by Josh Weil
“Well,” he finally said, “Dad thought an awful lot of his beef. Once he give a calf its name, that’s what he called it. Heifers, cows, bulls, named them all like they was dairy cows. Never knowed anyone else to do that. I don’t believe he once named a calf the same, neither. Not in all his years.” It wasn’t until after he said it that Osby realized just how incredible that was. “We got some cows been calfin’ eight, nine years. I guess they’ll miss him.” He thought his father would have liked to leave it at that, but it seemed wrong, so Osby said, “I guess we all will.”
At the muddy jeep trail up to Bowmans Ridge, they slid the casket out of the hearse and lifted it into Osby’s pickup. Anyone with a car left it at the side of 247 and piled into the trucks. The wind was blowing up at the Caudill cemetery, and it was colder, like Osby had known it would be. They didn’t take long getting Cortland in the ground. Everyone was glad to get back in the trucks and drive, caravan style, into Pembroke for a late lunch at the Buttercup.
By the time they were done and driving back, the day was on its way out and Osby was starting to feel the letdown that hits after an event, just because it’s over. His tie crammed in his shirt pocket and lumpy against his chest, he drove behind Carl, a few other trucks and cars following him, rising and dropping over swells.
As they neared Harts Run, the vehicles turned off onto side roads, one by one, leaving dust where the gravel spilled out onto 33. As he passed by Alva’s store, the last car behind him pulled over at the pumps. The road, suddenly empty in his rearview mirror, seemed to lengthen behind him. A few miles later, the taillights on Carl’s truck glowed and his friend’s thick arm jutted out the driver’s side window, hand casually open. Osby raised a couple fingers off his steering wheel and watched the mud-freckled Ford turn off onto 288. Nothing in his windshield now but the wide valley and the long black line of asphalt cutting through it. Well, Osby thought, that’s that.
Before going home, he decided to check on each of the five small herds they ran. In his head, he corrected himself: the herds I run. He wound along through lingering patches of sunlight and the sudden, cold shadows behind the hills, starting with the herd furthest from home, the field his dad—now he—rented from Sheldon Ballard alongside the government land. The ground was freezing up again, and the truck rocked and bumped over the pasture. Spread out below the hill, the cattle turned toward the engine noise all at once, the way a flock of birds rises in unison at some imperceptible signal. Osby got out and bunched his thick neck a little further into his collar. It was going cold, fast. The sunlight was at its deepest orange, just before it went red. It always looked to Osby like it should be at its warmest then, and it seemed to him a major flaw, a failing of someone’s, somewhere, that the light contained no heat at all. He watched the cows as the shadows crept out of the swales and covered the herd. He had just shy of a quarter of his beef pastured in this field: twenty-eight reddish-brown cows, four of them already calved. Mostly Angus-Lemosine, some with a little Hereford in them. No heifers; the heifers were in the two fields closest to the house so he could keep an eye on them. He and his father bred all their bulls and they ran them regular. They had a two-year-old Black Angus in with this bunch. At the fringes of the herd, Osby spotted a new dropped calf suckling from its mother. She was a good cow, had given them eight or nine calves—those wide Lemosine hips—and now he tried to remember what his father would have called her. The name didn’t come to him. He scanned the rest of the herd, looking for signs of compaction, foot evil, making sure all the calves were there. A few of the cows were showing bags beneath their tails and he watched them negotiate their legs under swollen bellies. One or two looked as if they might drop their calves anytime, but they were old pros. The swath of hay he’d rolled out that morning was still catching the sun at the top of the hill. Everything looked fine. Everything looked the same.
