The Cadence of Grass (28 page)

“Hadn’t moved,” he said of the feet. “How are you?”

“I’m all right, I’m fine.”

“I don’t think that calf’s comin’ on his own. I kinda dozed. Nothin’ don’t happen, I’ll pull him. Drink this coffee first, though.”

“Okay.”

“I hate to use that puller, but I can’t get at this one.”

“I’m so sorry about what happened.” Here was the disease again, and Bill said nothing at all. “For what little it’s worth, that never happened before.” She knew this was just one more side of the same thing, embarrassment where rage should be. There was nothing censorious about Bill’s quiet. He never took on other people’s questions, and he always knew what to do next.

He put his cup down and got up, attached the calf puller to the protruding legs, looping its chains above both fetlocks, fitted the breech spanner to her hips, made sure the ratchet on the cable drum was pointed in the right direction, then slowly turned the crank. Once the cable had tightened, Bill tried to time his downward press to the cow’s contractions.

Finally, the calf was drawn out in its glistening caul, sliding forth in a tumble of afterbirth. The mother clanged against the restraints around her head, and Bill pulled the calf around to the side so she could see it, wet and luminous, then wiped the membrane away from its head and seal-bright eyes. “A little bull,” he said.

Alice Whitelaw brought so many covered dishes to the ranch that Evelyn and Bill worried about gaining weight, and since she periodically checked their housekeeping or did it herself, they became conscious of their sloppy habits and began doing things they had never done before, such as hanging up their coats.

Bill looked on all this with quiet amusement. Sometimes, as Alice marched around laying down the law, he remembered her as the slender girl of their courtship, that night in the Martinsdale Hotel, when she said, “Cowboy, I can beat you to the floor anytime you want to try.” Time, he thought, all it is is time. All it will ever be.

Stuart and Natalie settled their differences without a trial. After Stuart announced his engagement to Annie Elvstrom, things went quickly. They would be married in Two Dot in June. Since Natalie did not want Miss Elvstrom living in her house, now grown sacred in memory, she kept it and compensated Stuart right down to the penny. She was currently angry at Paul for saying, when she’d announced her plans for a face-lift, “Quick thinking, Natalie,” and she seemed to be acquiring a lot of hard-to-pin-down ailments including chronic fatigue syndrome, Epstein-Barr, seasonal affective disorder. She bought a light box and put travel stickers on it. Bought a cute little Audi. Sideswiped a parked car while chasing the first robin of spring.

Nobody had seen Paul for a while, and reports were scanty: he was a stamp collector, a ham radio operator, a car salesman; he’d been spotted at the Guns Galore emporium out on the interstate. Violet and Claire at Just the Two of Us assured Natalie that they had seen a section of State Road 287 with Adopt-a-Highway signs with Paul’s name on them. Donald called Evelyn to say he’d bumped into him in Helena but was in drag, testifying against a restrictive farm bill, and thought better of striking up a conversation.

Then, after a month or so, Paul began paying visits to Evelyn, but with Bill there, these remained formal. Evelyn didn’t want him on the ranch at all, and she distrusted herself in the face of his narcotic appeal. She was never unaware of the bruise on her soul, and wished he’d fall in love with anybody else.

Paul felt he was making better headway by turning his considerable skills on Bill, who never wasn’t watching him. Despite that, Paul found numerous ways of being useful, running parts and supplies out from town, revealing some surprising mechanical abilities and, more important, filing for cost-sharing and farm subsidies, which entailed hours of tedious paperwork. He began to persuade Bill that the burden of the ranch on Evelyn’s modest estate could be alleviated through imaginative forays, even beyond tapping into the federal subsidies which of late were the only real crop. Appealing to Bill’s fear—some by nature, some age-related—of being a burden, particularly on Evelyn, was a rich vein in terms of gaining Bill’s acceptance.

