He pulled off the road and stretched across the long seat and rolled Uncle’s window down. He could smell the man, the smell of oil and the scent of fire burning and sweat. And Luther could feel him, the indention his rear end had made over the years. Luther put his hand there. It was still warm.
…..
At the Calhoun Hotel that night, Luther Dobbins and his family sat at the large round table on the last row. The table up front was reserved for the winner and his father. He’d thought about sitting on the second row, but that was where the pitiful sat, those who’d never had any kind of shot at glory and never would. He told himself he’d better get a table with plenty of room around it so people could talk to Charles. That meant the back row.
He’d placed his younger son on his left and, on his right, leaned the back of Charles’s chair against the table to save his place. Charles had not yet arrived. Luther sat so he could easily see the door and his boy walking in. Mildred sat on the other side of LC. Another family filled the rest of the seats, except the one beside Charles. Luther had it reserved for the county agent, Paul Merritt.
Mildred wore a dark blue dress, one of those rich blues that Luther liked. He couldn’t say she was a pretty woman, but he wasn’t embarrassed to have her sit with him. He didn’t know how much she weighed, but it wasn’t much and not even close to what she weighed when they married. Back then, he had something to hang on to. He missed that, but at least she wasn’t fat like Merritt’s wife.
The room had an elegance to it, especially the chandelier in the middle, as fine as he imagined any home in Anderson possessed, even the rich people who lived in homes along the Boulevard or Murray Avenue, but also the walls with their sage green wallpaper that appeared as satin with its high shine.
“So, how does it feel sitting out all the way in the back pasture with the rest of us?” It was the man across from Luther. He’d seen the man before but had never thought him important enough to remember his name.
Luther slapped the back of Charles’s chair. “My boy Charles won nine years in a row. He’s probably getting him a parking place at this very minute.”
The county agent walked in. Luther rose to his feet and waved him over. The man did as he was told but shook his head the whole way there. “You know I got to sit at the head table, Luther.”
Luther liked that Merritt had to raise his chin in order to look at him. Luther wanted to tell him, You mean the grand champion’s table, but was afraid his voice would catch. So he said, “Thought you might want to talk to Charles. He’s coming, you know. You might learn something.” Then Luther sat and tucked the white cloth napkin at his throat, letting the rest of it hang down over his high-dollar tie that went with his high-dollar suit. “Wonder when that steak’s coming?”
A waitress set a small wooden bowl of tossed salad with French dressing at each place. Then came plates filled with steaks and small Irish potatoes, boiled and already buttered. “Looks like sirloins,” Luther said and took his knife and cut into his. The meat looked to lack sufficient marbling. He put a piece, a small one as if sampling, in his mouth and chewed but soon reached for his iced tea glass and took a big swallow. He was right. “This ain’t a Dobbins steak. Tough as shoe leather. Somebody pass me the Heinz 57.”
Merritt stood at the podium and began talking. Luther knew he was only a few minutes away from asking the grand champion and his father to stand. “Yeah, my boy Charles,” Luther told the table, “is a big college man up at Clemson studying what they call animal husbandry. That’s a fact.”
“Big LC,” Mildred whispered and nodded with her head towards the front.
“Yeah, he’ll probably come back when he’s finished and take that man’s job up there.” Luther had the attention of several people at tables nearby. “He already knows how to put an X on a cow’s forehead and kill it with a ten-pounder.” Luther put his arm around the back of Charles’s empty chair. “And can you believe I ain’t having to pay for all that? He’s on scholarship he’s so smart.” He took a big gulp of his iced tea.
“I did something today,” his younger son said.
Luther spewed tea from his mouth across his plate of food.
Applause broke out around the room. This year’s grand champion and his father were standing now. The crowd joined them, even Mildred. But LC stayed seated, as did Luther, his boy’s eyes fixed on him. Luther could feel rings of sweat beneath his armpits.
The crowd sat, the room becoming quiet, except for the flashes from the newspaper woman’s camera. Luther cut an extra big piece of steak and put it in his mouth.
