CHAPTER 33
Beck
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The storm hit the valley like a thing with a grudge.
Beck took the barn door at a run, Laney a half-stride ahead of him, and the wind tried to take the door off its hinges before he could haul it shut behind them.
Rain came down in sheets a man could lean on.
Lightning walked the mesa rim, and for a half-second the whole world went white and flat and then dropped back into a dark so complete it had weight to it. Only one light held against all that.
The single hanging lamp over Juniper's stall, swinging a little on its cord, throwing a pool of dirty gold across the straw and pushing the storm-dark back maybe ten feet, no more.
Ten feet. That was the whole world now. That circle of lamplight, and the mare down in it.
“Down,” Laney said. One word, flat, and it landed as a verdict rather than a question.
Juniper was down on her side in the shavings, sides heaving, and the thing coming out of her was red where Beck had braced himself for the slick pale balloon he'd been told to expect.
Dark, angry, blood-red, bulging where it should have been white, and Laney was already on her knees in it, already pulling Tom's brass-handled hoof knife out of her kit, her hands going somewhere very far past steady into a stillness that scared him worse than panic would have.
“Red bag,” she said. “Placenta's separated early. She's foaling but the foal's not getting oxygen — it's still sealed inside this. Beck. Listen to me.” She didn't look up. She didn't have to. “When I open this, we go fast. There's no slow part anymore. You understand me?”
“Tell me what you need.”
“Hands. Towels. And you don't leave.”
You don't leave. The old reflex stood up in him out of pure habit, the part of Beck Calhoun that had spent ten years being good at exactly one thing, and the door at his back was right there, and the storm was a wall, and somewhere under his ribs the cold familiar voice said this is the kind of thing you ruin.
He knelt down in the blood instead.
“I'm right here,” he said. “I've got you. Both of you.”
She slit the red bag in one long pull, clean as gutting a trout, and a gush of fluid hit the straw and the smell of it rose up hot and coppery and animal.
Inside was the foal's white amnion, the right color finally, and one small dark hoof, and Laney's arm went in past the wrist before Beck could even register what he was looking at.
“One foot,” she said, talking to herself now, the triage cadence, assess and rule out and act.
“One foot and a nose. Other leg's back. I have to bring it forward or she'll never pass it and we'll lose them both.” She breathed out hard through her nose, that one sharp exhale he knew meant she'd just told herself a hard truth and decided to do it anyway.
“Beck, when she pushes, you hold her tail back and out of my way and you do not let her roll. She rolls, this is over.”
The mare gathered and pushed and Juniper screamed, a sound Beck felt in his back teeth, and the muscles under his hands went rigid as cable.
He set his shoulder against her flank — not the bad one, his body noted on its own, the wrist with the two pins held low and careful — and he held.
Lightning hit close enough that the thunder came with it, no gap, and the lamp jumped on its cord and the shadows lunged and he held.
“Don't push, girl, don't push, give me a second,” Laney was saying, low and even, her whole arm buried, her face gone smooth and absent the way it went when she was all the way down inside the work and there was nothing of her left over for fear.
“I've got the leg. I've got the knee. Come on. Come up. Come up.”
A long, grinding, impossible moment. Sweat ran down the side of Laney's face and dripped off her jaw.
The freckles across her nose stood out dark against skin gone white.
Her lips moved, counting, the way her father had taught her — flex the fetlock, cup the hoof so it won't tear her, walk it up and over the brim.
She had her arm in her mother mare to the shoulder, her cheek nearly down in the straw, every cord in her forearm standing as she worked blind by feel alone against the next contraction.
“Don't push, girl. Hold for me. Hold.” A pause.
A breath. “If I can't turn this before her pelvis locks down, I'm cutting and we lose the foal to save her, and I am not doing that tonight, I am not —” Then something shifted, some hidden architecture of the animal gave way under her hand, the small back leg folding up out of where it had jammed, and she said on a great gasp, “Got it.
Both legs. Both feet, one nose, that's a diver's position, that's right, that's right. Now she can do it. Now she pushes.”
