by April Smith
—
The children rode toward the herd in the distance. The closer they got, the more they could see that everything was a mess. The snow was all churned up. Turkey vultures were sitting in the trees like hungry priests. They could tell from the different-colored ear tags that these cows were all mixed up from neighboring ranches. They’d gotten lost and drifted over the fences that were covered with snow.
At the edge of the field they saw two pickups hitched with trailers.
“Maybe those guys know something about it,” Jo said.
The road was open and three men were busy loading cows into the trailers. Two were older with weathered, rough, unshaven faces. Their winter dusters were black with filth and their boots all worn down, which didn’t make them different from any other cowboys, except by the manner in which they were handling the cattle, shouting and cracking bull whips. Like they didn’t know them and didn’t care. When you knew your herd, you could tell the girls apart: who was gentle or likely to charge; who had trouble nursing and needed to be coaxed. Each and every cow was money in the bank and you wouldn’t hustle them so fast up a narrow ramp, like these guys were doing, making their hearts speed up and their eyes roll in fear, risking a broken leg or one of them bolting altogether.
Also their dogs were mean. They were just black junkyard mutts who sat in the trucks barking their heads off. They weren’t smart working dogs like Lois and Bandit. Something was definitely wrong. Then Jo knew.
“Those are ours,” she told Lance in a low voice.
“Which?”
“The Red Angus. See? The rest are Charolais and Herefords. They’re all mixed up together. Those guys are stealing our cows.”
“Hell!” said Lance, taking advantage of being hundreds of yards from their mother to curse out loud. “They can’t do that. Let’s get ’em.”
The children rode closer.
“Hey!” called Jo. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The two older cowboys didn’t give them a glance, but went about the business of locking the trailer doors behind the load. The youngest of the gang was Honeybee Jones, who’d been called upon with a knock at the door at three that morning to serve as a hand rounding up the livestock that had surely strayed in this kind of storm. For legit ranchers, the snow would turn out to be a sorrowful disaster. For Honeybee and his cohorts, it was an opportunity, like open purses at a radio show, to get the cows on the train to Chicago before anyone counted them missing.
Honeybee walked right up to Jo and Lance and smiled. Except he wasn’t really smiling. His puffed-out cheeks were covered with reddish-blond fuzz. His eyes were small and close-set. He looked familiar—like a nasty woodchuck set to bite.
“What are you two doing way up here alone?” he asked in a phony nice voice.
“We’re not alone. Our mama’s right over there,” said Jo.
Honeybee nodded. All he could see was a white field that stretched to the hills and no traces of another human being.
“Uh-huh,” he said doubtfully.
“Get out of here,” Jo said. “This is our property.”
“I’m collecting my cows.”
“They’re not yours, they’re other people’s. And those are from the Lucky Clover Ranch. They’re ours.”
“Is that so?”
“You bet. We run Red Angus.”
“They’re all branded up,” Lance added defiantly.
“Sorry, our mistake.”
“Give them back,” said Jo.
“No can do.”
“You’re stealing!”
Honeybee laughed. “Stealing? Naw. What’s your name, honey?”
Jo had the advantage of being on Sprite, higher up. She gave the man her most mean and nasty glare, memorizing his evil features.
The others were impatiently smoking cigarettes. The doors were locked and the motors running, spewing vapor. Jo could see the trailers shifting with their weight as the cows poked at the window slits. She saw a red head with a yellow ear tag and her heart swelled up with anguish as if one of her family was being dragged away.
“See that one?” She pointed. “She’s definitely ours!”
“Forget what you seen,” Honeybee said coldly. “You ain’t seen nothing.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Ain’t you the little smarty pants?”
One of the others was calling him to get in the truck, but Honeybee grabbed the bridle of Lance’s horse, pulled the animal toward him, and in one sweep of the other arm grabbed Lance’s jacket and jerked the boy off the saddle, threw him to the ground, and pinned him down on his stomach with a heavy knee in his back.
“Stop it!” shrieked Jo.
