8. Andrew
Andrew
The air had the iron taste that came ahead of snow.
Andrew stood on the porch before light and watched the pines on the ridge move in long, even pulls.
He had been waiting on this front for three days.
Here it was. Thirty years on this porch, and the sky had never once asked him a question he could not answer.
Tin Cup pasture was a thousand feet above him in the dark, eight miles of switchback up, with a hundred and eleven head that needed to come down before the weather closed the trail.
He had kept Ray on the leases past the work, and the front had caught him for it.
He had reasons. He had not laid them out for himself and was not planning on it.
A light came on in the kitchen behind him.
He did not turn.
Boots crossed the boards behind him. They did not thump anymore. Somewhere around the third morning, Mandy had learned how to move through the house without fighting them.
She did not come out onto the porch. He had not expected her to. They had a thing about the kitchen at five, where he took the porch and she took the stove, and he stayed out until she had her quiet minute with the coffee. He let her have it.
When he came in, she was pulling on the canvas coat that had belonged to Mary Jo’s ex-husband, then Mary Jo, then nobody, and now her. She wore the brown hat and the big boots and poured the last of his coffee into her thermos.
“Tin Cup,” he said.
“Mary Jo told me.”
“It will be cold.”
“You say that every morning.”
“It will be colder.”
She paused at the door and looked at him, her mouth almost smiling.
“I’ll dress for it.”
She went out. Andrew set down the empty cup and followed.
Ray’s Blazer pulled into the yard as the first gray broke over the eastern ridge, headlights glaring in the wind, the old body rattling like a tin sheet over the cattle guard.
Walt was already at the rail with a mug.
He turned a quarter inch when the Blazer came in, and did not turn the other three quarters until Ray was out and walking, and that was Walt’s whole greeting, and Ray took it as the welcome it was.
“Boss.”
“You look thin.”
“I am thin. A week of beans and a woman who lied about her cooking.”
“She lie about anything else?”
“That is between her and the Lord.”
Walt’s mouth moved an eighth of an inch.
Andrew was at the buckskin’s stall with a cinch he did not need to be checking, and he checked it anyway.
He could hear Walt and Ray at the rail, falling back into the rhythm they had shared for nine years, the small dry catechism that confirmed nothing had needed catching up.
Ray had come to him off a San Luis Valley outfit, from a family that had run cattle in that high country when it was still Mexico and before the line on the map had been drawn across them.
He sat a horse the way men do when they were put on one before they could walk.
Andrew let them have the moment. He would come out in a minute.
Mandy came around the barn with Junebug on a lead. Ray’s head turned. Walt noticed Andrew noticing.
“Ray,” he said. “Amanda.”
She let go of the lead long enough to step the two paces and put out a hand. “Mandy.”
“Ray Cruz.” He took her hand brief and respectful and not without interest and let it go. “Walt didn’t say.”
“Walt does not say.”
“True.” Ray looked from her to Junebug and back, and a half-smile happened. “She let you saddle her yet?”
“On the second try.”
“That’s better than me.”
“It is not.”
“You’re right. It is not.”
Walt laughed into his mug. Andrew turned back to the buckskin’s cinch.
They went out at first light, four riders and the dog.
The buckskin under him. Walt on the steady gray.
Ray had Vinegar, because Ray was one of the three people on earth Vinegar would not bite, and the two of them had an arrangement worked out years back that nobody else was party to. Mandy was on Junebug.
He rode point because he always did. Walt rode drag because he always did. Ray was on the flank he liked, the left. Mandy was on the right, where she had been put and not moved off of, because she rode it well enough that nobody had needed to move her. The dog ran where the dog ran.
The trail climbed in switchbacks for the first hour and nobody talked. Mandy had learned the crew’s morning silence and rode inside it easily.
At the second meadow they crossed the creek.
The buckskin took the water clean. Behind him Junebug took it cleaner, and he did not turn his head to see, and he saw it anyway, because he could see the shape of horse and rider in the wet gray light against the snow in the pines without turning.
He had been carrying around what Mary Jo had told him last week, the thing about the grandmother Mandy had mentioned, on her place, before, a piece of information that sat in his pocket and turned over slow and did not quit.
The first cattle were in the timber above the second meadow. He could smell them before he could see them. Walt’s gray caught it too, head coming up an inch, and Walt nodded once down the line, and they spread.
He gave Mandy a look and a nod. She gave him one back. That was the whole of it.
Cattle in timber did not want to come out of timber. The work for the next two hours was riding into the trees and turning them in ones and twos and small bunches and getting them out into the open where the dog could be useful. Mandy did her share of it without being told what her share was.
She used a pine switch as Walt had shown her, not on the cow but through the air above it. Her pushing voice was lower than her speaking voice, and twice Andrew caught himself riding with his head turned farther than the work required.
The third bunch were three cows with calves at heel, and one of the cows was the kind that could be mean-headed, sour, refusing the open meadow because she had decided the timber was where her trouble lay.
He had seen her two years now and put her down on his list to cull twice and not done it.
She tried him at the edge of the trees and the buckskin spun under him impatient and quick, and the cow tried again and broke right, and Mandy was there.
She came up on Junebug with the switch low at her thigh and did not speak and did not fuss.
She put Junebug a half-length ahead of the cow and turned her shoulder, and the cow turned because Junebug had said she would turn, and the calf went where the mother went, and the other two followed because that was how cattle worked when you did not give them the chance to think.
She did not look at him when she had done it. She looked at the next thing.
Andrew watched one second too long.
Walt’s horse came up on the flank a moment later, and Walt’s eyes touched his face once and did not comment, and that was worse than commenting would have been.
By midmorning they had thirty head bunched in the open below the tree line, and the dog was holding them, and they had another sixty to find.
