Black Angus (11 page)

After the yearlings were finished and had begun butting and riding each other, he ran them out of the corral and closed it again. Then he drove back to the house, where he found Tommy waiting for him, sitting on the back porch steps holding on to his dog Spot with one hand while he petted it with the other. He looked close to tears.

“Susan and Whit goin' away,” he said.

“Just for a while.”

Tommy shook his head. “No, Whit said they not comin' back. He said they leavin' for good.”

“Well, he's wrong.”

“You sure, Bob?”

“Yes, I'm sure.”

Tommy smiled with relief and got up, still holding on to the dog. “Boy, I'm glad,” he said. “I don't want them go away and not come back.”

Blanchard asked him if he'd had breakfast.

“Toast and milk.”

“Well, you just let go of Spot and we'll fry you up some bacon and eggs. A rancher's got to have a real breakfast, Tommy, you know that.”

“That's right. That's fer sure.” Still grinning, Tommy let go of the dog and it scampered away. The two brothers went into the kitchen, where they found Whit sitting sullenly over a bowl of cornflakes while his mother opened a can of frozen orange juice at the sink.

When neither of them looked up, Blanchard tried to pass it off with humor, moving his hand back and forth in front of his son's face.

“You awake?” he asked him. “Can you see this? It belongs to your father.”

The boy did not respond.

“Leave him alone,” Susan said.

Blanchard pretended consternation. “What's the matter with you two? This is Liberation Day, isn't it? I thought you'd be in here dancing on the table.”

Whit started to cry and Susan asked Blanchard if he was satisfied. Tommy had turned around, heading back outside.

“No, you sit down,” Blanchard told him. “I said I was going to make you some breakfast.”

“I haven't left
yet
,” Susan put in. “And until I do, I'll make the meals around here.”

For a moment Blanchard thought she was trying to be funny, but her look suggested otherwise. “Fine,” he said. “You do that. Because I want to have a talk with Whit.”

He took his son by the hand and led him crying out of the kitchen and across the living room to the sunroom, where he sat him down on the sofa. Susan came in right behind them, looking pale and furious.

“Don't worry,” Blanchard told her. “We're just going to have a little talk. You go back to the kitchen, okay?”

“He's upset enough as it is.”

“I know. That's why I want to talk to him.”

“You'll only make matters worse.”

Blanchard again asked her to leave them and finally she complied. He turned back to Whit then, sitting down on the coffee table in front of him. When the boy still would not look at him he took hold of his chin and forced it up, making the boy meet his eyes.

“You okay?” he asked.

Whit managed a nod.

“Look, I don't know what your mother told you or what you think of all this, but I want to make sure you've got it right. I mean, where we stand, all of us.” Blanchard was not sure he was making much sense but he pushed on anyway, feeling that it was important to give the boy something to hang on to, even if that something was less than the truth.

“This won't be for good—us being apart,” he went on. “It's just for now. You understand that, Whit? It's just for a short time.”

He told the boy that his mother was tired of the ranch and wanted to live in Saint Louis for a while but that he himself could not leave right now, that all his money was tied up and he had a lot of cattle to ship before he would know what to do, whether he would be selling out or staying on. But either way, he said, they would all be together by fall, he would see to that. He loved him and his mother too much to live apart from them, and his mother loved him too, loved Blanchard, though she might not act like it lately, which was just the
ranch getting to her, he explained. But the important thing was they would all be together again, soon. He could promise that.

Then Blanchard tried to give the boy something a little firmer to hang on to, something sure to happen.

“Remember, Whit, within a year or so you're going to start developing. You'll get big and strong, probably bigger than me, bigger than your grandfather. And chances are, you'll outgrow your asthma—that's what the doctors keep saying, right? So, hell, even if we do stay here, even if you and your mother come back here instead of me joining you two, you'll fit right in. You'll be able to work right alongside me, in fact probably work me right into the ground. That doesn't sound so bad, does it?”

Whit was still snuffling, but at least he was able to look at Blanchard, to nod now and then. And finally Blanchard got up and pulled the boy with him, put his arms around him for a few moments as they stood there together, and almost cried himself when the child hugged back, hugged desperately. Across the living room, in the kitchen door, Blanchard caught Susan watching them, caught her for just a moment before she turned away, her look stricken, maimed.

