Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
The supply run came down to Stephen the way most things did at Bolton Farms. Sideways, and through Annie.
He was coiling lead ropes outside the tack room when her voice carried out the office window, bright and certain.
“…and Stephen ought to be the one to go. He’s levelheaded. He won’t let the Hickory Hollow folks talk us into the dear stuff.”
Chad’s answer came low, dry as a cob. “Quit running my crew, woman. I’ll send who I send.”
“I’m only saying.”
“You’re only always saying.”
Stephen hung the ropes on their pegs and made nothing of it. Annie had a notion about every soul inside the fence and half the ones outside it. A man could go gray chasing the why of what she said.
By week’s end Chad sent who he sent. He sent Stephen.
The joint order was a twice-a-year chore, two ranches splitting a flatbed of the same goods to spare the freight, one body from each outfit to sort whose was whose. Stephen pulled into the feed store lot early and put the trailer against the dock in one clean cut.
The Hickory Hollow rep stood already inside, bent over a clipboard, laying down the law to a stock boy who looked grateful for the counter between them.
He placed the voice before he placed the face.
Elise Pollard. The prickly one from the barbecue, the one who’d carved up his layout and kept her chin high the whole time she did it.
Of course it was her.
He squared his shoulders and let his grandfather have a word in his ear. Earl Garrett had a saying for every fix a man could land in, and the one for this came up quick. Make the most of where you’re set down, son. The Lord seldom asks your druthers.
This was going to be a job of work, making a good day out of an afternoon chained to that clipboard. But he’d give it an honest go. He owed Earl that much.
“Garrett.” She’d clocked him without lifting her eyes from the page. “Bolton’s half is the left column. Keep your stock off my pallets and we’ll be done by supper.”
“Afternoon to you too.”
“It’s nearly evening.”
“Is it.” He set his gloves on the counter. “Where do you want to start.”
She wanted every sack counted and checked against the invoice before a one of them left the dock. He wanted to load by weight and by drop, heavy on the bottom, Bolton’s gear on the tailgate end for the shorter haul. Two right ways to do one job, and neither of them built to bend.
“You load before we verify the count,” she said, “and when the tally comes up short, you’ll be unstacking the whole rig on the shoulder of the highway.”
“I load light to heavy and we count as it goes. Nothing leaves this dock I haven’t laid hands on.”
“That’s not a system. It’s a memory test.”
“Worked six years running.”
“So has mine, and mine leaves a paper trail.”
They settled it the way folks settle a thing when neither one will fold. In the end, they did both. She counted at the dock and he loaded behind her, and every third pallet they hung up on some fine point of order and had it out right there among the grain bins.
“Mineral tubs go on first,” she said.
“Mineral tubs go on last. They come off soonest at your place.”
“They’re the heaviest thing here.”
“Which is why they ride over the axle, not out on the tail.” He swung one up to make the point. “You run the pencil. I’ll run the truck.”
Her jaw set. But she moved to the next line on her sheet, and the tubs rode over the axle.
A small win. He kept it off his face.
“Sacks of cube next,” she said, not glancing up from the sheet.
“Already on.”
“On where.”
“Bottom left, where you’ll want them off.” He cinched the strap. “I do this for a living too, case it slipped past you.”
That earned him a look. Not a warm one. A look that allowed he might be right, which from her was likely close enough.
She was quick, he’d grant her that. Had the invoice by memory at the second pallet, caught a miscount the stock boy near slid past, and never once asked him to say a number twice. The woman ran hot, but she ran right.
When the flatbed sat loaded and strapped down, the afternoon had slid past its peak, and they’d argued their way to a kind of truce, the sort two people reach once each has privately granted the other one pulls their weight.
He pointed the truck toward Hickory Hollow with the windows down and the load riding heavy and true.
The blowout hit on the gravel cut-through past the Mercer place, a bang loud as a rifle shot and the wheel hauling hard to the right. Stephen rode it down to the shoulder, both hands easy on the wheel, and let the truck roll to a dead stop in the weeds.
“Tell me you’ve got a spare,” Elise said.
“Full tread, under the bed. Jack that works, too.” He was already out the door. “We’re not walking.”
“Then what’s the holdup?”
“Ground.” He crouched by the shredded tire. “Soft from the rain. Jack’ll want a board under it or it sinks clean to China. That’s the holdup.”
She came around the front, crouched beside him, the dust of the road already on her good slacks, and pulled the flashlight from his glovebox without being asked.
“You don’t have to,” he said.
“I’m not standing in a ditch admiring the sunset while you do it wrong in the dark.”
He near about smiled. Near about.
They jacked the truck up slow, and somewhere in the cricket-loud quiet, with nothing to manage and nowhere to be, the talk came on its own.
“You always this quiet, or is it me?” she asked.
“Mostly me.”
“Was that a whole sentence? I’m framing it.”
A short sound left him, close kin to a laugh. “I talk when there’s something worth the breath.”
“And the rest of the time?”
“I let the quiet do the asking. Folks tell you most everything, you give them room.”
