As Featured in Under the Wing by O.G. Rose
Under the Wing
A Short Story
2015
The hymns of the cows rose over the Johnson grass but not past the fences, as if those loose and tangled barbed wires the fawns slid under withstood the test of time. My oldest, Stone, paced behind the herd, guiding them toward the new grass in the front field through the blue gate ahead, while my grandson David walked behind my legs clenching the long blue skirt Jim liked to see decorating my hips. Jim thought women should be walking art even when they were out herding, and I didn’t want him sitting on a cloud thinking it was a funeral. I imagined my husband never telling God that my hair turning white at forty was a curse — as long as I wore it in a ponytail down my spine, that smashed soul had to be happy. I pushed David out.
“Cows won’t hurt you.” I tapped his shoulder. David was too young to know that his fate was our fate, that his life was the only line our blood still ran in, but he sensed it: all of us were born sensing something pushing us out. “Get old, and then they’ll think there’s hurt in you to fear.”
“They’ll chase me,” David said. “Along the fence, Memaw, they’ll chase me.”
“Then don’t move,” I said. “And you know it’s Mary-Rose, boy. No family down here working.”
Red dusk shimmered up the tips of the tree-line — won’t no time for feeling close — our lives were races against the sun. Spare the rod, spoil the child, so best to be the rod and make David know our lives were running. David looked at the cows and back at me, his black hair dust-kissed, and asked for guidance. The phone pressed Mary-Rose’s black hair into her ear as she waited for her Daddy down in Florida to speak. He had just been told that his daughter might stay in Virginia on a farm. She married last night, under the Bradford pear trees, but she told her Daddy that, with his blessing, she might elope tomorrow. He always said eloping was fine, that you knew when you knew.
“Whatever happened to the boy who rode bikes with you when you were young?” her Daddy asked.
“He’s gone, Daddy.”
Out flew what lived inside of him. “When you were eight, you said you’d live in a house next to ours, that our grandchildren would play in the same yard you played make-believe with that boy, always remembering what mattered.”
“What should I do?” David asked again in that voice which belonged to boys who were twelve but needed to be twenty: quick and loud. I rubbed my forehead to smooth out the costs of sipping bourbon, the stirrings.
“Stay behind,” I said. “Watch your father and keep them moving.” This won’t the age of boys women at fifty were intended by God to bear, but Stone went and wed a woman who didn’t know the right time to die. “If any turn on you, you stand in front and send them right. Mommas swerve from whatever is in front. Don’t let them stop, and hell if you let them think.”
David asked about cows and anger. From the barn, Mary-Rose saw Jim manning the gate and closing it fast when a calve tried to squeeze out; he’d open it for heifers to let pass. The women and children needed to be separated: it was time for worming and castration. A bull was behind Jim in the field — it must have escaped the lot in hunger for breeding — charging. Mary-Rose screamed. He looked at her.
I yanked the bandana off my forehead and soaked up the sweat under the neckline of my white collared shirt. “Don’t be asking if they’re hell.” I said, not needing to see what was stirred. I rolled down my long sleeves and felt a tick crawling near the top of my boot. With a small bite, the bastard could make a farmer allergic to beef — a laughing stock — but being a farmer took walking through the grass. I swear, you could spend life standing straight just to get bent over. And at fifty too — hell couldn’t ticks respect elders? Fifty when people could call you old, but it won’t right: death felt a state over even if after the next bowl of grits it slipped in through the window. My skin was more red than wrinkled, and certainly won’t pale like when I felt kicks in my stomach and the doctor strolled into the emergency room. Jim was ground.
In a marching line on the far edge of the herd, field-dust dancing with the light, four steers snorted close to David and me. I stopped walking and crossed my arms over my breasts, anger on my face — how God made it to rest. A steer turned out, and David opened his legs and arms wide and side-stepped left. Steer could have stomped right over my grandson, but David tried his heart out, fighting fear and proving he won’t spoiled. Dying never good, but no life outside of fighting. David kept scuffling and pleading for reasonability. “Why don’t the neighbors come?!”