“Before you go,” Blanchard said to his son, “I want you to do something for me.”

“Sure, Dad,” the boy said. “What?”

“Tell Tommy that you were wrong, that's all. Tell him we'll all be together again soon. Okay?”

Blanchard was not able to get Susan alone for almost an hour, either by her own design or because Whit and Tommy maintained such a close and uneasy vigil over both of them. But finally he caught her out on the front porch, where she had gone to watch for her father's arrival. It was getting close to noon.

“Can't wait, huh?” he said.

She got out a cigarette and lit it. “I just want to get it over.”

He told her that it wasn't too late to change her mind and she countered that it wasn't too late for him either.

“You can still come with us,” she added.

“I'm not sure you realize how dangerous this is.”

“The hell I don't.”

“It could become a wall between us. And the longer it's there, the harder it'll be to knock it down.”

“I'm not putting up any walls,” she said.

“But you are.”

“I don't want to talk about it. Everything's been said.”

“Whit's not very happy about going.”

“Well, of course not. He wants you to come with us.”

“Maybe he wants to stay.”

“He hates it here, and you know it.”

“Do I?”

“You should.”

“Tommy's going to be lonely.”

At that Susan raked him with a look of contempt. “Maybe you'll have to take him with you nights from now on. Maybe you can find him a whore, too.”

Blanchard realized she was only trying to get back at him, not ridicule Tommy. Nevertheless the comment left him speechless. He lit a cigarette too and for a short time joined her in her vigil, watching the blacktop where it first came into view, at the crest of the farthest hill.

“After we get the hay up—the first break we have—I'll come see you,” he said.

“First things first.”

“Naturally.”

She turned to him, her eyes suddenly, unexpectedly, red. “Just in case you become forgetful while we're gone,” she said, “I still love you, you know. And Whit loves you. And
we'll be waiting every day for you to come and be with us. Take care of us.”

Blanchard took her in his arms and as a sob broke from her he felt it entering him, a common wound. He was slow to speak for fear his voice would break, and when he tried finally, it did break.

“Please don't go,” he got out, “Please, honey.”

She pulled away from him, forcefully, and ran down the few steps to the lawn and started around the house, waving for him not to follow. And he understood. He knew she had to get all the cold armor back in place, shining and impervious, ready for daddy.

The doctor arrived at a quarter past one o'clock, making do with a Ford LTD sedan that was probably the largest car he had been able to rent in Springfield, but still an embarrassing come-down from the Cadillac Fleetwoods he was used to and which he bought new each year, barely breaking them in before trading for the next model. And as always, except when he played golf, he was wearing a custom-tailored suit, this one a three-piece gray pin-stripe that decorously proclaimed both his affluence and his conservative good taste. Blanchard often asked himself if he would have disliked the man so thoroughly if he had not been Susan's father, and the answer invariably was affirmative, for Doctor Ernest Adams Tidewell was easily the most grossly self-enamored man Blanchard had ever met. On the night of the doctor's wife's death from cancer six years earlier, Blanchard had tried to offer him sympathy and condolences, and was rewarded with a view of the abyss.

“Don't bother,” the doctor had advised him. “A surgeon sees a lot of death. And anyway Margaret and I weren't all that close. She would have been happier with a less successful man.”

Blanchard almost said, “How about congratulations, then?”
But he bit his tongue and walked away, wondering how much of the doctor's tainted blood flowed in his wife and son.

Over half the artwork in the doctor's house was devoted to portraits of himself, oil paintings and drawings and photographs, one even by the incomparable Yousuf Karsh. And the doctor thought nothing of sitting under one of them meticulously filing his fingernails while he made ex cathedra pronouncements on politics, art, sociology, anything, for there was nothing he did not know, nothing on which he was not an authority—all one had to do was ask him. His self-contentment was such that Blanchard could not even imagine the man rising from bed in the morning as any normal person would, feeling tired and beaten and foul-spirited, but rather as a television actor in a sleeping pill commercial, stretching contentedly, smiling, glowing as he rises to conquer another day.

