The Legend of Sander Grant

by Marc Phillips

  Marc Phillips

  The Legend of Sander Grant

  TELEGRAM

  eISBN: 978-1-84659-111-2

  Copyright © Marc Phillips 2009 and 2012

  First published in 2009 by Telegram

  This eBook edition published 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  TELEGRAM

  26 Westbourne Grove, London W2 5RH

  www.telegrambooks.com

  For Bean. I’m speechless.

  1

  Sander is a giant. But people around Dixon are used to that. His daddy was a giant, and his daddy’s dad, and so on. Back when other whites had just arrived, Sander’s people were already there, and nobody knew where in all hell they came from. Those who used to trouble themselves about it, of course, they’ve grown old and died. Locals now remark on Sander Grant in the same way they do the August heat. Like a mother tells her kids Jesus is love. Sander is a giant.

  The town of Dixon only exists relative to someplace else. It lacks noteworthy coordinates of its own and is thus defined – when it’s mentioned at all – by proximity. East of Dallas. West of Louisiana. Across the Red River from Oklahoma and a grateful step behind the times. It’s a good spot for cattlemen, land seemingly created by some bovine deity, and an ideal place for anyone content staying out of the public eye. The tight-knit community doesn’t really conspire to keep secrets. It just so happens that rumors don’t travel far through pine bark and country people won’t say much worth hearing until the strangers leave.

  The big men preferred their ranch outside of town. They ventured into Dixon proper as rarely as possible and were loath to stray across rural county lines. So they caused nary a stir for most of the twentieth century, in East Texas or beyond. Word of a Grant baby, meanwhile, never lost its curious appeal in those parts. It got people talking down at the feed store; over on the courthouse lawn; and up to Skinner’s Meat Market where the subject naturally arose when locals bought Grant Beef. They kept talking as the child soared like a hemp weed, rapidly outgrowing a province tailored to regular folks and casting a shadow on any semblance of comfort around most of the folks themselves. Then he was simply another giant out at the Grant place and thereby restored the status quo.

  Grant men favored small women, so the lore goes, none of recent memory being over five and a half feet. Who could know if that was a choice they made each on his own, or something they talked about father to son? This is what a lot of people in Dixon thought, that they were terribly pragmatic for the sake of their heirs, that they were breeding toward normalcy, managing their own bloodline like they managed that of their cattle. The fact that Sander and Dalton, his daddy, were as comfortable above their neighbors as the Texas sky didn’t dissuade the ones prone to thinking such. How much sense would it make anyway, holding out for women their size?

  Apart from their stature, the Grants were beautiful men. At least, the ones born since the advent of photographs. Even in nineteenth-century Tintypes, they exuded a nobility of which they were apparently unaware, which made them all the more attractive. None ever wanted for female companionship or, when the time came, a bride. Young women didn’t complain over a giant’s attention. Their parents did the bitching, generally with a bias toward forethought at the expense of youthful passion.

  Josephine was eighteen when Dalton proposed to her. They had been dating for six short months. She carried home the news on a purling stream of emotion. Frank, her father, heard a call to the colors and took up the battle forthwith.

  He told her, ‘Jo, babe, you’ll be looking after him all his life. They don’t fit anywhere. It’s no way to be. It’s not meant to be.’

  Doris said, ‘Skip it, Frank. Can’t you see the girl’s in love?’

  ‘Stop and think. It don’t make no sense.’

  Doris leaned into her daughter, ‘Your poppy said the same thing to me about this one. “Find you another man. Can’t you see how stupid he is?” It’s what fathers do, honey. No man is good enough.’

  Frank started to storm out of the kitchen in a huff, to brood in the garage like he used to do until somebody gave in. He made it only to the dining room table before he remembered supper was almost ready.

  He sat down and said, ‘Stupid don’t eat a whole hog every other week or need special clothes sewed for his big ass, does he?’

  ‘Tiresome just the same, though.’

