‘If you’re not all spent, climb on up there and let me show you something.’
Sander hadn’t the breath to respond. He made his way up and the tractor started again, in second gear. Dalton trotted alongside, covering the distance between bales in long strides. His son didn’t see the first one leave the ground, but he heard it – vooof – and got his feet under him just before it hit him in the chest. Javier was grinning up there as the tractor seat bounced on its springs.
‘I wish one of us could sing,’ shouted Dalton.
Vooof.
‘It would help. You know, the rhythm of it and all. Don’t you think?’
Vooof.
Sander was watching more closely now. Dalton paid no attention to the netting as a handhold. Instead, he drove his fists into the sides of the bales, latching onto them like a two-pronged logging grapple, then swinging them skyward in one fluid motion, all while moving forward. When the third layer was done, he climbed up with his son and they rode to the pole barn in silence. They would unload, ride back, and do it again until dark, as always. If they were to finish this field today, though, Sander knew he had to stay on the trailer.
6
Sander slowed his breakneck progression through school once he hit eighth grade. There were a number of reasons. He knew he wouldn’t be going to college. Had no desire to, so what was the hurry? He was beginning to doubt he’d stick it out until graduation at Dixon High. The classes grew more boring every year, the facilities more uncomfortable no matter how they tried to accommodate his size; his home and the lumber yard being the only places he could stand erect indoors. He figured tenth grade would just about do it for him. And he liked working with his daddy full time in the summer without worrying about what text he should be reading to make sure he didn’t miss anything.
‘Makes me no difference,’ Dalton said, ‘but why not just keep skipping ahead and have your diploma in two or three years?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sander shrugged. ‘No reason, I guess,’ and he returned to his mound of new potatoes and sausage.
‘Uh-huh. Who is she?’
Her name was Alejandra Sandoval, and she happened to be in the eighth grade when Sander showed up.
Alejandra’s grandparents immigrated north from Chiapas, Mexico, in the years after World War II, so her family didn’t have as much of a history in Dixon, or with the Grants, as did most of the people in town. Obviously they were accustomed to seeing the big people around, but they hadn’t yet achieved that inborn acceptance of living among giants. It’s one thing to go about your business at the feet of these men, keeping yourself from staring more times than not. It’s another thing altogether to imagine yourself in a relationship with one. And a bigger leap again to being at peace with your little girl dating one. When Dalton went through this with Frank, at least he didn’t have the cultural barrier to contend with. He did not envy his son.
Jaime Sandoval wanted his daughter to find a nice Hispanic boy. His wife, Clarita, couldn’t agree more. Dixon had a thriving Hispanic community and there were plenty of respectable families to choose from. What’s more, they were all, so far as Clarita knew, Catholic. Most of them went to their church, the same one Sander visited some months ago. Alejandra didn’t see him sitting back there, but Jaime and Clarita did. Now, rumor had it, Sander was going to that church full of weirdos over on Eden Drive. Which wasn’t entirely accurate. He had been there once. Though, had anyone asked him, he would not have denied that he intended to return.
As for Allie, she was smart, gorgeous, strong-willed and not afraid of much. Sander couldn’t think of a thing to add to that recipe. He approached her on the fourth day of school. By the fourth week, he’d already decided to quit skipping grades and he told her as much. Inside of two months, they were an item. At school, that is. They weren’t up to letting the townsfolk see them together. This was chiefly because Jaime had already heard the talk and he absolutely forbade his daughter to go on a date with the boy. Through Clarita, he issued several edicts regarding Sander, but it’s not like either of them could go to class with Allie. What Jaime could do, though, was keep her working at the family store every waking hour that she didn’t spend in school. Clarita could keep her off the telephone and sort of accidentally search every cubic inch of the girl’s room while changing her bed linens. This was their strategy and Allie was not blind to it.
Sander had a strategy in mind as well, but his relied heavily on timing. Half the school year had passed before he was able to implement his design. Dalton had appropriated funds from the budget and they were replacing that fence in the northeast corner, the one Bart was worried about, when Sander brought up the subject.