And this one too he conquered, but benevolently, even smiling now and then at Blanchard, asking about this and that on the ranch, how things were going—did he see a break in the cost-price squeeze, was there any light at the end of the tunnel, did the new tax shelter laws help or hurt?—all this while Blanchard and Tommy loaded the car with Susan and Whit's luggage. Finally the doctor took Blanchard by the arm and gently walked him off a sufficient distance so they would not be overheard and proceeded to offer him all the financial help he needed—in getting out from under the ranch, in getting on his feet again, in Saint Louis. Blanchard thanked him but said he didn't need any help, that cattle prices were coming back and that he would make out all right, it was just a question of time. The good doctor smiled coldly at that, said he was happy for him and that if things didn't work out as he expected, the latchstring was always out in Clayton. Blanchard said he would keep that in mind.

They returned to the car. Susan kissed Tommy good-bye,
and Blanchard kissed her and Whit. And then they got into the Ford and the doors were pulled shut and the car moved away, going very slowly all the way down the hill, almost as if the doctor wanted to protract the scene, make it last for all of them as long as he could.

Blanchard's appointment at the Rockton bank was for two o'clock, so he had to hurry, making a quick lunch for himself and Tommy and then washing up, changing into a clean shirt and slacks. He got out the folder containing his financial documents and put it in his old attaché case. Then, instructing Tommy to stay near the house, he left for town, driving his old Chevy Malibu instead of the pickup.

Rockton was only nine miles away, most of that distance via the highway, the main route running south from Springfield to Arkansas and beyond. But main route or not it was still just a two-lane blacktop that obligingly went straight up and over every hill it came to, which made it something of a challenge for all the truck drivers who used it and for whom time was definitely money. Coming downhill they would accumulate speeds of seventy and eighty miles an hour, a terrible and beautiful momentum they were loath to surrender to anything except gravity as they climbed the inevitable next hill. So any automobile drivers in their way, especially any foolhardy enough to obey the fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit, often wound up being steamrollered by eighteen-wheel K-Whoppers and Peterbilts.

This day, as he drove the short distance very fast and very carefully, Blanchard again found himself thinking of three men who had not done so in the past couple of years, ranchers like himself, men who had either been so bedeviled by financial worry they had not noticed the behemoths bearing down on them from two directions or else had seen them and simply
did not care. And he understood. He had been a rancher for almost five years himself now, working in a way that big-city union laborers and salaried white-collar workers simply would not have believed. So he could understand how it might feel after a lifetime of such work, to see it all going as year after year one went on producing his only product at a loss and thus had to live on equity, borrowing from the past against the future. He could understand their inattention as the great trucks roared down upon them.

But once again he himself made the trip safely. He drove around the quiet square to the bank, where he parked and went in. And as always in the summer the place was glacial, its thermostat set at a scrotum-shriveling seventy degrees or less, which ironically had to be at least ten degrees cooler than the bank was kept in the dead of winter, posssibly, Blanchard thought, because the management misunderstood the energy crisis, thinking it a crisis of oversupply. But then he really knew better, because “management” was the astute J. R. Gideon, a mean little weasel of a man, a born-again Baptist who liked things done his way in Rock County and was able to see to it that they were.

When he had first come to the area and bought the ranch Blanchard had gotten a thirty-year mortgage through the bank. And ever since, to buy cattle and equipment and time, his indebtedness to Gideon had grown steadily. As Susan enjoyed pointing out, only their furniture and clothing were unencumbered by a Gideon lien. Blanchard was often hearing of other ranchers getting extensions on their loans at the bank, and he saw no reason why the same courtesy could not be accorded him. That at least was the purpose of the meeting today, on his part anyway. For Gideon he imagined it was otherwise—to receive at least partial payment on the largest note, the one secured by Blanchard's cattle and totaling almost twenty-six thousand dollars, with accumulated interest due of
over four thousand dollars. Unfortunately Blanchard did not have the money, only the cattle, of which only the yearlings were marketable. And even if they sold at the current market top of forty cents a pound, he would not have been able to cover the entire note, let alone the added interest. So, once again, he needed time.