Plainsong (Plainsong #1)(19)

Goddamn it. Quit it, Harold yelled at her. He and Raymond had come running over. Here now. Stop that. You goddamn crazy old raw-boned bitch.

They gathered around, wanting to stop her, to quiet her, but she was kicking and thrashing in a crazy frenzy, and they couldn’t get close. Finally Guthrie climbed over to face her, to shove her back, to see if she’d come that way, but she had thrashed and kicked so much, rocking, teetering on the corral board, that she managed to tip herself forward, and suddenly she went over headfirst into the holding pen, making a heavy crashing somersault, her old angular head down, her hindquarters following, flopping over with a great thump onto the ground. Then she lay still.

I want you to look at that, Harold said. Go ahead then. Stay there. Maybe that’ll knock some goddamn sense into you.

They watched her. Her sides heaved but nothing else was moving. Her eyes stared. Climbing into the holding pen, Guthrie approached and lifted her head with his foot. That seemed to rouse her. She began to tremble and suddenly she rose up, Guthrie stepped back, and then she stood wobbily, glaring around. There was a gash along one flank where it had torn on the splintered corral board. The torn hide quivered and dripped blood in bright quick drops, and all along the back of her and over the top of her head she was covered with a mantle of dirt. She looked like some kind of beast from a medieval pageant, dirty and gory, threatening. She shook her dirty head sideways and took a couple of steps and then limped, trotting, over to the other cattle and heifers. They seemed leery of her and backed away.

Guthrie said, You want me to bring her back around?

No. Let her go, Harold said. We’d have to about kill her to get her in here now. She either stuck when she was with the bull or she didn’t. She seems to think she did, since she wants over there so bad. He looked at her with the other cattle. Anyhow, she seems to of took a serious dislike to you, Tom.

I’ll sort her out again, he said. If that’s what you want.

No. Let her go. We’ll keep an eye on her.

What about that cut?

She’ll heal up. I reckon she’s too disgusted with us to go off and die. She wouldn’t want to give us the satisfaction.

The two boys helped push the tested cattle out into a nearby pasture. The wild red-legged cow limped along in the middle of them. The two open cows were left in the holding pen and they called after the other cattle, their heads lifted, bawling, and moved over to the fence where they stood looking out through the rails. At the chutes the boys helped collect the medicine and the vaccination guns and put them away in the back of the truck. Then they climbed into the Dodge pickup and sat beside their father with the heater pushing out hot air onto their knees while he talked a little more to Harold. Raymond came around to their side of the truck.

Roll your window down, their father said. He wants to say something to you.

The old man stood in the cold in the sandy gravel beside the pickup and took out a soft leather purse from an inner pocket of his canvas jacket and held the purse in his hands and unzipped it. He poked around and picked out two bills. He handed them in through the opened window to the two boys. I hope that’ll be compensation, he said.

They took the money shyly and said thank you to him.

You boys can come back here any time, he said. You’d be welcome.

Wait now, their father said. That isn’t necessary.

You stay out of this, Raymond said. This is between me and these boys here. This don’t concern you, Tom. You boys, you come again any time.

He stepped back. The two boys looked at him. At his old weather-chafed face and reddened eyes under the winter cap. He looked quiet and kindly. They held the money in their closed fists, waiting, not looking at it until their father had finally said goodbye and not until he had put the pickup in motion and they were turned back away from the cattle chutes and had driven past the house and were rattling on the county road with the gravel banging up under the fenders and then were pointed toward the west where the sky was beginning now to fade. Then they looked at the money. They turned it over. He had given them each a ten-dollar bill.

That’s too much, their father said.

Should we give it back?

No, he said. He took his hat off and scratched the back of his head and put the hat back on. I guess not. That would be an insult. They want you to keep it. They enjoyed having you out there.

But Dad, Ike said.

Yes?

Why didn’t they ever get married? And have a family like everybody else?

I don’t know, Guthrie said. People don’t sometimes.

In the pickup it was warm now, driving along the county road. Beyond the ditch the fenceline passed by, thickened and snarled with tumbleweed and brush. Above, on the cross arm of a telephone pole perched a hawk the color of copper in the lowering sun, and they watched him but his head didn’t turn at all when they passed under him.

I just guess they never found the right girl, their father said. I don’t rightly know.

Bobby looked out the window. He said, I guess they didn’t want to leave each other.

Guthrie glanced at him. Maybe so, he said. Maybe that’s what happened, son.

At the highway Guthrie and the two boys turned north and it was quieter in the pickup now because they were on the blacktop, pointed toward town. Guthrie turned the radio on to receive the evening news.





Victoria Roubideaux.

When she said her name the middle-aged woman sitting on the other side of the window looked at her and said, Yes, Mrs. Jones called, and then she made a check mark on the chart in front of her and handed the girl three sheets of paper on a clipboard to fill out. She took them back across the waiting room to her seat and held the papers on her knees, leaning over them with her hair fallen about her face like a thick dark curtain, until she lifted it deftly in a motion familiar and automatic and settled it behind her shoulders. There were questions she had no answer to. They wanted to know was there cancer in the family, heart disease among her father’s people, syphilis in her mother’s relations. Altogether more than a hundred questions. She answered the ones she could, the ones she had some certain knowledge of, believing it would not be right to guess on the others as it might be if this were some test she was taking at school. When she was finished she took the clipboard and sheets of paper to the woman and handed them through the window.