Honeybee whipped out a rope and in three seconds had the boy’s arms and legs tied up like a rodeo calf. His kicking and flailing meant nothing, nor the piercing wail for help that his mother was too far away to hear.
Honeybee slung the struggling boy over his shoulder.
Jo yelled, “Put him down!”
“He’s coming with us, straight to the slaughterhouse,” Honeybee said, carrying Lance toward the trucks. “Nobody’ll know where he disappeared to when he’s nothing but bones.”
Jo kicked Sprite and galloped full speed at Honeybee in an attempt to run him over, but he spun around and raised his arms, yelling, “Haaaa!” The horse spooked and Jo flew off, barely escaping Sprite’s pounding hooves.
“Leave my brother alone!” she screamed on the ground, feebly throwing snow.
One of the other cowboys opened the truck door impatiently and yelled an obscenity. Honeybee let go of Lance and simply dropped him face-first.
“Keep your mouth shut, little girl. Say one word and I will come back for you, I promise you that. You and your brother and your ma and dad. I know where you live. The Lucky Clover Ranch, ain’t that it?” he said in a petrifying growl, popping his eyes.
Terrified, vision blurred by snot and tears, Jo knelt beside Lance, whose blood stained the snow, desperately working to loosen the ropes before Honeybee came back with a shotgun, but he was already in the truck and the rustlers had driven off, leaving behind the couple of dozen cows they couldn’t fit.
—
Betsy had mended the fence and ridden halfway across the plain when she met her children riding the other way to meet her. Their faces were shiny red and they were sniffling from the cold.
“What took you so long?” she asked.
“It’s a whole big jumble over there,” Jo replied staunchly. “It looks like a bunch of cows came over the fences and they all ended up together. There’s some of ours and some of the neighbors’, all mixed up.”
“When the weather clears we’ll sort them out,” Betsy said. She noticed that her son had a swollen nose and the beginning of a black eye. “What happened to you?”
“Snowball fight,” Jo answered quickly.
“I fell off,” Lance mumbled.
Betsy leaned over to grab Lance’s face and inspect his teeth.
“No permanent damage,” she pronounced, then turned toward the gate. “Looks like tire tracks. Someone’s been up here.”
“We didn’t see anyone,” said Jo.
“The road is open,” Betsy said. “Let’s go home.”
14
Cal pulled in late that night, but Betsy was in her bathrobe and already downstairs by the time he’d slipped through the kitchen door and put the suitcase down. They hugged with desperation and relief. Her body was soft and smelled of homemade soap, while he felt like a trooper from a far-off war, stiff and sore, whose clothes should be burned.
“Is everyone okay?” he asked. “The kids?”
She nodded. “But it was bad, Cal. We lost at least five cows that I could count up at Bottlebrush Creek, maybe more.”
“What the hell happened?”
“We had a wicked rain. I think it was the rain that killed them.”
She started to shake. He took her hands. They were icy cold.
“Come here,
” he said, sitting her down at the kitchen table.
“We got three inches in a couple of hours,” she went on. “I’ve never seen rain like that, so hard and fast. There was mud this thick in the yard. They say the wind got up to seventy miles an hour. It sounded like the house was coming down. Then, around three in the morning, it turned into a blizzard. You couldn’t see a thing. I got the calves that were still in the corral and brought them inside—”
“Jesus, Betsy, you should not have done that! You should not go out in a storm like that alone. What is wrong with you?”
“I had to, or we would have lost all that money.”
“Where was I?” Cal said bitterly. “Out dreaming somewhere.”
“Look, nobody thought it would move that fast—”
“I could kick myself for not being here. And for what?”
“We both agreed that you should run,” she reminded him gently. “What’s the matter?” she asked, seeing his deep disappointment.
He gave an exhausted shrug. “We’ve already lost.”
“The election? Why do you say that?”
“The storm took us out. I didn’t make it halfway across the county before I had to turn around.”
