“HEY you dogs!”
A harsh voice broke the air. At once both dogs scrambled to their feet and sidled toward the porch, tails nervously awag. A figure emerged from the shadows, propping itself with both hands on a cane. The big golden’s rear end hung back as his front cautiously curved up to her. His smaller black companion cowered behind him.
“Get back t’your hut damn you!”
Their tails stopped midair. They hesitated. The person flinched her leg. They shot off instantly for their hut.
Descending the porch steps, whacking them one by one with her tightly gripped cane, head fiercely upright despite her stooped shoulders and round back, heavy black dress over work pants, face hidden under a torn felt hat, chopped white hair blazing out in back, Wade had never seen anyone quite like Frances Meeks.
Not sure what to expect, everyone waited in place: Joe, Wade reverently behind him, the dogs at their hut, the golden with one forepaw crossed elegantly over the other, the black resting his jaw on the golden’s neck. Their tails flicked, their eyes darted, but both stayed fast as Frances haltingly caned her way, not to greet them, but to an old silver jeep parked on the grass.
“You wanted to see me?” Joe finally said.
“Now I seen you.”
Frances hoisting herself into the jeep, which took a few tries. She knocked Joe’s hand away when he tried to help. She started the engine, backed into the road, then paused a minute, eyes front.
“You’ve looked better.”
She ground the gears and rattled off in her jeep out to the back pasture.
Wade looked at Joe, puzzled. “Are we going out with her?”
“No, we aren’t.”
Joe watched the jeep leave, then walked back through the yard to the orchard behind the house.
Wade followed, eyes everywhere at once. His feet crunched fallen apples, his hands brushed the white blossoms clinging to the few unbroken branches. The dogs ran bounding through the waist-high grasses; the golden pounced on him, knocking him down, whereupon the black joined in, grappling and nipping. When Wade got to his knees, the golden flipped on his back. Wade scratched his belly, a tangle of long hair and burrs.
“It’s so beautiful here, right, Joe?”
Joe raised his palm against the sun. What he saw wasn’t beautiful, it was a barren infestation of brome and leafy spurge and blossoming dandelions. . .the perfect plant for Frances, one surly root going down ten times its size, sucking up the last drop of moisture, leeching the land for everything it was worth.
At one point, Wade’s movement through the grasses released a flight of insects with dusty green wings.
“What’re all those? There’s hundreds of them.”
“Grasshoppers.”
“Are they good for anything?”
“Yeah, they’re good for nothing.” Joe wiped his forehead. “Whatever’s useless, there’s always plenty of it up here.”
Walking only a few steps farther, Wade spooked up a flash of brown that vanished into a nearby gulch of juniper and chokecherry.
“Ring-neck pheasant, Wade.”
“Man!”
Wade ran after it, the dogs racing ahead, inspired by Wade more than any interest in prey.
Joe went into the stackyard, what there was of it, mostly just strands of barbed wire hanging between fallen down posts, which left the measly hay unprotected and ravaged by deer. He toed a loose bale, and the rotted twine snapped, spilling its sheaf of moldy feed. A bull snake moved sluggishly under another bale, rattling annoyance.
Wade came back, brandishing a thorny branch thick with blackish red berries. “What’ll happen if I eat these?”
“Nothin. They’re just pretty bitter is all.”
“Okay, here goes.” As soon as Wade bit, the pulpy berries sucked the tissues of his mouth dry, coating his teeth. He spit out.
“Ugh, worse than medicine.”
“That’s why they’re called chokecherries.”
Wade looked at the juice stains on his palms. “You think Indians used them for war paint?”
“What Indians? Meeks are about the only people dumb enough to live up here. It’s one god-awful waste, you ask me.”
The rest of the morning they sat in Frances’s house, waiting. The air was heavy with mildew from the pasteboard walls. Every so often, Joe got up from the bentwood rocker and paced. Examined the old shotgun stacked on a rack of antlers. Fingered dust off the mangled antenna of a dead Motorola. Held up a pearl-glazed coffee cup, remembering the hard black coffee he’d drunk from cups just like it, morning after morning, sitting at this same table, even before his legs were long enough to reach the floor.
