Whatever’s Killing the Cattle Is Killing Him Too

The Cattleman by Aaron Gwyn

The little Angus heifer was lying in the shade of a black oak in the south pasture, legs tucked beneath her and her head a half foot off the ground. JR cranked down the window and sat with the pickup idling, watching the cow. She was a three-year-old and he’d never known her to be sick, but the way she had her head canted was very strange. Her open mouth was strange. 

“Do you think it’s heatstroke?” Mary Louise asked.

“Don’t know,” JR told his wife. “Worth taking a look.”

He pushed the column shifter into park, fetched his hat from the bench seat beside him, opened the door, and stepped out. 

He waded through the switchgrass, squaring the hat on his head. Within ten yards of the heifer, he felt the hair stand on the back of his neck and he stopped as though he’d struck a wall. 

The first thing he noticed was the cow’s left ear was missing and the next thing he noticed was her left eye was gone. She wasn’t breathing.

JR moved forward slowly and began to circle the heifer. When he rounded her far side, he stopped once more and then squatted, reaching for the ground to steady himself. A rectangular swatch of hide had been sheared from her back. By a scalpel, looked like. Or a box cutter. He got to his feet and studied the bare earth beneath the tree. He’d had coyotes pull down calves over the years—yearlings, mostly—but there were no coyote tracks in the dirt, no tracks of any kind, not even the cow’s. 

He heard the truck door slam and turned to see Mary Louise walking around the vehicle’s front end.

“Don’t come up here!” he called.

She stopped and stood there with her eyebrows arched. He asked her to get back in the pickup and Mary Louise said, “Did she fall?”

“Momma,” he said, “get back in the truck for me.” But his wife only crossed her arms.

JR glanced back at the heifer. Flies crawled across her flank and stifle. Flies swarmed around her parted lips. A breeze stirred the leaves overhead and there was the tang of urine in the air. He looked at the tree line across the pasture, then at the road that wound up toward the house. Cicadas buzzed from the buffalo grass. Birds called from the oaks. He started for the pickup, staggering slightly, frightened in a way he didn’t understand.

---

JR stood at the kitchen counter, flipping through the phone book. He could hear Mary Louise’s sewing machine upstairs, the click and chug of the treadle. His shirt was soaked in sweat. 

When Sheriff Bledsoe pulled up the driveway in his cruiser, he walked out and shook the man’s hand.

Bledsoe said, “Cindy says you got a calf down?”

“Be better just to show you,” JR told him, and the two of them climbed in the old Ford and started down the dirt road that ran through the woods.

Bledsoe was a short man with thinning hair and a face that always seemed to be sunburned. He looked over at JR and said, “And how is Mary Louise?”

“Well,” said JR, “right now she’s kind of rattled.”

The sheriff didn’t seem to hear him. He said, “We saw her over at the bake sale last weekend. Wanted to see if she had any of those little tarts she makes, but Patty was in a hurry.”

JR nodded. He could feel the sheriff looking at him, waiting for a response, but he wasn’t about to talk bake sales with everything he’d seen that morning. After a few moments, Bledsoe turned to regard the pines blurring past the passenger window.

Then he said, “It’s a cow we’re going down here to look at?”

“Cow,” JR said.

He stopped the truck in the road a couple dozen yards from the oak tree in the pasture. The heifer was just as he’d left her, and when they came walking up, Bledsoe cupped his mouth in one hand and whispered something JR couldn’t hear. They stood there for half a quiet minute, staring at the striated ribbon of muscle and fat where the patch of hide had been cut away.

The sheriff said, “I never seen a dead animal with its head raised like that.”

JR told him he hadn’t either.

“This is how you found her?” Bledsoe asked.

“Exactly how I found her, bout ten o’clock this morning.”

“Remember when you saw her before that?”

“Feeding time yesterday evening,” said JR, “down at the barn.”

Bledsoe had stooped and begun to study the ground. He said, “Wasn’t coyotes.”