“There’s still time before the special election—”
“No, there’s not. It was a great idea to grab Doc Avery’s seat, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I can’t take off until we’re all dug out, and who knows what we’ll find when the snow melts? Half the fences will be down.” He stared at his wife, straight and true. “I never want you and the kids to be alone like that.”
“We did all right.”
“What happened to the calves?”
“Chilled to the bone, but they made it, at least the ones down here. We toweled them off and put them by the fire. The red newborn had to go in a warm bath. His poor little ears and tail were frozen solid. Jo and Lance are quite attached because they birthed him by themselves. They’ve decided to raise him.”
“That’ll be good for them.”
Betsy nodded but tears sprang from her eyes. “When I think of how those cows died, I just can’t bear it! Soaking wet and so cold…They went to the low spots, along the creek beds, to try to get away from the wind, and I’m afraid what happened was they got stuck in the mud from the rain. They must have been so tired and just wanted to rest. The snow came down so wet and heavy, it buried them where they’d taken shelter, trying to protect their babies.”
Cal’s eyes filmed over in sympathy. “It’s nature. Honey, there’s nothing you or I could have done, even if I’d been here,” he added regretfully.
“I don’t know,” Betsy said, not an answer but a statement of despair.
She got up and leaned against the sink, wiping her glistening cheeks with her fingertips. Cal took the bourbon from the cabinet and flipped the cap off a bottle of Coke.
“I had to mend the fence at Bottlebrush Creek. The children found a bunch of cattle running loose near the road,” Betsy told him. “Some of the neighbors’ as well as ours.”
“So there are survivors.”
“Oh, yes. And Lance fell off Tex,” she added. “He’s got a shiner but he’s okay.”
Cal was surprised. “Lance is good on Tex. And Tex doesn’t usually spook.”
“Somebody threw a snowball.”
“Oh, I see. Somebody named Jo?” Cal suggested.
He smiled. He loved his daughter’s tough, can-do spirit, pleased they’d raised the kind of girl who wouldn’t kowtow to boys, not that he’d ever let one near her. He already had suspicions about eight-year-old Robbie Fletcher.
He cracked some ice into glasses and they downed a couple of sweetly burning drinks before going upstairs with every intention of an urgent reunion. But it wasn’t right. During trying times they’d always found that making love put things in order. They’d clung to each other when Betsy got the letter about her father’s death. When Adlai Stevenson was defeated they got so drunk on cheap red wine they ended up on the floor. Maybe they had underestimated how deeply they had come to cherish their animals and the rangeland that they farmed, because the loss was as grievous as death in the family, and with the breadth of devastation still unknown, it would have been sacrilegious to dance on the ruins.
In the morning, as if the world had changed its frivolous mind and given them another chance, the temperature shot up to fifty degrees. Cal got the generator going and there were chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, but despite their favorite treat the kids were withdrawn, and when he drove them to school there was silence in the backseat, not even squabbling. He had to probe like a lawyer to get anything out of them concerning the way things went while he was away.
“How’d your new baby calf do in the storm?” he asked Jo.
“Fine,” said Jo.
About the fall off Tex, Lance’s reply was equally noncommittal.
“I’m fine.”
“Dad, he’s fine,” Jo snapped, hoping to hear no more questions about what happened at Bottlebrush Creek.
Jo and Lance were terrified that the cattle rustler would come back and murder them all. They didn’t know he was a small-time punk named Honeybee Jones—they believed he was a criminal escaped from prison, like the bad guys on the TV show The Lineup. He knew they lived on the Lucky Clover Ranch, so why not climb through the window and stuff a pillow over their faces “To keep your mouths shut!” In whispers in their bunks at night, they kept each other in cold fright about the petrifying possibilities, arguing whether they should tell their parents or just lie low, hoping he had left the country and escaped to Mexico. Meanwhile, they knew where Dad kept the shotgun.
