Chapter 10
Hollis Kane crossed over from Boone’s crew the second week of October, the latest in a trickle that had started with Wyatt back in the spring and had shown no sign yet of running dry, and I heard about it from Deacon before I heard it from anybody who’d witnessed it.
I put Hollis on sorting duty his first morning, mostly to see how he worked before I decided where he belonged on the crew.
He was quiet in a different way than Wyatt was quiet, not shy, just economical, the sort who’d rather move a gate himself than explain twice how he wanted it moved.
We worked a pen of yearlings together the better part of an hour, him on the gate, me calling cuts, and by the end of it I’d learned more about how he thought than a month of Deacon’s secondhand reports could have told me.
“You don’t rush them,” I said, watching him ease a reluctant heifer through the chute without raising his voice or his hands.
“Rushing costs you a bruise on the meat or a hand in the hospital. Learned that early.” He latched the gate behind her, unhurried. “Boone used to rush them. Not cruel about it. Just impatient. Wanted the sorting done so he could get to the next thing on his list.”
“You never told him that.”
“Wasn’t my place.” He looked at me a second, weighing something. “It’s not my place to tell you things either, Mrs. Teague, but you asked, so I’ll say it once. Man’s not cruel. He’s just been in a hurry his whole life, and a hurry’s a hard habit to break once the world starts rewarding it.”
I didn’t have an answer ready, and Hollis didn’t need one. He went back to the gate, I went back to calling cuts, and the yearlings kept moving through the chute at the unhurried pace the job required.
“Boone’s down to two full-time,” Deacon said, checking a heifer’s hindquarters with the flat concentration he gave everything, like the animal in front of him was the only thing in the county worth his attention.
“Two and whatever day labor Mackenzie’s company is paying for, which isn’t the same as a hand who knows the ground. ”
“That’s not my doing.”
“Didn’t say it was. Said it’s happening.
” Deacon straightened up, wiped his hands on his jeans.
“Man built a reputation on a rodeo circuit that doesn’t actually run cattle.
Turns out the actual cattle-running requires people who know what they’re doing, and most of the people who knew what they were doing were people who’d worked under you as much as him, all these years, even if his name was the one on the paycheck. ”
“I never asked them to leave him.”
“Didn’t have to. You just kept being good at your half of the job while he was busy being good at his photograph.” Deacon moved on to the next heifer in line, done with the subject as far as he was concerned. “Hollis says the hay’s coming in late on his side. Nobody left to run the baler right.”
I didn’t answer right away. I walked the length of the working pen instead, checking gate latches that didn’t need checking, giving my hands something to do while I sorted through what I felt about it.
A month back, standing at a dessert table with an untouched slice of pie, I’d have felt something close to satisfaction at the hay’s coming in late on his side.
I went looking for that satisfaction now and came up mostly empty, which surprised me more than the feeling would have.
“You want me to send anybody over,” I asked Deacon, half joking, “long as we’re ahead on the numbers?”
“That your call to make.” Deacon didn’t look up from the heifer. “Don’t sound like a joke you actually think is funny, though.”
“No,” I admitted. “It doesn’t, does it.”
Deacon finished with the heifer, let her back out into the pen with the rest of the herd, and leaned against the fence rail a moment, about as much of a break as he allowed himself most mornings.
“You’re allowed to feel more than one thing about this, you know,” he said.
“Man humiliated you in front of the whole county. Nobody’d blame you for wanting to see the hay come in late on his side.
Nobody’d blame you either for not wanting that, once you’re standing close enough to see what it actually costs him. ”
“Which one am I supposed to be feeling, Deacon?”
“Not my job to tell you that. My job’s the heifers.
” He almost smiled, which for Deacon at seven in the morning counted as an outright grin.
“But I’ll say this much, boss, and I don’t offer this kind of thing lightly.
I’ve watched you get harder about a lot of things since September.
Fence lines, feed budgets, who gets hired and who doesn’t.
I haven’t watched you get harder about him.
That tells me something, even if you’re not ready to hear what it tells me. ”
I let that sit without answering it. Deacon didn’t push past the point where a thing needed pushing.
We finished the morning’s checks in easy quiet, and the day settled back into its ordinary rhythm: feed orders, a fence post near the creek, a cough going around two calves. Small things. The kind that make up an operation.
? ? ?
I rode up to the rise behind the north pasture that evening, alone, where four generations of Larkins were buried under a scatter of modest stones and one newer one, my mother’s, granite still sharp-edged where the older ones had gone soft with a hundred years of weather.
I didn’t come up here often. No rule against it, just a private reluctance I’d never examined too closely, a sense that grief handled too regularly stopped being grief and turned into performance, and I’d never wanted to perform this for anybody, myself included.
But something about the last few weeks, Deacon’s Margaret, my grandmother’s journal, Consuela’s old marriage, had left me wanting to sit with my own dead a while, plain, no occasion required.
Eleanor Larkin, the stone read, and the years underneath, eighteen of them now since the last one, and I sat down on the grass beside it the same as I used to sit beside her hospital bed those final months, not saying much, just present.
“You’d have had something to say about all this,” I told her, the way I sometimes did up here, not embarrassed by it, not anymore, not after enough years of doing it that the strangeness had worn off.
