Rough Broke (Three Saints Ranch #1)

Chapter 1

Holt

The cold met me at the door the same as it always did in calving season, like it had sat up all night just to get its hands on me first. I pulled my collar against it and stepped off the porch into the dark.

The yard came up gray and familiar around me out of habit more than light.

It was four-forty in the morning. The Chapel and the Steeple and the Spire stood black against a sky going the gray of dishwater behind them.

Orion had gone down off the west rim hours back, under for the season, and he wouldn't stand over the valley again till the far end of summer.

What was left up there weren't the stars I counted winter by.

I didn't stop to look. There was a heifer two days off her time and a list as long as my arm, and a man could freeze to death admiring the sky.

The barn smelled like it should, hay and iron and the warm animal funk of cattle that had breathed the same air all night.

I ran my hand along the rail as I went, counting them without meaning to, the habit of it older than I was.

Forty-one head wintered in the near lots and every one of them a line in a ledger I couldn't make come out right, but I didn't think about that yet. I thought about the heifer.

She was in the corner pen, standing wrong.

Tail up, sides going slow and heavy, head low and swinging a little like she was looking for the door out of her own body.

First-calf, and frightened of it, and she didn't know yet that the fear was the smaller half of it.

I knew that well enough not to crowd her.

I let myself through the gate as quietly as I could and stood a while just inside it, not moving, letting her get used to the size and the smell of me in the half dark until her ears quit working back and forth and settled.

"All right," I murmured. "All right, girl. Nobody's in a hurry but you."

Her name was nothing. We didn't name them, not the ones that went down the road in the fall.

I'd learned a long time back not to let my mouth get attached to a thing my hands would have to load onto a trailer.

But I talked to her anyway, because the talking settled her and the barn at that hour was the one place I could say a soft thing and have nobody hear it but a cow.

I checked her over with my eyes and not my hands, reading the slack starting to come into her, and judged her to be hours off yet.

Maybe more. She'd go today but she wasn't going this minute.

So, I forked her hay she wouldn't touch and broke the skin of ice off her water and left her to it.

Then I went back out into the dark to do the things a body could do with its hands while it waited on a thing it couldn't hurry.

The tank by the corral had frozen over solid and I went at it with the maul, the shock of it ringing up through my wrists and into my shoulders.

The cold air bit the sweat before it could finish forming.

The tractor didn't want to turn over and I talked it into it the same as the heifer, choke and patience and a hand flat on the cold hood like the machine could feel that somebody meant it well.

A stretch of the north fence had been down a week and would stay down another. Fence would keep. Calving wouldn't.

Under all of it, low and constant as the cold, was the number.

I had a rule about the number. I didn't think about it before the sun cleared the ridge, because if I did it rode the seat beside me all day, got its fingers into the back of my neck while I fought a frozen bolt, and turned every small good thing sour just by sitting there.

So, I kept it where it belonged, down under the work, and I let it wait its turn the same as the heifer would have to wait hers.

There'd be time after sunrise to stand in the office with the bank's letter and feel the floor tilt. There always was.

The kitchen window was lit when I came up at six, which meant Gus was awake, which meant Gus was already lying to me about how he'd slept.

I stamped the worst of the cold off my boots on the mat and went in.

He stood at the stove in his union suit and a flannel that had been mine first, working a spoon through a pot of oatmeal like the oatmeal had said something about his mother.

"You're up early," I said.

"Same time I'm always up." He didn't turn. "You're the one come in late. Heifer?"

"Not yet. Today, though."

"Mm." He tapped the spoon on the rim and set it down.

I watched him rest his hand flat on the counter just long enough to take his own weight while he caught a breath he didn't care for me to see him needing.

He was slower up the stairs than he'd been last fall.

He was slower at everything than last fall, and he'd have walked into the creek before he'd have admitted it.

I'd have gone in after him before I'd have made him say it. That was our arrangement.

He'd taken me in when I was eleven years old, a mean, half-feral kid the county had run out of places to put.

He handed me a pitchfork and a list of chores and never once made me thank him for the roof.

Everything I knew about keeping a thing alive I learned between his kitchen and his barn.

The thought of losing either one to the bank sat in me like a stone I'd swallowed and couldn't bring back up.

"Sit and eat," he said. "You look like something the dog dragged off and thought better of."

I sat. He put a bowl down in front of me and I ate it because he'd made it.

Eating was easier than the talk we were both walking circles around, the one with the date in it.

The man came today. I'd known it for a week and managed not to think about it the same way I managed to avoid thinking about the number.

