It was already a decade ago, that day when they walked in the direction of a half dozen circling vultures. It was hot, Jack remembered, the oppressive sky shimmering like aluminum. A cow had disappeared. The vultures signified the end of the search for her. She was pregnant, Catherine said. She'd wandered off right before she was due. Probably she died in labor. Catherine was searching to see if the calf was alive. She seemed bent by the task, grimly plodding down the hill.
Jack, Molly and the kids were up for a visit from San Diego. It was strange to be asked along on this grisly search, but it seemed important to Catherine, so they went along, leaving the kids back at the house with strict instructions not to touch any of the ATV's. Something tickled at his brain. Some feather touches of understanding that eluded him.
They walked in silence under the ropy trees that lined their path. Catherine stopped.
"Smell that?"
Jack breathed in, but couldn't smell anything. It wasn't until they stepped over the first lip of the valley that he caught the odor of rotting flesh. It hit him like a wave. He wrinkled his nose. Beside him, Molly waved her hand in front of her face.
"You sure you want to go in after that?" she asked.
Catherine stopped and gave Molly a hard look.
"You going to make a fuss about a little smell?" she asked.
"This is ridiculous. That calf's not alive."
Catherine shook her head and turned back down the path.
"Can't take that chance. It's our duty to find out," she said.
Jack followed, Molly beside him, stumbling over tree roots in her annoyance. The gnarled buckeye tree on the hill rustled gently in the hot breeze.
"I still think we're wasting our time," Molly said.
"Waste or not, it's our duty to take care of these critters," Catherine said. "It's not killing us to walk a ways."
Jack looked at his wife, beside him. She walked with her shoulders hunched up and her hands in fists.
"Molly," he said, softly. "Leave it."
"Leave what? We're on a wild goose chase that's going to take our whole day, and we go back tomorrow—we don't have much more time together. The world doesn't begin and end in these hills, but Mama's always seen it that way."
"Have I?"
"Yeah, you have. Haven't you ever thought of other places? People are everywhere. Some people live in cities, on boats. Or in the desert. Some people have never eaten meat, or tasted goat milk. This is not all there is, Mama."
"I don't know what you're blathering about. I'm looking for a calf," Catherine said, pausing and turning back to them.
Molly's chest was heaving. Jack put a hand on her shoulder. Catherine was still watching them. Jack noticed again how small Molly was, compared to Catherine. The top of her head only measured to her mother's nose when they stood side by side.
"I don't know, I don't know," Molly said. "It seems like everything is always up to you and it's all about the ranch, and so here we are, traipsing down to a dead and rotting cow because you think we should. It's always been this way, I don't know why I would think it would change."
"I could do this alone," Catherine said. "But I wanted to talk to you."
The ticking in Jack's brain intensified. He saw Catherine take a large breath.
"I want to ask you to take the ranch next year," she said.
Of course, Jack thought. Of course.
Beside him, Molly seemed to shrink. She brought her hand up to the back of her neck and looked straight down at the ground, running one foot over a tree root that snaked across the path. Jack waited, his eyes on Catherine's face.
"I'm done," she said. "My body is wearing out. I'm seventy years old and it's time for me to move on. I'll wrap some things up, but then I should start thinking about the next part of my life."
Molly looked up, startled.
"What? You'll stay here, won't you?"
"No, I don't guess I will. I don't have it in me to be all that understanding with you—with whoever is taking care of the ranch. I couldn't leave them alone long enough to figure it out. I'd be miserable and I'd make them miserable." She laughed, then sighed. "I know that much."
The ticking in Jack's brain turned into singing. He reached out and took Catherine's arm. They continued down the path. After a moment, Molly fell into step behind them.
"Molly didn't think you'd ever leave," Jack said.
"I didn't think she'd want to leave," Molly said.
"Oh, well. I don't know that my heart won't break when the time comes, but I don't see a better way."
