6. Andrew
Andrew
His arm was in the heifer up to the shoulder and his eyes were shut, because they were no use to him in there.
He found the calf by feel, by all the years of knowing what a thing was the instant his hand closed on it.
Two hooves and a nose, the nose turned wrong and pointed back the way it had come, inside a heifer who should never have been bred at all.
The barn held its three-a.m. silence, that thin brittle quiet a cold night made when even the horses had given up on him. Frost filmed the lower panes. The hung bulb threw a yellow circle over the calving stall and left the rest of the aisle in shadow.
The heifer had been laboring since first dark. By the third hour, Andrew knew this one would not come easy.
She was first-calf, too young, bred by accident when the bull jumped a fence Andrew had cursed Walt about for a week afterward. He had watched her for two days and moved her into the calving stall after supper, hoping she might come through on her own.
She had not.
So now he knelt in the straw with his shirtsleeves rolled past the elbow and the calf locked sideways in the canal. The heifer had quit pushing twenty minutes ago. Her flanks heaved without conviction. One large dark eye watched him through the rails.
“No, ma’am,” Andrew said quietly. “No, you don’t.”
He worked by touch. The light from the hung bulb was the wrong color, and his hands could not see anyway. He found the hocks. The dew claws. One leg, then the other, talking to her in the same low voice he used on horses that had been hit by men.
“Easy. Easy, mama. Give me this one. One more.”
The calf shifted.
The back legs came up and out. The heifer, with the last of her bad temper, gave him one push he had not asked for, and the rest of the calf slid into the straw between his hands in a slack, wet rush.
It did not breathe.
He cleared the mouth with two fingers. Wiped the nose. Lifted the small ribcage and dropped it. Lifted it again.
Then he slung the calf by its hind legs across his thigh, a thing he had not done in six or seven years and resented being asked to remember.
The calf coughed.
It coughed again, a soft wet sound, and drew a breath that shook every leggy, unfinished inch of it.
Andrew sat back on his heels in the bloodied straw and rubbed his jaw with the back of his wrist before remembering what covered his hand.
He laughed once, dry, at himself.
Behind him, the heifer made the smallest sound.
“There she is,” he said.
The heifer was up. Bleeding more than he liked, but standing four-square on legs that should not have held her. Her head turned toward the thing in the straw. Her ears worked forward and back while she tried to understand what the night had produced.
Andrew had thought she might die. He had been wrong by about ninety seconds.
He would take the win.
Boots sounded on the cement aisle. Too light for Walt. Too sure for any of the boys after the night they had run.
The steps stopped at the calving stall.
Andrew did not look up. Beneath the smells of the barn and his work came the faint clean trace of lemon dish soap from the kitchen sink.
“Bad?” Mandy asked.
“Was. Came backward.”
“Both of them all right?”
“Don’t know yet.”
He laid the calf in the straw where the heifer could find it. The calf, all elbows and unprocessed information, lifted its white face and looked at the world.
“She’ll get up. Or she won’t. We have an hour to find out.”
Andrew stood. His knees went after ninety minutes on cold straw. He caught the wall with one bloody hand and made it look intentional.
Mandy waited at the stall door in his oversized flannel, a brown Carhartt, and the hat he had not worn in eight years. Her hair was knotted beneath it. The bandage on her palm had a clean edge. Mary Jo’s work.
She looked at the calf rather than Andrew, which was a mercy after where he had spent the better part of two hours putting his arms.
“What do you need?” she asked.
He could send her back to the house. Tell her to start breakfast. Make the rest of the morning something she was not part of.
“Towels. Top shelf, tack room. Brown ones, not white. And the bottle from the fridge with orange tape. Don’t shake it.”
She was gone before he finished.
When she returned, the towels were folded over one arm with the care of a woman raised to fold towels correctly, and the bottle was pressed against her ribs. She set the towels beside his knee and handed him the bottle without asking what it held.
“Colostrum,” he said. “Frozen from spring. He needs it inside half an hour, or we’ll be hand-raising him.”
“Him.”
“Him.”
She crouched beside him in the straw without worrying about the new jeans. Her movements had none of the hesitation he expected from someone seeing a calving stall after a hard birth. She did not wrinkle her nose, ask whether the blood was normal, or search his face for reassurance.
He warmed the bottle under his shirt while he rubbed the calf down. The bull calf was black with a white face and one white sock on the off-side hind. The breed registry would have opinions about the markings. Andrew did not. The calf had earned the right to be ugly by surviving.
