CHAPTER 6 #2
“Easy,” Laney said, low, the word she said to all of them, animal and man alike. “Easy, easy—”
“She's going to break that leg,” Beck said.
“I know it.” Her voice didn't rise. It never did. The stiller she got, the worse it was, and she'd gone very still. “Get on her shoulder. Your side. Push when I say and not before, or she goes over backward and breaks her neck instead. On three.”
He didn't ask a single question. He moved — graceless, rusty, but where she'd told him, when she'd told him, his whole weight into the heifer's shoulder as Laney got the leg, talking the animal down the way her father had taught her, you don't win a fight with a thousand pounds, you win it by being the calmer thing in the room, and between the two of them they walked the panic out of her, eased the trapped leg back, let her find her own feet.
The heifer stood blowing in the chute, sides heaving, fine.
Laney's heart was going. She let it. That's adrenaline, she told it.
That's the cow. She knew it was a lie even as she filed it.
Some of it was the cow. Some of it was Beck's shoulder a foot from hers, both of them breathing hard in the dust, his forearm against the rail close enough that she could see the rope-burn calluses banding his palm, the old surgical lines down his wrist where the pins were, the St. Christopher medal swung loose from his collar and catching the light.
He smelled like sweat and horse and that thing underneath that ten years and a thousand miles hadn't changed at all, and she hated, with the clean cold precision she brought to everything, exactly how much her body remembered.
“Good hands,” he said, and his voice had gone rough. “You always had—”
“Don't.” She bent to the heifer's lame foot, brought it up between her knees, reached for the hoof knife. Tom's brass handle was warm from the sun. She trimmed the abscess clean, let it drain, and the heifer flinched and held. “Don't tell me about my hands. We're working.”
*
She washed up at the iodine bucket between cows.
She crouched in the overhang shade and sank her arms into the amber water to the elbow, the iodine swirl going milky as it took the dust and the blood off her, the smell of it sharp and clean and so much her whole life that for a second she wasn't thirty-two and careful, she was eleven and beside her father at this same barn watching him mix the same gold from the same brown bottle.
A little kills the bad and leaves the good. She scrubbed and let the water cloud and tried to want a single thing less than she wanted it.
Beck's shadow fell across the bucket.
“Laney.”
She didn't look up. She watched her own forearms in the iodine water, the freckles, the pale crescent scar on her left thumb where a colt had bit her clean through at sixteen, her first hard lesson in trusting a young thing too soon.
“I want to say—” he started, and there it was, the run-on coming, she could hear it gathering, the way his sentences ran long when the feeling got out ahead of him, “—I know I don't have the right to walk back out here and stand in this barn like the last ten years didn't happen, and I'm not asking you to act like they didn't, I just—”
“You want to know what I think.” She straightened, water running off her arms, and turned and looked at him, and went so calm her jaw ached with the holding of it.
“All right. I'll tell you. I doctor strays.
You'd be surprised how many show up — somebody's dog, somebody's barn cat, half-wild, dumped at the county line.
And there's a kind that comes to your hand sweet as anything and lets you feed it and lets you doctor it and the second the gate's open they're gone, and they don't come back, and you can stand there with the bowl in your hand feeling like a fool for the rest of the night.”
He didn't move. The dust hung gold around them both.
“You don't fix the ones that bolt, Beck. That's the thing nobody tells you. You don't gentle it out of them and you don't love it out of them. All you can do is stop leaving the gate open.” She picked up her towel. “I learned that doctoring strays. I learned the rest of it from you.”
His thumb went to the scar through his eyebrow and stayed there this time, pressed hard, and he didn't pretend it hadn't. When he spoke his voice was low and flat, the grey eyes gone flat with it, hiding.
“I'd say that's fair,” he said.
“It's not about fair. Fair's got nothing to do with it.
It's about what a body learns to expect, so it stops getting taken apart.” She dried her arms. “My pulse went up just now.
Back there with the heifer. You want to know what that was?
Adrenaline. A cow in a chute. That's all it's allowed to be, and that's all I'm going to let it be, so we're clear.”