“No,” said JR, “I’m confident of that.”

The sheriff stepped closer and took a knee beside the carcass. He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and prodded the heifer’s mouth with its tip, pressing her lower jaw down a few inches. His face flushed and he glanced up at JR.

“Come look at this,” he said.

JR walked over and knelt beside Bledsoe and saw what he’d missed before: the cow’s tongue had been sliced away below the root.

The creep of something climbed his backbone, joint by joint. He thought it was like coming home after a long trip to find your house ransacked, your drawers pilfered, muddy boot prints in your bed.

He said, “I hope you’re able to locate whoever did this ‘fore I do, Jack.”

“Well,” said the sheriff, “I don’t blame you feeling that way. You ain’t had a run-in with anybody, have you?”

“I don’t have run-ins,” JR said.

“I know it,” Bledsoe told him. “Those your tracks?” He was pointing the pen at a pair of prints in the soft earth under the tree.

“Them are mine,” JR said. “I’d known what I was walking up on, I’d’ve called you first.”

The sheriff nodded. He palmed his thighs, rose with a grunt, and stood there gripping the pen in one hand like a wand.

Then he said, “I reckon you already did a head count.”

“Did one first thing,” JR told him. “My Brahmans are up in the corral and the Angus and Black Baldies are in the west pasture. All accounted for.”

“Nothing else out of place?”

“Nothing,” JR said.

Bledsoe shook his head. “I never seen anything like it,” he said.

“No,” said JR.

“If we could figure out how to get her loaded, you might haul her in to Dr. Thrasher.”

JR looked at the man. “What would that do?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” said the sheriff. “I’d think a vet could tell you more than I could. This is the damnedest thing I ever seen.”

On the way back up to the house, Bledsoe sat silent as a sundial, staring at the dashboard. He still had the pen in his right hand and JR realized the sheriff wasn’t going to put it back in his pocket. Something about that troubled him worse than everything he’d seen that morning. Bledsoe hadn’t wanted to touch the heifer, and he didn’t want to touch anything that had. As though it might wear off on him.

“Wasn’t any blood,” the sheriff mumbled.

“What’s that?” JR asked.

“Blood,” said the sheriff. “I didn’t see a single drop.”

JR lifted his boot off the gas pedal and let the pickup roll to a stop, then just sat with his hands on the steering wheel. Crows cawed from the black oaks. A squirrel darted from the tree line, paused in the road with its ears twitching, then leapt back into the brush.

JR said, “I want you to listen at me, Jack. I’m going to find out who done this. I aim to treat it like a full-time job.”

“I can appreciate that,” Bledsoe said.

“Tell you something else. I catch somebody stepping foot on my property, it ain’t going to be no conversation. I’ll wear the ground out with him.”

Bledsoe nodded and cleared his throat. “I’m going to act like I didn’t hear that,” he said, “but if you shoot some ole boy for trespassing, you drag him in your house before you call us.”

“Is that right?” said JR.

“That’s right,” the sheriff said. “And you didn’t get that from me.”

---

They were sitting out on the deck after supper, watching the sunset reflect off the pond.

“And you don’t think it could’ve been a bobcat?” Mary Louise said.

JR shook his head and set his coffee mug on the little table between them. “It was a perfect patch cut off that heifer,” he told her. “Bobcats don’t carry pocketknives, last time I checked.”

Mary Louise brought the blue porcelain cup to her lips, blew into it, then tilted the cup, and sipped. She wore a nest of tight brown curls and in her plump, pretty face were a pair of hazel eyes.

“What did Jack have to say?”

“Not much,” said JR. “Seemed pretty baffled by the whole deal.”

“Well,” Mary Louise said, smoothing a hand over the left leg of her slacks, “I am too.”

Then into the quiet she said, “Where did you bury her?”

“Out on the pasture under that tree.”

“You don’t think the coyotes will dig her up?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “I cut down about five foot with the front-end loader. They’d have to work at it.”

