Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) (9 page)

“I believe you,” she said. She was silent for several moments, and then she asked, “Where did he expect to get the balance? Had he planned on coming to Mama?”

“Apparently that was no problem. He said he’d have the thirty-six thousand at the closing.”

“Mr. Hope, you are absolutely
flooring
me, do you realize that? Are you saying that a bank was willing to lend a
tennis bum
thirty-six—”

“He was already in possession of the money, ma’am. He told me he had it in cash.”

“In
cash
? And please don’t ‘ma’am’ me, I’ll
really
feel like an old lady. How old are
you
, anyway?”

“Thirty-eight,” I said.

“Young whippersnapper,” she said, and smiled. “Get into fist-fights and everything, don’t you? Bet your knees are all scraped up, too. Who
really
beat up on you, Mr. Hope?”

“Two cowboys in a bar.”

“Leave it to cowboys,” she said, and rolled her eyes the way her daughter had earlier.

“So,” I said.

“So,” she said.

“Mr. Burrill—”

“Who’s Mr. Burrill?”

“The seller. The man who contracted to sell fifteen acres of farmland, together with all buildings, improvements, machinery—”

“To Jack’s
estate
, as it turns out.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“For forty thousand dollars.”

“Yes.”

“Thirty-six of which is still due.”

“At the closing,” I said.

“I don’t know of any estate Jack left,” she said. “I’ll have to talk this over with my lawyer.”

“Of course. You might mention to him that Mr. Burrill’s attorney has indicated he’ll bring suit if the estate refuses to honor your son’s contractual obligation.”

“Suit against whom?
Me?
”

“No, the estate. There’s no way
you
can be held personally responsible by virtue of being related to your son. I’m assuming you’d be the personal representative of his estate, but you’d best check that with your lawyer, too.”

“How long do we have on this?”

“We were supposed to close early next month. As soon as the title search and the other necessary...”

“Why’d Jack get me into this stupid mess?”

“He wanted to be a farmer,” I said.

“That’s like wanting to be a
shepherd
!”

“Well, talk it over with your lawyer. Please understand, Mrs. McKinney, I’m not taking an adversary position here. I was representing your
son
in this transaction,
not
Mr. Burrill.”

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll call Erik as soon as we get back to the house. Those are our pens over on the left, would you like to take a look?”

She pulled up the Jeep before a wooden fence that enclosed a labyrinthine maze of narrow, mud-churned passages similarly enclosed, a series of fences within fences.

“This is where we work the cows,” she said. “You’ve come at a quiet time of the year, most of our activity is in the spring and the fall. In August, what we do mostly is mend the cross-fences between the pastures, chop down the thistle, burn off the palmettos—like that. We’ll work the cattle some, too—pregnancy testing, semen testing, and so on—but that’s on an as-needed basis. In August it’s mostly maintenance, a sort of holding action till October and November.”

“Do you have one of these pens in each of the pastures?” I asked.

“No, this one serves the whole ranch. We drive the cows over and put ’em in a crevice—that’s a small pasture, not a crack in a rock—the night before, and then pen ’em the next morning. Work one herd at a time that way.”

“By work—”

“Well, unless you’ve got all day,” she said, “it’s really too complicated to explain.”

I felt I had been mildly discouraged from asking any further questions. There was a short, awkward silence.

“This contraption here is the squeeze chute,” she said, “holds the cows while we’re working them.”

I was looking at what appeared to be an instrument of torture, with sloping metal sides fashioned of three-inch-thick steel bars, and a curved metal plate that looked like the headrest on a guillotine. Above the mechanism was a row of levers with black plastic knobs on them.

“Herd them in from where we unload them,” she said, and reached up for one of the black knobs. “I’m not too good at operating this thing,” she said, “the cowboys usually do it.” She pulled one of the levers down. The spread metal sides of the chute began closing. “It catches the cow in there and holds her fast,” she said. “There’s no way even a
dozen
men could hold a
seven-hundred-pound cow when you’re drenching her or trying to find out if she’s pregnant. This one,” she said, and reached up for another lever, “lowers or raises the head—I
think
.” She pulled on the black knob, and the guillotine headrest at the front end of the chute began rising. “Yep,” she said, “that’s the one. Handy little machine,” she said. “Man who invented it probably makes more money than all the cattle breeders in the world put together. Shall we head on back to the house, Mr. Hope? I’ll give Erik a call, ask him how
he
thinks we should proceed. Erik Larsen,” she said, “do you know him? Of the law firm of Petersen, Larsen, and Rasmussen—all of Danish extraction, I would assume.”

