Killing the Buddha Page 19

  We pause now and then and sit in the cantinas and drink. The air is hot, and the trees are so very green. Music fills the air. We are far from Babylon here, the maps insist on this fact, we are in the very loins of the mother, of the perfect homeland that once was and, of course, once must be again.

  He has reached that decision, the one he made in the cathedral when he sank into prayer while I watched various communicants struggle toward God in the sterile air that priests always seem to leave in their wakes, that astringent air that denies the aromas coming off all the kitchens, the perfume wafting up from between her legs, banishes all these fine things, and insists on a scrubbed world and a virgin, always that virgin, insists on a place before and after experience, a place where nothing happens and there is simply duration. And this damnable sterile air. I have never been in a sanctuary where I did not want to bust up the pews and light a cook fire, fill the air with smoke and savoring stench of burning grease.

  The politician has decided to run for congress back in Babylon. He says simply that it is time. I do not ask questions. I tell him I will help. I know why he will run. Because he feels his people have been slighted, because he feels things have been taken away and he has been made a captive in Babylon. But I also know he is a man of Babylon, not of the villages down here, across the border, in the other country. Nothing will be restored, but maybe some things can be made better. No regrets, no resentments, but the hungers are forever, or as long as it takes us to end it. I fight, that is true, but I also accept. And I have never wondered for a single instant why my ears keen to the click of her high heels on the cool stones.

  He savors his tequila.

  We do not talk of the man of fire. He is not written, he left no prophecies, he offers no restoration. But the eyes will not release anyone who looks upon them. The temple must burn. Once, twice, yet more times. Burn to the ground, burn forever. We will rebuild, that is true. But then we will simply burn it down again.

  It is the only way we can go on.

  It is a true matter of faith.

  Hey, buddy, they’re rebuilding the temple. Got a light?

  We’ve been dry too long and the thirst rasps our throats.

  Mount Vernon, Texas

  A horse is a false hope for victory.

  PSALM 33:17

  SOME called him “Two Foot” George, to others he was “Hawkeye” McVay. He was a geologist by degree and a onetime rodeo champion, a preacher by birthright—“my dad was a Methodist minister, my granddad was a Nazarene”—and by virtue of the call that had brought him from Louisiana to look for a ranch. He bought 450 acres, leased 300 more, but what God really wanted him to find, he came to believe, was a temple: an abandoned livestock auction house on the south side of the interstate, a drafty box with long barns extending from both sides like wings.

  “Something intrigued me to it,” George recalled. He put down what was left of his life savings, cleared out the bats and the skunks and the possums that had moved in when the cows had moved out, and put a new coat of paint over the wind-worn boards of the exterior. Inside he set up tables and covered them with red-checkered tablecloths, and with his wife, Stacy, he opened a country diner. He invited fiddlers to play and led his customers on trail rides, and soon enough he had himself a regular congregation. So he began bringing in preachers; and on days they didn’t show he began preaching. The crowd dwindled, people wanted to eat in peace, folks asked him if between the Baptist and Holiness churches in town he couldn’t find a church that suited him.

  “Long story short,” George told us, “I went out of business. But it was a blessing-in-disguise kinda deal.” He put the chairs up on the tables, pushed them into the corner, and retreated to the big room at the center of building, the one with the windows looking out into the livestock stalls. He tore out the metal gate through which cattle once bustled and declared the wooden benches rising to the rafters to be pews. Threw down a plywood platform over the dirt floor and built up a pulpit where the auctioneer had once called. The smell of beasts remained, so he hung rotating fans from the ceiling. Strung up two bare lightbulbs above them. Where you might find a picture of Jesus in another church he put a painting of a caramel-colored Texas longhorn, standing strangely serene against a pale yellow sky, tall grass slanting past its knees. Out front he planted a cross made of whitewashed horseshoes.

  “My God,” George told us one afternoon as we sat in his parlor. “He’s a God in the business of restoring things.”

