The cattle looked so fine scattered out on the grass and the springs were flowing at such a good rate, that Joe, out of pride, gave Lureen a tour, driving through the pastures in the truck and noting the atmosphere of renewed prosperity. She peered peakedly out at the ranch, her face low in the window of the truck.
“How much are they going to make us?” Lureen wanted to know.
“We’ll find out when we get to the sale yard.”
“But they always used to tell me ahead of time. I could just call that nice Mr. Overstreet and he’d tell me.”
“That was a lease, Lureen. We didn’t own the cattle. And Mr. Overstreet isn’t what you think he is.”
“I just don’t know,” she said. They drove on past the sheep-herders’ monument to the low breaks that looked off toward the Crazies. Some cattle were brushed up in the midday and a coyote angled away from them, stopping every few yards to look back. The truck labored in first gear and Lureen held on to her seat with both hands. There were two short-eared owls coursing over the sagebrush for mice and one distant hill had the outline of a band of antelope serrated on its crest. What am I saying by this, Joe wondered. That it is mine? The owls curved on around toward the truck, their pale, flat faces cupped toward the ground. Their wings beat steadily and they moved at the speed of a man walking.
“I could have done without this,” said Lureen. “Your father pushed me around when he put it in my hands. In a way, I never wanted it. I worked all my life. I didn’t want to be pushed around. Then Smitty had so much bad luck. The war hurt him. The war all but killed Smitty. And I had to help him, more than I could have without this.”
“Does Smitty realize the war is over?”
“I really couldn’t say.”
“What does he want, Aunt Lureen?”
She thought. She looked out through the windshield at the country Joe liked so much. The country seemed to wither as she looked at it, the springs stopping and the steady wind carrying the life out of everything.
“I think Smitty would prefer to be somewhere where he could be warmer. He thinks a lot about falling on the ice.”
That would be about right, Joe thought.
“Do you see how fat those yearlings look?” he asked.
She looked blank. Fat cattle were the local religion. They were the glow, the index of this place. If one didn’t care about fat cattle, this was not the place to be. It should not have been necessary to find words for it. It was annoying to find yourself trying to communicate the glow of a particular country to someone with a blank look on her face.
Lureen kept looking out the window and trying to be interested. She put a finger to her cheek when they passed a few yearlings standing alongside the road and said, “Mmm!” like someone tasting a candy bar in a commercial.
When he got back from dropping Lureen off, a bundle of steel posts and barbed wire in the back, Astrid was down alongside the creek looking into a pool. “I can see the fish!” she called. Joe parked and walked down beside her. They sat on a sun-warmed boulder. “This is pretty nice,” Astrid said. “The birds shoot back and forth across the creek. It’s like there are two bird countries and they visit each other. There’s also one that walks down the bank and disappears under water. Am I hallucinating?”
“It’s a dipper.”
“Well, no one lives quite like the dipper. Give me a hug.”
Joe squeezed her. She slid down from the rock and stood embracing him, her face turned sideways on his chest. She held him that way for a moment then pulled her dress over her hips and pressed against him. “Here?” he said.
“I think so,” she said. As they made love, he felt with his fingertips where the warm granite was pressed against her flesh. Later they dressed and followed the stream up for a couple of miles. There were teal in the backwaters and they saw a young mink darting in and out of the exposed cottonwood roots along the bank. Joe told Astrid what it was and she wanted to know how many it took to make a coat.
“Have you noticed something?” Astrid asked.
“What?”
“I’m still here.”
“I did notice that!”
The Butterfields down the road past the Overstreets had a siege of dust emphysema go through their calves, and everyone chipped in to doctor. Joe helped move cattle down the alley to the chute, and afterward he spent a few hours hunting arrowheads. Joe remembered the time he fell down a hole, knocked himself in the head, and dreamed that he was an Indian attacking his own home. When he looked for arrowheads, it was with a ticklish feeling that he was searching for part of his own earlier life. He stopped at eighty-year-old Alvie Butterfield’s little house to ask permission to hunt in his recently spaded-up garden. Alvie’s garden happened to be a camp where Indians had dropped projectiles from Folsom points all the way up to Winchester cartridges from the Victorian age, continuous occupancy for thousands of years. It was just a garden to Alvie, who was getting ready to join those warriors in what the Indians called “the other side camp.” Standing reedily in a baseball cap, Alvie Butterfield waited for the end.
“I left ’em all for you,” said Alvie.
“Attaboy.”
“You got a TV?”
“Yes, I do,” said Joe.
“What’s it supposed to do?”
“Rain by Wednesday.”
“Good.”
“You need anything, Alvie?”
“Not really, no.”
Joe went out to Alvie’s garden spot. There were the weed-less hand-spaded rows. There were the curves of earth where the shovel had left them in the ancient camp. Many a rare plan was laid here. The new sun was sucking the moisture from around the eloquent flints. Joe began to walk the rows like a stoop worker at a lettuce farm. Each row unraveled beneath his eyes slowly, the approximate straight lines of Alvie’s shovel converted to amazing canyons, the clay banding the loam wherever it fell, numerous rocks. Joe had never much cared for rocks. They were merely the increasingly magnifying context of what man had not made. Too many rocks were annoying. Joe had been dutiful about going around with a field geology guide but it had not taken. The rocks and soil were just the old land as received. His mind filled with their tumbled shapes as he made his slow way up and down the rows with intermittent hopes over stones that had accidentally split. A circle of warmth expanded between his shoulders. Alvie’s radio played from afar. A band of birds went through the air like a cluster of buckshot. He found places where Alvie in his weariness had rested on the shovel, the blade penetrating without lifting. For a long time, Joe felt himself to be in a place in the earth where no one had ever lived; a few flakes of brighter, prizeable stone like a thin pulse began to turn up and suddenly life surged: an arrowhead. Joe picked it up and blew the grains of dirt off of it, a bird point, notched, shaped, a little weight in the palm, something he wanted to close his hand around to feel the life in it. He was as possessive as the man who had lost it. It was just a moment, as if they could feel each other through the stone.
Then some of Joe’s cattle got through the fence and traveled a couple of miles to the bottom of a big coulee where they loafed in the ruins of an old homestead. Joe tried to bring them back but ended up having to get Freddy Mathias and one of the Lovells’ high school kids to help him. It made a nice day horseback, whooping and riding through the rough country, the yearlings running erratically in front of them with their tails straight up in alarm. The southern migration of birds of prey had begun and there was an archival assortment of hawks on the crooked cedar posts. A golden eagle towered over the ranch, slipping from lift to lift till he went through the roof of heaven. The high school boy took a header at a gallop, a burst of dust; the tough kid scrambled to run down his horse and remount. Freddy went past Joe at a conservative trot and, when he saw the youngster snatch up his horse, said, “Oh, to be young again!”