“I know the firm,” I said. “I don’t know him personally.”

“Nice man,” she said, “and a good lawyer. Looks like I’ll
need
one if this farmer plans to sue, huh?”

We got into the Jeep again. She backed it away from the fence, and then turned and drove onto another muddy side road. I realized all at once that we were making a big circle around the ranch. Drainage ditches ran alongside either side of the road. A small alligator, basking on the grassy bank, turned tail and splashed into the ditch.

“The gators’ll sometimes prey on our young calves, we’ll have a sickly one every now and then. But for the most part they’re harmless. Buzzards are the chief predators to worry about. Unless you consider
disease
a predator. There’s plenty of that,” she said.

“Is there?” I asked cautiously, remembering her curt reply to my earlier question, and afraid she would tell me that
this
, too, was “complicated.”

It was.

When they were working the cows—I still didn’t know what “working” them meant—in the spring and the fall, they vaccinated for blackleg, pasturella, and malignant edema, the vaccine usually administered in a triple dose subcutaneously. A
must
vaccination for heifers they hoped to breed was for brucellosis or Bang’s disease—“I don’t know who Bang was,” Mrs. McKinney said. “Probably a vet who couldn’t spell brucellosis.” The disease caused infertility, and since a “cow-calf lady” (as she called herself) was in the business of breeding cattle, Bang’s disease was a dreaded nemesis. Cancer eye was another severe problem, especially in Herefords, who sunburned badly around the eyes because of their white faces. This was treatable with silver nitrate, she explained, but even so, the cow would eventually lose the eye. “Angus don’t suffer from it,” she said. “Black is beautiful.” They vaccinated against leptospirosis, which could cause a cow to abort or prolapse (“That’s when everything hangs out the rear end,” she said, “and you lose the unborn calf”). Leptospirosis was highly infectious, as was scours, a form of diarrhea.

“And there’s also mastitis,” she said, “which is an udder infection, and colic, which you flush out with mineral oil, administered orally from a garden hose. I know a rancher out West who lost ninety percent of his calf crop because his cows were eating pine needles that caused them to abort. Moldy hay can do it too. We haven’t had any of
that
yet, thank God; when
our
cattle are stressed, they go for the palmettos. The ranchers out West
also
have to worry about poison grasses like larkspur and senecio—pretty little blue and yellow flowers, but deadly. Locoweed too, out there, which isn’t deadly, of course, but which makes the cows go bananas—they’ll run right over you, go through fences, knock down posts, who needs it? It isn’t an easy business, cattle breeding. Do you suppose snapbean farming is less work?”

Her mind kept circling back to the farm, I noticed, and what I was sure she considered a foolish investment on her son’s part. We passed a pair of deer standing some fifty feet inside the pasture fence on our left. They stared at the Jeep in surprise for a moment, and then turned and went loping off gracefully. I unfastened the
chain on another gate, and we drove into yet another pasture on yet another muddy road. We passed a grove of orange trees—“I keep two hundred acres in citrus,” Mrs. McKinney said. “It’s a nuisance more than anything else”—and we passed a huge, black wild hog rooting in a copse of trees she said was called “Happy Hammock,” for reasons she could not fathom. And at last we drove past the small clapboard house where her manager lived, and her hand’s mobile home, and the horse barn—a brown quarter horse was grazing outside now—and the two rusting gas tanks. She parked the Jeep under a huge old oak and we walked together up the porch steps and into the main house. She had set the air conditioning too low. The temperature inside was virtually subarctic.

“Ah, nice and cool,” she said. “I’ll just call Erik from the office, it won’t take a minute. Would you like a drink? Something a bit stronger than tea?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Well, make yourself comfortable,” she said, and opened a door beyond which I could see one corner of a cluttered desk. The door closed. From upstairs in the house someplace, I heard a record player blaring a rock-and-roll tune. Sunny, I thought. I sat in one of the wicker chairs in the fern-cluttered corner nook where Sunny and I had earlier had our brief conversation, and I wondered why I felt it easier to talk to her mother, who—by strict arithmetical calculation—was far more distant in age from me than was her daughter.

