The Virgin of Small Plains (3 page)

“Good boy.” She resumed coughing, and turned back toward bed.

With one hand on the railing and one on the wall, he vaulted down the stairs three at a time, grabbed the stuff he’d told his mom he would, and then raced outside. His father and brother were already waiting for him in his dad’s truck, which was idling at the front of the house. Rex saw that Patrick was in the backseat, so he climbed in front. “I thought we were only supposed to get a couple of inches,” he observed to his dad.

“Goddamn weatherman,” his father muttered. “There oughta be a law.”

In the dashboard lights, his dad’s complexion, always red from high blood pressure and a choleric nature, looked dark and purplish, from the heat of anger and the cold of the weather. Nathan Shellenberger jerked the truck into first gear so furiously that the vehicle’s rear end whipped from left to right and back again on the icy driveway.

“Whoa, Dad,” Rex said, putting a hand on the dash to keep from banging into things.

In the backseat, Patrick laughed as he got jerked around by the centrifugal force.

They were still fishtailing as their headlights picked out the highway. It was going to be a slick, hazardous trip to their first gate. If his mother had been with them, Rex thought, she would have said, “Let’s don’t end up in a ditch, all right, Nathan?” But she wasn’t there, so his dad continued driving too angrily and too fast for safety.

They knew which pastures to check, but the pastures were large, with many draws and hard-to-reach spots where cows wandered off to give birth to their calves. Fairly easily, they located one “girl” down in a draw where she was on her front knees, bellowing in pain and difficulty. Under their father’s direction, the brothers dragged a metal Y-fork, winch, and chains from the back of the truck and used them, working together as a practiced team, to pull the bull calf from his mother. Within moments, after delivering the placenta, the mom was back on her feet, turning toward her new calf, nuzzling him, trying to get him on his feet, too. But the baby was soaked and shivering so much it couldn’t stand. Patrick scooped it up in his arms and carried it into the truck with him—blood, excrement, and all. Rex and his dad led the new mother up a ramp into a narrow stall in the bed of the truck, where they shut her in. When the three of them climbed back into the cab, with the baby in Patrick’s arms, and his dad turned up the heater, Rex smelled the rich, animal, comforting stink of new life all over them.

Slowly, this time, they made their way back to the barn, where they placed the pair together in a stall. When they saw the mother licking the calf and the calf starting to butt her in search of an udder, they hurried back through the cold and snow to the truck to repeat the process as many times as they had to that night.

“There,” Rex’s father said, and pointed to a mound of snow where there wasn’t any natural reason for such a mound to be. “Look there, boys. What do you think that is?”

They had already found two more new calves, one doing all right, the other frozen.

This looked as if it was going to be more bad news.

Rex couldn’t tell from a distance what it was that lay so still in the whiteness.

Even when his dad pointed the truck’s headlights at it, they couldn’t tell what they were looking at. “One of you boys go see, so we don’t all have to get out again.”

“Your turn,” Patrick told him.

“Baloney.”

“I don’t care whose turn it is,” their dad snapped. “One of you go!”

Patrick swatted the back of Rex’s head. Because of the cold, it hurt worse than usual.

Rex whirled around and yelled at the backseat. “Stop it, Patrick! What are you—ten?”

“Go!” his dad said. “Or I’ll leave you both here.”

“No, you won’t,” Patrick said, sounding comfortable. “Mom’d kill you. Go, little brother. Mom won’t be nearly so upset if Dad only leaves one of us behind.”

Rex climbed out into the blowing snow and bitter cold again, thinking,
If I was the one who got to go to college this year, I’d have made sure I got to
stay
there.
Patrick—the good-looking one, the wild one, as he was known to the world—had managed to flunk out after only one semester at K-State University in Manhattan. He’d been back home only a week, and nobody but his family knew he was back. Feeling ashamed of his brother’s failure, Rex hadn’t even told Mitch or Abby the news that Patrick was home.
Hiding out,
in Rex’s opinion,
mooching,
while he figured out what school might take him next, pretending to be helpful around the ranch while it was actually Rex who did the work.

The closer Rex got to the mound of snow, the less it looked like a cow or calf.

He was nearly nudging it with the toe of his boot when a horrible queasy feeling shot through him a moment before the awful truth seeped into his brain. His mind registered,
body,
before his eyes conveyed,
girl.
Before he could put all the pieces of the shocking puzzle together, he knelt on one knee beside her, looking down at her, not understanding.

She lay on her side, impossibly naked in the blizzard.

Her hip was the highest part of her, the snow-covered hump they’d seen from the truck.

Her skin was as white as the snow around it, her hair as brown as the earth under her.

Without thinking, Rex grabbed her thin shoulder, turned her over, and gasped as snow fell away to reveal her body and face. Her eyes were closed as if she had lain down and gone to sleep. He took in the full breasts, the mound of stomach, the pubic hair, the slim legs that were bent as if she had tried to curl up for warmth. For all of that, it was her bare feet that made her look the most vulnerable. Rex saw blood between her legs, down the inside of her thighs, and pink snow beneath her.

Even cold and dead, she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.

Emotion whipped through him like a bullet, ripping his eighteen-year-old heart open.

“Rex! Is it a calf? What’d you find?”

His father came up behind him.

“My God,” he heard his father exclaim in a loud, stiff, shocked voice.

Rex felt himself lifted and pulled to his feet, felt himself pushed away.

His father took his place, kneeling down in the snow to look at her.

“Dear God.” Nathan Shellenberger turned around to stare up at Rex, as if his son could provide the answers. “Do you know her?”

Dumbly, Rex shook his head, denying her:
No.

