Her brother-in-law Ray was there at the sale. He had driven over with her that morning and he had been wandering the other lots while Margaret talked to Calvin. He came back just as Margaret was writing the check. He looked at the saplings. He looked at Margaret. He looked at Calvin. He looked back at the saplings. “Maggie,” he said, “what in the world are you doing?” “Buying trees, Ray.” “For what?” “For the pastures.”
Ray took off his cap. He was fifty-six years old. He had been ranching in Gonzales County his entire adult life. He ran four hundred head of Angus on eight hundred acres east of Smiley. He was her late husband Frank’s older brother. And since Frank had died in February of 1980, Ray had been driving out to her place once a week, whether she asked him to or not.
“Margaret,” he said, “you’re going to shade out half your grass. You know that, right? You know what a tree does to a pasture.” “I know exactly what a tree does to a pasture.” “And why?” “I’ll tell you in seven years, Ray.” Ray looked at Calvin Ruiz, who was watching this exchange without expression. He looked at the four hundred little green things in their little black pots. “Frank would have never done this.” “Frank’s not here to do it,” Margaret said. “And I am.”
The story was at the feed store in Nixon by Tuesday morning. Margaret Holloway bought four hundred shade trees from that Argentine fellow. Going to plant them in her pastures. Every single one of them. It was at the co-op in Smiley by Wednesday afternoon. And by Thursday, it had reached the cattle auction in Cuero, twenty miles south, where a man named Dale Purdy heard the story while buying a replacement heifer.
Dale Purdy had known Frank Holloway since grade school. He didn’t laugh when he heard it. He just shook his head slowly and said, “Frank’s not even cold yet and she’s planting trees in the pasture.” By Friday, the story had made it to the diner in Nixon, the Methodist Church parking lot after the ladies’ Wednesday Bible study, the line at the feed mill, and the booth at the back of the Dairy Queen where four of the older ranchers sat every morning at 7:30 drinking coffee that was too hot and talking about weather that wasn’t cooperating.
At the Dairy Queen, a man named Lowell Watts delivered the definitive verdict. “She’s grieving,” he said. “That’s all this is. Frank’s been dead two years and now she’s lost her mind. Going to be a train wreck out there by fall.” The other three nodded. They had seen this kind of thing before. Widows making strange decisions. It was sad, but it was predictable.
In six months, there would be an auction at the Holloway place. The land would go to one of the neighbors. The cattle would be dispersed. The trees, if any were still alive, would be bulldozed by whoever bought the land. This was the story Gonzales County settled on. A widow, forty years old, running her dead husband’s ranch, making a decision that even the Argentine nurseryman had tried to talk her out of. A woman planting trees in a cow pasture.
The county repeated it the way small counties repeat things. At every gas station. At every fence-line conversation. At every Sunday dinner for three months. Margaret Holloway heard about it, of course. There was no way not to. She said nothing. She planted the trees.