Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

  Is that another one of your truths again? I say.

  You pick things up when you read, he says.

  I read, I say.

  But not the Bible.

  No, not the Bible. Though Rose had one, an old one, and I would look at it sitting there always in the same place and gathering dust. Seeing it always bothered me. I felt it like a parent looking back at me, is what I think it was. But the stuff in it, it’s popular enough to know without having to read it. I mean, who doesn’t know the story of Adam and Eve? With the snake and that. The forbidden fruit and all. The tree of knowledge and such.

  Making love ought to be approached as prayer, he says.

  A lot of angry stuff in those old Bible stories. I think that that tree-of-knowledge thing, that was meant to be a lesson of the meanest kind. What’s that tree supposed to be about but what it is we’re cursed by, that we’re punished forever by the knowing of our dying? Isn’t that what you’d call our fall from grace?

  We have never fallen from grace, he says. You are better off not believing such stories. Just believe what you feel. Take what you know from what there is inside you to be true.

  What I feel? Okay, what is that? Too much? Not enough? I should pick one. Where do I start? I’m sorry, is what, sorry about the old man, sorry about Rose, sorry when it comes to Son. Maybe sorry for myself, mostly.

  Here, he says. He takes his handkerchief from his pocket.

  I put it to my nose and smell mint chewing gum.

  Start from the start, he says.

  Well, then, I think I’ve come to the end.

  Nothing ends without something beginning.

  What’s that but going in circles? I blow.

  In the spiritual life you may know joy in life.

  I lean my head onto the back of the loveseat.

  My head is spinning, I say. It must be that incense stuff.

  Love is the true redeemer of souls, the Padre says.

  He puts his glass down on a table and takes a cross-legged seat on the floor in front of me. He reaches out and takes hold of one of my feet.

  Please, he says. Why pull away? Why should you be afraid?

  Who says I’m afraid? No, I just need to blow my nose again. I need to wash my face. Where can I go wash my face at?

  Then ashamed, maybe? Don’t be, he says. Don’t turn your head away. Here, give me your foot. Give me both. There. Feet are very humbling. Mary Magdalene washed Jesus’s feet.

  The Padre’s fingers sink like clamps into the flesh of my foot. He rubs a thumb along the spine of the sole. Here is your liver, he says. Here is your kidney. And here, this is your heart.

  It hurts there when you push.

  It won’t after a while.

  WE RIDE OUT to the potrero to check on Ham’s livestock, to cut what he calls the colicky beeves from the rest of the herd so the vet can do the day’s doctoring. I ride a gentle appaloosa that Ham’s daughter used to prize—until she just growed tired of him for his gentle and knowable ways, he says. Ham rides a palomino that was his wife’s everyday favorite, wanting to keep the horse from going barn-sour before she comes back home and wants to get back on him again. Ham tells me he’s heard from Pearl, that she writes to say she has had luck breeding the thoroughbred and to say too that she and Daughter Pearl will stay to see the foaling. Meanwhile, they will enjoy the northern climate, though the mountain refuge has not been as cool as it was known to be before. The spell has been cast wide, Ham says. But it is anyways lucky we have the means for the gals’ retreat. If I thought you’d be in any kind of good keeping, I’d send you up north to join ’em. But I’m betting you and Son are not beyond a reckoning between the two of yous, sooner than not.

  A handful of vaqueros trot ahead of us on grulla ponies, Mexican men hired as needed, some of the best punchers being keepers. They round up the stock to move them a bunch at a time into the pens, where they will filter them on in through the chutes and from there into the arena. The vet’s border collie skirts the herd along with the men, the working dog all the while clipping and snapping at heels to gather and steer the livestock onward. The drove moves about like a cloud, changing shape but without pouching or breaking, their cloven prints blown loose and risen into the air as soon as they’re set into the earth. The tracks vanish into the blind of dust and sun above, where new batches of worlds are forever taking shape. Up there, where heavenly bodies are colliding, where stars are burning out while all the while we spin in the blue, in the realm of the very small here below.

