In Ecstasy

The pink polish is chipped on the sixteen-year-old girl’s fingernails, and dried blood is caked around the cuticles: she grasps the scrotum gently and pulls it taut and with a scalpel cuts off the tufted base and throws it down, reaches deep into the sac to find the testicular cords, jerks them loose, and drops the testes into the clouded water of a gallon jar holding another three dozen. The whole operation is nearly bloodless. Cheryl will cut calves but she refuses to brand them—that she leaves to the others. In my nostrils is the smell of burnt Hereford hair, an odor that takes getting accustomed to, and white smoke from the electric branding iron swirls up for a few moments, then blows clear; on the little bull’s haunch is a flying , the raw skin shining brown like new harness leather. Linda leans and thrusts a hypodermic needle into the haunch.

Through all of this the four-month-old bull has lain silent, but when Arlene puts the electric iron to its skull to burn off the buttons that would grow into horns, and smoke swirls again, the animal bawls keenly. Then it’s all over, and the calf table—a hinged chute that clamps and lays out the Hereford—swings back upright and opens, and the little fellow shoots across the corral and looks around in confusion, and somebody calls out in falsetto, Welcome to steerdom! The five women move the next animal toward the calf table, but this one is recalcitrant, and Jane says, Come on, sugar, and it takes a step or two and then throws its heavy little skull against Cheryl’s head, and she drops to the dust, and it’s a few minutes before she can continue. When she does there is no vengeance in her work. Throughout the hot June morning none of the all-woman crew has cussed or kicked the animals. If you’ve ever watched men castrating, branding, dehorning, and inoculating cattle, you know it just isn’t done this way.

Jane Beedle Roger owns these calves and the land they graze on; she is thirty-five, dark blond, about a thumb’s length taller than five feet, and she often does things the way they aren’t done. Consider her corral attire: a pink pith helmet, high-top pink sneakers, an emblazoned T-shirt, WE’RE OUT TO WIN OUR SPURS. Earlier she said seriously to me, My views aren’t always in tune in here, so I keep them turned down. While she usually hires only women to work cattle, she does employ one man to help with her two hundred acres of feeder crops, but now that the last little bull has been cut I’m the only intact male in six miles, and one of the women has just flashed the knife toward where I sit watching above the calf table and says, Next? and another says, Forget it—he’s a canner, meaning an animal too old to bring a good price, the kind Roger believes goes into most franchise burgers, and somebody says, Couldn’t even get a Little Mac out of him.

Jane Roger has awakened feminism in her employees as Linda Thurston helped awaken hers, and this morning she said, Agricultural knowledge doesn’t pass on a Y chromosome—it’s learned behavior, and if a cowboy can learn to work cattle, anybody can. I mean, his idea is, “If it don’t fit, get a goddamn hammer.” When a woman is around animals, her nurturing instinct comes out. Jane knows that any cowboy who didn’t scorn such talk would be ridiculed, and she also knows that, in spite of her early success, men here still say an all-woman operation can’t last long; her response is to quote native son William Allen White: My advice to the Women’s Clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias. She raises only a little of the first and none of the other, but she does raise three hundred crossbred Herefords. She can see no reason for rodeos that only perpetuate adolescent male myths about cowboys and encourage a moronic masculine desire for dominance over dumb animals: Some of these guys are so bright they can’t even see when they’re running a pasture calf to death.

When the cattle are again on the grass, we climb into her Jeep, and she hands me the jar of ballocks rolling sluggishly in the thick water as we bounce back to the ranch, where she will clean the little creamy ovoids, heavily veined with purple and looking like nothing so much as nighthawk eggs, and to her friends she will dole them out like Godiva chocolates. As for herself, she’s never eaten one.

I’ve known Jane for a year or so, occasionally seeing her along the desolate roads near her pastures in the southeast part of the county, but it was only a couple of weeks ago that I went to her home in Bazaar after I heard her crew was going to cut and brand. That evening we stood and talked on her back porch, and she said abruptly, Do you eat red meat? and I thought she was setting me up as she likes to do, and I said, if it’s brown, and she said, I just got some steaks today. We went inside and she began fixing two mail-order strips. Jane doesn’t eat her own animals; about that she said, Inconsistency is just great, and she put the cuts on the grill and said, I grew up eating beef twice a day. Now maybe it’s once a week. Jane Roger’s six-thousand-acre Homestead Ranch, a third of which she leases for transient grazing, goes mostly to her year-round cow and calf operation where she allows eight acres to each animal, twice the transient ratio.

