WITHIN A WEEK something did happen, but instead of a new man coming into her life, an old man went out of it. She was feeding Davey spinach and making a mess of it, one day at lunch, when Roger Wagonner’s sister called to tell her Roger was dead. His sister was older than he had been and had a dry cracked voice and the accents of West Texas.
“How did you know to call me” Patsy asked, stunned. She had scarcely taken in the details, which were that Roger had had a stroke and had been dead two days when the mailman found him.
“Well, Roger wrote us about you, honey, when he decided to leave his property to you.”
“I’m sorry,” Patsy said. “I just can’t think. What can I do?”
“Not much more to be done,” the old lady said. “You know how thoughtful Roger was. He paid the funeral home two years ago, they told us. All we have to pay is the increase in price.”
“Oh, dear. When will the funeral be?”
Tomorrow, she was told, and the old lady rambled on in her twangy small-town schoolteacher’s tone about how good Roger had been, how methodical, how he had arranged with a neighbor to take care of his animals in such an event. Patsy numbly agreed, though she had never thought of him as methodical and couldn’t, any more than she could immediately think of him as dead. Even in her numbness, though, she felt a certain embarrassment, and a fear that his sister would resent her because of the land. But before she could say anything the old lady relieved her mind.
“Honey, don’t you be worried about us wanting that land,” she said kindly. “We ain’t got long to live ourselves and of course I guess he told you about us losing our boy, so don’t you worry about it. If Billy had lived we would have wanted him to have it, but me and my husband can’t hardly take care of what we’ve got in Wilbarger County, much less Roger’s old place. We told him ourselves he ought to leave it to somebody young—somebody who could enjoy it.”
“Oh, thank you,” Patsy said, though she did not believe that she would ever enjoy it. The kindliness of the voice on the wire was so akin in tone to that of the man who was dead that it was causing her to cry. Her inclination was not to go to the funeral, or near the ranch at all for many months until her memories had worn smooth again, but then she recalled that Roger had driven all the way to Houston because she had had a child. The least she could do was go to his funeral, since he had died. She said she would be there and hung up.
She lay down on her couch to weep, but then got up and immediately began packing, still crying. She didn’t want to give herself any time to think. In an hour and a half she, Juanita, and Davey were in the Ford and on the way to Dallas. Davey was cheerful and excited, bouncing on his car seat, patting Patsy’s shoulder, and occasionally grabbing her hair. Juanita was worried about proprieties. She would be staying in Dallas to help Jeanette with Davey, and she had had to pack in such a hurry that she was sure she had come off without something that might be socially essential. Her weeks in Dallas while Jim had been recuperating had not intimidated her, exactly, but they had informed her. She knew Jeanette expected of her what one should expect of a maid, while Patsy’s expectations were lighter and, she could not help feeling, somewhat erratic and eccentric. She loved Patsy dearly but she had always been a little worried about her behavior. Every few miles she bethought herself of something she might have left, and turned and rummaged in her handbag to see if it was there.
It was a bright cold March day, with a few small high clouds and a keen wind that caused the Ford some strain; it had not been on the open road in months and ran peculiarly, Patsy thought. Had she been able to keep her mind on it, she would have worried, but the state of the car she was driving was the last thing on her mind. It was as if Roger’s death had caused all the silt and sediments of uncertainty to sift out of her emotions; they were a pure water as she drove. For the long hundred-mile stretch of the freeway that cut through the pine forests from Houston to Madisonville she was happy in the drive, the sun and blue sky and bright green of the trees all pleasing to her. Occasionally she tilted her head to the side and let her hair tickle Davey, who giggled and shoved her away. But mostly she just drove, and she scarcely looked around when he grew fretful with his car seat and Juanita took him out. He wailed deafeningly for ten miles and then went to sleep. She drove, untouched by Davey’s wails or Juanita’s worries. It was pleasant to drive and her destination and her reason for going were not in her mind, either.
