Black Angus (21 page)

Blanchard dragged on the last of his cigarette and threw the butt out into the yard. “That wasn't in the stars either,” he said.

“You could say that,” Shea allowed.

“Well you're not alone.”

“Oh, I know. And that makes me feel just great.”

“Maybe that's our mistake.”

“What?”

“Maybe we shouldn't have expected to feel great.”

Shea laughed feebly. “I'll try to remember that,” he said.

Blanchard was waiting for Clarence when he arrived for work the next morning, parking his pickup where he always did, next to the corral under an oak tree, indifferent to the bird droppings that rained on it throughout the year. And though the old man saw Blanchard waiting for him, something that almost never happened, he still took his sweet time getting out of the pickup, first fishing out a bag of Redman and stuffing a chaw inside his lower lip, then putting the bag away and fussing with the shoulder straps on his overalls before closing the truck windows finally. Blanchard meanwhile was pretending interest in the Angus bull and a few of the cows that had followed it into the corral, which connected with the barn where the bull had luxuriated on grain and protein supplement during the winter, in preparation for the breeding season, which was still in progress. But often, if no cow was in heat, the bull evidently would remember the taste of the grain and would come plodding up the hill and into the corral on its way to the barn, only to be blocked by a closed gate—a pilgrimage Blanchard's other two bulls might also have made, except that the pastures they were in did not connect with the corral.

In any case Blanchard was glad the bull was there, for it presented the opener he needed.

“Well, he's got it,” he said.

Clarence spat over the fence. “Hell, I knew that.”

Blanchard asked him how he knew it.

“Well, I knowed you'd call Parnell soon as you could. And
since you didn't say nothin' Saturday, makin' hay, well I jist figured he had it, that's all.”

“Him and six of the cows. I'm gonna have to bloodtest the whole herd.”

“That's the way she goes.”

“And that's not all.”

Clarence did not pick it up. It was not his style to show undue interest in anything.

“The bank turned me down. Gideon won't renew my notes.”

“I knew that, too.”

Blanchard resisted a strong urge to hit the old man. Instead he smiled. “Yeah, I kind of figured you did.”

“So what happens now?”

“Well, there's one other thing—which I imagine you already know too. My wife didn't just go to Saint Louis for a vacation—she went for good.”

Clarence responded by letting fly another missile of tobacco juice. “Bound to happen sometime,” he said. “She didn't belong here. Any fool could see that.”

Blanchard lit a cigarette and dragged deeply, as if to fortify himself. He did not like what he was about to do. “I'm not sure you understand what all this means,” he said. “I'm gonna have to let you go.”

Clarence looked at him now, squinting. “You
what?
”

“I'm gonna have to let you go.”

“Why's that?”

“Money. I don't have any more money to pay you with.”

Clarence thought about it for a few moments, scratching his stubbly chin. “Well, I guess I could take a cut for a while if I had to. And you could pay me the difference later, when you git it.”

“I don't have it, Clarence. Not now. And not in the future either.”

“What about all them yearlings? They're ready to ship, ain't they?”

“We're in quarantine, remember?”

Clarence was becoming agitated now. He was chewing furiously and his hands would not stay still. “Well, what in hell you gonna do alone? You still got all thet hay to put up. And—”

“Shea's still here,” Blanchard said. “I told him if he wanted to stay, he'd have to work.”

Clarence spat again. “Shea—shit! Jist what could that big horse do, huh, 'cept drink beer and talk smartassy?”

“He'll work. He'll have to.”

Clarence suddenly kicked out at the corral, hitting the bottom board. And if anything broke, it was in his foot.

“Damn!” he cried. “Damn it. Jist when everything was goin' good.”

“It hasn't been going good for some time, Clarence. At least not for me.”

“Well, I'll talk it over with the woman tonight,” the old man grumbled. “I guess we can git by fer a spell. But you jist got too much to do here. And anyways, what would I do at home—jist sit around and stew all day.”

