“You oughtn’t go talkin too loud yourself. I ain’t so sure you treat your own kid much better yourself.”
She planted her cane and hoisted herself up.
“Guess I oughta go invite that horseman to some lunch.”
She left. Joe remained, and in the dust and manure and riversmell and bawling cow unable to give birth and mothers crowding outside the corral smelling for their calves and the carcass of the dead bull shimmering in the distance, he remembered again why for sure he never should have come in the first place.
WADE BROWSED AROUND the house while Frances served the cowhand his lunch; there was little to do and much to ask, most importantly the story of Frances’s bad hand, but it wasn’t a good time. Joe was out walking the river, Frances staring out the window, the plain-faced cowhand eating a deer sausage and potato salad lunch, and old Emma asleep. No one had much, had anything, to say.
He found some old photographs in a kitchen cabinet, when they were alone, Wade took them to Frances. On top was a photograph of rough miners and primly seated women. He asked about the black-bearded man circled in ink.
“Peter Meeks.”
Next was a photograph of a pack horse being struck by lightning, grazing unsuspectingly in the instant of its death; a jagged bolt creased the dark sky to the saddle horn, electricity crackling around the horse’s body the way you would imagine but never think it would really appear.
“Just some accident,” Frances said, disinterestedly.
Under that was a reaping team of two swayback horses, a wagon of loose hay and four gaunt, climate-hardened figures standing stiffly for the photographer. Wade could identify all but one, the glum young boy with the lowered head. He guessed aloud that the old woman standing to the side was the mother, Peter Meeks’s wife. Frances nodded. He guessed that the woman on the buckboard was Emma, seeing in her eyes even then the same black circles she had now. The one holding the team, a young girl in a long dress, he guessed was Lillian. So the glum young man, he asked, was it Frances’s husband?
“Husband? What made you think I ever married?”
Then who was the father of Leonard and Harlo?
“Accidents themselves,” she said, her eyes not leaving the window.
“Why? Don’t you like men or something?”
She never gave them much thought, they never stick around long enough to bother with anyway.
Then who was that other man in the photograph?
It was no man, she said, at last turning to him. “It’s me myself.”
Wade looked again and realized it was so.
Just then, through the window, Wade saw the sorrel filly start rampaging in the corral, her sharp hooves thrashing up wet loose manure. With her hind legs she began pummeling the chute where they had penned the stallion saddle horse, who was now heaving himself against the posts that confined him. His efforts excited the filly even more; she slammed the chute with the full weight of her body.
The cowboy flew out from where he’d gone to wash up, racing into the corral, Wade right behind him. With humans on the scene, there was a short hiatus; both horses, male and female, panted, stock still, their flank muscles twitching. The cowboy eased open the chute to pull his stallion out and get him away, but the horse reared and wouldn’t come, and the rejuvenated filly tried to get at him with renewed ardor.
The stallion moved after a hard kick in the flank, and while the cowboy dragged him across the bridge, the mighty animal twisted and churned and tried to bite the halter. His shod feet hammered splinters out of the planking, and his neighing sent the filly racing around the corral in frenzied circles, ears down, head horizontal, her bulging eyes wide with desire, oblivious to anything in her path, which happened to include Wade, who stood watching her, transfixed.
“Wade! Get the hell out of there!”
Joe’s running up from the river roused Wade out of his trance just in time to make the fence as the filly thundered past him. She halted at the gate as her stallion, fearful of the turbulent river beneath him, forgot her for the moment and nervously allowed himself to be led across. The filly strained her neck over the fence, panting and smelling the air.
Wade felt Joe Meeks grab his arm.
“Better we head back, Wade.”
Wade nodded. Midway across the bridge, he stopped.
“What were they doing, Joe?”
“What do you mean?”
“The horses. They weren’t fighting, were they?”
“Um, well. . .” He saw the cowhand had loaded his mount and was leaving. “I thought Frances meant to sell that sorrel?”
“I did too, but told me she’s keepin her after all.”
“She say why?”
“Said she changed her mind is all.”
The filly’s neighing pierced the silence, as the pickup pulled the trailer, and its stallion, away.
