“It’s got the bloat?” LC said.
“What? You think I’m an idiot, Paul? That I don’t know that? I’ve had my share of cows with the bloat and I’ve seen them die from it.” Luther’s voice was weaker than normal. It hurt to talk too loud.
“It’s not going to die, is it?” LC said.
Merritt touched LC’s shoulder like he was the boy’s father. “Hey, that’s my boy,” Luther told him and slapped Merritt’s hand away, then put his hand where Merritt’s had been. The boy was thin. Charles had a lot more meat on his bones when he was LC’s age.
“Sure hate to, but reckon I’ll pass out that paper for the boys to sign at our December meeting,” Merritt said and started towards his truck.
“Don’t think you need to do that, Mr. Merritt,” LC yelled and ran that man’s way.
Luther followed. “Hey, you’re not going to say anything about how my boy’s steer is finishing out?”
“He’s looking good, Luther.”
“Some details, Paul, details.”
Merritt was inside his truck now.
Luther thought if could get the county agent to say exactly what looked good, he would know what to concentrate on. He motioned for him to roll down his window.
Merritt obeyed but said, “I made it clear to them that they must keep him on his feet. God help them.”
Then he backed up and left.
LC, though, remained by Luther’s side.
His bloat was lessening. “Listen and learn, boy. Grand champions are made between the holidays, Thanksgiving to Christmas. Your competition’s going to slack off, but the mighty Dobbins are going to step it up even more.”
Merritt hadn’t realized he’d given Luther an early Christmas present. Keep him on his feet, indeed.
…..
“I know you told me not to come around here on no day but Monday,” Ike called from his truck to his boss man, who was in the pecan grove with his boy and Emmanuel. “But our steer’s got something bad called the bloat. We give him two Pepsi-Colas to drink, but I was wondering if you know anything else to do, because he might die.”
Mr. Dobbins made no response with words, only blew smoke from this cigar in little short bursts like he was kissing the air.
Ike knew he was talking fast and that his breath was foul from the vomiting he’d done over the mistake he’d made. “I said, the steer has—”
“Heard you the first time, for God’s sake.” His boss man’s words carried an edge that he had become familiar with. “I don’t know of nothing.”
Ike looked at Emmanuel, who had his head down. “I put him on that full feed like you said, but—”
“Full feed?” Mr. Dobbins hollered.
“Yes sir, full feed.”
“I never told you that.”
“Yes, sir. That day you hired me on as your hired hand.”
His boss man had his eyes on his boy, who stood within a couple of feet of him. “Everybody knows—everybody, right, LC?—that you don’t put him on full feed until November.” He slammed his hand towards the ground, sent some pecans bouncing and hitting his boy’s leg. “You must have misunderstood me.”
His boy moved away from him.
“Yes sir, I reckon I did. I’m sorry about that.” Ike wanted that whale in the Bible to open his mouth and swallow him like he did that man, Jonah, but he wanted the whale to go ahead and chew him up, too.
“I’ll just see you on Monday, Mr. LC,” Emmanuel said and held up his hand. He tipped his cap towards them all and started towards the road.
“LC, why don’t you run on, too,” Mr. Dobbins said and pushed him aside and started for Ike’s truck. Ike wished now that he’d taken time to stop by Drake’s for some chewing gum.
“If you’re going to be my hired hand,” his boss man was saying, “you’re going to have to start listening with two ears. I’ve got a reputation in this county. Even this whole state.”
“Yes sir. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. Matthew 18:20. Yes sirree.”
“What’s the matter with you? You talking like a preacher. That’s blasphemy.”
Ike shook his head. “Oh, no sir. I’m a hired man through and through.” He felt perspiration in his arm pits and kept his arms down by his side.
Mr. Dobbins glanced around like he was looking for something and then leaned in towards Ike. “I reckon the biggest thing I can advise you is to try to get it to lay down. So it can get some rest.”
His voice was so light, Ike could have missed his words. “Lay down. That what you said?”
“That’s right. Get it to lay down.”
