Gid fished out his pocket watch, but it was stopped.
“Shadows are pretty long,” Molly said.
“Time we got on,” he said.
“Aw, you’all stay for supper. I’ve got some fresh black-eyed peas shelled. We’ll dress a fryer.”
“I guess we can’t,” Gid said, sounding a little gloomy. He set his empty buttermilk glass down on the tray. His nose still looked raw and stingy.
Molly walked out in the yard and began to pick on the lilac bushes. “I don’t see why you’all don’t just sit a few more minutes,” she said. “Supper won’t take no time.”
“We’ll have to put it off till some other time,” Gid said. “We’re much obliged.”
“I don’t want your much obliged,” she said, kinda snappy. “I want you to eat with me.”
Then we walked around the house and stood by the cellar a minute, the cellar Old Man Taylor had built. The sun was down and it was clouding up agin over in the northwest.
Gid said let’s go and Molly tried one more time to get us to stay. She walked out to the pickup with us, looking down in the dumps. Gid bragged on her bandage a little, to try and perk her up.
“You’all come by and see me,” she said.
“I’ll be by,” I said. “I might even get back tonight.”
“I wish you would, if it ain’t out of your way. I’ll keep something on the stove.”
“No, don’t go to no trouble,” I said. “No sense in you waiting up special. I might not get by till eleven o’clock, I don’t know.”
“Okay,” she said. “Do as you please.”
We told her good-by and I drove on out through the cattle guard, into the lane. Molly was still standing by her windmill, watching the world, or maybe just watching us.
“She’s getting lonesome in her old age,” he said.
“Tell me where to go,” I said. “I don’t want to get blamed for taking you someplace wrong.” He never had found out I wasn’t no mind reader. Once when we was younger and got drunk I took him to a rodeo in Newcastle and it turned out he had paid his entry fee in one in Waurika, Oklahoma, a hundred and fifty miles the other way.
“Just take me home,” he said. He was blue; he always got blue in the late evenings—had been for years. If I had to face Mabel, I wouldn’t have had no fondness for sundown, either.
“Molly’s been lonesome a good while,” I said. “Her independent talk don’t fool me.”
“We’re the only ones that ever go and see her,” he said. “Wonder why she don’t like womenfolk.”
“Same reason I don’t. They’re silly as hens, all of them except her.”
He turned it over in his mind for a while. It wasn’t quite dark good, but all the lights were on in Thalia. Ever time we topped a hill I seen them flashing. The shower had cooled things off and the country smelled nice and green. Being in wrecks made Gid thoughtful.
“Molly’s had a lot,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “But I wouldn’t call it no whopping success of a life.”
“She’s made mistakes,” he said. “So have I and so have you.”
“At least I ain’t made the same ones over and over agin,” I said.
“Why not? You might as well make them you’re used to as to make new ones all the time. It don’t do no more damage.”
“Anyhow,” he said, “I wish she wasn’t lonesome.”
We drove through Thalia. Two or three cars were parked in front of the picture show, and a couple more outside the domino hall.
“Television’s got the picture show business,” he said.
“No wonder. They quit making good shows. The last one I seen that was any count was Red River”
“Good night,” he said, “that was years ago.”
“So were a lot of good things,” I said. Six or eight kids were scuffling and fighting on the courthouse lawn, under the mulberry trees.
“You don’t keep up,” he said. “Shane was made since then. So was The Searchers.”
“Them was so-so,” I said. “All the good movie stars are getting too old.”
“I wish I had the energy them kids have,” he said.
“You’d waste it,” I said. “Just like they’re doing.”
We passed the drive-in eating place, and it looked like 90 percent of the cars in town were there. “Them things are what makes the money,” I said.
“I know it,” he said. “I hate a drive-in. Them jukeboxes are awful.”
“Susie’ll be right there in a few years,” I said. “Right in the middle of it.”
“I guess so,” he said. “I reckon so.”
I pulled up in his driveway and stopped. Gid opened the door, but he kept sitting there.
“How’ll we get those goddamn goats?” he said.
“I favor a thirty-thirty,” I said. “The ammunition’s cheap.”
“But the goats ain’t. We’ll just get out there about daybreak and get them ourselves.”
“I knew you’d decide on the hardest way.”
“If you stop at the domino hall,” he said, “tell Charlie Starton to get his wrecker and go get that car. You might show him where it is.” What he meant was, be damn sure I didn’t let that car sit out there all night.
