One Good Mama Bone

by McClain, Bren; Monroe, Mary Alice;

  But LC did not come.

  Only Mildred rushing out that same door and a late model automobile driving into the backyard and Mildred hollering, “I tried to tell her not to come back here, Big LC!”

  The automobile stopped a few feet short of Luther, and out stepped a woman and a young boy about the size of LC.

  Luther glanced over at the porch door.

  “Mr. Dobbins, sir,” the woman said, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to barge in on you, but I need to buy my boy here one of your little cows, a steer, for that cow show next year.”

  “Where’s LC?” Luther called towards Mildred, who stood behind the woman and boy. She was wringing her hands, but she had no blood to be rid of.

  “I told her it’s too early, Big LC,” Mildred said, “that y’all don’t start fooling with the show until the fall.”

  “I can’t wait that long, sir.” The boy came to stand in front of the woman, no more than a foot away. She and the boy were close.

  Luther aimed his eyes towards the porch and saw nothing but screen.

  “My boy here needs him an animal right now, sir. To buddy with.”

  Buddy with. Before LC started feeding out his steer last fall, he and Luther were buddies.

  “I got money,” the woman said.

  Luther looked her way. She was holding out a five dollar bill. All the fertilizer he’d just put on his pastures had set him back.

  “Can start on paying you. I’m good for it over time.”

  “Emerson Bridge,” he heard called out from the house. It was LC at the screened door, and there was a lift in his voice.

  “LC,” Luther said and raised his arm his boy’s way. He tried to see his face, but the screen was in the way.

  “Hey, LC,” the woman’s boy said and waved towards the door.

  So the boys knew each other. Luther didn’t know if from school or church.

  Luther stepped towards the woman and boy but kept his eyes on LC. “I’ve done picked out the winner for next year. Picked a good one, too, for my boy there. Y’all are wasting y’all’s time here.”

  LC ran back inside the house. Luther heard his little boots against the floor, taking him further away.

  “Oh dear,” Mildred said and cleared her throat.

  Heat shot up Luther’s body, his face on fire.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the woman and boy, still standing close. Luther stood alone, the space around him wide and empty, any sound he’d make echoing.

  They looked poor, their shoes, especially, hers scuffed and run over, his beat up and too small. Luther believed his boy could outrun him. He summoned saliva to his mouth, as much as he could hold, and sent it forward. A spot of white bubbles, the size of dimes stacked, landed beside the woman’s shoes. “Don’t sell to no woman,” he said, glad that she wasn’t a man. What excuse for his feelings of unadulterated envy would he have then?

  Luther was too far away to smell body odor, but he bet they hadn’t bathed in a while. He should offer up his watering trough to them. It was round and cut from a terracotta pipe as big as the trunk of one of his mighty oaks in the front yard. He’d had it built after Charles won two Grand Championships in a row and made his farm a real show place. They would see he was rich and would tuck tail and run.

  Another vehicle came into the yard, this time a truck. It came up fast like somebody wanted to run him over. Luther clenched his fists and was ready to put the driver in his place, but a little man in a big cowboy hat leaped out and said, “You Mr. LC Dobbins, Sr., the most important cattleman in all of Anderson County?”

  Luther felt himself relax. “I am.”

  The man was wearing a new denim shirt and jeans, and his boots looked to be fresh-polished, if not brand new. Luther was dressed in denim, too, overalls. But his denim was covered in blood.

  “Ike Thrasher,” the man said and extended his hand.

  “Thrasher,” Luther said. “Isaiah Thrasher, big cotton man Thrasher?” He had never had any interest in competing in cotton.

  The man cleared his throat and looked away. “My father,” he said in a voice so light it could have been LC’s.

  The blood on Luther’s hand had washed away. Luther obliged him.

  The man’s truck looked shiny. Luther’s was a dull black, but it had no blood on it. Luther had left the deer and the gun on Parson’s Mountain.

  “I aim to be a cattleman like you,” Thrasher told him.

  That’ll be the day. But this man did come from winning stock, albeit cotton.