When Jack glanced back, Molly was biting her thumbnail. She avoided his eyes.
Other than the occasional burst of song from a small bird, it was silent in the valley. Catherine gestured to a small hollow in the distance. Jack could just barely pick out the dead cow in the grass ahead, a black lumpy form.
The song in his head grew louder. Molly hadn't been happy for so many years. She was a transplant, one that hadn't worked out. This would be the thing that would heal her. This would bring her back.
"We couldn't say no to you," he said.
Catherine looked at him. Her face was open with surprise.
"In a way we've always known this would be our future." He gestured with one arm, indicating the valley and the cow and everything around them.
Catherine kept on walking, but she smiled up at Jack, her eyes filling with quick tears. They spilled onto her cheeks and dried there, in the heat and wind. The sun was getting ready to set and the light coming through the trees was soft. Molly was silent behind them. They continued their solemn procession toward the dead shape on the ground.
To Catherine's delight, the calf was alive, bawling softly. He was weak but Catherine said she could see from the look of him that he'd be fine. The cow had probably died the night before. They'd arrived just in time.
That was the way out here, she told them. Taking care of land and animals—you had to suspend doubt in order to believe as hard as you could. It was the way to survive in the hills. The way to get from one day into the next.
Jack had learned how true it was, in matters of ranching and in matters of marriage. Strange how something he had agreed to for Molly's sake had caused so much strife for them.
What was Molly up to? He roamed through the house and into the kitchen, stretched his back and kneaded the muscles in his neck, wanting a run. He wouldn't get one today. It was hot already, anyway, probably steaming even on the forested trails where the sun barely made it through the trees.
Surely Molly was fine.
He poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot that was sitting on the counter, brewed and ready. He sipped it and skulked around the kitchen for about six minutes telling himself there was no urgency, before he sat the full cup back down on the counter and walked outside to find her.
He squinted as the hot air washed across the yellow hills, across the gravel, up to his face where he took a deep breath of it and felt it dry his lungs. So hot, so early. The glare of the chalky sky sent fissures of pain scattering behind his eyes. He drove his legs toward the goat barn.
It was an ancient building directly across the driveway and down the hill a few hundred feet, the closest barn to the house. Catherine had built it with her friends and neighbors almost sixty years ago, and it had been standing on this hill ever since, weathered gray wood lumpy with additions. If Jack didn't know any better, if he was squinting, say, in the light that comes half an hour before sunset, he might say it was rustic or even beautiful. In fact, he was pretty sure he had said so, ten years ago. Back in the short-lived bliss of a city boy turned rancher.
Now, under this impossibly smoky sky, the age of the goat barn pressed down on Jack's shoulders. As he passed under the lintel, he noticed for the hundred and fiftieth time that the plank above his head was two nails short of falling off completely. He needed to get around to fixing that.
There were newer buildings on the ranch, but unless something was landing in piles at thei
r feet, it needed to wait until later, and the goat barn was far down in a long line. It seemed that he would be forever fixing broken things.
The first room he entered was what they called the cookhouse. Molly pasteurized the milk here every morning, though she had started selling some of it raw because of the demand for raw goat milk in their county. People drank it, paid good money to get it. And here Molly led expeditions into the fragrant world of cheese making. She'd started seven years ago and had caught on immediately, forming mounds of soft cheese, deftly shaping wheels of ripening curds, rubbing oil into them with her small strong hands, hauling them away to age. Their dairy was small, but she'd won an award for her chevre only two years after she started. And Molly's aged cheese was the best he'd ever tasted. This year they would be putting out a seven-year-old cheese, with a party to match the event. At the moment the seven-year-old cheese slumbered on the other side of the door at the end of the room. The door led to the aging room, a library with cheese catalogued in its walls.