“I killed a deer today, my very first one,” LC said, his voice as loud as Luther’s had been. “I’m marked now.” His boy looked at him straight on. He had washed up clean. All that was left could appear as a slight sunburn.
“I didn’t know it was deer season, Big LC,” Mildred said. “Charles always killed his in the fall of the year.”
Luther raised his hand. He noticed it was shaking. He put it back down and cut his eyes to the people around him. Most shifted in their seats.
Mildred put a peppermint in her mouth.
Luther looked towards the door. Where was Charles?
The steak was still in Luther’s mouth. He tried to swallow, but the meat wouldn’t go down. He took a drink of iced tea and tried to swallow again, but the steak seemed stuck. He took another big drink.
Nothing.
He brought his fist near his upper stomach and tapped it there as if he had just bumped his hand. He wanted to do it harder, but he didn’t want anyone to know he was in trouble.
His heart rate picked up to a near frenzy.
He got up from his seat and hurried out the door to the lobby to an area off to the side.
He was choking. He was going to die. And die a loser. And do so in front of his boy, whose love he did not have. And Mildred, he was leaving Mildred with a house and a farm she believed was paid for. But it was not. And then there was Charles, who did not need him and never had.
He dropped to his knees. His did this on a rug more plush than he could afford, and all of this in front of a settee, covered in velvet the color of blood. His body fell forward, his upper stomach hitting the mahogany arm railing hard, the chewed piece of sirloin now dislodging and coming back into his mouth.
He looked around. No one was there.
He coughed the chewed meat forward, the dark, ugly mass hitting the wall a couple of feet in front of him and then began sliding down the green satin shine. Luther wiped his brow with the back of his hand, his brow slick with wetness, his throat on fire and burning.
He was being punished. He had called that woman, Mrs. Creamer, a “heathen.” But that’s what he was. God had let him taste hell, let the flames of fire in the devil’s house lap at his heathen heels and climb his heathen legs.
He heard applause inside the room. That’s where everyone else was, his boy and the grand champion and his father, a man who had not pushed a ladybug over that day, nor was he a man who had put a gun in his boy’s arms and forced him to kill, knowing his boy was too tender for that.
Wasn’t he too tender for that?
…..
Emerson Bridge, darkness having settled in, remained outside with the steer, off to the side, sitting in front of his papa’s barn. The steer’s sounds had been loud in the daytime but now had become a scream. Emerson Bridge cried louder at night, too.
He thought of his papa’s urging to be kind. His mother had delivered a bucket of water to the animal soon after it arrived that afternoon, but he had done nothing to make the steer’s way better. He had thought he wanted an animal to be his friend, but seeing it and hearing its cries reminded Emerson Bridge that his papa was gone.
He recalled the animal’s face, white with a brownish color scattered about, and his hair had looked fluffy, like it might be soft. His papa’s beard, before he shaved, was soft.
He looked towards the tree, where the steer was still tied. He could see its dark s
hape. It was alone, too.
Emerson Bridge rose from the ground and went to the animal, nudged closer the bucket of water and stood still. The steer backed up to the tree and made a sound with its nose like it was pushing air through. Emerson Bridge thought he could smell it. There was a sweetness.
The moon hung high in the sky behind them. It lit the steer’s face, that fluffiness, that softness. Emerson Bridge lifted his hand towards the animal, held it still in the growing cold, and said, “It ain’t your fault my papa ain’t here no more.”
The steer seemed to hold on Emerson Bridge, their eyes about level.
“And I’m going to be kind to you. I promise you that.”
The steer released its scream again. Emerson Bridge didn’t know what the animal was saying, but he knew it was important. No, more than important. Necessary.
Emerson Bridge wondered what was necessary for him to say. He could smell the fatback his mother had fried for his supper. He had not been in to eat, and she had not bugged him about coming in. The word “lucky” came to him. He was lucky to have her.