Mary Louise said, “We ought to start shutting the gate down at the road. Of an evening, anyway.”

“Already done it.”

“Did you padlock it?”

“Padlocked it.”

They sat for several moments and then Mary Louise said, “Maybe it was teenagers.”

“Maybe.”

“Drunk teenagers pulling a prank.”

JR said, “Me and George Northcutt pulled a prank or two when we was kids. Never would’ve occurred to us to mess with a man’s cattle.”

“These kids now are different.”

“I mean that.”

“I saw this thing on TV,” she said. “There were people in Tulsa stringing cats to fences and a policeman said it was a Satanic deal.”

“Satanic?”

Mary Louise nodded. Then she said, “I don’t see how somebody could come in and do all that without Gretchen and Moses barking their heads off.”

“I thought about that,” he said. “Maybe they didn’t come up the drive.”

“You think they came through the woods?”

“Might’ve.”

Mary Louise seemed to consider that. She said, “If there was ever a reason to move into town, I don’t—”

“Momma,” he said, “don’t start.”

“Why not?”

“We’ve had that conversation,” he said.

“Yes,” she told him, “and we’re fixing to have it again.”

It’d become a sore spot between them and JR knew she couldn’t keep herself from prodding it.

“You know how I feel about this,” he said.

“And you know how I feel about throwing money out the window on your cows.” Her face had gone flushed. She brushed a piece of lint off her blouse.

He sipped his coffee. “They’re our cows,” he said.

“And is this our ranch?”

“You know it is.”

“I don’t know any such thing,” she said, her words coming a little faster, a little higher in pitch. “I’d like to be able to get something from the store without driving into Seminole. I’d like to meet Margaret and Lucille for lunch.”

“You meet them pretty regular,” JR said, trying to think of something that might put this to bed.

“Sitting out here on this farm,” she told him, “while you go around playing cowboy.”

She’d said that to him before and it always stung. He stood and tossed the last of his coffee over the porch rail, then turned and started for the door. He’d just opened it when she said, “JR?”

He glanced back at her and thought her face looked more troubled than mad: brow furrowed, eyes slightly wet.

“This has scared me something awful,” she said. “I don’t like knowing someone’s been on the place.”

“I don’t either,” he told her. “There’s nothing about it to like.”

---

He’d been looking for the Brahman going on three days, a little yearling named Belinda. It’d been two weeks since he’d found the mutilated heifer in the south pasture, and he was walking the fence line on the west side of his property, long about the shank of the afternoon. He glanced up and saw two turkey buzzards wheeling in the cobalt sky and knew he was about to come on something dead. He threaded his way through the brambles on the edge of the blackjack forest and went downhill through the oaks toward the creek.

He glanced up and saw two turkey buzzards wheeling in the cobalt sky and knew he was about to come on something dead.

The yearling was on her side in a brown bed of leaves, bloated, all four legs stretched out straight as a string. The air reeked of rotting flesh, sickly sweet. He approached from the animal’s rear, scanning the ground for tracks, and when he looked up, he saw there was an oval-shaped cavity where the cow’s vulva had been. He stood there, eyes watering from the smell. There was no doubt in his mind the cuts had been made by some sort of razor. He didn’t see a speck of blood. He turned and went back the way he’d come, stepping in his own boot prints, and when he returned a few hours later, Sheriff Bledsoe was with him.

It was Sunday and the man was out of uniform, but he’d brought a camera. He circled the heifer, taking pictures. He photographed the body, and he photographed the forest floor, then he asked JR to lift one of his feet off the ground, and he photographed the boot sole. When he was done, he capped the lens, and stood with the camera hanging from its leather strap, biting at his lower lip. He looked at JR.

“Left ear and eye,” said Bledsoe. “Just like the other.”

“Tongue too.”

“Tongue too,” the sheriff said.

JR pointed at the cow’s hind end. “They even cut out her business.”

