“Mrs. Stoddard, if you need advice or anything, please call me.”
“I will.”
He stood and watched as she got into the Studebaker and drove away down the road between the derricks and the pumpjacks.
BEA HAD TO go out and sit in the fodder shed, on a discarded old kitchen chair with no back, beside the cane shredder to write in her journal. Her breath poured out in frozen clouds. They had had the first freeze of the year on November 12 and it hadn’t let up yet but nonetheless the thirteen-year-old was flushed with a grateful, joyous feeling, like somebody pulled alive out of a collapsing house. They had paid an installment on the taxes and they would not foreclose for now. Life was possible. Bea put an old blanket over her knees and laid her journal on it.
She had to find out how you made a script. Where could she find a radio script? If she wrote to One Man’s Family would they send her an old one so she could copy it, and see how they did it? And how much did they pay you? It was easy to see how you had to write things up for magazines. Radio scripts were mysterious. They were a hidden, arcane secret.
Bea bit the end of her pencil. The eraser in her other hand was gummy and crumbling. There were spiders in this place. She drew her feet together.
AT GAREAU’S DAIRY, Mayme joyfully tore off her head scarf and said good-bye to Mr. Gareau. She would wait until she actually went into town to apply for the office job to tell him she was quitting, but in the meantime they all said she seemed so happy. Whistling when she scalded the separator vat and forked chopped cane to the Holsteins in the foggy atmosphere of the cow-house. Their breath and the manure and the hot milk made a constant lifting mist in the place. Her auburn hair was in spirals when she walked into the front door of the old Tolliver house.
JEANINE BENT OVER the cookstove, drying her own short hair in the rising heat. Their mother was sitting at the kitchen table, worrying over some papers. She had decided to make herself a little desk. Her own desk. Elizabeth’s mother’s old enamel worktable was on the back porch and she could bring it in and call it a desk. Nobody would remember her mother cutting up chickens on it.
“You said you were going to keep house while I made the money,” said Mayme. She sponged off her shiny old gabardine coat and blew the dust from her little cloche hat. “When are you going to fix the roof?”
“I need help,” said Jeanine. “There’s got to be two of us do it.” Her light-brown hair whipped and crackled through the bristles.
“And you can’t just turn those chickens loose in the barn. Varmints will get them. And that’s my brush, sister.” Mayme pointed accusingly and then beat on the hat with a dishtowel.
“I’m doing it! I’m closing in one of the old stalls.” Jeanine put the brush down.
“You need chicken wire for a run, Jeanine, and a dog. We need a dog to kill the varmints. Whoever heard of a farm without a dog?”
“Will you let me do the work, Mayme? Who asked you to supervise?”
“Well it’s got to get done!” Mayme slapped the hat down on the safe counter. “And you can’t hang colored clothes out in the sun!” Her voice was rising. “They fade, you faded my only good dress!” She turned to the laundry basket and jerked the dress out in an explosion of cloth, making Albert bolt out of the basket and across the room. Loud voices made him afraid of getting his nose smashed again. Mayme threw the print dress, now faded from navy and green to the color of old denim, at Jeanine. “Look at that!”
“It’s only faded a little!” Jeanine was yelling as well. They were yelling because they were afraid of taxes and drought, afraid of being reduced to taking relief in town, of being alone without their father to help them and it had come upon them suddenly, like a little hot dust devil full of field debris, stinging them. Jeanine’s hands shook. “They wouldn’t hire you if you walked in there stark naked with your hair on fire so shut up about it!” She wadded the dress into a tight ball and threw it back at Mayme and it hit the sugar canister and knocked the canister over. Sugar spilled out onto the floor, a rare and precious treasure pouring through the cracks of the floorboards.
“Stop it!” Elizabeth stood up and banged the hairbrush on the table. “Clean that up.”
Mayme and Jeanine got down on their knees with a spatula and a box top and began to scoop up the sugar. They were rigidly, furiously polite with each other. Jeanine knew she should say she would hang out the colored clothes overnight from now on. She should say Sorry. But she was too mad and also hurt and so she didn’t. Sugar clung to her fingers.
