One Good Mama Bone

by McClain, Bren; Monroe, Mary Alice;

  “Watch, Mama!” Emerson Bridge called out and held part of the biscuit in front of Lucky’s mouth. But the steer continued to play.

  Sarah loved seeing him enjoy something so much. She tried to think of a time when her own mother may have felt that way. Sarah had loved to look out her bedroom window at the colored glass in the windows across the street at her mother’s church. “I see you looking out your window, girl, every time I walk over there,” her mother told her one night after returning from a service. Sarah was in bed and braced herself for a whipping. But all her mother said was “They’s a big picture of Jesus hanging behind the preacher’s head and he’s got him on a pretty white robe and what looks like an angel’s halo around his head. You heard of angels, girl?” Sarah nodded. Her papa had told her they’re something that she couldn’t see, but they were around her and looked out for. She and her mother were in darkness, and Sarah couldn’t see her mother’s eyes, but she imagined they were sparkling. “And that pretty colored glass all around out where the crowd sits, they’s three windows right beside each other, and right in the middle of all three, they got flower petals. Four of them. Two straight up and one on the right and one on the left. It looks like a cross, the kind Jesus died on for our sins. For our real bad ways. He wiped them all out. All the bad we do. Every bit of it,” her mother said. “Every blame bit of it.”

  Emerson Bridge now was laughing so hard, it rang out like a church bell. His steer now was licking his face, doing so in long swipes. “It’s rough, Mama, and it tickles.” He threw his head back like he was happy, like there was nothing more in the whole wide world he wanted.

  “Look at you with your giggle box turned over,” Sarah told him, and he laughed harder and louder. She looked Mama Red’s way and began to laugh, too. She let herself inside the gate, went to her boy and with her fingers, tickled his belly like she had seen a mother do in the Piece Goods department at Gallant-Belks. Sarah did this without thinking and started to stop when she caught herself with such display, but he bent forward towards her touch, closing in over her like he wanted her to stay.

  …..

  Mr. Thrasher had just pulled up near Sarah and her boy when the county agent drove in.

  “I can’t wait to show you Lucky, Mr. Merritt,” he called out and started jumping up and down as the two men approached the fence.

  Mr. Merritt had a nice smile on his face that reminded her of Harold, way back. No wonder Emerson Bridge had talked so highly of him.

  But the smile left. “What’s that mama cow doing in there with your steer? And nursing her?”

  “He missed her so much, she come for him,” her boy said and opened the gate for them all to go in. “Four miles.”

  “That’s right, four of them,” Sarah told him and followed them all inside.

  Mr. Merritt lifted his cap, then set it back down. He was shaking his head. “No sir, son, we can’t have this. That steer’s got to be separated, weaned off his mama. That’s the first order of business.”

  Sarah rushed towards him. “No sir, we can’t do that. That was tried once, and both of them pitched a fit.” The thought of taking Mama Red away from her calf again made her dizzy.

  Mr. Thrasher made a show of clearing his throat. “I told them way back we didn’t need no sissy boy still with his mama.”

  They were all standing near Mama Red and Lucky, who continued to nurse as Mama Red chewed grass. “Separating is the natural course, folks,” the county agent was saying. He now had edge to his voice. “A project steer still can’t still be nursing.”

  “But will he have enough to eat?” Sarah asked. She couldn’t see that there was enough grass out there to fill them up.

  “It’s the natural course.”

  “Natural,” Mr. Thrasher said and spit on the ground.

  Sarah had never seen him do that.

  “Y’all can do what’s known as ‘fence weaning.’ It’s not as severe. Just a run a fence between them.”

  Sarah thought about the money it would cost to do so.

  “Your steer needs to be on small grains, son, three to four gallons a day, and all the dry feed it wants, plus some kind of meal like I said yesterday. You can get all that at the FCX near town. He’s got to feed out to around a thousand pounds by the time the show rolls around, and that’s just six short months away.”

  Sarah was only getting about six hours of sleep a night. She’d go to five and make more dresses to sell.