  “But mainly I aim to have the Grand Champeen next year.” The man yanked at his jeans and about pulled himself off the ground.

  He must have been adopted.

  “Mr. Thrasher?” It was that woman.

  “Why, Mrs. Creamer,” the man said and removed his hat.

  Creamer. This was the woman who was not a churchgoer and who had dared make dresses for his wife. He recognized her now. Luther crossed his arms. Selling to a woman aside, this was a heathen woman. He shot Mildred a look, but she missed it. She was slouching towards the house.

  “Why, I’ve just come from y’all’s place,” the man told the woman. His head looked like a peanut. The two of them huddled together and began talking low like they were in cahoots.

  Luther always thought that God made his right eye the way it should be, to look at things straight on. But, his left eye, God had made special. It sat cocked off a tad to the left and up a little high and helped him be watchful for whatever was coming up behind him or from the side or from above. This one helped him see what people really were up to. “Hey,” he said, “y’all have y’all’s little hen gathering someplace else. I got important doings. My boy Charles is due here anytime now.”

  He started for the house. The Cattleman’s Supper was that night, and this would be the first time he’d not be there as a winner. He imagined the smirks and whispers that would break out when he walked into the room, growing into all-out laugher and fingers pointed, the word “loser” hurled his way. His stomach knotted, his breakfast sausage trying to come high. He bent forward and crossed his arms down low. Maybe he wouldn’t go. Maybe he’d say he was sick.

  But then he thought of Charles, the all-time winning Charles, who would be there with him. Everyone would want to see his elder son, the closest to a star anyone in Anderson had ever known. They would flock to him the way they flock to football heroes or movie stars. Luther would stay by Charles’s side all night. Maybe then Luther could bear his embarrassment.

  “Me and Mrs. Creamer and the boy here,” Thrasher called out, “we want to buy the nicest looking steer you got, Mr. Cattleman, sir.”

  Mr. Cattleman.

  Luther uncrossed his arms and straightened his body. He was a tall man, the only good trait he’d gotten from his father.

  “And he’s a man,” he heard the woman say. “You can sell it to him.”

  Luther kept his back to them. “This ain’t no beauty contest. It’s a steer show, people.”

  “That’s right, I am a man.” Thrasher’s voice had gone deeper.

  “Please sell us one, sir.” It was the boy now. There was something about him, the way he spoke up, a strength to his voice. Luther wanted that for LC.

  He turned to look at the boy, and there was Thrasher, holding a one hundred dollar bill as new as Luther had ever seen. Luther pictured his bank account. It was so low, the teller surely had called the bank president to gawk at it. He felt his stomach tighten again.

  Now that he thought about it, he did have a steer he could sell. It belonged to an ancient mother cow, sixteen years old, ugly with a splotchy face like none he’d ever seen. Always before, she had dropped heifers and did so in the spring of the year when she was supposed to. Girl calves grow up to be mothers and produce more calves, which was why he’d kept her around twice as long as most farmers would have, besides cows pay for themselves at age six. But she messed up last November, way out of cycle, and dropped twin calves, one the buzz
ards got and the other a bull calf, something Luther didn’t need. He had Uncle cut his balls, making it a steer whose fate would be the butcher block as soon as he was weaned from his mother and fed out some. She was headed for the block, too, and the only thing she was good for now, hamburger meat. He was doing the old cow a favor. With her age, he feared if she became pregnant again, she could have trouble delivering, and that could leave her paralyzed and unable to stand. The steer wasn’t but four months old, which was at least two months too early to wean, but that hundred dollars could put Luther back in the comfortable category. And if he sold the mother for another two hundred at next week’s cattle sale, he’d be sitting high again. The calf might die without his mother’s milk, but that wasn’t his problem.

  He removed his can of Prince Albert’s tobacco from a pocket high on his overalls and a pack of rolling papers. He selected one piece, and with his forefinger, tapped the side of the can, forcing the crushed brown leaves onto the paper, which he brought to his mouth, and licked the outside edge and rolled it all together.