MAYME CAUGHT A ride on Gareau’s milk truck to the high school library in Tarrant and returned with an instruction book on typing. She made herself a piece of cardboard covered with rows of circles that said QWERTYUIOP and ASDFGHJKL and ZXCVBNM and she pressed these imaginary keys with her eyes on the ceiling with great fervor for hour after hour while Jeanine brought in wood and bleached out the tea towels and Bea sat with her homework, her small cat on her lap. The lithograph of the small girl in the forest turned in the rising heat from the stove and the glass flashed and it seemed to Bea the bird’s song had turned into fragments of light to enchant the solitary child. Then she sighed and forced herself back to the gray printed page and facts about the produce of the state of Texas. Cotton. Cattle. Oil. Peanuts.
“Try to stay friends with Mr. Gareau,” said Elizabeth. “We are going to need rides to town in the milk truck to save gas.”
Jeanine heard Smoky calling down in the field. It was a kind of scream. She pulled on her jacket and ran with the halter in her hand across the graveyard, through the peach orchard, then into the field with the seedling cedar. Smoky stood on one side of the fence line and old Mr. Crowser’s Jo-Jo on the other. Smoky was trying to paw the fence down to get at him. He wanted to kill him and then he would have the lovely Sheba all to himself. Sheba stood off to one side. She was a dark half-Percheron and very elderly and at this moment, coy. Jeanine saw old Mr. Crowser coming down in a stiff and jerky run. He was also carrying a halter and lead rope.
“Get away, Miss Stoddard,” he said. “You’re going to get hurt. Don’t get between them.” He put the halter on Jo-Jo to lead him away. Smoky shifted with tense, small movements, darting back and forth, his two front legs stiff as fence posts and squatting on his hind legs. He wanted to go over the fence and couldn’t make up his mind whether he would or not.
“I can handle him,” she said. But she was afraid of him. She held the halter in her left hand and put her right hand on his neck. His neck muscles were so tense they had the feel of warm iron. She slipped the halter over his nose and buckled it and jerked at the lead rope. “Pay attention to me,” she said. “Here, look here.” Her hair flew into her eyes.
“I’ll repair this fence line,” Mr. Crowser said. “But you’ve got to do something with that stallion.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. She took the slack of the lead rope in her left hand and lifted it. “He’ll mind me.”
Smoky flung his head against the lead rope and suddenly darted his head at her with all his teeth exposed. She struck him across the nose with the end of the lead rope and he reared. She held on and pulled him down.
“Young woman, you are going to get yourself killed,” said Mr. Crowser. He turned back to the barn with Jo-Jo following. “Keep him in the barn for a couple of days while I repair this fence.”
It took a long time to get Smoky back to the old sugar barn. It was like fighting with a tornado on the end of a rope. He circled her and once stood very still, watching her, as if he would charge. He was thinking about it. By the time Jeanine coaxed him into the barn she was sweating and shaking.
She rested for a while and then got up and warmed water to wash out the juniper green silk. She had to do something about Smoky Joe. When he got near a mare he became some other creature. He became volcanic. He was no longer her friend. He was nobody’s friend. She plunged the silk into lukewarm water and chipped soap into the tub. She handled it very carefully. She would make a pretty dress for M
ayme from it and then they wouldn’t be mad at each other anymore. When she was done it hung on the line with the sun behind it sinking into a dust haze, and the material lifted and sank like a pale flag.
Mayme put on her faded good dress and the shiny gabardine coat, and drove the Ford truck with its balding tires into Tarrant to apply at the oil field office. They hired her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It was as if he were pulling the calf out of a cave and some great force that had nothing to do with the cow had hold of the other end of it, and would not let it go.