“Okay,” I said. “See you when it gets light. Any special horse? You got one that’s good on goats?”
“Bring me any one you can catch,” he said.
He was out, still holding to the car door. I began to back up. The only way to get loose from him was to drive loose. When I swung into the street my headlights shone on him, standing outside his door cleaning his boots.
Charlie Starton was standing on the sidewalk in front of the domino hall, smoking a cigar.
“What’s the matter with Gid?” he said. “Can’t he drive?”
I never cared to stand around having no conversation with Charlie Starton.
“His reflexes don’t work too fast,” I said. “Are you coming or ain’t you?”
When there was money involved Charlie’s reflexes worked awful fast. He followed me right out and winched up the car. I turned in at Molly’s, but it was past ten, and she had gone to bed; I hated that. I hated to see Molly lonesome, and I had been counting on some cold supper besides. But it wasn’t no go. I went home and fed the chickens and ate me a bowl of Post Toasties and went to bed.
three
About two weeks later we met Molly at the feed store one morning. It was August then, and the country was drying up, so Gid wanted to feed his old cows a little. I was in town early and we thought we’d be the first customers, but Molly’s old Ford was sitting by the loading platform.
“She’s getting her chicken feed,” I said.
Gid looked a little nervous. Him and her might have been having arguments, I didn’t know.
Her and the feed-store hands were sitting in the back of the store on the sacks of dogfood, drinking coffee. Samuel Houston was petting his old mangy dog and telling a big windy. He didn’t own the feed store, he just foremanned it: His boy T.I. and a crew of Mexicans did what little work got done.
Molly looked up and said hello to us, but Samuel H. never broke his stride.
“He caught me about two miles this side of the stop sign,” he said. “Come walking up to the car with a big gun on his hip and a badge on his chest. ‘I’d like to see your driver’s license,’ he said, like it was a friendly conversation. ‘I’d like to see your funeral notice, you sonofabitch,’ I said. ‘Now, mister, don’t use that foul language,’ he said. ‘What are you going to tell the judge when you have to show him this ticket?’ ‘I guess, by god, I’ll tell him I run a goddamn stop sign,’ I said. ‘Now give it here, I got to get this feed unloaded this morning.’”
“Why, I’d have stomped that mother into the pavement,” T.I. said. “Where he needed to be stomped.” He might have, too. Once at a medicine show T.I. won what they said was a genuine white Mormon wife, only it turned out to be a genuine White Rock Hen. He stomped a little tha
t night. His real name was Texas Independence.
“Why, hello, Gid,” Samuel Houston said, “have you seen my dog? This here’s the smartest dog I ever raised, and I call him Billie Sol. He can suck the eggs right out from under the hens without them even noticing.”
Gid just looked impatient. “I hate to bother you fellers,” he said. “But if it ain’t too much trouble, I’d like about a dozen sacks of cottonseed cake.”
The three Mexicans got the biggest laugh out of that. They led such easy lives sitting around that percolator, I guess they could get a big laugh out of anything.
“Oh, it’s no trouble,” Samuel H. said. “No trouble atall. That’s what we’re in business for. Sit down and help yourself to some coffee.”
“No thank you,” Gid said. “I believe we’ll get the cake and get on. The longer we wait the hotter it will get.”
“Then, by god, why go? A man can get too hot out working, if he ain’t careful. It’ll be cool agin this afternoon.”
“Oh, sit down a minute,” Molly said. “I got a favor to ask you.”
But Gid was having a stubborn fit; he kept standing up fidgeting. Finally I got tired of standing and sat down.
“We’d sure like to get on,” Gid said. “Maybe me and Johnny could just load the feed ourselves, if you’d show us where it is.”
“Why sure, Gid,” Samuel Houston said. “It’s right over there in the corner. Just feel right at home. Show him where that cottonseed cake is, T.I.”
T.I. yawned like he had just got up. “Sure,” he said. “Why don’t you let these boys help you pitch it in the truck? They don’t mind.”
I knew it would eventually come down to me helping load it. Gid would have soon handled a rattlesnake as a sack of cattle feed. He never lifted one except in emergencies. But as soon as I stood up and moved, the Mexicans grabbed the sacks and had the feed loaded in a minute and a half. And as soon as Gid saw that, he was perfectly happy to stay awhile; he felt like things were getting done.
Only he said the exact wrong thing, and Molly thought he said it to her.