—
Cal had been right about what lay beneath the snow. As the sun grew stronger and the heavy banks began to melt, people were awakening to a ghastly nightmare. Pennington County had become a mass graveyard. Over spotty phone lines, among clusters of ranch wives who gathered in markets and on street corners in town, friends and strangers alike leaned in close and listened to the stories told in soft, shocked voices as word spread that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cattle had died in the storm. And it was calving season, the worst possible time, because calves were the future of a ranch. Cowmen were going to lose their livelihood, that much was certain. The only question was how many.
With no sign of outside help, anger focused on the government, feeding the age-old loathing of ranchers toward authority. Cal had already picked up that sentiment from the talk he’d heard through the open windows of the pickups that had gathered at the school bus stop, and then by witnessing the extent of the catastrophe himself as it began to unfold across the region with gruesome regularity.
Every couple of hundred yards along the road there were dead and frozen cattle lying in ditches, on their backs, on their sides, here and there a surreal hoof sticking straight up out of the snow. His stomach lurched watching two cowboys on horses tentatively make their way across the patchy fields, not knowing what they would find on the other side of the downed fence lines, where disoriented animals had stumbled blindly in the blizzard, fallen into the trenches, and died of exposure.
Trooper Randy Sturgis’s car was stopped on the side of the road alongside a black pickup with souvenir state decals plastered all over the windows that Cal recognized as belonging to Spanky Larson. Cal pulled over, took out the shovel he always carried with the rest of the gear, and slid down the embankment to where Randy and Spanky were clearing snow from three black bellies protruding from a white grave. Down in the gully the wind was colder than up on the road, shadowed by bare cottonwood trees whose leaves and branches lost in the storm lay in whirlwind patterns on the sparkling crust of ice.
“These can’t be yours, Spanky,” Cal said, knowing Spanky’s property was twenty miles away.
Spanky shook his head. “No, they ain’t, but I’ll tell you, it’s a mixed blessing.”
They were digging out around the heads in order to c
ut the ear tags off and return them to the owners so they could claim their losses—a grim service duty everyone in the county had spontaneously taken on, along with feeding and doctoring whatever stray cattle ended up on their property until they could be claimed.
“Your heart’s in your mouth until you see it ain’t yours, which is a relief, but then you feel just awful for the fella who’s lost his girl. The guilt alone’s enough to bring you to your knees,” Spanky said.
“We’re seeing cows miles away from where they should be,” Randy Sturgis commented grimly. “Found sixty head stuck in a steep bend in the creek. They must have stumbled over the bank and into the water, and either succumbed to the cold or got buried in the snowfall and suffocated. And if that ain’t bad enough, a ring of thieves is out there, rounding up the ones that got lost.”
“Cattle and rustlers go together like dogs and fleas,” Spanky commented. “Where there’s one, there’s the other.”
Cal dug deep, watching the tip of his spade slice into the bluish snow so he didn’t have to see that fifty-six-year-old, white-haired Spanky Larson had stopped to take off his bandanna and wipe tears from his eyes.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Spanky said when he’d composed himself.
When they were done Cal followed Randy Sturgis and Spanky Larson to the Bison Café, where the trooper solemnly gave the three ear tags they’d clipped to a third-generation cowman in his forties named Tim Ehrlich, who closed work-blackened fingers around the tags, which represented several thousand dollars in losses. His tablemates murmured condolences. Tim turned a stubbled and sleepless face toward the officer, staring hard with frank blue eyes.
“Thank you, Randy. This means a lot. Where’d you find ’em?”
Randy described the spot on the highway. “They drifted an awful long way from your place.”
Tim Ehrlich nodded blankly. “These were yearling heifers,” he said. “Hand-raised. You got to wonder what the good Lord had in mind,” he added sadly, and even the most righteous churchgoers among them kept their eyes on their coffee cups.
The volume of talk in the Bison Café had risen to a kind of hysteria, like the meal after a funeral when propriety gives way to garrulous inhibition. During the crisis, the usual pecking order had been suspended. Men roamed freely among the tables and squeezed into crowded booths, cheeks of broken blood vessels to jowls of too much flesh. Horror stories were repeated to every newcomer in full detail. Cowboy hats stayed on.
