4. Andrew
Andrew
Andrew Stevens could run any number on Stillwater to the dollar. What it cost to winter a cow. What her calf would bring come fall. What a rod of fence ran. The place lived in his head as a column of figures, and the column closed.
The woman in his spare room would not.
He had the seven-fifteen Greyhound from Marlow in mind, along with a paper sack for the ruined slip and the nineteen dollars she had left. If she came out, she would quit by ten. If she did not, he would drive her to town tomorrow morning.
The plan was clean.
She had come out of the side door looking like a child who had raided her father’s closet.
The coat hung past her knees, with the cuffs swallowing both hands, the storm collar standing up where she had not bothered to fold it down.
The brown hat from the hook by the door sat too low over her eyebrows.
The black work boots came halfway up her shin, and her gait had the soft slap of a foot riding two pairs of socks deep.
Her hair was pulled back off her face in some style his mother would have known the name of and he did not.
He had told her about the coat and the boots. He had not told her about the hat.
She had chosen the hat herself. It sat crooked, plainly ridiculous and entirely sensible at eleven degrees.
The porch let her down to the path, and the cold took her at the first step.
He heard the small inhalation. The wind came off the upper meadow in a thin, steady push that smelled of horse and snow and the wood smoke from the barn stove Walt had lit an hour ago.
Their boots cracked the crust on the path.
Above the peaks, the sky had begun to lift in a long blue expanse, with the stars on the eastern rim already going pale.
She kept up.
He set his stride to what hers could carry and did not pretend otherwise, and they covered the hundred yards to the barn in silence. He opened the side door and pushed her ahead of him into the warmth.
The barn was the one place on the ranch he allowed himself sentiment, and he did not allow much.
The smell of it had not changed in thirty-one years.
Hay and grain and the warm dust of a working barn. Leather of two dozen working saddles, oiled by hand. The faint, sharp sweetness of liniment from the tack room.
The radio was on. Walt had a station out of Salida that played Merle Haggard at five in the morning and would not be moved on the subject.
The light along the aisle was the soft yellow of low bulbs that had been low bulbs since Andrew’s father had put them in.
A magpie was complaining about something out by the corrals. The horses, hearing them, came forward in their stalls in the soft, unhurried way of animals already fed.
Andrew watched her face.
She had stopped just inside the door. Her hand was on the post. She was looking down the aisle, and there was something in the look he had not anticipated and did not, at first, know how to read.
“There is a bay in the end stall called Vinegar,” he said. “He’s the one that bites. Stay on your side of the chain.”
“Vinegar.”
“Walt named him.”
“That tracks.”
He pointed at the manure fork by the door.
“Like that. Not like a broom. Hand here, other hand here. The straw moves around the manure if you do it right. Do not pitch the whole stall. Find what does not belong and lift only that.”
She took the fork and held it.
He adjusted her hands without touching them, by example, lifting his own as if he held one.
“Walt is in the south barn. I will be in and out. Do not ask him to help you. He will not. Do not ask me to help you. I will not. If you cannot do it, come find me and we will go to town.”
“I can do it.”
“All right then.”
He walked out into the cold.
The mare was still at the rail. She blew steam into his palm and let him put the headstall on without fuss.
Andrew worked the south pasture all morning. The yearlings had to come off the upper field before more snow set in, and that mattered more than a dead car that was not going anywhere.
Walt had asked which he wanted first, the yearlings or the wreck. Andrew had answered without hesitation.
The yearlings.
It was the right call.
At nine, he rode through the barnyard on his way to the south pasture.
The wheelbarrow was at the third stall.
He could see her from a hundred yards out. A small, dark shape in too-big boots and his coat, her braid coming out from under the brown hat.
She was bent over the work. He could not see her face.
The mare blew.
He rode on. By noon, the wind had risen, and the snow that had been mostly threat became a slow, real fall.
He brought the mare in at twelve-thirty, rubbed her down, watered her, let her into the corral, and went back to the barn for a sandwich.
Walt was at the rail by the second stall, leaning on his folded forearms like a man at a fence watching weather come, except he was watching the woman down the aisle.
Walt was sixty-three and had been at Stillwater since before Andrew bought the second section, and he had a toothpick at the corner of his mouth, as he did every other day of the year. He did not look around when Andrew came in.
“Andrew.”
“Walt.”
“Brought one home.”
“She brought herself.”
“That what we’re calling it?”
The wheelbarrow was at the seventh stall.
“She is using the fork all right,” Walt said. “I will give her that.”
“That is something.”
“Not much.”
“Not much.”
Walt considered the dust at his boot.
“She’ll be gone by Friday,” he said.
“Probably.”
“Andrew.”
“Walt.”
“Women like that do not stay. They go back to what they were raised for. They always do. I have been at this longer than you have been at this. I have watched dozens of them come up here on a hard week and run home by Sunday. And the ones who do not run by Sunday break something on the way out.”
Andrew said nothing.
“I am not telling you what to do, Andrew.”
“You never are.”
“I am just saying.”
“I know it.”
Walt nodded once, slow. He pushed off the rail, examined the toothpick, and put it back in his mouth.
“I’ll get her a sandwich, then I will be in the south barn.”
He went.
He found a reason to be in the barn at one. There was tack to mend that he could have mended in the tack room at any time in the past month. He mended it in the tack room.
