Dust in March
The woman was slicing canned olives when a groan slipped beneath the door. She pretended not to hear at first, for the morning radio was on too high and the kettle was nearly boiling and her hands were greased with olive juice. But those groans continued, pressing themselves haughtily into her front porch.
March is too early for the bull to be out, the woman thought, And he'll freeze to death, no doubt. The Plains are still snow-dusted in March, even when the warm-bellied geese arrive to soften the frost into wet mush. A smart farmer keeps his bull in until the crows call.
When the groans began to nip at her heels, the woman set her knife down. Dust was collecting in the window's lip. She made a point to wipe her kitchen down later, then stepped into boots.
Outside, the geese had already flown on. The March sun was raw, and the clouds were bloated with dust.
A warm March is a warm Easter, she figured, even if it's unexpected. Down the front porch steps she went, careful to step lightly over the cat, who lay sunning herself in the March sun. She was expressionless, as cats tend to be. Her kittens mewed from the hollow bottom step. It's too early for the cat to have kittens, the woman knew, but then again, it's too early for the bull to be out and the geese to be gone.
The woman must've realized long ago that she'd be alone at this house, save a mother cat and her kittens. The dirt road, a quiet, straight line in a quiet town, stretched on. To the north was the autobody shop; to the south, the farmer's market. Her neighbor, a flame-haired woman, grew persimmons and sold them there on Thursday. She tended to the persimmon tree from her backyard, the one that her husband planted a few years before he left. The woman liked this neighbor and bought her flame-colored fruit, even though she wasn't particularly fond of persimmons. It was nice to know another woman.
The woman, looking down the road to her neighbor's place, got back to it. The groans were persistent. So she went on her way, stepping over cart tracks harded in the March mud. Her palms and forearms smelled of canned olives, and she worried the flies would come. The flies didn't come until June, but who really knew if the bull was out and the snow had melted in March, anyway?
When she arrived at the bull's fence, her ankles ached in her boots. Trudging is hard at sixty-eight, even with a life of olive-slicing and farmer's market-shopping and lying in bed alone. She leaned into the pasture and looked in. There he lay, a misshapen dark body, a tired summer beast, breathing in, out, in, out in that unfamiliar March haze. His trough held just a handful of oats.
Sometimes, when the farmer bought hens, they picked away at the trough before the bull could. Women do that, she knew, they'll take whatever they can get around here.
The woman realized that she didn't know why she'd come all this way to the bull's pasture. The kettle must've boiled over by then, and the cat was probably looking for a way into the olives. Her joints hurt and the sky was not blue, not beige, but somewhere in between, perhaps the sepia-tinted fade in the corners of old photographs.
She watched a fruit fly meander, hit its head on a wood post, and meander in a different direction, hardly embarrassed.
A few yards away, the bull groaned. His watering trough was empty and stained with the salt of bull saliva. The woman thought of her own father, a man long gone into the Earth, buried with his dog tags and - as her mother callously joked - his favorite glass. Before he left he'd have something in that glass every night. When it ran dry, he'd mumble and groan to the woman's mother.
Sometimes, when the woman was just a little girl, she'd sneak into the living room to see her daddy when he came home. Usually she didn't make it in time. He'd be fast asleep, slumped over in that armchair he liked with the TV static turning her ears all fuzzy. His glass would be empty. It left sticky rings on the table.
She'd hide between the open door and the wall and watch her robed mother come in, push the thinning hair back from her cheekbone, and look at her father with eyes that said so be it. Then she'd take a step forward and slip her hand into the pocket of his jeans, where that night's earnings would cradle itself in a crumpled bundle. Ones, tens, whatever she could take, she did. She'd then stand back up and tap his balding head. Not in the same way she tapped her two little ones' heads, though; she'd tap his head as if to say okay. Okay, I have it now, you've done your job, now I'll go. Don't come into my bed tonight.
Even in her old age, the woman never looked like her father. Her eyes were more biting, and she had her mother's high cheekbones and thin lips that said she was here to do, not to be. Her father's nose and alcoholism were passed to her brother.
The woman figured she'd do her neighbor a favor. Silly man had forgotten to give his bull some water, she thought, and now his animal's throat is caked with dust.
The tap, rusted from years of rains, took some force to turn before it spun and unleashed a stream the color of urine. She looked at the bull. The farmer always bragged about what a gentle bull he was.
Is a gentle bull something to brag about? the woman wondered.
This bull would never step on a fruit fly, he'd tell the woman, he's quite the lazy one. Not the best for breeding the cows.
At the watering trough, the woman's hands were red with rust from the tap. She looked up when the bull groaned again and, for a fraction of a second, she saw him, the quiet self that things with souls keep inside their eyes. Black, dark, rectangular; the television in the living room that her father loved to stare at.
Without second thought, the woman stepped towards her neighbor's gentle, groaning bull. He didn't look up again. His horns were dull at the ends, and his ear tag was folded.
The farmer would be mad, very mad, if he saw this woman standing alone in the middle of his pasture with his bull on the ground. He'd be mad, even though she was just doing him a favor and giving his bull something to drink. He'd be mad all the way from the farmhouse, where he was probably sitting on this March morning, hiding from the dust. He'd be as mad as when the woman's flame-haired neighbor brought her persimmon cart to the farmer's market and took the business away from his milk and eggs. He'd be mad if the woman told him not to take his bull out before the crows called, or if she reminded him to keep the hens away from the oats.
But the woman had given the bull his water already, and she'd watched him grimace, groan, shift his hindquarters, and start up to his trough. She'd given him what he needed, at the expense of her joints and her canned olives and her kettle boiling over on the stove.
Her mother used to take that money from her drunk husband's pockets, crunch it between her fists, and go to the store. She'd bring cornbread and butter back. She'd also have the whiskey.
The cat would bring olives out from the kitchen to her kittens, scraping her foot on the loose nail in the door frame. In eight months, she'd find herself with a fresh set of kittens to feed.
Her neighbor, another woman alone on the long dirt road, would find herself with a dead persimmon tree one day and no means to make money. Her husband would laugh up from the ground at her.
And the woman would come to watch, remember, and know the way it went. When she brought her olive dish leftovers to the farmer later that day, he'd take it all in and leave her behind.
Beside her, the bull was breathing heavily. He was tired, and his breath was clogged by haze. She squatted, sitting back into the pasture's dust, and swatted at the flies. Maybe, if she sat there still enough and for long enough, the March dust would swallow him and leave her here, alone with the flies, batting at the dust in her eyes. She'd swim through this dust if she could, with all its floating and choking. She'd let it get in her eyes and stay there, or she'd catch it in jars and feed it to the Plains when it lifted. If she could, she'd be it.