The heifer came over and sniffed him. She licked one towel, stepped back, stepped forward, and circled once in the narrow stall. Then instinct caught. She went after the calf with a young mother’s mixture of tenderness and panic, licking hard enough to move him through the straw.
Beside Andrew, Mandy made a soft sound.
“There,” she said.
“There.”
He offered the bottle. The calf refused on principle.
Andrew worked a finger into the corner of its mouth and got the nipple in. The calf sucked twice, quit, and considered the situation.
“He has opinions,” Mandy said.
“He’s a bull.”
“That explains the confidence.”
Andrew looked at her.
Her face remained innocent.
“Careful,” he said.
“Was I wrong?”
The calf decided to eat before Andrew had to answer. Andrew felt the pull through the bottle, and the breath he had held left him.
Mandy was watching his hand.
She did not look away when he caught her. She held his eyes for one breath, then returned to the bottle.
He fed the calf.
When it had taken what it would, he capped the bottle and stood in two movements he made look like one. Mandy rose without offering him help.
“I’ll clean up.”
“All right.”
“The boys will be in for coffee in an hour. Mary Jo around eight. Walt wants you at the south corral by ten. They’re bringing the cut in for tomorrow.”
She nodded.
Andrew remained in the doorway. His arms hung heavy at his sides, his hands stiff with cold and work. He had been about to say something.
Whatever it was had gone.
Mandy looked at the calf.
“He’s pretty,” she said. “For a calf.”
“He is ugly. But alive.”
“That’s a very you thing to say.”
He looked at her.
“A very me thing. You’ve known me three days.”
“Four. And it is.”
He went to the barn sink and washed with brown lye soap. The water ran red, then pink, then clear.
Behind him, she said, “What do we call him?”
“You name him, he’s yours.”
“Mine?”
Andrew turned.
Her hands were in her coat pockets. The bandage showed beneath the cuff of his flannel.
“I’ll call him Lucky.”
“Worst name in the book.”
“Best name. He earned it.”
The calf got its legs under itself and began the experimental side-to-side movement of the newly born.
Andrew looked at Mandy. Then the calf.
“Lucky it is.”
By the time Andrew had washed properly, changed, and put coffee on, the sun was up and Mary Jo’s truck rolled into the yard. The door stuck on the first slam and gave on the second.
He met her at the kitchen door with a mug. She took it without comment.
“You look like hell.”
“Pulled a backward calf at four.”
“Mama?”
“Up.”
“Calf?”
“Mandy named him Lucky.”
Mary Jo paused while taking off her coat.
“You are short two hands going into the worst week of the year.”
“I know.”
“Six guys. You need eight.”
“I know, Mary Jo.”
“Walt will work himself into the ground.”
“Walt has been working himself into the ground for thirty years. He’ll do it on schedule.”
She gave him the look that had worked on him since childhood.
“I could pull Ray off the leases for ten days.”
“Pull Ray.”
“I’ll call him after breakfast.”
She drank her coffee and studied him over the rim.
“Andy.”
“Don’t.”
“She saddled Junebug.”
He set his mug down.
“Did she?”
“Off-side check. Cinch knot her hands knew without looking. The bloat trick. All of it.”
“Wonder who taught her.”
“Her grandmother. A place in Bandera. Before.”
“Before what?”
“She didn’t say.”
Andrew looked out the kitchen window.
Mandy crossed the yard from the barn with a fork over her shoulder.
Brown hat. Carhartt. His flannel. The clothes were wrong in size and right in every other way.
She walked differently than the woman he had carried from the ditch—still sore, but no longer apologizing to the ground for taking up space.
“You going to ride her?” Mary Jo asked.
“What?”
“Junebug. Are you putting her on Junebug today?”
“That your idea or hers?”
“Hers.”
Andrew exhaled.
“All right.”
“You are welcome.”
“I did not thank you.”
“You were going to.”
He took Mandy out at ten, after Walt loaded the cut and headed south with the boys. The yard settled into its midmorning quiet, the kind that only happened when everyone was where they belonged.
Andrew saddled the buckskin he had ridden all week. Junebug watched Mandy approach with the patient skepticism of a horse still deciding about the person on the lead.
“You have ridden?”
“Yes.”
“How long ago?”
She looked at him beneath the brown hat.
“Fourteen years.”
He kept his face still.
“All right.”
She put her foot in the stirrup, rose, swung over, and settled into the saddle. Her shoulders dropped. Her hips found the seat. She gathered the reins correctly and exhaled.
