Thomas Mcguane - The Cadence of Grass

He was clutching his cell phone.

“I went around to see Stuart,” he began, eyes ablaze with indignation. “He’s looking quite spiffy in my old office. He’s got people coming and going with armloads of paper. He’s got a phone ringing off the hook. He’s got my old secretary doting on his every need. He’s got his little girlfriend working down on the shop floor and a movie poster from Down to the Sea in Ships on the fucking wall. He’s got this whole hearty manner like a sea captain. It is to puke over.”

Instead of the intended picture, Evelyn imagined a Stuart unbound.

“I told him about my arrangement with Majub as a liaison man. I realized that you don’t find companies you can sell every five minutes. I told Majub that. I told him I need something to carry me between sales, to keep gas in the Chevette, for Christ sake.”

Evelyn could smell the liquor on his breath.

“But Majub is like, ‘Finders fee, period, and don’t ask again.’ When I tell him I can’t live on that, he tells me not to get my panties in a wad. So my proposal to Stuart is why don’t I go on calling on some of my old customers, kind of earn my way, use my own car and so on, can’t be anything but good for one and all. And Stuart says no. When I ask for clarification, he spells it for me: N-O. You believe this? I go straight over the top of his desk, and next thing I know he’s got goons dragging me out into the alley, where I receive unnecessary roughness at their hands. You have to understand, these are my former employees.”

Evelyn’s heart did pull somewhat toward Paul, but she thought she should be candid with him, despite the tight look of his face, the wildness of his eyes, and tell him how in her own view he was merely bringing trouble upon himself. The first blow astonished her with its ferocity. He had not beaten her before, and she was not expecting it. Soon he was knocking her through the furniture with such fury that she wondered if he meant to kill her. Curled on the floor, her head muffled in her arms, there was a sudden lull during which nothing could be heard at all. Then she heard Paul say, “Okay, Pops, I’m going,” and looked up to see Bill training his Winchester on Paul’s head, his finger through the trigger guard, his face the same expression of unemotional focus he bore when he cut the worms out of an old bull. After glancing toward Evelyn to see if she intended to intervene on his behalf, Paul laughed without humor and went straight out through the door.

Before Evelyn could explain the situation, which she badly wanted to do, Bill was gone too. Evelyn almost expected to hear a shot, but it never came.

She hardly slept. Her bruises were such that if she drifted off, moving or rolling over, pain awakened her again. Anxiety that she could have been so vulnerable ran through her like voltage, her life turning into one jagged question after another. She was ready to run, not from Paul or the place itself or her family, but from her own abasement. Around four, she gave up and went into the kitchen. From there she could see light from the barn, which meant Bill was pulling a calf. Evelyn began to feel some relief from her self-hatred as she imagined the calf’s craving for oxygen. Then after filling a thermos with coffee, she put on her coveralls and went out to face Bill. The snow danced in the halo of the barn door.

He sat on an old car seat that he had arranged for just such vigils. An unhappy young cow was secured in the head catch, and Bill was half asleep. He said nothing as Evelyn handed him a cup of coffee and poured herself one. She sat down next to him and they watched the cow, a pair of tiny black feet projecting from her rear.

“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.