But when she left the freeway and drove through the opening country Roger did come to her mind. That he was dead came to her mind—the country brought the fact in now and then. Some horses standing on a hill, a gray farmhouse standing in isolation far off the road, the pickups parked at a country store at a little crossroads community—such things reminded her. After three hours, when she was beyond the heavy forests, the loosening and spreading of the land itself as it began its long roll westward toward the plains, that too reminded her. She would cross a roll of land and see farther than she had seen in months, see the land spreading away for thirty miles under the gathering afternoon clouds, colder land than the forests and covered still with winter grass. When she thought of Roger her eyes filled—not really from pain, but from a kind of sorrow, sorrow that she had not gone to see him again, sorrow that she would not talk with him again. Of all the people she missed in life there was suddenly one that she must miss forever. No more words would pass between them. It was an awful thought.
“We cry but it does them no good,” Juanita said nervously. Crying was for the house, to her mind, not for a crowded highway.
“I’m not crying for him,” Patsy said calmly. “He was happy enough. I wish he had lived until Davey was older.”
And she glanced back at Davey, asleep on his stomach on the seat, his face mashed into the crack of the seat and one foot bare. He would not remember the old man who had taken him riding; that would belong to her and not to him.
She decided to spend the night in Dallas and drive on to the funeral in the morning. At dinner, offhandedly, in telling her mother and father what kind of man Roger Wagonner had been, she mentioned that he had left his ranch to Jim and herself. To her surprise, instead of seeing it as a generous but, all circumstances considered, reasonable act, they both became terribly upset, particularly when she told them she would probably spend a day or two there, seeing what shape things were in and what the details of the inheritance really were.
“But he was not really related to you,” Jeanette said. “Why would he leave his land to you?”
“He had no one else. Besides, he left it to both of us, not just to me.”
“Well, it seems to me Jim is the one who ought to be looking into it,” Garland said stiffly. “You don’t know anything about things like that and besides it won’t look good. If you ask me you ought to call him.”
“I mean to, but it’s two hours earlier there. He’s barely off work. He’s not likely to come, though. I can do it. It should be fairly simple. After all, I’ll be there.”
Jeanette, to Patsy’s surprise, was extremely flustered. “But you aren’t related to him,” she said again. “I’m sure it won’t seem the usual thing at all, to the people who knew him. I think your father just means it would be better if you waited until some time when Jim is with you.”
“Why?” Patsy asked. “I thought I explained to you that so far as I know, Jim won’t be with me any more. I simply have to do things on my own now.”
Then it dawned on her what they were upset about—that the townspeople would construe it that she had somehow seduced Roger in order to get the land. Her parents thought that people would see her as a siren who had appeared at the eleventh hour and acquired all an old man had worked for all his life. The recognition of how they assumed people would look at it made her white with anger, and she put down her fork.
“You never fail, do you?” she said. “Why did you have to think that? Do I look that bad? Why did you have to think that?”
The sight of her anger was enough to switch her parents’ mood. They instantly decided their apprehensions had been ridiculous, but the damage had been done, so far as Patsy was concerned.
“His own sister told me she was glad about it,” she said. “I don’t care what you think people might think about me, but what do you think people think about him? He lived there all his life. Do you think people saw him as a fool? Or a lecher? He was a fine man.”
“Well, we just didn’t know him,” Garland said, very humble pie. “If we had we wouldn’t have said it.”
Patsy was so disturbed that she decided not to spend the night. Her anger wore off, but she didn’t want to be exposed to her parents’ way of thinking through the evening. Before she left, her parents had become so apologetic about it all that she was doubly glad to be leaving.
But once she got out of Dallas into the open country she almost regretted her haste and her moodiness. Driving at night by herself was very different from driving in the daytime with Davey and Juanita. She had never driven any distance alone at night. At Denton she turned off the big well-trafficked highway onto a small state road and for a stretch of thirty miles was almost the only car in sight. After the rush of traffic out of Dallas, the road seemed very silent. The Ford’s radio had long since ceased to work, so she hadn’t even that company. The Ford itself was still making peculiar sounds, and she couldn’t help wondering what she would do if it broke down. She saw now and then the yellow light of a farmhouse window off the road, but couldn’t really imagine herself walking across the fields to such a house. There would be giant dogs, probably. On the other hand, she didn’t want to stand by the road and present herself to the uncertain mercies of midnight travelers. She felt frightened just driving, and it annoyed her. After weeks alone she should be above such girlishness. But in Houston there were houses, not dark fields and pastures, and street lights at a comfortable height on the corners, not the countless cold stars far above. When she had driven the West with Jim, the vastness and the stars at night had delighted her, but with Jim she had felt safe within the car, and alone she didn’t feel safe at all. What the whole evening had done was persuade her again that she needed a man. She wished Jim had been home for her calls. The inheritance, contrary to what she had said, might have been just the thing to bring him back. At that moment she wanted him back. Perversely, once it was too late, her parents’ flusterments seemed quite natural. What would people think when she popped in the day of the funeral to inquire about her land?
