Chapter 6
Morgan
Somebody was pounding on the bunkhouse door and I was in my boots before I was awake enough to wonder why. I hadn't been here a week and I already knew nobody out here knocked at night unless something was dying.
Holt filled the doorway with a headlamp blazing off his face and the cold pouring in around him.
"I need hands. Now. Don't bother with the coat, you'll cook.
" And he was gone back across the dark before I'd found the words to say I didn't have hands, not the kind he meant, not hands that knew a single useful thing.
I ran after the swinging light anyway. The cold hit me in the chest and I ran through it with my lungs burning and the ground like concrete under my boots.
The house was dark. Nobody had woken Gus, and I was too far into my own panic to wonder why.
The whole way across the yard I was thinking please don't let me be the reason something dies tonight.
I had spent my whole life being the most important person in the room. Nobody had ever needed me to be able to do something.
The calving shed was lit up and hot after the cold. It stank of blood and iron and something older underneath that I had no name for and didn't want one. The heifer was down in the straw on her side. She was out of the lot by the barn. The close one, for the ones that hadn't done it before.
Even I could see she was in trouble. Her whole body bore down and nothing came of it. The groan that ran out of her rattled at the end. There was fluid on the straw a color I knew was wrong without knowing anything. Two small hooves showed and stopped showing.
Holt was already stripped to a T-shirt with his arm soaped to the shoulder, kneeling at the back of her, and he didn't look up.
This was nothing like the ranch work I'd been learning all week. This was the actual machinery of it, life and death running against a clock. There was no mark to hit and no second take. Nobody was going to fix it in the edit.
"Head," he said. "Get up by her head, put your knee against her neck, your weight, keep her down. If she tries to get up while I'm in her she'll tear and we lose both of them. Talk to her. Doesn't matter what you say."
I knelt in the muck at the head of a thousand-pound animal dying to live.
I put my knee against her neck and my hands on her jaw, and I talked.
I could not have repeated a word of it. Nobody had ever written me this scene, and the noise that came out of me was just a man saying easy, easy, stay with me, you're all right.
Her eye rolled white and found me and held on.
I held on back. That was my whole job and I had never been so frightened of failing at anything.
Holt had his arm inside her to the elbow, reading something with his fingers that I couldn't see.
"Leg's back," he said. "Big calf and a leg back and she's too tired to do it. I have to bring it round."
I had spent four days trying to get a read on this man and here he was three feet away with his eyes half shut, paying me no attention at all.
He was working by feel. His mouth moved a little without any sound in it.
There was dirt in the creases beside his eyes and grey coming in at one temple and a white scar through his eyebrow I had never been close enough to see.
Four days I'd spent trying to get near this man.
All it had taken in the end was a cow going down at two in the morning and both of us with our hands full.
He shifted his grip and pushed in past the elbow. "This is the part where she fights. Don't you let her up."
She fought. She fought like she meant to kill one of us, a heave that came up through her whole body and nearly took me off her.
I threw everything I had down onto her neck and kept talking, kept saying the untrue tender things.
Holt made a low sound of effort and worked his arm and the heifer screamed.
I screamed something back at her without meaning to.
"Got it."
He said it on an exhale, almost to nobody, and the second small hoof appeared beside the first.
"Now we pull." He looped two soft chains above the calf's ankles, put the handles in my hands and wrapped his own over them. "When she pushes, you pull. Down and out, toward her heels, not up. With her, not against. Wait for it."
Her whole body drew up.
"Now."
I pulled. I pulled with everything I had, and the chains bit into my palms, and nothing moved.
The blisters went in the first pull. I felt each one let go, a small wet give against the chain, and after that my palms were just meat and I kept pulling anyway.
Then she quit pushing and we quit with her, and my arms were shaking.
"Again. It's coming. You felt that, it moved."
I had not felt it move. I took his word because his word was the only solid thing in the shed.
She went hard again under my knee and we pulled again, Holt's hands hot over mine, his shoulder against my shoulder, and this time I felt it.
Something the size of a dog moving inside an animal the size of a car.
I made a sound I'd be embarrassed by later and pulled harder.
Then it stopped. The calf hung there half in the world and half out of it, too big. Her pushes came weaker and farther apart, and I understood that she was going to die and take it with her.
"She's quitting," Holt said, low and fast. "We do this one ourselves. Next push or not, we pull, and we don't stop. You hear me. We do not stop."