  ‘Doris, it aint a joke. Dalton’s mother bled to death and she was nearly two of Jo. His father dropped dead at forty-five. Don’t none of em live very long. Did he tell you that, Jo?’

  ‘That’s enough Frank. You said your piece.’

  He raised some valid points, though none his daughter would hear. Brides truly paid a dire toll for having a Grant baby. Dalton’s mother, Sandy, was a stout and formidable woman, but her body just couldn’t tolerate the stress when he came out, three months early they say, and three feet long.

  Frank knew his daughter wasn’t asking his permission. Besides, she already had her mother’s blessing. There was nothing more he could do, save further angering them both. The following autumn, when Jo was pregnant, his worst fears set upon him with terrible weight. Frank stopped sleeping for almost half a year. He could not be in the same room with Dalton for all that time.

  Doctors knew more when Jo was big with Sander. When it got where she could barely stand, they opened her up and took Sander out. He’d been in there five months. The nurse wiped him off and stood him up, on his feet, to have a look at him. He wobbled a little as he watched the doctor cut his mother’s spent uterus from her belly and dispose of it. The next month he was standing beside her at the kitchen sink, watching her peel potatoes.

  When his daughter didn’t die, and once it was medically impossible for her to give birth again, Frank latched onto Sander and wouldn’t hardly allow the boy room to breathe. He had to be told to let him alone sometimes, to quit cleaning his face and pampering him, let him go get scraped up, get into some poison ivy, fall off a fence, and generally be a boy. Doris rode her husband about his smothering tendencies. Then, when he wasn’t looking, she gave Sander sweet things she baked especially for him and she cooed to him and measured him for something nice she was always making. She asked him how much bigger he thought he’d be in three weeks when she finished this sweater, or these pajamas.

  They started regular Sunday dinners at Jo’s parents’ house. Frank insisted on it, and Doris would not allow them to bring any food.

  ‘I can feed my children,’ she told them, ‘one day a week. Let me.’

  Dalton couldn’t get comfortable anywhere, but he didn’t say a word about it. He sat on the floor in the living room or a low ottoman at one end of their table and smiled at Jo.

  Doris cooked in jumbo stock pots that would fit whole turkeys and arranged food in great mounds on the table. She dared the fellas to eat it all. They never quite did. There was always a slice of meatloaf left, a few rolls, one scoop of beans that would be put away for leftovers. And when Jo got her family home afterward, she would pull two briskets and a casserole out of the oven. She would p
at them on their backs as they sat down to finish eating and she would tell them they were so kind to her folks.

  On their way out to their truck one Sunday, Frank grabbed Dalton by the waist of his pants and pulled him aside. He looked up and said, ‘Don’t you let nobody tease him. You hear? And you keep him fed.’ He said it like he was prepared to whip his son-in-law’s ass if he didn’t take heed.

  ‘I promise, Frank.’

  But if Sander needed shelter from anything, it was Josephine doing the sheltering. The sweet little bride turned into a she-bear when it came to her boy. People figured since she gave up part of her insides to have him, she’d be damned if anybody was gonna harm him. It’s why Sander long ago quit claiming any rights to his given name. In the presence of his mother, nobody ever used it. They grew accustomed to Jo saying, ‘Where’s my boy?’ ‘My boy will help me with that.’ And, at the Affiliated Grocery as folks watched her empty the freezer into her cart, ‘My boy likes his chicken.’ They took to calling him Jo’s boy.

  You hardly saw him with his daddy. Dalton was a busy man. The more he took on himself, the less hired help he needed with the ranch. In addition, none of his people were ever given to colorful expressions of their inner thoughts and feelings. So it might have seemed to the unknowing eye that, though the Grant men had a core goodness you could bank on, they weren’t an especially caring lot. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It was said about Dalton, as with his father Will, that you could trust completely whatever understanding it seemed like you had with the Grants – but don’t expect it to be hashed out in discussion. This held true for family. There simply wasn’t that much talking, yet the care these men took was tender, in all things.