Blanchard had been afraid of this, knowing that work was quite simply the old man's life. He and his wife, who held a part-time job at the Rockton chicken plant, lived on practically nothing. They owned a small ten-acre farm on which they raised almost all their own food, making do without indoor plumbing or a phone or air-conditioning, drawing the line only at refrigeration and television, which in the Ozarks as in the big-city ghettoes seemed to be the only real necessity.

“If I can't afford to pay a man,” Blanchard said, “then I can't afford to let him work for me.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just that. I can't pay you, so I can't let you work.”

“You mean
right now?
I'm through
right now?
”

Blanchard nodded. “Until I can afford to pay you again. Then I'll let you know, and try to get you back.”

“
Try to git me back?
”

“That's right. Because this hasn't got anything to do with you, Clarence. You're a good hand, I know that. If I could afford to keep you, I would.”

Clarence spat again. He shook his head and ran his sleeve across his mouth. “This jist don't seem real,” he said. “Folks always used to ask me about you and I always told 'em you didn't know much, in the beginnin' anyways, but I always said you was straight—'cause I thought you was. But this here ain't straight. No sir, this jist ain't straight.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You're sorry, are ya?”

“That's right.” And Blanchard truly was, for he saw tears—of pain or rage—welling in the old man's eyes.

“Well, you jist go to hell, Mister Bigshot,” Clarence got out. “You jist go straight to hell.”

Gimping back to his pickup, he struggled into it and instead of backing up, threw it into the wrong gear and lurched forward into the corral, breaking the two middle boards at the point of impact. Then he backed up and slammed the truck into gear again and roared away, not once looking over at Blanchard. And Blanchard was glad of that, for suddenly he was feeling sick. His gorge had risen, and he could feel his breakfast stirring in his stomach. As he struggled not to vomit, it occurred to him that he finally knew what the old phrase meant, the one about not being able to “stomach” oneself.

And yet he also knew that he had had no real choice in the matter, once he had decided to get rid of the cattle. The old man would have known something was wrong as soon as they began moving all the herd except the blacks into a single pasture,
for it simply was not the way Blanchard operated, putting more than one bull in with a group of females, or risking having the yearling heifers bred before shipment. And after the “theft,” Blanchard could not have the old man knowing the truth and spreading it around—that Blanchard himself had supervised the bunching of his cattle in one pasture on the day before they disappeared—for that could have furnished the sheriff and the insurance people with all the reason they would need to press an investigation that in time could have led to his arrest and conviction. And of course he did not want that, no more than he wanted to lose the respect and friendship of Clarence.

But that, he was learning, was one of the hidden costs of crime. It might pay in other regards, or at least he hoped it would, but at the same time he had to admit it did little for one's self-esteem. One just could not commit a crime, it seemed, without feeling like a criminal.

After finishing the chores, he got Tommy and Shea, and together they loaded the pickup with twenty sacks of feed and a half-dozen portable sheet-metal feedbunks that Blanchard himself had made. Then they got in the truck and drove to the far corner of the small pasture behind the corral, where they unloaded the bunks and filled them with feed. Then they opened the fencegap at the corner of the pasture and drove on into the field that Blanchard called simply “the knob,” one hundred and sixty acres of woods and native grass meadows dominated by a steep limestone hill from which one could see for miles in every direction, in fact all the way to Arkansas toward the south. To most of the old-timers in the area, like Clarence, the hill was known as Newt's Knob, in honor of some long-dead local hermit who had forsaken the fast pace of the horse-and-wagon valleys for the solitude of the hilltop,
subsisting on nuts and berries and the sweet water that still poured from a spring on the west face of the hill. But by whatever name, it was an inhospitable place, suitable only for hermits, goats, and birds, especially the turkey vultures that nested there and used it as an aerie from which they maintained their graceful deathwatch over the countryside. The cattle shunned it, preferring the meadows during the cool of morning and evening, and the woods in between, resting and chewing their cuds in the shade through the long hours of brutal midday heat.