In a town called Bowie she stopped at a filling station to consult her map. The little town of Thalia, where Roger was to be buried, was so small she wanted to be sure she wouldn’t miss it. She got out and asked the attendant, a young man in a Levi jacket, if he would please look under her hood and tell her if anything was drastically wrong. He immediately informed her that she needed a new fan belt and went off to see if he had one that would fit. The wind from the north swept across the bare bright concrete, very cold; after shivering for a minute Patsy decided to wait inside in the warm office. It was heated by a gas stove, the flames flickering and blue, and was so warm that the plate-glass windows had fogged over. The lights outside were a strange blur. She decided she wanted a Coke and while the young man changed her fan belt she sat on a small iron bridge chair, all the paint worn off, sipping a Coke and eating a package of cheese crisps. There was a radio on the desk next to the green credit-card machine, and it was playing a hillbilly song. A late-night high-watt station in Fort Worth was trying to sell an album of hillbilly favorites from yesteryear, fifty songs for two ninety-eight. The album was called The Teardrop Special. She heard “Take These Chains from My Heart,” and then the announcer went into a three- or four-minute spiel about the album. The announcer was everybody’s friend and had always been everybody’s friend:
“Folks, these are songs you’ve all heard many times, songs we all love. Some of the singers you’ll hear are dead now, but I know most of you haven’t forgotten them and I know you’ll want this album. Why, it’ll bring all these great country singers into your homes again, just like old times, you know, when all you had to do to hear ’em was turn your radio dial. Just as soon as I tell you what you have to do to get this fine album we’re going to play another song, this one’ll be the old “Panhandle Rag,” by Monroe Malory, the old Wichita Ranger, but first get out your pencil and paper and take down this address . . .”
It scarcely registered; Patsy crumpled up the cellophane the cheese crisps had come in. When it did register, the announcer was going on about how they could receive the album C.O.D. She waited, not sure she had heard aright, but it turned out she had. Finally, after the announcer had repeated the address four times, she heard the voice of Hank’s father:
I was ram-bullin’ throoough
A Texas border tooown. . .
and on through a little story about a traveling man who met a woman. They fell in love but it didn’t work out and the man went on to ramble through other towns. It was not a convincing song; the rhythm was too snappy for the story. There were tones in the voice that were like tones in Hank’s, but the person Monroe Malory’s voice really reminded her of was her own father. There was whiskey in the voice, and the same falseness of tone; it brought back to her her father’s red-faced confusion at the supper table, confusion perpetually trying to wear the mask of good nature. The young attendant came in while the song was playing and Patsy got some change and walked across the street to a phone booth near a street light. It seemed to be the only phone booth in town. Hank was not at his apartment but she got him at the movie theater where he worked. He was just closing up. It was a bad connection, as if the cold north wind were blowing through the phone.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m on my way to a funeral and I just heard one of your father’s records.”
She told him about it and they both laughed a little at the incongruity of their positions in the world, he in an art theater on the cap rock, she in a spidery phone booth in Bowie. “Amazing invention, the phone,” she said.
When she told him where she was going he was silent a minute and she knew why. It was less than two hundred miles from where he was. He wanted to come and see her. She had considered it as she walked across the street, and she didn’t feel against it. She felt for it. So when he asked she said okay. He agreed to come the day after the burial.
“I’ll be at the ranch house, I guess,” she said. “I’m getting all these houses lately. You’ll have to ask someone how to get there. I don’t really remember.”