  Grant Beef was the family business and ambassador of the family philosophy. The brand has been around for quite a while now. At first, the talk of the new ranch was, ‘What else are giants going to do? They won’t fit indoors.’ Then, ‘They have a natural way with those cows. It’s uncanny.’ And now they say, ‘Yeah, this is a damn good steak, but you can tell it’s not Grant Beef.’

  Over the one hundred and seventy-five years represented in the ranch books, you can trace the meticulous development of hybrid Angus/Simmental stock known across the nation as Grant’s. In those pages, you would see the chronicled history of superior cattle ranching, the building of a new brand from a paltry ten head and nearly two centuries of sweat. And then there are the things you won’t see in the books. Not a single missed day. No terse notes in a tired, sloppy hand. No tiny detail or mild concern left out. For an unbroken chain of 63,692 days, dawn to dusk, these enormous men coaxed out of Dixon pastures the only statement they felt germane regarding life, love, and obligation.

  Actually, you wouldn’t see any of that. Not a glimpse. Possibly someone could’ve raised a mob to subdue Dalton, ransacked that huge house, and might’ve found the books. Barring that, nobody saw those books. Texas A&M University had been writing for three decades, pleading the case for higher learning, offering interns to help on the ranch, free visits from their top vets in exchange for some inside knowledge of the operation. No deal. Will’s father told him, Will told Dalton, and Dalton would soon pass it along to Sander. ‘Grant cattle comes from Grant land. Nowhere else. It’s ours. Protect it.’

  The hired hands bailed hay, helped with the worming, branding, barn and tractor maintenance and the like. That’s it. They were not involved in cutting the herd, culling, sizing up brood cows from the new heifers, and never allowed near the bulls alone.

  By 1980, Dalton had built back up to eight bulls that showed promise as herd sires. He separated and fenced them off in different tracts spread over the twelve hundred acres. He had space ready for half a dozen more when the right genes cropped up. He had recently survived a horrifying lesson, not long after taking over the ranch himself. He learned that even in the most careful of operations, calamity visited.

  The summer drought of ’69 killed two bulls and heat stroke sterilized another. In ’75, a stray .30-30 round from a hunter’s rifle struck and slew Buster Bingham, the long-time senior bull, maybe the best in fifty years. Lightning took Buster’s heir apparent the following spring. Another prize sire would not distinguish himself for two generations, and Dalton swore not to be the first Grant to compromise the line, so the herd numbers steadily fell during those years leading up to 1976, the year he wed Josephine.

  In bed one night, not many weeks after their vows, she listened to the rotten luck that had befallen him of late and she said, ‘Maybe it’s time you talk to God and see won’t He throw us a break, so we can get our feet under us. He likes married people.’

  ‘Does He?’

  ‘Yes. Or He approves of it, as a rule.’

  ‘I don’t know that I could be civil right this minute. I’m a little scared.’

  ‘I can tell, sweetie.’ She kissed him on the forehead. ‘I’ll do it for you. Don’t worry.’ And they conceived Sander.

  God took His time in getting back to Jo, but she could be patient like a river rock when the mood struck her. She had other things on her mind, what with Sander kicking around in there. Dalton kept busy with the beef sales, rationing, rotating to different markets, driving up the price to compensate for falling production. He willed his young bulls to grow, to show him the traits he needed to see, and he didn’t press Jo for a response from the Lord.

  Sander was born and, for a short time, he and his mamma were the only concern around that house. Then the troubles came back. Over the following months, the stress began etching lines on Dalton’s forehead, around his eyes and mouth. Jo felt his big shoulders turn to knotted bois d’arc timbers under the strain.