“Dad won’t tell me what you’d have said.
Says he doesn’t see the use in talking about you.
I think he just doesn’t trust himself not to fall apart if he starts. ”
The evening was going gold, the way October does out here, long light stretching shadows off the fence posts below, the whole operation laid out from this rise as it must have looked to every Larkin who’d ever climbed up to bury somebody or just to think.
Cattle grazed the low pasture, small as toys from this height, Boone’s half and mine both in view at once, the fence line running dead straight between them, a scar the land hadn’t decided yet whether to keep or heal over.
“I built a fence, Mom. Eleven miles of it. Cut the whole operation clean in half after Boone said something ugly into a live microphone at the harvest supper.” I picked at the grass, an old habit from childhood, sitting up here after her funeral turning the same grass over in my fingers while my father stood twenty feet off not knowing how to comfort a fifteen-year-old who’d stopped believing comfort was a thing the world still owed her.
“I don’t know if it was the right thing.
Feels right some days. Feels like something else other days. Wish you were around to tell me which.”
Nobody answered, of course. Nobody ever did, up here, and that had stopped disappointing me a long time ago, somewhere in my twenties, when it came clear that coming up here wasn’t about getting an answer.
It was about saying the thing out loud to somebody who’d once have listened without an agenda, and trusting that the saying did most of the work an answer would have.
I sat until the light went down, the first stars coming up hard and close out here, away from any town bright enough to dim them, and then I got up, brushed the grass off my jeans, and rode back down to the house in the dark, alone as I’d ridden up, a little steadier for having come.
? ? ?
I mentioned the visit to Deacon the next morning, in passing, no weight on it, and he told me something that stopped me cold in the middle of the equipment shed.
“Boone used to mow that whole hilltop himself,” Deacon said.
“Every spring and every fall, regular as clockwork, whole eleven years you two were married. Never made a thing of it. I’d just see his truck up there some Saturday morning, and by that afternoon the grass around every stone would be cut clean, weeds pulled, the little iron fence around the plot touched up with fresh paint whenever it needed it. ”
“He never told me that.”
“Didn’t figure he would. Wasn’t the kind of thing a man tells his wife, in my experience.
The telling would’ve made it about him instead of about her, and I don’t think that’s ever what he wanted it to be about.
” Deacon kept working as he talked, checking a length of chain for wear, not making a production of it, passing the fact along as unhurried as he passed along everything else.
“Asked him about it once, years back, why he bothered with a hilltop full of Larkins who weren’t any blood relation to him.
He said your mother was kind to him, the two years he knew her before she passed.
Said it was the least a man could do, keep a kind woman’s resting place decent, whether anybody ever noticed or not. ”
I stood there a while, turning that over, eleven years of a marriage I’d thought I knew down to the last corner, and finding, even now, months after the fence and the mic and everything since, a piece of him I’d never once known to look for.
“Has anybody mowed it since the fence went up?”
“I have. Didn’t think it was right to let it go just because you two were having your trouble.
Figured your mother wouldn’t much care whose truck did the mowing, so long as somebody kept doing it.
” Deacon set the chain down and looked at me level.
“Didn’t tell you before now because it wasn’t really my story to tell.
Figured it’d come up when it was supposed to come up, same as most things do out here, eventually, in their own time. ”
I thanked him and went to check my own stock, but I carried that with me the rest of the day, unable to set it down, a small unglamorous kindness that had gone on for eleven years without a word of credit asked for.
How many other pieces of him had I never bothered to look for, too busy being married to the man who photographed well to notice the man who kept a dead woman’s grave decent for no reason except that she’d once been kind to him?
? ? ?
I found Boone at the cattle guard a few days later, on my way back from a feed run, and stopped my truck before I’d decided to, some impulse stronger than my usual caution pulling me over onto the shoulder.
“Deacon told me something,” I said, through the open window, not getting out, not sure yet whether I wanted this conversation to last long enough to require it. “About the cemetery. That you’ve been mowing it, all these years.”
He went still at that, caught off guard in a way I rarely saw him caught. “Wasn’t supposed to be a thing you found out about.”
“Why not?”
“Because telling you would’ve made it about getting credit, and it was never about that.
” He leaned against his own truck, arms crossed, not quite meeting my eyes.
“Your mother was kind to me, the two years I knew her. Sat with me at your grandfather’s table my first Thanksgiving here, when I didn’t know a soul and felt about as out of place as a man can feel.
Told me, straight out, that she was glad her daughter had found somebody with decent hands and a decent heart, and that she expected me to keep both of those in good working order the whole marriage through.
” Something moved across his face, old grief finding new shape.
“Didn’t do a great job keeping that promise, the last few years.
Mowing her hilltop felt like the least I could still manage, whatever else I’d let slide. ”
“Thank you,” I said, plain, no performance in it, just the words themselves. “For keeping that particular promise, even after you stopped keeping the rest of them.”
“Didn’t do it for thanks.”
“I know. That’s exactly why it’s worth thanking you for.” I sat with that a moment, the pair of us across a few feet of gravel shoulder, something unnamed passing between us, different from anything since September. “I should get this feed back before it starts raining.”
“Drive safe,” he said, and I did, the whole drive home filled with a hilltop of grass cut clean around four generations of Larkin stones.