  The three people before him reminded him of the Three Stooges, an oddball comedy act of three idiots he’d seen from time to time at the State Theatre. He put the cigarette in his mouth and lifted the bottom of his boot and struck a match. The man stooge was waving the money like a flag. Little did they know they had surrendered.

  The searing sound of the match was brief as it lit its intended. He dropped it to the ground, part of his seventy-one spectacular acres of Kentucky 31 fescue and ladino clover that helped tack down the earth and keep it from blowing away. He was doing important work. He stepped on the match with his boot, a real cattleman’s boot, dirty and carrying a smattering of blood. He twisted the stick into the earth and tried not to, but he looked back at his house to see if his boy was watching.

  The mother cow heard the automobile’s engine before it came into view up near the barn. The sound was not one she recognized. She began moving in a half circle, bringing her offspring along with her, until he stood behind her, tucked in. She lowered her head back to the tender grass, while her calf clamped his mouth around her teat and pulled.

  When the second vehicle sounded, another she did not recognize, she did not lower her head to eat. She kept it high in the air.

  The third sound was one that she knew. It was the farmer’s truck. She turned towards it and watched for it to come around the barn. She walked that way, her calf following. The sound could bring them food.

  The truck stopped beside a tree that gave the mother and her offspring shade. The workingman stood in the back and began swinging something that caught the neck of her calf, who tried to run. The man jumped from the truck and tied her calf to the tree.

  The mother cow ran towards her calf, the two of them bawling in a rhythm that went back and forth. She circled the tree and her calf. She circled again and again.

  Other cows raised their heads and watched. Some moved in closer.

  The farmer sat on the tailgate. “Just let it wear itself out. The mama, too. She’ll wear down after a while.”

  The while came, the animal’s voices no longer strong, the sun having peaked and begun its slow crawl towards the horizon. The workingman grabbed at the calf’s flank where its back leg joined its body and then rammed his knee up into it hard, pushing the three-hundred-pound animal onto the ground. He tied its back legs and moved to the steer’s face, where he placed a halter.

  The mother cow continued to circle. Her gait had slowed but not her frenzy.

  The farmer no longer sat on the tailgate. He made a ramp of two long boards off the back of the truck.

  The workingman untied the steer’s legs and rope from the tree, then started with the animal towards the ramp, grabbing its tail and twisting it hard, then yanking it high and holding. The steer moved forward into the bed, five foot high wooden railings surrounding him. He moved from side to side, looking through the holes between the slats. The mother cow rammed the side of the truck. The railings shook.

  The two men drove her offspring away.

  She chased after them, running free for a stretch but found the barbed-wire gate closed and sitting snug in wire loops. She rammed it with her 1,008 pounds, her chest pressing into the barbs. They pierced her and brought forth blood.

  The fence was made to hold. She pressed harder.

  Her cries were loud, and, as light faded and darkness turned bold, they grew deafening.

  That evening, the winds became high. She was accustomed to wind. She’d come from it, was born into it. Every now and then, there would be a short break, and in that space, the wind delivered to her, his voice.

  She bellowed back, still pressing. Like his, her sound stretched long.

  Sarah, along with Emerson Bridge and Mr. Thrasher, had been waiting in the yard for more than two hours when Mr. Dobbins’s truck pulled into the driveway. “Where’s the lot to keep it in?” he called from his open window as he passed Sarah. She pointed towards Harold’s barn.

  They all chased after him, even Mr. Thrasher, who had been quiet during the wait, his head lowered, his hat on the verge of falling off. Mr. Dobbins had refused to let him bring the steer home in Mr. Thrasher’s truck, saying he did not have what Mr. Dobbins called “bodies.” They were railings that would protect the steer’s safety during transport.

  When Mr. Dobbins came to a stop, Mr. Thrasher shouted towards him, “Hey, I want you to know I’m going to get my own bodies.”

  But all Mr. Dobbins said was, “Where’s the fence for this baby beef?” He sounded mad.