By the time he got home, it was fully dark. The moon hadn’t yet risen. There were no lights on in his house. He drifted past the driveway, wishing there was one more pasture to check on or something he had to do in town. Maybe he’d drive over to Carl’s place, just to say hello; it had been years since they’d sat on Carl’s back porch, drinking beer and throwing sticks for his bird dogs. As he rounded the bend, his headlights sucked the Old House’s mailbox out of the night. It had collapsed against the giant chestnut stump and the letters his grandmother had carefully painted were half gone; they read he Ca ills, now. He braked, his ribs suddenly feeling too small for all the stuff that had to fit in his chest. Slowly, he turned onto the dirt. A few feet up, he stopped. The truck idled under him. Grass and weeds had grown between the tire tracks and last spring’s rains had gouged the driveway. Up the hill, beyond the reach of the headlights, the Old House stood blackly against the stars, a hole in the sky. His home, the newer house he and his dad had lived in, had been built nearly a century ago, but the original family place, the Old House, was twice that age, the walls in its living room still made of logs from the homesteaders’ one-room cabin. After his grandmother died, his father used the house for storage: bags of fertilizer, car batteries, cattle medicines.
Osby flicked on his brights. The windows that still had glass flared. He hadn’t been in there since the day he found his father. He could make out the glinting shape of Cortland’s pickup, parked at the top of the driveway. The front door to the house was still open. He’d forgotten to shut it. Or the ambulance guys had. Or the cops. They had come, looked things over. There wasn’t much guessing to do. Osby asked them not to clean it up, said he wanted to do it himself. It would help him seal the thing shut, he said, put a cap on it. When the neighbors offered to take care of things, he told them he’d already scrubbed and swept and burned what had to be burned. Truth was, he hadn’t touched a thing in there. The idea of going back in made his bowels go watery.
The truck sputtered, and he gave it a little gas, shook a cigarette out of a pack of Winstons, and sat, smoking. He knew he ought to go up there and close that door.
When Osby’s mother died, his father hadn’t let anyone help them take the body to the funeral home. They had wrapped her in the sheets and carried her downstairs, his father holding her under her arms, Osby clutching her cold ankles. She had smelled like old cabbage. Her body sagged, heavy as wet sand. His thin twelve-year-old forearms strained and he struggled to keep his fingers locked around her legs. Halfway down the stairs, he dropped her. Her heels thwacked the hard wood step, and he had thought how much that would hurt if she was alive. Outside, they hoisted her into the pickup and drove into town. His father hadn’t even let people gather in the house after the funeral. He had refused the casseroles and cakes they brought.
The next Saturday, Osby had helped him with an excavating job and they had sat in the bulldozer’s shovel, out of the cold wind, passing a thermos of steaming coffee between each other. “Ain’t going to have ’em walking all over our place,” Osby’s father had said. “Big show.” And a week later, in the kitchen, digging shotgun pellets out of a rabbit with the tip of a knife: “When I go, I don’t want no noise about it. Don’t want the whole of ’em traipsing around, tearing up the driveway, snooping around the Old House. Just dig a hole and dump me in.”
When he’d finished the cigarette, Osby rolled down his window, tossed out the butt, shoved down on the clutch, and put the truck in first. Behind the Old House, Bowmans Ridge, solid and black, smothered the bottom edge of the sky. After a while, his left calf muscle started to shake. He shifted into reverse, backed up onto the road, and drove home.
Quiet smothered the bang of the truck door almost as soon as he shut it behind him. He could hear the night animals moving around, small birds, opossums, squirrels, making crackling noises too big for them in the dry leaves. They went silent as his feet made their noise from the truck to the porch.
Inside, the house had gone cold. Osby clomped into the kitchen, opened the flue on the woodstove, and stirred up the remaining coals, watching them feed on the draft. Whe
n they were glowing, he shoved a couple overnight logs on top, waited for them to catch, and then shut the stove up and let it go to work. He scanned the twenty-odd cans lined up on the kitchen counter. He and his father never bothered putting the soup in the pantry. That was for the things they bought on a whim and ended up never looking at again, things like cake mixes or cloves of garlic, things that needed what Osby and his father called “major preparation.” Cans of soup, cans of beans, cans of cranberry sauce, jars of pickles; those things were useful; they stayed on the counter where they could be got at.