“They only said they’d come over your Poppa’s grave,” I answered. I wore black when Rustburg joined together and said absolutely anything we needed was on the table. Jim hated black, but I couldn’t look like a whore ready to move on. Jim was a town hero — star quarterback leading us to a State championship before the kicker missed a goal — and a lot of lovers tried to box me in and call me home. Men called sobbing who knew the worth of acres near a growing college, friends who Jim said I could marry if something ever happened to him. Death could part somebody else. “What did I tell you about trusting people near dying?”
I saw David’s chest stiffen and hold in what he felt like saying, and I felt good about raising him. Insects chirped. Boys from dead wombs either became men by twelve or died fifty years later the same age as when their mothers left them. I started walking again when I saw the antics of my grandson paying off: cattle turned and kept moving in the direction of the herd.
“You’re doing fine,” I said. “I’ll keep them right if they come at me.”
This was when never lying paid off. When the boy couldn’t tie the barn roof down with the right knots, I told him he was an insult to creation; when he tried skinning squirrels and put in too much flour for the gravy, I told him the fumes of his cooking knocked out buzzards. So he looked at me, and he smiled.
“You like it, Mary-Rose?” David asked. I broke off a straw and tied it into a knot like a little girl and looked up at my oldest. Stone was on the other side of the herd near the tarp-roofed barn and the red gate leading out toward the house, moving the heard through the blue gate in the fence dividing the main and front fields. The gold sunset sat on Stone’s shoulders, child-like, kissing, August dry on his lips. “Is that yours?”
I laughed. “Herding cattle even miles from a small city?” Jim was in the ground, and though I knew he didn’t have patience for barns held together by galvanized steel frames, we couldn’t afford to replace the wood boards. “Hell.” Jim had to understand wood barns were smaller and cost more, and he could see from the dirt or heaven the wall of round bales and yellow vats and the cow chute we fit inside. Stone’s voice cut in.
“David!” my oldest yelled. The gate swung then stuck on a post; Jim was caught between the metal and the bull’s head. His skin tried escaping and squeezing between the bars. “Run up and shut the blue gate when they’re through!”
“I chose you,” Mary-Rose said. This was where my blood was flames, and no other light worked in the dark. “Do you understand? I chose you.”
“Yes!” David started running. I stopped and crossed my arms, watching, taking breaths after the stirring Stone caused. Boy already knew it would be up to him to keep the farm going and his family alive — was always acting like he was up for the task to get things done and make me feel better. I looked up and saw Stone guiding the cattle into the field sectioned off from the main plains where we’d separate the calves out. Our days were working days, so finishing work meant our days were done.
David hurried on his short legs along a ground-crevice where water tumbled over itself and found spots to soak in downhill. Streams lowered annually — a river that never went away was what we needed. I cracked my fingers, watching David and the last cow trot through the fence opening, and, the job a step from being done, David ran his heart out to slam shut the blue gate and chain it. He struggled to fit the loop around the hitch, as kids did when they were scared but excited to do something right. The cows mingled in the front field, the new grass convincing their guts to pay my grandson no mind.
Stone walked toward me down through the pasture, dust-clouds rising along his boots. My oldest brushed the flies off his arms and then brushed his hands on his blue jeans. Men won’t born to have white hairs mixed in with black at thirty, but he married a dead woman and had a son. I married a dead man and had him. We lived together, and I prayed every night for Jim to stare Sarah down.
“We can slaughter twenty.” Stone rubbed the bristles on his chin, missing a beard like his father. “Turn over some profit.”
“No margin, no profit,” I said. “Money ain’t always money.”
“Can we pay the Mexicans?”
“We always pay.” I took offense. “But don’t mean we’re making it.”
“Legal?” Mary-Rose asked. The brown man stuttered through English, but in any language, he could bow his head. Mary-Rose’s son was too young to handle a wrench, let alone bushwhack. Families ran farms, but after a life of stewarding, Jim was in the ground. If Mary-Rose lost the ground, she’d lose him.
“You’ve got nothing” Mary-Rose started asking but ended up stating. She had land, so she was like the Mexican: penniless. People outside Long Mountain grocery said land was money, but unsold land was dirt: all dirt and money had in common was growth and hardening. If Mary-Rose sold her red clay and creeks and oaks, her ground-held and watching husband would end up owned by someone he didn’t die for.
The brown man patted his throat to fight the word loose. “Family.” The home of Mary-Rose wouldn’t make a return, only offer a life, assuming she could keep it. Besides, selling off, she’d have to turn around and buy a new home — and couldn’t.