  “We don’t have one of them,” Sarah told him. “What about him just staying out in the yard like a dog?” The steer was larger than any dog she’d ever seen, by three or four times. It stood pressed to the railings on the right side of the upper end like it was scared and made sounds, deep ones. Emerson Bridge stood just out from the animal, his head titled back, chin in the air. Sarah wondered when he’d want to touch it. The railings allowed room for such between the boards, as much as four inches.

  “I said where?” Mr. Dobbins shouted.

  “Well, let’s see.” Mr. Thrasher had his hands on his hips, his body pivoting on the heels of his boots. “Cows eat grass, so we need a place where there’s grass.”

  Mr. Dobbins slapped the outside of the door with his flat hand. “Tie it to that water oak over there, Uncle, and let’s get out of here.” He was talking to another man inside his truck, a negro and on the skinny side.

  He got busy doing what Mr. Dobbins asked.

  Emerson Bridge walked up to the truck window and asked, “What’s his name, sir?”

  But Mr. Dobbins waved him off and revved his engine. And when his helper got back inside, he backed up into the yard and left.

  The animal pulled hard on the rope. Sarah hoped he would like his new home.

  He had to.

  Emerson Bridge stood near the barn, about twenty feet away. “You like your new buddy?” Sarah called out to him.

  He plopped down in the dirt and leaned back against the wooden boards. “My papa’s my buddy.”

  The steer’s bellows were becoming more shrill. Sarah wondered if she’d made a mistake bringing the animal there. She felt needles in her face and head.

  Mr. Thrasher was walking beside the barn, appearing to study some cedar trees growing in a line and then back a ways. He put his hands on the trunk of one down low.

  Sarah took a deep breath and thought about all the goodness she had seen that day. She’d taken needle and thread to hem Mrs. Dobbins’s dress, but she already had it hemmed in town. And Mr. Thrasher had offered to buy the steer outright and suspend her payments on the land, until after they won, if she let him participate. With the extra $7.50 she now no longer owed him, she had $15.97 to pay the light bill down and buy notions and fabric and gasoline and food for Emerson Bridge. “You’re a good man, Mr. Thrasher,” she called out.

  She saw her words move through his body, cause him to jump into the air the way she ha
d seen schoolgirls jump rope. She was glad he could play. She wondered when Emerson Bridge would.

  “Reckon we should build a fence,” Mr. Thrasher said. His hands were back on the cedar trunk. “Reckon how you do it?”

  Reckon how you pay for it, Sarah wanted to say, but that was no one’s problem but hers.

  …..

  “They don’t have a shot in hell, do they?” Luther asked Uncle as they drove back home. “I mean, could you find three bigger clowns or what? A jelly, a woman, and a snot-nose.” Luther began chuckling and waited on Uncle to join in, but Uncle stayed quiet. Luther gave him a quick push on his upper arm. “What? Cat got your tongue? I’ve asked you two questions.”

  Uncle cleared his throat. “I feel for them, Mr. LC.”

  “Feel for them? Well, I feel for that steer. God help it. With no mama’s milk and no pasture, it’ll be dead before summer.”

  Uncle shifted in his seat.

  “You ain’t going soft on me, are you? You know those people have no business messing with my Fat Cattle Show. They’re an embarrassment. And where’s that woman’s husband? You know jelly’s not him.”

  Uncle had his head turned towards the side window. Luther let out a huff and gritted his teeth. How dare Uncle take their side.

  Luther slammed on the brakes. “Get out! Get the by God out right now.”

  Uncle stepped out.

  Luther peeled off. How could Uncle be so ungrateful when Luther had built him a tenant house and let him live free from day one on Luther’s land?

  He watched Uncle get smaller in his rearview mirror and told himself that the steer didn’t matter, and neither did those people. They had as much of a chance of winning as Uncle did, which was zero, since he wouldn’t be allowed to enter, only the Negro Fat Cattle Show & Sale, which was a pitiful knock-off.

  Luther needed some air. His window was down, but Uncle’s was rolled up. What was it with negroes and not wanting to be cold?