  There’s an explosion of dust—a shudder and thud, a crying out, a man pitching from his horse. He lunges at a calf and bulldogs it down to the ground, setting off a commotion of yipping and hawing and whooping among the others. The downed animal looks stunned, as it just lies there on its side with its legs splayed out. The vaquero picks himself and his hat up off the ground and hazes the cow’s head with the hat, and the cow rises up on unsteady fours and looks about stupidly before it turns and trots back into the herd.

  You gotcher one fine bulldogger there, the vet says.

  He’s my top waddy, Ham says.

  He really took that dogie down by the horns.

  Ever one of these men gets worked up about rodeo time, Ham says. Half a time they got contests of their own going on among themselves.

  You got you a training ground here for good wrestlers, the vet says.

  I wish’t they’d cut the horsin’ out and get on with the doing of what work we got here to be doing.

  Yet it ain’t right to hobble the spirit out of the men now.

  You could say so, Ham says, if you was wanting to be fair about it.

  You got to sabe what’s fair or not for yourself, the vet says.

  Fact is it’s a helluva time to be sporting and funning about in this godamighty heat, Ham says. Take a lot out of man and animal, as you know better than everbody. What I know is these buckaroos ought to be preserving ever bit of their fortitude for what work we need ’em doing. And not wearing our animals down none neither.

  Especially as my doctoring fees are by the hour and you’ve got a lot of vacas needs eyeballing and treating, the vet says.

  You needn’t be reminding me, Ham says. He swats at a horsefly buzzing too near his head.

  What you been feeding? the vet says.

  I feed ’em all good, Ham says. Specially the ponies. They get a mix of corn and barley, cottonseed hulls and alfalfa hay, molasses and a bit of silage, and some cornflakes and cheerios to boot if they’s some left of it in the kitchen. I got a pearburner so we can add the prickly to the fodder. Beeves get this elixir too, but with a lot more plain hay in it for filler. And they’ve got a girt of grazingland I keep irrigated alongside the river for ’em to feed off of as well. They even get a bit of shade there to keep their hides nearly cooled off.

  I believe the colic’s likely been brought on by sand what’s got mixed in with the grain, the vet says. It happens now and again. I been seeing it with an awful lot more stock these days. Sand’s pert near in everything and in every place.

  Or maybe too it’s the stress, Ham says.

  Could be in addition, the vet says. Heat is tough on any animal. You got to watch ’em for the coughing pneumonia and the emphysema they get from the dust. You got to watch ’em so they ain’t drying up and dropping over with their tongues all swolled up and hung out.

  Nosirree-bob, Ham says. Won’t let that happen.

  Nope, the vet says.

  You know what we want, Ham says. We want that certificate of approval from you, is what we want. We want these animals in top form come rodeo day, and I’m counting on you to get us in shape, even if it cost me some extra dollars. As I’m counting too on us getting closer to a break in the weather, he says. I’d give the Good Lord the pay dirt necessary for that prayer to be answered. This curse a heat can’t go on forever now.

  The vet takes his hat off and scratches his head.

  You wouldn’t think, Ham says.

  No, you wo
uldn’t, the vet says.

  Let’s get us a header and a heeler.

  You’re the hacendado.

  They nod one to the other.

  Speckled outbursts of starling birds lift from the withered branches of an old pecan tree as I lead the appaloosa toward its pool of shade. I stand the horse and watch as some of the men drive another part of the herd into the pen. A couple of the vaqueros wait inside the arena and prance after the stock once they’ve come in through the chutes. A nimbus of dust rises up and takes shape, like some celestial body yet chained to the earth in its drift. One of the men trots through the mass to the clear, working the stiff from a rope and building a loop of it. Another man trots at the heels of a weakling and waits for the header, now looping overhead until the lasso should take the proper shape and weight on. When the header nods ready, he comes about and tosses the rope and catches both horns and pulls back. The heeler rowels his horse and moves around again from behind and throws the lariat and catches both hind legs as was his aim. The calf stumbles, but the riders don’t topple the animal, and their horses know to keep the ropes taut enough and to wait for the cue. At this, the vet rides over and eases his horse up to the cow, and he plants a foot on the cow’s head and leans over and stabs a needle through the hide and into the flesh, injecting the medicine. He quick marks a line along the animal’s forehead with a greasepaint stick, and saws his horse to back it up and waits as the men untie and recoil.

