The Salebarn (part I): Prompt Post No. 6

wind blew across the parking lot as Tomi stepped from her car, crunching shit-stained snow with her black heels. Her small car, its shiny green body sure to get lost in between the staggered rows of tail-gated vehicles, was nosed in forward-- no need to parallel park, here, she thought, shaking her head slowly. Life in Boston had been a shock to her system, coming from the sweeping grasses of her Plains prairie, but grandfather, he had prepared her for that one.
"In the cities, there are so many cars people park in long rows down the street. It is different in many ways, and if you park funny, your difference will show."
Tomi had always hated it when her differences showed off the reservation, but on it, she was proud of her distinctions.
"There goes Tomi 'Too-Good'," joked the boys she had no time for, when they were feeling particularly mean and nasty, but Tomi would smile and nod her head into her books, trying hard to feign indifference. She knew she would get off the rez, leave behind the sadness and misery that had so long been suffered by her people. Grandfather told her he saw that in her future, and since he knew everything, she had always believed him. His comments about her differences being beautiful were something she had never believed growing up on the edge of the reservation, but in the city, well, people had loved them.
And now, she could remember his words like it was yesterday...had six years really passed already? Was her beloved Grandfather really dying? What had he said, crackling and wheezing from her cell phone?
"No more moons for grandfather?"
Tomi knew he'd said it in an attempt at humor, poking fun at his old ways, the things lost to her people that he'd held dear, those things she's once dreaded. Things like the dances, the way the drums spoke deep in her heart and her stomach, the way the rocks sang at the lodges and whispered the secrets of her people. She’d hated being known in school for those things, the Indian girl who was bused in to town on government funds, but now, her heritage was something almost magical.

Remembering her high school days Tomi slammed her door shut, and walking purposefully, moved toward the screened-in entrance.
it had been years since she'd driven past this lot, and now, back from college, the memories of her timeworking at the salebarn haunted her. The white paint was chipped and ugly along the north side of the building, and the scattered straw, manure and yelllowed snow puddles washed the ground leading to the chutes with an equal squalor. The men and women who worked here said that life on the Rez was putrid and ugly, but did they ever take a second look at their surroundings? The kids she'd guarded in basketball or ran against in track, the ones who'd been so hard on her for the way she'd ridden her horses in 4-H, did they ever think twice about the way they treated their own animals? Had she, when she slapped rumps and prodded ankles?
As Tomi reached the screen door-- still hanging at an uncomfortable angle after McClintock lost out on a heifer bid--she craned her head around to the east of the building, so that she could just see beyond the first pens and around the chute. The pens, once red and black, “in honor of the Herefords and Black Angus that come through,” Ellis had told her, were now rust colored and bronzed, or a flaky, dirty gray.
To the south of the pens, the loading chute was exactly as she’d remembered it: weathered wood, gone gray and warped in the harsh winters, covered with shit spatters of all colors, like brown,honey,gold,yellow,tan,chocolate,raisin polka dots. This was where the animals met their new enclosures: slatted semi-trailers, horse trailers or maybe just porta-pens in the back of a truck.
Tomi was hoping for a familiar face or two, but she couldn't see anything but cinnamon hide and loopy, bubble-gum udders. The cows were still in progress-- it would be a while until the bull sale started, so steadied by the determination in her mind, Tomi pushed open the screen door and was pulled forward.

The grounds had been kept up over the years, obviously, because the parking lot was full of trailers and pickup trucks and semis—hers was the only car—and that meant that today’s was going to be a big sale, but she had wasted enough time outside already. She knew how she felt about the commerce of animals. Boston had changed that, too. What she wanted to know…would Ellis be working here today?


The first time she stepped foot in the salebarn it had been dark out, but the sky was full of stars and the Moon was shining.
The 4-H sale had ended, and Tomi's steer had brought top dollar. Ellis Drum, who's dad Gene owned Drum's auction and officiated at the 4-H sale proceedings, spoke to her back in the pens when she'd returned her steer to his holdings.
"You know, Tomi.." he'd said, slow and calculated, with the mind of a man who is used to sizing up female animals for their heft, durability and reproductive capabilities "I could take you inside the salebarn sometime, show you around.. get you a drink."
Tomi's hand had stopped brushing whorl in the middle of her steer’s hindquarters. She knew Ellis in the way everyone knew him-- good looking, funny, Gene Drum's son. Golden. They'd talked at the 4-H dances each year, shared a few, shared more than that many beers, but they'd never been friends. Not really. Why did he want to do this for her now?

