Thomas Mcguane - The Cadence of Grass

Her head was down on her chest and the snow piled upon herself when she heard a tentative lowing which gathered into a broad, inquiring volume. Evelyn stared hard toward the rumble of deep voices, the spinning whiteness of the snow. At length, the first black faces began to appear, massing in front of her, crowding for room, then around her, each different from the next. In her black dress and loose coat, she curled on the ground before them. The circle tightened until she felt their heat.

Was this the warm outer room of death? Evelyn was wrapped in several army blankets, her head turned against a gray-and-white-striped ticking pillow. The shade of the bedside lamp had pine trees appliquéd to panels of imitation buckskin, the seams laced not with rawhide but shoelaces. The room smelled of cold wood, and beyond the uncurtained window the flat winter light contained no detail. Evelyn ran her hands over herself and discovered that she was in the same black dress, then noticed pants and an old blue sweater folded over a chair, it seemed, for her use. Some of the tension went out of her body, and she was aware of a sound outside.

Evelyn looked down into a yard enclosed by a shelter belt of caragana and evergreens, grown tangled together and unkempt, banked by graying snow, fastened here and there by debris that seemed to have blown from the general refuse of the house into the nearest thing that stopped the wind: newspapers, binder twine, plastic grocery store bags. Wrapped in one of the blankets, she started as a figure appeared below her dragging a length of wood and adding it to a rick of logs and branches. An empty flagpole stood to one side, its ropes slapping in a steady wind. The figure was a man, encumbered by heavy clothing and a navy blue hat whose earflaps were drawn alongside his face, and for as long as she watched, he continued to drag wood from out of her sight into the square steadily formed by the logs. What is he building? A shelter? Nothing about this procedure changed, and in its repetition was something grim that Evelyn wished to see no more of. She turned from the window and looked at the clothes on the chair, reluctant to put them on. When she dropped the blanket from her shoulders, she regarded the previously fashionable black dress as some annoying slut suit and unhesitatingly rid herself of it and replaced it with the baggy, warm and clean clothing on the chair. She balled up the dress tightly and put it on the chair, where it began to expand; she compressed it again and pressed it between the rungs. She was ready to be seen, should there be anyone to see her.

Her door was locked. She went back to the window and thought at first to signal to the figure below but saw that there were two people dragging pieces of wood to what was now a considerable pile. The carcass of a huge, leafless cottonwood hung over the yard and the patterns of human activity below, patterns Evelyn could not begin to understand. Maybe the tree would come to life in the spring, but this did not appear likely. It looked dead, and its black trunk was textured in the seams of its bark by the flying snow that made crooked vertical lines almost up to the crown, where it turned black once again, perhaps above driven flakes, and was composed entirely of the frantic shapes of the leafless limbs. Somehow these arboreal corpses kept returning to life.

There was nothing in the room to read except an old Norwegian Bible next to the rustic lamp. Evelyn glanced at it and then made the bed, crossing from one side to the other to pull the gray blanket until it was quite as tight as a drum. She plucked out the corner of the pillow so that everything was perfectly symmetrical and turned to the dresser and washstand where she could see herself, her face somewhat interrupted by a fading BIG BROTHER AND THE HOLDING COMPANY decal. A key lay on the dresser and when she moved it, she saw that its shape had discolored the wood beneath it in its own dark shape. There was a keyhole in the top drawer, but the key did not fit the lock. The drawer opened perfectly well without it and inside were advertising materials for a Packard automobile, a coin from Mexico and a flat carpenter’s pencil advertising a lumber company in Miles City.

A nice room but nevertheless she was locked inside it. Possibly this was a mistake that would painfully embarrass her gracious hosts. Or maybe she was enslaved.

Evelyn pulled a chair up beside the window, where initials were carved into the sill. Ice had formed around the upper pane in a smooth bluish arc suggesting the window of a church. The square of logs and branches had not gone further, and the people were no longer present. Into this emptiness appeared a dog whose face was divided black and white almost precisely down the middle. He had a tail that curved high over his back, and he sped around the yard sniffing the ground intently before departing from Evelyn’s view. She had begun to remember the cows, the ones in flight across the country in cattle trucks and the ones that circled her… when? Last night. Last night, after she’d run off the road, after the truck with the men had come up, the flash of light on opening doors. She had a great conviction that she’d been right to flee, though the flight and the sense of being overtaken by driven clouds of stinging snow, and then it all just not so gradually stopped. She had slept in a circle of cows and now she was here. Her anxiety had subsided and, hearing footsteps ascending the stairs, she became hungry, as if whoever was coming knew she needed food.

Evelyn watched for the door to open. She stood well away from it, in front of the window, which she was imagining as an exit without expecting to need it. When the door did open, she immediately recognized one of the figures from the snowy yard, a rather short and stocky woman, with a nose in the exact center of her face, bristly hair and a small round mouth. Her face was red, probably from the cold, and she had a very direct gaze. “Well, you’re up,” she said.

“Yes. Thank you.”

“And are you rested?” she demanded.

“I am, yes.”

“I’m Esther.”

“How do you do; I’m Evelyn.”

“You’re just lucky to be alive,” the woman said. “If Torvald hadn’t gone out with his bale feeder, you’d of froze. You was near froze as it is. Most of the time Torvald just spikes a round bale, cuts the strings and rolls it down a hill about a mile away. But the weather got so fearful he says he’s worried about the cows and goes out with the feeder, only this time the block heater come unplugged and the hydraulics was kaflooie. Had to use a can of ether — smell it clear to the house — and I’m thinkin’ Torvald was liable to blow hisself up. Took half the night, but lucky for you, you wasn’t clear froze yet, no more froze than Torvald. Well, how’d did you get there?”

“I went into the ditch. I was looking for help.”

“Should’ve stayed with your outfit and waited for help to come along.”

Evelyn decided not to say what it was that put her to flight and thought it was better and shorter to let Esther assume that she was foolish enough to try to cross a snowfield at night in search of rescue. No explanation for fighting a blizzard in a party dress seemed adequate. She was comfortable now and hungry and the old clothes were warm.

“I’d better feed you,” said Esther.

“Oh, that’s not necessary at all,” said Evelyn. “If I could impose on you for a lift into town, I’ll grab something there.”

“Impossible. We’re snowed in.”

“Oh.”

“We been waitin’ for this. We been hopin’.”

“To be snowed in?”

“You bet. Oh, you bet.” Esther went out the door. “Your food is ready when you are.” Evelyn thought about the couple in the yard, and marveled that there were people who actually longed to be snowed in, for whom there was never enough isolation.