“Don-ny,” Aunt Kate prompted, with a smile seeking forgiveness from the Herta-Gerda partnership, “any red threes to meld?”
Not a good start. “Sure, I was just about to.”
I grabbed the trey of hearts I had stuck at the far end of my hand without a thought and flopped it on the table. Aunt Kate leaned back and smiled at me with a hint of warning in her eyes that I had almost cost us a hundred points by not playing the damn three in the first place, and Gerda looked at me slyly as she flipped me the replacement card. “My, my, aren’t you something, you’re beating the pants off us already,” Herta said in the same dumbed-down tone she used in talking to the bird.
After that I tried to keep my mind fully on draws and discards and Herman’s eye-deas for bushwhacking and the rest, but the hen party combination on either side of me, not even to mention Biggie the budgie squealing away, was really distracting. Herta actually clucked, making that thwock sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth when she exclaimed over something, which was often. That was bad enough, but her partner presented an even worse challenge. The last name of Gerda was Hostetter, which was so close to Horse Titter that I couldn’t get that out of my mind, either. I had learned by way of Gram to call grown-ups I didn’t know well Mr. and Mrs., and every time I addressed the widder to my right it came out something like “Mrs. Horssstetter.”
“Oh, don’t, snicklefritz,” she killed that off after the first few times. “Just call me Gerda, please.” Making a discard that I had absolutely no use for, as she uncannily almost always did, she idly glanced at me, saying, “I understand you’re from a ranch. Is it one of those fancy dude ones?”
“No-o-o, not exactly. It’s more the kind with cows and horses and hayfields,” that last word came out wistfully.
“I suppose you’re glad to be here because there’s not much for a boy like you to do there,” said Gerda, as if that were the epitaph on my ranch life.
“Aw, there’s always something going on,” I found myself sticking up for the Double W. All three women were eating the cheese-and-cracker nibbles as if they were gumdrops, so it must have been their obvious devotion to food that brought what I considered an inspiration. “You know, what’s really fun on a ranch is a testicle festival.”
That stopped everyone’s chewing and drew me full attention from three directions, so I thought I had better explain pretty fast.
“It happens at branding time, see, when the male calves have to be taken care of. It’s nut cutting, there’s no way around calling it anything but that. Well, castration, if you want to be fancy. Anyway, all these testicles get thrown in a bucket to be washed up and then cooked over the fire right there in the corral. There’s plenty to feed the whole branding crew. Two to a calf, you know,” I spelled out, thinking from the blank expressions around the table that maybe they weren’t that knowledgeable about livestock.
“Don-ny,” Aunt Kate spoke as if she had something caught in her gullet, “that’s very interesting, but—”
Herta blurted, “You actually eat those?”
“Oh sure, you can guzzle them right down. Rocky Mountain oysters, they’re real good. You have to fry them up nice, bread them in cornmeal or something, but then, yum.”
“Yum” did not seem to sit well with the ladies. Thinking it might be because they were used to nibbles, as Aunt Kate called the candy gunk, which bite by bite didn’t amount to much and Herta’s crackers-and-cheese treat that tasted like dried toast and library paste, I kept trying to present the case for Rocky Mountain oysters despite the discreet signals from across the table that enough was enough. Not to me, it wasn’t. I had an argument to make.
“Honest, you can fix a whole meal out of not that many nu—testicles—see. They’re about yay long,” I held my fingers four or so inches apart, the size of a healthy former bull calf’s reproductive items.
Herta seemed to take that in with more interest than did Gerda, who just looked at me as if sorting me out the ruthless way she did cards. Apparently deciding I could be coaxed off the topic, Herta crooned in practically birdie talk, “That tells us so much about ranch life. Anyway, aren’t you cuter than sin in your cowboy shirt.”
Without meaning to—much, anyway—I gave her the full snaggle smile for that, the one like I might bite.
“Heavens!” She jerked her cards up as if shielding herself from me. “What in the world happened to that boy’s t—”
“He fell while he was working on the ranch.” Aunt Kate wisely did not go into the roundup tale. “They have a favorite dentist back there and his grandmother is taking him to be fixed up good as new, the minute he gets home from the summer to Montana,” she topped that off smooth as butter. This was news to me, but not the kind intended. My supposedly no-nonsense aunt could story as fast and loose as I could.