It was still morning, though, when Blanchard reached the meadows, so the cattle were still out in the open, grazing as the pickup moved among them, bumping over the rough ground. Most ranchers in the area, when they had to move cattle, would simply have saddled up their quarter horses and driven the cows where they wanted them to go. But Blanchard did not enjoy riding and considered the constant care and feeding that horses required too stiff a price to pay for those rare days when their services were needed. So, early on, as he learned how difficult it was to drive cattle on foot or in a pickup, he had opted for a Yamaha trail bike and animal psychology, specifically the wonder of the conditioned response. And it was this last that temporarily anyway had given Clarence his first real proof that his boss was mad, a raving big-city lunatic. First, Blanchard made the light, portable feedbunks, and then he proceeded to take them out to the cattle in the fields, where he would fill the bunks with a grain-and-molasses feed that the animals dearly loved. And as they ate, he would blow a whistle, over and over, a shrill and tuneless accompaniment to their unexpected repast. Clarence had not understood at all—not until Blanchard began placing the feedbunks where
he
wanted them, and
then
blew the whistle. The cattle of course had
come running, indeed sometimes almost stampeded, with the result that in time Blanchard was able to move them anywhere he wanted, sometimes by just blowing the whistle, but usually by feeding them as well.

So as he drove among the herd now, blowing the whistle out of the truck window, the animals began to follow behind, some running, others jumping and kicking up their heels, knowing what the sound of the whistle promised, a taste of sweetness rare in their lives. When he was confident he had alerted all of the cows, Blanchard headed back toward the corner fencegap and drove through it, to the place where he had left the filled feedbunks, which almost immediately were ringed by cows, over forty of them, mostly Hereford and black-whiteface, with a few dairy-beef crosses Blanchard had picked up cheap. Finally there was the bull, a five-year-old Polled Hereford, predictably the last to arrive, since he never had to worry if there would be a place for him at the feed-bunk or waterhole—the ladies always made room for the boss.

While the cattle fed, Blanchard led Tommy and Shea back into the knob pasture, where a number of calves had got hung up along the fence. Not seeing the corner gap, they were frantically trying to get through to their mothers beyond the barbed wire. The men circled behind the calves and drove them along the fence line and through the gap, which Shea then closed behind them. And Blanchard was surprised to find him winded by the effort, minimal as it had been.

“You're really in shape,” he said.

Shea mopped at the sweat running down his face. “You actually dig this, don't you? You're wacko, you know that?”

“Susan told me often enough.”

“Well, she was right.”

Sitting on the tailgate of the pickup, they both lit cigarettes. Tommy sidled close to his brother.

“Well, we did okay,” Blanchard said to him. “We're still smarter than the cows anyway.”

Tommy beamed. “We sure did it, all right.”

“Yes sir,” Shea joined in. “A bunch of winners, that's what we are.”

Blanchard gave him a despairing look. “That's the attitude. Whenever we get down, you just keep bucking us up, okay?”

“No sweat,” Shea said. “I'm your man.”

When the cattle finished the grain, Blanchard loaded the feeders back on the pickup and then drove to the gap that led to the north pasture, where he kept the yearlings, and where the old loading corral was located. He had Tommy open the gap and then he drove on through and began to blow the whistle again, and in time most of the cattle had followed after him, though not as eagerly now, since they were not as hungry. He and Shea and Tommy drove the few stragglers on through and closed the gap, and then they repeated the entire process with the cattle located in the south pasture, which ran in between Blanchard's two hay fields and was much more open and level, seeded to fescue and clover.

By noon they were finished and returned to the house, Shea suffering and sweating in silence while Tommy excitedly carried on about the operation.

“Boy, we sure did it, didn't we, Bob? Didn't we, Shea? How many cows you think we moved, huh? A whole bunch, I know. We sure moved a whole bunch, didn't we?”

Nodding wearily, Shea trudged upstairs to shower and change. In the kitchen Blanchard found a note from Ronda, who had slept late, as she usually did at home in her trailer.
Have gone to by grosries befor we all starv—be back around one
.