Free The Cadence of Grass by Thomas Mcguane Page B

vacation, shouldn’t she and Natalie simply admire her readiness? And be happy when she didn’t come home in the ship’s refrigerator?
    “Mother, I never realized you were interested in Alaska.”
    “Well, I haven’t been
un
interested in Alaska.”
    “But I don’t see any books or any—”
    “As I said, it’s not an abiding interest,” Alice said patiently.
    “Why not the Caribbean is I guess what I’m trying to say?”
    “Can’t you just picture those types?”
    “It’s practically winter up there. This doesn’t seem like the time of year to go that far north. Anyway, my thought would be to have some purpose in mind.”
    “For what?”
    “For the
cruise
.”
    “Darling, I would appreciate it if you addressed me less sharply. I
do
have a purpose in mind, and that is to
collect
myself.”
    “Which
I
say could be done more comfortably in the Caribbean.”
    “Evelyn, I don’t
wish
to go to the Caribbean. I don’t
wish
to be cheek by jowl with the characters who are drawn to beaches and loud clothes, and that music which is just beating on things.”
    “And what about people who’re
drawn
to Alaska, in their plaid shirts and down-filled whatever. . . .” Evelyn was too exercised to go on.
    Her mother gazed at her in long affectionate thought. She smiled. “Are you asking if I am hoping to meet someone?”
    “I’m not ruling it out.”
    “Evelyn, I don’t like it when you girls are devious. And no, that is not why I’m going. I’m very fragile just now, and I need a change. If I should find myself shipboard with excitable, harmless people or ninnies, I would be in frightening distress.”
    “I understand.”
    “You
don’t
understand. I have spent forty years under a certain roof.”
    “Perfectly aware of the outer world,” said Evelyn, meaning to speak volumes with this suggestion whose impact was not easily seen.
    “Perhaps.”
    Upstairs, the piles of Alice Whitelaw’s clothing had seemed like the breastworks of a fort.
     
    Evelyn rode up on a crippled bull standing out in a field of frost-killed mule’s ear and mullein, one swollen foot tipped up behind.
    They’d left Bill’s house early after a coyote breakfast, which Bill defined as “a piss and a look around.” She remembered that before leaving he’d stood staring at his woodpile in thought, then gone back inside for some vet supplies he put in the saddlebags on his bay gelding. “That motley-face bull’s got foul foot,” she told him, and together they went back to the bull. Bill took down his lariat, moved his cigarette from the corner of his mouth to the front, cracked a kitchen match into flame with a thumbnail, cupped it around the tip, took a deep inhale of smoke and roped the bull. After tightening his loop, he let the lariat hang while Evelyn swung her rope and threw a trapping loop in front of the bull’s back legs. Bill winked through the smoke in approval, wrapped his lariat around the saddle horn and rode off slowly, rope tightening until it pulled the bull forward and his back feet tripped Evelyn’s loop and he was roped. Bill rode forward, looking over his shoulder as the bull slowly toppled onto its side. While his horse kept the rope tight, he half-hitched his lariat on the horn and dismounted; the bull watched his approach with a rolling white eye, slammed its head on the ground and gave up.
    Bill knelt and touched the swollen foot, feeling around the joint. “Not quite to the tendon sheath,” he said, “but the toes’s all swollen apart.” He held the syringe up to the sky and filled it from a short white jug. “Poor fella,” he said, “abandoned like bones at a barbecue.”
    “Is that LA200?”
    “Nope, plain ole oxytetracycline. Don’t treat these and it infects a whole pasture. Red Wolf wouldn’t like that.” He swept the flies from the indentation along the spine and gave the bull his injection in the hip. “We’re gonna have to do this several times,” he said. “Funny deal, dry