  George did with his church just what he’d done with his diner, started bringing in fiddlers and guitar players and honky-tonk holy rollers. Turned Prairie Station Cowboy Church, as he called it, into a stop on the Saturday night–Sunday morning circuit traveled by musicians hoping to make it big in country or Christian recording.

  “Cowboy Church” as de facto denomination began in the open air of rodeo arenas, but as a faith with actual foundations it has grown strong in Texas. There’s Crooked Pine Cowboy Church in the town of Humble, Cowboy Church on the Move in Abilene, churches all over rural Texas with names like Rugged Cross and County Line and Silverado. There’s Living for the Brand in Athens, the All Around Cowboy Church of Sealy, the Cowboy Church of the American West in Midland, the Cowboy Church on Fire in the town of Iraan.

  The Cowboy Bible, a folksy translation of the New Testament with western scenes on the front and back covers, opens with a set of ten directives for a cowboy and his horse. Number 10 reads: “Horse—accepts all!…Rope, bridle, blanket, saddle, rider.” The lesson being that the whole truth of Christianity is that a person must be as obedient to his God as a horse is to its cowboy.

  “It’s in the heart, see,” George said. “Anyone can follow the creed of the cowboy.”

  But not just anyone could claim the name. George led his congregation of thirty booted-up mailmen and physician’s aides on account of the fact that he was the real article. People called him Hawkeye because he was a fine judge of horseflesh and seemed to have a second sight for where an animal wanted to move. Old rodeo riders remembered him as Two Foot for his skill with the bulls. Soon as the chute gate swung open, he’d throw both feet out wide as a split and yank them back to jack his spurs into the bull’s shoulders. This earned him extra points from the rodeo judges but made him no friends in the bull world. Once a brennel bull named Number 99 threw George into the dirt and dropped his hoof on him like a one-ton hammer. Nearly split George’s liver in two. Another bull hooked his lip and sliced it in half, leaving a scar that gave George a kind of friendly sneer. Then there was One Jump George, so called because no rider ever held on longer than a single buck of his hind hooves.

  George versus George: One Jump bucks free from the chute and throws his rump into the air. Two Foot makes good on his name, kicking so that his heels would click if not for a thousand pounds of muscle between. Three seconds into the ride—a rodeo aeon—and the two Georges are still together. Four seconds: George the bull spins and jumps. George the man hangs on with his right hand, his left in the air like he’s blowing a kiss. Five seconds: One Jump looks back, surprised to see a cowboy still holding on. He swings his head over his left shoulder, down then up, and catches Two Foot’s face with the point of a horn. Bare cow bone drives into George’s left eye and back out like a spoon scraping a bowl. Six seconds: George McVay is on the ground.

  “If God didn’t want me to have that eye,” George told us, “I don’t want it neither.” He petted an orange tabby in his lap and squinted at us from behind gold-rimmed spectacles through his right eye alone; the other was glass and didn’t move. His voice was deep and twangy. He wore a black down vest over a salmon-colored western-wear shirt, lean jeans, and cowboy boots caked with mud. He believed you could tell a lot about a man from his hat: His was black and dusty with a red-and-green cord tied around a crown rounding out to shapeless. He took it off whenever he sat down, but he was most comfortable with his hat on.

  He wore it when he preached at the church, and it must have helped,
because despite his lack of ease in front of a crowd he managed to give a good sermon. “Growing in faith,” he preached when we sat with his congregation, huddling in down jackets because the heat wasn’t working, “it’s like being Michelangelo, carving David. You do it by not by accumulating doctrine, but by shearing it away. It’s hard work, cuttin’ marble. You don’t get it done fast.”

  George had cut most of the frills out of his service—he’d sent the fiddlers packing, he no longer bothered with Nashville-bound gospel singers. Instead he relied, week after week, on a single sobered-up cowboy named Ron, a onetime one-hit wonder of mainstream country with a handsome but thin voice that didn’t quite fill the barn when he sang one of his own compositions, “Praise You with a Twang.”

  “Growin’ in the Lord, it’s like cuttin’ a cow out of a herd,” George preached, shifting his weight back and forth up on the stage. “Which is why you need a cowboy to do it. Tough. Patient.”

