by Fred Stenson
“Remember that old girl? The spring her calf was born dead? I wanted to get rid of her, but you talked me into giving her a second chance.”
“I remember.”
The day the cattle liner came to haul the Ryder cows to the auction mart, Billy took the morning off. Ella came out to watch, but was crying so hard after the first dozen cows boarded that she returned to the house and stayed there. Tom could not have explained why he was in a good mood, but he was. He felt young that day, had a real hop in his step. While Billy and the trucker hazed the cattle into the chute, Tom hung over the side and watched them go, recognizing each and every one. When a cow stopped, usually to shy at the blackness inside the truck, Tom would give her a nudge. If that didn’t work, he’d twist her tail and launch her through.
When the inner doors were closed and they were down to the last fifteen, they were dealing with the hard cases: stubborn, wily old girls. One of these went halfway up and stopped. The trucker yelled and gave her a boot in the muscle of her hip. She lay down, filling the chute.
Tom watched the cursing trucker head for his cab and knew he was after his stock prod. On the way back, he zapped it against a post to make sure it was working. By then, Tom had hopped over the wall and stood at the base of the chute, between the trucker and the cow.
“Nope,” he said. “No one’s ever used one of those on these girls, and no one ever will—not on this farm anyway.”
The trucker cursed more and threw his prod back in the cab. He came back and stood with his thumbs in his belt loops. “I got another load to pick up today,” he said.
“Tell you what,” said Tom, reaching for his shirt pocket. “Let’s have a smoke. My guess is, by the time we light up, that old girl will be sick of lying there.”
Tom was licking his cigarette closed when the cow rose and walked aboard.
Tom followed the truck to Haultain Station. He wanted to see as much of the cows as possible before they were gone. In the corrals at the auction mart, he was standing by the fence looking into their pen when the part-owner of the mart came over and shook his hand.
“End of an era,” Herb said with a sadness he did not feel.
“My era,” said Tom.
“They’re lovely animals. Since you listed them, I’ve been telling everyone I could. A lot of guys said they’d be in for the sale. See if they could pick up some Tom Ryder cows.”
“They’re Ella Ryder cows too. Every one carries blood from her parents’ herd.”
“Your son’s not interested?”
“He’s going to be an engineer.”
“Too bad these young fellas aren’t much for ranching these days.”
“Not too bad for them.”
“That may be a good way to think about it.”
At home, Ella was angry.
“Billy’s gone to Waterton with Lance Evert to have a meal at the Prince of Wales. On his last night home! I have a nice roast in the oven.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I’m not blaming Billy. He felt bad about it. But what’s Lance Evert thinking? Has he not had enough of Billy’s time?”
They ate the roast themselves. Tom complimented Ella on it. She laughed at him. It was the same kind of roast, cooked the same way, as they’d had every second Sunday forever. It was only then he realized it was Friday.
“The Pope might mind,” said Ella, “but I doubt God cares.”
Tom was down in the corral with a flashlight, checking on his remaining cows, when a car came over the hill and entered the yard. The night was clouded and black. A solitary frog called from the slough across the fence. The car sat running. Tom imagined Billy and Lance Evert in the front seat, saying their farewells.
After the car drove off, the gate hinge creaked. Billy came walking.
“Enjoy your meal?”
“All right. Rather have eaten at home.”
“Last time I spoke to Evert, he was pretty high on you. ‘That Billy’s smart as a whip.’ ”
“I heard that about six times tonight. Lance got kind of plastered. He hardly drinks usually.”
“Sounds like he had something to tell you.”
Billy hesitated, then said, “Yeah. He’s quitting here. He thought he could get this plant modernized, but his bosses won’t spend the money. He’s got another job to go to. Better plant. He offered me a job there, for next summer.”
“Where is it?”
“A few hours north.”
Tom had the flashlight on an old sprockle-face. Her jaw revolved as she chewed her cud. “Remember this one?”
