Heart of a Shepherd (9 page)

“Muy bien,
almost there.” Ernesto gives the cow a pat on the shoulder.
“Tranquila, mi vaca. No temas.”

“Hey! It isn't so hard now. Here it comes!” I tug the last few inches and two little hooves poke out. Another tug and I see a nose. Suddenly the heifer figures out what she should do, and the calf squirts out so fast I fall over backward and thump! eighty pounds of wet, bloody calf lands on my chest.

“Well, look at you,” Grandma says, glancing over the top of the stall next door.

I'd rather not. I'm sure I've never looked more revolting.

“We'll make a rancher out of this boy yet,” she says.

Grandpa reaches out a hand to help me stand up. “This boy might have his own road to follow.”

“Do you think?” Grandma says, looking me over more carefully.

“Time will show,” Grandpa says.

Grandma reaches out and messes up my hair. “Don't you let that road take you too far from us.”

Even though every muscle in my body aches, I can't stop smiling. Dad will be so proud of me when I tell him. The calf shivers and blinks open her eyes. I rub the goo off her face. The heifer turns around and starts licking her calf clean with earnest concentration. I hold the calf just long enough to know she's breathing steadily and then slide her onto the cleanest patch of straw I can find in the pen. Ernesto tosses me a rag to wipe off the slime. The blood doesn't seem nearly so gross to me, now that I'm really helping with the birth. It just feels like a natural part of the work, as clean and honest as dirt on the ground or sweat on a horse.

I kneel beside my calf and stroke her fur. She's going to be a beautiful rusty red when she dries off, just like her mom. She has huge brown eyes and the
saddest little face. I hold out my hand to her, and she immediately tries to suck on my fingers.

“She's a fine strong one,” Grandma says, and then she turns to Grandpa. “Look at that boy shaking. When is the last time we fed this child?”

I shrug and try to hold my arms still. “I dunno. Lunch?”

“For heaven's sake, that was seven hours ago. There's a pot of stew on the stove. You eat; we'll finish up here and catch up with you.”

I nod and slide open the barn door. The long evening shadow of the cottonwood tree reaches all the way from the barn to the front steps. I stop by the hose at the side of the house to wash the rest of the goop off my hands and arms. I kick off my boots, slide out of my work clothes, and run into the house in my shorts.

All the lights are out, and the house is weirdly quiet. I triple-wash my hands in the sink, click on the evening news, and dish up a big bowl of stew. I take it to the sofa in the living room.

There's a roadside bomb on the news. Again. It seems like there's one every night. The TV flashes pictures of burning trucks and gaping holes in the pavement and people wandering around, dazed and weary. Every time I see it I want to turn it off, but I stay and
search the edges of the picture for Dad. But he's never there, and they never say the names of the dead.

I used to like the news when Dad was home. We would put it on every evening after chores, and Dad and I would find the news stories in the atlas. If the big brothers were home, they would make pretend bets on the sports, and everyone watched the weather.

Grandpa has kept track of the local weather every day for the last forty-eight years. He keeps a log in his journal of the daily temperature at six o'clock in the morning, noon, and nine o'clock at night, along with the barometer reading, wind direction, and rainfall. Sometimes I watch him copy it out in tidy block print in the plain black journal he writes in every evening after supper. He always looks up from his writing for the weather, checking the local report for accuracy and keeping an eye on communities in Montana, Nebraska, and Washington where he has friends.

Sometimes I see him sigh and shake his head at the weathermen, especially the young ones. “They don't account for the shape of the land,” he would grumble. If it looked like anyone was paying attention, he'd launch into his personal philosophy of the weather.

“The land makes weather as much as the sky,” he would say, demonstrating the contours of a landscape
with his hand. “The shape of the hills and the amount of water in the ground.” And then he'd lean back in the La-Z-Boy and say, “Land shapes a man's heart, too, and his aspirations. A man near the mountains learns to look up, and it calls his mind to God.” And then he'd do that Quaker thing where he sits quietly and says nothing, and the rest of us go back to playing chess or poker, and a dozen hands later he would say something like, “God's in the valleys, too, in the coolness of the water and the softness of the ground. That's the tender side of the Almighty.”

