“This is such an enormous waste of time,” Matt complained as he picked up a shovel from the back of the truck and started walking over to the dead cow and her calf.
The buzzards had fled when Matt and Clint approached in the pickup truck. Some circled and others, burdened with the weight of the flesh they had gorged upon, perched in the tops of the trees, waiting for their chance to resume the feast.
Bo had sent the men out to free Sally II from the barbed wire fence and bury her next to the spot where he’d put her down.
“We should just roll what’s left of the cow into the creek, or better yet, let the buzzards finish her off. Hell, even buzzards got to eat.”
“You just start digging a hole and be thankful that the soil is soft and sandy down here by the creek,” Clint replied, throwing a look of disgust in Matt’s direction.
“Why are you looking at me like that for? It’s just a dead cow. It ain’t like it’s his best friend or something like that.”
“Look up there on the hill, boy.” Clint turned toward the graveyard and pointed. “His whole family is buried up there, including his wife Mary Beth. Would you want this next to your loved ones?”
“They’re dead. It don’t really matter much. Once you’re dead, you’re dead.”
“You’ve got a lot more to learn about the living before you can make a statement like that. When you look down, all you see is a dead cow. But when the boss saw this, I’m sure it tore him up inside. He won’t forget what he saw here because this is more than just a cow to him. It’s a part of him and it’s a part of his family—even though, as you say, it’s just a cow. Now dig, and dig deep enough so it don’t get dug up by the critters.”
Within forty-five minutes they had the hole deep and wide enough for Sally II, with her calf still in womb. Clint returned from the truck with a set of posthole diggers and a pair of wire cutters. He reset the posts and repaired the wire. He then turned to Matt, who’d started to walk off towards the truck with both the shovels, and hollered, “You need to smooth this off so there is no hump in the dirt. It needs to look as if this never happened.”
“Geez, if we’re going to go through all that trouble, why don’t I just go up to the graveyard and fetch a stone for it?” Matt dropped one of the shovels, stomped back down toward the creek with the other shovel, and started flinging dirt in all directions in order to smooth off the top of the mound. Clint resisted the urge to say anything for a few moments as he observed Matt throwing his little tantrum. Once Clint had calmed himself down and gathered his thoughts, he picked up the other shovel and assisted Matt.
“Do you know what compassion means, boy?”
“Yeah, but I don’t see how compassion can apply to a dead cow.”
“The dead cow is a metaphor of how the boss’s life is going right now. He’s lost without his wife, and he only gets to see his family when they feel like coming down here to the ranch. Besides that, something else has been burning in him awful hard. The fire in his belly is so bad he can’t find much comfort in anything he does. Seeing this cow struggle and suffer like it did probably felt like a red-hot poker thrust in him.
“If you were here on time, you would have seen what I saw in his eyes when he set off on Whisky to find Sally II and her new calf. He was a young cowboy again, sitting tall and proud in the saddle, gone off to fetch back a shiny new calf. It was the first time I’ve seen him that happy in a long, long time. I poured myself a cup of coffee and made my way over to the edge of the bridge in order to see firsthand the look on his face when he crossed the bridge with a pretty new calf slung across the front of his saddle. And that’s when I heard it.” Clint became quiet as he bent down and picked up the remainder of the tools and started toward the truck.
“Heard what?” Matt asked as he followed close behind Clint. Clint, however, did not speak until he was sitting in the truck and Matt had closed the door on his side.
“The sound of his pistol. It meant only one thing, and I knew it right away. That’s why I returned to my office and waited.”
For the first time, Matt was quiet, as if he were taking it all in and it was starting to make sense to him.
“I didn’t hear a pistol.”
“That’s because you weren’t listening, just like you’re not listening now.”