"Oh, really? What for?"
Tomi knew that there would be a cost of some sort involved in this; the Drum family hadn't wrangled the largest salebarn and auction reputation in the tri-county area with nothing but their good looks and silver tongues.
"I dunno, just thought you might like to see the place we kill the animals."
Tomi snorted, whipping around and bending upright to face Ellis.
“Cut the shit, Ellis. You know as well as I do that I’ve seen death before, and I’m not scared of it. You’ll talk to me here, ask me to see your salebarn while no one’s around, but you really want something. What.”
No nonsense, matter-of-fact. Tomi still talked that way, always had; it was this sensibility that had interested Mr. Brookings when he encouraged her to go into law.
Ellis’ dark eyes had almost glowed that night, like the firebugs she’d chased up from the grasses as a child, and when he answered her, she knew he meant it.

“Business, is all. You’re a good looking girl, gonna be a woman before school starts again.. I know you want offa that wasteland up north. Come down and work for us rest tha’ summer. Help out during the year.Put up some money for college. Dad’s on the Golden Clovers scholarship board… maybe he could work something even better.”
Tomi had pulled at the steer’s halter when Ellis offered her the job, a little harsher than necessary, and the young animal had bawled. And bawled and bawled, she though, shaking the old sounds from her head, then realizing that the lulling she heard was taking place now, in the present.


Without stopping by the small cafeteria to see if Cookie still worked here, Tomi had made it from the front door to the orchestra-pit style auctioneer pen, and there, teeming and gnashing and bawling, was an old Holstein and two little calves. The cow’s black splotches were haphazardly inked into her white hid, and if Tomi squinted, they looked mildly circular. The caked-on mud and shit that had spread across her back was dried and chunky, covering up her natural color. She was a mess, and her swollen udders, looking like pulled-taffy that had been stretched waaay too far, had cracked from a winter spent being milked hard.
It was not a scene Tomi had hoped for, when she’d parked her car, or at least not the first thing she saw upon entering. Why couldn't it be the little Brayden twins, in their matching Wranglers, chasing each other over the seats and playing "bangbang" with pistol fingers? Of course it wouldn't be them.. they had to be grown up now.. junior high school at least. Or Sally, the other Native who swept out the pens and sometimes snuck inside to watch the sale? Something nice, something warm and comforting.
Right. Comforting, at the saleabarn, where lives are bought and sold and deals are made among the human animals.


That fall, after the fair was over and Tomi skipped out on the carnival and dances to go drinking, Ellis had taken her inside the salebarn. No livestock, no humans, just the two of them, and that smell. That wet, earthy smell that comes from and is a range animal. It had been her first time inside the salebarn, and even though all they did was sit up in the crow’s nest and drink bourbon, Tomi thought it felt familiar. Like maybe she belonged. She made up her mind that night to work at Drum Auction and Packing, because she knew that working in the white man’s town, trading his commodities and understanding them, was crucial to her success when she left her own broken land.


“Iminabid iminabid, iminabid, five, five five, no, six, no, seven, no, ten, do I have ten? Up ten, up ten, up ten on the dollar, to the man in the white hat, the white hat, the Stetson, yessir, number 45, is that you Bob? You are number 45, if I am not mistaken?”
Tomi was jerked again from the past into the present, hearing Gene’s undulating voice drop down and run up octaves as he raised the bidding price on the cow in the pen. It surprised her how easily the language of the auction came back to her. The “man in the white hat white hat white hat,” Gene knew him, he was a regular at the auctions, and it wasn’t uncommon for Gene to sneak in greetings and observances in the middle of a sale, then carry on with the bidding without even taking a breath. The cow and her calves, looking to be about two weeks old, sold for just over $800 dollars.
Eight hundred dollars for her life, and the lives of her children. Surely worth more? But how would Tomi know? Hadn't her own life, her hopes for something better, been commodified in a similar way, in this very place, just a few years ago?


Tomi sniffled at the cold air and watched the next items lope inside: two small, red heifers. The thing about watching an auction that always bothered Tomi was not that the animals would be killed and eaten—dinner—but that they had served as entertainment first. Mick was still working here, brandishing the prod that kept the animals in line, and as he shocked one of the heifers from behind, she jumped forward, slipped on the wet, shitty dirt, and skidded across the pen floor. The men around Tomi, intent on the sale in progress, didn’t seem to notice the animal’s fear, or frantic energy. iOr perhaps they did, and they just didn’t care? She was never quite sure which it was, but either way, it didn’t matter. What was clear was that the animal had suffered, then rushed into this pen, thinking only of something different, yet not knowing quite what.