The afternoon passed, the sun waned, cooler air wafted up from the river. Wade sat with Joe out in the shade of the stackyard while they waited for Anne. Joe, restless, just to pass some time, began to lift some of the fallen bales back up on the stack.
Wade got up to try too; he bucked one up on his knees the way Joe had done, and—to his surprise—found he could raise it above his head.
“Hey Joe. It’s lighter than hell.”
“It’s so dried out, weighs less than feathers. And you can stop with that swearing while you’re at it, Wade.”
Was he always so tall, Joe wondered, as Wade slapped his hands clean and stepped back to admire the bastion of straw he was restoring.
“Bet you’re an expert at this, Joe.”
“Yeah, I probably stacked and unstacked quite a few by your age.”
“Maybe this summer I will too.”
“Except soon enough, they’ll build that dam, and you’ll need a motor boat instead of a Farmhand tractor.”
The stack sagged at the center like a starving animal, old posts jabbed into it to prop it up. Joe gave one a swift, impulsive kick. The rotted post shattered and the entire stack gave way, avalanching them both in dust and hay.
“Holy shit!” Wade cried, thrashing out of the mess, brushing clots of hay off his head and daddy long leg spiders out of his mouth. Joe burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“You,” Joe chortled, “you looked so. . .surprised.” He laughed harder, and harder still; he couldn’t stop. He sunk to his knees in the loose hay, still laughing.
“Well what about you?”
Wade’s voice broke; frustrated, he threw a wad more of hay on Joe’s head, but the sight of the hay jiggling from his laughter was ludicrous, and Wade felt his own laughter removing the insult he felt he had taken.
“Frances will be mad as hell though, won’t she?”
“Tell her,” Joe Meeks squawked, tears streaming down his face, “we went for a roll in it.”
And so they remained, the stack and dust and hay shaking with their laughing, though it made no particular sense, which only made it more funny. It was a long time until Wade could breathe again, and when he could, he lay under the fibrous mound chewing a fat stalk of clover.
“Joe,” he said after a long silence, “I get why you ran away now.”
Joe sat up. “You what?”
“‘Cause this was such a shitty place to grow up. Right?”
Wade flashed him a toothy grin.
“Yeah, and what did I say about you swearin, Wade?”
They both turned, then, hearing a pickup work its way down along the gulch.
“Anne’s here. Joe?”
“Yeah, I see.”
But Joe, in his mind, wasn’t seeing Anne’s pickup, he was seeing an old black Studebaker, one hurtling down that same lane twenty years earlier, and remembering how he had stood up then as he did now, clearing his eyes of sweat and hay dust. He had been high on the haystack helping get feed to the yearlings, Frances with him, cursing for the hundredth time Harlo’s slowness returning with the farmhand. But she stopped
when she too caught sight of the car. It pounded across the irrigation ditches, barreled up to the stackyard gate, and sprang to a stop. A barefoot person, a girl, flew out, red hair flying. She hurled her door shut and stood, looking all directions, her eyes white. Joe had no idea who she was or why she was there; no one ever came to the ranch, especially no girl. He stood up, twelve tiers above her, naked to the waist. A trickle of dirt and sweat forked mercurially down the small of his back; he shivered ecstatically, despite the heat. Her sickle-sharp eyes darted up to him.
“What’re you gawkin at?” she yelled.
He swelled his chest. He felt bold, and didn’t answer.
“Feed wagon’s due there,” Frances said, “so you better get your damn car clear of that gate.”
“I know that!”
The girl kicked her car so hard a hubcap rolled off. She kicked it again. She slapped her fists on her hips. “And Harlo ain’t gonna get rid’a me so easy as them others.”
“Damn him and his little shit-ass females,” Frances muttered. She looked to the heavy ball of sun, then threw her old legs over the ladder to climb down, and though that meant quitting time, Joe hardly noticed.
“Look at you,” Frances snapped at him, “you barely got your skin on, never mind a shirt, and here there’s a female around. You’re worse’n a goat in locoweed.”