“I seen that,” Bledsoe said, tapping his index finger against the camera’s lens cover.

“Jack,” said JR, “whoever’s doing this has done it before.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning it’s a smart chance it’s happening to someone else around here.”

The sheriff stood with the thumb of his left hand hooked in the rear pocket of his jeans. He said, “I think you might have something there. If I was to hold a meeting, would you mind telling folks what’s been going on?”

JR reached and scratched the whiskers on his cheek. “I reckon I could.” The sun beat down on them. “I don’t like a crowd,” he added.

“Don’t have to be nothing formal,” Bledsoe told him. “Just tell everybody what you seen. If there’s other ranchers have this happening, we might get an idea or two.”

“All right,” said JR.

“All right,” Bledsoe said. “I’ll go ahead and ask Buzz Gillespie to run it in the paper, and I believe I might get Brother Keith to mention it at service tonight.”

“I appreciate that,” JR said, but he was already worried what Mary Louise would say when he told her about the cow. She was liable to start in on him, demanding he sell the ranch. It’d be a real dust up and he didn’t know he had the wherewithal for that.

In fact, he knew he didn’t.

---

Friday evening, they gathered at the library down the street from the courthouse: Robert Gist and his wife, Lucille; George Northcutt and his. Ruth Martin was there with her grandson. Gene McQueen, Lois and Johnny Shoemaker, all three of the Buford brothers and their father, Gerald. Herb Gunter, Dr. Thrasher, Sandy Prince who owned the dog kennel north of town. Dennis Wisnatt came in swaying slightly; the man was often drunk. Turning to look back at the crowd who’d assembled, JR saw OU ballcaps, John Deere ballcaps, a cowboy hat or two, and then he saw Betsy and Phillip Harjo walk in and take seats at the far side of the room. They were Seminole, the only Native people in attendance. JR had known Philip for thirty years. The man was combat veteran, World War II and Korea; he’d been in the Marine division that’d taken Guadalcanal. 

Just after seven, Sheriff Bledsoe approached the lectern and informed the audience about the mutilated heifers, then asked JR to speak.

JR and Mary Louise were sitting in the front row of folding chairs and he stood to face the crowd. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, ended up crossing them behind his back, holding his left wrist in his right palm. A panicked thought blossomed in his brain, the notion that the person responsible for carving up his cattle might be seated in this room.

When he was done telling them, the sheriff said, “Thing that struck me, there wasn’t any blood. And I mean not a single drop.”

“Coyotes,” said Johnny Shoemaker from the back of the room, pronouncing the word like a two-syllable slur: ki-oats.

“There weren’t any tracks,” Bledsoe told him. “And I’ve never known coyotes to drink blood.”

Robert Gist raised a hand and the sheriff nodded to him. Gist said, “Did the heifer looked like it’d been scrounged?”

“Well, that’s another thing,” said Bledsoe, “wasn’t none of that.  Didn’t even look like the buzzards had been at her.”

“What about the tongue?” Dennis Wisnatt asked.

“Yes,” said Bledsoe, “Mr. Stewart mentioned it’d been cut—but we don’t mean chewed on. Looked like someone had done it with shears.”

Couples began mumbling to each other. JR glanced at Phillip Harjo and thought he saw something come into the man’s eyes, a faraway expression, slight crinkling of his brow. He looked as though he might say something, but he didn’t.

“Now,” said the sheriff, “that was enough to cause me concern, but then this past weekend Mr. Stewart found another one.” He turned to JR. “You mind talking about that?”

“So,” said JR, “this was a little yearling that had been missing a few days. Ended up finding her down by the creek and it was the same sort of deal: left eye, left ear, swatch of hide.”

“And her privates,” added the sheriff. “Whoever done this cut them out like a surgeon and there wasn’t tracks or blood, either one.”

JR saw several women in the audience cross their arms and then Ed Thrasher raised his hand.

“Yessir,” Bledsoe said.

