Thomas Mcguane - The Cadence of Grass

Natalie sprawled on her back. “What were we doing with all our energy, smart Stuart, when we should have been planning our lives?”

Stuart didn’t answer, because now in their weariness they could have the time-filled lovemaking they’d desired. He embraced Natalie again and with some difficulty she managed to bestir herself. “I’m enjoying you,” she said once he’d begun. “I’m enjoying you now.” When they were finished, they lay back on the deep grass, and Natalie found herself really watching the clouds, seeing their passage and imagining their destinies. It was with a rare lightness of spirit that she resolved to stop seeing Paul at least until she could dump Stuart. It would be like the release of the white doves at the opening of the Olympics.

When Evelyn wondered how she had befouled herself with so unsuitable a marriage, she imagined it was her abrupt immersion in a carnal world. The widely experienced Paul hardly thought of anything else. She might have been moved as well by her father’s enthusiasm for Paul welded in business talk, duck blinds and the national rodeo finals, an annual trip that left the two under the weather for a week after their return. Evelyn and her mother never inquired even when one of these trips resulted in an amateurish attempt at blackmail by a phone voice named “Nancy.” She also reminded herself that Paul was not always as he was now; he’d had surgery on one of these Las Vegas trips and had come back changed. Still, those were good times to stay out at the ranch, and often her mother went too. Evelyn was only slightly baffled by the friendship that had grown between her mother and Bill. And she was amused at the curiously sharp views her mother had about how Bill should be running things, which she expressed to him with what Evelyn considered unseemly familiarity.

Evelyn’s freedom from Paul was expensive, as she reminded herself regularly. Natalie and Stuart said less and less, despite being financially chained to Paul and a business that was already declining in value. According to Melvin Blaylock, the lawyer who’d attended the funeral, the day would come when the bottling plant was worth nothing . “You really should sell it yesterday,” he said, his tiny features remarkably without animation under the warlike crown of his peculiar hair.

“But that requires that Paul and I reconcile,” Evelyn told him. “And we dislike each other.”

At this, Melvin Blaylock raised a finger. “It’s your money,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” she beamed.

Actually, Natalie did remark, once, “God, we would have a lot of money.”

Evelyn cringed at the force of the remark, and it rarely came up again.

Evelyn drove past the grain elevator and pulled in by the old wool dock to the feed store. She bought some sacked oats, a hundred pounds of birdseed and a half ton of cattle minerals, and headed toward home, the truck lower on its springs, listening once again to Townes Van Zandt on her CD player, thinking as she heard about the federales once again how much she would have liked to figure in some terrific myth like “Pancho and Lefty.” She didn’t even know what had become of her dream to move off into an unbounded grassland — a veldt! — where human life would arise and expire in the general great sweep of things like a spark that glows then dies. Maybe holding the ranch together with Bill Champion could be enough.

Clanging over the cattle guard, she passed Bill’s little frame house behind the orchard and saw his sleeping horses switching flies, and only shifting slightly at the passing of the truck, heads, rumps, prop work of legs, all asleep in the sunshine. Kingbirds spaced themselves along a stretch of barbed wire, while a crowd of young starlings raced the truck before swarming off into a chokecherry thicket whose leaves had curled from frost. When she passed the last hill on which their pinwheel brand was marked with white rocks, her house stood in an angle of warm shadow, an insignificant shape under the chambered upper stories of the black river cottonwoods. While the cooling engine ticked under its hood, she tried to take in her happiness and decided it might consist of nothing more than living by herself. Sometimes it was loneliness, sometimes freedom.

She quickly carried her groceries inside, throwing open a few windows, then resumed her trip to Bill’s house, made distant by his discards: metal drums he planned to cut up to hold stock salt and range minerals, tires, sprayer tanks, a set of bedsprings, defunct farm machinery, feed sacks, old batteries, a broken wheelbarrow and a camper top that had lost its windows. Evelyn stopped at Bill’s house, where even more of his horses — Who, Scram and Matador — observed her before going back to eating, pulling hay through the bars of a steel feeder, and she recalled her father’s frequent exclamation, “Good God, he’s got another horse!” Bill didn’t answer her calls, and so she assumed he would be down around the barn. She unloaded his groceries in the kitchen and started thinking about Paul again because a package of ground round had reminded her out of the blue that Paul’s hero was Ray M. Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s. “Life is dog eat dog and rat eat rat” was his favorite Kroc quote, not exactly Emersonian in spirit. “If my competition was drowning, I’d put a hose in their mouth.” Paul used to say that hamburger was where the rubber met the road in the cattle business, and that Ray M. Kroc was the ultimate trail boss.

From the kitchen she could see her own unmade bed and loved the innocence of its disarray, rumpled on one side, taut on the other. She thought with near glee of waking early and alone, birdsong coming through the window and no reason to make the bed. She went back outside and walked toward the barn. This would be a fine day, one of the last, to work her young colt, Cree.

Standing in the bad light of the barn under the hay mow, with saddle stands back in between the disused draft horse stanchions, Evelyn searched through the bridles that seemed, in her view, to be festooned from too few pegs, so that in hunting through for the short shanked Kelly Brothers grazer, all she could find were snaffles, Argentine bits, a cable tie-down, offside billet straps, cinchas with broken strings, detached go-betweens, old steel stirrups that Bill said were cold enough in winter to “freeze the nuts off a riding plow,” a coppermouth John Israel, a gag bit, an Easy Stop, a knockoff of a Garcia spade, boot tops made into saddlebags and a chain twitch with a handle from a World War II foxhole shovel. Just when it seemed hopeless, Bill walked by and said, “That colt of yours has dug him quite a hole.” Pigeons flew out from under the roof of the barn, wings colliding with the eaves like broken fan belts.

“If you’d of left my stuff alone, I’d have him saddled.”

“Red Wolf’s been in there.”

“Right. You feel like turning some cattle back for me?”

Evelyn carried her saddle and blanket out to the colt, who had indeed pawed up a considerable mess. She brushed him and handled him a little, but Cree shied back when she threw the blanket up near the base of his neck and slid it down into place to make his coat lay flat. She kept the offside stirrup on her own side when she put the saddle up because he looked like he was getting ready to fly back. Cree was coming good, but he was quick to spook. When Evelyn was on his back, she still couldn’t open gates and if someone handed her anything, he was liable to bolt. As she pulled the latigo, she felt behind the cinch ring to make sure it didn’t roll up some skin and pinch him. Then she fastened his girth and led him around a bit until he quit the little skittering toe dance and let her bridle him. He kept his teeth closed at first until she gently slid her thumb up against the base of his tongue. Evelyn pulled his nose next to her, went around and did the same on the other side, then led him a few feet from the nearest thing it would hurt to be bucked off against and stood up in the near stirrup, feeling him line his body up straight to take the weight, and swung aboard, discovering all over again that it was the very best place to be, and they jogged toward the cottonwoods where Bill and his kelpie dog, Cow Patty, were bringing in some black-bred heifers from a stand of reed canary grass where they had nearly disappeared. From Cree’s purposeful little shuffle she could tell the young horse had already happily seen the cattle and felt as if he might have business with them. The scattered glimpses of shifting cattle began to solidify under the movements of Bill and his dog, until a small black mass moved gradually toward the overhead gate of the pen. Then a piece of irrigation dam flapped up from one ditch, and Cree bolted gustily for forty feet before stopping and staring it down. Evelyn nudged him with her spur, and he reluctantly started off where the last of the cattle were skipping past Patty, who lay on her belly at the gate. With her intent black-and-brown face, she seemed to be counting them in.