“Ah—” Joseph puzzled. “They might say—I see.” His voice turned brutal. “They might say I felt like the bull. Well, I do, Burton. And if I could mount a cow and fertilize it, do you think I’d hesitate? Look, Burton, that bull can hit twenty cows a day. If feeling could put a cow with a calf, I could mount a hundred. That’s how I feel, Burton.” Then Joseph saw the grey, sick horror that had come over his brother’s face. “You don’t understand it, Burton,” he said gently. “I want increase. I want the land to swarm with life. Everywhere I want things growing up.” Burton turned sulkily away. “Listen to me, Burton, I think I need a wife. Everything on the land is reproducing. I am the only sterile thing. I need a wife.”
Burton had started to move away, but he turned around and spat his words, “You need prayer more than anything. Come to me when you can pray.”
Joseph watched his brother walk away and he shook his head in bewilderment. “I wonder what he knows that I don’t know,” he said to himself. “He has a secret in him that makes everything I think or do unclean. I have heard the telling of the secret and it means nothing to me.” He ran his fingers through his long hair, picked up his soiled black hat and put it on. The bull came near the fence, lowered its head and snorted. Then Joseph smiled and whistled shrilly, and at the whistle, Juanito’s head popped out of the barn. “Saddle a horse,” Joseph cried. “There’s more in this old boy. Drive in another cow.”
He worked mightily, as the hills work to produce an oak tree, slowly and effortlessly and with no doubt that it is at once the punishment and the heritage of hills to strive thus. Before the morning light came over the range, Joseph’s lantern flashed across the yard and disappeared into the barn. There among the warm and sleepy beasts he worked, mending harness, soaping the leather, cleaning the buckles. His curry comb rasped over muscled flanks. Sometimes he found Thomas there, sitting on a manger in the dark, with a coyote pup sleeping in the hay behind him. The brothers nodded good-morning. “Everything all right?” Joseph asked.
And Thomas—“Pigeon has cast a shoe and cracked his hoof. He shouldn’t go out today. Granny, the black devil, kicked Hell out of her stall. She’ll hurt somebody some day if she doesn’t kill herself first. Blue dropped a colt this morning, that’s what I came out to see.”
“How did you know, Tom? What made you know it would come this morning?”
Thomas grabbed a horse’s forelock and pulled himself down from the manger. “I don’t know, I can always tell when a colt will drop. Come and see the little son-of-a-bitch. Blue won’t mind now. She’s got him clean by now.”
They went to the box-stall and looked over at the spider-legged colt, with knobby knees and a whisk-broom for a tail. Joseph put out his hand and stroked the damp shining coat. “By God!” he cried, “I wonder why I love the little things so much?” The colt lifted its head and looked up sightlessly out of clouded, dark-blue eyes, and then moved away from Joseph’s hand.
“You always want to touch them,” Thomas complained. “They don’t like to be touched when they’re little like that.”
Joseph withdrew his hand. “I guess I’d better go to breakfast.”
“Oh, say,” Thomas cried, “I saw some swallows fooling around. There’ll be mud nests in the barn eaves, and under the windmill tank next spring.”
The brothers had been working well together, all except Benjy, and Benjy shirked when he could. Under Joseph’s orders a long truck garden stretched out behind the houses. A windmill stood on its high stilts and flashed its blades every afternoon when the wind came up. A long, unwalled cowshed arose beside the big stable. The barbed-wire fences were edging out to encircle the land. Wild hay grew rankly on the flats and on the sidehills, and the stock was multiplying.
As Joseph turned to leave the barn, the sun came over the mountains and sent warm white streaks through the square windows. Joseph moved into a shaft of light and spread his arms for a moment. A red rooster on the top of a manure pile outside the window looked in at Joseph, then squawked and retreated, flapping, and raucously warned the hens that something terrible would probably happen on so fine a day. Joseph dropped his arms and turned back to Thomas. “Get up a couple of horses, Tom. Let’s ride out today and see if there are any new calves. Tell Juanito, if you see him.”
