The ranch house was unusually, almost uncomfortably, clean and spic and was well provisioned, along certain lines. There were three cakes on the kitchen table, an angel food, a chocolate, and a coconut, each minus one slice. There was also a huge neatly covered plate of cold fried chicken and a bowl of cole slaw—all gifts of the funeral party.
Out of habit, Patsy went into the bedroom where she and Jim had stayed, took off her sober funeral dress, put on blue jeans and sneakers and a sweater, and combed her hair. As she was looking out the window a red pickup drove past and stopped at the barn. A tall man in a Levi jacket got out and went quickly into the barn. For a second she was frightened, but then she remembered that someone had described the neighbor she was supposed to rely on as a tall fellow. That was probably the man. She looked up his name in her address book and saw that it was Melvin Huston. She decided to be bold and go and meet him. She got her leather jacket, the most Western thing she owned, and left the house.
When she got to the barn and peeped in, Melvin was standing in the hallway sacking oats, scooping them out of a bin with a big scoop shovel and easing them skillfully into a sack set between his legs. Patsy felt shy about making her presence known. Melvin was as tall as Roger, at least twice as heavy, and was very absorbed in sacking oats.
“Hi,” she said. “You must be Mr. Huston.”
Melvin deftly sacked the scoopful of oats he had in hand, looked up at her in blank surprise for a second, then gave her the sort of grin that is said to be as big as all outdoors. It certainly seemed to stretch across the hallway of the old barn.
“Why, howdy, howdy,” he said, coming over and shaking her hand. “Mrs. Carpenter, I bet.”
He said it so vigorously and quickly that Patsy assumed a lively stream of conversation would follow. None did. Just Melvin’s grin. Having said her name he seemed mildly bewildered as to what to say to her next, but he kept smiling to assure her of his good will.
“Are those oats?” Patsy asked, more or less rhetorically.
“Uh, yeah, them’s oats,” Melvin assured her. “Sacking up a few for them old horses. Actually Roger told me a year ago if it ever come to this to pasture the horses and take what horse feed there was. Never figured you’d need it, I guess.”
“No, I certainly don’t need it,” Patsy said, peeping into the various stalls of the barn. “You’re welcome to it all.” She opened a door latched with a piece of leather and saw a room full of miscellaneous junk. There were numerous buckets, a couple of very old saddles, a motor, a shotgun leaning against the wall, and many smelly gallon bottles that had once held some kind of crude medicine. Melvin surveyed the room with a look of slight embarrassment, as if its disordered condition was somehow his fault.
“Little bit of everything in there,” he said in an instructional tone. “That’s a shotgun—old single shot.”
“I see,” Patsy said, deciding not to ask him to explain much to her.
“Say, I’m plumb sick I didn’t make the funeral,” Melvin said, and a really sorrowful look crossed his face. “Long as me and Mr. Wagonner been neighbors, wouldn’t seem like there was no excuse, but I been calving my young heifers this month and I was right in the middle of trying to get a calf out and didn’t have no help and didn’t hardly see how I could turn it loose. In fact I’d a given what the calf is worth to have had Mr. Wagonner there to help me. He was as good as a vet at that kind of thing.”
“Don’t feel bad about it,” she said, seeing that, despite the calf, he did feel bad about it. “It was a very quick funeral.”
“I guess it was,” Melvin said. He had resumed his sacking and was working efficiently, glancing at her now and then. “I come on in as soon as I got cleaned up, hoping to catch up with it at the graveyard at least, but everybody had done left and there wasn’t much I could do but kick a few clods around. Don’t nothing ever happen convenient for me.”
There was the sound of the shovel hitting oats and then of oats sifting into the filling sack.
“Course it wasn’t convenient for Mr. Wagonner, either,” he added, still working. “Me and him was gonna dehorn his yearlings this week.”