She shook her head, descended and left. Joe watched her thread back to the house. In the shadows back of the barn, a stoop-shouldered statue, his father, stood pressing the brittle teeth of the mower sickles into a grinder. A fireworks of sparks bounced off him. Joe felt dread suddenly, of summer and its hard labor, but even more of the fall. Even as his first year of high school was ending, he dreaded the year to come, and the year after that. . .nothing but cranky teachers and pimply smart-alec town kids for the rest of his life.
His heart sank, and he looked back down. The girl was slumped against her car. She had come for Harlo, Joe didn’t know why, but now he felt sorry for her. Far afield, he saw the spurt of black tractor smoke behind the ridge, then just as it came over, the farmhand stopped. When the girl saw it, she trembled.
From his vantage atop the stack, Joe saw what she could not, Harlo sneaking off the tractor and down the gulch, which concealed his route to the house. No intention of letting her find him.
“What d’you want with Harlo anyway?”
“Forget about Harlo.”
“What if he don’t come?”
She ignored him, sticking insolently to the car, and suddenly Joe knew who she was. His uncle Harlo, who was nearly thirty and still a bachelor, sometimes went to dances in Meagher, and though Joe had never taken any interest before, this last time he waited up to hear every word, so to better know the ways of town kids. But all Joe could get from him was that town girls kept getting so young and spare that he finally just got so drunk he even went after Sheepeater Croft’s girl. “She’s so ornery, I’d of had better luck wrasslin with his sheep,” he had told Joe.
“I know who you are,” he said brazenly, “you’re Marly Croft.”
“And you’re a shitkickin steer-fucker!”
Her red hair flashed, a tangle of knots. Her chest rose. She raised up a dried piece of cow dung.
“I’ll stuff this in your mouth, you ain’t careful.”
“Whyn’t you come up and try?”
Joe’s heart galloped. He teetered on the bale. She glared at him. Neither moved. Late afternoon sun sparkled between the pines along the ridge, leaving a feathery light on the range. The fencelines were green with thistles and the field creamy with last year’s fallow straw.
Marly Croft sidled into a slice of sun; her red hair gleamed. “You come down here.”
“What for?”
“So I can give you what I meant for your older brother.”
“We ain’t brothers. He’s my dad’s brother.”
“I don’t care if you’re cowlickin assholes, just come down here. You afraid of me?”
“Nah.”
Joe looked away. He saw his dad had finished sharpening sickles; lights were on in the milking barn.
“Don’t you even got a shirt?” she sneered. “How’d you like it if I went around without a shirt?”
“Suit yourself.”
She swore, then started up the ladder. Once up, she was taller than Joe expected. And obviously a few years older. He stared at her, she stared back.
“Your dad’s Sheepeater Croft. Harlo told me.”
“Piss on Harlo.” She spit to the ground. “You ain’t so shitless yourself. An what’re you lookin at?”
The light darkening but clear; her eyes sparkled. Harlo had called her a gap-toothed skag, but she didn’t look that way to Joe. Her teeth flashed white and her lips opened, exciting him.
“Don’t get any ideas. Kid.”
“What ideas?”
“I’ll show you what ideas.”
She shoved him, and he fell on his back. The hay was sharp, but with the broiling sun all day welding sweat and hay dust like a second skin to him, he felt nothing. He lay waiting for what she would do next. She straddled him. He tried to wrestle her off but she was strong. She sat. “Give this to Harlo,” she cried, then all at once she began punching his shoulders like a wild animal, scaring Joe but exciting him more. He held her arms at bay, and she started yelling at him, crying, laughing, he couldn’t tell which. Her ratty blouse fell open, baring her breasts, and then Joe, going somehow numb to everything, stopped holding her back altogether. She was rocking back and forward on him, her breasts swaying. Joe no longer cared. His eyes rolled shut. He shuddered, shuddered again, continued to shudder until where she sat on him flooded in a warm wet quaking spasm.
His eyes opened, his brother’s burly sheepdog sniffing his head. Joe batted him away, and he yipped, scampering away. There was a head sitting on the edge of the stack. The head with a young boy’s face, Scotty, who had trundled up the ladder to stand and watch.