A hall door opened. Joe looked up, expecting. . .he didn’t know who, but certainly not the ghostly woman inching her heavy shoes step by step toward the swivel chair next to the table. As she walked, her head bobbed up and down from the loose skin of her sternum, as though her neck had been removed. Her face was sallow, her dress worn. Flesh colored stockings bagged over her ankles. Eventually reaching her destination, she wheezed, then in weary stages lowered herself into the dirty cushions cladding her chair. She seemed to age with every breath.
Once seated, she noticed Wade, and her face wrinkled with a dark smile that opened around her three or four rotting teeth. Wade smiled back, trying not to gape; he had never seen anything so old yet still living.
“This is Emma, Wade. The oldest Meeks sister.”
Emma croaked, Wade not sure whether it was words or guttural cleansing. She smiled again then fell dead asleep.
Joe, finding a pair of binoculars, spotting out the window, saw Frances standing over a large red-brown fallen lump.
“The hell with this waiting for her.”
“Wait up, I’ll go too,” Wade called, following Joe out the front.
“Just stay put for now, Wade. I mean it.”
Joe headed through the corrals out the gate into pastureland, already hard and dry again from a morning of sun baking out all moisture from yesterday’s snow. Here and there, a few scrawny head of cattle grazing leftover winter stubble, eyeing him hopefully, sickly calves, heifers chewing dirt, sheep gouging thistles along the far off fence corners. All of them marked with the familiar three-iron brand: Bar Slash Heart. Frances’s brand.
Good riddance to this soon enough, Joe thinking as he headed toward Frances. Nice to imagine all this land—hardened by bitter winters, remorseless summers, and leathery humans—lying under the enormous reservoir of a Bitterroot dam. He agreed now, one hundred percent: best thing for everyone was for Evan Gallantine to get as much as he could for it.
When he reached Frances, he saw the red-brown lump was a bull, dead so recently its belly had not yet bloated. A lariat was lashed around its back legs, and on the other end was Frances, sitting in the shade against the back tire of her jeep. Sweat jewels gleamed in the folds of her forehead. She either didn’t hear him arrive or chose not to.
“Looks like it just died last night.”
“You come here to tell me that?”
“What d’you think it was?”
“Probly just he got fed up eatin nothin but thistles.”
She worked her way to her feet and tied off the rope to the tailgate. Watching, Joe remembered her hand, where there should have been three fingers there were only swollen knuckles grown together. The same disfigured claw he’d seen day after day hooking haybales, milking cows, tossing lambs like sacks of flour.
“You can’t let your hired man take care of this?”
“Him? He quit.”
“How come?”
“Ever know a man who didn’t?” she said blackly.
“Well did you ever try paying him? That sometimes helps.”
“You think a man’ll work for what I could pay? Even the drunks and old time sheepherders don’t bother anymore.”
Joe leaned against the wheel well, the metal hot on his back.
“Maybe it’s time to call it quits, then.”
Sh
e turned. “That’s what you come to tell me?”
“I came to make clear; I’m not wasting my life stepping in where dad left off.”
“You think I’d let you? You’d be even less help than him.”
“Still, you can’t run all this livestock yourself.”
She pulled a thistle from her dress. “That’s why I’m sellin em.”
“Selling em?”
“Truck’s on its way even now. Here I figured at least I’d get a decent price on this bull. Now I don’t even get that.”
Her steely eyes found his. He looked down. Frances waved her bad hand at the fields.
“Look at it. Even burdock hardly bothers comin up anymore. Buyin feed costs more than I get for the few calves I do manage to get. Half the herd is too old to calve anyway. It ain’t worth draggin withered alfalfa mornin and night to keep a few steers and heifers alive. How’m I goin to keep at it, when I can’t even feel my feet half the time, I’m so damn old? And there sure ain’t no one else gonna do it for me.”
“Well whose fault is that?”
