Chapter 2 Bastien — Day 3 #2
He worked through until the sun was over the barn roof and Opal rang a bell that sounded like it came from a schoolhouse. He drank two glasses of water at the pump and washed his face, and the water was so cold his teeth hurt.
Lunch was beans and cornbread at the crew table on the porch.
Mara came out of the office with a legal pad and didn't look at him for the first ten minutes, and he found himself unable to look anywhere else.
She was in a plain gray T-shirt with the sleeves rolled once, her braid over her left shoulder, a bandana tied at her neck against the sun.
In his life he'd been in rooms with women who had entire industries built around dressing them.
He'd never once felt what he was feeling now — a small quiet catch in his chest every time she leaned to write something.
She looked up.
“Beau.”
“Yes.”
“You throw bales all right?”
“So Rafe tells me.”
“Rafe would tell you that if you'd dropped one on your foot.”
“Then I'll say I did all right.”
Her mouth softened, considered the smile, and let it go. She looked back at her pad.
“You'll be on the north pasture with Thayer this afternoon. Fence check. Bring water.”
“All right.”
She held her pen still on the pad. “You know what a fence check is, Beau?”
“I can guess.”
“Guess out loud.”
“Walk the line,” he said. “Look for gaps. Look for wire down. Look for anywhere a cow could think about being clever.”
This time the smile stayed long enough to count.
“Close enough. Thayer'll fill in the parts you're missing.”
“Thank you.”
“Don't thank me. He's the one who has to walk it with you.”
She was already looking back at her pad, but warmth still held at the corner of her mouth, and he understood he'd spend a lot of energy over the next week trying to earn it again. Across the table Rafe watched him with the pleased attention of a man who saw everything and intended to use it later.
The afternoon was wire and pliers and Thayer not saying twelve words in three hours.
Bastien learned to hold a strand under tension so Thayer could staple it.
He learned that if he set his feet wrong on a slope the wire would slap him.
He learned that Thayer would let him make a mistake once and then quietly show him the fix without ever once saying that was wrong.
Around three, Thayer handed him a canteen without looking.
“Drink.”
“I'm fine.”
“Drink anyway. High desert. You'll be flat on your back before you notice you're thirsty.”
Bastien drank. The water tasted like the metal of the canteen and, faintly, like the plastic gasket in the lid, and it was the best thing he'd tasted in a year.
“Thank you.”
Thayer took the canteen and drank himself and capped it and slung it over his shoulder, and that was the whole of their conversation for another forty minutes.
By the time they walked back to the yard the sun was orange on the western ridges and Bastien's shirt was stuck to his back and his hands felt like they belonged to a bigger, older man.
Mara was at the corral. She had the bay in a halter and was walking him in a slow figure eight, watching the off hind. She glanced over as they came in.
“He's still off,” she said to Thayer.
“Yeah.”
“Rest him a week?”
“Yeah.”
She let the bay go and hung the halter on the post and walked toward the porch, and then, halfway, she turned and looked directly at Bastien.
“Beau. Come here a minute.”
He came.
She waited until Thayer had drifted off toward the machine shed, and then she reached into her back pocket and pulled out a small, folded packet of bills.
“Day rate for a hand who works a full day is eighty,” she said. “I'm not paying you weekly till I know you'll be here weekly. So.”
She held it out.
He looked at it. Then at her.
“Take it, Beau.”
“I don't know if I've earned it.”
“You threw bales, mucked four stalls, and held wire for Thayer without whining. You've earned it.”
“All right.”
He took the bills. Four twenties, folded once, warm from her back pocket. He felt the warmth against his fingers and understood he'd remember the exact sensation of it, unhelpfully, for a long time.
“Thank you.”
“Beau.” She waited until he looked up. Her eyes were gray-green in the low sun and steadier than he had any right to. “You showed up. That's more than half of them do.”
She turned and went up the porch steps and inside, and the screen door slapped shut behind her.
Bastien stood in the yard with eighty dollars in his hand and watched the door.
He'd been paid before. He'd signed a bonus check once that had four commas in it. He'd, in his life, made and lost more money in an afternoon than every hand on this ranch would see in a decade. And he'd never — not one time — held money in his hand that he'd made with his hands.
He folded the bills once more and slid them into his shirt pocket. They sat over his heart, which felt on-brand for how his day had gone and which he didn't enjoy.
Opal was in the kitchen window. She was drying a plate, and she caught his eye, and she didn't smile. She held his eye a beat longer than a cook should hold a hand's eye, and then she went back to drying the plate.
He walked to the bunkhouse. Rafe was on the porch peeling an apple with a jackknife and didn't look up as Bastien passed.
“Beau.”
“Rafe.”
“You're not gonna last.”
“Probably not.”
“Just so we're clear.”
“Clear.”
Rafe grinned to himself and cut a wedge and ate it off the blade, and Bastien went inside and sat on the edge of his bunk and looked at his hands.
They weren't his hands anymore. Or they were, but they'd started to be a hand's hands.
A splinter in the meat of his right palm.
A red line on his left thumb, low, where the old sailboat scar crossed the joint and the pliers had rubbed it raw.
Both palms had the beginning of a blister at the base of the fingers.
He looked at them a long time.
One week, he told himself. He'd give it one week. He'd sleep on a bunk and eat Opal's bread and throw bales, and at the end of the week he'd get in his truck and drive somewhere else and be somebody else, and Vale Ranch would have been a stop.
One week.
He heard the screen door of the main house from across the yard, and he was on his feet before he'd decided to move. He wasn't going anywhere. He crossed to the small window that faced the house instead, and he stood there in the falling light and watched for a braid over a left shoulder.
She didn't come out. He kept watching.
One week, he'd told himself. He was, he understood without any particular grace about it, already lying.