After their breakfast, the three men rode away from their houses. Joseph and Thomas went side by side and Juanito brought up the rear. Juanito had ridden home from Nuestra Señora in the dawn, after spending a discreet and polite evening in the kitchen of the Garcia home. Alice Garcia had sat across from him, placidly watching the crossed hands in her lap, and the elder Garcias, guardians and referees, were placed on either side of Juanito.
“You see, I am not only the majordomo for Señor Wayne,” Juanito explained into their admiring but slightly skeptical ears, “I am more like a son to Don Joseph. Where he goes, I go. He trusts only me with very important matters.” Thus for a couple of hours he boasted mildly, and when, as decorum suggested, Alice and her mother retired, Juanito made formal words and prescribed gestures and was finally accepted by Jesus Garcia, with a comely reluctance, as son-in-law. Then Juanito rode back to the ranch, quite tired and very proud, for the Garcias could prove at least one true Spanish ancestor. And now he rode behind Joseph and Thomas, rehearsing to himself the manner of his announcement.
The sun blazed on the land as they rode up a grassy swell looking for calves to notch and cut. The dry grass made a whiskering noise under the horses’ hoofs. Thomas’ horse skittered nervously, for in front of Thomas, perched on the saddle-horn, rode a villainous raccoon, with beady, evil eyes looking out of a black mask. It kept its balance by grasping the horse’s mane with one little black hand. Thomas looked ahead with eyes drooped against the sun. “You know,” he said, “I was in Nuestra Señora Saturday.”
“Yes,” Joseph said impatiently, “Benjy must have been there too. I heard him singing late at night. Tom, that boy’ll be getting into trouble. Some things the people here will not stand. Some day we’ll be finding Benjy with a knife in his neck. I tell you, Tom, he’ll get a knife some day.”
Thomas chuckled. “Let him, Joe. He’ll have had more fun than a dozen sober men, and he’ll have lived longer than Methuselah.”
“Well, Burton worries about it all the time. He’s spoken to me about it over and over.”
“I was telling you,” said Thomas, “I sat in the store in Nuestra Señora Saturday afternoon, and the riders from Chinita were there. They got to talking about the dry years from eighty to ninety. Did you know about them?”
Joseph tied a new knot in the riata string on his saddle. “Yes,” he said softly, “I’ve heard about them. Something was wrong. They won’t ever come again.”
‘Well, the riders were talking about it. They said the whole country dried up and the cattle died and the land turned to powder. They said they tried to move the cows to the interior but most of them died on the way. The rain came a few years before you got here.” He pulled the coon’s ears until the fierce little creature slashed at his hand with its sharp teeth.
Joseph’s eyes were troubled. He brushed his beard down with his hand and turned the ends under, as his father had done. “I heard about it, Tom. But it’s all over now. Something was wrong, I tell you. It won’t come again, ever. The hills are full of water.”
“How do you know it won’t come again? The riders said it had been before. How can you say it won’t ever come again?”
Joseph set his mouth determinedly. “It can’t come. The hill springs are all running. I won’t—I can’t see how it can come again.”
Juanito urged his horse abreast of them. “Don Joseph, I hear a cowbell over the rise.”
The three men swung their horses to the right and put them to a canter. The coon leaped to Thomas’ shoulder and clung to his neck with its strong little arms. Over the rise they galloped. They came upon a little herd of red cows, and two young calves tottered among the cows. In a moment the calves were down. Juanito took a bottle of liniment from his pocket, and Thomas opened his broad-bladed knife. The shining knife snicked out the Wayne brand in the ears of both calves while they bawled hopelessly and their mothers stood by, bellowing with apprehension. Then Thomas knelt beside the bull calf. With two cuts he performed the castration and sloshed liniment on the wound. The cows snorted with fear when they smelled blood. Juanito untied the feet and the new steer scrambled up and hobbled lamely off to its mother. The men mounted and rode on.