I love it when he talks like that, because then, when I go wading in the creek, I think of the Holy Spirit squooshing up between my toes.

Now I turn off the news and get the atlas from the bookshelf in Dad's room. I sit on the edge of his bed and flip it open to the Middle East. Nothing but flat land in the entire nation of Iraq. Well, okay, maybe a few hills around the edge. For real mountains you have to go east to Iran or north to Turkey. What's Dad going to look at on all that level ground? It's not even nice tidy deserts like in Saudi Arabia. Iraq's got swamps, and every picture I ever see on the news just looks dirty and depressing. What's going to lift him up over there?

Cities are even worse. Dad can barely stand Boise. I don't know how he's coping with Baghdad. Whenever we have to go to town for something, Dad maps out the route and timetable like it's a mission. He gets us in and out of there in two hours tops.

I asked him about it once and he said, “In the city, they never look at you when you walk by. To get a friendly smile or a civil greeting, you have to buy something.”

I hear Grandma and Grandpa and Ernesto on the front porch, talking about tomorrow's work. I head back to the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee for them, and grab a handful of cookies for me. I sit down at Grandma's computer and log on to the chat room the brothers have on Sunday nights.

FRANKenstein: Hey, Brother, what's the news? How are the Grands?

I wipe the cookie crumbs off my fingers and type in an answer.

IGuanodon: It's calving this week. The Grands are tired but fine.

PyroPETE: Hola amigos, what's the news? I'm the staff duty officer tonight for the battalion. It's hotter than habaneros down here.

IGuanodon: I pulled a calf just now. It was great! How are your soldiers? Did you blow anything up today?

PyroPETE: Nope, land mines were last week.

JOHNBronco: Good job on the calf, Brother. Your arms are going to be killing you tomorrow.

PyroPETE: Didn't you and Jim have a college rodeo this week?

JOHNBronco: We medaled in team roping. I took third in bronc riding, but Jim tanked. Dead last. Bad horse. He made up for it at the dance afterward. Now he's got a bunch of city chicks on his MySpace. Like that's going to work out.

Jim is a better dancer than all of the rest of us put together. For one thing, he can remember both steps of the two-step. Plus, he's brave enough to ask a girl to dance. I'm never going to do that. Not in a million years.

IGuanodon: Hey guys, we should talk about branding.

JOHNBronco: What's to talk about?

IGuanodon: I think we should go with acid branding this
year. It's easier, cheaper, and not so hard on the calves. I'm just saying because some of the calves will be yours.

FRANKenstein: Still afraid of that hot iron? Get over it. You're not a little kid anymore.

JOHNBronco: You should have a branding party, Brother. You never have any fun. How are you going to get a girlfriend if you don't get a chance to impress the ladies with your roping and tying?

As if!

PyroPETE: Dad likes the hot brand better. I think we should stick to his way. He's counting on us to get it right while he's gone.

IGuanodon: Dad always had 5 sons and a dozen neighbors. I've got nothing!!!

I shouldn't have said that. That was a stupid thing to say.

IGuanodon: There just aren't enough men around here to do a regular branding. Are you guys going to be home in June?

PyroPETE: Sorry, Brother, come summer we've got orders to train up soldiers heading to Iraq. Nine months straight. All leaves canceled.

Oh man, if Pete doesn't come it just won't work, because Jim and John will fight over who's in charge and Frank will spend the whole time assigning the icky jobs to me.

IGuanodon: The army's supposed to give you 30 days leave a year. What happened?

PyroPETE: I wish I could be there, but a training mission is still a mission. Sorry.

FRANKenstein: Buck up, Brother. We don't need Pete to babysit us. John, when are you and Jim home for the summer?