The way he kept calling Roger Mr. Wagonner stabbed at her suddenly. Though he must have known Roger for years it was clear that he had never called him anything but Mr. Wagonner; and the thought of Melvin, in whatever kind of suit he could own, the blood of birth barely off his hands, alone at the filled-in-grave, hit her hard. It had the sort of poignance the funeral had utterly lacked. She went outside while Melvin finished sacking the oats, and dipped her fingers in the icy water of the watering trough. Her eyes and lashes were wet. The animals were gone. No horses, no milk cow, no chickens. When Melvin came out and with a grunt heaved the heavy sack into his pickup she had recovered and asked him about them.
“Oh, my wife got the chickens yesterday,” he said. “I guess we’ll deep freeze ’em. We don’t keep no hens. The milk cow’s got a fresh calf, so I got her over where I can milk her handier. Bet you think I’m running off with all your livestock. Jump in and I’ll show you what you got left.”
She got in the red pickup and as the late winter sun fell, Melvin, talking a blue streak at last, gave her a bouncy tour of her new estate. He took her to four pastures, pointing out what he took to be the salient features of each in his hearty tones. Here and there were cattle grazing amid the leafless trees. In each of the pastures, when he came to what seemed to him a strategic spot, Melvin stopped and stood on the running board of the pickup, the door open, calling the cattle. Occasionally he honked the pickup horn, but only as a kind of accompaniment to his own voice. She had never heard cattle called, and though it was a little deafening she liked to listen. In the still, clear late-evening air Melvin’s strong voice carried far across the pastures. At times she heard its echo, though what it was echoing off of she couldn’t imagine. The cattle heard and responded. She could see cows half a mile away lift their heads, listen a minute, and then immediately move toward the pickup, often bellowing in answer.
Melvin seemed to count the incoming rush of cattle with some amazing computer in his head, for forty or fifty animals would sweep in and mill around the pickup, bumping it with their hips, and in five seconds Melvin would lean in with a slightly worried look on his big face and say, “Forty-six here, that’s missing nine, must be a little pocket over in the southwest corner that can’t hear me, sure would like to see ’em,” and then would step down, alternately whoop and cluck at the cows as if they were giant hens, and would dole them out a little trail of cowfeed from a sack he kept handy in the back. By the time the cows had lined up to eat, shoving at one another, and their calves trying to shove in to be near them, Melvin would be back in the cab and they would be off again to another pasture. “Got to get away quick,” he said. “I never gave them but a little dribble. Didn’t want ’em to think I’d call ’em in for nothin’.” In his walk down the line of cows he would have acquired all manner of intimate information which he conveyed to Patsy as he drove, assuming, apparently, that she would remember the cows he was talking about. One had had a calf she hadn’t brought to the feed ground; one was looking like she was due to calve that night or in a day or two; one was getting hoof rot, though he didn’t know how, no more rain than there’d been; and a number had disposition or personality problems that displeased and worried him.
“Goodness, you seem to know them as well as Roger did,” she said, a little awed. She had assumed that Roger’s way with animals was a rare and magical thing, and it was surprising to hear a big pleasant goon like Melvin talking about them in the same tones, and so informedly. It occurred to her that if one could relate to animals, country life might not be so lonely.
“Well, we neighbored a lot,” Melvin said. “He knowed mine about as well as I knowed his.”
When the tour of the pastures was finished the sun was just down. Melvin let her out at her back gate and got out and stood by the gate a minute while Patsy thanked him for his kindness and r
ather awkwardly attempted to work out some arrangement where he would be caretaker of the land and do or have done whatever needed to be done. It was obvious to her that Melvin was going to do whatever needed doing anyway, and she wanted him to be fairly paid.
The subject embarrassed him considerably. He pushed his hat back off his windburned forehead, slapped himself on the thigh with his gloves, chewed a grass blade, inspected the ground, inspected the sky, kicked his pickup tire, shook a post in the yard fence to see if it needed replacing, and acknowledged, finally, that although his time wasn’t worth a whole lot he guessed he could take a little something for looking after the cows until he could find a good buyer for them. He supposed fifty dollars a month and Patsy, assuming he was underpaying himself by at least half, insisted on a hundred. Melvin, red-faced, finally agreed because he figured it wouldn’t take more than a month or two to get the cattle sold.