  “All right, sir,” Emerson Bridge said, “but I wanted to tell you that Lucky don’t like biscuits. But I’ll see if he’ll eat a bite of whatever Mama makes for supper.”

  “Excuse me?” Mr. Merritt said.

  “You said feed him some kind of meal.”

  “I’m talking about linseed meal or cottonseed meal.” Mr. Merritt took a deep breath. “Where’s your pasture, son?”

  “You mean where they eat?” the boy said.

  “I mean pasture. Where Kentucky 31 fescue is planted or some other kind of grass, along with some clover like ladino.”

  Emerson Bridge was looking at Mr. Thrasher with eyes that Sarah recognized. They were asking for help. He used to look at his papa that way.

  Mr. Thrasher hunched up his shoulders.

  Emerson Bridge told the man, “All they’ve got is this grass. Don’t know the name of it.”

  Mr. Merritt squatted down in front of him. Harold used to do that. “Son, listen, I don’t know where you got this steer, but I’m afraid this might be too much for you.” His voice had softened. “What you have is not a pasture. I’ve got to tell you most of the boys have a year-around pasture, a permanent pasture. It would take you a good year, if not two, to get you a good stand.”

  “Why, we got him from the biggest cattleman there is, Mr. Luther Dobbins,” Mr. Thrasher said.

  The county agent jerked his head Mr. Thrasher’s way. Emerson Bridge put his hands on Mr. Merritt’s face and turned it back towards him. Sarah thought he was going to throw his arms around the man’s neck, but her boy kept his arms down and told the man, “Lucky’s special, sir. You just wait and see.”

  Mr. Merritt touched the top of Emerson Bridge’s shoulders, then rose to his feet and tapped the top of his head.

  “We’ll sure get us one of those pastures for our grand champeen,” Mr. Thrasher called out. He’d already left the lot and was standing by his truck, which carried bodies now. He wanted the county agent to see them.

  Mr. Merritt told them, “Mama cows don’t know how to tell their younguns to stop. They’re not like birds that just stop feeding their young, so they’ll leave the nest.” And then he took a bucket of grain from the bed of his truck and kept holding it in front of Lucky, Mama Red trying to get in between them, until the steer followed him out of the gate and back to the tree, where it had been tied before.

  Mama Red stood at the gate. Sarah wondered if she would try to break out. She had noticed the mother cow’s ribs showing, but she had been thinking, with the hot summer they’d had, the mother cow didn’t feel like eating so much. She lined up in her head all that they were doing wrong and brought her arm around her boy’s shoulder and pulled him to her.

  …..

  Luther Dobbins yawned and covered his mouth, making sure his back was to his boy, who was about to swing open the big wooden gate on the barn to let his project steer into the lot. Luther had had little sleep the night before. Paul Merritt was due out any time now to see LC’s steer for the first time, give the animal an assessment, which meant assessing Luther. He’d lain in bed practicing his words. “The big one there,” he would say and point to the steer, “your next grand champion, don’t you think? An easy feeder, for sure. Look at that back. Water already runs off it. It’s as straight as they come.”

  Luther turned towards his boy and the lot and saw two steers head for the water trough. The bigger one, the better one, was his son’s. Luther had the other there to provide competition, to make his boy’s steer eat more. He pulled a cigar from hi
s overall’s front pocket and tried to keep his hand from shaking so he could light it. He saw his boy coming towards him. He turned his back again.

  “I’m going to cream everybody this year, Dad,” LC told him, Luther cigar’s catching fire. “You just wait. It won’t even be a contest.” This was the first time LC had called him what Charles had always called him, Dad.

  It being a Saturday, Uncle had the hammer mill in full operation, the tractor that powered it sputtering and shooting black smoke through its stack.”We’re not like the others,” Luther told LC. “No other boy has their very own grinder.” He pulled a long draw from his cigar and sent it into the air above his son’s head. He wanted LC to see him send the smoke at least as high as the tractor’s, even beat it.

  LC’s hair was cut close, because Luther preferred it that way, since Luther was mostly bald, with only a semicircle that ringed his head like someone had thrown a horseshoe. He always wore a hat to keep it hidden. LC’s hair was sandy blond, the color of Luther’s when he was that age, but over his thirty-seven years, Luther’s had turned a shade of brown that carried hints of both light and dark.