“Lay down,” Ike repeated. “Get the steer to.”
Mr. Dobbins removed his cigar and raised his chin. He released a slow and steady stream of smoke. Then he returned the cigar to his mouth, bringing his chin down.
Ike took that as a nod. He had gotten it right this time.
He told his boss good-bye and left the driveway even faster than he’d arrived. Up in the distance he spotted Emmanuel, whom he assumed was walking to town. Emmanuel motioned for him to stop, which Ike did, but he leaned across the seat and told him, “Wish I could take you, but I got to get back to the Creamer place in a jiffy.”
“Reckon that boy’s mama’s got an ice pick?” Emmanuel’s voice was low.
“Reckon so.”
“Think I can help you.” Emmanuel hopped into the bed of the truck, but Ike threw open the passenger door and hollered, “Get up here with me, or I won’t take you.”
Emmanuel got in the cab. He smelled like the wind.
Ike felt like they were on a secret mission together. Here he was with this man who knew something more than his boss man and didn’t want to show him up. Ike tried to think how an ice pick would help. Maybe to chip up a block of ice to hold on the steer somehow? Or eat it as a way to get water in the steer? “But I don’t know if Mrs. Creamer has a block of ice,” Ike said.
“Won’t be needing ice.”
The steer was on his feet when they arrived, the boy and Mrs. Creamer standing beside him. Ike would let Emmanuel do what he needed with the pick, and then he would share his special advice with the boy. “Emmanuel’s going to help us,” Ike hollered, “and he needs an ice pick right quick.”
Mrs. Creamer started towards her house in a run.
Emmanuel called after her, “And can you boil it good, please, ma’am?”
She raised her hand in the air.
Emmanuel ran his flat hand over the steer’s side. The animal moaned.
“Please don’t let him die,” Emerson Bridge told him.
Ike loved that the boy was free to be honest. He wished he could be a boy again.
Mrs. Creamer returned with the pick, wrapped in a dish towel. Emmanuel held it by its handle, long ago red but now a dull gray. The sharp metal part, those four inches, appeared clean and glistening in the sunlight. “Y’all might want to step back,” he said.
But no one did.
He put his flat hand up high on the steer’s side in the triangular area between the hip bone and last rib and moved his hand in a circle, then made a fist and hard tapped the spot as if his hand was a child’s pogo stick. When he made the stab, it was fast and deep. The steer adjusted his feet and tried to pull away from the post. Ike heard the boy draw in a breath. Mrs. Creamer held her hands over her mouth. Ike swallowed.
Emmanuel leaned down and held his ear just out where the pick had been. “Here it comes, some air. I hear it.”
“Mama Red!” Sarah called out and started the mother cow’s way. She stood on other side of the fence. “Your boy’s going to make it!”
“Ma’am, he—” the man tried to say, but the boy hustled over and put his ear at that place. Emmanuel held the pick out to his side, the metal part covered in blood.
“Sounds like a little wind, a baby one,” Emerson Bridge said, and then a smile came across his face, the sun seeming to throw a spotlight on his dimple l
ike the lights on the stage at the State Theatre. It wasn’t looking like they would make the Roy Rogers Riders Club meeting this day.
The boy wrapped his arms around the man’s waist. “Thank you, sir.” Emmanuel held his arms out from the boy but did not touch him. They were not of the same skin color. Ike had held his arms out from the boy like that, too, but he didn’t have that excuse. The truth was, if Ike ever hugged the boy back, he might not let him go.
“But he ain’t out of trouble yet,” Emmanuel said.
Emerson Bridge bent his head back and looked up the man’s long body.
Ike wanted to be tall like that. He pressed down on the front of his feet and reared up on his toes.
When Emerson Bridge released Emmanuel, Ike motioned for the boy to come his way and then bent towards him and whispered, “Got us some more secret knowledge, but this time I got it right.” He concentrated hard on his words. “We need to get him to lay down. Give him some rest.”
The boy made no comment, though, and ran back to his steer and Emmanuel.
Ike waited for the boy to make the steer lay down.