The door to the tack room opened onto the main aisle. He could hear her through it. The slow grit of the fork. The thump of a wet flake landing in the wheelbarrow. The squeak of the bad wheel.
And that one had a bad bearing he had been meaning to grease since spring.
She was working with a wheelbarrow that fought her at every step.
He did not go grease it.
At one-thirty, there was a sound from the end stall that was not a sound he liked, and a small, short cry that was hers, and he was off the bench and into the aisle before he had decided to be.
She was sitting on the floor in the doorway of the twelfth stall, her right hand cradled in her left. Vinegar had his head over the door, ears forward and lower lip loose.
“You all right?”
She did not look up.
“He bit me.”
“I told you he would.”
“You did.”
“Show me.”
She held the hand out.
He crouched.
The skin was broken just below the thumb, and the bruise was already coming up purple. It was not a bad bite, as Vinegar bites went, and he had seen Vinegar bites that took stitches.
He turned her hand to the light from the aisle and looked.
Her fingers were small in his, and the nails she had walked in here with yesterday, the careful ovals, were gone. Three of them were split to the quick, and one was lifted away entirely. The skin of her palm was raw from the fork. There was blood under what was left of the polish.
He let go.
“Cold water. Hot water will hurt more. Five minutes. Then dry it, then we will put something on it from the kit in the tack room. You are not going to die.”
“I assumed not.”
“You can stop.”
She looked up at him.
“No.”
He stood.
“All right then.”
He stayed in the tack room another hour. He did not go grease the wheelbarrow.
He could hear her working again by two. The bad wheel and the fork and, at one point, once, very softly, in a voice she did not know was carrying, a curse that would have surprised her father.
He almost laughed.
He did not.
At three, he came out for a halter and stopped at the end stall.
She was in with Vinegar.
She should not have been in with Vinegar.
He had not given her any reason to be in with Vinegar.
The stall was hers to muck around him, through the door, with the chain across, no body part in reach.
The chain was off. She was inside. The fork was set against the post. She had her hand flat to the bay’s shoulder and her face turned up to his face, and she was talking to him in a low even voice that did not have the Highland Park in it at all.
“Mandy.”
She did not turn.
“You hush,” she was saying to the horse. “You hush now. We don’t bite people who are doing their job. You and I are going to have an understanding about this, sir. You may be sour about it. I am sour about it too. We’re going to manage.”
Vinegar had his head down.
Andrew looked again.
Vinegar actually had his head down.
Andrew stood in the aisle and watched the bay gelding who had bitten three hands in two years lower his head to the small, wrong-coated woman in the too-big boots.
She ran her unblistered hand up his face to the place behind the ear where Andrew had fought him for the bridle yesterday, and the horse let her.
She scratched, and the horse leaned in.
Andrew did not move.
After a minute, she turned and saw him. The look on her face was the look of a person caught doing the thing they had been told not to do, and then it was a different look, a flush coming up under the pale, and then it was nothing at all because she put it away.
“He’s fine.”
“I see that.”
“I’m almost done.”
“I see that too.”
She had grown up around horses.
He knew that now. He wanted to know where.
The question remained unasked.
The light went at five, fast and without ceremony.
The sun off the peak.
The long blue shadow walking down the meadow.
The cold coming up through the boots.
Walt came back in from the south barn at quarter past, and Andrew was in the office off the kitchen, on the call to the lawyer in Denver he had been avoiding.
When he hung up, he stood at the window above the sink and looked across the dark yard.
The barn light was still on. Past it, where the land ran up into black, the pass sat under its new snow with the car somewhere on it.
He looked that way for a second longer than the barn light accounted for and then looked away.
He went out without his coat, telling himself he was going out because the bad wheel needed grease before tomorrow. He took the can from the mudroom.
He did not open the side door.
He stood in the cold and looked through the slats.
The aisle light was on.
The wheelbarrow was at the end.
She was at the twelfth stall, the last one, the one with Vinegar. She had moved him into the empty stall before she worked it. Andrew could see the bay’s ear in the next stall over.
She had a flake of straw under one arm, and she was breaking the lip ice on the trough with the back of the fork.
Her braid had come out from under the hat hours ago and her shoulders were shaking. She was not crying.
She broke the ice and filled the trough.
She set the fork against the post exactly as he had that morning, when he had shown her how.
Mandy came out of the stall and closed the chain. She stood in the aisle a moment with one hand against the door, breathing.
Then she picked the wheelbarrow up by its bad handle and pushed it out the far end of the barn and dumped it on the pile, and brought it back, and set it where it lived.
She turned off the aisle light and came toward the side door.
He stepped back from the slats.
She came out.
She did not see him at first.
He was standing in the dark off the corner of the building, the grease can in his hand, and she shut the door behind her and stood on the path and tipped her head back and looked up at the sky.
The stars were out.
At this altitude in October, the sky was a thing he had stopped seeing twenty years ago, and she was seeing it now.
Her face in the porch light forty yards on was wet in a way she would never have let him see, and her mouth was doing something he could not at first parse.
She was smiling.
It was not a smile she had put on for anyone.
He stepped farther back into the dark as she came down the path past him without seeing him and went up the porch steps and into the house.
The grease can was cold in his hand.
He stood in the dark and watched the kitchen light come on and saw her shape pass behind the curtain and disappear down the hall.
He set it down without greasing the wheelbarrow and went inside.