“Oh yeah. I was surprised you kept her.”
“She’s the only one in the bunch that shows the Shorthorn. Cochrane Ranch paid a thousand guineas for a Bates Shorthorn from England. Record price for a cow at that time.”
“Tomorrow’s the big day,” said Billy.
“You’ll be heading back.”
“I meant the cow sale.”
Tom moved the flashlight to another cow, a younger Simmental-Hereford. She spooked to her feet.
“Ah, hell. I should leave these girls rest.”
He snapped off the flashlight. It was coal dark until their eyes changed. A cat came and twined around his legs.
“I’m fine with it, you know,” he said. “I imagine Ella thinks I should retire completely. Can’t imagine hitting a little ball around a field, though.”
“There’s probably other things to do,” said Billy.
“Guess so. Guess I’ll find out what they are.”
The next two summers, Billy worked for Lance Evert at Sulphur Falls. The plant was new and enormous, set a long way back in the bush south of Jasper. During his second summer there, Lance asked Billy if he would join their company full-time, after he finished his degree. Because of all the experience he would have by then, he could start as junior plant engineer. Of course Billy said yes. It would put him years ahead of the usual trajectory for an engineer in his field. A dream job.
Once, Billy had stood outside Lance’s office door and listened to him brag up his protégé on the phone: “Billy Ryder will be no average BEng when he graduates. He’s already a member of our professional organization and has delivered his first paper at a technical meeting.”
The paper compared analyzer performance in complex CO2 and H2S gas streams, and even though Lance had coached him through it, it was ground-breaking stuff. Billy had received whiz-kid accolades, and it all seemed easy.
In his last year of university, Billy became engaged to Ginny Maier, Lance and Judy’s favourite niece. They planned to get married after he graduated. Beyond the wedding and honeymoon, their destination would be High Brazeau, the town closest to Sulphur Falls. They would live in a wood-frame house Billy had bought for a song and renovated during his evenings.
Brazeau was a rough little town left over from a coal frontier, and Billy knew it was not a place Ginny would like. He hoped that wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t be downing pitchers at the local tavern or watching the street fights on Friday night. More likely they’d spend their evenings with Lance and Judy, who lived there too. Billy liked being in the bush where there were no farmers and ranchers, just a few squatters living out antique lives in the woods. He would never have to deal with smell complaints and sickness.
Ginny was an industrial lab tech, and there was no immediate job for her at Sulphur Falls. A capable Chinese guy ran the lab, and it would be hard to convince him he needed more help. Lance had to be careful too how he brought his niece onto the payroll, now that Billy was almost family. Nothing was perfect, the two men reasoned, but it would sort itself out in time.
The work was what Billy liked. The field at Sulphur Falls was enormous, and the hydrogen sulphide content was double what it had been at Aladdin Hatfield. They were making mountains of sulphur, mostly for Japan, and they were doing it right. Outside their specialized world, few wanted to hear the details; few could even understand them. Even Ginny, whose background was in oil and gas, glaze
d over. But it was interesting to Billy. He knew exactly what he was doing and why.
As for Tom and Ella, Billy did not see them much. They were still on the farm. Aladdin Hatfield was still choking down gas across the road, but it wasn’t the same situation. There had always been two fields at Hatfield, one more sour and higher pressure than the other. After Lance left, the company sold the more sour field to another plant better equipped to deal with it.
In their phone calls, Ella said the plant still smelled but the dangerous days were few. When she put him on the phone, Tom said it was a shame Aladdin hadn’t sold that field twenty years ago. But that’s all he would say about it.
Tom had his cows still, and, in the summer, put up a bit of hay. He sold the calves in the early fall, and his feedlot stood empty. Ella gardened still but on a reduced scale. For recreation, they took drives together along oil exploration roads into the mountains; nothing too adventurous, never overnight. They liked home was how Ella put it.