“Juniper,” Beck said, dumb with it, talking to the mare like she could understand. “Come on, old girl.”
The mare pushed. The foal came in a rush, all at once, a slick dark tangle of impossibly long legs sliding out onto the straw into the lamplight, and Laney caught it and dragged it clear of the wet sac and it lay there.
It lay there.
It didn't move.
Beck's whole body went to ice. He'd seen a lot of things go still that should've kept moving. He knew the particular quality of that stillness from a long way off and he hated that he knew it.
“No,” Laney said, and it was the only time her voice broke all night. She had the foal's head in her hands, stripping the membrane back off the muzzle, clearing it, fingers in the little nostrils. “No, no, you don't. Beck — straw — rub it, the chest, hard, like you mean it, now —”
He grabbed a fistful of straw and went after the foal's ribs with it, scrubbing, rough, his hand the size of half the little thing's body, and Laney bent and pinched the foal's nostril and blew two long breaths into the other one, her mouth over its muzzle, her hand cupping it shut, and sat up and watched and the foal did nothing and she did it again.
“Come on, little one,” she said against its wet face. “Stay. Stay with us.”
Outside the storm hammered the tin and the dark pressed in on all sides and the one lamp swung and that ten-foot circle of gold was the only place in the world that anything could still be saved.
Beck kept rubbing. His arms burned. Stay, he thought, and didn't know if he was talking to the foal or to himself, to the man kneeling in the blood instead of looking for the door.
Stay. For once in your sorry life, stay.
The foal heaved.
A great shuddering whole-body heave, ribs flaring under Beck's hand, and then the little chest pulled and the nostrils flared pink and a thread of breath whistled in, and then another, and then the foal lifted its dripping head off the straw on a neck that wobbled like a wet rope and looked at them both with one dark unfocused eye and gave a small, indignant, water-clogged snort.
Beck made a sound he didn't have a name for. Laney sat back on her heels in the bloody straw with both hands pressed over her own mouth and laughed and the laugh had tears all the way through it.
“There you are,” she whispered. “There you are.”
Juniper lifted her head, blew low and deep, and answered her foal. Down the line, alive, the both of them.
“A filly,” Laney said, wiping her face with the back of a wrist and only smearing it.
“It's a filly, Beck. Look at her. Look at those legs, she's going to be tall, she's going to be —” The triage cadence had abandoned her entirely; she was just talking, fast and bright and broken open, and it was the best sound he'd ever heard.
“She's all leg. Look at her go, she's already trying to — she sounds like a cricket. Listen to her.”
The filly snorted again, a small dry chirring sound, and tried to organize four legs she'd never used.
“Cricket,” Beck said.
Laney went still. Then she nodded, once, and her eyes came up to his over the new little life between them, green and wrecked and full. “Cricket,” she agreed.
They worked another half hour by the swinging lamp — iodine on the navel, the filly helped up onto her ridiculous stilt legs and aimed at the bag, Juniper hauled to her feet to clean and nuzzle and claim her own.
The storm spent itself slow, the thunder walking off east, the rain easing from a roar to a hard steady patter on the roof.
When there was nothing left to do but watch, they sat down side by side against the stall boards in the gold light, soaked to the skin and stinking of blood and birth, and neither one of them moved to go.
Cricket folded down into the straw against Juniper's flank and slept the boneless sleep of the newly alive.
For a while Beck just breathed. Then he heard himself say the thing he'd carried for ten years, said it quiet, looking at the foal and not at Laney, because some things a coward could only say if he didn't have to watch them land.
“It was Tom's truck.”
Laney went very still beside him. He felt it more than saw it.
“On the bridge that night,” Beck said. “I wasn't drunk.
I never told a soul that, and I'm not telling you to make myself look better, because I don't, it doesn't, but you asked me once for the whole ride and I gave you the part that ended with me looking worst and kept this part, and I'm done keeping it.” The words were coming faster now, the way they did when feeling got out ahead of him and he couldn't rein it back.