In April on a warmish day the snow seemed to be melting. Catherine was out in the barnyard with Tim having a sandwich and feeding him a jar of pureed peaches, watching the nearly mature hatchlings driving each other batty. Tim watched them closely and didn’t stop smiling. She held him up at the fence so he could touch the soft noses of the horses and a single very docile calf. Clyde had come by with three piglets to raise good pork for the two households. She had long figured out that supermarket pork wasn’t nearly as tasty as what her grandfather had home raised and butchered. It would cost money to feed them as you couldn’t grow corn easily in this high, dry climate. Hud growled and the piglets shrank back in the pen. Tim reached out for them but Catherine held him back thinking they might mistake his little hand for food. Three days later one of the piglets got out but only trotted over to nibble corn scratch with the chickens. Tim was gleeful and Hud furious. She said, “Hud, no,” to his growling. She was able to pet the piglet and scratch its ears, both of which it liked. Tim was so delighted to touch its ears and the piglet sniffed his hand.
In grade school the boys who all dressed like junior cowboys had called her a “wimp” for her tenderhearted view of the lowliest creatures. Her mother had given her Charles Roberts’s The Naturalist’s Diary for her birthday. Her concern was widespread and it seemed that every boy craved to shoot a deer, elk, moose, bear, anything would do in the local ethic. Only one mannerly boy was interested in bird dogs and hunting for Hungarian partridge and sharp-tailed grouse with his father. She had a crush on him but he ignored girls. Catherine’s mother was also softhearted about animals. She convinced her to let go a turtle she had caught in the cattails at the edge of the pond. Her mother’s point was “Why should the turtle’s only life be to amuse you?” Her mother had studied biology in England but was largely unaware of American wildlife. On an early trip south to Yellowstone her parents had seen a sow grizzly kill an elk. Her father thought they were lucky to see it but her mother was totally repelled and had grizzly nightmares. The junior cowboys loved to scare each other and the girls with stories about rattlesnakes and grizzlies. A boy in her sixth-grade class was bitten in the arm by a baby rattler in the school woodlot. His arm had become horribly swollen but they got him to the hospital in time for the antivenom to be effective. She was shocked and told her father about it at dinner. He laughed saying that boys get bitten because they’re always fooling with snakes to show their daring, same as when he was young. This was why she was trying to aversion train Hud to rattlers. She had used a choke collar for a few weeks whenever they saw snakes and now on the rare occasion when they saw one on a walk he would shrink back and whine. There were no grizzlies in the Crazy Mountains nearby but there were some in the Absaroka Mountains less than fifty miles to the south. There was a written record of Lewis and Clark killing one locally when they passed through. Catherine had hiked with friends in the Absarokas but had never seen a grizzly and hadn’t wanted to see one.
Jerry called to say that he was sending her mother’s ashes by Purolator courier adding that she should go ahead and distribute the ashes by the “lake” as he had an important business trip to make for several weeks in Key West. It took her breath away. The heel. He couldn’t be bothered. She felt a flash of anger that upset her stomach.
The next day the ashes arrived and along with them a check for fifty thousand dollars with “Tim’s education” written in the memo field. She guessed Jerry was buying off his conscience. She didn’t care. Did he have to fly to Key West to get laid? Surely someone closer to New York would make sense, or the summer place in Rhode Island where the entryway was cold marble. She would put the money in the bank where it would reproduce and Tim could go off in eighteen years in new clothes. What more could she want of life? She had no lover but certainly didn’t want one for the time being. But she had a farm, a few horses, about fifty cattle, three piglets, and of course the beloved chickens, also a tiny boy who seemed to like them too. The other day she stupidly ran to the house for the phone and left Hud to guard Tim. When she returned a hatchling was nestled in his diaper and he was smiling from ear to ear while Hud growled at it. Catherine had taught Hud to stay clear of the hatchlings though it enraged him when they pecked at his feet. With one hand Tim brushed the feathers with little coos.
Another piglet escaped, and she called Clara who caught it with difficulty, finally offering it more scratch which it ate out of her hand.
“Doesn’t make you want to eat pork, does it?”
“No!” Catherine laughed. It was best not to name a pig or cow who would end up as meat. The piglet squealed in anger when Clara put him back in the pen and plugged up the escape hole. He simply wanted to wander around freely.
Chapter 17
The parents of a ten-year-old Mexican girl had died locally in a car accident and the township was looking for a foster parent who spoke Spanish to take care of her until relatives came from Mexico to retrieve her at the end of the summer, some months away. It was commonly known that Catherine was the only white person in the area who spoke Spanish and she had a decision to make. A recent cold snap had left snow on the ground and Catherine shivered on her way to meet the girl, Lola, and a social worker at the drugstore for a chocolate sundae. The girl held Tim and then quickly changed his diaper on the counter. Her deftness won Catherine’s heart. She spoke soft sibilant Spanish to Tim who enjoyed it. At dinnertime the social worker brought Lola out to the farm. Hud had taken off across the pasture that afternoon and not come back but she couldn’t look for him with the girl arriving. She was sure he’d be all right. Lola had a pathetically small amount of belongings. Her English was fair and full of American slang. She was amused by Catherine’s Spanish and called her “profesora.” Catherine put her into her old bedroom adjoining the new addition so she could hear Tim.
The next morning it felt as warm as a Chinook wind as she looked out at the distant Crazy Mountains, named for the woman who had gone fatally crazy there. Catherine remembered the Chinooks of her childhood fondly. Once it was only ten degrees in the early morning and by noon it was sixty. Kids at school loved them and ran around in shirtsleeves.
Lola looked after Tim, playing with him on the living room rug where he shrieked with laughter, while Catherine carried her mother’s ashes out behind the barn across the lingering snow. She sat on her egg rock holding the box of ashes inside of which was a lovely urn, no doubt Jerry’s idea. There was a thin lid of ice on the pond which was quickly melting. She cast the first handful of ashes out on the ice feeling with her fingers and seeing small bits of bone which was eerie. She was able to take off her coat in the warm wind. She continued to toss handfuls of ashes saying, “Goodbye, Mother.” How could her mother become ashes? She reminded herself of the ways of the earth.
When she finished and the ashes were sinking into the water she thought about how much her mother loved this place and all of their early little picnics. Now the two horses and a calf and a cow were watching her over the fence with curiosity. She would try to keep Tim off of horses for as long as possible. The area was full of the maimed and injured from horseback accidents. Other places boys wanted to be football and basketball stars but here they wanted to be heroes of rodeo, much more dangerous even than football.