“That’s the stuff,” he said. “We can get going in a minute now and get some work done. I wasn’t raised lazy, like most people.”
I don’t know what possessed him to say it; maybe it was being nervous. And I don’t know what possessed Molly to take it wrong; he never meant to aim it at her. But she sat her cup down and gave him the strangest hurt look.
The elevator boss drove up then, and Samuel and T.I. and the Mexicans jumped to get to work. Just us three stayed there, and it was real quiet. I tried my hardest to think of some conversation to kinda pass it all over, and I know Gid did too, but we couldn’t come up with much. It was plain silly, but it was awkward as hell; five minutes of it would have made me sick.
But it never lasted over two. Molly broke down crying; I knew she would. “That wasn’t a very nice thing to say to me, Gid,” she said. She bent over with her head between her knees and we could only see her hair, and her head shaking. Then all of a sudden she straightened up and looked right at me. “Well, aren’t you going to take up for me?” she said, and went to crying agin.
I didn’t know what to say. None of it made sense. I guess she took it as something against her dad—she always tried to fool herself about him. Gid never could appreciate how hard some people worked to fool themselves.
She cried hard when she cried, but it didn’t last too long. Gid was just flabbergasted. In a minute her back got still, and she looked up. The tears were dripping everywhere, but she was kinda calm agin, and nobody would have believed she had been so upset. I went over and filled her coffee cup and handed it to her. “Thank you,” she said. She rested her elbows on her knees and bent over, sipping coffee, with the tears running off the corner of her mouth and dripping right in the cup. Gid couldn’t stand it—he got up and fished out his handkerchief.
“Here, don’t ruin that good coffee,” he said.
She took it and kinda grinned at him. “What am I going to do with myself?” she said.
“Why, I’m terribly sorry, Molly,” he said. “I never meant a thing by that remark.”
“Oh, I know you didn’t,” she said. “It’s silly. I don’t know why some things upset me so. You ain’t to blame.”
But he was, really. At least he sure thought he was. We sat for about five minutes, all of us a little bit worried, drinking our coffee.
“I thought of something while I was crying,” Molly said. “I hadn’t thought of it in years. It was when all of us kids were at home, when we still used blackstrap molasses for all our sweetening. Daddy went in to Thalia and bought the winter groceries one day.” She stopped and looked out the feedstore door, at the hot, dusty street and the houses of Thalia on the other side of it, with television aerials sticking up on their roofs like I don’t know what. She looked like she was looking through a telescope at something as far away as the moon. And I guess they was about that far away, them days. It takes a long memory to sit on a bunch of dogfeed sacks and call up Old Man Cletus Taylor riding off to Thalia in a wagon. I bet he had a whiskey jug on the seat beside him, too.
“When he come back, just before sundown,” she said, “he had a big barrel of sorghum molasses sitting in the front of the wagon. Him and Shep went to unloading the flour and stuff, and the rest of us kids stood there looking at that syrup barrel. I couldn’t hardly imagine that much syrup. It was the sweets for the whole winter. Pretty soon Dad and Shep came back and walked the barrel to the back of the wagon, so they could lift it down.” Her talking quavered a little. “I never did know how it happened,” she said, “but anyway, when they were lifting it out of the wagon, one of them lost his grip and it fell and busted open on the ground. The molasses stood by itself, just a second, and then it all spread out and began to run down the hill toward the chickenhouse. We all just stood there; we couldn’t move for a minute. The first was when Richard stuck his toe in it. It ran real slow, and ants and doodlebugs got caught in it. There wasn’t no way to scoop it up. Then we all begin to cry. Mary Margaret took it the worst. She held her breath and ran all the way around the house before anybody could catch her to pound her on the back; then she went over and began to bang her head on the cellar door. She was the worst to hold her breath and bang her head I ever saw. Even Shep was crying. Richard was the only one that showed good sense. He squatted down and stuck his finger in it and kept licking it up that way till after dark. I couldn’t believe it. Nothing had hurt me that bad before. After a while Richard put a horned toad in it, and it got stuck. I went in the house and got in one of the woodboxes and wouldn’t come out till after supper. Shep and Daddy argued over whose fault it was till Shep just finally left home, and Daddy stayed down in the cellar drinking whiskey nearly that whole winter.”
“My god,” Gid said. “That was a tragedy.”
“Nothing will ever make me forget watching that sorghum run downhill,” she said.