In Catherine's day the cookhouse had been a very basic room, four walls with a stove and a sink and cracks of light coming in through the lumber walls. Molly had nailed in sheetrock and painted it the color of adobe, Jack had hauled in a back-breaking granite countertop and industrial-sized stove for her. Herbs from the garden hung in bunches from the ceiling. Thermometers, glass measuring containers, and a small crystal vase all sat on the long windowsill. The huge window was one of the first things Molly made, knocking out half the wall with a sledgehammer so that she could see the slope of the hills. Now you could look down and see almost all the way to the river.
"We need light," she'd told Jack then, wielding a crowbar with an insane glint in her eye. She didn't need to tell him. He knew how open she needed to be to the light, how she pushed back curtains as if they were shrouds.
In spring, the heavy crystal vase held wildflowers. Molly gathered a few on her way to the barn every morning. Jack, walking past, smiled now as he touched the tips of the seeded grasses that were there. She was still doing all she could, gathering grasses in late summer when all the wildflowers had withered.
Jack could hear Gerard humming as he approached the door that led to the milking pen. When he opened it, the wall of heat was first to welcome him. The cookhouse hadn't been used today yet, so it was a lot cooler than the milking pen, open to the barnyard where the sun beat down on the dust inside the fence.
He paused in the doorway to watch Gerard and Molly sitting at the two milking benches, coaxing milk from two goats who were busy with the alfalfa in their feedbags. Sam, the dog, was curled under Molly's bench, snoring. Each doe stood on top of a bench, and Molly and Gerard sat on stools at the end of the benches, milking into metal bowls. They were building a rhythm with alternate notes as the milk streamed out and rang against the metal.
Molly was silent, but Gerard was humming like he always did, his chest-length hair hiding his face. He looked up and nodded as he saw Jack in the doorway. The barn was built on a small plateau, with the cookhouse jutting up onto the side of the hill with one wall that had a view to the west. Above them was the ceiling, clustered with cobwebs and dust motes that launched their way from rafter to rafter if there was a breeze flowing through the barn, or from rafter to floor if there wasn't. The space under the eaves normally kept the air flowing with small winds that reached them from under the firs. Today, everything was still. The dust fell sadly and prolifically.
Molly didn't look up as she bent over the bowl before her. She was here, where she should be, doing the morning milking, and relief slid into his belly like hot water, dissolving the lump of fear that had been there since she wasn't in their bed when he woke up. Where else had he thought she would be? He didn't want to think about it.
She leaned over to whisper to the goat she was milking and though he couldn't hear her, he could imagine what she was saying. Molly spoke to her goats like they were people, as her mother had before her. Unlike Catherine, Molly told her goats sweet stories about the milk they were giving: where it was going, whose table it would end up on. "It'll be in the morning, Daisy, in an old pitcher with a few fine cracks in it. They'll pour it over the oatmeal, and be so thankful to you for it." She told cheese tales and yogurt yarns, she saved up praise from customers like oats, to throw into her does' feed bags while she sat with them.
Catherine, though, had always soothed and coaxed the goats with strong commands. "Let down now, Mama, let down," she would say, flicking her braid over one shoulder as she worked with her large hands. She wouldn't tell a goat a story, she wouldn't dream of it, but the goats responded to both women just the same.
He could see the back of Molly's neck as her hair fell forward while she coaxed milk from the doe's teats. Her neck was so vulnerable and white that he didn't want anyone else to see it. He wanted to walk over and cover it with his hand, but he forced his mind away from the urge, just as Gerard straightened and stood to lead his doe back to the outside pen.
Molly glanced up as she sensed Gerard's movement, finally noticing Jack standing there in the doorway. She looked at him with her nose wrinkled in concentration and he wanted to kiss her sweet flushed face. She frowned slightly.
"Honey, if you stand there like that, the cookhouse will get all hot,"
He stepped down, closing the door behind him. "It'll be nuclear as soon as you start boiling milk in it," he said.
"Well never mind, better not to get it hot sooner than it needs to be."
He raised his eyebrows. That made no sense to him.