  Let’s vamoose and go on after the next of ’em, he says.

  The appaloosa stands patiently beneath me, borne up as we are on a vast desertland, shaped by splintered plates and buckled crusts in a constant state of stretch and crack, causing the earth to solidify and rift, if I’m remembering my geology correctly. We’re moved in our repose through currents, caught within the eddies of westerlies, the great mountains in the far away snagging every cloud and withholding any vapor or bit of mist or drop of rain. The sun is distorted by its own fevered glare above, and little sandspouts whirl about in the dirt and skitter out across the vega before us. I sit under our modest yet glorious cover of shade, the horse swishing her tail at the flies that bite, watching as the men run through the herd and do what they do again and then over again, all the while taken in by the might and the spectacle of all of it.

  THE HOT-STAR sparkle of diamond catches my eye, a glint of light seen in the adamantine luster, in the fire crystaled inside, in the faceting as was intended for matrimony, in the merging of elements complete. Inside too I see the lies bedded and the promises cleaved that disturb what remains of any brightness there might once have been. I close my eyes to any regret. I let the startle of flesh and the stroke of breath carry me to another place, where each thought becomes no thought at all.

  It’s like a door slammed and I’m startled awake. That fast are we fallen and come to our senses again. Or come out of our senses, if you might say it that way, and come into our minds again, come into the ordinary, as if we’re suddenly no longer touched by whatever wand had so touched us. For what happened between us isn’t any of what I’d imagined it to be. Not after the words, the mouths, the caressing, the groping, the fumbling at loving. Not after the clothes are off. Not because what I had seen was not what I had thought it would be, as far as the shape of the head not being cut and molded the way Son’s is, and the other different things about another body that might take you by surprise and so frighten and arouse. But it was once the Padre had come into me, once he was inside, it was that quickly finished. In a minute—no, less, not even, less than a minute, in an instant—it was done. He was finished.

  He lifted his gaze upward, his breath caught hard and quick, as if he were hearing something from above that had in a sudden come to him.

  It’s not so much that it was over for the Padre—over in just the obvious way, in that all that was stored up was suddenly gone to spill in me. But more that he behaved as if helpless or ignorant as to what he could do now. Do with me, I mean. Anything, do anything, do something—my body could not have been more pleading at the time—but please, don’t just roll over and turn away and lie still. Don’t abandon me. Don’t say, Forgive me. Not just, Forgive me. As if doing nothing but speaking a few words of apology was all that would be needed. As if he believed he were some kind of saintly being or other and needn’t do a thing but simply ask for forgiveness and expect that he should get it.

  THEY SET AN eight-second clock for the bronc riding and other roughstock events, Ham says, because eight seconds is the best you can get out of any bucking animal. Experience proves you cain’t expect any much better, as after eight seconds the horse or bull will tire enough to change the game. Every cowboy goes into a show wants a good bucker so as he can make it to the short-go. Or she. Cowboy or cowgirl, he says. Though most ladies will stick to their barrels, as you know. Not all, but most. As maybe they’ve got the better sense as far as the sexes is concerned, he says.

  Ham gives his bolo a tug and stares at me as if he either remembered or had forgotten something.

  You want good buckers, I say.

  As I was saying, he says.

  You were saying, I say.

  Now, for the bulls you got to train with the dummy to get what you want out of ’em—that’s that itty box there with the antennae on top a it, he says, pointing to the contraption in the corner of the tackroom. You take your young brahmas, who are naturally aggressive and got the drang to buck, and you get them used to a thing on their back that they don’t like from the get-go, and you will have ’em to leap and to kick and to whip about each and ever time in no time. We use the dummy pert near a year afore we put a rider atop the bull at all.

