The Rustlers

It seemed like nothing but a prank when it began. Roy came across two of his Jersey heifers blocking the road one morning and slammed his foot to the brake pedal, spilling a mug of coffee onto his lap in doing so. The cows stared back at him, their eyes wheeling with lazy curiosity, then slowly approached his truck to investigate. He got out and scratched their foreheads, asked where in the world they were off to and called them his beautiful gals. Then he rounded them up along with the other runaways—about fifteen or so in total—before driving the perimeter of his land in search of the breach. Fallen limbs sometimes grounded the lines on windy days, or else a startled group of deer might charge straight through them, tearing a dozen stakes up from the earth as they galloped and sprung about, blindly fleeing the powerful jolts of electricity. But this time the lines had been cut, which Roy took for the vandalism of drunken teenagers. He mended the fencing and counted the herd, soon to find a yearling bull unaccounted for. Then he phoned around to let his neighbors know of it.

“Sounds like a rustler,” one old neighbor told him, his voice thick, as if he’d just eaten a spoonful of honey. “You’d better put a stop to it before they run you dry.”

“Like from a Western?” Roy asked. “You must think we live out in Wyoming.”

“The Melos had three head taken in April. They still don’t know who did it.”

“That dumb bull must be asleep in the shade somewhere,” Roy said. “I’ll find him.”

But he never did recover the young bull and another animal disappeared a few weeks later in the very same manner, so here he was patrolling with his gun and his coffee thermos, listening as the frogs sang from their holes. The clouds slid like boats of foam across the black sky above, and Roy took it all in for long enough to relax, forgetting his debts, his troubles. He held the rifle by the barrel and rested the stock in the wet grass as he thought of Jennifer back home. She was probably sleeping beside their child, or else nursing. Her body had plumped like a pear over the past few years and all the Pilates classes and running regimes could not return her to what she once was. It frustrated her immensely, but to Roy it was only a comfort, a reshaping that drew her closer to him—he felt it protected them both somehow.

~

The cows shifted and made sucking sounds in the mud as Roy skirted the edge of his biggest pasture and watched the lights of a vehicle play off the treetops. He looked at his watch and saw that it was one-thirty in the morning, then started across the field. For a week he’d been at this, catching a few hours’ sleep after supper each night then slipping out to make his rounds. All his normal chores awaited him in the morning: He’d prepare the feed and the herd would crowd about the barn for breakfast and milking; there were chickens to water and throw food scraps to, eggs to gather; the milk tanks needed cleaning soon, and so too would the cattle need their hooves trimmed. It mounted, day upon day, and still the animals went missing and the margins narrowed. But life hadn’t always been so trying.

Unlike his father, who had tended this farm from childhood right up to an early death, Roy had once worked on a scallop trawler as so many young men in this town did. He dangled his feet over the waves for a full decade before Jennifer finally came to him with an ultimatum: “Get off that boat and start up the farm like you promised,” she told him. “Or I’m running for California without you. I always wanted to see a redwood tree.” She’d had enough of his weeks at sea and his benders upon docking in port, not to mention his days of recovery afterwards and how the whole cycle inevitably began itself anew.

Roy loved working on the trawlers and felt as wild and free as a pirate on them, but he could not argue with Jennifer on any of it—he’d never truly known another woman and wasn’t about to let her get away from him. He’d only kissed one other girl his entire life, in fact, and that was during a game of spin-the-bottle at a Halloween party in the sixth grade.

“I want to start up the farm again too,” Roy told her as he picked at his calloused palms. “I just never knew you felt so firmly about it.”

The first step was to buy enough cows for a starter herd, along with a tractor and the milk machines, and all the other equipment that had either rusted away or been sold off since his father’s passing. Sometimes Roy came off the boat with a small fortune and Jennifer did well for herself waitressing at a local restaurant too, but he still had to go to sea for another year in order to scrape the great sum of money together. He attended farm auctions in his free time rather than drinking with his buddies, and as he shucked scallops in the belly of the trawler and washed their innards down the slough, he thought of cheeses and cream, of slimy calves swaying to their feet for the very first time. In that long year Roy would often drift away like this as he rode the swells of Georges Bank and the Great South Channel, and he almost always came to imagine his father as a young man when he did, plodding through the fields on his tractor with the blocks of hay birthing out from the baler after it had eaten up the loose strands of alfalfa and bound them together in twine. He knew he was doing the right thing in those moments—for Jennifer, for the family they would surely have—but now, as he walked his land like some jumpy soldier out on his first patrol, he was not so sure of it.

