Chapter 3
Holt
He followed me to the bunkhouse carrying a leather bag soft as a glove and without a single mark on it, holding it out from his body so it wouldn't catch anything off the place.
I put my shoulder to the door, which had stuck for nine years because fixing it never once climbed high enough on the list, and I let him take in the whole of his next six weeks at a glance.
Two iron beds, the one made up. A woodstove.
A table and a lamp. A window with a view of the back of the barn.
Cold enough inside to hang a side of beef.
"There's your heater." I toed the stove.
"You'll want to learn it tonight before you need it, because nobody's coming out at two in the morning to light it for you.
Wood's stacked on the north side. Bathroom's the door at the end.
Water runs cold a minute and then it runs less cold, and that's the best I can tell you about it. "
He set the bag on the made bed and turned a slow circle with the bright, willing face of a man who had decided in advance to find all of this delightful. "It's perfect," he said. "Genuinely. It's got real character."
"It's got a draft and a mouse." I dropped an armload of wood by the stove. "Keep your food put away and you won't have to meet the mouse."
"Noted. Me and the mouse, strictly long-distance." He gave me the smile again. It hadn't worked in the yard an hour ago and he ran it out anyway, like a man jiggling a latch that's already stuck.
"Barn in ten minutes," I said. "Wear something you don't mind ruining."
"Ten minutes." He looked down at what he had on like it had never once occurred to him that clothes could be destroyed. "Define ruining."
"You'll know."
I left him there with his expensive bag and his perfect mouse.
He came out in nine, which I marked in his favor and didn't say.
The jeans were new enough to stand up on their own, the boots still had the cardboard stiffness of the shelf in them, and the flannel was so fresh off the rack the fold lines rose off the chest in squares.
A man wearing the costume of a ranch hand, which I supposed was the literal truth of why he'd come.
The trouble was he looked good in it. Store-bought and wrong as all of it was, it hung on him like somebody had been paid to put it there, and I had a whole second of standing in the mud noticing before I got the door shut.
I'd known he was handsome. Anybody with a phone knew that.
What I hadn't planned for was that it would work on me at half past seven in the morning with nobody selling it and nothing in it for either of us.
There was work enough in the day to bury it. I went and got it started.
"You ever done a day of real work?" I asked. I needed to know where the floor was before I built anything on it.
"I did a boxing movie once," he said. "Eight weeks of training. I had a guy."
"So that's a no."
"That's a no." He said it easy, no flinch, almost glad to be caught, and a better man than me might have warmed to him for it. I handed him a fork.
I put him on the stalls first, because a barn didn't care who a man was anywhere else.
Lift, turn, toss, I showed him once, and watched him take it up and do it wrong in every joint he owned, the load sliding off the tines before it ever cleared the wall.
Manure and wet straw went down his new jeans in a long brown smear he hadn't earned yet and would be wearing for the duration.
"You're hauling with your back," I told him. "Bend your knees and let the fork carry it, not your spine. Keep on like that and you'll be wrecked by Thursday and no use to me."
"Let the fork carry it," he repeated, and looked at the fork like it might do the job for him if he asked politely, and I turned to the next stall so he wouldn't see my face.
He hadn't done one thing right all morning.
But he was funny without trying to be, and that was worse than a man who tried.
A man who tried gave me something to hold against him.
This one gave me nothing, and I stood there and took it.
He worked. I'd grant him that and not much more, not for the first hour.
He worked badly and he didn't stop, and the whole time he kept up a low unbroken stream of talk, to me, to the horse, to himself.
He told the gelding it was doing great. He thanked the wheelbarrow out loud when it didn't tip.
None of it was for anybody. It was just what he did instead of being quiet.
Somewhere in the second load he stopped and leaned on the fork.
"Can I ask a dumb one?"
"You can ask."
"The ones in the lot by the barn look like they're about to pop, and the ones out in the meadow don't." He said it carefully, the words borrowed and not yet broken in. "Is that you putting them there, or is that just where they wandered off to?"
I stopped what I was doing. In fifteen years of green help nobody had asked me a question I had to think about before I answered it.
"First-calf heifers," I said. "They've never done it before. You keep them close so you can get to them in a hurry."
"Because they're more likely to have trouble."
"Because they're more likely to have trouble."
He nodded like I'd handed him something and went back to the fork, and I stood there a second longer than the work called for. A real answer was a door. I had doors enough standing open already.
By the second hour his hands had started to go.
I saw him flexing them when he thought I was looking the other way, the soft palms blistering up under the work, and he never once mentioned it.
I could have written off a man who complained by dinnertime.
This one just bled a little into the fork and kept loading the barrow.
Around the middle of the hour I threw a pair of my gloves at his chest, no word with them, so it couldn't be mistaken for kindness.
He caught them. He looked at them, and then at me, and had the sense not to say thank you.
First wholly right thing he'd done since he stepped out of that car.
The heifer went a little after ten, and she went easy.
I got a hand around the calf's fetlocks and pulled with her twice and that was all my part in it.
Five minutes and I was back out of the pen with my sleeves wet to the elbow, and the calf was up on its bad new legs hunting for the bag, and Morgan was still down in the third stall with his back to the whole business.