The veterinarian said, “If I could, I’d like to take a look at the body.”

“Well,” said Bledsoe, “here’s the deal: that heifer was in the woods about a mile from the road and it wasn’t no way we could get a pickup in to tump her out. I believe Mr. Stewart buried her.”

“I did,” said JR. “Took me three hours to dig the grave and I had to use a pry bar to lever her into it.”

“It happens again,” said Dr. Thrasher, “I want you to call me.”

JR nodded.

“Now,” said the sheriff, “I didn’t call y’all down here to cause a panic, but me and Mr. Stewart thought if this was happening to him, it might be happening to some of you. If you know anything, I’d sure like to hear it. You don’t want to talk in front of everybody, you can call me at home.”

JR stood beside Bledsoe, watching the crowd. Most of the faces staring at him looked puzzled or uneasy. A few looked disgusted. Only Phillip Harjo looked unsurprised by what he’d heard. He sat there in his OSU ballcap, both hands cradling his left knee. He turned to his wife and whispered something.

The sheriff said, “Anyone had stock go missing?”

Men began to shake their heads and Gerald Buford said, “We do a head count ever morning. We hadn’t had nothing like what you’re talking about.”

Johnny Shoemaker said, “Any sumbitch comes traipsing around my place without a by-your-leave is going to end up with a bad case of lead poisoning. I’ll give him a load of double-ought buck.”

Several men smiled and Lois Shoemaker’s face went red.

Gene McQueen said, “JR, I hate hearing this. That sort of thing would eat me plumb up. Whoever’s behind this ought to be doing a stretch in McAlester, you ask me. There’s a reason ranchers used to make cattle rustlers the guest of honor at a string party.”

Robert Gist said, “Hear, hear.”

“Just awful,” said George Northcutt.

“Terrible,” Ruth Martin said.

“Now,” said the sheriff, “I want y’all to listen at me. I got a herd myownself and I’d be lying if I told you this hasn’t put me off my feed. But that’s no call for anyone to get crossways with the law over it. You see anything out of the ordinary, you call our dispatch. Me or one of my deputies will be there quick as a minnow can swim a dipper. Bad as you might want to, you can’t go shooting somebody over a cow.”

Every man but Phillip Harjo—the only person present who’d ever shot anyone—looked rankled.

“What if they was to come in our house?” Herb Gunter said.

“That’s a different story,” Bledsoe said. “If you’re in your home defending yourself, the law’s behind you and I am too. That’s always been the case. I just don’t want this turning into a corpse and cartridge occasion.”

JR watched the sheriff. Bledsoe seemed to be addressing everyone, but he was staring at Johnny Shoemaker.

“All right then,” Bledsoe said, “that’s all I got for you. Appreciate everybody coming down. Y’all see anything out of fix, you call. Otherwise, have a good evening.”

---

JR drove down the gravel road at dusk with the season’s last fireflies tracing luminous arcs in the pastures. He’d called Phillip Harjo 30 minutes before, asked if he could stop by, and Harjo had said, “Come see me, yeah.”

The land went rolling out east of JR’s ranch. He topped one hill and descended into the valley beneath, his mind following similar contours, cresting and plunging, the sun setting behind him, blue twilight ahead. He’d half begun to wonder if an oil company wasn’t behind his carved-up cattle, some yack trying to spook him into selling, and the thought made him feel crazy—it was a crazy thought to have. One man alone couldn’t have accomplished all he’d seen, and two or more would’ve left some trace, tire tracks, all manner of sign. He’d considered the possible motivations of his neighbors, weighing each man’s interests until he’d begun to suspect them, every one—which was foolish—and he’d started keeping a pistol on him at all hours, a Dan Wesson .357 revolver; it lay on the bench seat beside him now. He woke at odd hours and peered out the windows of his house. 

He’d considered the possible motivations of his neighbors, weighing each man’s interests until he’d begun to suspect them, every one—which was foolish.

