The Cadence of Grass (13 page)

“My mother really tried to reach out to him, but it was all lost on Grandpa. Everyone on the place was half starved while he paid into a pension plan through the Odd Fellows. And he had a high-dollar pinky ring, which was totally inappropriate to begin with, and which he swallowed once he knew the end was at hand. Said we’d only use it to buy train tickets out. These were all more or less jokes, but serious enough that he actually did swallow the ring. My folks and I are just unwilling to go in and get it, even though it’s pretty obvious we could use the money. Now—” he rapped his knuckles on the corpse’s stomach “—you’d have to use a chisel or tire tool or some damn thing.”

Evelyn, shivering from the cold, couldn’t quite keep her eyes off the corpse, and was tempted to blame it for everything. Donald said he was uncomfortable having it lean up against the wall like cordwood and put it in a small wagon, towing it around the room looking for a better place. “I remember when the damn thing was jumping around barking orders,” he said. He looked through the room for a place to park the wagon. “My dreams change every day,” Donald was saying. “For years I’ve also had a great interest in going to Mars. It seems more and more possible. If I hang on to my share of Grandpa’s pension and invest it wisely, I could be on one of the first trips. When I heard they’d found evidence of water there, I thought,
Whoa
, I could have it all:
a hot tub on Mars!
Here, this is good, I think. . . .” He lifted the corpse out of the wagon and stood it in an upended metal stock tank, where it took on the aspect of a roadside shrine down in Mexico.

Evelyn tried to see the merits of hot tubbing on Mars, the plains of the Red Planet all around and the troubled, complicated Earth hanging on the far edge of the void. Donald had put her in a strange mood.

Donald, meanwhile, was gazing reflectively at his grandfather. “I’m sort of orchestrating the funeral tonight. There will be modest pageantry and some music. If only he could talk, eh? I can guarantee you he’d say we were doing everything all wrong.”

Viewed from the Red Planet, of course, casual wounding within families would seem trivial.

“What kind of music?”

“I have some bitchin’ tunes.” He reached deep into his beard in thought, his eyes moving slowly from side to side.

“So much snow,” said Evelyn. “If only you had a phone. Is he going to stay propped up okay? A few flowers would make a big difference.” She was losing her grip.

Evelyn sat at the kitchen table with a pile of old magazines, never quite taking her eyes off the weather. She had inquired about all the distances—to the county road, to town, across the fields, to the interstate highway—and finally Mrs. Aadfield, at the stove with a towel over her shoulder, told her she would just have to accept her predicament and that it was unlikely to last more than another night.

Evelyn was looking at the meat on a platter atop the stove.

“That’s not that moose, is it?”

“No, and I’d offer you some TV but Donald backed over the dish with the swather and the reception ain’t so good. Sometimes it skips off the stratosphere and we get Red Deer, Alberta. Dad watches it anyway, just for the movement. Says it helps his eyes.”

Evelyn said, “Can’t I make something?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, a pie?”

“What’re you gonna make it out of?”

“You got any apples?”

In fact, they had a cellar full, and once Evelyn had them piled on the table, she abandoned herself to peeling them while she tried to remember how to make pie crust. None of these people knew what a terrible cook she was, and she wanted to bask in their not finding out. At the critical moment, Esther removed a box from the freezer and handed it to her: a brown generic box that said
PIE CRUST
, and inside were perhaps thirty crusts in a stack. “Jeez,” said Evelyn, “how do you get them apart?”

Eventually, Torvald and Donald reappeared in the kitchen. Esther suggested that being indoors, which they obviously craved, was a luxury to which they were not yet entitled. Nevertheless, they stood shoulder to shoulder pounding their hands together, then pulled off their insulated coveralls, stamping up and down, and seeming to become smaller as clothes piled around their feet.

“Everybody fed,” said Donald, reminding Evelyn that a herd of cows was often referred to by ranchers as “everybody.” “That old brockle-faced, crooked-horned, prolapsed, swinging-bagged, broken-mouthed, spavined whore chased Dad and me up on the wagon again, one of us ever trips we’re gonna be toast.”