“Oh? Think you could’a done better, that’s why you’re here? Back to run things right? Well maybe so, maybe you’d do fine, for the coupla months you’d stick around.”
“I’d stick around if there was the least reason to.”
“Oh? Whose side’re you on today, or did you forget?”
Joe toed the ground, exposing white tendrils of new growth, life struggling on. Frances got in the jeep; it stalled before budging the carcass even a foot. She tried twice again with the same result.
“Why don’t you just leave it?”
“Why, as a callin card for coyotes and timber wolves? It’s about the only thing hasn’t overrun the place as it is.”
“It’ll be under a hundred feet of water before long anyway.”
“Ha.” She tried hauling the bull again, racing the engine so it wouldn’t stall, but now the tires only spun uselessly and a cloud of smoke and dust spewed over Joe.
“Untie him then,” she said, sliding to the passenger side, “and drive me back; I’m sick’ve this whole damn. . .everything.”
Joe sighed, untied the bull, and got in, placing his hands on a steering wheel grooved to years of her holding it. This wasn’t the conversation he wanted to be having. Had he come all this way for nothing, he wondered, staring at the cows who began to circle the jeep, dumb-faced and expectant, as if he’d brought food.
“What’s the hold up, let’s go. You forget how to drive anything but bulldozers?”
“Maybe so,” Joe said, and took off, wheeling through the litter of white boulders and hungry animals. Back in the corral, as he stopped to open the gate, Frances saw Wade standing at one of the pens.
“Now who in hell is that?”
Before Joe could answer, she was out caning her way to Wade like a three-legged bull herself. Joe trailed after. In the pen was a sickly cow, lying on her side, belly distended, eyes glazed and ringed with thick puss, panting and weakly bellering. Wade had his hand through the rails soothing her white forehead.
“What’s wrong with it?”
Frances looked her over long and hard. “She’s way overdue with her calf. Though doubt she’ll make it, way it looks.”
Joe shook his head. Was there anything on this place not dead or dying?
“He’ll make it, though, won’t he?” Wade asked.
“Who he?”
“Her baby calf?”
Frances turned to Joe. “Clear this ain’t your boy. Way too optimistic.”
She asked Wade his name and offered him her hand. Wade took it, staring at the white and blue flesh where three fingers were missing. He was about to ask her what happened when the cow bellered and kicked.
“Shouldn’t we do something?”
“Bout only thing is to shoot. . .put her down.”
“You mean, like, with a. . .”
“There’s the trucker comin,” Joe said, seeing a long livestock tractor trailer navigating the lane toward the house, followed by a pickup pulling a horse-trailer. The semi moved painfully, inching its way carefully on the ungraded road.
“Who’s that?” Wade meant the butternut horse with burnt orange mane standing in the shade where the river ran through the corral.
“That’s my sorrel filly there,” Frances said.
“He looks like a real good horse.”
“Sure she is. Should get a good price for her at least.”
Wade, taken aback, said, “You mean, sell her? Why? Don’t you, you know, need her for something?”
“No good to me; I got no one to finish breakin her. Though if I remember correct, your dad there could.”
“They’re here.”
Joe pointed across the river, the semi backing up to the bridge, too unsound for it to cross, while the pickup driver let out a saddle from the trailer. Frances waved him over, directing him to the beer she had waiting, gesturing toward the pastures, and what he was to round up.
While her disfigured hand flailed instructions, the sorrel filly sauntered near the saddle horse, a large bay stallion, and the two began to nicker. When she began nipping at his flank, the stallion reared. The cowboy tried to slap her away, but the filly was not about to be put off. As he led his horse out of the corral, she tried to follow. When he closed the gate on her, she banged her sides against it until the cowboy rode out of sight.
Frances scanned the hillsides, its glistening streaks of shade and snow, as though it was her gaze more than the sun doing the melting. Joe opened a beer, more for something to hold than drink.
“Frances? So what happened with my dad, anyway?”