And lucky to have a new friend, too. He wondered if the steer knew how to play throw-the-rock, and then he let out a giggle, his first since he lost his papa.
“Lucky,” he said aloud and knew he’d said the animal’s name. “Lucky, you’re my Lucky boy.”
…..
The steer’s bellowing did not let up. It rumbled like thunder in the pitch black.
Sarah lay in bed and wanted to sleep, but she was feeling what the steer was sending forth in her toes. It made the bottoms of her feet sweat and rise up her body in waves.
She got up, lit the kerosene lamp, and went outside to the steer. Emerson Bridge was no longer was with the animal. She’d heard him come into the house about midnight.
“Sounds like you’re calling for somebody. Who you calling for?” Sarah’s voice was like a child’s, large and full of wonder.
She held the light at its face and saw mostly white but also a pretty red brown that started at the bottom, near its nose, and ran ragged on a diagonal towards its right eye. Over its left, a dot of that same red brown like somebody had dropped a speck of red-eye gravy.
The animal raised its chin into the air and released his long, slow resonance, and, this time, Sarah’s legs began to tremble. The utterance was not one she recognized in her head. But in her bones, where it had lain since her beginning days, she did.
MARCH 18, 1951
Sarah woke in the early morning light to a pin-dropping quiet.
The steer’s sounds were no more. Had it died? Or broken free of the rope and run away?
She rushed to her window, threw it open, and held herself.
But she heard nothing.
She ran through the house and out the door, running barefoot, the ground cold and hard.
With the sun rising at her back and her eyes straining toward the tree, she saw the shape of something large. She came to see it was a cow but much bigger than the steer, maybe three times. The animal shifted backwards and revealed a smaller one, its rear end aimed Sarah’s way and its head tucked beneath the larger one. She heard slurping sounds, hungry ones. The small one was nursing. A rope extended taut from the animal to the tree. This was Emerson Bridge’s steer.
The larger cow’s face looked at Sarah, straight on. It carried the same two colors and markings she’d seen on the steer the day before, only more pronounced. This was the steer’s mama.
She looked around the yard for Mr. Dobbins’s truck but did not see it. She wondered if he dropped her off sometime in the night. But why would he pick such a late hour? And would he expect payment? The cow would likely cost triple what the steer had cost.
All up and down the mother cow’s neck and chest and legs, Sarah saw cuts, many appearing deep and in long, jagged runs like someone had taken serrated knives and sliced. Most of the blood was bright red, but some was almost black. She hadn’t seen this much blood since the night Emerson Bridge was born.
She recalled the fence of little x’s at Mr. Dobbins’s farm the day before. She and Emerson Bridge and Mr. Thrasher had stood behind it and watched his truck move into the pasture to get the steer. She had touched one of the little x’s. It was sharp. It could pierce.
Chills spread over Sarah’s body. The mama cow had broken free and come for her calf.
Sarah had taken her child away. She took a step back. How could she have done that?
The mother cow held her eyes on Sarah, circles of soft brown that welcomed, not chided. The cow began to chew, her mouth moving in a rhythm, slow and steady. It was one Sarah recognized. It was the rhythm of her arm, stirring a pot of grits. It was the rhythm of love.
“How’d you know?” Sarah’s voice full of hush. “That’s a long way for you to come. And in the pitch black, too. How’d you know?”
The mother cow raised her chin and sent forth a sound, a short one, yet deep, even vibrating. The sounds the steer had made were deep like that, but his were long, intended for the long haul, for his mother, who heard and who came. Sarah knew now who he had been calling. His mother. Such acts had never occurred to her. Neither a child’s calling nor the mother’s coming.
She thought of Emerson Bridge and looked back towards the house, to his window, where six feet away, he lay. “I got a boy, too.”
The mother cow’s neck now was stretched to her far right, the bottom of her mouth and chin moving along the ridge of her calf’s back near his tail. She began to lick, making long runs with her tongue. Her breath, hot against the cold, hung in a mist. And then rose high in the growing light.