‘Dad, would you and mamma like to meet Allie sometime?’
‘Is it serious between you two?’
They progressed at a walking pace, leapfrogging one past the other, picking up the T-posts where they had spaced them out, holding them plumb with one hand, then crashing down a single blow with the post driver in the other hand. Like so many of their daily tasks, no machine made could do it faster than him and his boy, and that alone was proof to Dalton that these very things were what Grants should do. Their conversation continued in spurts as they passed behind each other.
‘I don’t want any other.’
Sander said that just as Dalton was on a downstroke and he heard the slightly off sound of the whack. Dalton mumbled something, jerked the crooked post from the ground and straightened it.
‘What about her? What does she want?’
‘Marriage. Children. Nice little house south of the border where we can raise goats. They eat a lot of goat down there.’
Dalton was standing still. ‘Quit joking around. You’ve been steady for a while now. Your mom and I aren’t deaf. I don’t think these are unreasonable questions.’
‘Seriously? Okay. Guess what Jaime does.’
Dalton already knew what the Sandovals did. ‘They own that little hardware store outside of town. Don’t they?’
They were regaining their momentum now.
‘Yep. And Allie says they can order any feed on the market. I’ve found the one we need to try. It aint the most expensive. It aint the cheapest. But it’s the one for us. We can order it by the pallet and have it in a week. They don’t have to stock it, so we get a break on the price.’
Cattle feed had been the subject of much debate between them for going on a year now. Hay sales had played a key role in digging them out of the financial crunch resultant of the semen storage operation. However, it had taken its toll in return. Obviously they couldn’t allow their stock to feed in the fields dedicated to hay production. They could rotate back into those fields after a crop was harvested, but the nutrient value available from a fallow field, having been conditioned for rapid growth and recently harvested, fell short of what Grant cattle needed. This was especially true for their growers and calves during the critical June to October period when the quality of the forage naturally drops anyway.
Dalton was no stranger to feeding grain. Will had gotten a little ambitious once, way back, and kept a few dozen more breeders than the land could easily support. It was a calculated gamble, but the weather didn’t cooperate. Rather than put the animals down, Dalton’s father made a deal with Pete Lawson’s father; beef for grain. The grain was so expensive that Will’s gamble was a wash, that’s what Dalton remembered.
Sander kept telling him that the new stuff was both cheaper and more nutrient-dense, so you needed less of it. It was the science behind the new stuff that bothered Dalton. He didn’t understand when Sander rambled on about organic supplementation and optimizing genetic potential through protein and phosphorous ratio management. Or something like that. How can you make grain better? No getting around it, though. Something had to be done.
‘You priced feed?’ he asked Sander.
‘Yeah.’
‘You didn’t think I needed to be in on that?’
‘That’s what this is, dad. Me fi
lling you in.’
‘We’ve always taken our business to McCoy’s or Lawson Farm and Ranch. We don’t know anything about the Sandoval store.’
‘It’s a True Value franchise. And we know these T-posts came from there.’
‘Do what? Who said you could go off and do that?’
‘I saved us twenty cents apiece. You want me to take em back?’
So that’s how it would go down, thought Dalton, just like in the old days. Balanced symbiotic relationship is the euphemism – between people on the one hand, between pocketbooks on the other. He wasn’t especially happy with that because he saw it as a step backward. When he was a boy, his daddy told him stories of their ancestors vying for acceptance among the locals by taking all their business to the old town merchants. It’s the easiest way to get on their good side, he said. Show them you trust them, you can help them. Dalton thought even then that it seemed a crass and insubstantial bond, and that’s without romantic entanglements complicating things. The numbers made sense, though, and Dalton soon relented. As far as Sander’s thing with Jaime’s daughter, well, he wished the boy luck.