“Nice little bunch of cows,” he said. “Wisht I had the money to buy ’em myself.”
Patsy was hoping he would say that and said, “Why don’t you? I’m not pressed for money. You could pay me in installments, if you needed to.”
“Ma’am, I couldn’t raise an installment on one cow, much less two hundred,” he said. “Many thanks, anyway.”
Patsy let it go, determined to pursue it later, when they were better acquainted. As she went into the yard Melvin looked at her worriedly, as if it had just dawned on him that she intended to spend some time there all by herself. Clearly, at some point during the drive through the pastures, she had revealed herself to him as a city girl.
“Say, Miss Pat,” he said, “you run up against anything you can’t handle while you’re here be sure and give us a call. We don’t live but two miles over there, won’t take no time for my wife or me to get there. We ain’t good for much but we do believe in neighboring.”
“Thanks. I will if you’ll call me Patsy,” she said, touched. “But I’ll only be here tomorrow and tomorrow night. A friend’s coming by to see me. If I don’t see you again this trip I’ll see you next time I’m up. Please call me collect when there’s anything I should know about.”
Melvin promised and touched his hat to her and was soon in the red pickup, bouncing over the cattle guard. A towsack blew out, but he didn’t notice. She walked through the yard and picked it up and hung it on the yard fence near the gate, where Melvin could find it next time he came.
Walking through the back yard, she remembered that she had forgotten to ask about Bob, the old dog. He was nowhere to be seen, so she assumed the Hustons had adopted him too. With the failing of the light the yard and the long sloping plain to the west of the house had a colder, grayer look, as did the house, the old smokehouse, everything but the few black angular mesquite trees and the glowing spot on the western horizon where the sun had just disappeared. Bob would have been someone to talk to.
In the darkening kitchen the three gashed cakes, the plate of chicken, and the bowl of coleslaw faced her like so many unwanted bridal gifts for whom thank-you notes had to be written. She looked more closely and saw that Mrs. Daniels had pasted the name of the owner to each plate, so she could return them when she passed through town. Patsy felt a bad, lonely depression building up and only managed to stave it off by building a fire in the living-room fireplace. It took her thirty minutes, but the cheer it produced was more than worth it. She dragged the couch over—Rosemary’s couch, and probably not sat on three times since her death—and made herself a sandwich with the last of the peanut butter she had bought so long ago. She ate and drank milk and began a MacKinlay Kantor novel in one of the twenty or so Reader’s Digest condensed books, which, with a Bible and a Sunday School teachers’ handbook, piles of Reader’s Digests and The Cattleman, a half-dozen J. Frank Dobie books, and a small nineteenth-century edition in blue floral binding of Owen Meredith’s Lucile, filled the little glass-fronted bookcase by the fireplace, constituting the Wagonner library. When she finished the MacKinlay Kantor novel she went back to the kitchen for more milk and discovered that the chocolate cake was not at all bad. She reduced its girth considerably. There was lots of dry mesquite wood. She returned and lay late by the fire. After MacKinlay Kantor she read Daphne Du Maurier. She felt untroubled; the fire was nice, the logs popped loudly, making virtually the only noise.
It was the silence of the house and land that made her slightly conscious of how isolated she was, and the sense was heightened when she stepped out on the cold front porch for a minute. It was not terribly cold, but cold enough, and the stillness, the moonlight and the stars over the plains gave the night air a cleanness and clarity that were tangible; everything in sight was very distinct: the cedars, the yard gate, the old swing at the end of the porch. It was the opposite of Houston, whose warm, foggy, mushy nights melted everything together, made neons pastel and figures blur. The night was so beautifully clear that it was disturbing, and too dry even for smells. And while the keen air felt good on Patsy’s skin, the goose-bumpy cold prickling her ankles and neck, she could not help missing her own front yard at night, with its misty light and spunky odor and wet leaves.