The connection got dramatically worse and they gave up on the conversation. Patsy got in the Ford and went on. For forty-five miles she drove through a townless stretch of ranch country, rolling, scarcely wooded at all, no lights except those of distant oil rigs or oil flares. The little town, when she finally came to it, was on a hill, or a ridge, so that she saw its lights miles away. Once she did get there she realized how stupid she had been not to wait until morning, for it was obvious that everyone in the tiny hotel was long since asleep. There was a light over the desk and in lieu of a bell there was a horseshoe which could be struck with a piece of iron if the management had to be summoned. Patsy felt very silly. She carried in her suitcase, in order to delay striking the horseshoe. She was tempted to try and sleep in the car, but it was too cold. Finally, reluctantly, she hit it. It made an amazingly loud sound, but the silence of the hotel, and of the town, was as complete as ever once the sound had died. She had to strike it twice more before she heard a thump upstairs. Very shortly an old man came running downstairs and crashed into the desk alarmingly hard. It startled her a great deal. In his grogginess he had accidentally built up speed and had to keep running to keep from falling. He wore a flannel robe of faded maroon and had a mop of tousled gray hair.
“Excuse me,” he said, holding his side and grimacing. “I ain’t got my wits about me. I started downstairs thinking I was in a dream, and when I woke up I was about to fall on my face. Good thing the desk was between me and the window, I’d a run right through it and cut myself up.”
“I’m sorry,” Patsy said. “It’s my fault for coming in so late.” He was obviously in pain from having hit the desk so hard, and she felt herself to be an inordinate lot of trouble, especially since the room she took only cost three dollars.
“That’s very cheap,” she said, wondering what the room would be like.
“Yeah, about the only people who sleep here are folks who break out of jail,” he said. “It’s just across the alley. You must have read your map wrong, or you wouldn’t be here. This ain’t exactly the crossroads of the world.”
“No, I came for a funeral. I’ll just be here one night.”
“Oh, Roger, I guess,” he said, still rubbing his ribs. “Knew him all my life. Been funny if I had killed myself coming down to register you, wouldn’t it? They could have buried me and Roger together, except they’d have had to bury me on credit.”
The morning took some getting up to. The old man, whose name was Holiday, had provided her with ample cover and she slept so well and warmly that when she awoke she was extremely reluctant to exchange the comfort and snugness of the bed for the grimness of everything around it. The night before the room had seemed all right. In the flat morning light it was bare and dusty and ugly, a hotel room out of Dreiser or some Midwestern novelist, chair, scratched yellow pine dresser, white gas stove which she had no way of lighting. The rug was frayed. It was a room for males, and males who didn’t intend to use it more than a night or two. The shade was only half drawn and beyond it she could see the housetops of the town, and the country beyond the town. The sky was gray, almost the color of dust, though she didn’t know if the dustiness was in the sky or on the unwashed windows. It didn’t look like a world worth getting up to, particularly since it was very cold. She solved the heat problem by skipping in and running a hot bath in the narrow tub. Fifteen minutes’ soaking left her warm enough to dress in the sober dress she had brought, and when she got downstairs Mr. Holiday, looking as if he still hadn’t his wits fully about him, told her not to worry, it was due to warm up in the afternoon.
At the little cafe where she ate breakfast they fried eggs exactly as Roger had fried them. A couple of cowboys were there, and a civil servant or two, having coffee. All looked at her curiously.
The funeral was to be in a small red brick church, with cedar trees flanking the door. Patsy sat in front, in the Ford, with the motor running and the heater on, waiting for the crowd to gather. Roger’s sister found her easily. She was as tall and angular as he had been, and looked twenty years older than he had looked, with white hair and furrows of powder on her cheeks. She and her heavy, silent bald husband, along with Patsy, constituted Roger’s family, and they sat in the front of the church. Soon the church filled with his friends. The men looked uncomfortable in their suits, and in contrast to them the two heavy young men from the funeral home, in attempting to appear suave, appeared dandified. With their pompadours and heavy self-seriousness they reminded her of the show steers she had seen at the stock show. Roger’s sister—Mrs. Daniels, she was—kept whispering details of this and that as the church filled and the organist began to play.