~

An old cow lowed and made a useless effort to stand in the bottom of a dried-up pond bed—she was a nurse cow at the end of her days. A group of heifers, young steers and mature cows alike flocked to her side like children bent over their mother’s deathbed. Roy had waited too long to sell her off as he always did, his soft heart getting in the way of things. He came alongside her in the muck, his boot tops nearly overwhelmed, and patted her massive shoulders as he talked softly into her ear. The vehicle that had shone its lights had passed and was only a motorcycle. There was no longer any hurry.

“We’ll get you out of here in the morning,” Roy told the old cow after much cooing and praise, and then he left her in the care of her children, who bellowed into the darkness.

He moved on as the bullfrogs thundered like jug players, the green frogs like banjo strings losing their tune. He had always been amazed by those small, button-eyed creatures, by what racket they could muster together in the night. He felt that same sense of wonder when he considered his daughter’s high-pitched shrieks too, which seemed to reach decibels his own voice box could never hope to achieve. Recently she had taken to standing beneath the dining room table, holding onto one of the legs for balance and screeching at the top of her lungs for the pure and simple joy of it. The first few times had brought Roy and Jennifer rushing to her side only to find her lying on her back in wild fits of laughter, and after that it became a game for them all, a sign that the remission was real and would surely hold.

~

It seemed to Roy that his mind was in too many places at once—hospital bills, the old nurse cow, which bull would make the best breeder if set to the herd—which explained his astonishment when he came upon the northern fence line of his property and discovered the wires hanging limply to the ground. He spun around as if the rustlers might creep in the shadows just behind him, then listened to the herd in the adjacent field, where they snorted and grunted, stomped their hooves in agitation and raked them against the earth. His biggest mistake was in assuming the thieves would announce their arrival with the roar of engines and the clatter of stock trailers. It would have been better to focus on changes in the animals’ temperament, but somehow it never occurred to him that the rustlers would move with such stealth.

There was a lot of running in store. Roy dropped everything but the rifle and hustled across the wide field for the ancient stone wall that divided this pasture from the next. He strode as fast as he could without spooking the cattle or alerting the rustlers to his presence. The dips and rises of the earth tripped him up now and then but he kept on running to the wall, where he took a knee and quickly brought the gunstock to his shoulder. He scanned the field through the scope and saw the backs of his animals glistening in the buttery moonlight as they circled, gathering then dispersing like shoaling baitfish. A well-trained cattle dog ran among them, nipping at their hocks in an effort to split one from the rest. The dog worked a nearly grown heifer from the drove and cut at hard zigzags behind her to keep her trotting farther and farther away from the rest. Roy followed the dog in the rifle’s sight. He felt as if his lungs were squashed flat inside him, as if a giant stone lay on his chest. He scanned back to the herd which continued to reel in commotion, and there he saw her running with his cattle: a redheaded girl of maybe eleven or twelve, a long stalk of bamboo held in her hands.

~

For his time at sea, Roy had his lucky Red Sox cap, his torn, drooping socks and his string of worry beads that an old nun had gifted him after he dug her car out from a snowdrift. If he forgot any one of these, the captain would wait for him to drive home in order to retrieve it, then the crew would set off again with relief and courage. Others had lucky rabbits feet or t-shirts so holey they looked like netting, and one young greenhorn always wore the same pair of tattered boxer shorts, the ones he had worn on the night he finally lost his virginity with his first girlfriend. There were more odd bits of superstition too—wives and girlfriends were banned from the deck before departure, for example, and whistling a tune in a storm would earn you a hard smack to the back of the head.