Sarah stepped forward and leaned in, in the hopes that the mist would come find her, that it would trudge across however far it needed to come, even knock down a fence or two, to come find Clementine Florence Augusta Sarah Bolt Creamer.
The mother cow heard a squeaking sound behind her and then a slap slap. Her calf’s head was beneath her, nursing. She turned to face the sound. He lost his grip on her teat but caught it again.
The day’s light had begun to appear. Someone was moving towards them, someone the mother cow did not know. She positioned her body so that her calf was tucked in behind her, protected. He was not free to run like she was.
This someone wasn’t as tall as the farmer or his workingman. This one moved slowly the way a gentle wind blows grass. The mother cow was not afraid. She straightened her body, bringing her calf within view of the gentle wind that came to stand just out from them.
There was a stillness now. Blood from her wounds had started to dry, but now that she had moved again, the cuts on her front knees oozed. She had broken free of the farmer’s fence just as the moon was losing its orange and becoming white. Her calf’s cry drew her across lands that were foreign, open fields of wheat, the green sprouts rubbing her belly, and across stretches of grass, just reemerging to the promise of warmth.
When she’d come within a half mile of her young, she could smell him. She bore down, the wind in her face.
When she found him, she’d sniffed just up from his mouth, where she ran hers, parched. And then she began licking him, as she was licking him now.
The gentle wind was making sounds. They came from her mouth.
The mother cow continued to lick.
Sarah returned to her house, to Emerson Bridge’s room. He was asleep, his body curled in tight under a thin sheet. She pulled the bedspread up over him and got on her knees and called up in her mind the mother cow, how she had moved her mouth along the top of her calf’s back. She was saying, I love you, boy. She didn’t have to say, And I hope you know I want you. The calf already knew that. His mother had come for him.
Sarah brought her hand up and touched her own mouth. Then she moved her face, pushing aside the inches between her and boy, to his cheek, where her lips hovered above his silent dimple. She lowered herself to him and found his skin as soft and warm as the inside of a biscuit.
She felt him stir and drew her face back. His eye
s were open and on her.
She scooped him up, brought him full to her chest.
Around her neck, hard and fast, he wrapped his arms.
She released a sound she had never made. It carried both a low end and a high, like she had lost her breath and spotted it in the distance.
They began to rock.
She had always thought she lived to see his dimples. But it was this. This is what she’d lived for. This.
You done started on your teaching of me. With my boy. Can I tell you that, girl? I don’t know your name. What’s your name? Mine’s Sarah.
I come back out here to thank you. I’m six days now into having to be his mama full on. But can I tell you something? I don’t know how to be. I don’t mean to be whispering, but them words—be a mama—they scare me. I’m lost. See, if me and you was a long piece of cloth, you’d be one end with me clear across the whole wide world on the other, trying to hang on to a skinny piece of nothing. Because as good a mama as you are, I’m that, that… I don’t know how to be a mama.
You can sure tell your boy there is yours. Them two colors on y’all’s faces, that pretty red brown and that white. And both of them arranged in that same exact pattern, except his is littler. Like his ears and his forehead is stamped in that red color across the bottom of your face. Like his shadow has fallen on you for all time. So that you won’t never leave him. No ma’am, Mama Red, you don’t. Mama Red. Can I call you that?
See, my boy don’t look like me. That’s because he’s not my flesh and blood.
Oh, to say those words out loud.
Not another soul that’s alive on this earth knows that but me. The two that did are dead.
I see you holding your head just as still, listening to me with that good kind of mama way you got. This ain’t the first time I’ve seen it. The first time was when I was a girl, six year old. An old mama dog showed it to me. She come across our backyard one afternoon. I spotted her out the kitchen window when I was making some cornbread for Mama before prayer meeting. “Get it smooth now, girl!” Mama hollered down to me. She was upstairs on her sewing machine. “Don’t want to see no pones, no big fat pones, sticking up out of it.”
One Good Mama Bone Page 9