  For the first time, he could see what Charles had always claimed, that LC looked more like Luther than Charles did. LC had Luther’s nose, its narrowness that ran to a sharp point and flanked by a squatty roundedness on each side. Charles had Mildred’s, that simple kind, as if God had made theirs in his sleep. Luther thought of his boy’s name, Luther Charles Dobbins the third. Mildred had tried to dissuade him from having a second namesake, saying it wasn’t proper, what with Charles already being Luther Charles Dobbins, Jr. But Luther wouldn’t hear of it.

  LC picked up a rock and threw it hard against the side of the hammer mill. It bounced back about halfway. LC looked at Luther. “You like that, Dad?”

  Luther did not like it. The rock had likely put in a dent in his machine. But LC began to laugh, and Luther had not heard laughter like that since before the deer. He thought of the ladybugs. He’d not yet shown them to LC. “Come on, let’s go see something,” he said and started for the pine trees, his arms motioning wildly for LC to follow, Luther feeling like a boy himself.

  But LC did not follow. “You really mean it?” LC called out, his voice climbing higher with each word.

  Luther stopped. LC did not believe him. If Luther was Luther’s boy, he wouldn’t believe him, either.

  A truck pulled around back of the house. It was Paul Merritt.

  Luther dropped his arms and bit his teeth around the cigar, before taking it from his mouth. “About time you showed up,” he told the man and nodded towards the lot. He would wait until Merritt got out of his truck before saying the rest.

  But Merritt stayed in his truck.

  Luther walked over to him and slapped his hand against his door.

  Merritt jumped. “Sorry, Luther. Thinking about those people I just left. They’re earnest people. And he’s a little shaver of a boy.”

  “What people?”

  “The Creamers.”

  “That Roy Rogers wannabee?”

  “Don’t say that, Luther.”

  “Why? That’s what he is. And that’s just being polite. If I weren’t such a good Christian man, I’d call him worse than that.”

  Luther dropped his cigar, ground it into the dirt with his boot, and motioned LC over. He could feel the bottoms of his feet sweating. “The big one there,” he said and pointed towards the lot. “Your next grand champion, don’t you think? An easy feeder, for sure. Look at that back. Water already runs off it. It’s as straight as they come.”

  The county agent, though, was not looking. He was shaking his head. Luther shoved the flat palm of his hand against the man’s shoulder. “Hey, what’s the matter with you? You better remember where your bread is buttered.” Luther had helped get Merritt his job.

  “Think I’m going to have to do something this year I dread. Think I’m going to give the boys a paper to sign, saying they know this is a terminal event, that they acknowledge the steer will be sold for slaughter once the show’s over.”

  “Everybody knows that,” Luther said.

  “Yeah, everybody knows that,” LC said.

  He spoke up like that Creamer boy had back in the spring. Luther balled up his fist and tapped his boy near his shoulder. LC would thank him one day for toughening him up.

  “The Prater boy didn’t. After the sale last time, he asked me when he could buy his steer back, and when I told him he couldn’t, he cried. And then there’s the new Creamer boy this year.”

  “Jellies,” Luther said.

  “Hey, heard you sold the Creamer boy his steer,” Merritt said.

  “So what if I did? It was just a throwaway.”

  “Did you take a good look at him? He’s thin now, but—”

  “But what?” Luther said.

  “But he might be an easy feeder, a real down-the-roader. Wide in the eyes and looks to have the base for finishing out top of the line.”

  Top of the line. Luther felt lightheaded. He wanted to ask, What about my boy’s? He lit another cigar and took a long draw.

  “They’re in over their heads, though,” Merritt said.

  Luther wondered if he was, too. But he’d done better selecting his boy’s steer this time. Hadn’t he? LC would see that his father could be a winner. Wouldn’t he? Luther blew a smoke ring and watched it fall apart.