He turned south onto a red dirt road that cut through the black oak forest, sagging barbed wire fences on sun-bleached posts, the bar ditches overgrown, limbs hanging above the narrow lane thick enough to make night early.

When he pulled in at a well-kept drive that wound through the cedars, he crossed a cattle-guard, then crossed another, and stopped in front of a two-story cabin. He’d been there before, but never inside. Lifting the column shifter, he pushed it all the way to the left, and then just sat, trying to gather himself. He glanced at the pistol, then hit the glove compartment button, leaned down, and stowed the revolver atop the papers and tire gauges and pairs of needle-nosed pliers. An old pocketknife he’d forgotten. A roll of nickels. When he sat up, he saw that Harjo had stepped out on the porch. The man raised a hand in greeting, and JR opened his door to get out.

---

They sat at a twin-slab table beside a large window that looked out into the woods. JR thought the cabin was a jim-dandy—more lodge than ranch house—with walls of lacquered pine and cedar crossbeams above. Mounted deer heads. Calfskin rugs. An upright piano in the living room and the entire house lit by electric lamps in walls sconces that resembled the old kerosene ones in the shotgun shanty he’d grown up in. Seminole was a boomtown then, the streets a mud quagmire, wooden derricks like a ghastly forest, far as the eye could see.

Betsy Harjo served them coffee and fried pies. Her blue-black hair was parted in the center and worn in long braids down her back. She had dark, dazzling eyes that stared out from a face that must have been older than it looked. JR thought she could’ve been any age between thirty and fifty-five—it was hard to say. She asked after Mary Louise and then about their son in Oklahoma City and then she nodded at her husband and went upstairs.

The two of them talked for a while about the assassination attempt on President Ford the previous week and then they talked about Patty Hearst who’d been arrested in San Francisco. When JR finished his coffee, he looked at Harjo and asked what he’d made of the meeting on Friday.

“Oh,” Harjo said, “that was something. John Shoemaker’s kind of funny, enit?”

“He’s worse than that,” JR said, and a few silent moments passed. A crow cawed from out in the night. He could just hear the muffled sound of a pumpjack engine, a faint, muted chug.

He said, “Phillip, it sort of seemed to me like you might’ve had some thoughts on what all’s been happening over at my place. Understand you not wanting to air your lungs in public, but I’d appreciate listening to anything you’d have to say.”

Harjo sipped his coffee, turned his head and glanced out the window where their reflections hung in the glass. Then he looked at JR and said, “Everyone talking about coyotes and outlaws. Gerald, I think it was? He wouldn’t know a bandit from a bull’s foot.”

“Have to agree with you there,” JR said. He picked a piece of crust off his plate and put it in his mouth, chewing slowly before speaking again. “I ain’t discussed this outside the family, but I’ve had a dozen oil companies try to buy me out so they could come in and drill. Mary’s wanted me to sell for a few years now and move us into town. Appreciate you not telling that around.”

“I don’t talk other people’s business,” Harjo said.

“I know you don’t. I’m just saying.” 

“You able to turn a profit?” Harjo asked. “It wasn’t for these wells of mine, I wouldn’t have any cows at all.”

JR shook his head and exhaled a long breath. “I’ve lost a thousand dollars a year on my herd, but the ranch has been in the family since 1911. I hoped to pass it on to my boy, but he don’t care nothing about cattle. Can’t say I blame him. Sure ain’t no money in it. But I’d hate to see it go to some petroleum company. It’s Stewart land.”

Harjo was watching him with his calm, steady eyes. He said, “Reckon whose it was before?”

“Beg pardon?” JR said.

“Before the Rush, it was our land. Seminole land.”

“Well,” said JR, “I don’t mean to get into all that.”

“Why’s that?”

“I just don’t see it pertains.”

“No?” said Harjo.

“No,” said JR. 