These rules were serious, as magic ran rampant at sea and you couldn’t be too careful in keeping it away from your ship. But Roy found none of this held true for the land. He saw no godly tricks in the rhythms of his herd, nothing that indicated the milk would sweeten or sour if he cut the hay on a certain wind or donned a particular pair of sunglasses while doing it. But as the redheaded girl raced with his cows, slapping their backs with her pole and weaving in and out of their legs like a horse vaulter, Roy was suddenly taken by the old sorceries once more and a tingling surge of adrenaline ran through his limbs like a long, writhing column of ants. His fingers pulsed with blood and felt fat and tender against the steel. The girl moved as if she’d done this a thousand times before. She wore coveralls and her hair winged about in pigtails; she was not so different from how Roy’s own daughter might look someday.

A high whistle came from the road, beyond the far fence line and a row of hedges, and the girl answered with a yipping call like a TV cowboy. She fell in line with the dog and now both of them drove the heifer, the dog looping around from behind and the girl running alongside and cracking the pole against the cow’s tailbone again and again. Roy watched them through the scope, shifting back and forth between the two.

This was it, he thought: he had to do something. It may not have been the crusty, mean-looking old man with a beard he expected, but he couldn’t stand by and let it happen. He tried to figure something to do but came up dry. His mind swam randomly, and he realized then that he could not even have fired on a full-grown man. He aimed his rifle for the sky, the best option he could come up with. Maybe the shots would stop the whole operation and they would never return for fear of being killed. Maybe they would tell him they were sorry for stealing his cows, for making him stay up till sunrise. Or maybe all the rest of them—a whole family of rotten thieves—would come out from the hedges with their rifles and machine guns to fire mercilessly at Roy, before turning the barrels on his herd. He thought these things as his finger pulled the trigger each time, as he slid the bolt back and forth along the rail.

The girl dropped to the ground immediately, as if she herself had been shot, and pressed her hands over her ears to block out the sound. The dog rushed to her side and the heifer broke free and found the rest of the herd in the far corner of the pasture. Roy watched his animals assemble. He was angry that the girl and whomever she was with had caused them such trouble. They were not simply stealing cows—it was much more than that to Roy. He pictured his daughter’s nursery—the plastic cows and horses that lined her shelves, the mound of stuffed animals that lay in her open toy chest—and wanted to be there with her more than anything. He could almost see her in Jennifer’s arms, seated on a rocking chair by the open window, both of them asleep at this hour and perhaps, Roy liked to imagine, with their dreams entwined like the roots of two trees knotted together beneath the soil.

~

The cattle trotted and bellowed all through Roy’s acreage now, no longer contained to the pasture where the shots had been fired. A dust cloud swirled up through the trees, and the ground shook with the weight of fifty tons. The girl dragged her fingers through her red curls, unsure of what action to take. She had run so swiftly among the cows, but now that something beyond her control had occurred, her youth showed through.

Roy climbed over the stone wall and walked toward the girl and her dog. He couldn’t help but wallow in the emptiness this all had brought him. He had only been trying to save his farm, cling to what money he could for his daughter’s medical bills, and maybe—if that steady flow of peril could be overcome—for her college tuition someday. But now he had this strange child to deal with and the knowledge that this wasn’t even the end of it. She was only a few steps away from him now, sobbing on a mound of dirt as she brushed her tears away with dirty fingers. It would be a miracle, Roy thought as he regarded her, if his own little girl could reach the age of five and learn how to ride a bicycle. That’s what all the doctors told them at least, not to get their hopes too high. He pushed it from his mind as often as he could, but of course it seeped through a thousand times each day and all he could do when it did was suck in a breath and look around at the world, thankful she was a part of it for the time being.

~

The dog stood between Roy and the little girl, growling with its hackles raised, and Roy looked at the girl and knew it was pointless to be angry with her. She was only a child after all, and she was here on account of somebody else. Roy studied the hedges from where the whistle had come a few moments earlier. He pointed the gun here and there but could not find her partners. “What’s your name?” Roy asked as he lowered his rifle to the ground. “Why are you out here all alone?” But the girl kept on crying and the dog kept on growling, and then an old man wearing only a red bathing suit and cowboy boots came out from the hedges, his grey, uncombed hair hanging clear to his bare nipples. He emerged from the thick growth—from where a narrow hole had been cut some time earlier then camouflaged with a layer of brush—and strode toward them with a long revolver fixed directly on Roy. It was almost comic, Roy thought, how the barrel looked to have been stretched out, like some gun from an old cartoon. Roy didn’t lift his rifle to oppose him, he didn’t even move.