In observing his reliable alertness, Paul failed to understand its purpose. He explained that he was facing a difficult, very important decision that might also produce opportunities for Bill but that he had decided to leave it, if not to chance, then to Punxsutawney Phil’s forecast on Groundhog Day. When it was reported that the rodent had indeed seen his shadow, Paul packed his bags and left without further explanation.

Bill’s vigilance was rewarded when Paul called from Medicine Hat, Alberta, quite late at night. Paul was at his best and made what he clearly thought was a great case for Bill to lend a hand in bringing a boat into the States duty-free. “I knew you’d come through,” Paul said, prematurely celebrating his loss of respect for the old coot. Then after supplying the operator with further coins, he gave Bill his instructions. “It may be coming a little late in life, Pops, but I’m going to show you how the big boys make money.”

Evelyn drove Bill to the bus station, an errand she would recall for the rest of her life, as though Bill had borne the shame of her beating upon his own shoulders, believing him to be headed off to his neglectful daughter in Miles City.

But Bill rode to the High Line. He had nothing but his coat, his gloves and his worn Open Road Stetson. In his pocket a wallet contained photographs of Alice, and of Natalie and Evelyn as children, and a pair of reading glasses with only one earpiece. He didn’t speak to the other passengers and stared out at the weary landscape emerging from snow as from time to time mountain ranges rose and fell in the distance and the bus followed the wet black road north. They went through some open country that reminded him of a twenty-thousand-acre pasture without a division fence in which he’d once tended cattle. Most of the time, he had been alone with a saddle horse and had slept on the ground. The crew boss left him food the first and fifteenth of every month at the shipping corrals, but Bill never saw him do it. He was eleven years old.

He looked out of the window at low cliffs, sage-covered pastures, fences poking out of snow and enclosing nothing. Ranches looked like remote fortresses in the distance, white crowns of snow, blue shadows of road cuts. He smiled to see Angus cattle strung out and feeding toward the horizon, willows growing out of flat panels of ice. The land was wired together with telephone and electrical lines, railroad lines and highways, as if it might otherwise drift apart. Every now and then, a treeless new subdivision showed up, looking much the same as a car lot. They passed yellow stacks of lumber and a sawdust burner at a prosperous little mill. A distant, vertical plume of smoke suggested a rare, windless day.

He changed buses at Great Falls and two hours later stepped off at Havre, where three men awaited him. One a sandy-haired fat man whose face reminded Bill of a cat’s. The beetle-browed man in an old sateen jacket advertising auto-racing products never once looked at Bill and spoke only French to the third, who was small, startlingly better dressed than the others and wore a long mackintosh over a sports coat. He looked like an Asian sort of fellow. The three of them drove Bill across the Milk River, where the man with the cat’s face pointed and said, “There’s your river,
monsieur
. That’s how you get back to the U.S.” Bill didn’t know what he’d been told, but now he was patient as a wolf, watching the three with cold absorption. The only snow left here was in the still-filled ditch forming an enormous white worm that raced alongside the car. The second man said something in French and gestured at a ridge where antennae bristled in every direction. The natty one replied in French, and Bill joined them in gazing up at the structures, some sort of border surveillance, he assumed. All he could make out from the signs was “Alberta 880.” At Aden, they crossed the border itself without pause, and it seemed to Bill that the men exaggerated their Frenchness to produce some sort of effect on the Canadian border officer. The small, well-dressed man held all the passports and handed the guard Bill’s driver’s license.

After a short drive, they turned into a road that was little more than tracks in the sod. Their headlights picked up the ridges and the gates through fences, but the well-dressed man was hunched over the wheel, cursing incomprehensibly as they pushed through miles of badlands. Bill could no longer determine what part of the middle of the night it was, mostly aware of the cursing that had been omnipresent since he got off the bus.

At length they struck a line of cottonwood trunks blazing up into the headlights. Then Paul appeared in front of them, a jack-in-the-box shielding his eyes against the glare. Bill, the last to get out of the car, hardly took his gaze off him as he chatted with the others, apparently making the acquaintance of two of them for the first time but greeting the small and dapper man with familiarity.