Harjo leaned back in his chair. “Since I was young,” he said, “I’ve heard our elders speak about these matters. There is a good deal of bitterness, you understand. They call your people chiselers. I would not say so. You had the property from your father and your father had it from his. But now a terrible thing has happened and you feel some great affliction.” He looked at JR. “This is how the Seminole have felt for generations.”

JR stared at the crumbs on his plate. “I don’t see how that helps.”

Harjo leaned forward and braced his forearms against the table’s edge. He said, “You own your mineral rights?”

“Surface and mineral,” JR said.

“What’s your acreage?”

“Six hundred and forty.”

“Whole section.”

“Whole section,” JR said.

Harjo glanced up at the ceiling, as if calculating figures in his head. Then he looked at JR. “I would buy it,” he said.

JR had heard him just fine, but he was so stunned he asked Harjo to come again.

“Your place,” said Harjo. “I would buy it from you.”

JR felt like he’d been splashed with hot water, anger scalding his face. Yes, I see, he thought. I can see it now.

He pushed his chair back and stood.

“Mr. Harjo,” he said, “I thank you for your time. You tell Miss Betsy I appreciate the refreshments.”

He crossed the room without waiting for a response, a kind of electricity coursing through him, the air all but crackling with it, and he’d just placed his hand on the doorknob when he heard Harjo say, “You think about it, yeah?”

JR opened the door and stepped out.

---

But JR didn’t see how Harjo could’ve carved up his cattle. He’d suspected so many culprits it drove him distracted. Probably, the smart thing would be to contact the OSBI, but when he called Bledsoe to float the idea, the sheriff said, “We could do that. We certainly could. But you really want the State Bureau poking around your property?”

“What about the Feds?” JR asked.

Bledsoe snorted. He said, “Them ole boys couldn’t drive nails in a snow bank. I wouldn’t let them step foot on my place.”

By the time he hung up the phone, he was wondering if the sheriff was involved, though that went against everything he’d ever known about Jack Bledsoe.

He’d heard folks talk about paranoia, but he’d never felt it until now: a chill behind your breastbone, wouldn’t seem to thaw. His people had come out of Howell County, Missouri; before that, Tennessee—Appalachian hill-folk, a long line of Scots-Irish bootleggers, long riders, barroom brawlers. They were fractious, short-tempered, at times. Certainly clannish. But not exactly paranoid. It was just good sense to assume anyone who wasn’t family was trying to fix your flint.

He wasn’t thinking clearly, wasn’t really sleeping. When he managed to drift off, he’d dream of a forest glade festooned with cattle teeth, a floor of white incisors. He dreamt of a boneyard pasture and a black sun in a scarlet sky or an owl on a low branch with a needle in its human hands.

Every morning, he did a head count of his beef and show cattle, and he did another in the afternoon. His Angus cows had always been a bit skeersome, but his Brahmans were little more than pets. He’d thread his way among the silver bodies, touching each blue-gray hump. He felt like he was going a little mad. One night at the supper table, Mary Louise looked over at him and said, “Why, JR.”

She was pointing at his plate with the tines of the fork she held, and he glanced down to see that he’d picked the bones out of the chicken wings he’d been eating and arranged them atop his mashed potatoes like a cairn.

Then he woke one morning from a dream he couldn’t recall and heard rain lashing the side of the house. Mary Louise was still asleep in the bed beside him, her face slack and her lips parted, her bosom rising and falling, rising and falling.

He stood at the window watching the gray sheets of rain. It was a real toad-strangler; he could hardly see twenty yards. He dressed and went in the kitchen to make coffee and by the time he’d sat down, the rain had stopped. He pulled on his rubber boots, tucked his jeans into the leg covers and went to do his morning count.

The Brahmans were under the eaves of the cowshed he’d built just outside the yard. His chow dogs were whining and pawing the fence, and he let down the tailgate of the truck for them to hop into the bed, then drove up to the hay barn in the west pasture where his Angus and Black Baldies would gather during a storm. He parked in the bay and did his count, came up one short, did the count again, and then a third time. One of the Angus steers was missing.