She grew up in Cottonwood Falls. Her father, Evan, a Yale graduate in English literature, is an heir to one of the big ranching operations in the state, a place partly comprising land bought from the New York Rockefellers by her great-uncle, the son of a Kansas immigrant from Connecticut in 1883 who became wealthy in banking and realty speculation. On that ranch in the Gypsum Hills of southwest Kansas, Jane and her sisters used to spend summers working cattle. Her mother is a native countian and a descendant of the Norton Ranch family. When Jane went off to the first of several colleges, she vowed never to return to Kansas; she studied some religion but never graduated, although she did earn her pilot’s license. At a tiny Nazarene college in Idaho she realized the Flint Hills still held her even after eight years, and a novel gave her the final urging: Evan challenged me to read Atlas Shrugged, so I did, and Dagny Taggart became my mentor. I thought if she could run a railroad and succeed while playing by men’s rules, I could operate some outfit. She woke up in me the importance of ethics in business and the dangers of compromise. So I came home to run my railroad, which turned out to be a ranch, and I’ve been motivated—like Dagny—by anger at people saying, “You can’t.”

Evan Koger saw several reasons for not buying Chase pastureland at more than the fifty dollars an acre he had last paid years earlier, and he refused to help Jane buy back land once in her mother’s family. She said to me, I figured it was better to buy it and lose it than never to try. Evan antagonized me to success. He’d say, “fane, you can’t do it. There are things you just can’t do.” But I knew that, because we’re not as strong as men, we don’t have to be as dumb, so instead of muscle we use a come-along to pull a calf from the uterus, or we get a front-end loader to move a chute. Gears and ratchets and hydraulics are great equalizers. The upshot of all this was that, with my sister Kay, I committed to a quaiter-of-a-million-dollar debt to the Federal Land Bank. I was twenty-five then. Evan gave some seed stock. Later I bought out Kay’s interest—she and her husband run a ranch up at Hymer. After my grandmother died I bought her home, this house, and remodeled it a little, and now I’ve reassembled a lot of family land. When I’d proved a few things—had succeeded almost in spite of Evan—then he contributed some more land. I’ve taken a rancher’s short course at Kansas State—my family calls it a short rancher’s course—and I’ve attended a stockmen’s school in Texas, and I read. Still, people here think I’ve had it all handed to me. They say Evan Koger was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but his kids have left him with a plastic fork.

She set out the steaks and rice and broccoli, and I said that I’d heard she had one of the biggest ranches in Chase among those who run their own cattle, and she said, somewhat absently, I suppose, and then, People here sit around and compare how poor they are, see who’s the worst off. I mean, being successful in this county is suicide. Nobody wants you to succeed. People get together and tear you down, and that used to bother me until I realized it wasn’t just me they tore down—I saw that, if they could chew me up and spit me out as a potential failure or whatever, they wouldn’t even pause before going on to the next person. They’ll get around to you too. I just don’t understand it: they talk about economic development in Chase and at the same time they don’t want anybody to achieve anything.

I said someone had told me that in spite of all the low-income families here, there were a dozen countians worth more than a million dollars out of a population of only about three thousand, and she nodded and said, But this is still a great county for not taking risks and not having a good time. Before my parents moved away, they belonged to the Over Forty Club, and all they did was have good times. There’s nothing like that around now. A lot of these people don’t know what they have because they’ve always lived here, and it’s the only world they know so it looks typical and ordinary. That’s sad.

Later she would say, Last year a colt was born in the early morning, and I was there with it. That afternoon I was in New York, on Broadway, buying a ticket for The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show. I was standing in line with trash blowing around, bag ladies limping by, everything shoulder to shoulder, and I was thinking of that wet colt in Chase County, Kansas, and I felt I knew how different this place is and what it’s worth. I love New York, and one of the reasons I love it is that it shows me what I have in this county.

To the end of helping city people explore the tallgrass country and understand where their Whoppers and tenderloins come from, for several weeks each year Jane opens the Homestead to a few women; for sixty dollars a day, a visitor can eat and sleep in the old south ranch house on Thurman Creek and loaf about the prairie, or she can join the crew and help work cattle, even down to castration. Jane said: I like people, but I live where there aren’t many, and I want to share some of this prairie—a few people at a time. But to get outsiders to see the beauty, they have to ease back and stay for a while. This place comes to you slowly—or maybe we come slowly to it. I want women to see the reality of my operation, and, if they’re not afraid, they can watch a pregnancy check or watch the electro-ejaculator go up the bull’s rectum, and they can help measure testicles to determine if he’s fit to service my cows. People should understand at this basic level what has to happen to put a burger in their mouths. The women who come in here are great. They ask all the questions you hope nobody will ever ask, like “How do you make silage?” They don’t mean, how do you cut and pack it—they want to know how caramelization works. They want to know about drugs and chemical enhancements in my beef, and I tell them I use antibiotics only by injection. They’re necessary to inoculate against pinkeye and influenza, and I put antibiotics into cattle feed only during the three weeks of stress following weaning. Hormones I don’t use at all, and no ear implants. I tell these women they should get after the cattle industry because too much shit goes into beef—not nearly as much, of course, as goes into hogs. If it was feasible now, I’d raise only natural beef. I’d feel better about organic meat, but ranchers’ traditions and consumers’ unwillingness to pay a few cents more makes it difficult. When the Europeans announced they wouldn’t buy American beef because of possible dangers to humans from animals laced with hormones and drugs, I cheered. I mean, when will we wake up?

