In Open Spaces (28 page)

“All right,” I called to the guy.

“Blake,” Bob said. “That barely covers a year’s feed for one of these bastards.”

I nodded. “I know. But do you want to turn them around and take ’em back now? They got us, just like you said. Right here.” I grabbed my crotch.

Bob shook his head, and the guy called over his shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”

Bob and I stood waiting, heads hanging, as if we’d done something to provoke this indignity. Although the twist wasn’t a complete surprise, especially with Dad’s warning, I thought about expecting the worst, and wondered whether I would be less disappointed if I had anticipated this. I didn’t think so.

The man returned with a metal box tucked under his arm. He didn’t look at us, setting the box on a shelf mounted along the fence. He pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the box, folding a black cover back to reveal a thick pile of bills.

“There’s no give on that price?” I asked.

The man closed his eyes for a second, as if he couldn’t believe anyone would ask such an ignorant question. “You sellin’ or not? If not, you gotta clear out of here. There’s bound to be more coming.” He finally, for the first time that morning, looked at us, and I wished he hadn’t.

The man wore dungarees that were worn at the knees. His hands were rough and scarred, his forearms thick. He was one of us, except for one obvious exception—his eyes. His eyes were hooded, cold, disconnected. And I wondered whether his heart was as cold and disconnected. And I wondered what had happened to this man to make him so hard and cold. Nobody comes into the world with eyes like that, I thought. Was he one of the many who had lost their places? Had he lost his stock? His family? Any of these was possible, but at that moment, I had no room for compassion for this man. Because to me, no matter what had happened to him, taking it out on his own kind was inexcusable. I hated this man.

“We got twenty-seven head,” I said.

He dug into the box, pulled out a notepad and a chewed pencil, and figured while I did the same in my head. “Comes to a hundred and sixty-two by my count. You want to check it?” He held the pad out.

“That’s right,” I said.

He counted the money and handed me a wad of cold, greasy bills. Then he took another pad from inside the box, and wrote out a bill
of sale. “I’ll have to have one of the boys count, just to make sure.”

I nodded.

The guy called into the building, and two big guys opened the massive sliding doors and sauntered outside.

“Give me a count on these,” the guy shouted to them.

Ten minutes later, after they had counted our sheep and herded them inside, Bob and I were still sitting on the fence, unmotivated, immobilized. I felt humiliated. Another rancher came along on horseback, pushing about fifty head of sheep. I opened the gate for him. And standing there holding the gate open, I heard a loud bang from inside the building. Then another. It was a strange noise—very loud, and very penetrating, like two pieces of metal slamming together.

Bob and I approached a small, dirty side window. We held our hands to the sides of our eyes and pressed our faces against the glass. And what we saw still pains me.

Our sheep were lined up in a chute. The sheep we had spent years feeding, nursing, or pulling out of the mud and tangled wire. At the end of the chute stood two of the biggest of these many big men, with sledgehammers. And just as we peeked inside, one of these men swung his hammer in a giant, gleaming arch down onto the ewe’s head, shattering her skull, sending her body into convulsions. Then two other men pulled the still-jerking torso from where it lay and heaved it onto a pile of dead meat, dead wool, where several other big men sheared the carcasses.

I felt ill. Bob swore through his teeth. I tasted salt in the corner of my mouth, and turned away from the window, running the back of my hand along my cheek. Bob hadn’t moved, and I heard another slam of steel.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

We went and got drunk, the first time Bob and I had ever done that together, and it helped us forget, but only for that evening.

To this day, I have never understood why, while people were starving along the roads of Montana, and starving in their homes, and piecing
together meals from scraps, meals of hard moldy bread smeared with lard, or the tough, stringy meat of an unfortunate prairie dog, the government bought hundreds of sheep people had mothered and loved and doctored for the purpose of feeding people, and they slaughtered them and let them rot. They did nothing with the meat.