Everett had a piggin string wrapped around the calf ’s front feet for a handhold. He tore the calf out of its mother with all the strength of his back and arm muscles. The cow struggled to get up, her tongue thrust out of her mouth. His boots made crackling sounds as he slid around in the crisp, dusty soil. His horse stood tied to a little persimmon tree and the dog lay at his feet, both of them staring at this difficult birth with a kind of dread interest.
The calf slid out in a rush of fluid and with it came the entire uterus, flowing out of the cow and turning inside out, prolapsing, a sliding sack of flesh the size of a sleeping bag, shedding its red lining. The cow made a gasping noise and she lay in a great mound, lifting her head again and again.
He tied the umbilical cord in two places, four inches apart, with twine. He cut between the knots with his penknife. He threw his slicker over the calf and pegged it down around it with rocks. It was a bull calf. He fished around for the roll of gauze bandage in his saddlebags and found it. He knelt down and began to wind it around and around the prolapsed uterus, now stuck all over with twigs and the small leaves of the Texas persimmon. There was blood all over his coat. He was smeared with fluids. Every predator within miles would be lifting its head, opening nostrils, licking its muzzle.
The bovine uterus was a great unwieldy bag that weighed more than thirty pounds. It began to take on a manageable shape as he wound the gauze bandage around it until it was the shape of a column. His hands seemed very old, older than the rest of him. They were spotted with white scars. They were difficult to operate. He got to his feet.
“Get up,” he said. She made a mawing, blatting sound. “Get up, goddamn it.” Her big hooves scrabbled and made grooves in the dust and ripping up the shiny, elastic stems of the leather plant. He knelt at her head and held her muzzle in one hand, clamping her mouth shut and with his other hand shut her nostrils and cut off her wind.
She fought with the last of her strength against suffocation and suddenly plunged to her feet, back end up first and then the front and Ross jumped to get out of her way. She swung her head and knocked his hat off. He kicked it aside and kept one hand on her. She was swaying. “Good girl,” he said.
The prolapsed uterus, bound into a long column, hung from her rear end. He pushed it back into her, unwinding the bandage as he fed the internal organ back into the cave of her body. The smell of birth and its detritus all around him in the crisp and burning drought lands. He put his hat back on after he wiped his bloody fingers on his shirt. He stripped the slicker from the newborn bull calf, and got it on its feet, and milked the cow of some of the birth milk. He opened the calf ’s mouth and thrust it in. He stroked his hard fingers over the calf ’s eyes and dug matter out of its nostrils and wiped the matter on his cracked chaps.
“Come on, baby.” He held the calf between his legs, and pressed the teat at his mouth. “Come on, sport, I been waiting for you a long time.”
The calf sucked one suck and turned his head up to the empty blue sky as the heavy cream rolled down its throat. It opened its perfectly fitted mouth and closed it again and sucked again, and the stuff of the new world poured into its body and with a sort of finality it sucked again and was committed.
He waited for a while. Then he untied his horse and held the rein with one hand and picked up the calf with the other. He threw the off-rein over the horse’s neck and stepped up into the saddle. It was a clumsy thing to do with the little brush carbine sticking up out of the scabbard and the loose-limbed bull calf slipping under his arm.
The horse took in a deep breath of the wind to see what information might be riding down on it. Then he turned his head quickly to a clump of little live oaks and cedar. His ears were stiff as buckram. Something had come along already, probably a coyote or a fox, but nothing to challenge a man on a horse. The dog started off across the stony ground toward whatever it was, but Ross whistled him back. Then he lifted the reins and they moved off, downhill, the cow trailing after, bawling for her calf. He wanted her to walk very slowly or she would come apart again. They passed by the ravine where the government men had buried his shot cattle. Some of the skulls and bones were exposed, scoured by the dry wind.