Perhaps because of the ushers, perhaps because of Mrs. Daniels, perhaps because she couldn’t really connect it with Roger, the funeral didn’t touch her. She was dry-eyed and not sorrowful at all. It was a generally quiet funeral. No one seemed near hysterics. Mrs. Daniels’ long narrow face was grave, but scarcely racked by emotion. Two ministers gave modest eulogies; a fat woman sang “The Old Rugged Cross”; and an aged preacher, considerably shakier than Roger had ever been, gave a short sermon on the theme of dust to dust. Patsy’s mind was on Hank. She was getting a slight case of cold feet, a slight sense that it had been a mistake to agree to let him come.
Passing out of the church, she glanced at the dead man as briefly as was decent; she didn’t want to see him. It was the only time she had ever seen him in a tie; the oddness of that was enough to cause her to turn away. At the graveyard, watching the people who stood around waiting for the casket to be lowered, it occurred to her that probably the only times Roger had worn ties was at funerals, his own or someone else’s. The tall rawfaced men stuck out of their department store suits as angularly and awkwardly as the bare mesquites around the graveyard stuck out of the wintry earth. They were all wrists and necks, but afterward, when several of them grouped together to smoke, they made a good windbreak. The sprays of flowers looked odd against the cold clods and gray mesquite grass. They were real flowers, but were so unnatural there that they looked like plastic. Mrs. Daniels introduced her to a number of the old ladies; they were so kindly that they made her feel shy, and their stockings were twisted. The graveyard stood on the northeast edge of the ridge that held the town, and the wind that sang across the rolling gray plains rustled the old ladies’ veils. In the northeast the gray clouds were breaking a little, and patches of sky could be seen. It was far from warm and Patsy was glad when they could go. She felt quite calm.
Mrs. Daniels took her to the house of a friend, where they had lunch. It was a small squat house whose living room was almost filled with ugly china dogs. The two old ladies talked about their high school romances, and Roger’s, while their husbands and Patsy ate in silence the fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans that were available in quantity.
After lunch she was introduced to Roger’s lawyer, a paunchy man who apparently owned the best suit in town. Her duty done, Mrs. Daniels and her husband departed for their home in Wilbarger County, assuring Patsy that there was everything at the ranch house that she would need. The lawyer looked her over circumspectly and came straight to the point, which was oil leases. Various companies had drilled with no success, but various others wanted to drill.
“Be funny if they were to bring in a big well now, after he lived there bone poor all his life,” he said. “That’s the way it happens half the time.”
Patsy told him her father was an oil man; she would ask him about it. She thought of Roger, and of Jim, and became depressed. Roger’s gift had shown a faith in them that they had not lived up to. She left the law office feeling slightly cheap but equipped with numerous keys and the name of a neighbor whom she could consult if anything puzzled her. On the way out of town she stopped at a filling station to find out how to get to the ranch. They told her, of course, that the owner of the ranch had just that day been buried and were very surprised when she told him she was his heir.
The warming that Mr. Holiday promised had come, after all. It was three in the afternoon when she left the town; all the morning’s clouds had blown away, the western sky was a lovely deep blue, and the sun was just beginning to drop in its short arc. It had grown so much warmer in only a few hours that she shrugged her coat off and turned down the heater in the Ford.
As soon as she got to the brown road turning off into the pastures, she felt secure about the way and began to feel happy, though it was a little strange to be spending a night in the country absolutely alone. Once she slipped off in a rut that had been made by some heavy vehicle after a rain, and the Ford bounced and squirmed the whole length of the rut before climbing out. “Atta boy,” she said, patting the dashboard. When deprived of all other companions she often talked to the Ford. In the corner of the back seat was one of Davey’s boot socks, kicked off while he was napping and overlooked, giving her a vision of him scrabbling about her mother’s house with one foot bare. A covey of bobwhites scurried across the road in front of her and she slowed so as to miss a laggard. After the grim cloudiness of the morning the bright sun was beautiful, touching the grass and the wires of the fences, the coats of the small hurrying birds, and the old fraying bark that still clung to the fence posts. A longing took her for Jim. If she had been able to get him, and he had come home, and could be driving with her, surely it would fix them and they would be all right. She regretted having called Hank at all. She should have kept on until she got Jim. It was Jim Davey needed, or would need.
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 rather 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.