On a weekend off, Billy took Ginny south to introduce her. It was the expected success. Ginny had low-key ways, an infectious laugh. Ella and she did the instant-bonding thing women do. By the second day, Tom took Ginny out in his cigarette-butt-strewn pickup and showed her the sights. Ginny loved Tom: the jokes, the languorous stories, his old-fashioned chivalry.
“He’s so handsome and funny,” she said as they drove away. “So calm.”
“Do you think I’m like him?”
“You might get like him.”
When he finished his degree and went to work full-time at Sulphur Falls, Billy lived in the High Brazeau house and counted the days until he and Ginny were married and living together. Even with the loneliness, he would have told anyone his life was great, almost perfect—until one night when the phone rang quite late, and it was Ella.
“Billy. I’m sorry to tell you but your dad is dead. Tom is dead.”
The line bristled. A million mites were crawling up the wire.
“He came in from the cattle. We had supper. I was carrying our dishes to the sink. I heard something, and he was on the floor. I didn’t have time to do anything. He was dead.”
She was not crying, but her voice was pulled tight.
“Is he there?”
“What? Oh, you mean his body. No. I called the priest but he didn’t come until after the ambulance had taken Tom away. He said he would go into town and give him the last rites there.”
Then she cried. He heard a clatter. He pictured the receiver swinging from its cord. Far away, she blew her nose sharply.
“This is what I want you to do. Donna is waiting for you at her place. The two of you come down together. There’s no reason to hurry. Do you understand that?”
Billy said he did.
“I’ll phone Jeannie now.” She hung up with the faintest click.
Donna and he were silent in the car. Somewhere near High River, she said she could hardly believe it. Billy felt the same, but his thoughts were on times when Tom had noted discomfort: tightness in his lungs, a pinch in his ribs. There was his rumbling smoker’s cough, and the fatigue Ella mentioned. Why had it not been obvious?
As quickly, Billy knew why. Even carved down as Tom was by everything, he was still the family’s leader, its strong man. If Tom did not declare himself to be in a dangerous state of health—and he never had—none of his children could move past that to any other conclusion.
This was the first thought that seemed worth saying to Donna, but many more miles passed before he did. They were crossing over the Porcupine Hills by then, and in the east, a half moon had risen high enough to stare at them through the trees.
“I let him think I was so interested in the farm. The cattle,” she said.
“You were interested.”
“I was interested in him. I wanted Dad to love me more than he did anyone else.”
“He did love you more.”
“And then after the club calf died, I dumped him.”
She was crying, and Billy let her be. His car rose and fell through the shadowed landscape. He knew what came beyond every hilltop and curve. On the flat, he could see each living home, each deserted shack. He felt where the creeks narrowed into culverts beneath the highway. Billy slowed when the road wove through a break in the ridge. A buck stood on the shoulder, grazed by the headlights.
Donna kept on sobbing and Billy saw in her state what it was going to be like from now on. Each Ryder would believe she or he had caused Tom’s death. Each of them would insist on it, would see his or her line toward this night as the bold one. Billy did not have to think why he was the cause. He had always known.
After the funeral, Jeannie decided Ella should not stay at the farm. Jeannie omitted the word “alone” but Billy knew that was what she meant; alone even while her son was in the house and looking after the farm.
Prayers, Mass for the Dead, ceremony at the graveside, lunch at the house: through every stage of the community’s farewell to Tom, Billy answered each question he was asked, responded to each comment that wanted response, but an inappropriate hostility roved inside him that he could not hide. Donna poked him in the ribs; Jeannie rebuked him in an upstairs bedroom; still he could not do other than what he was doing.
Ginny seemed to understand better, or at least made no criticism of him. She had a nice way of talking about Tom, whom she’d only met once, of consoling Ella and Billy’s sisters. She did well too at representing the silent man onto whose arm she held tightly. Lance and Judy had brought her down, and Billy suggested she return with them. He explained he had to stay and look after the livestock, which was true but not his motive. Ginny knew he didn’t want her there. She accepted with grace his choice to go it alone.