Marly, sitting on Joe’s thighs, panting, trance like, glared at him, to go away, but Scotty stepped up another rung, staring back, neither speaking nor leaving.
Joe sat up. “What d’you want, Scotty?”
Scotty pointed to the barn.
“Yeah, okay. You just get on back. I’ll come milkin in a bit.”
Scotty remained.
“How come he don’t say nothin?”
“‘Cause he ain’t quite right, is all. Scotty, quit starin and get goin.”
But only when Joe stood did the boy and his dog quickly vanish.
Joe swayed on his feet, hard to hold steady, his ears humming loudly. Marly blouse-less, hay-dusty, sweaty, smeared her forearm across her mouth.
“Lookit you. All puffed up. Like you stole something Harlo probly never even wanted anyway.”
She snatched up her blouse, flung it at Joe, and climbed down. Joe stood at the stack edge as she drove off, then lay back. The hay bristle gouged his back; he was not feeling so thick-skinned now. He lay a long time, weak and pleasantly tired. In no hurry to go get his whipping. It could wait.
He put Marly’s blouse over his face and breathed.
ANNE’S PICKUP PULLED to stop; she waited, the engine idling. Joe momentarily forgetting who or where he was, took a deep breath. His lungs swelled, his nostrils singed, the odors of earth and decay. He stood, tenuously, echoing with daydream afterimages, then followed Wade, like a weary cavalcade of two, to the pickup.
On the drive down, Wade feigned sleep. The center of his vision was disappearing again, but he hoped maybe this time the raging headaches and flaming lights would not follow.
For what seemed hours, Joe as silent as Anne, Wade off and on realizing he’d let his forehead roll onto her shoulder. Which was comfortable, and she didn’t seem to notice, but it occurred to him it must hard for her to steer, so he leaned away. And off and on realized it was lolling onto Joe’s shoulder.
In time, it grew dark. Ranch house lights miles away, blue and luminous, the sky ticked with star
s, an impending quarter moon etched the eastern ridge.
“Might want to turn on your headlights now.”
Anne wordlessly switched on the lights. Wade saw their reflections, all three, curling up onto the black windshield. She turned on the radio, which only crackled with static, signals lost to the stellar confusion that was night over the Hellwater.
“Guess you weren’t fired after all,” Joe observed to the window.
“What makes you think that?”
“You seem different.”
“Differnt what?”
He didn’t answer. She turned off the radio.
“You were wrong about one thing anyways. About Norman. Son of a bitch chewed me out first thing. Said one more stunt like that and it’d be my last.”
“So what’d you do, scratch his eyes out?”
“Just about. I started to get all riled but. . .I don’t know, I just bit my tongue. Told him I was sorry. Wouldn’t happen again. He just nodded and walked off.” She took a deep breath. “Thinkin about it, it makes me nervous now.”
“How come? He didn’t fire you.”
“At lunch, instead of eatin by myself again, I sat near him. He eats by himself too, only but a few minutes, then starts to work again, so, this time, stead a takin the full half hour, I kinda just got up when he did. He didn’t seem to mind, or even notice, me standin there, while he was readin figures from the log books each team keeps, makin some calculations, then writin other numbers on one of those big maps. I never paid much attention to em, but all of a sudden I recognize the section where we’d been workin. It just leaped out at me, all the coulees and the notches, like a picture developin right under my eyes. Next thing I know he’s got me readin from the log so he don’t have to look back and forth, and he’s snappin at me just like he does the other guys. When it occurs to him I’m s’posed get back out haulin chain, and he sees everybody else still lazin away on their half hour, he said to pair up with him, and let those Roscoe boys carry chain. So all day I got to work the, what d’you call it, that telescope thing.”
“Transit?”
“Yeah, transit. Then after work, I got up my nerve to go let him know I was int’rested in learnin more, like you said this morning. And how much I’d liked helpin out that day. He asked if I meant it. Well I did, so he gives me a book, and tells me he’d appreciate it if I’d read a certain section of it. ‘Cause if I learned more or less of it, it’d help free him up for other work he wanted to get to.”
Return to Independence Basin Page 9