  Back at the ranch, though, George was feeling anxious. Six foot four and broad in the shoulders, bearded, handy with any tool you could name, George did not seem like a nervous man. But he admitted that calving season kept him up at night. “Just thinking about those mamas out in the cold.” So we climbed into one of his trucks, a white Ford Lariat XL loaded with stiff, heavy chaps, a braided bullwhip, a blanket, and a lasso, and went looking for calves.

  “Most beef cattle aren’t really built for birthing,” he said as he drove. “Take your typical cow and mate her with a fifteen-hundred-pound bull and like as not you’ll end up with a calf you’ll need to cut up inside of her if you’re going to get it out and not kill the mama. But the Texas longhorn is one of the few that has a pelvis that’s made for birthing a baby steer. She’ll drop her calf in fifteen, twenty minutes, while she’s standing in hard rain if she has to, and if it’s healthy that baby’ll be bounding about in half an hour.”

  George turned left off the packed dirt of the ranch road, and we rolled through an opening in the post-and-plank fence that kept the herd from wandering toward the interstate. The prairie spread out before us. The windshield filled with dark gray sky.

  “There’s some question among Christians whether cows go to Heaven,” he said. “To me it ain’t much of a question. Think about it: What’s creation all about? What’s a mama got for her baby? Compassion. That’s all it is. Say we see a baby with extreme deformities. We gonna have compassion up on that baby, ‘cause it’s one of our own. Well, this here? What I call my ranch? These cattle? It’s all His own, the whole outdoors.”

  George drove in silence for a few minutes before he continued speaking. “Tell you something. A secret. I’m thinking of giving up my ranch. More church I do, less comfortable it sits with me. Way I look at it, it’s animals suffering for man’s sin.”

  Which was why evolution sat no more comfortably with him, despite his training as a scientist. “I don’t see what a monkey’s ever done wrong to end up a sinful man.”

  He had another theory. “So we know the Lord created Adam and Eve and all that,” he said, “all them plants and animals we have around now. But there’s no real way of knowing which cycle of creation Adam and Eve were.” George glanced over with his good eye, the brow above it arched with something close to scientific curiosity.

  “Shoot,” he said. “A thousand civilizations coulda come and gone before then and for some reason the Bible just don’t mention it. But that don’t mean what it does say can’t be true.”

  It was a strangely Hindu approach to Christian fundamentalism; maybe he learned it from the cows. What are they but four-legged samsara machines, walking wheels of life and death, grinding grass into meat generation after generation just as we kill and eat them to do what we do, driving pickup trucks, building churches, reading books? When did it all start, why should it stop? Call it Christianity if you have to, but the faith of the prairie is one of un-numbered beginnings and endings, alphas and omegas coming and going like flash floods and drought, surprising you even when all the signs are there.

  “Well, there they are,” George said. The pickup slowed at the edge of a moving acre of hide: brown, black, and white, in a dozen mottled combinations; one hundred head of longhorn cattle, huddled together shoulder to shoulder, snout to flank, like steaks packed tight in a walk-in freezer.

  Outside the pickup it was bitter cold, no protection in sight from the wind that scrubbed the plains. We cracked the window anyway, and the cab filled with pungent air. There they were, and there it was: a whiff of the insides of the animals we eat, so sour it clogged our noses, made us close our eyes and say, Whew! But then we breathed it in deep as we could. Ah, let there be manure. Let there be cows. Let there be the reek of waste and growth and possibility. The prairie drops hints that maybe Eden wasn’t a garden at all but a thick-mudded shit field, dark earth softened to a mortar so thick even God must’ve had four-wheel-drive.

  George stopped the truck but kept it running as he leaned over the wheel, squinting at the milky gray sky. High above the herd, black dots circled in clumsy figure eights, spiraling down one and two at a time, growing larger and faster as they neared the ground.

  “Buzzards,” George said. “They come around calving season, try to kill both mama and calf when they’re vulnerable. Try to eatem while the calf is still hanging out its mama’s behind.”