She used her shoulder to rub at her cheek, hands directing the milk into the bowl skillfully, and glanced up at Gerard, who was picking the next doe for milking. "You should do Lily next, G. She's looking really full."
Jack could see that Gerard had been pulling another doe in by the collar, the one with the black patches on her ears. Ruby, Jack thought she was named. Gerard turned around silently and let Ruby go, plucking Lily from the herd.
Gerard had been working for them for nine years, swooping in after Molly had nearly collapsed trying to take care of the goats by herself during that first strained year. He was around fifty, Jack thought, though Molly insisted he wasn't more than forty-two. He wouldn't tell them his age. His jet-black hair, a hand-me-down from a Yurok grandfather, wasn't giving any clues. He was tall and wiry with a habit of humming whenever he was working and a way of making the barn feel peaceful, as though the air around him was gentler than the air around other people. Jack was always thankful that they had found Gerard.
Molly wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of one hand and sighed heavily.
"Any word from my mother?" she asked.
He dragged a chair across the packed dirt to where she sat at the bench. He sat backwards on the chair and rested his chin on his arms.
"Nothing yet."
"When did they say they'd get here?"
"They didn't know. It depends on Todd, really."
"How fast he can get himself out of bed."
"He said he'd try to be early."
She made a face at him, and he smiled. Their son wasn't a morning person.
As Molly finished with the doe, he reached to take the bowl from her. She hesitated for a minute, then handed it to him, giving the doe a little push on the rear to get her to hop off the bench. Molly stood and opened the gate for her, then picked up a clipboard that was tied to the wall and frowned at it. Jack eased himself off the chair and poured the milk into the five-gallon bucket that was sitting on the concrete countertop Molly had painted white last year. He sat down again, holding the bowl loosely in one hand, ready for her when she needed it. She was still frowning at the wrinkled paper on the clipboard, muttering and making small notations.
The clipboard was the single most important piece of equipment on the ranch, cataloguing the milking and pregnancy and feeding of every doe, the names and numbers and orders of all the customers, where the bucks were (they sometimes hired them out for brush clearing)
and every other pertinent piece of information about the goats. Jack had tried to convince Molly to computerize the information, like he'd done with his cattle, but she said she couldn't properly understand something unless she could hold it in her hands. And scratch it up.
"And doodle on it, and spill milk on it," Jack had said. And she'd shrugged in agreement.
"Sure."
Now she looked up at Gerard.
"G, did you milk Zuzu?" she asked. When he nodded she made a tiny checkmark on the list. "Maria is ready to be started around tomorrow… have you seen how her kid is doing?"
"He looks good," Gerard replied without looking up from his milking. They gave the kids six months of nursing before starting to milk the does, beginning with once a day and graduating to twice as the kids got older and stronger. Molly scrawled something on the paper and then let the clipboard fall back to its place on the wall.
Jack watched her walk into the barnyard and pull Ruby out of the herd. His wife was so tiny, small boned and slender, her short black hair swinging around her jaw. He could almost feel her small shoulder blades under his palm, just watching her. She walked back with Ruby and urged her up onto the bench, although it didn't take a lot of effort because Ruby knew her alfalfa was waiting for her. As Molly scooted her stool into place, Jack handed her the bowl.
"Thanks," Molly said, as she turned to whisper to Ruby. The milk started its metallic song. Zing...zing...zing... Gerard took up his humming again. Jack was very aware that he should be moving along, getting on with his day, checking the cattle, but first he would rest his pounding head and watch his wife milk goats. She smiled at him, wrinkling her nose, then frowned abruptly.
"I was thinking...you need to call the State Parks guy," she said. "The director or whatever. Talk to him about this."
"What do you think I should say? Sounds like people have already tried talking to him."
"Tell him about us! And our ranch! Tell him it's been in the family for three generations, going on four…"
The Eve Tree: A Novel Page 3