Pale Harvest. Braden Hepner
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and the low, unheard mumble of the local news as a third companion. The old woman had not appeared from her bedroom. Blair left and came out with her on his arm. He guided her gently to the table like she was made of blown glass and set dry toast, bacon, and scrambled eggs in front of her. Her wiry hair was matted in some spots and stuck up crazily in others, like a play doll whose specialty was a stiff workable thatch on its pate.
—Do you need me to feed you dear, er… said Blair.
She mumbled something, her lower lip sagging to reveal a collection of narrow, crooked teeth, some twisted, some leaning against another, all yellow and worn, not unlike the teeth of the aging horse they kept. She picked up the fork fist-over and leaned above the eggs. Jack watched her. Her hand trembled so that her first effort at bringing eggs up failed when they fell off the fork and it reached her mouth empty. She did this twice more, slurring words neither man could make out. Blair looked at Jack with a slight smile and a twinkle in his eye, his mouth full, his jaw working. The old woman set her fork down and her fingers descended like spider legs onto the plate and picked up a mess of eggs and brought it to her mouth. She blinked her milky eyes as she chewed. One of them ran. Jack stopped watching her and watched Blair instead, who ate steadily and shared his attention between his wife and Jack’s own reaction to the spectacle. She ate her eggs, feeling out the last curds with her fingers, and then ate the toast in methodical bites and took small sips of milk. In all she tried to say she hadn’t spoken a clear word and when she finished she sat in silence with her head bowed in fatigue.
Jack gathered the dishes to the sink and climbed into the tiny shower in the wash room and bumped his raw elbows as he cleaned himself, some wounds opening again and bleeding a thinned pink onto the floor. Since he did not have what it took to dress his wounds he put on clothes and searched for his good boots. The scrapes had scabbed over and felt tight and they burned until he was nearly comfortable with it. When he passed the living room the old woman was on the couch in her nightgown. Blair had put Matlock in the VCR and she sat listening to it, perhaps recalling the scenes from memory.
It was past eight o’clock by the time he came to the three-wheeler. He could see deep tracks in the hay where Blair and Elmer had driven through, evidence of their laziness, and Elmer’s long Chevrolet parked across the field beneath the big tree. The machine started on the third kick and he killed the engine and sat on the seat awhile looking toward the McKellar house. He drove his truck to the barn to refill the dented milk pail and then returned to the McKellar house and got out with his heartbeat filling his ears. There was no answer at the front door. He walked toward the back yard and found no one there. He knocked on the door, called out. Then he entered the house, called again, and walked into the kitchen, his boots sounding heavily on the floor. He put the milk in the refrigerator. After taking a quick look around, feeling what seemed some kind of reverence for the place, he left.
She was blue water in a yellow land. In the days that followed, she flavored his life. He waited for those times he saw her outside her house, or walking the lane, stepping off into the wild barley that brushed her thighs with heavy heads as he passed. And when he touched a cow, ready to drain the milk from her swollen udder, he touched her more gently, his reckless mind insisting that somehow Rebekah could be connected to this action.
HE WATCHED THE OLD WOMAN EXPIRE IN INCREMENTS. It was impossible to say what went on when he left the house to the two of them, but he reasoned that there might be a side to his grandfather he’d never seen, that such a thing must have been there in the beginning even if it had been tempered or diluted by the years. Blair had started writing Jack’s paychecks himself in a chaotic back-slanting scrawl. When Jack came upon the aged two together in the living room watching Matlock, her favorite show, or outside on lawn chairs under the tree, or at the kitchen table, Blair serving spoonfuls of soft food into her mouth, it seemed the old man was letting her down slowly to the grave. It was strange to lend any pity to a man who seemed indestructible and who would have none of it outright, so he didn’t, but he wondered what toll her death would take on him. This woman was a zombie and as unsightly, the grandmother he’d known all but gone in spirit and the flesh only a failing receptacle waiting to be shed. Her imminent passing meant she would be relieved of her pain here, of her muddled mind and the stupor of her fading mortal existence, but it also meant that the matters of the farm would be decided. He did not know where his heart was on the matter, how much or how little he wanted what seemed to be coming his way. But he had waited and he felt ready for whatever would come. His father had said a man could only fashion his fate with what he was given, and fashion he must, but so far it seemed he had not been given much with which to work.
Early twilight and he drove the loader tractor to the bull pens carrying a one ton bale of hay on the forks. As far back as he could remember they had kept rodeo bulls, incredible beasts even in decline, like stoic gods when dormant, like the demiurge when in the violent throes for which they’d been bred. They were fed by a round metal feeder at the edge of their pen. He dropped the bale into it and cut and pulled the baling twine from around it. Seth McQuarters came across the field from his house and the two leaned on the plank fence and watched the big animals eat. Seth was of medium height with a slight wiry body muscled from a life of farm work. Dirty blond locks of hair curled from beneath his Peterbilt ball cap around his ears and his hair in the back was a little longer than the rest, a thick pad bulging from the band of his hat. His close-set eyes moved over the herd. The muscles of the bulls moved like hard rolls of earth beneath their hides. They looked agile, despite their size. Seth wrestled a hard pack of Reds from the pocket of his jeans, and throwing a glance at his house he wiggled them back in and took out instead a can of Copenhagen and plugged his lip. He held it out in offering and Jack took a pinch and worked it down with his tongue between gum and cheek, minty, rank, and comforting. He told him the can would leave a ring on the pocket and expose his new habit to his mother and Seth said to hell with the frazzled woman, he didn’t care. Jack told him about the wreck, about Rebekah, and they spat dark streams into the dust and the evening was wide all around them. Darkness and coolness replaced light and heat and from where they stood, fields of crops spread to the foothills in one direction and toward the smoldering horizon in the other. It was a gentle night, and it felt right to be leaning on this fence, engaged in gentle vice, examining these bulls from a distance.
—Which ones can I ride? said Seth.
—Any you can get in the chute, except the one that killed that guy in Evanston. The old man said he’d need to talk to your dad first.
—No worries. He used to ride broncs.
—Bronc riders are different.
—I already talked to him about it. My mom forbid it, but she ain’t approved of a thing I done since I got weaned off her nipple.
—These bulls are dangerous.
—I know it.
Seth tilted his head down in thought. It was only a matter of time with these bulls, a law of probability. Who did Jack know who had ridden bulls for a time and didn’t still carry the visible proof in a limp or a vulgar scar or a wandering focus? He felt dread curdle like old milk in his stomach and fear coursed slowly through his veins. He admitted that he was afraid. It wasn’t fear as long as they were stock in the pen, but to agitate them, to provoke them and pretend even for a few seconds to dominate them was more, and the consequences could be grim. He guessed that the fear he felt now was similar to when he first started fighting in high school. Once he was hit, the fear left and there was only the thrill of the fight and an abundance of violent energy to be dispensed. It seemed a similar purity that drove Seth, some design of courage, but it wasn’t all courage. It took a measure of guts to get on a bull, but also a measure of willful ignorance, and a good amount of recklessness, and this became Seth’s brand of originality.
Seth leaned his body against the fence, his arms folded on the top rail and his chin resting on them.
—That one there, he said, and spat into the dirt of the pen. You see the brown one with the dark neck? He’s looking at us now.
The bull’s bleary eye regarded them indifferently as he chewed