Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America

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  Casey was here like he usually was: right after school and then into July. His stay always lasted a month. It gave Steve’s sister a chance for some space apart and now it was a part of their lives over the last several years. Cousin Casey, she called him. She supposed it more rightfully might be Nephew Casey, but she was closer to him than that, and besides, since just living with Steve and not being technically a part of his family, cousin seemed at once closer and more informal.

  He liked the country. He came out and away from the hot apartment and the close, car-lined streets of the little neighborhood in the city where he spent his days, and the tense lines that she could read in his face and especially in the muscles of his body always eased after the first day.

  She helped them ease. He would complain, when she first came into the room with its saddles and its one bridle, hanging off the knob of the dresser mirror and down one side. She would see his resistance when she first entered. Both windows would be open and there would be this heaped form in the bed that she would rouse with her “up, up, you sluggard, daylight in the swamp” routine. She would peel back the covers and he would clench the sheet, not looking, with his eyes closed tight. Then she would find his feet, and he would helplessly release the sheet at the first tickle and it would be all over.

  Cold cereal for breakfast, quick orange juice, goodbye kiss to Steve. As soon as his car cleared the driveway, it was time for the horses. During his visits, it usually went this way for a good week before the pasture transfer began. But this year it was longer. The older nineteen-year-old stallion had died in mid-May; they brought in a new horse just for breeding season, and the mares wouldn’t settle. They would go in and respond and the stallion would breed them, but they wouldn’t settle, still in heat. So Casey got a sex education different from the one he was receiving from those semi late-night shows on cable TV. Real sex. Neighs, biting and raised hooves and then the grunts and motions of the act itself. It courses through us, she thought, the last time they brought the stallion alongside. He was a pretty old boy and gentle, so she did not fear handling him. Still, she made Casey stand aways back, out of respect, she told him, for the loving couple. She wondered if he thought that this was how she and Steve were, under the covers, or his mom and her occasional boyfriend. It is a river, a current—sometimes a swollen flood, sometimes a gentle flowing, but it is always there. We are animal, we are mammal, she thought, as the old boy dismounted and moved away, his distended penis in full view of the boy and Amanda both as it slowly retracted into its sheath.

  Because of all this love-making and lack of mares settling properly, they fed out a lot of hay. This was the first action after their quick breakfast. Hay and water both were carried. The stud got his last, the mares and the foals theirs first. Casey would be sweating pretty good by eight thirty and when it reached nine they both would be dripping wet from the humid air and their work.

  “How do you know when they’re ‘settled’” he wanted to know. He had just broke off the last leaf of some good green sweet-smelling hay that she had bought at the baler from her neighbor down the road. More of it was piled in the hay mow and still more waiting for them to buck it up into the rack from the wagon out front.

  She looked at him.

  “Well, there’s this ache, an ache deep inside and then it’s not there anymore.”

  He flipped the last green morsel towards the second filly foal standing farthest away.

  “And for him, too?”

  “No, not exactly. Stallions always seem ready, but not the mares.”

  “Come on,” she said, moving towards the blue tarp covering the wagon. “Help me get this off the load, then we’ll hitch up and drag the wagon inside and get this over with.”

  Casey groaned.

  “Come on. Another load will be here tomorrow night and there’s a chance of rain this afternoon with all this heat.”

  They began peeling back the blue plastic tarp from the sweet-smelling bales.

  “This is how it is in June, Casey—and July too. You get to sleep when the day is done. Besides, aren’t we going riding this afternoon?”

  “You said.”

  “Yep, guess I did.”

  He was a nice kid. Even wore the slouch hat she gave him one Christmas back. Looked at it, then, thanked her at the promptings of his mother, and then moved on to computer games. But when he came out that summer, there it was, riding his head. Casey took things in. Drank them hurriedly one moment and others sometimes just sipped, but he was always at it. There were wheels beyond the brown soft orbs of his eyes that took what the eyes offered and locked them away: gifts, perceptions, insights. She sense acquity; he missed nothing. Today it was sex education, tomorrow an essay on competition and survival. Always. He was always at it. Was this the way she was once?

  “Where we gonna go?” His city lip had softened here in their presence, and at times he acquired a country lilt. Steve mocked him once, but she looked daggers at him across the table, and he learned to let it go. Give the kid a chance. He was telling her that he wanted to follow. He was the yearling straying off away from the line of the other horses and then slowly curving back towards the rest in the last of the light.

  “Trotter Creek, I suppose.”

  “Good. Jimmie says I’d like it down there and the horses’d like it too.”

  “Well, Jimmie should know. Been here all his life.”

  “How old is Jimmie?”

  “Lord, Casey, I’m not sure I could tell you. His face is ageless. He moves freely and has great energy.”

  “Kind of like Dobbin?”

  She was struck by this. The boy came just two and a half weeks after the horse went down and she was still grieving him and the boy quickly sensed that. Apparently it was still on his mind, too.

  “Dobbin had a fair sized lead over Jimmie. I mean, the horse was nineteen when he died.

  “And he never showed any signs you said.”

  “Nope. Dobbin just lay down and quietly died. But this is horses and people you are doing, boy, and that won’t do. You should know: we all hang by different life lines.”

  “Sounds like we’re just dangling.”

  “Kind of spidery isn’t it, Cousin Casey.”

  “Yes it is, Cousin Amanda,” he said, smiling, pulling a straight green stem of grass out of the closest bale like his uncle would do.

  The blue tarp was on the ground and the heat already was building. She would be going for the truck.

  “C’mon,” she said to the boy, “it’s time to buck that hay.”