Osby chose a can of chicken and dumplings, shaking his head a little at all the clam chowders. His father had loved the stuff. Osby couldn’t stomach it. Now he was stuck with a dozen cans. He rinsed a saucepan under the faucet, using his thumb to rub away most of the crust left from last night’s soup, dumped in tonight’s chicken and dumpling, lit the stove burner with a match, and got out the bowls and spoons.
The kitchen opened up right onto the living room, and Osby went in there, turned on the TV, and watched the weather report while he unbuttoned his shirt and tugged it off his arms. Not wanting to put his good shirt on the floor with the rest of his clothes, he held it in one hand while he took off his shoes and pants, and then held those bunched in the other arm, while he listened to the forecast for the next day. There was a slight chance of snow.
“Hope not till afternoon,” Osby said aloud to the empty house, feeling foolish immediately afterwards. When he heard the pot spitting soup, he hurried into the kitchen, dumped his clothes on the counter, and emptied the chicken and dumplings into a bowl. For a second, he stood, perplexed, staring at the second bowl. He didn’t remember taking out two. He put the extra bowl and spoon away and took his soup into the living room to finish watching the local news. It was still cold in the house—the heat from the woodstove never really reached all the way into the living room—and he turned on the electric space heater, pulled it close to the couch, sat in his underwear and T-shirt and the brown socks that looked strange to him on his feet, slurping the soup while the space heater’s warmth started to tingle on his skin.
An hour or so later, during the ads between two sitcoms, he glanced to his side to see if his father had fallen asleep yet. The other end of the ratty brownish-orange couch was, of course, empty. Seeing it, he tried to feel whether he missed the old man. He couldn’t tell. He lay down, stretching his legs out all the way along the couch. True, it felt odd to do that. He tried to picture his dad sitting there where his feet were now. It should have been easy; after all, Cortland had sat there nodding off practically every evening since Osby was a kid. But he couldn’t picture him. When he looked back at the TV, he thought he saw his father’s face looking in at him through the window, not as he looked in life, but as Osby had found him three days ago in the Old House: his lower jaw and half of his right cheek blown off, one eye exploded in its socket.
Osby made himself stay still and stare at the window, where there was nothing but his own reflection, until his heart had gone back to thumping like normal. Then he scraped up the last of the soup, sighed, and carried the bowl to the sink. As he clinked it against the other dishes, he had a sudden urge to wash them all, to wipe down the counters, get the place clean. He filled the sink, watching the steam billow up through the soap bubbles.
Through the window, he could see the occasional pair of headlights drift along Route 33, a couple miles off down the valley. After they were out of sight, he could still follow their progress for a while, watching for the patches of hillsides swept briefly by the faint yellow glow. He wondered if he was going to be lonely now. He didn’t see why he should be; his father had never been much for company. He didn’t think he was lonely.
He scrubbed at a bowl—he hadn’t gotten even one dish washed yet—and spent the next couple minutes picking at dried pieces of partially burned rice welded to a pot. When he was done, he decided that he probably was just lonely. Maybe he even missed his dad. That would be normal. But he didn’t feel like calling anybody, or driving the half hour into Pembroke to go get a drink and play some pool at Ten Points. He didn’t feel like visiting Carl. Even the TV, he realized, was bugging him. He went into the living room and turned it off, leaving soapsuds on the knob. When he came back to the sink, he put his hands in the water. It wasn’t warm anymore. He ran some more hot water through the tap, and, listening to it thunder in the sink, watched another pair of headlights wander through the distance. He wondered who it was out there, if it was someone he knew or not.
It didn’t really matter.
He stared at the almost clean pot in his hands. The rice he’d scrubbed off—his father had made that rice; his father had eaten half of it.
He wondered how long it would take for him to quit thinking about his father. In some ways, he felt he had already begun. He wondered how long people would remember him, if he were to go out to the Old House tonight and blow his head off. Not long, he thought.
“Yeah,” he said out loud. “I guess I’m just lonely.”