It wasn’t long before Pete Lawson spotted Sander pulling a trailer of feed and supplies from the True Value parking lot. Or he heard about it. Or he suspected it and started asking around. An operation like Grant Beef can’t hide much in a town the size of Dixon. Sander saw his dad on the phone one day at lunch, shaking his head, catching a ration of hell from somebody while his steak grew cold on the plate. When he figured out it was Pete, he stood and asked for the phone. Dalton had always hated the telephone and was none too sore about getting Pete out of his ear and sitting back down to his plate.
‘Mr Lawson? This is Sander.’
‘I know you, son. I was just explaining to your father that you don’t cut a relationship like ours for the sake of a girlfriend. I had no opportunity to bid when you started buying feed. No offense, but that aint right. She’s a good girl. They’re good people, I’m sure, but–’
‘You got your books in front of you, Mr Lawson?’ Then, ‘Go get em. I’ll wait.’
Sander stood there eating a sirloin with his free hand and when Pete was back on the phone, he told him the brand name of the feed, precisely how much they ordered and at what intervals, off the top of his head. He waited again and exchanged a glance with his dad.
‘No sir,’ said Sander. ‘I need your best price. I got lunch waiting.’
Pete gave him a good deal, cut his margin to near zero and told Sander so.
‘Mr Lawson–’ He was interrupted, then continued, ‘Okay, Pete, you were straight with me and I’m gonna do you the same. That’s better than fifteen percent higher than what we’re paying now. We can’t afford it.’
‘That stuff, the protein supplement, comes from overseas. No way I can compete with a national chain like True Value and you know it, Sander. I can’t work for nothing.’
‘No sir. Nobody’s asking you to.’ He sucked steak juice off his fingers. ‘But Grant Beef aint a hobby. We have a bottom line too.’ Pause. ‘I can understand why you think that, and I’ll tell Alejandra you think she’s a nice little Mexican girl. But one thing’s got nothing to do with the other. We clear on that?’
Dalton watched and ate, noticing how comfortable his son was in this role, how unperturbed by Lawson’s rants and pleas and inappropriate remarks. When Sander sat back down to his plate, he asked him, ‘How’d he leave it?’
Sander shrugged. ‘Hung up on me.’
Jo was walking in from the den. ‘Who hung up on you?’
‘Pete Lawson,’ Dalton told her.
‘What on earth for?’
‘It’s ranch business, honey.’
She brought them more bread and tea, then started cleaning the kitchen.
Dalton asked, ‘How are you getting on with Jaime?’
‘He’s a very good businessman, a straight talker. He trusts me on his forklift, which is good, and none of our orders have been late.’
‘And?’
‘And we don’t talk about that. Not yet, anyway.’
Friday rolled around again and Jason showed up that evening with a check made out to Sander Grant in the amount of five hundred dollars.
‘What’s this for?’ asked Sander.
‘One of your paintings,’ Jason told him with a smile.
‘Which one?’
‘You choose. He doesn’t care.’
‘Who is this person?’
‘A buyer in New York. Scott Jacob Paulson. I’ve shown in his gallery.’
‘Why would he buy art he hasn’t seen?’
‘They do it all the time. He’s loaded and I told him some about you.’
‘Like what? What did you tell him?’ Sander asked.
‘That you were better than me.’
Sander turned the check over in his hand. ‘So I just pick out whichever one I want to get rid of and send it?’
‘You can do it that way if five hundred dollars is all you want. Or, you can let me help you pick out your most outstanding piece of work and sell it to him for less than it’s worth. When he asks for more – which he will – the price is no longer five hundred dollars. And he won’t expect it to be.’
All Sander could think of was what he could buy Allie with a couple hundred dollars and how he could hide a reconditioned arc welder in the shop beside the barn. Dalton wouldn’t be happy about it, but their welder had given up the ghost last week and things needed fixing. Maybe he could knock around the replacement and scuff it with a wire brush so it looked like the old one once it rusted a bit. His dad never looked very closely at the tools.
