The Cadence of Grass (9 page)

“Paul has offered to lend me his luggage for my trip,” Alice said, standing stocking-footed in the carpet beside neat piles of her travel clothing. “Isn’t that nice?”

“You’ve got your own luggage,” said Evelyn, somewhat shortly.

“Paul says it’s inadequate.”

“He does, does he? Well, Paul loves his luggage in an immoderate way. It’s some kind of English aluminum stuff, like aircraft material. He had a briefcase made out of the same thing, looked like robot luggage or something.”

“It’s very rugged. And, Evelyn, I
am
going to Alaska.”

“Mother, I don’t think it’s necessary to pack as if this were an expedition. I read the brochure, and it’s all a safe and pleasant illusion. If you don’t want to meet the natives—”

“On
National Geographic
they tossed people up in the air with a blanket!”

“—you can tough it out with a manicure and a facial.”

“Speaking of which, you look a fright.”

“We’ve been worming cattle.”

“You and Bill?”

“Yes.”

“Is he well?”

“You can’t hurt him with a crowbar.”

“A beautiful man on a horse.”

“What’s that?”

“Bill Champion,” said her mother, “rides well.” Then she moved quickly downstairs to the kitchen.

“Yes, but so did you,” Evelyn called, following behind.

“Long ago, angel, long ago.”

“I bet it’s still there.” She swept toast crumbs from the counter into her palm and slapped her hands together over the sink. “Bill said you were right there, right in the middle of it.”

“That’s very kind, but I don’t quite know how he thinks he knows.”

“Bill knows everything. Said, ‘Alice was a queen.’”

“Oh, my!”

“Mother, your face is red! That’s just the cutest thing!” Evelyn was elated that her mother was sufficiently undefeated by her father’s death to venture a blush. She picked up the swatter and nailed a fly against the window, fearful that as various intrusions began, this house would become like one of the hulks one saw along old roads. “I can’t believe all the health claims on these tea bags.”

Once in the living room, and while the tea steeped, Alice Whitelaw said, “You realize I had nothing to do with your father’s estate planning.”

“Of course I do, Mother. I don’t argue with it anyway. If you aren’t free to plan your own estate, I guess you’re never free.” She recognized her own perverse chipperness. Her hands were in her lap.

“Your father felt very strongly about the sanctity of marriage. He desperately wanted to see yours restored. And he was very fond of Paul.”

“Sanctity?”

“That will do, Evelyn.”

“Reconciling with Paul for the purpose of liberating assets? I don’t know.”

“Only I suppose if the rest of us should fall on hard times. Natalie nearly reduced to groveling as it is.”

Evelyn felt sick. “Mother, aren’t you worried about being with that many strangers? It’s not such an easy time for you, you know. But
Alaska
—”

“Right now, Evie, it is so very hard to be among familiar things. Of course I dread being with all those unknown faces, but if I can get over
that
, maybe I can begin to handle the rest of my life. Sometimes people get on these cruises and it’s all widows. And they have a refrigerated compartment for people who die en route.”

“Ugh!”

“Under normal circumstances, Alaska would seem just awful, but I need a change.”

Evelyn had come to the house hoping to talk her mother out of plans that, with Paul’s deluxe luggage, promised to be unstoppable. She found her courage touching, even though she knew the risk was real: a boatload of party animals hoping to meet the Eskimos; whale watchers with expectations aroused by Disney Studios; drifting, affluent boozers with alluring staterooms. She also felt a childish fear that her mother might return indifferent to her previous life and, especially, her own daughters. In fact, should her mother find real consolation, Evelyn would be, for all practical purposes, an orphan. She was ashamed of this thought that wouldn’t go away. Detachment. That’s what her mother wanted; and if her reaction to widowhood was a solitary vacation, shouldn’t she and Natalie simply admire her readiness? And be happy when she didn’t come home in the ship’s refrigerator?

“Mother, I never realized you were interested in Alaska.”

“Well, I haven’t been
un
interested in Alaska.”

“But I don’t see any books or any—”

“As I said, it’s not an abiding interest,” Alice said patiently.

“Why not the Caribbean is I guess what I’m trying to say?”

“Can’t you just picture those types?”

“It’s practically winter up there. This doesn’t seem like the time of year to go that far north. Anyway, my thought would be to have some purpose in mind.”

“For what?”

“For the
cruise
.”

“Darling, I would appreciate it if you addressed me less sharply. I
do
have a purpose in mind, and that is to
collect
myself.”

“Which
I
say could be done more comfortably in the Caribbean.”

“Evelyn, I don’t
wish
to go to the Caribbean. I don’t
wish
to be cheek by jowl with the characters who are drawn to beaches and loud clothes, and that music which is just beating on things.”

“And what about people who’re
drawn
to Alaska, in their plaid shirts and down-filled whatever. . . .” Evelyn was too exercised to go on.

Her mother gazed at her in long affectionate thought. She smiled. “Are you asking if I am hoping to meet someone?”

“I’m not ruling it out.”

“Evelyn, I don’t like it when you girls are devious. And no, that is not why I’m going. I’m very fragile just now, and I need a change. If I should find myself shipboard with excitable, harmless people or ninnies, I would be in frightening distress.”

“I understand.”

“You
don’t
understand. I have spent forty years under a certain roof.”

“Perfectly aware of the outer world,” said Evelyn, meaning to speak volumes with this suggestion whose impact was not easily seen.

“Perhaps.”

Upstairs, the piles of Alice Whitelaw’s clothing had seemed like the breastworks of a fort.