  Not twenty feet away, a stand of cattle parted to reveal what it was that had the birds so excited: a newborn calf, white and pink-nosed, slouched in a puddle of rainwater and blood, black buzzards tearing at his legs, pecking dots of red into his snowy hair. The calf’s mama, a brown-and-white-speckled beast, her hair matted and her ribs heaving from the effort of birthing, roared and stabbed at the birds with her horns, but her baby just lay there and took it. What else should he do? Ten minutes old and no reason to believe life was otherwise.

  Every minute was learning. The lessons were the cold of wind, the wet of mud, the pinch and snipe of bird beaks. A buzzard dug into him behind the joint of his knee and flew off with a few ounces of hair and blood he’d never have a chance to use. A tongue more blue than pink slipped out of his mouth, and his eyes rolled toward the sky, watching as bits of him were carried away on the wind. So that’s what my legs are for.

  Two Foot George thought something different. The pickup’s door swung open and startled the birds, scaring them high into the air. The door slammed shut, and George was out in the mud in his boots. We followed him out of the truck but hung back as he waded into the sea of longhorns. Each one had a span of tusks that could spear and lift him from the sternum like a bale of hay, but George slid through undaunted and untouched, crouching low, talking quietly all the while, feinting toward the calf but keeping his eye locked on its mother’s. She didn’t so much moo as growl. George backed away, his eye still on hers, and pulled his whip out of the truck. Her eyes darted from her baby to his hand to his eyes, one squinty, one wide and blank, then back to the whip in his hand. He held it coiled, more a symbol than a threat, and approached the calf again, whispering to the mama sweetly even as the other cows surrounded him, until he was gone from our sight but for the black hat bobbing amongst the horns, his words blending with the grunts and bellows of the cold, angry cows, the squawks and cries of the vultures, the whistle of a cold, sharp wind, and the tapping of rain turning to hail: a high plains polyphony. “You know I’m a-gonna help now, mama,” George whispered. “We gonna save this baby together now, mama, I gotta get in close now, mama…”

  George’s arm shot out beneath the mama’s horns and snatched the hind legs of the calf. The mama wheezed; in her four stomachs, the sound’s pitch rose as its last strains squeezed past her teeth. She scraped her hooves in the mud and switched her tail. A few strands of hay clung to the horn she dipped low and up, low and up, testing the motion. George stood his ground, out of courage or resignation—so that’s what my eye is for—we couldn’t say. But the mama backed off. George hoisted the calf onto its front legs, trying to plant the rear ones in t
he mud as if he was building a house of cards. If the calf couldn’t stand, it couldn’t nurse; without milk, soon, it would die. But all the calf could manage was to buckle and fall with a splash back into its puddle. Every minute was learning.

  The cows crowded around went back to chewing grass with bovine indifference, forgetting in an instant what they had been so excited about. Even the mama looked away. She wandered off to pass the afterbirth, walking slowly with a sack of pale red fluid drooping behind her. “She’ll spit that out in just a minute,” George said. Soon as it dropped, she turned around to eat it. That’s what they do.

  George looked on the scene with his one good eye, tugged down the brim of his hat, and deadpanned the shortest sermon ever spoken in the mud of the East Texas prairie. He trusted Scripture as far as it went, but today his text was all around him, the story of a heifer devouring her placenta as buzzards swarmed to do the same to the calf she had nourished for nine months.

  “Well,” he said. “There’s creation for you.”

  George bundled up the calf in straw and a horse blanket, hoisted him in the air, and carried him back to the pickup. Placing the calf inside, he turned up the heat, directing the vents so they’d blow directly on the calf’s shaking limbs. Then he circled around to the driver’s side, planning to bring the calf home, where he’d wrap him in a quilt and feed him by hand. Only then did he remember that today he was not alone with the creatures in his care.

  Two Foot George looked at us from behind his glasses. One eye dead and gone, the other still looking for life, he kicked the mud from his boots as he asked us, “Y’all mind riding in the back?”