Helen had a treasure hunt set up for the boys. There was a map, which she burned around the edges for authenticity. Little George and Teddy studied that map closely, and went searching for several buried treasures—some baseball cards, bags of hard candy, some colorful marbles, and a brand-new book for each boy—Treasure Island for Teddy and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for George.

The boys were thrilled by the whole affair, laughing each time they unearthed the next surprise.

“I thought this was my birthday,” Bob complained.

“Bob!” Helen scolded, but they were both smiling.

We sat down to a birthday dinner of shark (actually catfish). The party had raised our spirits as high as they’d been in years. We laughed loud and often, sometimes just from looking at each other and our ridiculous costumes.

Bob sat at the head of the table lit up like a Halloween pumpkin. He said practically nothing, just smiling and absorbing the good feelings around him.

I sat watching Bob, grateful to have this diversion from the difficult realities we had just experienced days before. And as I scanned our little round dining room table, seeing the joy in those familiar faces, I struggled to find a way to measure the importance of this family.

There was, it seemed, only one certainty—that being the unwavering hold my family held as my most important source of strength. This
would never change. What did seem vulnerable to so many things was my ability to remember this, and to keep it in focus. I realized how much I had been distracted lately, even before the trip to Belle Fourche. The years of drought, of falling prices and rising casualties, had quietly but steadily created a monster in my head—a monster that started as a small desire to stop the decay, but had grown into an obsession with figuring out a solution. I had somehow convinced myself that there was something that we were overlooking—some answer to our problems that, once we stumbled across it, we would all slap palms to our foreheads and say, “How could we have missed that?” It couldn’t be so simple, I thought. It couldn’t be that just because we weren’t getting any rain, so many around us were on the verge of death. The obsession had pushed me into a mental storm shelter, I realized, where I’d locked the door, trying to protect myself from the damage. The problem was that I was alone in there.

That day, looking at my family, I vowed to remind myself that everyone else in the room was facing the same hardship that I was, and despite that, here we were—laughing, happy, together. I needed to remember that the solution to my problems was right here in front of me—we were it.

“A toast,” I announced halfway through the meal. I stood and raised my glass. “To the toughest damn pirate on the high Montana seas. Barnacle Bob.”

Everyone laughed, glasses high, and Bob turned the color of the stripes in his shirt. As I sank back into my chair, a tinking of spoon against glass turned all eyes toward the head of the table again. Although Helen was standing, she was so small that it wasn’t immediately apparent. She cleared her throat, looking down for a moment. When she raised her face, her cheeks were shiny red. “I know that this is Bob’s day. I don’t want to steal any glory from old Barnacle Bob here…” She gestured toward him, laughing nervously. “But I do have an announcement to make.”

Helen dropped her head once more. “I do hate to bring up something…well, something less than happy…” She ran a knuckle under her nose.

“Sweetheart, don’t…” Bob reached for her arm, but she twisted her torso away from him, just out of his reach.

“It’s okay, Bob. I want to.”

“I don’t want you to,” Bob said quietly. “That’s just it. Not now. I don’t want you to.”

Helen ignored him, and Bob’s lips pursed as he watched her prepare to say what she was going to say. Helen lifted her chin.

“It seems that some of us don’t have soil that is as fertile as others,” she said, and she turned directly toward Rita, her blue eyes fixing on Rita with a brief, envious glare. I don’t know if anyone else even caught it, but it sent a current down my spine, and Rita looked at me with a puzzled frown.

“Bob and I lost our baby,” Helen said. “Just yesterday,” she added. “We lost our little baby boy.” And Helen put a hand to her eyes, squeezing them into a bundle of skin. Bob stood up and wrapped an arm around her waist, leading her from the room as her shoulders bounced against his chest.