“Are we making it?” Stone asked. Men headed households, but not sons. I kicked up some dust.
“Wild Turkey says so.”
“I said you shouldn’t.”
“Work’s done and bourbon burns disease out.”
“When you last see a doctor?”
I watched David fiddle with the gate. “Drinks keep me up with everything.”
“Can’t keep up with a hole in your head.”
“I hear you,” I said. “Doctor would just agree.”
“Can’t kill off death.”
“Don’t tell Jesus.”
David yelped when he finally fit the chain loop through the gate hitch. He turned and ran toward us, smiling through the leaping crickets and rubbing his hands like he worked from sunrise to star-rise. “Memaw, drink?”
Grandson was ready for work to be over after a sweat-bead. “Water back home. You’ll make it.”
“The cows drink, don’t they?” David asked about what we put in, guilting me. We walked the main field toward the blue gate David ran from — young didn’t like to work but then didn’t know when not to work — and I pointed at a black box over the electric tensile wire that we put in after the barbed wire broke. Red dirt surrounded the plastic base that had a blue ball in it; grass didn’t grow until a few feet out.
“They press down on that ball and it gives,” I answered to act like I didn’t think he talked back. “Water beneath.”
“Does the wire really hold them back?” David asked, acting like he was only curious and brave. The herd could run through anytime, truth be told, but the cows loved the ground under their hooves. Bellies wired in.
“Some fence does,” I said. David inspected the drinker again.
“Does the ball keep the water clean?”
“I told you this.”
“It could have changed”
Stone laughed. “Here?”
David’s face lost its shine; it felt right to speak on his behalf. “He’s doing better,” I said. “I only yelled at him once.”
David perked up, making me feel good. “Will I be as good as uncle?”
“Uncle?”
“Dad?”
I brushed the hairs on his head. “High bar.” I winked at Stone, a man at that age when the dark circles under the eyes never faded out, those wrinkles that told stories about how days became a doing it again. Stone scratched his temple with his middle finger, and I rubbed David’s back. “Lord good to send you. Ungodly for a hen to only need a wing.”
“Chicken Little!” David recognized the tale. “Can I finally watch the movie?”
“And ruin the story?” I pulled him against my hip. “Sky never be the same.”
I saw Stone’s face tighten. He walked a step and pointed over the blue gate. I looked. “Drinker leaking.”
Below the black plastic and the blue ball, the dirt lost its redness and darkness spread. I bolted up the clanging gate and hopped down on the other side. The cows scattered, mooing, but there were no calves near to worry about charging. I squatted and put my finger to the plastic. “A knife?”
I heard the gate lightly shake and Stone plop down, his boots stepping and flattening the soil. He squatted down with me and felt the hole. “Cut alright.” He lifted his fingers and rubbed them. “Blood.”
I swallowed hard: drinkers cost thousands. “From Rustburg?”
Stone wiped his finger on the wet ground. “The kids dirt-bike up yards, sure, but even their parents would switch them for this.”
I turned and yelled across the fence. “Tell the Mexicans to shut off the water!”
David jumped. “The valve?!”
“To drinker one!”
He ran toward the barn. I turned back, my skirt touching the spreading puddle. “If this been leaking long” — I couldn’t even mention wells.
Stone stood and brushed his hands on his jeans. Step by step, he followed the leak. “Dirt ain’t wet but for a few feet out,” he said. “It’s new, hardly a trickle reaching the grass…”
I yanked out my fingers from the drinker and jumped up, feeling my sides for a weapon or anything. Stone pulled out a knife and flicked it open. Pistol at the house. We knew it could happen, but to get by, we forgot what we knew. I paid Mexicans as good as I could, but they wanted the dirt they sweated into, the trees they axed for wood. Why Jim may have never wanted them, but Jim, Jim, I had to keep the ground. Keep the living.
I looked out into the herd. Heifers chewed grass and stared back. A big mother tired of me and bent down for another bite. The head lowered. The black eyes. I saw that smooth and beautiful brown skin down to the fingertip, dripping, bloody. Radiant even in the dusk. Hell, especially in the dusk. Stone’s knife fell and plopped.
.
.
.
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