Chapter 9
Holt
The weather turned on us the third week.
The morning came up blue and soft as a lie and had its back to us by noon.
I was up at the calving shed when I felt it change, the air going heavy and metal-tasting, the light flattening out.
I came around the corner of the barn and looked north.
A bank of gray stood up off the Chapel and the Spire with the snow already smoking off the tops, walking down the valley toward us with the slow certainty of a thing in no hurry to kill what it had come for.
Thirty-odd heifers were down in the low meadow, all of them pregnant and some of them close.
There was no shelter down there. Nothing but grass and the creek and a straight run of wind off the peaks.
Wind like that would lay snow on a wet newborn calf and freeze it to the ground before its mother could get it licked dry.
I'd left them down there because the grass was good and the morning had lied to me. I had maybe an hour to get them up to the corrals and the windbreak. An hour wasn't enough but it was what I had.
The kitchen window was lit. Ten years ago he'd have been out that door before I got to the barn, and I'd have had a man beside me who'd done this forty times instead of one who'd done it never.
I didn't go up and knock. I stood in the yard about two seconds working out whether I was protecting him or just saving myself the argument, and then I quit thinking about it, because I had thirty pregnant heifers in an open meadow.
I found Morgan mucking stalls and didn't waste breath. "Get your gloves and your coat, the heavy one. We're moving cattle and we're moving them now."
He didn't ask why. He'd learned to tell from my voice when there wasn't time, which not one hand I ever hired managed in a season. He dropped the fork and went.
Three minutes later he was up on Biscuit at the gate with his collar turned up and his jaw set, scared and game. I was glad to have a second rider. I was glad it was him, and I didn't have time to be bothered about that.
We rode down into it. The wind hit us at the lip of the meadow, a hard shove out of the north that flattened the grass and made the horses turn their tails to it.
"Take the back," I hollered at him. "Keep them bunched. Don't let one peel off."
"What if one does?"
"Then they all do and we're chasing them till dark in the dark."
He nodded and didn't hear half of it and did it anyway, swinging Biscuit wide and slow the way he'd seen me do. We got behind the bunch and started them up the lane.
They didn't want to go. Cattle never wanted to head the direction I needed them in weather.
They wanted to turn tail and drift with the wind, down and away, toward the creek and the trees and the dying.
It took everything the two of us and two good horses had to keep thirty head pointed uphill into a storm they could smell coming.
The first snow came stinging sideways before we'd made the first gate, fine and hard as sand. Then it thickened. Then the light went, and the whole world closed down to a white roaring nothing with cattle in it.
I lost the top of the valley. I lost the fence line. I held the side of the bunch by the dark moving shapes of the cows and the wind in my left ear. Twice a heifer broke and I had to spur up and turn her back.
Every time I came back, I looked for Morgan and found him. A dark shape against the white, still there, still pushing, sitting that old horse with the snow caked to one whole side of him, doing the work wrong and not quitting it.
Once a big roan heifer broke off the back of the bunch and ran for the creek and the trees, the worst thing she could have done. I was on the wrong side and too far to turn her. I opened my mouth to yell and found I didn't have to.
Morgan was already moving. He laid Biscuit into her path in a move I had never taught him, leaning the old horse hard into the wind.
He didn't know the first thing about turning a cow off a bunch.
He got Biscuit's shoulder up in front of her and held it there, and the heifer threw her head and thought about running him down and gave it up and turned back to the bunch.
He should not have been able to do that. Two weeks on a horse and he read her before I did, from the back of the bunch, in a whiteout, and moved. Nobody taught that. Either a man had it in him somewhere or he didn't, and I had spent three weeks deciding he didn't.
Morgan looked over at me through the snow with his teeth bared, and there was not one thing wrong with him. I turned my face back to the cattle before it told him what my mouth wouldn't.
It took an hour and felt like three. By the end of it I couldn't feel my hands on the reins and I had snow down my collar and up both sleeves.
Then the cattle smelled the home corrals and the windbreak, and pulled the last quarter mile on their own, bunching in behind the pines.
I rode the gate shut behind the last of them and dropped the chain.
