Chapter 10 The South Pasture
The south pasture arrangement meant James came more often.
Not just in the mornings for the telling-Holly-things sessions, which had continued beyond what either of them had initially expected, but in the afternoons as well — to walk the fence line and assess what needed repair, to look at the water situation in the lower section, to evaluate the carrying capacity and what it would require to bring a small herd in for the spring.
She came with him on the first afternoon walk, which he had not suggested and she had not asked permission for. She had simply put on her coat and walked alongside him when he went south along the fence line, and after a moment he had adjusted his pace to hers without comment.
This was the thing she had begun to notice about him that was not professional and was not practical: he adjusted.
Not in the performance sense, not with the social management that men sometimes did with women in a new context, the conspicuous accommodation that announced itself.
Quietly. The way you adjusted to the presence of someone you were used to, because the adjustment had become natural rather than deliberate.
She was not sure what to do with this.
She was sure what to do with the south pasture.
She had spent three evenings with the ledger and the notes James had provided and she had a picture of what the pasture required and what it would produce and what the timeline looked like.
She was not going to have cattle on it this winter — that was impossible, the preparation took time and winter was already here — but she had a spring plan that was documented and specific, and the documentation and specificity made her feel better about the general uncertainty of the enterprise.
"You like knowing the plan," James said, on one of the afternoons when she was showing him the spring document.
"I like having a plan," she said. "Whether I like it depends on the plan."
"What if the plan doesn't work?" he said.
"I make another plan," she said. "Plans are working documents, not contracts."
He was quiet for a moment. "Harold used to say the only plan that survived contact with Colorado was a plan that started with something I haven't thought of yet."
Holly looked at the plan she had made. It was twelve pages, organized by quarter, with contingencies noted in the margins. She thought about her uncle, who had apparently understood something about planning that she was going to have to arrive at through experience.
"I say that too," she said. "Something I haven't thought of yet."
He looked at her with the quality that was becoming familiar. "Do you?" he said.
"When I don't know the answer," she said. "I find that naming the not-knowing is better than pretending I know. Something I haven't thought of yet means: I will think of it. It's not a surrender to uncertainty, it's a placeholder for the solution."
He was quiet again. Not the uncomfortable kind. The thinking kind.
"That's how Harold used it," he said. "I hadn't thought about it that way. I thought he was just — saying something hopeful when the situation looked bad."
"Maybe he was," she said. "Hope and method aren't exclusive. You can be hopeful that you'll find the answer and also be genuinely looking for it."
He looked at the south pasture through the fence they were walking. The afternoon light was doing its December thing, the low gold of the late afternoon slanting across the snow on the meadow. It was cold and specific and entirely itself.
"You think like your uncle," he said.
"I didn't know him well enough to know if that's true," she said.
"It's true," he said. "He didn't say many things twice. When he said something, it counted." He looked at the meadow. "He said he had a niece in Kansas City who kept the books somewhere and who had a head for numbers. He said it like it was something he was quietly proud of."
Holly stood in the December afternoon on the fence line of her property and thought about a man who had been quietly proud of her without telling her so, the way some people carried their affections at a distance that made the caring private and real.
"I wish I had known him better," she said.
"He wished that too," James said. "He said it once. That he should have written."
She looked at the mountains. They were doing their afternoon thing — the light on the upper peaks was the gold-rose of the late afternoon, the color that only happened here at this time of year at this hour.
"You knew him well," she said.
"As well as he let anyone," James said. "He was private. But what he let you see was real."
"Like the apple tree," she said.
"Like the apple tree," he agreed.
They walked the fence line in the December afternoon and the mountains watched them go, and the land was hers and the plan was hers and she was learning both faster than she had expected, and the man walking beside her had known her uncle and had understood him and was helping her understand the place her uncle had made, and the whole of it was more than she had expected when she had packed her two trunks in Kansas City and got on a train heading west.
* * *
The fifteenth day produced a problem.
The problem was the heifer that had wandered from the Breck property through a gap in the shared fence line and was now in the north section of the Vance pasture, apparently entirely comfortable with the relocation and disinclined to be relocated back.
Holly discovered this on her morning walk of the property, which she had established as a morning practice after James had told her that you had to walk your land every day to know what was happening on it, that land that was only seen from the house was land that would surprise you when you weren't looking.
She had been surprised. The heifer was standing in the north pasture with the easy confidence of an animal that has gone somewhere new and found it adequate.
She went to the fence line, found the gap — a section of post that had heaved with the freeze — and then went to find James, who was on his own property doing something with a hay bale when she arrived.
"One of yours is in my north pasture," she said.
He looked up. "The young red one?"
"Brown. Ears out. Looked comfortable."
He identified the heifer from this description without difficulty and came, and they addressed the fence gap together — he knew how to fix it, she held the post while he set the brace, and the heifer was persuaded back through the gap before it was closed with the joint effort of two people who approached the heifer from the right directions because they had both thought about where the heifer was likely to go and had positioned accordingly.
"Good instinct," he said, about her positioning.
"I watched where she was looking," Holly said. "She was looking that way, so I went the other way."
"That's the instinct," he said. "Most people go toward where they want the animal to go, which is where the animal doesn't want to go, so the animal goes where the person went from."
"That seems obvious," she said.
"It's obvious once you see it," he said. "It takes a while to see it."
She thought about how many things were obvious once you saw them.
About how much of practical knowledge was this: not complex, not requiring intelligence so much as requiring experience or the right kind of attention.
About how she had the attention and was acquiring the experience, and how the combination of the two was beginning to feel like competence.
They fixed the fence. The heifer went back where it belonged. Holly marked the fence gap location in the property notes she had been keeping, which already ran to thirty pages and were organized by category.
"You're taking notes," he said, when he saw the notebook.
"Every day," she said. "Everything I learn goes in. If I need to know it once, I'll probably need to know it again."
He looked at the notebook. "Harold didn't take notes," he said. "He kept it all in his head. I always thought that was a risk."
"It's a significant risk," she said. "Everything in one head and if the head stops working, the knowledge goes with it. A notebook survives."
He looked at her with the quality she was learning to read as: processing something that is changing how I think about this situation. "Yes," he said. "It does."