Andrew looked at the buckskin’s withers longer than necessary.
“I’ll follow you,” she said.
“South pasture. Salt licks. Slow ride. You’ll be sore tomorrow whether we go one mile or ten.”
“Then let’s go ten.”
“Five.”
“Eight.”
“Six. And you don’t argue with the boss.”
“You started it.”
He swung up.
The buckskin shifted beneath him. Andrew gave him his head, and they walked out of the yard side by side with Mandy’s laugh behind him.
He had heard it once before, out of her sight. It sounded the same.
He looked ahead before she could see what the sound did to him.
They rode through the lower meadow where the cattle lifted their heads and watched them pass. The snow had thinned under the cottonwoods, leaving black earth and flattened grass along the creek.
Ice had formed at the edges. Junebug stopped before the crossing and lowered her head.
Mandy gave her time.
The mare tested the first stone, shifted her weight, and stepped through. Mandy did not haul on the reins or crowd her. She followed the movement with her hips as though fourteen years had been a season rather than half her life.
At the first salt lick, Andrew dismounted and checked the block.
Mandy stayed in the saddle.
“Am I allowed to ask a question?”
“You have been asking them without permission.”
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“It was the answer you’re getting.”
She looked across the pasture.
“Do all ranch owners communicate entirely through obstruction, or is this a personal gift?”
Andrew put the salt block back.
“Personal.”
“I thought so.”
He remounted before she could see the smile he nearly gave her.
At the ridge, the valley opened below them. Stillwater spread across the lower country: house and barns tucked against the slope, cattle in dark clusters, the creek cutting silver through the meadow, and the long fence lines running toward the foothills.
Mandy went quiet.
Andrew let her.
On the ride home, she talked to Junebug under her breath, giving the mare a steady account of roots, rocks, and her own good judgment.
“You are carrying this partnership,” Mandy told her after a steep descent.
Junebug’s ears stayed turned toward her.
“She knows,” Andrew said.
“I appreciate a competent woman.”
The mare flicked one ear toward him and then dismissed him.
They returned at one.
Walt stood at the south-corral rail, hat pushed back, thumbnail at his teeth. He watched Mandy unsaddle Junebug and put away the tack. He watched her cross the yard with the small stiffness of a body remembering work it had not done in fourteen years.
He waited until she entered the house.
“You took her out.”
“I did.”
“For six hours.”
“Three.”
Walt produced a toothpick and chewed it slowly.
“Andy.”
“Don’t.”
“She is a soft-handed woman.”
“She is not.”
“She will go back to it.”
“Maybe.”
“You know it.”
Andrew did not answer.
“You know what you are to a woman like that. A story she’ll tell. A season.”
Andrew looked at him.
Walt had been his father’s hand before he became Andrew’s. He had carried Andrew on the front of a saddle at four, taught him to throw a loop at seven, and stood beside him through the first winter after Caroline left without once saying her name.
He loved Andrew by standing between him and anything that resembled an old wound.
“I hear you.”
“That is not agreeing.”
“No.”
Walt nodded, spat into the dust, and walked away.
Andrew remained at the corral after Walt left. The boys would return at four. The bunkhouse stove would go on at five. The evening would happen in its usual order, except Mandy was in his house taking off his boots at his door.
He greased the bad bearing on the green wheelbarrow before going inside. The work took four minutes. It had waited six weeks.
He did not walk down to the old hay barn. The car sat under a tarp against the far wall, and there was a morning’s work in it for a man who wanted its owner gone by Friday.
He left it there.
Andrew came in after dark.
The kitchen was empty.
Supper sat on the back of the stove beneath a clean towel. One plate set at his place. The brown mug stood upside down across from it on a folded square of paper towel.
He stopped in the doorway with his hat in his hand.
He had expected to see her.
Andrew hung the hat, lifted the towel, and found stew with biscuits beside it. He filled his plate and ate in the quiet the house used to produce every night without effort.
The bunkhouse windows glowed across the yard. Voices crossed the cold in pieces. Walt’s laugh. One of the boys shouting over a card game.
The chair across the table remained empty.
He had not realized until he entered that he had expected the brown hat on the peg, her voice from the hallway, or the scrape of his borrowed boots on the floor.
Andrew cleared his plate and put the food away. At her door, he saw she hadn't shut it completely.
It was jolting. She trusted him. He smiled ever so slightly and went to bed.