The wind had picked up another notch, and the cold had teeth in it now.
He pulled the four of them in under the shelter of a leaning fir and they had ten minutes with thermoses and saddles still on the horses, because there was not time for off-saddle and they all knew it.
Mandy poured coffee from her thermos into the lid and handed it to him without asking. He took it. He drank. He gave it back.
She drank from the same side of the lid his mouth had touched and did not seem to notice. A thousand times he had passed a lid to Walt and felt nothing but the cold. This time he noticed every inch of rim between them. He kept his expression still.
Ray was watching, easy, not unkind. Ray had not been a fool the whole time Andrew had known him.
“How long she been on?” Ray said.
“Not long.”
Ray took that in. “She from?”
“Down south.”
“Mm.”
Ray accepted the answer and left the closed doors closed.
Walt’s eyes were a different temperature, and Andrew did not look at Walt.
The afternoon was worse. They found another bunch high in a draw he should have looked at first, twenty head with calves and no water near them and the wind getting into the draw and going nowhere, and they had to ride them out the long way because the short way was a slot the cows would not take with calves.
He took Ray up the back side, and left Walt and Mandy to hold the bottom of the draw and turn anything that came out wrong.
He did not like leaving her with Walt because she did not need Walt.
He did not like leaving her without Walt because the cold was getting serious now and the country was high and an inexperienced rider could go down on a slick patch, and a hand on the ground was a long way from anywhere.
He had Walt with her. He rode up with Ray and made himself not turn around twice on the climb.
When they got the bunch moving down the back side and out into the meadow above the draw, he could see Mandy on the flat below, the brown of her hat steady, her right hand low and quiet.
The cattle came down out of the draw without trouble, nobody making a mistake.
She turned a mother cow that broke and the cow gave it up after one try.
He watched her do it from a quarter mile out with the snow starting to come in off the peak.
He thought about her grandmother on her place before, and he thought about Walt’s voice last week in the south corral, and he found that he was holding the reins too tight and made himself ease them.
The buckskin sighed under him.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
By two o’clock they had ninety-seven head, and the snow had started in earnest, big flat flakes coming in sideways out of the northeast, and the rest of the cattle were going to be tomorrow’s problem because today’s problem was getting these ones down before the trail iced. He gave the call. They turned the herd.
Going down was different work than going up.
Going up you brought them. Going down you let them want to go, because they wanted to go, because they could feel the weather coming, and your job was the geometry of it, the angle of the flank, the held line at the front, the rider behind picking up the slow ones and the ones with notions.
Mandy rode the right flank. He rode point. Walt rode drag because Walt rode drag. Ray was behind the dog and beside the dog and sometimes in front of the dog, depending on what the dog was deciding.
The light dropped fast. The snow thickened. The trail iced where the trail was going to ice, and the buckskin took it with the small, contained impatience he kept to himself.
Twice in the last hour Andrew had to ride back to Mandy because the trail came down through a place where the cattle could spill, and twice he was alongside her with the snow whitening the brim of her hat and the sleeve of the canvas coat he had watched her put on at the door of his kitchen at five in the morning, and twice they did not speak, and twice he was aware of her with a precision he had not been aware of anything in years.
The second time, the buckskin’s shoulder brushed Junebug’s, and Mandy’s gloved hand moved a quarter inch on the rein.
Andrew felt the touch travel up the buckskin’s side and his own thigh and into him.
The buckskin had brushed a thousand horses in his time and Andrew had not felt one of them.
Now he had felt this one. He pushed the buckskin a length ahead and did not look back.
They came down out of the timber into the lower pastures at dusk with most of the light gone out of the sky and the snow still coming.
The hands at the lower gate had the chute set and the receiving pen open, and the dog peeled the herd into it because the dog had been doing this job since he was eight months old, and the cattle went in because there was hay and shelter and they were not stupid.
He counted as they went past. Ninety-seven coming down. Ninety-seven going in. That was the kind of count he liked.
Walt closed the receiving pen and walked on past them toward the yard. Ray took the dog to the bunkhouse to feed him. The two hands who had held the lower gate took the horses they had been holding for the change and disappeared with them toward the barn.
He and Mandy were the last two at the corral gate.
The snow was coming down between them in big slow flakes.
The light from the barn lay long on the ground.
Her hat was white across the brim, and her face under it was the face of a woman who had ridden ten hours in a wind off the peak and was still standing because she had decided to be still standing. He looked at her.
She looked back.
Andrew looked at her and stopped pretending he did not want her.
She did not smile or drop her eyes. Her gloved hand rested on Junebug’s cinch buckle. Andrew’s hand held the cold gate latch three feet away.
He took the half step.
She did not move back.
Her chin came up. The snow on her hat brim slid an inch and did not fall.
“Andy.”
Walt’s voice came from the far side of the barn, from the yard gate, the one that did not need anyone to ask.
“Andy. You want this one closed.”
Andrew did not move for a count of two. Then he stepped back.
“Closed,” he said. He stepped back and walked toward the barn.
He did not look back.
Walt was at the tack room door with the gate-key in his hand.
“I am going to ride the south fence,” Andrew said.
Walt looked at the snow coming down.
“I saw a place this morning that wants checking.”
Walt looked at him.
“Before it gets worse.”
Walt waited before saying, “Andy.”
“Don’t.”
“Andy.”
“Do not say it, Walt.”
Walt’s mouth set. He handed over the gate key.
Andrew saddled the buckskin again. The horse watched him with open irritation.
When Andrew led him out, Mandy was gone from the corral. Her shape moved behind the yellow kitchen window, taking off the brown hat.
Andrew rode through the south gate into the snow.
“It will not help,” Andrew told the wind and rode on.