I still found it hard to believe that anyone her age could be so—well, there were no other words for it—well preserved. I know divorced men of my age who won’t dream of “dating” (a word I despise) anyone older than twenty-five. Thirty-eight is a dangerous age for a man. For a woman too, I suppose, but I’m not qualified to speak for the opposite sex. At thirty-eight, a man starts
looking over his shoulder to see how closely the shadow of forty is following. Forty is a dread age. Forty means you’d better grow up fast if you’re going to grow up at all. Forty means taking stock of where you’ve been and where you’re going. At thirty-eight, forty is only two years away (in my case only eighteen months away) and forty means problems. You can go bald when you turn forty. Your teeth can start falling out, if they haven’t already been
knocked
out by a football player in Chicago. You can hurt your knees. Your back can start troubling you. Forty is a pain in the ass. My partner Frank had turned forty in April. He said it was easy. Just like falling off Pier Eight, he said. I didn’t know where Pier Eight was. I supposed it was in New York City someplace.

But Veronica McKinney was fifty-seven years old.
Fifty
-seven! Almost twenty years older than I, and looking fit and trim and healthy and vital. Veronica McKinney made a person believe that forty would indeed be a piece of cake. Veronica McKinney had found the fountain of youth that Ponce de Leon had come down here looking for, and had drunk of it deeply, and was living proof that all of us terrified men trembling on the brink of middle age had nothing at all to fear. Veronica McKinney was a glowing promise of hope for the future, and that was reason enough to feel comfortable and secure and somehow content in her presence.

The door to her private office opened. She stepped out into the vast living room and walked briskly to where I was sitting in the corner nook. She moved like a sprightly teenager; I couldn’t get over it. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink?” she asked.

“Work to do when I get back to the office,” I said.

“I’d offer you a swim, but we haven’t got a pool. Do you have a pool, Mr. Hope?”

“I have. And please call me Matthew, won’t you?”

“Oh good,” she said, “I
hate
formality, it seems so out of place here on the ranch. Will you call me Veronica, then?”

“Is that what your friends call you?”

“Some of them call me Ronnie, but I find that more suitable for someone my daughter’s age. Veronica will do nicely, such as it is. I’ve never felt completely comfortable with it, I must admit. Back in the early forties, when I was a teenager, I began combing my hair like Veronica Lake—does she mean anything to you?”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“Big movie star,” she said. “Used to wear her hair hanging over one eye, I forget which one now, either the right or the left—it was very sexy, actually. Made her look as if she’d just tumbled out of bed. I’d demonstrate, but my hair’s too short now. Anyway, I started imitating her. She was a blonde, remember? I began wearing my hair like hers, and talking in that low breathy voice she had—my friends must have thought I was
crazy
,” she said, and suddenly began laughing. “But she was the only other Veronica I knew, and it was
such
a relief to be able to identify with
someone
. Adolescence is such a difficult time, isn’t it? I can understand why my daughter clings to it so tenaciously.”

I said nothing.

“Anyway,” she said, “you don’t want to listen to me prattling on about my green and salad days.”

“I’m enjoying it,” I said.

“Well, I’m glad,” she said, and smiled. “What we’ve decided, Erik and I, is to tell this Mr. Burrill, as simply as possible, that my son left no estate that we know of—other than his personal belongings and his automobile.”

“Yes, those would be part of his estate.”

“Well, Mr. Burrill is certainly entitled to those if he insists on pressing the matter. The car’s three years old, a Ford Mustang. But what Erik suggested—and I’d like your opinion on this as well—Erik thought Mr. Burrill might be willing to forget the entire matter if we simply forfeited the four thousand dollars you’re already
holding in escrow. It’s Erik’s opinion that if there’s no estate—and in essence there isn’t—then Mr. Burrill hasn’t a prayer of collecting the additional thirty-six thousand. Erik said that even if I were a billionaire—and I assure you I’m not—there’s no way Mr. Burrill could proceed against me directly.”