After we finished the meal and pushed our chairs from the table, she said, There’s no public access in the Flint Hills worth talking about so my “internships”—the real name is Prairie Women Adventures—help out, and I have some control over who explores my land. I think a private response like this is better than the prairie park, even if I can only take five or six people a week.

I said, you’re an assault-rifle radical until the park comes up, and then you turn into a shoot-that-clock reactionary, and she said again, Inconsistency is just great. You know that my grandmother was one of the leading park opponents, but I’ve never been opposed to maintaining grassland, although I am against overrunning the place. You’ve got two million acres in Yellowstone, and now they’re moving out bears instead of Winnebagos—that’s mismanagement I don’t want to see happen here. She was warming up, and what she took to be my view on issues may have altered her words somewhat. I like Aldo Leopold’s idea of stewardship: just because the recorder of deeds says the land is mine doesn’t really make it mine, but in this county I’d rather admit I’m a feminist than an environmentalist. People tolerate me—they even expect me to be a feminist, but being an environmentalist is just not an acceptable mode of behavior, although one day ranchers and conservationists are going to be on the same side. Already we both agree that the place can’t be opened to Winnebagos or tourist strips and still survive.

For the third time the phone rang, and for the second time she said, No, he’s here, and when she sat again, she said, I’ve learned that I can’t get the land to do what I want it to do. Mostly I have to follow what it wants to do, so it’s my responsibility to learn how the prairie lives. If the land wants fire, I give it a match. I’m a manager, that’s all, and basically what I am is a bug manager—what I’m really interested in is my cows’ digestion, and that’s a result of microorganisms in soil and water and stomachs. Basically, this is a bug ranch. Don’t thank a rancher for your steak, thank bugs.

I leaned toward the floor and said, thank you one and all, and she groaned and with her pink sneaker kicked my chair. She said, Look: one day I’m going to write an essay called “Maggots and Rattlesnakes,” and the idea will be that we’re all in this together, even the things we may not like. Maggots are an integral part of my world where I have dead animals and disease. I need all kinds of decay—my business depends on it. My crop is really grass, and cattle are just the means to harvest and package it.

I said that not everyone here saw things that way, and, especially, the absentee landlords did not seem to act as stewards, and Jane said, The bad thing about absentee ownership is the system of payments where the managing cowhand receives a check from the cattle owner and then the cowhand pays the landlord. We need to reroute it so that the cattle owner pays the landlord, who will inspect the pastures to protect her investment, and then she’ll pay the cowhand. The way it is now, in the short term, overgrazing gives more dollars to managers and cattle owners.

I asked whether absentee owners didn’t often treat their land like old-time bonds where all the investor did was clip a coupon and send it in, and she said, It’s hard to care about what you don’t see. A couple of years ago I wanted to double absentee owners’ taxes, which would have included Evan, and the county treasurer said she’d go along if I could convince my father. Well, goodbye to that idea. Jane sat quietly for a while, I picked up the plates, and she said, If anyone anywhere should be environmentalists, all of us here should: if we lose the land’s productivity, we’ve lost our hope of living on here.

Out along the near tracks the Santa Fe horned and dieseled through Bazaar, its noisy regularity a kind of Big Ben to the hamlet. She said, Ask one last question and then go home, and I asked what was so special about the Flint Hills. Picking and handling her words carefully as if they were newborn, taking her time, she said, These hills are so everlasting. I get bored with the work sometimes but never the place. But you need an excuse to stay on, and ranching is one we all understand. And a moment later: I’ve come to see that if I sit still, things and people will come here. Even canners like you, and she was quiet and then said, Maybe that’s the religion I left Kansas to find. There was a silence, and when I thought it safe, I said, and then you tapped the heels of your ruby slippers three times, and she let fly a pink sneaker, and she said quietly, Nevertheless.

After I was out the door and in the cool and dewed night, a chuck-will’s-widow calling from a wooded slope, I noticed for the first time her Jeep license-plate letters: IMNXTC.