“Go get your brother.”

But when Rex returned with Patrick, it wasn’t so his dad could also ask his older brother if he knew her. It was only so the three of them could lift her and carry her between them back to the truck. They were all big men, over six feet, but none of them could do it alone because of the awkward, frozen posture of her body. His dad lifted her head and shoulders, Patrick took her feet and legs, leaving Rex to place his gloved hands under her hips. He had to force himself to do it. It was all so strange. And one of the strangest things of all was that nobody was saying anything. He had told his brother on the way back to their father what was going on, and Patrick had said, “Jesus!” and “What the hell?” and “Who is she, is it somebody we know?” Rex, his lips numb, his mind reeling, hadn’t answered his brother’s questions. When they reached their father and Patrick saw her, he, too, fell silent.

The snow was falling so thickly it was disorienting in the dark.

Rex felt as if they were moving through space, that they were giant spacemen threading in and out among trillions of tiny luminous stars. Several times as they struggled through the drifts, over the rough ranch land, Rex thought he was going to drop her, or be sick.

At the truck, they paused, holding her, unsure what to do next.

“We’ll have to put her in back,” their father said.

Rex hated that part of it, the handing of her stiff, bent body up to the bed of the pickup truck, the securing of her body by laying her down between the back wall and some fifty-pound feed bags. It felt ludicrous and disrespectful, even when his father covered her with empty burlap. But Rex knew the answer to the question, “What else could they do?” was
nothing.
Small Plains didn’t have a hospital so there was no ambulance to send for, and his dad couldn’t expect McLaughlin Brothers Funeral Home to send out a hearse to the middle of a cow pasture, not in this weather.

Back in the cab of the truck, his father said gruffly, “I’m dropping you back home, Rex.”

“Why? Where are you going?”

“Well, we’re not leaving her in the back of the truck all night, son.” His dad’s tone was sarcastic, but also gentle. “When you go in the house, don’t say anything to your mother about this. I’ll tell her.”

“Yes, sir.”

The “sir” came out unexpectedly, as it sometimes did when his dad changed from rancher to law enforcer.

“We disturbed the ‘scene,’ didn’t we?” Rex asked, now speaking to the sheriff.

“Can’t be helped. We couldn’t leave her out there.”

“Why not?” Patrick asked, sounding sullen.

His father snapped a glance in the rearview mirror and said, more impatiently this time, “Think. Coyotes.”

Rex shuddered, sliding down in the seat.

“The snow’s going to destroy some evidence,” his father said, “like footprints, but it might preserve other things.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, Patrick. We’ll see when it melts.”

“Do you think somebody killed her, Dad?” Rex blurted.

Instead of answering the question, his father said, “It looks like she was raped.”

Rex felt shocked to hear the word spoken out loud.
Raped.

In his mind, he saw the red streaks on her thighs, the pink snow beneath her.

After his father said the loaded word, it hung in the cold air of the car, as if his dad was waiting to hear how his sons would respond.

“What about the new calves?” his brother asked, from the backseat.

“There’s nothing we can do about them now,” their father said.

“We’ll lose some,” Patrick persisted, as if that was the most important thing.

Suddenly furious, Rex turned around and glared at his brother. “She’s
dead,
Patrick.”

“So what? Shut up.”

“So
what
?”

Patrick shrugged, turning his face away and staring out the far window.

“Asshole!”
Rex whirled back around, violently shoving himself into the seat back.

His father didn’t remonstrate with either of them, just let them stew in their own emotional juices while he navigated the hazardous roads back home. When Rex glanced over, he saw that his dad had a grim set to his mouth, which could have been because he was thinking hard, or because of the girl, or just because of the driving conditions. It was hard to tell, just as it was hard to tell how his father felt about a lot of things, unless he was angry about them. It was only anger that his dad seemed able to express openly and without reservation, and now and then a kind of patient, sarcastic affection. The more subtle ranges of feeling stayed locked up inside of him. Or, maybe, Rex thought, he had delegated all of those to Rex’s mom, who had enough sensitivity for all of them.

When his dad pulled up into their driveway, Nathan Shellenberger bypassed the house and drove on to park in front of the barn.

Rex got out of the truck, and Patrick opened his door, too.

“Get up here in front with me, Patrick,” his dad ordered him.

“Why?” It sounded whiny, and made Rex want to slug him.

“Because you’re coming with me.”

“Huh? Where? I don’t want to. I’m tired, Dad.”

“And I don’t care if you don’t want to. Get up here. Now.”

Patrick slammed the back truck door, then just stood in the snow while their dad got out on his side and trudged toward the barn.

“What’s he doing now?” Patrick complained.

“Probably going to use the barn phone.”

“To call who?”

“How the hell would I know, Patrick?”

They watched their dad slide one side of the barn doors open, and then disappear inside.

Patrick took a step toward the truck door that Rex was holding open. He got right up in Rex’s face, grinned, and said in a low voice to his brother, “Congratulations, asshole. You finally got to see a naked woman.”

Rex shoved him into the truck.

Patrick laughed, and shoved him back.

Rex pulled back his right arm to hit Patrick with everything he had, but Patrick ducked under and slid into the front seat, so that Rex’s fist landed on the metal divider between front and back. Pain shot up his arm like a lightning bolt, and blinded him. His teeth clamped down on his tongue, filling his mouth with pain, too, and with the bitter taste of his own blood. He fell back into the snow, grabbing at his broken fist with his other hand, then crying out in agony at the touch of his own hand.

Laughing, Patrick slammed the door shut, and locked it.

“Sucker!”

When their father returned, Rex had already gone into the house, cradling his fist.