But the boy did not do that. The boy laid his head against the animal’s side and stretched out his arms to hold him.
Ike waited for more than an hour.
But the boy never did.
Ike returned to his truck and left the driveway. When he came to the road, he pressed his eyes shut, squeezing out water that ran down his cheeks, shaved as smooth as a baby’s earlier that day but now carrying stubble that he was always thankful for. But this day he dug his fingernails into his skin, trying to scrape off what surely God had meant as a joke. “You were right, Daddy. I ain’t no man. Ain’t no cattleman, either.”
He drove to the boarding house and shed himself of his hat and boots and rider jeans and rider shirt and neck kerchief.
He got in the bed.
Then Ike Thrasher began to shake, not of being cold, but of being nothing.
…..
As soon as Mr. Thrasher left the driveway, LC saw his father walk towards the barn and heard him call for him. LC was hiding behind a tree and had overheard his father telling the man to do something that LC knew to be wrong. He needed to warn Emerson Bridge to not do what his father had said. He had seen two of his father’s cows lay down from bloat, not because his father had made them, but because they could no longer stand. Neither ever got back up.
He stayed quiet until his father reached the barn, and then he made a run for the house and tried to telephone Emerson Bridge. But the operator said the number had been disconnected. LC would have to sneak over there. He knew where they lived. Uncle had told him one Saturday when they were running the hammer mill. LC figured the sooner he could satisfy his father, the sooner he could break away. He ran out the back door and let the screened door pop loud.
“Where you been, boy?” his father asked. He was standing beside LC’s steer.
“Working on my lessons.”
“The only lesson you need is with your beef here. Going to teach you how to do like Charles.” His father slapped the steer’s rump and made the animal lunge forward. But LC put his hand on the animal’s face to calm him.
“Hey! You going soft on me?” His father shoved LC towards the fence.
LC felt the barbs in his back. His mother had tried to get him to wear his coat, but he’d thought the afternoon temperature would rise. “No, sir.”
His father lit a cigar and put it in his mouth. LC wanted to shove it down his throat.
“I’m talking about breaking him, boy. Breaking him to lead with his rope, breaking him to start following you. The trick is to put an apple in your back pocket. They’ll walk over nails to get to that apple.”
LC already knew this. He’d practiced with an apple last time but left the apple at home on the day of the show, because doing such was against the rules. He looked towards the house, hoping his mother would be standing outside. Come get your coat, dear, he wanted her to say. But she was cleaning the house. She would not be coming for him.
LC went through the motions with his steer, marking time until his father opened the side door of the garage for his afternoon secret drinking. And when his father did, LC made a run for the road.
He was barely out of the yard, when he heard at his back, “Boy! Where you going?” It was his father, and he was standing beside the house.
“To check the mail!” LC turned and ran hard to the mailbox, which he’d just passed. The box was empty, as he knew it would be. His mother always got the mail. “Mama must have gotten it!” he called out.
His father now was coming his way. LC began skipping towards him like he was playing. This would signal that he was not scared.
But his father grabbed his arm. “I asked you where you were going.”
“I told you, Dad. To get the mail.” LC knew he’d hesitated. Lying did not feel good to him.
“I believe you’re telling me a story, boy.”
“No sir, Dad, I’m not.” LC told him faster this time.
His father slapped his mouth. “That’s to remind you that you better not be telling me no story, because if I catch you, you’re going wish you’d kept on running wherever you were headed.”
LC tasted blood. It tasted like deer’s blood.
…..
Luther watched his boy go inside the house, and then he returned to his garage. He’d already had his one drink for the day, had wrapped his glass in one of Mildred’s dish towels and set it inside an empty lard can behind LC’s old tricycle. But he took the glass back out and poured in the rest of the RC Cola he’d already capped and had waiting for Monday. He tried not to drink on Sundays.
He kept his pint of whiskey hidden behind an old hub cap that leaned against the back wall. Uncle bought the whiskey at a store in town. It was easier for negroes to buy it. People expected negroes to drink.