I nodded. I had no breath for words.
She gave one last failing heave.
"Now."
We pulled, the two of us, against the whole dead weight of it. My hands had gone to nothing in the chains and his locked over them. I wanted that calf to move more than I had ever wanted anything.
It came all at once at the end, the whole wet weight of it out into the straw and the cold, and it lay there steaming and didn't move. It didn't breathe. It didn't breathe. It didn't breathe.
"It's not—"
"Shut up." There was no time in him for anything else.
He swiped a coil of birth sac off its face with two fingers, jammed a piece of straw up its nose so it jerked, and lifted the whole thing by the back legs and swung it once, hard.
Then he set it down and went at its ribs with the flat of his hands like he meant to start a fire in there.
"Come on. Come on, you. Rub it. There, the chest, hard, you won't hurt it. Rub."
I rubbed. I knelt in the blood and the afterbirth in the freezing straw and rubbed at the ribs of a thing that had never breathed.
"Please." That was all I had. It was the most honest prayer of my whole trumped-up life. "Please. Come on. Please."
Under my hands the calf shuddered, coughed a gout of fluid, and dragged in a long wet rattling breath. I felt the exact second it crossed over. Nobody had ever let me put my hands on anything like that.
It lived. The ribs went up and down on their own.
A minute ago it had not been an animal and now it was one, lying in the straw breathing and shaking its head.
I sat back on my heels with my hands dripping and made a sound that was half a laugh and turned, before I could stop it, into something else.
I was crying. Out in the open, no camera, no choice in it, the tears just coming. I didn't put my hands up to hide it.
And Holt was looking at me.
He'd sat back too, arms on his knees, steaming in the cold, blood to the shoulder, and he was looking at me cry over a calf.
He was just seeing me, the actual article, red-eyed and wrecked and useless.
He didn't look away from me and he didn't reach for a joke.
He didn't do the merciful thing and pretend he hadn't caught me.
I had been photographed ten thousand times and looked at by millions of people.
I could think of two who had ever seen me.
And now he had, in a blood-soaked shed at the bottom of the night with my face a mess, and I couldn't look away from him either.
"First one's always like that," he said, his voice soft. "Don't let it embarrass you."
"I'm not embarrassed." And it was true. I wasn't. He'd seen the whole thing and he hadn't made me pay for it.
We sat there a while in the straw with the calf between us and neither of us in any hurry to be the one who stood up.
"Is this normal?" I said.
"Happens."
"How often?"
"Often enough that I own chains."
"Do you lose them?"
"Sometimes."
He didn't dress it up and he didn't look at me when he said it, and I understood that I'd asked a real question and been given a real answer, and that I should probably stop while I was ahead.
The heifer got up on her own, which I would not have bet on, and went straight to the calf and started licking it. Hard, rough strokes that knocked it sideways every time. She had nearly died an hour ago. Now she was busy.
Ten minutes later the calf tried to stand and got all four legs going in different directions and went straight back down. It did it again. On the third try it stayed up, swaying, and started hunting along her flank for something to eat.
Holt got to his feet and put a hand down to me without seeming to think about it.
I took it, his hard scarred hand closing around mine and hauling me up out of the straw.
For a second we stood too close, both of us steaming, both of us covered in the same blood.
Neither of us moved. He was the one who let go, and it took him a while to do it.
He stepped back and the night came in between us again. "Go wash up," he said. "Cold water first or it sets. You did all right." He looked at the calf, not at me, when he said the last part, which was how I knew he meant it. "Better than all right. Go on."
I looked down at myself for the first time. I was wearing most of the inside of a cow. The man on magazine covers would not have survived the sight. I stood in the wreckage of him and found I didn't miss him even a little.
I washed at the pump outside with water so cold it went straight past hurting into something else.
He was right about it. The blood came off my arms in long ropes and left the skin underneath looking like it belonged to somebody who worked for a living.
I stood out in the dark scrubbing at my own wrists even after they were clean.
Then I quit, and stood in the middle of the yard with the stars overhead, shaking and grinning like a fool at nothing. I was not going to leave this place in six weeks the same as I came.
I had come here to take something off this place. It had already taken something back, and I'd let it happen. Standing out there with another creature's whole life dried onto my hands I could not make myself sorry about any of it.