  “No pasture to speak of, no mineral lick, no hay, no grain, no kind of meal, only a little bucket to drink water out of, and to top it off, the steer’s still nursing his mama. Had to separate them. And what’s she doing over there, anyway?”

  Luther began to chuckle. What had he been worrying about? And the mother was still alive.

  “Let’s just call it charity,” he said and blew another ring.

  “Didn’t have the heart to tell them all I could, though.”

  There was more?

  “The boy’s already named him. Lucky, of all things.”

  Naming him. The death nail. Luther took his cigar out and began to laugh. When his boy joined in, Luther’s laughter grew, becoming loud and hard. But it was not the laughter Luther had imagined with the ladybugs. They had wings and could fly. Luther had seen them do it. The sound of the ladybug laugh would be more light. More free. Him and his boy taking off and going up, up and away, soaring over God’s earth.

  The mother cow stood at the far left side of the fence, pressing against it and bellowing for her young, standing near a tree where she had found him after he was taken away. This was as close to him as she could get. He kept trying to return to her.

  Tall shoots of Johnson grass in the midst of a few trailing vines of lespedeza clover surrounded their hooves. Flecks of pink and purple from the clover’s flowers peppered her mouth and his. Mostly, she ate the clover, since it was soft, unlike the Johnson grass, which was hard to break off, since she had worn what remained of her bottom teeth down to almost nothing and had lost six of her eight altogether. She’d lost another tooth that day. Mostly, she brought gum to gum when trying to take food into her mouth.

  The gentle wind stood beside the mother cow, while the gentle wind’s little one remained with the mother cow’s young. Earlier, the gentle wind and the little one had made sounds, light ones, that floated to the heavens. Now, they made none.

  Behind her, unfamiliar men tore holes into the earth and placed in them parts of trees.

  Inside the mother cow, a new baby was growing, three months old and the size of a newborn puppy. Just that day, it had crested the mother’s pelvic rim and moved into her womb. A neighbor’s bull had jumped a low place in the fence and mounted her while the stars sprinkled above.

  Me and my boy, we got a fence running between us, too, Mama Red. You just can’t see ours.

  I didn’t come by being a mama like you did. I bet yours was all quiet. I come by it loud, with a gunshot, Mattie’s. That was my boy’s mama. She took her own life the night he was born. I ain’t proud of how I carried mys
elf that night. Can I tell you that? You never would have done what I done, said what I said. It’s eating me plumb up. See, I never did get saved by my mama’s Jesus, so I’m going to spend eternity in what my mama called “the fires of hell.” Reckon I could tell you about it? How I got over here. If I could just stand here with you, girl, and tell you.

  A handsome man come knocking on my mama’s door one afternoon in Gainesville, Georgia, where I grew up. I’d just come from a memorial service for my papa. A bad tornado blew him off somewhere. We never found him, like a lot of people they didn’t find. So they just had a casket with a blue cloth over it for the men and a pink one for the ladies.

  The man said he had a telegram for the family of a Mr. Claude Bolt. That was my papa. Condolences from President Roosevelt himself.

  I offered him some sweet tea, and he said, “You know how to make sweet tea?”

  I told him, “I sure do. Know how to cook, too.”

  Mama hollered in, “He can tell that by the way you look, girl. Either that, or I know how.”

  But all he did was smile and say, “That’s awfully kind of you.”

  He said his name was Harold Creamer and was from over in South Carolina, a place called Anderson, and that he worked for the telephone company, and they’d asked for volunteers to come over to Georgia to help out. He told me, “You right handy around the house. I like women who are handy around the house.”

  I noticed his eyes on me, especially on my bosom.

  He come back the next day about suppertime, wanted to know where a fellow could get good eats. Mama pulled me away from the door. “I know you ain’t never been around no boys before, but don’t go hog wild over the first one that crosses your pig path.”

  He left but wrote to me he was coming to see me Saturday night week, for me to be ready at six o’clock. I’d heard girls at school talk about wearing tight tops that showed off what boys liked to look at, so I put on a dress that was too little for me up there. We went to a café, and his eyes kept dropping to where he liked to look. He said he’d sure missed me, and I told him I’d sure missed him, too.