She turned that over without a word, the flashlight steady on the lug nuts.
“Your daddy teach you the strong, silent routine,” she said, “or did you come by it honest?”
“Grandad. Earl. Raised me out past Terry Hill after my folks passed.” He fit the wrench to the top nut. “Man could go a whole day on a nod and a grunt and still say more than most.”
“Sounds a piece of work, your grandad.”
“He was the best of them.” Stephen broke the nut loose. “What about you. Where’d a town girl learn to hold a flashlight steady on a flat?”
“My daddy ran a one-truck hauling outfit. I was changing tires before I was tall enough to drive on them.” She braced her elbow on her knee. “So go on and load your truck whatever way you please. I just like the paper to match the pile at the end.”
He let that sit. The cold he’d hung on her back at the barbecue didn’t square with the woman kneeling in his headlights, holding the light right where he needed it and not crowding his hands.
“You don’t come to the socials,” she said. “Six years at Bolton, and I’d never laid eyes on you before that barbecue.”
“Work doesn’t quit for a social.”
“Everybody’s work quits sometime.”
“Mine keeps better company.” He set the next nut. “No offense to the company.”
“Some taken.” But she was near smiling again. “You hide out on that land as if it’ll run off the minute you turn your head.”
“It might.” He said it lighter than he meant it, and she let the heavier thing underneath go on by, which he counted a kindness.
The jack chose that moment to slip on the soft board, the truck dropping an inch with a lurch. Before he’d swallowed the word he didn’t say out loud, Elise had her shoulder to the fender and a fresh board jammed under the base of the jack.
“You’ve done this before,” he said.
“Told you. Hauling outfit.” She wiped her palms down her ruined slacks without a flicker of regret. “You figured I only pushed paper.”
He had figured that. He didn’t admit it. He set the spare on the studs and spun the nuts down, and the afternoon stopped being a chore somewhere along the way without his leave.
The spare went on tight. He let the truck off the jack, stowed the tools, and pointed them down the road with the light going gold over the pastures.
She rode most of the way quiet, worn down to easy, her head against the window frame and her clipboard hugged to her chest.
He turned into the Hickory Hollow lot as the yard lights buzzed on.
“That was less of a catastrophe than I budgeted for,” she said, gathering her things.
“High praise.”
“Don’t get accustomed to it, Garrett.” But the bite had gone out of it. She stepped down, then leaned back into the cab. “Thank you. For the ride, and for not gloating about the tire.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
She shut the door and crossed to her car, and Stephen sat a beat longer than the moment called for, one hand on the shifter and his eyes on the office door easing shut behind her.
Then he put it in gear.
The drive to Bolton ran twenty minutes of empty road, and he gave every one of them to her.
Elise Pollard. Sharp as a fresh blade and twice as fast. Competent in the way that never once asked for the credit. And prettier than he had a lick of business thinking, with that road dust on her and that light held dead steady in her hand.
He shut the thought down before it could put down roots.
The math didn’t work, and Stephen was a man who respected math. Elise had her whole life squared and labeled, an apartment that was hers and a job she ran without a wasted motion and not one loose thread a body could tug.
And him.
Land-rich and cash-poor, and both of them by his own choosing.
He could clear every notice in that kitchen drawer tomorrow, sell off a corner of Garrett ground or sign over the minerals the lease men came sniffing after every spring, and not miss the money.
He wouldn’t. Earl had left him the land and one instruction to keep it by.
Keep it in Garrett hands. Don’t sell, and don’t let anybody buy you cheap.
So the taxes got paid the slow way, out of a crew lead’s wages, a lean winter at a time, and the old truck kept its bald tire a while yet.
It wore on him some, and not the way a body would guess.
He didn’t grudge the going-without. He’d gone without his whole life and made his peace with it long ago.
What sat heavier was the question that crept in on the quiet nights with the drawer open in front of him, whether the old man would truly want him riding the place this close to the edge over a handful of words said off a porch one winter.
He let the question stand, the once. Then he set it down.
Earl hadn’t dealt in maybes, and a promise to a dead man was the one thing Stephen meant to keep whole.
He’d cover what he owed the way he covered everything, on his own two shoulders and his own wage, and he’d do it without parting with a single acre or a barrel’s worth of what his grandfather left in his keeping.
A woman with her life squared the way Elise had hers didn’t need a man hauling that kind of freight. What would he even bring to her table? He’d inherited more than a huge parcel of family land from Earl. He’d also inherited his prideful stubborn streak.
He’d been raised by a man who never took a handout and never aimed to be one, and Stephen had come up cut from the same bolt of cloth. Pride and solitude, the one paid for with the other. It had cost him plenty over the years. It had also never once let him down.
He talked himself out of it the rest of the way home, the way he’d talked himself out of wanting things since he was old enough to do the wanting.
The Bolton gate came up in his headlights, and Stephen had the matter settled. Elise Pollard was a fine woman and a closed door, and he’d built a life out of leaving closed doors closed.