The relief came through me so hard I had to sit a second before I could get off the horse.
I stepped down. My legs didn't want to hold me and I let them figure it out.
I turned to find Morgan and he was right there.
Closer than I'd thought. He'd ridden up to ask me something and stepped down the same moment I had.
We got off the horses into a wind that wanted the air out of my chest. The barn was a gray ghost four steps off, and the two of us were the only warm things left alive in it.
"Are they all right?" He had to put his face close to be heard.
His hat was gone, lost somewhere back in the meadow. His hair was full of snow and his face was scoured red and streaming. Just a cold tired man who had ridden into a storm for cattle that weren't his and wanted to know if it had worked.
"They're all right," I said. "You did that. Second week on a horse and you held the back of a bunch in a whiteout."
Whatever went across his face then, I felt it in my own chest. We were close.
The wind screamed and the horses stood with their heads down, in no hurry about any of it.
The snow was piling in our hair, and Morgan looked at me with the snow melting on his lashes and not blinking it away.
The distance between us was nothing. A hand's width.
The only warm air for a mile was in it. I watched his eyes go down to my mouth and come back up slowly, not hiding it.
His breath coming ragged in a way the cold could not explain.
I wanted to kiss him. That was all it was, and I had never in my life wanted anything that simply. It came up so fast it scared me sober.
The heat came off the side of him. My hand was already deciding for me, the arm gathering to come up and find his jaw.
I could see the snow caught in the stubble of it and the chap of his bottom lip, the pulse going hard in the side of his throat.
I knew the exact weight my hand would have laid against the cold of his cheek.
Knew it in my body, the same as I knew the heft of a calf or a bale, before the mind ever got a vote.
And he wasn't moving away. He was leaning the last of his weight out over that small warm space like a man leaning over the edge of something.
All I had to do was nothing. All I had to do was let it happen. It was louder in my ears than the wind was. And then the rest of it came up underneath like cold getting in under a thin coat.
He would be gone. A month, maybe less, a car going back down that road and a bright life I couldn't picture waiting to swallow him back down. A man did not buy what he could not feed through the winter. I'd built my whole life on that.
I didn't care. I wanted to lean the last inch in and let the whole rest of it burn, and the only thing standing in the way was thirty-six years of not.
I stepped back.
The wind came cold into the place where his warmth had been. I took up my mare's reins in a hand that wasn't steady.
"Get the horses in and rub them down good. They earned it."
I watched his face shut. He wasn't even angry. That was the part I kept. He wasn't even hurt, or he wouldn't let me see it if he was. He nodded. He gathered up Biscuit's reins and gave me a small plain smile with not one ounce of shine on it.
"Sure, Holt."
He turned the old horse toward the barn and walked away into the blowing snow.
I watched him go until the snow took him, the dark shape of man and horse swallowed gray and then white and then nothing. I made myself not call him back, which was the hardest single thing I'd done since I signed the sorrel away the Saturday before, and a long sight harder than that.
I could hear him in there through the wind, talking to that old horse the way he talked to everything, low and steady and not needing an answer.
He was doing what I told him and doing it right.
He'd have stayed at it an hour if I'd said so.
He didn't know how long it was supposed to take and he wasn't going to be the one who quit.
That was somehow the worst of it.
Then I did what I'd always done with a thing I couldn't carry and couldn't set down.
I went back out into the worst of it and walked the fence line in the blind snow, checking by feel the wire I couldn't see, my bare hands going numb and then past numb on the frozen steel, one staple and one post and the next.
My fingers quit working and I kept on past that, finding the wire by the ache in the bones of my hands, because the ache was clean and simple.
It was about the only thing in me that night that was.
I worked it down that way, post by post, the cold taking it off me a degree at a time until what was left was a size I could stand next to.
It took a long while. The storm didn't care how long, and in the end neither did I.
I went through the corrals once more before I quit. Thirty-odd head bedded down in behind the pines with the snow packed on their backs and every one of them still breathing, and not a calf on the ground yet. It had worked. I stood there in it and could not make that feel like anything.
When I finally went in, past his window with the light still on, I did not slow down and I did not look.