Upstairs, she poked a little, discovering that the TV set she had assumed the Hustons had liberated with the livestock was still in Roger’s bedroom. She turned it on, but the reception was awful and she quickly turned it off again. The deep cedar closet in the hall smelled of mothballs and there were still ladies’ dresses hanging in it, dresses of the forties, dresses that ought to be given to museums. There were boxes of bank statements and boxes of snapshots, but she was too tired to snoop seriously. There was also, in the big closet, an old windup phonograph with a few thick seventy-eight records in its record cabinet. She found some needles and by winding with one hand and holding the needle arm with the other managed to play a part of a badly scratched Jimmy Rodgers’ record:
My mothah was a lady,
And yours I would allow,
And you may have a sis-tah
Who needs pro-tecshun now . . .
Quaint as it was, she soon decided it was not worth the effort it took to wind it. In her room and gowned and in bed she discovered that it was possible to make do with the overhead light as a reading light if she burrowed under the covers and poked her head out where her feet would ordinarily have been, so that the light was directly above her. The quilts that were on the bed must have been resurrected by Mrs. Daniels, for they smelled of mothballs and long years in a cedar shelf, a lovely smell to go to sleep with, and when the quilts had made her yawn and Daphne Du Maurier had made her yawn several times, she tiptoed and turned out the light and, leaving the morrow for the morrow, went to sleep.
15
IT WAS WHEN SHE AWOKE, alone in his house, that the knowledge that Roger was dead struck her. She woke early, warm under the quilts but aware that she was in a strange place. Outside, the sharp keen starshot darkness had changed to vague gray. Patsy tried to go back to sleep, but she was not sleepy. Every time she looked out the window the light had become a little stronger and she could see a little more of the slope leading to the barn. The ground was white with frost; everything was absolutely silent in the house. There was no creaking of boards as Roger walked down the hall, no sound of bootheels on the stairs, no water running, no toilet flushing, no muffled sounds from the kitchen as he made breakfast. There was only her own breath and the creak of the bedsprings when she turned on her side. She marked his absence in the absence of the sounds she had been accustomed to him making on her few visits.
A little later, when she got up and sat shivering in her bathrobe, tying her sneakers, she looked out the window and saw the slope, white with frost and sparkling beautifully with sunlight, and saw the empty lots, the barn with no animals near it, the chickenless chicken house, and marked again, quietly enough, the absence of Roger. The land was there still, but not the man, and the morning light that had always called Roger forth would call him forth no more. She cried a little in the bathroom, not through any excess of grief, but beca
use she saw his razor. She was snooping in the bathroom cabinet and it was still there, an old razor, all the silver plating long ago worn off, so that it was like a brass artifact. It still had a blade in it, but she took it out and decided to keep the razor. After a bit she felt all right and went down and made oatmeal in an improvised double boiler and then cleaned out the cabinets thoroughly and washed all the wooden-handled knives and forks.
She was standing by the cabinet drying them with a coarse dishtowel when she heard the cattle guard rattle and in a minute saw Hank drive up to the back gate and park his old Oldsmobile beside the Ford. He got out and peeked in the Ford, as if to reassure himself by the familiar clutter in the back seat that she was somewhere about. His hair was a little longer but otherwise he seemed the same as he had seemed when she watched him leave the filling station. He still wore the brown suede coat.
She went to the screen and met him, attempting to look critical and severe, but it didn’t work. She had been lonely and he was very much the same—more greedy than talkative. In less than an hour they were attempting to restore the quilts and sheets of the bed to some sort of order. Patsy went over and raised the window. The day was warming, but the bedroom was still cold enough to raise goose bumps all over her body and she hoped to let some warm air in. She felt somewhat snippy and irritable about the rapidity of the proceedings. Hank looked complacent, and the look annoyed her a little. She got in bed and turned her back on him, so as not to see it. He immediately tried to turn her over, but she clutched the post at the head of the bed. One nice thing about the bed was that it had something she could hang on to.