“Leonard?” Frances scoffed. “I’ll tell you what. As soon as they announced that dam, that lackey Gallantine shows up, sweet-talks Leonard, gets him so worked up he couldn’t see straight. Yellin about everything, carryin on, drinkin. He’d be in the Gulf of Mexico now but the car he drove off the bridge got snagged between river boulders.”
“All Evan’s fault, I guess.”
“Well it wasn’t me killed him.”
“You might as well have, holding out like you are. All he ever wanted was to finally get something out of this damn place.”
“It ain’t mine to give away, Joe. It’s Emma’s.”
“You’re custodian. You have the right.”
“Meanin I have to do what’s right.” She lowered her beer can. “Don’t s’pose you went to pay him your respects yourself, though. At least I did that much.”
“Like you ever had any. How come you haven’t roped in your other son by now? Or don’t he count?”
“Harlo? That drifter, he’s better off in prison. Knowin him he probly prefers it.”
Something caught her eye and she looked off. “Damn surveyors.”
Joe followed her look. Far off, in the rocky mass of Sweetgrass Moraine, sunlight sparkled on a red pickup.
Anne’s, Joe realized.
“Why’re they surveyin that far up? No Bitterroot Gap dam would back up a reservoir that far.”
“Dam?” Frances spit. “There’s gonna be no dam there.”
“There sure enough is; why else is everyone but you sellin out?”
“Sellin out?”
“Evan said once I’d made clear I have no interest, you’d finally deed over like Leonard wanted. Like Burchard and Gustafsen already did. So, in case I wasn’t clear, I ain’t int’rested.”
“That don’t matter; the last thing I’d ever do is give over this place to any Gallantine.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“I see you sucked up Evan’s crazy ideas just like your dad. There ain’t goin to be no dam. It’ll never happen. Those HRC folks don’t got the money now any more’n they ever did. There’s no dam and no reason to listen to any kin of Lillian’s.” She caught her breath. “I half wish there were, just to be done with it. But I run the place, long as Emma’s still with us, that’s how mother wanted it and that’s how it goes.”
&nb
sp; Cattle had begun to throng into the corrals, driven by the cowboy, who rode up out of the dust and noise, hollering. Wade leapt off the fence and soon, copying Joe, he was raising his arms, shouting, darting like the well trained dogs, flailing to keep the calves at bay while the cowboy drove the mothers back outside the corral. Once the calves were separated, they did the lambs, then when they were done, they and the dogs forced the jittery bawling yearlings across what they sensed was a treacherous passage. Beyond which waited the menacing hulk of the semi.
When the last of them were loaded, Wade sauntered back, joining Joe and Frances in the corral. Thirsty, helping himself to a beer, to which he clearly felt entitled, though having no idea how it might taste, he sipped it gingerly.
“Is that cow in the barn going too?”
Frances shook her head. “Don’t think she’s quite up for it.”
“Good.”
“Good, huh. What d’you mean, good?”
“I want to see a calf born.”
“So you think it’s gonna make it after all?”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“No reason, I guess.”
Wade nodded. As he walked off to the river, Frances drank on her beer, then pushed back her hat.
“Somethin about him at that. Kinda like havin him here.” She looked at Joe, then back to Wade. “How he sees things; that look in his eye. Makes you wonder.”
“Wonder what?” Joe asked.
“If he were a little older.”
Jesus, Joe thought, but kept silent.
At the river bank, Wade ripped a handful of grass and patiently held it out, to get the sorrel filly to come to him. She approached, cautiously stretched out her neck, sniffed. Then suddenly her lips parted, her teeth shot out, and the clump was gone from his hands. Wade jerked back, which startled the filly. She bolted quickly away. Wade, disappointed, went for more grass.
“Frances?” Joe squatted. “Anybody ever say much after I left?”
“What was to say? You did what you did.”
“Didn’t it matter to anybody? No one ever wondered?”
“What difference did it make? You’re the one ran off, not us.”
“Sure I did,” Joe said, his voice rising. “Because you sons a bitches never cared about anything but this pile of rock dirt.”
Frances tamped her cane free of the mud and manure balled up the end.