“What was that favor you wanted to ask?” Gid said.
“Oh, Old Roanie got out in the big pasture the other day,” she said. “I can’t get her back.” Roanie was her milk cow. She was a wild old bitch.
“We’ll come right on and get her,” he said, standing up. Molly put up her coffee cup and got in her car, and we got in the pickup. “You drive,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “This pickup is the only means of transportation I have. I ain’t anxious to let you under the wheel.”
“I wish we didn’t have to get that cow in,” he said. “We just barely will have time to do the feeding.”
“I’m glad to do it today,” I said. “Another day or two and you’ll be gone to have your operation, and I’d have to do it by myself.”
“Molly needs to be married,” he said. “She ain’t able to run that place by herself. I never meant to get her so upset this morning.”
“She’s too touchy sometimes,” I said.
“I had heard that molasses story before,” he said. “That w
as awful. I can imagine just how them kids felt.”
When we got to Molly’s house she was just going in the back door. Had her mind on dinner. I went on down to the barn. Gid was out before I got stopped.
“Let’s pen the old hussy and eat dinner and go,” he said. “Which one you want, Chester or Matt?” Molly named her horses after Gunsmoke.
“Chester, I guess,” I said.
“Goddamn,” he said, trying to saddle up. “This old bastard’s so big around it’s like trying to saddle a whiskey keg.”
He didn’t get no sympathy from me. I had reared back to throw my saddle on and heaved and Chester had got one of his big front feet on the girt. It like to broke my back. I dropped the saddle, too.
“Well, I’ve shot my wad,” I said, “I never will get up strength for another throw.”
Gid got a big laugh out of it.
And at that the horses was easier than the cow. She was standing right in plain sight, down by the salt lick. The sight cheered Gid up.
“Well, looky there,” he said. “This won’t take no time. I was afraid the old bitch would be off in the mesquite somewhere.”
“She may be yet,” I said. “I can remember cattle closer to the gate than she is that ended up getting away. How about Mick and Big Shitty?” They were two old outlaw steers Gid had owned for about ten years. We chased them up and down Onion Creek all one summer and finally tricked them into the lot with some hay. We kept Mick, too. But Gid got careless and Big Shitty ran over him and a water trough and tore up three fences and got plumb away.
“Aw, she’s just an old milk cow,” he said. “You sickle around behind her thataway.”
I did. Old Chester loped about as graceful as a roadgrader. At first old Roanie came along fine; actually, I just don’t think she had noticed us. I think she just thought it was Chester and Matt by themselves. Molly just sooked her afoot; she might not have never seen men on horses before.
But when she figured things out, the race was on. She had her head down and her bag swinging from side to side, and she was covering country. I was closest and I whipped up: I knew if I let her get in the brush, it would be my fault from the conception to the resurrection. Chester had no idea what it was all about, but he done his best. We barely got her turned before she hit the brush; then she struck out south, just as fast, and Gid and Matt struck out to head her agin. It was the funniest sight I ever seen. Old Matt didn’t no more care about that cow than if she was the moon, and when it come time to stop and turn her he just went right on into the brush. The brush went to popping and the cuss words come a-flying back. But I took in after Roanie; I didn’t have no time to worry about Gid. Actually, she turned out to have about twice as much speed as Chester, and I was just hoping she’d stop for the south fence when I seen Gid and Matt come flying out of the brush ahead of me, hot on her trail. Them thorny thickets hadn’t helped Gid’s disposition, I knew that; he didn’t have his hat any more, or all his shirt. But he had his rope down. Nobody in their right mind would try to rope off a plowhorse, but Gid would rope an elephant off a Shetland if he took a notion. He was whopping old Matt with the rope about every two steps, and Matt was going to the races. Gid came roaring over a little knoll, swinging his rope and yelling, and pretty soon he let fly and caught him a cow. It was where his troubles began. Any horse with a grain of brains would have stopped when Gid threw the rope: Matt wasn’t in that category. Gid reared back on the reins—he seen his fix immediately—but Matt went right on. I guess he seen the old cow when he run by her, but he sure never dreamed him and her were connected. She was just landscape to him. Roanie got a big surprise. One minute she was headed for the high and lonesome, and the next minute Matt had got to the end of the rope and she was tearing up the land like a plow. Gid, he was just a spectator, but his sympathies were all with the cow. Finally Matt figured out he was dragging an anchor. When I rode up all three of them were panting.