Now it was morning, he was arriving, and there wasn't any not-thinking left in the day to spend.

"What time's he land?" Gus asked, like he'd been in my skull the whole time.

"Said midmorning. Whenever the road lets him."

"You'll go easy on him."

"I'm not going to do anything to him." I scraped the bowl. "He's going to do ranch work and I'm going to take his money. In six weeks he's going to fly off to wherever it is people like that go, and we'll have made the spring payment, and that'll be the end of him."

Gus turned from the stove. He put those pale eyes on me and left them there, waiting to see whether I'd say the rest of it myself or make him say it for me. "Six weeks of board money," he said. "That's a finger in a hole in a dam, son, and you know it."

"It's six weeks more than we had yesterday."

He didn't fight me on it. Gus Rhodes would argue with a fence post if the post took a tone with him, but he turned back to the stove and let me have the last word.

He'd run the figures I'd run and come out at the same black bottom.

We were taking in a movie star to muck stalls and string wire because the place that raised the whole pack of us was a few bad months from belonging to men in an office in Denver.

I'd sooner have eaten the spoon than say it out loud.

I didn't even know who he was. I'd had to go look him up, standing in the back of the feed store with the phone held down at my hip like a man hiding something filthy, reading about a face I half knew off of ads and magazines.

Morgan Masterson. Every picture wore the same smile, factory-fit, pulled on first thing like I pulled on a coat, and not one of them looked like it had ever once been cold.

Coming to immerse himself, the article said, for some movie about cowboys.

Coming to learn the life. As if the life was a coat too, a thing to shrug on for six weeks and shrug off again with the dirt still in the seams and somebody else's.

"He's going in the bunkhouse," I said, only to be saying something.

"Course he is."

"I'm not giving up my bed for him."

"Nobody asked you to give up your bed, Holt.

" He said it to the oatmeal and not to me, which was as close to a laugh as he'd spend before noon.

"Though I'd pay money I haven't got to watch you try and make a movie star comfortable.

You'd toss him a horse blanket and tell him to quit his bellyaching. "

"He bellyaches, he can call somebody who's paid to care."

"That's the spirit." He came around and lowered himself into the chair across from me carefully, both hands on the table edge taking the trip down in stages.

I kept my eyes on my coffee and let him do it private.

"You don't have to like the man. You just have to not run him off the place before that check clears the bank. "

It sat on the table between the salt and the sugar, and neither of us reached for it.

We needed a stranger not to leave, and that bought me a month and a half of being patient with a soft man who'd never done a day's true work and never had cause to.

My shoulder had gone tight on it already, the one I broke young and never had set.

It told me weather a day out, and it had never been wrong.

"I'll keep him alive and working," I said. "That's all I'll promise."

"That's all I'm asking." He reached over and took the bowl out from under my spoon with a bite still in it, because he could see I was done eating.

He was slow now, and short of breath, and he still missed nothing.

"Go on, then. See to your heifer. And Holt.

" He waited until I looked at him. "Put on a clean shirt before he gets here.

Whole valley'll know he's here by suppertime.

No call to have them know you met him smelling like the south end of the barn. "

"They'll hear that part from you," I said as I stood and got my coat off the hook. He didn't deny it. He just shook his head with a grin.

The heifer still wasn't ready. I stood with her a few more minutes anyway.

She was honest, and out there with the light coming up on the faces of the Three Saints I could hold the bank and the road and the man on it out at arm's length.

The cold still had its teeth in everything. The tank was already glazing back over.

Off east I heard Lane's truck working up the grade toward the horse barn, that bad rod knocking, same as it had for two years.

He'd be up there before full light like he was every morning, and he wouldn't say a word to a living soul before noon.

Then it would be to a colt. I put my hand up out of habit.

There was half a mile of hay meadow between us and no chance on earth he saw it.

I heard the other thing before I saw it. On the ranch sound ran out ahead of sight, and it came on too smooth and too quiet in the thin air to be anybody's truck. It was a low expensive hum that didn't belong to a working morning.

It wasn't seven o'clock. He was three hours ahead of what he'd told us, and nobody came down that road early unless he'd driven it in the dark.

Whatever he was leaving, he hadn't wanted to wait for morning to do it.

I straightened up off the rail and wiped my hands down my jeans, for all the good that did.

My clean shirt was hanging on the back of my door, three hundred yards off.

Down the county road the dust came up gold where the sun caught it, a long bright plume of it trailing back behind a car that had no earthly business on a road like ours.

"All right," I said to the heifer, who had troubles of her own. "Here we go, then."