He couldn’t drive to the south pasture without the pickup bogging down, and by the time he got back to the house, a soft drizzle had begun to fall. He went inside to get his slicker.

Mary Louise wasn’t in the kitchen and she wasn’t in the living room and when he walked down the hall to their bedroom, the bed was made and all the pillows arranged against the headboard. He opened the closet and got his slicker from its hanger, then went back up the hallway and poked his head out into the garage: her car was sitting right there.

He stood in the living room numbly. Drops of rain beaded the windows.

“Momma,” he called, “you in here?” He listened to his voice Doppler along the wood-paneled walls. He walked down the hall and went upstairs.

The guest bathroom was empty, as was Jonathan’s old room. He knocked on the door of Mary Louise’s sewing room, then opened it and stepped inside. Without knowing why, he closed the door behind him and stood in the center of the room.

She enjoyed working in here because of the light from the south-facing windows. Her dress mannequin was in the corner—a headless torso on a walnut stand—and her antique sewing machine sat on its mahogany table against the wall. She’d been after him for a new electric model, but he liked that she did things the old way. The noise of the foot treadle was a comfort to him.

He heard a door slam downstairs, and he was about to walk out when, outside, Gretchen and Moses began to howl. He stepped over to the window. Water dripped from the eaves and through the light screen of rain he saw the dogs standing at the fence that enclosed the yard, ears back and hackles raised, rucking up a chorus. Out in the pasture, not fifty yards away, the Angus steer lay on its belly in a rumpled patch of bluestem, its legs bent at crazy angles, as if it had been dropped from a great height. From the bridge of its nose all the way around its lower jaw, a circle of the black hide had been sheared away.

He stood there, watching, trying to ignore the howling. Nothing he’d done, no one he’d spoken to, had brought him any closer to an answer, and suddenly he knew this would keep happening until his entire herd was gone. Turning, his eye fell on the sewing dummy again. The charcoal-colored dress Mary Louise was making hung over the torso like loose flaps of flesh and he saw how perfect the joinery, how precise the cuts. He stepped over and fingered the cloth. On a small table, beside bolts of fabric, lay a set of stainless steel X-ACTO knives. He glanced out the window at the mutilated steer, then back at the dummy, and the hair rose along his forearms. His heart began hammering against the thin wall of his chest and he could hear blood rushing in his ears.

Ain’t no way, he thought. Little woman, wife and mother, no more hurt in her than a sparrow. Georgie on her bosom in the hospital not three hours old and her face lit up like a sunbeam. She’d held him just the same after he went through that windshield down in Bowlegs, summer of ’62, had changed out his bedpan for two weeks while he was laid up, never once crinkled her nose. Thirty years and hadn’t asked for anything but some cash for the sewing store or not to have to sit around on a failing farm while he— 

He looked out the window and he could see Mary Louise’s face that day in the south pasture, calm as a millpond. Wouldn’t listen to him. Wanted to see for herself.

Go around playing cowboy.

He stared at the bolt of fabric on her worktable, the cuts so clean.

“Ain’t no way,” he whispered, as if speaking the words would make them true.

A man makes decisions about what to believe and he makes decisions about what he won’t. He would auction off the herd, sell his ranch to Harjo or one of the oilmen, whoever made the best offer. His grandfather was a cattleman, his father too, but his days of raising cattle were over. He could stand knowing someone was dismembering his stock. He could stand suspecting his friends, his neighbors, even the sheriff. But his wife of thirty years? That was the last feather.

He heard Mary Louise on the stairs. “Daddy,” she called, “are you up here?”

That was a good question, he thought. All he’d wanted was to figure out what was happening to his cows, but now he decided he didn’t need to know. Wasn’t going to think about that anymore, wasn’t going to do it. 

JR turned from the window and started across the room.

“Yes,” he said, and his voice sounded strange to him. He reached for the knob and opened the door.