“Looks like I’ve got the drop on you,” the man said. “Throw down your weapon and we’ll be on our way. We won’t cause you any more trouble than we have to.”

Roy let go of his gun and the girl ran to the old man’s side. She dried her eyes on his bathing suit as he patted her head, and through all this the man stared at Roy with a frown on his face. Roy was afraid of the man and felt weak in his knees; somehow he knew, as he looked at those cheeks that seemed so unnaturally smooth beside the unkempt hair, that this was a man who would not hesitate to pull the trigger when the time came.

“You gave me a hell of a scare,” the old man said, and he lifted his gun up over his head and began to scratch his shoulder blade with the tip of the barrel. “Here I am sitting in my truck with the radio playing low when I hear a line of big booms and think my granddaughter might all of a sudden be dead and gone.”

“I shot at the sky,” Roy said quietly.

“That was the place to do it,” the man said. “But I don’t quite know what to do here. Heck, you won’t run into us around town because we don’t come through too often, but what if you happened to be in our neck of the woods sometime and caught sight of us then? I want you to think carefully about this problem we have before us.”

“I’d just nod my head at you,” Roy said. “I won’t call the police.” The man dropped his eyes to the ground and shook his head slowly as if he were ashamed by the answer.

“You might get yourself into trouble if you were to do a thing like that,” the man said. “I don’t know how else to say it—we might not want you to so much as look our way.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t even recognize you.”

“Fine,” the man said. “That sounds like something I can stomach. We know where you live, and you don’t want us coming back here—I hope you remember that. It’s a beautiful piece of land you’ve got, it sure is.”

He bent down to his granddaughter and said something softly, and she ran off with the dog toward the cattle and again began the task of breaking an animal free. She screeched out a loud cry and the animals scattered for the dog to chase. Roy glanced at his rifle but the man walked forward and picked it off the ground.

“You might as well kill me if you’re going to keep taking our cows,” Roy blurted out. “We already won’t turn a profit this year at all and we owe the banks more than this place is worth. We’ve got a sick daughter to care for, you know. She was practically born sick—she’s never known it any other way. And now you take her father away from her. Every night of the week I’m out here waiting, just hoping it won’t happen again.”

The man looked at Roy for a long time as his granddaughter ran and hollered. He held both the rifle and the pistol lazily at his sides. If Roy hadn’t known this was a man come to rob him blind, he might have thought he was about to start weeping.

“That’s a damn heavy thing to carry around with you,” the man said finally. “I could say we’ve got our sick babies too, but then you’d probably think I was just pulling your leg to make you feel better about us. The truth is, we’ve been lucky for a while now. We have an awful lot to be thankful for, believe it or not. But I’ll tell you one thing: this is our first time hitting you, there are a whole lot more of us than you might think.”

The girl came back with the dog and a different cow this time. She led the animal through the break they had cut in the perimeter fencing, then through the hole in the hedges and out onto the road. She had no lead with her, but Roy heard the animal stomp up a metal ramp into a stock trailer. Then the gate slammed shut and the girl called out that she had finished.

“She sure is something else,” the old man said as he shook his head back and forth with the utmost pride. “We won’t bother you again, sir, and I’ll leave that worn out rifle of yours on the side of the road for you—for the next ones who come along.”

The man walked off through the hedges, and Roy watched him go then lay on his back and took in the sky to calm himself down. He listened to the sounds of summer for a long time—the cows, the frogs and cicadas, the engine turning over in the near distance, then moving away—and for a moment he wanted to cling to this vision forever, forget all his life and watch as the stars spun west until a world of color came in with the sun. He had witnessed that spectacle so many times before at sea. But finally he stood and walked to the road and found his rifle on a flattened patch of grass. He chambered the last round, aimed straight for wispy cloud and fired it off—he would not be using it again, not for these purposes at any rate. Then he began his trek home across the fields.