JOHNBronco: Hate to tell you this, but Jim and I have Cadet Advanced Course up at Fort Lewis for a month in June. Same deal. No way to weasel out.

IGuanodon: Wait, who's going to take the cattle up to the mountains?

JOHNBronco: We'll be back in time for cow camp. It'll make for longer days with just me, Jim, and Frank up there, but we'll manage.

FRANKenstein: I'll be there, Brother. I'll be done with school in three weeks.

This is the other half of Frank's extreme bossiness— extreme loyalty, which is why I don't hate his guts. Trouble is, it doesn't solve the problem. There's no way
you can round up, rope, brand, and castrate every calf who needs it with one teenager and one kid, even with Grandpa and the hired man helping out.

PyroPETE: You've got good neighbors out there. When I was your age, we went to a half dozen branding parties a year. Those folks will help us now.

He just doesn't get it. Nothing is the same with Dad gone. Pete hasn't lived at home since he went away to board at the high school.

IGuanodon: Mr. Haskle's been pulling double shifts at the gas station so Arnie won't have to close it down while he's in Iraq. Mr. Egan's got back trouble, and he's already taken on the Jasper ranch next door. You can't ask people for favors they aren't able to give you.

There's a long pause, and I know my brothers are kicking table legs and muttering swears, but I don't care. They aren't in combat. It's their job to worry. They're not the ones who have to look at the Grands after they've worked for ten hours straight and the gate's still not fixed and the wood's not split or stacked
and the tractor engine is still in eight pieces on the back porch. I'd ditch school myself and do it, except Grandma would murder me on the spot.

PyroPETE: That's enough. Brother is the one boots on the ground at home. This branding decision is entirely his call.

IGuanodon: Thanks, Pete. Don't worry about it, guys. We'll do a good job. Grandpa and I are a pretty good team.

I put the computer on standby, drop my dishes in the sink, and head outside. It's almost dark, and the ground still holds some heat from the day. I stop at my tire swing and sit. The air is cool on my bare arms, and frogs are singing love songs down by the water. There are a few clucks and flaps from the hens settling into the chicken shed for the night, and Ike gets in the last word with the rest of the horses just so they all remember who's the boss horse in the morning. Sheep have got nothing to say at night on account of there are things out there that eat them. But our sheepdog, Donner, has started his night patrol around the edge of the flock, sniffing the wind and watching the shadows.

I think about Dad standing upside down to me on the other side of the world, with the sun just coming up. He's got a cup of coffee and a desk stacked a dozen
deep in maps. His driver, Arnie, is there, and the company captains, planning the day's business. I bet my dad turns away from them for a minute to take in the sky and picture me sitting here, taking good care of his land. I love knowing that we are imagining the same thing at the same time, and I send him the hug of knowing his home is here, right here, safe and green no matter how hot the wind blows where he has gone.

J
UNE

The thing I love about having Frank home from school is that I can beat him at chess at least half the time. The thing I don't love is that he drives. He just got his permit and now he needs a hundred hours behind the wheel, so Grandma is letting him drive us down to the VFW hall in the next town over. She chats away with him while he's driving, like this is perfectly safe. Grandpa actually falls asleep. Obviously these two have never played Matchbox cars with Frank; otherwise they'd know how much he loves to crash into things. I keep a close eye on the traffic and the speedometer from the backseat. I'm exhausted by the time we've gone twenty miles. At least when he goes up to cow camp in a few weeks, he'll be off the road.
The social event of the season around here is the Memorial Day dinner down at the local VFW. They changed it to June this year to make it a welcome home party because Mr. and Mrs. Ugarte are back from Iraq. We aren't going to see the rest of them for ages because Dad's unit got extended until the end of November.

I wish I could say the Ugartes are back safe and sound, but Paco and Rosita's dad left a fair piece of himself behind. He's been at the army hospital in Washington, D.C., getting fitted for a leg, and Mrs. Ugarte was treated for burn injuries right alongside him.