Evelyn rode up on a crippled bull standing out in a field of frost-killed mule’s ear and mullein, one swollen foot tipped up behind.

They’d left Bill’s house early after a coyote breakfast, which Bill defined as “a piss and a look around.” She remembered that before leaving he’d stood staring at his woodpile in thought, then gone back inside for some vet supplies he put in the saddlebags on his bay gelding. “That motley-face bull’s got foul foot,” she told him, and together they went back to the bull. Bill took down his lariat, moved his cigarette from the corner of his mouth to the front, cracked a kitchen match into flame with a thumbnail, cupped it around the tip, took a deep inhale of smoke and roped the bull. After tightening his loop, he let the lariat hang while Evelyn swung her rope and threw a trapping loop in front of the bull’s back legs. Bill winked through the smoke in approval, wrapped his lariat around the saddle horn and rode off slowly, rope tightening until it pulled the bull forward and his back feet tripped Evelyn’s loop and he was roped. Bill rode forward, looking over his shoulder as the bull slowly toppled onto its side. While his horse kept the rope tight, he half-hitched his lariat on the horn and dismounted; the bull watched his approach with a rolling white eye, slammed its head on the ground and gave up.

Bill knelt and touched the swollen foot, feeling around the joint. “Not quite to the tendon sheath,” he said, “but the toes’s all swollen apart.” He held the syringe up to the sky and filled it from a short white jug. “Poor fella,” he said, “abandoned like bones at a barbecue.”

“Is that LA200?”

“Nope, plain ole oxytetracycline. Don’t treat these and it infects a whole pasture. Red Wolf wouldn’t like that.” He swept the flies from the indentation along the spine and gave the bull his injection in the hip. “We’re gonna have to do this several times,” he said. “Funny deal, dry year like this. Supposed to bring sulfa boluses, and didn’t. Forgot to, I guess.”

Evelyn watched him peel back an eyelid and feel under the jaw of the increasingly relaxed bull. She’d watched him closely since her childhood. Now Bill Champion was old, but straight and lean and, when the narrow slits of his eyelids so revealed, the owner of the bluest ice blue eyes. He always had his hands all over his animals, and when something caught him by surprise like this foot rot, he seemed to doubt his own care. Likewise, he watched Evelyn continuously. Today he told her to shorten her reins, sit straight in her saddle, get her heels down in the stirrups and look to where she wanted to go before directing her horse there. “Sometimes they can tell just from your eyes.”

Now they gathered more cattle for shipment. Bill liked to leave as soon as you could “tell a cow from a bush,” so it was still dark when they trotted out of the corrals. They were desperately trying to beat the first real winter storm, after which shipping and pregnancy testing would become infinitely more laborious and wretched. One day, Bill alarmed Evelyn by leaving his good bay gelding behind in favor of a green colt—“He needs the experience”—which blew up five minutes into the work, dropping his head between his forelegs, then squalling and bucking through wind-bent junipers. Bill managed to ride him to a standstill, and the drive went on. Evelyn rode her reliable bald-faced bay, Crackerjack, and kept her canvas coat un-buttoned from the exertion. Her horse surveyed his land through a forelock that fell over his eyes. “That colt made you ride pretty good,” said Evelyn, who seemed even taller wearing spurs and chink chaps, her hair pinned up under a Miami Heat ball cap.

Bill had a sour look on his face, and a band of old sweat ran halfway to the crown of his hat. “I was all over him like a cheap suit.” This urgent race with the weather helped Evelyn forget that this was the most depressing day of her year, the separation of the calves from the cows and the shipment of the calves to faraway feedlots.

Evelyn rode along behind the herd, absently untangling Crackerjack’s mane with her free hand, reins slung loose from the other, and looked mournfully at the gamboling calves. Several times, an old cow who’d been through this before wheeled around to challenge her horse before losing conviction and joining the herd headed downhill to a certain future.

Wednesday morning it started snowing before sunup; they sorted off the calves amidst the deafening bawl of the cows. When they had divided the steer calves from the heifers into two pens, a rank cow with a single twisted horn grown close to her skull knocked a panel over and they had to sort them again. The big double-decker tractor trailers came down the long lane and circled, one backing up to the chute and the other standing by. Bill had positioned the chute so the early sun wouldn’t be in the cattle’s eyes when they loaded them. The brand inspector—a small man with iron gray hair, a green State of Montana jacket and worn-out cowboy boots—arrived around eight with a bag of doughnuts and a thermos of coffee, and they commenced the business of weighing the calves, taking them onto the wobbly old scale in drafts of tens and twelves. Evelyn stood with the cattle buyer, resplendent in bright Nocona boots and 40X Resistol with the latest crease, as they slid the weights around, taking turns but each watching the other’s hands until the brand inspector came inside and wrote in his book. Bill strode about with a white fiberglass pole, moving the calves here and there as needed as each scale load of confused calves was emptied into adjoining pens and the entire calf crop had been weighed. There was a cloud of steam above the shack, and a stormy sky building overhead in ledges of gray. Evelyn looked at one black calf, curled up on the ground trying to sleep, as if pretending none of this was happening. The buyer woke him with the toe of his boot, and he jumped up and scrambled into the trailer.

By the time all two hundred had gone up the aluminum ramps into various chambers against the roar of the cows and the steady rumble of diesels, Evelyn was covered with manure and had a heavy heart. The truckers stripped off their coveralls and climbed into their cabs in clean clothes. The dark wall that had been ascending in the western sky had overtaken them and it began to snow. Bill paid the brand inspector for his services and, holding the weight tickets between his fingers, raised his leathery face to Evelyn, studied her for a moment and said, “We had a good year.”