“Where’d you learn your French?” Paul asked.

“At my mother’s breast.”

“Bill,” said Paul, “meet Mr. Majub.”

Majub shook Bill’s hand warmly and said, “How thoughtful of you to join us.”

While the men conferred, Bill examined the boat that was drawn up on the riverbank, an oversized wooden rowboat with iron fastenings bleeding through its gray paint. From beneath tarpaulins and cargo netting drifted a sweet odor Bill had never smelled before. A pair of oars rested in their locks, and a single thwart spanned the middle of the boat.

“I’ll row first,” said Paul, clapping his hands together as he climbed aboard. Bill got in and sat facing him while the men on the beach exercised terrific caution in keeping their feet dry as they pushed the boat into the flow. Majub caught Paul’s glance and held a finger under his eye and nodded.

Bill listened to the steady creak of the oarlocks as the bright bands of headlight receded on the bank. The current underneath made the subtlest throb, and Bill’s eyes grew accustomed to the dark so that he could discern the gloomy country around them, sandstone bluffs and hoodoos divided by the dusky gleam of the river.

“Don’t let me hit anything,” said Paul with a friendly trill in his voice.

“How far we goin’?”

“A long damn way.”

Sometime before sunup, waking from a restless nap, Bill said, “What’s the cargo?”

“It’s medicine, Pops. And it’s had a long trip: Afghanistan, Siberia, Alaska, the Yukon, Alberta, and next stop Montana. Once it hits the High Line, it goes all over, and a lot of sick folks are going to get well. It’ll be a new morning for a bunch of folks who right now are trying to remember their own names.”

At first light, Bill took over the rowing. A cold, black storm was forming to the west. Daybreak had given him infinite keenness, whereas Paul complained of backache from rowing. This, Bill wanted to tell him, was not going to be a problem.

When it was Paul’s turn to row again, he gave a great yawn and stood up clenching his fists behind his head, elbows out in a luxurious stretch. Rising silently behind him, Bill followed the outline of Paul’s face against the black current. Paul bent back from the waist, rotating this way and that, bent his head back for a long gasping yawn. With deceptive ease, Bill shoved him over the bow into the river.

Paul made a tremendous splash close alongside and surfaced with a shout at the shock of the cold. Bill stood with one of the oars and fended off his attempts to return to the boat.

“Let me in, Pops. Honest, I’m not mad at you!” Only Paul’s head showed among the shapes of floating ice. “I can help you get ahead!” The absurdity of this remark was not lost on its author, and he began to laugh.

Bill could hear the scream inside the laugh even before it dissolved into curses, and stood there, imperturbably trailing the oar by one hand, and sat down only when Paul’s head went under. Bill suddenly thought he was going to be sick. The boat began to drift unguided as he leaned on his knees with his head in his arms.

He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting when Paul’s voice brought him upright, not a word but a groan that came from deep within his chest.

Paul was crouched in the bow gasping, arms hanging at his sides, a length of pipe in one hand, his eyes fastened on Bill. As soon as his breath quieted, he said, “I need the clothes, Pops.”

He began to undress, throwing his clothes in a sodden heap onto the floor of the boat. Slowly, Bill took off his old stockman’s coat, folded it carefully and handed it to Paul, who gestured impatiently for the rest and put them on as fast as Bill could get them off, including the boots with the undershot heels that he could barely pull on. Sitting at the stern, the wind blowing snow against his bare body, Bill declined to shiver.

Paul took the oars and angled toward shore, crossing several streams of current before the boat ground softly onto the sand. “Here’s your stop,” he said, slumping at the oars. “I know you’re a religious person, Bill. Think of this as a rain check and curl up some place warm.”

Bill climbed out and waded barefoot through the thin sheet ice rimming the shore, then watched the boat move away from him, just a smudge on the silver of river and then not even that, only the river and its steady sound. He turned away from it and began to walk.