“We're clear,” he said.
“Good. Bring up the next one.”
*
He brought up the next one. And the one after. They didn't talk about strays again.
But the work went on being the work, and the work was a confession neither of them was making out loud.
Her hands found his rhythm. His found hers.
The sun walked up over the barn and started its long fall toward the mesa rim, and the holding pen emptied cow by cow into the worked pen, and somewhere in there the thing between them stopped feeling like two strangers and started feeling like an old wound flexing, the kind that aches worse healing than it ever did broken.
He was watching her work, once — and the look was gone before she could read it. Her own face had done something she hadn't authorized when he'd put his shoulder to that heifer exactly when she'd said. She filed it all and refused to name it.
Hutch came down from the house near the end of it, bandy-legged and unhurried, a blade of grass working in the corner of his mouth, and stood at the rail and watched the last of the worked cows go through. He didn't say anything for a long beat. He never did.
“You two finish the herd?” he said finally.
“Spring-bred's done,” Laney said. “Got numbers for you. Six open you'll want to cull, the bald-face has an abscess I drained, she'll come sound. You've got a windmill about to throw a blade and a corral weld that's going to drop a cow through it inside the month.”
Hutch nodded like she'd told him the sun came up.
He looked at Beck. “You're hands-on now,” he said.
Not a question. “Tucker's stretched. I'm sixty-three.
Cody's a pup. The plan you cooked up needs a man in the dirt every day, and that's you, if you're staying to mean it.” He shifted the grass to the other side of his mouth. “You staying to mean it?”
Beck went taut beside her, the breath held a half-second too long. He wanted to reach for the joke or the exit, the way he always had — she'd have bet the truck on it. Then the want passed through him and left him standing where he was.
“I'm staying,” Beck said.
Hutch looked at him a long moment, the faded blue eyes giving away exactly nothing, and then he gave Beck the only blessing a man like Hutch had to give, which was three words.
“All right then.” He turned to Laney. “And you're contracted through the foaling and the works.
The herd's going to need you every week, more, with what's coming.” He framed it as fact, the way he framed everything; Hutch didn't deal in questions. “Same as you told Charlie.”
“Same as I told Charlie,” she said.
“Then I'll see you both out here,” Hutch said, “more than either of you wants.” And he chewed his grass and walked back toward the house, and left the two of them standing on the same ground, in the same dust, under the same dying gold light, bound to the same season and the same ninety days whether they liked it or not.
The silence stretched between them for a moment.
“Every day,” Beck said, half to himself, testing the shape of it.
“Looks like.” She crouched and tipped the iodine bucket out into the dirt, the amber water darkening the dust in a long fan, the gold of it draining away into the ground. She straightened with the empty bucket in her hand. “You crowd those heifers tomorrow, I'm not going to be nice about it.”
“You weren't nice about it today.”
“That was nice,” she said. “You'll know when I'm not.”
His mouth tilted toward a smile — or maybe it didn't; she refused to let herself be certain.
She gathered her kit, looped Tom's knife into its place, and walked to her truck with her back straight and her hands steady, ten years of practice holding them that way, and she would be damned if she'd let one day of remembered rhythm undo the work.
She loaded the kit. She set the empty bucket in the bed, the last of the iodine drying to a faint amber ring on its bottom, the smell of it following her into the cab the way it followed her everywhere, the smell of her father and her whole staying life.
Banjo lifted his grizzled heeler's head off the seat and thumped his tail once, and she scratched his ears and looked through the windshield at the man standing in the worked pen, hat dark with sweat, watching her go and not pretending he wasn't.
Every day, she thought. Same ground. Same dust. Same clock.
She turned the key. From now until the foal came or the ranch fell, she'd stand shoulder to shoulder with him in this corral, both of them having spent ten years staying clear, and there wasn't one thing she could do about it but show up tomorrow and do the work.
The empty bucket rattled once in the bed as the engine caught, the amber ring on its bottom going to dust. So she would.
She put the truck in gear and drove out, and didn't look in the mirror, and felt him there anyway, the whole length of the lane.