He and Jason spent their hour together debating which of Sander’s inventory represented his most mature, balanced work. There were dozens, years worth, stacked and leaning against the walls. They settled on Deception, an enormous oil on canvas depicting a man in work clothes, head down in a pasture but facing the viewer. In the background stood a black bull. At first glance, it appeared the bull was some distance behind the man; its relative size forced a depth perspective judgment upon the viewer. Jason said it was nearly flawless in composition and bleeding emotion. That’s what would sell it. However, when somebody – the gallery, the buyer, or some subsequent owner – realized the man’s fingertips were touching the bull’s shoulder, the viewers’ perceptions would crumble and they would suddenly realize they were staring at a giant. Jason predicted it would resale for several times the initial price, and he said Sander simply had to accept the loss. For now.
They wrapped the canvas carefully and Jason said he would ship it tomorrow, cod. ‘They can’t expect us to pay for shit like that,’ he said. ‘And I would be expecting to hear from Scott Jacob shortly, if I were you.’
Dixon True Value closed at five o’clock on Saturday. Allie always rode to work with Jaime and, after cleaning up, closing out the register, and doing whatever stocking remained from Thursday’s delivery truck, they were generally home by seven or eight. That’s a bit late to pay a call on someone, Sander realized, but Sunday was out of the question and he could not wait until Monday.
Sander stood on their doorstep at ten past eight, holding a bouquet of flowers. He took a deep breath and rang the bell. The porch light came on but the door didn’t open. Gnats buzzed in his face. He could feel an eye staring at him through the peephole and heard footsteps receding into the house, then more footsteps approaching the door. Allie opened it.
‘Sander? I wish you had called.’
‘Your parents would’ve told me not to come.’
She looked at the flowers and whispered, ‘Bring them to me at school.’
‘I can’t. I mean, no, that’s not–’
‘We’re having dinner.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Clarita walked into the foyer behind Allie. ‘That’s long enough to tell him we’re eating.’
Allie looked down and shook her head.
Her mother said, ‘Take the flowers, Alejandra, and close the d
oor.’ She did not acknowledge Sander.
‘They aren’t for her, Mrs Sandoval. They’re for you.’ He held them up, but didn’t dare reach over Allie and across the threshold. ‘Should I leave them on the porch?’
She stepped forward and stood beside her daughter. The smile on her face reminded Sander of something Jason told him a long time ago. There’s no feeling in a curved line, he’d said, it’s just a line.
Clarita took the bouquet. ‘Thank you, Sander. They are splendid.’ She excused herself with a nod and, as she walked away, ‘Dos minutos, Alejandra.’
Allie waited, then whispered, ‘You can’t bribe her with flowers.’
‘Not trying to.’ Sander pulled a purple felt box from his pocket and hurriedly said, ‘Just buying time. This is for you. Go eat your dinner.’
Allie stared at the gold bracelet.
‘I can’t believe it.’ She looked up at him. ‘Thank you so much. I’m very sorry about–’ She glanced over her shoulder.
‘Don’t be. I love you. See you Monday.’
Allie watched him drive away.
Sander had already bought the welder earlier that day, but he couldn’t bring himself to bust it up. It was too fine a machine. The subterfuge wouldn’t have worked anyway, as this was a bigger model. He kept it in the truck that night and, before sunrise Sunday morning, he hauled out the broken welder and plopped the new one in its place. His dad could gripe if he wanted, but things needed fixing and Sander resolved he could spend his own money however he saw fit.
The plan was to drop the old welder off at the dump on his way to First Unitarian that morning. He was hungry for another of Roger’s lectures, and possibly a few answers about that newspaper article. He still didn’t understand what he was supposed to get from that. He could be home by noon or a little after and help his dad brand some calves. Dalton had other plans. He was sitting at the dining table when Sander came down the stairs in his nice clothes.
From the kitchen, Jo said, ‘Breakfast is ready. Orange juice, baby?’
‘No, mamma, thanks.’
‘You ... going to church this morning?’ asked Dalton.
The Legend of Sander Grant Page 7