  You mean until the live dummies get on, I say.

  They ain’t so dumb, he says. Them boys know what they’s doin’ and what they’s dealing with. They trust the stock to be tough and the stockmen to deliver. You want toughest of the tough. You want rank. Good riders expect that. And you don’t go relying on finding good buckers from what’s come from somebody else’s remuda, or relying on luck, he says. You got to breed for what you want. Then you encourage the animals to do what comes naturally—to toss every cowboy gets astride of ’em right off and onto their pockets, is what.

  Ham reaches to his hip and digs into his canvas pants and pulls a watch and a chain out. He flips the silver cover open, and when he does, the sun hits the metal and strikes at the eye like lightning.

  Where goes the time? he says.

  He puts a hand to the middle of my back and leads me out of the tackroom and toward the arena. He keeps talking, with me all the while reined alongside him by what he knows and cares to tell me about.

  Now later on today, he says, what we got to do is introduce a few of the animals to the rodeo chutes. The aim is to keep the bulls and the horses bucking and yet at the same time get ’em used to being in the pens and being around people. Atop of all that of which we must check that ever one of ’em is properly branded and weighed and named. You can help me out with that part, if you’ve a mind to.

  He tugs a raggedy old bandanna from out of his pocket and swabs his forehead and the back of his neck with it, the flesh on him darkened and withered nearly to jerky.

  You’d think there’d be yumidity here with the way the sweat’s coming off me today, he says. He puts the bandanna to his nose and gives a hard blow. He looks into the rag. Yet they’s nothing but dust coming out, he says.

  Isn’t it crazy, I say, to think that in this plague of heat people would still keep the sport of rodeo going.

  Crazy to think we would not, he says.

  It reminds me of those poor countries you hear about where they’re in the middle of some war, one against another, both inside and out, but these same people are able and civil enough to compete in games of ball kicking or bat swinging, I say.

  I won’t make to any comments on the morals of mankind, Ham says. He slides the post back and swings the wooden gate open. He nods at me to go ahead on in, and we walk across the aren
a, the dirt powdering up at our heels, the sun hammering down on us from above. We head toward the shade of a stand of cottonwood and eucalyptus that lies on the other side of the fence, all of everything trembling in the heat.

  Far as I’m concerned, Ham says, is once a man starts talking about honor and morality, you’d best get to counting up your forks and your spoons.

  We climb to the low rung of the fence and look over to where a brahma bull is grazing in the pasture.

  Brahmas are the reason rodeos got to using barrel men and bullfighting clowns, he says, as bulls a this type are likely to attack a downed rider. That there is one rank bull you see before you now—downright nothing but mighty. The very reason we named him Bodacious.

  He looks anything but near his name, I say.

  He’s upward of two thousand pounds, Ham says.

  The bull doesn’t move but to rotate his head to look back at us. He regards us with glossy eyes. He has large, pendulous ears and upcurving horns and a hide that is velvety smooth and hangs in excess in the dewlap and underbelly. The bull gives a twitch of the skin and tosses off a skitter of insects and then turns his head back to look out at some distant yonder, caring less about our presence than we do about his.

  These animals know what heat is, Ham says. They can take it aplenty. Nowadays we got better breeds, like these ones. And we got nighttime rodeo to ease man and animal’s burden and suffering both in the sporting and the gaming. We got electric lights and a good reason for using ’em too. Asides, it’s more complicated than you might want to think, he says, these reasons men have for competing. Goes back as far as the start of any of the oldest stories, whether wrote about or just plain spoke enough of.

  Dear Katherine,

  You need to come home. You need to take my apollogy. You need to know how I am sorry for doing things I should be sorry for. You need to know that sometimes all of us does things that are not right for each other but that we cant help it even though we try. Since we are just humans. Right!? I promise we can work on things. I promise you will see and you wont ever want to goe and leave another time. Because I need you and you need me too, admit it. Just come home now and we can try it from brand new again.