“She’s going to town,” said Aadfield sternly. “I’ve had enough.”

“Must be three foot out there,” said Donald to Evelyn, turning his palms up hopelessly.

“Can’t you go to the shop and build something?” asked Mrs. Aadfield in a tone of exasperation.

“No, Ma, we can’t. The propane line is froze, and we can’t get heat to it.”

Donald led Evelyn to the living room, which bore no intuitive relationship to the rest of the house insofar as it was necessary to pass through two obscure doors to reach it. A small fireplace with a Heat-O-Lator insert was surmounted by the inevitable bugling elk against an overwrought tangerine sunrise; and it had been a long time since Evelyn had spotted tassels on furniture. A badly stuffed and moth-eaten bobcat was poised midpounce over a thoroughly dilapidated grouse, a tableau that proved to be a centerpiece for the windowless wall where hung various family pictures, including several of Donald as a rodeo star in pre–cross-dresser days and Grandpa in the Norwegian Navy. There was also a rather glaring colored portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Donald simply wanted to talk, and Evelyn found herself touched by surprising trustfulness. He wished to know where she lived. “Mostly in Bozeman,” she said, “but also on our ranch—well, sort of ours—helping out.”

There was a long and comfortable silence before Donald spoke.

“Well, uh—?”

“What was I doing out in your pasture in the middle of the night?”

“Yes,” he said solemnly, eyes seeming to drift for a moment, but then his face lit up. “Is it a fun answer?”

Evelyn looked vaguely at the ceiling, really thinking this over. Then she described the men getting out of the old sedan and her sense of foreboding, her instinct that she would have just one narrow opportunity to avoid the fate they held in their hands. “They were sort of uh, uh,
looming
.” But no, that wasn’t it so much as the differing speeds at which their faces were lit up by the headlights. As she went over this in her mind, it was suddenly very clear that she’d been right, that if she hadn’t run something very terrible might have happened.

Donald nodded. “Those might’ve been ordinary men,” he said, “believing all women in the world are just a bunch of Lorena Bobbitts. Probably just regular fellas leading decent lives, but when you get them together there’s always this one other fella—who you can’t see, you can’t even see, but he’s there all right and it’s no telling what he’s liable to do.” Evelyn sat very straight as he spoke.

A chinook wind began to blow in early afternoon, sowing panic among the Aadfields as the temperature steadily climbed and melted snow began to run from the gutters. The roads would soon be passable, and any mission of seeing Grandpa off would be subject to the interfering visits of neighbors. Thriving on this emergency, Donald announced, “We’ve got to make our move.”

Evelyn, reading a front-page story in the
Livingston Enterprise
about the advance of Africanized bees north from Texas estimated to arrive here in about thirty years, noted that his parents were immobilized.

Donald looked from one to the other in moderate disgust. “Let’s put an end to this,” he said to them. “That old man is gone. He ruined our lives. He—”

“
Donald
—”

“He ruined
your
lives. What can you say of a man whose last words were ‘I stood up for my water rights’? And when I left for San Francisco thirty-five years ago, he said, ‘Don’t come back, you no-good fairy.’ He never had a kind word for you, either. So, I say let’s burn the evidence.”

Torvald spoke. “Donald, you’re going to have to light the match. I can’t do it.”

“Me?”

Evelyn looked up and said, “I really shouldn’t be here.”

The silence in the kitchen was extraordinary, and Evelyn retreated to the classified section. “Nordic Track. Lo mileage. Illness forces sale.” She read on, in an effort to beat back the sadness invading the room, about available baby-sitters, archery sets, pop-up campers, sporting goods, help wanted, pet grooming, firewood, swing sets—until that, too, finally became unbearable. She put the paper down and said, in a remarkably flat tone, “I’ll do it. Then, can I go?”

Donald leaned close to Evelyn, his beard rustling dryly against her ear, and whispered, “Atta girl, you get out there and set fire to that stiff.”