On the night of the funeral, after the last car pulled out of the yard, Jeannie’s car with Ella aboard, Billy found a bottle of blended Scotch in the saved-paper-bag cupboard and started to drink. He drank out of the mineral-encrusted water glass from the porch. He was mad at everything that came into his mind. All he could commend himself on was that he had kept this anger bottled until now. Fear of not being able to was why he did not want Ginny here. It was the same reason he did not want Lance and Judy around.
Whatever Lance thought about his goodwill toward the Ryder family, Bill saw it as bullshit now. He recalled the man’s words about wanting to modernize Aladdin Hatfield, but he was hearing them tonight as Tom must have, as self-aggrandizing and less than true.
And the job of turning Billy Ryder into a crackerjack engineer, wasn’t that also bullshit? Something to soothe Lance’s conscience about the plant his industry had dropped in the Ryders’ lap? Lance had come and gone, then had come and gone again. There were always greener pastures for Lance Evert.
At the funeral, Billy had watched with a fire in his head as Lance bowed before Ella and took her hand. He saw a pain in his mother’s face that was different from what the other condolences were causing her. If Billy had let himself loose in that moment, he might have hit Lance, might have thrown him out of their house and harried him into his car. This: to Lance and Judy, who had done so much for him, who had treated him like family.
When Lance, Judy, and Ginny did leave, Ginny had looked back at Billy out the back window of the car as long as she could. Just before the dust rose, Billy saw the sun glint off the tears in her beautiful eyes. He was being unfair to her, she who had never done him any wrong, who contained almost no capacity for harm. Choosing him to love was her only crime.
While Billy was drunk—and he got deeply and lastingly drunk that night—he clung to the neck of a gallon bottle of sweet sherry and stood on top of the driveway hill. A hard wind blew in his face, and the old plant’s flare jigged in the wind.
“You fucking killed him!” he yelled at it as loud as he could. “You cross-eyed son of a whore!”
Later still, he staggered around the power pole, in the circle of yard-light. What drove him was electric and jagged and centred in his heart. His course around the drivew
ay circle made him so dizzy he fell and mashed his cheek into the gravel. “Hundred per cent fucking idiot,” he told the cold grey rocks. He went to lift the jug and found it light. Nothing left on his finger but the glass loop.
When he got to his feet, he returned to the house and opened the porch cupboards until he found his father’s lantern. He walked to the barnyard and let himself through the gate. He moved the cone of light in search of cows. The evening of his death, Tom had brought two into the home corral, one with a swollen hoof and another about to calve. The pregnant one was lying down and did not seem to find him strange; likely she could see nothing but light and assumed the human behind it was Tom. In the curve between her back leg and belly, he saw the white-haired udder round with milk, the teats pink and inflated. His insides zoomed with pleasure. A calf to deliver; to watch grow.
Bill had been on the farm two months. He did not buy newspapers or watch TV, and estimated the date by what wildflowers were blooming. During the day, he went out to the pasture and walked among Tom’s show herd. Sometimes he lay down in the grass and slept. In the evenings, he spun playing cards into an inverted cowboy hat. He turned down all invitations from neighbours to come for meals. He went to town when he was out of food and beer, and otherwise stayed home.
His sisters called to scold him. They’d heard reports from neighbours of emptied whisky bottles strewn on the lawn, of Billy wandering the roads in sock feet. He told them it was untrue. In fact he kept himself and his clothes neat and clean. After the first week of excess, he drank only beer. Between rounds of card-tossing, he did push-ups and sit-ups.
When Lance called, he would ask about Ella, her health, her mental state, before he asked about Billy. He would tell him about the plant, and at the end of the conversation, would urge Billy to come back to work sooner rather than later. Its junior engineer was not something a plant could do without. Lance was covering the gap by bringing in old friends, retirees, but that could not go on much longer.