AT THE BARN he put the cow into a stall and the calf in the straw beside her. His son helped to hold the cow while he took a jerrican and poured five gallons of water down into her uterus. The weight of the water would settle it and hold it in place until the tissues reattached themselves. He led the bay gelding into the fairway and shucked off the saddle and the rifle scabbard and the blankets and carried it all into the tack room and shoved it onto a saddle tree. He hung the bridle over the horn and turned the bay out into the lot. The bay had had a hard ride with double weight and wouldn’t be worth a crying dime for two days. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and they turned toward the house, where it drowsed under the bare limbs of the mesquite and the pinwheel of the windmill fan sailing stationary with its long blades. His gray stud Kat Tracks ran down the fence line and lifted his muzzle in the air with a feline curiosity to take in the smell of the new calf.
The cook came into the kitchen in his rubber apron.
“Yo, Jugs,” said Ross.
Jugs said, “What is it?”
“Bull calf.” Ross picked up a scrap of paper from the kitchen table. It had columns of figures on it and he smeared the paper with cow blood.
“Is that it?”
Ross tried to wipe off the paper. “That’s it.”
“No branding crew this year.”
“Nope. We can do it ourselves. Me, you, and the boy.”
He laid down the paper and then went upstairs to Miriam’s room. He searched through the drawers of her vanity for a little three-minute sand glass he had given her years ago. Brought it back from a trip to San Antonio. He found it in the second drawer along with a hank of ribbon. The Magic of Old San Antonio, the glass said. He blew the dust from it and took it downstairs and sat it on the kerosene stove and lit a burner. He filled a shallow pan with milk from yesterday’s milking and then broke three eggs into the pan and turned over the three-minute glass.
He heard shots from the barn; a twenty-two. Innis was shooting rats. They nested in the four-hundred-pound mohair bags, chewed holes in them and made themselves comfortable in the world’s most expensive fiber. There was at present no place to sell it except in the East. He turned to the kitchen table and again went over his figures. So much for the shearing crews and so much for the shipping and so much for a train ticket to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where most of the mills were shut down by strikes. Several people had been shot dead by the police. He would keep taking whatever he could get and storing it if he could keep the rats from establishing entire rat cities and rat undernations in it. This was called betting on the come. He had lost all his cattle except seven breeding cows and out of them he had got the bull calf in the barn and four other heifer calves.
Someday the grass would come back, someday there would be a market for angora coats and sweaters, and the military would need mohair for uniforms and flight suits. If they got into a war the four-hundred-pound bags would move quickly. In the meantime he had a match for Kat Tracks and that should bring in some money. He smelled something burning and the cook ran in the door.
“Shit, boss, it’s boiled over and them’s the last eggs.”
Ross took the pan by the handle and walked to the back door and threw the smoking eggs and burnt milk int
o the hardpan dirt of the backyard. He said, “Well, at least I still got my whiskey.”
His son walked up with five rats by the tails. He stepped around the mess of burnt eggs and milk.
“Was that my breakfast?” he said.
“Yes.” Ross kicked the pan. “There’s grits.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jeanine sat in Abel and Alice Crowser’s kitchen and laid out the map she had drawn of the 150 acres of Tolliver land and where she would begin clearing scrub cedar, which acres she could rent. But he knew the fields as well as she did. He had been neighbors to the Tollivers all his life, and friends with her grandfather for many years and Jeanine understood that he had stood as guardian and steward to the lower fields all the years of their abandonment and kept them clear. He placed his square forefinger on the map and explained to her that all the properties along the Brazos River were in the main smaller acreages, for farming, while those away from the river and in the other parts of Palo Pinto and Comanche County were much larger and held for ranching. If there were some way to pump water to the fields from the river, and if people could afford it, why, they would snap their fingers at the drought.
He would lease the lower seventy-five acres from them for ten dollars a month and she could drive their tractor. His own land would lie fallow and recover. It was an old John Deere and she couldn’t wait to get her hands on it. Alice said Abel wanted to plow with the horses anyway and if she could afford the gas for it then it was all right with her. Alice’s white hair sprang up in loops. She leaned over and patted Jeanine on top of her head.
“We never had a girl,” she said. “It’s a wonder I ain’t dead from the washing. Couldn’t get the boys to help. Your mother said you are a great hand to sew.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Jeanine. “I can sew.” She folded up her map.
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