The rest of us sat in a bewildered silence, staring at anything but each other. There were so many reasons to be uneasy about this turn of events, my mind swirled. First of all, this was not something our family usually did—announcing bad news in such a way, drawing such attention to misfortune. Especially something so personal and delicate. Something that most of us would hardly discuss privately among ourselves, and never in front of the kids. And for the very reason of the effect that this announcement had brought—the unease. But more than that, the timing of this was so hard to fathom—in the middle of such a joyous occasion, one of so few during that period. It was odd and unsettling, and finally, to add one more element—we had no idea that Helen was pregnant. She certainly wasn’t far enough along to be showing
yet, which wouldn’t be far considering how small she was. So that was one more reason that her announcement seemed bizarre. Miscarriages, in early pregnancy, were pretty common in our country. In fact, they were common enough that they seldom rated very high in the realm of news or gossip unless there was some twist to it—if it was an unmarried teenager, for instance. But as difficult as they may have been for some of the women who experienced them, there were enough children under ten dying that it pretty much overwhelmed the dramatic effect of a miscarriage.

All of this together was enough to make everyone uncomfortable. But for me, the worst part of all was the look she gave Rita. The rest I could find a way to chalk up to the frustration of a woman who was distraught. But I could not forget that look, which was hard to describe as anything less than envious hatred. It left me with a very uncomfortable feeling that the Helen we had lived with for the past two years had been a calculated presentation of what the real Helen knew we wanted to see. But the real Helen was lurking. I was afraid that we’d just seen a glimpse of her.

“W
e should be back before dark.” Dad tucked both arms into his coat, buttoned it up, and pulled a scotch cap onto his head. He had a strip of cotton cloth tied around his head, covering his ears, as did I.

“All right,” Mom said. She shoved a fresh loaf of bread into the bag of food she had prepared for Art and Sam Walters. After the murder in Alzada, and Mom’s dramatic apprehension of the killer, Stan and Muriel had shipped a big console radio to the ranch, to make sure we had more up-to-date news. The radio had become an immediate fixture, droning in the background all the time—providing news, ball games, and entertainment. We especially enjoyed listening to Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly. But the radio proved to be invaluable as a source of something everyone in our family was interested in—information—weather reports, news, and the latest statistics on the devastating decline of the economy. As we prepared for our departure,
the current stock prices drifted from the living room in a steady voice.

“You guys stay warm out there,” Steve Glasser said. “Don’t let Art sell you anything.” He smiled. “And tell him to drop in sometime soon.”

“We’ll do that,” I said, trying to believe that Steve’s optimism was justified. No one had seen Art for about a month, which prompted this trip. Not that it was that unusual for him to be out of sight for that long, but he had continued to deteriorate, looking more skeletal each time we saw him. During each long absence, the concern grew a little stronger.

It was damn cold, and the walk from the house to the barn, with the snow crunching beneath our feet, worried me. Dad was also getting old, and these excursions, even our morning feedings in the winters, were not easy on him. The sky was gray, the snow gray, the trees gray, and our breath floated thick and gray from our mouths and nostrils. I felt the icy ground right through the soles of my boots, and the moisture inside my nose froze within minutes. My nose actually hurt from the cold. The wind was strong, directly into our faces, and I pulled my kerchief up to my lower eyelids.

“Feels like winter,” Dad said.

“Yeah, must be just around the corner.”

The barn wasn’t any warmer, but at least it provided some shelter from the wind. We saddled our horses with stiff fingers. The horses fought the frozen steel bits, shaking and raising their heads, keeping their teeth clamped shut so we had to dig our fingers into their jaws. We rode out into the weather, and the six feet of horse put us higher, where the wind was stronger and colder. My joints felt stiff, and the exposed skin immediately lost all feeling. The leather saddle was cold against my butt and thighs. And it never did warm up.

We had lost more stock, but this winter hadn’t been quite as bad as the previous few. For one thing, most of the sheep and cattle we had left
were the strong ones, the ones that had made it this far. Unlike the men and women who tried to eke out a living on the land, the livestock had nothing to work with but bulk, muscle. Their smarts were limited to having enough sense to eat what they could find and drink when water was in front of them.

The ride to Art’s place took us through the river crossing, which was frozen over, the thick ice covered with two- or three-foot cliffs of powdery snow.