Evelyn pointedly ignored the rest of the arrangements, though she was impressed with the Aadfields’ renewed vigor. And when Donald wheeled a hand dolly through the kitchen, she began to feel something of a chill. It was a windy dusk and quickly turning dark when their preparations were finished and Donald, with a look of significance and gratitude, placed the box of kitchen matches on the table. Evelyn looked at them and thought that she would have no trouble with this task at all. She picked them up and asked, “Now?” The Aadfields nodded eagerly, and Evelyn found herself touched by their childlike unanimity. She put on the coveralls handed her by Torvald and went outside and into whirling air that was taking the snow from the roofs. She was oddly excited simply to be out of the house.

The heap of wood was a jumble in the darkness, but as her eyes adjusted she could see a mass of carefully crumpled newspapers at its base. The cadaver was in there somewhere, but for now it was just tinder and firewood. Her hair kept blowing over her face, and she reached behind and shoved it under the heavy collar. Now she could see the faces in the windows, one each in three different windows. She knelt by the paper, but the first match failed so abruptly that she looked to see how many remained in the box. It had been made clear to her that not any old match would do, and she had to get the job done with one somehow associated with the penny-pinching of the deceased. She had been struck by the helplessness of the faces in the windows—not the competent, if peculiar, household that had rescued her, but three cripples waiting for the fire they could never have started without her. This would be no problem once she got a match lit, which she did by making a great shelter of her own body and then carefully setting a bit of paper alight, and then another, until a cheerful glow blossomed at the base of the pile. She stood up and her hair blew free again and whipped around her face as the little fire spread into a general blaze as the wood finally began to burn, steadily and then with spontaneous speed until the entire pile became a globe of light etched by limbs and branches and revealing, with increasing clarity like the tiny figure in a fertilized egg, the corpse at first blue in its uniform, then black against the intensity of light and at last, as Evelyn retreated from the heat, waving its limbs about as though signaling from a Norwegian lightship to a cold outer dark. It had become little more than a silhouette, and at that moment, thinking of her father and his own accumulation of hope and pain, Evelyn knelt down and wept as the inferno illuminated the angled streaks of snow overhead.

After a while, she gathered herself and saw, in one lighted window, Esther, cradling a steel bowl, whisking a meringue with terrific energy; in another, Torvald was watching television with his fingers in his ears. On the second floor, a window was flung open almost at the level of the flames, and psychedelic music filled the air; Donald leaned out, his hands on the sill, and shouted, “Captain Beefheart! I love Captain Beefheart!”

As the bottles teetered along their track from the jet tank that filled them, they passed under a smaller machine that capped and sped them toward further automation in a humming, tinkling chorale of sound until they reappeared concealed in cases and moving at right angles to their first appearance, at which point they were borne out of sight and headed for the multipacker. Along the array of activities were gauges and instruments, and reading them, clipboard in hand, was a young woman named Annie Elvstrom from Two Dot, Montana. She was twenty, a shy beauty with a high clear forehead and chestnut hair drawn back in a tie, one of a large family that had starved out ranching. Paul visited Annie Elvstrom several times, starting conversations that went nowhere as Miss Elvstrom, glistening with high fructose corn sweetener from the machines, seemed frozen at the very sight of him. She behaved as though she’d seen someone from another world, and afterward needed a few moments to resume her tasks. Because he had given her several chances, more than she deserved, Paul entertained firing her.

She meanwhile directed her questions to Stuart, at first because the other workers claimed he was the only person who really understood all the plant’s operations, then because his gentle manner had emboldened her to speak just a little. Once, when a steel roller in the conveyor track jammed and bottles shattered around her legs, Stuart was there to shut the line down. Kneeling at her feet, he gathered the broken glass until it was safe for her to move. She thought Stuart was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. Knowing he was already married to the daughter of the august founder, whose very name glowed over the plant in yards of neon tube, Annie Elvstrom nonetheless wished Stuart would presume a little during their friendly chats; the smallest insinuation would have been welcome. It’s impossible to imagine her reaction had she learned Stuart had already named his sailboat after her.