Osby was out a half hour before dawn, walking quickly through the cold air that still clung to the fields, not even a whisper of wind covering the whisk-whisk of his jeans. The moon was gone but the stars still pinned up the night sky. He’d zipped his work coat tight and pulled his camouflage hat low, but his ears and nose still stung from the cold and his whole slightly mashed-looking face was numb with it. In front of him, the flashlight beam washed the darkness off the grass and shoved it through the gaps between the fence rails. He opened the gate and shut it behind him with a clang. The flashlight caught the cows’ eyes like a hundred flecks of Formica in the solid black field. Groans. Some lowing. A spatter of hooves. He swung the beam over each one, checking hides, mouths, hooves, and calves suckling at udders. He didn’t see anything wrong. Everything looked okay. He found his way back to the herd, the sky going blue, the cows still black against a less black field, large lumps of life, moving occasionally.
* * *
By the time the sun was over the ridge, Carl Veltre had already been up for three hours. He had milked the Holsteins before Lynne was awake, washed down the milking house while the kids were eating breakfast, and brought the school bus around to the house just as Lynne handed lunch bags to their two boys and sent them down the driveway. For the last forty-odd minutes, he had nursed the aging bus along winding back roads, practically standing on the gas pedal to get it to crawl up the steep hills, and stopping at all the least convenient places—blind corners, the very bottoms of long climbs—to pick up kids as young as five and as old as nineteen, an age bracket that, on mornings like this, Carl understood as the widest range of possibilities for obnoxiousness that the school system would allow.
“Hey, you all,” he shouted to the wide oblong mirror that framed pretty much the whole bus. “Whoever threw whatever that was I saw come from somewhere back there—are you smilin’ at me?—Whoever that was better not be smilin’ an’ better not do it again, neither.”
He pressed his hand to the windshield in front of him, slowly enlarging the clear spot in the foggy glass. The defroster had been working yesterday, when he didn’t need it. Any day now, he figured, the Virginia board of education was going to vote to include colicky one-year-olds and divorced, depressed, middle-aged dope addicts on welfare in the Eads County school system only.
“How ‘bout ever’ one,” he shouted back at the entire bus, “tries one whole minute of sittin’ still an’ shuttin’ up.”
His stomach growled. He set the bacon and ham sandwich on his lap and unwrapped the cellophane with one hand, stopping a couple times to shift. He was about to ask his two boys, sitting in the seat behind him, what their mom had made them for breakfast (it was a question he asked every morning in a poorly disguised bid for sympathy) when he saw a man standing in the fresh sunlight at the side of the road, one arm out, like someone flagging down a ride.
“Dad,” Luke, his youngest kid, said at his ear.
�
�I see him.”
“Oh, man,” Brian groaned. Brian was twelve and embarrassed by everything. It just about killed him that Carl made him sit up front with his brother. Having to put up with his father driving the bus was bad enough, but when, occasionally, Osby Caudill (who was the biggest loser of all his Dad’s loser friends) got on to chat, Brian couldn’t contain himself: “Can’t you just pretend you didn’t see him?”
“No,” Carl said in a voice that he knew would quiet Brian. “I can’t.”
Though he wished, especially this morning, that he could.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like Osby; he liked him fine. They’d been friends since high school, more than twenty years. Maybe that was the problem. All his other friends he’d made in his years after high school, working on construction, or because of Lynne, or through the school where Brian and Luke went. Osby just didn’t quite fit in anymore. Maybe, Carl thought, as he brought the bus squealing to a stop in front of Osby’s driveway, he never had. He was always a bit of a loner, a sad sack. Lynne called him a mope. She made it clear she’d rather not have him over to dinner. “He just sits there,” she’d said. “Antisocial. Comes to visit and just eats. What kind of example is that for the kids?” Oh, he was still a good hunting buddy, but recently—hell, for the past three, four years—it had been more obligation than anything else that kept Carl friends with Osby. These days, Carl always felt a sense of guilt being around him, so that, more and more, he found himself avoiding Osby—and resenting it when he just showed up, like now, as if it were the old days.
Plus, Carl thought, what am I supposed to say to him, especially now after all that with his old man?