The Cadence of Grass (21 page)

She wasn’t sure when Bill would finish, so Evelyn went into the house and called Natalie to tell her this would be a good time to drive out for a visit. With that done she set about making dinner, even though she knew it would have to be served to Bill when the cattle had no need of him. She concentrated on his great qualities out of fear that there might be a grievance between him and Natalie and herself.

But for all that, he couldn’t quite look Evelyn in the eye when he came inside and perched on the edge of the couch with an anxious, ingratiating look on his face.

“I’m throwing something together. I think it would be a good thing if we went ahead and sat down to supper before long.” She thought it would break her heart, seeing the fear in his old face. Once they were inside, he rambled on, scared.

“You see, my grandfather met Theodore Roosevelt at Mingusville, Montana. Roosevelt got him a position running the public stockyards for the Northern Pacific Railroad at Forsythe. Mingusville was changed to Wibaux. He come up the trail and I own his spurs, and the axle holding the cloverleaf rowels has run out the hole to an egg shape and they make a noise like a little Christmas bell, little tinkly kind of a deal just pretty as can be. Went to Wyoming, worked on the Spectacle for Hard Winter Davis, then come here, stoled a horse and got caught in Big Timber, didn’t have no jail. So they lowered Dad down a well for three days and it sure enough made him into a solid citizen. Got out and put this ranch together.”

Evelyn moved food onto the table. She had taken special pains for this meal, and was noticing, as if for the first time, the faded nasturtium wallpaper. There were certain things that emerged in winter when a house went from shelter to the whole world. It wasn’t long before Bill gave in to his need to talk. “Another time, Dad cut off his toe and would have bled to death but he dissolved black powder in his mouth and it stopped the bleeding, he said. When he was a kid he’d have strangled from diphtheria, but his ma put her finger down his throat and cleared the phlegm. Must’ve been tough, worked for everybody, Briggs and Ellis, the 22, the 79, the Two Dot. Also a outfit name of Jones.”

It wasn’t until Evelyn was carrying half of a store pie to the table that she had a burst of courage and said, without preamble, “When can we talk about this?”

Bill took a deep breath and exhaled. “We’ll get to it,” he said.

Then Natalie drove up, and rushed inside pounding her hands together. Once she’d hung up her coat and poured a cup of coffee, she sat down in a deep, upholstered chair, dropping her arms onto its sides to commence a new discussion.

“He says he’ll talk,” said Evelyn.

In the full heat of August, Bill stood with the smoke tank in his hand, the net over his face and watched the dust cloud of an approaching car. He knew how he must look to its driver, and he wondered who the driver was. He lifted the bottom of the hive and held the spigot underneath and waited until the smoke sped heavily through the sides. The day was cloudy, hot and still as he looked within at the gold and varnished chambers of this myriad larval world, a city whose oozing districts he could slice into or break off, sweet and heavy, with his hands. Bees swarmed around his head, their indignant movement swooning piecemeal into the smoke. It was the young merchant paying him a visit, Sunny Jim Whitelaw, the man who never smiled. He was so handsome it was terrifying.

Alice always got up at five and turned on the kitchen light. If no light showed by five, the neighbors would get wind of it and pass it all over the valley. Sleeping in was a bounty rarely enjoyed, especially in those early days when, short-handed, they fenced alone and hayed alone and a night calver was an unimaginable luxury and in the end they almost starved. But this day, Alice turned the kitchen light on at five and didn’t come back to bed. Bill had kept it in mind all day. He had it in mind now. The idea was to sleep till seven. They had two baby girls, Evelyn and Natalie; and Alice, who had rolled with everything that came their way on the ranch, was now consumed by fear that the impoverished family that had forced her out would be obliged to take her back.

This year his hives were out of the flood plain, a supposedly hundred-year flood plain that flooded every three years. The man from soil conservation told him it was a convulsive river, prone to lateral migrations. So Bill moved the hives. It was fine with him if the river had plans for the house, sooner or later. Being master of his own fate was wearing him out.

He was not going to finish this job in time. He couldn’t centrifuge this honey and get up to the house before Sunny Jim Whitelaw in his Buick. He set aside the smoking canister and rearranged the broken combs, then abruptly lifted the bee helmet from his head and tossed it aside.

The road took a wide curve around the hill between him and the house, and the hill was too steep to climb swiftly. Bill was a young man who had so much to do on this place, and not enough of it on horseback to suit him, that he no longer felt young. After he came home from the war, he lived and ranched alone and remained for some years a convinced bachelor. The service had not made him a glamorous stranger the way it did a man with money, and he’d married a poor girl from a mile up a dirt road who desperately needed to get out of her house. When the Buick didn’t slow down, Bill felt denied a common courtesy.

He would go straight to the house despite that the very distance seemed to be pushing him back, making him aware of his own cloddish footfalls and the glacial emergence of his house from the hillside. The car was parked right in the center of the gate, with two big lilacs above either fender in the summer heat. Parked as though no one else might use the walk, it was a smart, late-model Buick with rear fender skirts and whitewalls, “Treasure State” on its license plate.

Whitelaw, with a cup of fresh coffee in his hand, shifted his shoulder to look back toward the door as Bill entered. Alice stood next to the stove. Whitelaw had coal black hair and an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth. The paleness of his eyes gave him a remote quality that Bill thought made him seem here and not here.

Alice looked so small just then in her cotton dress, a nice one she rarely wore, and she pressed the fingertips of both hands against each other before weighing her words. She removed one hand from this contact and used it to indicate their guest. “Bill, this is Jim Whitelaw. He is going to start a bottling plant.”

“There’s a big need,” Whitelaw said emphatically.

