. He topped the knoll and looked back at the McReynolds place.
Through the pale curtain of falling white, the windows of the ranch house glowed with a liquid, amber light. He saw a pair of headlights sweep the sagebrush as a car curved slowly down the lane before he reined his horse toward home. The snow on the ground was collecting in drifts, small mountains and gullies, but in the flat light he couldn’t tell the difference. There was no wind. The snow seemed to fall, weightless, in a circle all around him. He could actually hear the snow falling—a shifting, ticking sound—so faint he hardly heard it over his own breath.
Until today, each snowfall had whitened the mountains and bared off in the valley. But some instinct or memory made him think that this one would stick. These same drifts would be on the ground in April. From now until spring the mountains and the valley would be entirely white. The world would seem to grow larger under the vast expanses of snow. But it would also seem smaller. If he stuck around, he would see old friends he hadn’t seen all summer. Ranchers would stop in to visit around the stove in the bunkhouse. Or Roddy would catch them in the afternoons playing cards at the grain mill.
He had to stick around a little longer to brand and wean his own stock, but it was almost time for him to go. If he stayed much longer, he’d miss too many rodeos and never qualify. He turned his horse and squinted into the blue light ahead. He caught sight of a line of willows and red-twig dogwoods curving along the creek. All he had to do was follow, and the creek would guide him home.
12
The sky was dark, the mountains weighted under a blanket of black and purple clouds, when the rodeo team bus turned off the highway and down a lane between two lines of barbed-wire fence, the top wire gleaming like a filament of silver in the last light. At the gate, a wooden sign branded with the name “Scullie’s Horse Palace” hung stretched across the road. The bus swung around in an arc and stopped in front of a large white trailer house. Beside the trailer, a new horse barn backed up against a stand of trees. Farm lights beamed down from high poles, dropping a circle of brightness in the yard. Kenny climbed last off the bus and stepped onto a thick carpet of damp sawdust. The glare of the lights and the smell of the red sawdust made him feel like he’d stepped down into a rodeo arena.
The other boys shouldered their riggin’ bags and ropes and wandered through the wide door of the barn. Kenny followed behind. Inside, green metal panels circled the barn to make an arena, and at the fa
r end, old boards and poles made up holding pens and chutes. In one of the pens, a dozen brindle calves had squeezed up to the gate. A cutting horse stood saddled and ready, his reins hanging loose to the ground, in the center of the barn. Kenny didn’t see any other stock.
A small, red-haired man, his barrel torso longer than his legs, limped toward them across the arena. Mr. Gallagher met him halfway and leaned down to speak. The short man nodded, glanced at the boys, nodded again. The two walked together toward the rail, one towering over the other.
“All set,” Gallagher said. “Dump your gear.”
The boys piled their bags and jackets near the wall and climbed up on a low set of bleachers.
“This is Rud Scullie,” Mr. Gallagher said, introducing the short man. “Mr. Scullie to you. Get ready to listen and learn.”
“Evenin’,” Rud Scullie said. He held a mashed-up hat in his hand. His hair was the color of canned yams and flattened with sweat to his head as if he’d been working all day. He wore a faded denim shirt, black at the edges of the cuffs, and leather chaps worn so thin his jeans showed through in places. He settled the hat down tight, turned, and walked to the cutting horse. Kenny wondered what was going on. Rud Scullie was too short to ride a cutting horse. But he scooped up the reins in his left hand and in one motion was on the horse. Barely shifting his weight, he turned the horse and trotted him back to the holding pens, where he leaned down to speak to someone. He backed the horse aside, and the brindle calves staggered, confused at first, out the gate. Kenny heard a whoop and yell, and the calves bunched up, jogging out into the arena. When they saw the boys, they scrambled to turn and tried to race back to the pen. But Mr. Scullie was there. More rightly, the horse was there.
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