He pictured his boy’s lip, the blood on it. He wished he’d not done it. Why couldn’t he have invited his boy to go see the ladybugs? They could have run there together and watched the insects play.
Luther poured in a shot of his whiskey.
Luther suspected the boy had somehow overhead what he’d told Thrasher about the steer and his boy was headed to the Creamers. But what if LC really had been getting the mail? That’s where Luther was headed. Mildred had not had time that day. She was getting the house extra clean. He liked it extra clean.
Luther held his bottle over his glass and tipped it all the way up.
…..
LC lay in his bed with the covers pulled high to his chin. On his body, he wore his clothes from the day, his jeans and flannel shirt and even socks and brogans. The time was close to his father’s bedtime, nine o’clock. His mother had already kissed him goodnight and closed the door.
He had butterflies in his belly. He’d never sneaked out before. Boys at school had talked of it and said a boy may as well be a girl if he’d never done it. But, when the bragging words came this school year from boys like the Prater boy, LC had laughed and called them jellies, telling himself that he’d skipped that stage and gone straight to manhood. But now that he had the opportunity before him, LC saw the escape not only as a way to help his friend, but also as a means to be a boy again.
Taking the stairs and leaving the house by way of the front or back door was too risky. The stairs liked to creak, like they were doing now. His father was coming to bed. He’d be passing LC’s room. LC closed his eyes and lay as still as a corpse.
The handle on his door turned. LC sucked in his breath as the darkness in his eyelids went light and then dark again. His father’s shadow had fallen on him.
“You asleep?” his father said.
LC tried not to breathe.
His father stepped closer. “Huh? You asleep?”
His father’s voice didn’t carry much of an edge, but, still, LC was thinking, Here it comes. He listened for the sound of his father’s belt sliding through his loops on his khaki pants. LC felt h
is body sweating.
But he didn’t hear any such sound, only that of his father clearing his throat. “Boy, you know—” He heard his father swallow. “You know I love you, don’t you?”
LC’s eyes flew open, but he squeezed them shut again and hoped his father had not seen. No, he wanted to say, no sir, I do not know that. I think you hate me.
“I know I’m hard on you, and I’m sorry for that. But I want you to have it better than I did.”
LC wanted to say, Then stay off my back.
His father took a deep breath, the smell of whiskey in the air between them, and then LC heard his footsteps take him away. LC allowed his eyes the slightest crack and saw his father’s shoulders slumped, his head hanging low.
The door closed.
The light went out in the hallway.
The door to his father and mother’s room beside his closed.
LC exhaled.
His father knew that LC had heard him. His father’s bent body told him that. Now LC wished he’d answered him, because what if his father laid in bed and cried?
His father wasn’t a bad man, LC tried to tell himself. He just liked to win, like Roy Rogers liked to win when he fought with the bad guys for stealing another man’s horse or cows or tried to cheat somebody out of something. As far as he knew, his father had never done those things. He’d only told the man to get that steer to lay down. But those words were meant to kill his friend’s steer.
His father was a bad man. He was the bad guy.
LC threw the covers off.
He raised the window a little at a time, all the while, listening for his father’s sounds. When he freed about a foot of space, he stepped through, placing his feet on the tin roof. It made a dull cracking noise. With his foot, he tapped along the tin until he found a run of wood beneath, and then he placed his weight there, following the beam towards the front of the house. He walked as if he was a 4-H girl, his arms held by his side like he was balancing a book on his head the way he’d seen the girls do to learn correct posture. At the end of the roof, a big oak tree rose tall into the air. Its limbs, barren of most of its leaves, provided him a helping hand.
He jumped on.
…..
Luther heard a noise outside his window and reached under his bed for his pistol, a loaded .32 with a pearl handle. He sneaked over to the window to look outside and saw nothing to his right towards the garage and barn, nor in front out in his field. But to his left, he saw, walking along the roof like a ballerina, his boy. He’d been right that afternoon. His boy had heard him and was headed to the Creamer place. Luther knew this as well as he knew his name.
One Good Mama Bone Page 16