Bill nodded nervously as Alice ran down all the things they were doing on the ranch until Whitelaw raised a hand to quiet her. “Hey,” he said, “I completely understand. It’s a hard job, even if it
doesn’t
pay.”

Alice Champion never mentioned the two little girls in the next room, not even that they existed. The main thing seemed to be how beautiful she looked: auburn curls pinned behind her ears, the cotton belt of the dress soft across her stomach.

“Do you live in town?” asked Bill.

“Have to.” He flicked the rim of his coffee cup, making it ring. Alice refilled it, the black stream pouring slowly.

When the cup was filled, Alice raised her eyes to Bill’s for the first time. He was aware that his mouth was not quite closed. He was about to ask for a cup of coffee for himself.

“I’m going to leave with Jim,” she said.

“Oh?” Bill had put all this together, yet he hadn’t.

Whitelaw stared down at his hands, trying to seem to share Bill’s pain. As yet, no pain accompanied this information.

“You only live once,” Whitelaw said with unusual force.

Bill supposed that this was meant to explain their recklessness and considered how this differed from “You’re only young once,” a phrase he found disturbing, as though youth was something you tried to flag down as it shot past.

“Have you already been unfaithful to me?” he asked Alice.

“Yes,” she said. Her mixture of contrition and pride was not quite working, but even Bill understood that this was not the time to choose one over the other. His time for wishful thinking had come to an end. The thought of some carnal turmoil overwhelmed him. He may have still loved her, but he certainly hated her. He couldn’t understand how this could be happening to them. She had loved the land absolutely when he hadn’t cared. Maybe that changed with the babies. She was the one always discovering eternal values in their lives, and now she was going off with this merchant. Her mouth had become an ugly slash. It would be years before she was more than an effigy, and Bill and Whitelaw would be partners in ranching before that ever happened.

Another thing he could tell was that they were waiting for him to say something they could really get their teeth into. They needed him to get this all out in the air. Standing next to the relaxed and handsome businessman in a house filled with a kind of pearly twilight from its small windows, Bill Champion was able to escape his pain in a feeling of injustice and relief in his contempt. Suddenly hungry, he opened the refrigerator and ate a big green apple so fast that Alice and Whitelaw just stared at him. There were dizzying columns of flies at the screen, and the distant bawling of a calf that had got on the wrong side of the fence from its mother.

Bill finished the apple and thumbed the small black seeds onto the floor. He looked up and thought, The hell with these two, then walked over to the door that opened between the pie safe and the Frigidaire and went into the children’s bedroom. He stared in at the two babies, Natalie and Evelyn, two small lumps under the same blanket. “What about these guys?”

“One step at a time,” said Whitelaw. “One step at a time.”

Bill agreed that this was an ungovernable question. He looked over at Alice, but instead of pain, he saw a kind of blank. Though he couldn’t blame her, this look of being stumped on a quiz show was disturbing. He feared that he was going crazy and about to sleepwalk through something terrible.

Just as abruptly, he was tired. Apple pulp filled the spaces between his teeth. He felt the individual weight of his eyes. The flies had gotten worse. When he looked at Whitelaw’s nice clothes, all he could think of was moths. And when he thought about the ranch, he knew it wouldn’t be beautiful anymore. He’d gotten the beautiful bit from her. He had come to believe that the cattle of America were like a big shareholders’ company, and that he had a little share and was part of it. But before Alice, he hadn’t seen any beauty. His mother had had him during a blue norther while his father jugged an old cow by lantern light in a path of red osier willows where the critter had gone to die. He thought of his own birth as equivalent to the poor beast’s bloody struggle. And then Alice filled him in on the true beauty of birth by having the two girls.

“You’re really being damned decent,” said Jim Whitelaw, beating his own thigh with his motoring cap.

Bill followed the hat around with his eyes.

“I’m just stumped,” he said.

“That’s true,” said Alice. “He’s like this when he can’t see what to do.” Bill never quite got over this remark, even after trying for thirty years, but on the day itself, the whole situation seemed to be drifting away from him. For one thing, Jim Whitelaw lost his looks. He wanted conflict, and these two were still in love; it made his face look lumpy. He was going to take the girls, all right, but from then on he would be subject to wondering what it was he got.

Nevertheless, the marriage was ruined, and Whitelaw and Alice were united in a much-photographed wedding. But on that day the marriage had a few minutes left, and once Whitelaw drove away, Bill Champion turned back to Alice Champion and, through a world of pain, rubbed his hands together and said, “Let’s wake the kids. You get Natalie and I’ll get Evelyn.”

When they came out of the children’s room, Alice cradled Natalie like a real baby and Bill had sleepy little Evelyn under the arms, her bare feet dangling. Bill leaned his face in until the end of his nose touched the end of the little girl’s nose.

“Do you want to hear how Daddy put the bees to sleep?”

Natalie glowed with happiness to learn that Sunny Jim wasn’t her father. Not that Bill made much sense to her. His taciturnity so annoyed her that she once angrily offered to send him to charm school. Still, this was a profound liberation, and Natalie looked transformed. “Bill, what did you do then?”

“Kept ranching.”

“So hard,” said Evelyn. “For everyone.”

“Bill,” Natalie said, “don’t worry your little head. We can handle this kind of information. We’re
happy
with it.”

Bill was still looking downward.

“I doubt it,” he said. “It should never have been this way.”

There was no penetrating the gloom that had settled upon him. It was only a matter of a very short time when the cattle demanded his attention, and he left the house. Afterward, the sisters tried to make an evening of it, but with new biographies their capacity for casual conversation was impaired. Natalie was virtually ebullient. “I never thought I’d get out from under Dad’s shadow,” she said, “and it’s going to take a while. Basically, I don’t get Bill like you do.”