He never knew. The only thing that mattered on the place that day came and went forty feet behind him, and he was busy learning to hold a fork.
Gus came out at the worst possible moment, which was the only moment Gus ever came out for, and folded his arms on the corral rail to watch Morgan fight a heaped barrow toward the door and lose a third of it over the lip.
"He's getting the hang of it," Gus said, pitched for the whole yard.
"He's getting a third of it on the floor."
"More than you managed your first week. You sat down in the aisle and cried about your hands.
" Gus swung the full weight of his attention onto Morgan, who'd stopped to drag a wrist across his forehead and left a stripe there nobody was going to tell him about.
"Pay him no mind, son. He came to me meaner than a cornered badger and about as friendly, half-starved and all elbows, and look at him now.
Big as a barn now and about as talkative. "
"Thank you, Gus," I said, to the stall wall. "I was eleven."
"You were," he said. "Didn't stop you."
Morgan looked over at me. I went back to the barrow.
"I'm Morgan." He stuck out the filthy hand.
Gus took it and shook it like it was Sunday-clean, and I stood there and watched the movie star and the old man strike up the easiest friendship of either of their lives over a wheelbarrow of manure, and felt the specific loneliness of being the only grown-up at the party.
Gus told him to come up to the house for coffee when I finally let him off the chain, and said it in front of me so I'd hear the leash in it.
Then he went back inside, slower than he'd come out, a hand finding the porch post on the way up the step.
I watched that and not Morgan.
"We're not done," I said, and it came out with a good deal more in it than the sentence called for.
He picked up the barrow. He didn't ask.
I worked him through the afternoon the same as I'd work any green hand.
That meant the jobs a man couldn't ruin badly enough to cost me anything, and it meant not explaining them twice.
He hauled water. He forked feed down out of the loft and came out of it with hay dust in his collar and his hair and down the back of his shirt.
I put him on a gate and told him which ones to let through, and he let one through that wasn't on the list. I got her turned back.
He apologized twice, when once would have covered it.
He asked about everything, all afternoon, and I gave him about a third of what he asked for.
"What's in the sack?"
"Cake."
"Cake."
"Range cake. Feed. Comes in a pellet."
"You people call feed cake." He said it to the sack like the sack had done something wonderful. "That's the best thing I've heard all year."
Later, at the lot fence, he pointed at a cow with his chin the way he'd watched me do it, which he'd picked up somewhere in four hours without being told.
"Which one's that?"
"Eighty-one."
"That's a number."
"That's her number."
He looked at eighty-one a while. Eighty-one looked back at him and kept chewing. "Deborah," he said.
"We don't name them."
"I didn't name her. I guessed."
I went back to the truck. The man kept moving when by every right he should have folded an hour back.
Once that afternoon, carrying water, he stopped dead in the middle of the yard and stood looking up at the Three Saints, the buckets dragging his arms down straight.
He didn't say anything. He didn't have anything to say, which in his case was the notable part.
I gave him ten seconds before I told him water didn't haul itself.
He picked the buckets back up. But I'd watched him forget to perform for the length of one held breath, and I set it on the small pile of things about him I was trying hard not to keep.
***
It was past five by the time we moved out to the hay.
The light had come off everything but the top of the Spire and the cold was climbing up out of the ground to take the rest, and he was fading in earnest. The patter had gone out of him.
He was running on the last of whatever a man like that ran on, and the staff and the trailers and the guy he had for the boxing movie were all a thousand miles down the mountain and not coming.
He went to swing a bale onto the truck bed, misjudged it bone-tired, and dropped the whole forty pounds of it square on his own foot, and he said a word into the cold with real feeling behind it, the first sound he'd made all day that hadn't been shaped for a room.
Then he laughed. A short, rough, startled bark of a laugh, nothing like the warm one, and he sat down hard on the tailgate and dropped his head and breathed.
I should have told him to get up. There was light left and work still in it.
Instead I stood with a bale hung off my knee and watched him for four seconds with the act clean off him, and what was under it was nothing I'd got ready for.
It was just tired. Bone tired, year tired, tired all the way down past where sleeping reached.
I knew that one. I'd had mine so long I'd stopped noticing I was carrying it.
My hands wanted to put the bale down and go over there. I stayed where I was.
Then he put it all back. I watched him do it, the way a man pulls a tarp over a load ahead of the rain, and when he lifted his head the smile was on straight again with all the gravel still under it.
"I'm fine," he said. "Just admiring your tailgate. Real sturdy work."
"Get the bale." It came out rougher than I'd aimed it, because the other things waiting in my mouth were a good deal worse.
Sit there a minute. I know. Let me take it.
A man who started handing those out to a stranger bound to be gone in six weeks was a man asking to be left holding the empty bag. "Daylight's burning."
He got the bale. Got it onto the truck on the second heave and grinned at it like he'd settled a personal grudge, and I kept my eyes off him the rest of the load.
I'd seen under it now. That was the trouble. I'd never once in my life managed to put a thing back where I found it, and I had the whole long spring ahead of me to stand there and pretend I hadn't looked.
That, and the other business I'd been pretending about since half past seven that morning.