  It was the early winter of ’78 when she finally had enough. A belligerent, relentless cold spell like no one alive had witnessed threatened to wrack the herd. Her man was poring over the books at the kitchen table, groaning and shaking his head, seeing his imminent failure written there. The sun had set and the house was haunted with quiet exasperation. Sander sat on the sofa and stared at his kneecaps. He would look around tentatively and look down again without comment. He couldn’t know that life was not like this, that these were only rough times, that he wouldn’t feel this way all his life. He had not been among them a full year.

  She saw that her child was nervous in his own home, and Jo couldn’t tolerate that. He needed to keep busy at something until they sorted this out. She bundled her son in his heaviest coat and sent him out back to stack wood on the patio.

  ‘It’s night-time mamma.’

  ‘Turn on the light.’

  ‘Can I split some?’

  ‘You stay away from that axe. Now go.’

  She wrapped herself in a bathrobe and scarf, put her fluffy house slippers on, and walked out the front door. She eased it shut so Dalton didn’t look up and wonder at the foolishness of what she was doing. Snow began to fall. Shattery flakes lit in her red hair, covered freckles on her face and perched on her eyelashes. She walked far enough to allow some privacy, turned her head up and told God she’d come to talk.

  Back in the kitchen, Dalton got hungry. He put away the books and called for Jo. No answer. He found his son out there at the woodpile and went to ask him where his mamma was. The boy didn’t know, which was odd. He always knew. As they stood there staring at one another, shivering, Dalton heard Jo’s voice coming over the second-story roof from the front yard.

  ‘You look here! You will step up and do Your job. Help my man. Are You listening to me?’

  Dalton said, ‘Go inside, boy.’

  And he followed his son. They stood silent in the kitchen, sharing a loaf of white bread and a gallon of milk. They could thankfully hear only the murmuring crescendos of the argument outside. Then thunder began to roil in the winter night, low and slow, and shook the rafters above them when it cracked. Sander spoke up first.

  ‘Is she praying, daddy?’

  ‘I believe she’s dressing Him down, son. I don’t recommend trying it yourself.’
>
  ‘No sir.’

  Sander was tucked into bed when his mother came back inside. Her face was blotchy from the cold. Dalton stood and waited.

  ‘Well?’ he asked her.

  ‘It’s time to put my boy in school next year. I’ll take care of that.’ She dried melting snow from her hair with a dishtowel. ‘Breed your two youngest bulls in the spring. They’ll do for now. Nut all the yearlings except the blackest. Meanwhile, take the herd down to three hundred head, no further. Can you do that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And don’t look for God around here for a while. We’re on the outs, but He’ll get over it.’

  The following Monday, Jo took her boy down to the Superintendent’s office at Dixon Independent School District. Sander had to pass a battery of tests since, at next enrollment date he would be only two years old, but they eventually let him into kindergarten.

  Dalton took heed of her advice in the pastures. Bringing to bear all his knowledge of breeding and skill in stock management, he was hopeful he might even keep the herd above three hundred fifty head. Week after week, things were looking up. So much so, on occasion Jo lamented to her mother that she could have but one of Dalton’s children. How she wanted a sister for her boy. Her mother warned her not to ever let her boy hear that. He would take it wrong.

  ‘I know, mom.’

  ‘Nor your pop. He loves Sander to death, but I see him cringe sometimes and I can tell he’s thinking of that boy coming out of you.’

  Dalton also spoke to his father, Will. Actually, he spoke to four generations of his ancestors. They were all deceased, and Will’s voice was the only one audible to Dalton, but that did little to dampen the conversations.

  One Saturday that fall, he sat atop the family grave, beneath a live oak atop a hill and overlooking the largest pond in their north pasture, his five feet of legs stretched out before him. It was the rarest of sights, a Grant man in repose while the sun shone. He plucked dandelions and chewed sourweed and fidgeted like a child. Made small talk. At last he worked up to blurting it out. He told his daddy he intended to freeze sperm as soon as he found the right bull. He didn’t know if he could say all this to the old man amid interruptions, so he spilled his whole plan, reasons and argument, in a rushing stream.