Chapter 15
Holt
The hospital bill came on a Monday in an envelope thick as a paperback. I waited until the house was asleep and Morgan was breathing slow against my side before I eased out from under his arm and went down to the office in my socks to open it.
There was a page of it. Line by line, the ambulance and the air the ambulance breathed for him, the stent, the two nights, the cardiologist who hadn't once looked me in the eye, and then a figure at the bottom that the insurance Gus carried had declined to do much about.
Fourteen thousand, one hundred and six dollars.
It was cheap insurance. It was the kind a man bought when he was betting against his own body but needed the money for hay. Gus had bet against his body for fifty years and finally lost the wager, and the house took its winnings in an envelope with a return address in Denver.
I read it twice. Then I got the ledger out of the bottom drawer and set the new number down beside the old one.
Gus hadn't asked to see that book in two years. He'd handed it across the kitchen table one night and never asked for it back. I'd taken it and never once updated him on what was in it.
The note payment came due the first of the month. Twenty-six thousand, and I had eleven of it. The hospital gave me thirty days and a phone number to call if I wanted to talk about a plan, which meant paying them a little every month for the rest of my life.
I sat in the cold with a pencil I didn't need and ran the numbers I already knew by heart, the way I checked a gate I'd already latched, just to feel it hold or not hold.
It didn't hold.
I moved the columns around like furniture in a room too small for any of it, hunting for space that wasn't there.
The cattle were the only real money and the cattle were the seed corn.
Sell the herd in spring to make a payment and there'd be nothing to ship in the fall, and a smaller herd every year after that until there wasn't one. The hay money was real but months off.
The ranch sat under all of it. Gus never borrowed a dollar against the ground in fifty years of lean ones. I did, four years ago, and the paper on it was in a drawer in Kremmling with my name at the bottom.
I'd known it was coming since the winter, since the cattle market broke and the well pump went and the tractor ate a season's repairs in a single February week. Selling the sorrel and the bays had bought one more spring. The heart attack had spent it in an afternoon.
I turned the lamp off and sat there a while, because the dark cost nothing.
Then I went up and got back into bed beside Morgan. He turned over into me in his sleep and put an arm across my chest. I lay there under the weight of it and did my best not to wake him up.
***
Morgan asked me where I was going Tuesday morning and I told him the feed store. It was the first outright lie I'd told him and it came out of me easy as breathing.
I drove to Kremmling and sat across a veneer desk from a loan officer named Coyle, a soft-handed man my own age who had never branded anything in his life.
I hadn't asked a living soul for one thing since I was eleven years old. I asked Coyle for ninety days. I kept my voice even, my hat in my lap, and watched him be sorry about it in the smooth practiced way of a man who was paid to be sorry.
"The note's already been restructured once," he said.
"I went to bat for you last fall, Holt. I did.
There's not much case left to make." He turned his monitor a few degrees, like the screen was the one with the bad news and not him.
"If you'd come in ahead of the medical. Maybe.
But the exposure on it now." He opened his hands at me.
"I can hold the date at the first. That's on the paper and I can't move what's on the paper. "
"And if I don't make the first?"
He didn't answer that, because the answer was already sitting between us. There was no version of it where a man in a clean shirt didn't end up owning Gus Rhodes's ground because of a signature I put on a piece of paper four years ago.
I stood and shook his hand. Somebody before Gus had taught me that much and I couldn't remember who. Then I drove home with the radio off and the peaks standing there not helping. I didn't stop or pull over once, though there was a stretch coming down out of the pass where I wanted to.
That was the only place in the county I asked. There were three men inside twenty miles who'd have emptied their pockets on my kitchen table if I'd said one word, and I did not say the word.
I didn't tell the boys.
Flynn would have put his own scrap of a place up against it and I'd have died before I let him. Dez had nothing in the world and would have handed over all of it plus a kidney. Lane would have gone quiet and worried himself thin.
So I kept it to myself. Especially from Gus. He was supposed to be mending a heart, not breaking it over money. He watched me from his chair by the window all week, getting his color back, getting his meanness back. On Wednesday he brought it up, out of nowhere, without looking at me.
"How bad is it?"
"How bad is what?"
He let a silence go by that told me he knew exactly what. "Holt Thomas, I built this place out of nothing twice, son. I can tell when one of my boys is doing sums in his sleep."
I stood there with the lie loaded and ready. I looked at the gray still in his face and the orange bottle of heart pills on the windowsill.
"It's handled," I said. "You rest."
Gus held my eyes for a long moment. He knew. He knew and he was going to let me get away with it. That was worse than being caught. I was sure he let me lie to him because some piece of him needed to believe I could carry the thing he couldn't lift anymore.
Then he said, "The boy goes Friday."
"He does."
"You ask him to stay?"
I stood in the middle of his front room with my hat in my hand like a man at a graveside.
"No."
"You going to?"
"No."
Gus looked out the window at his own ground for a while. "Well," he said. "You always did have a talent for the wrong kind of not asking."
That was the closest that old man ever came to calling me a fool. He was right, and I went out and split wood for two hours over it.
I didn't tell Morgan either.
That was the one that ate at me, because he knew. He read me better than Gus ever had, and twice that week he caught me at the desk past midnight. He came and stood in the doorway with two mugs of coffee.
Both times I shut the ledger in the drawer and made my voice into something lighter, telling him to go back to bed. Both times I watched the hurt cross his face before he packed it away, the small flinch of a man being shut out of a house he thought he'd been let into.
I did it anyway.
The second night he didn't go right off. He set one of the mugs down on the closed ledger in front of me.
"Whatever it is, I can handle it. I can listen. You're allowed to lean on me."
And I wanted to. I wanted to set the weight of it down in his open hands and let somebody else hold it for the length of a single night. But he had a ticket with a date on it and I had a ranch with a date on it. I knew which one of us was staying.
"It's ranch business," I said. "Nothing for you to worry about."
I watched the word you do its work. Watched it shove him back over the line to where the help slept.
He picked his own mug up off the desk and turned to go. He stopped at the door.
"I have money."
It came out flat and fast, like he'd been carrying it around a while looking for somewhere to set it down.
"I know you do."
"That's not what I—" He shook his head. "I'm not offering to buy anything. I don't know what it is and I'm not asking. I'm telling you it exists, and that's the last time I'll say it."
"Goodnight, Morgan."
He nodded and left.
I would have handed that place to the bank before I took a dollar of his, and I couldn't have told you why. It wasn't a thought. It was something I hit at full speed every time, in the dark, and turned around and walked away from.
I sat there with the warmth of his coffee going cold under my hand, having just made a man who'd spent his whole life being wanted for his money offer me some, and sent him to bed for it.
***
He was leaving in four days. I decided to spend them on him and take whatever the bill came to afterward.
That was my decision. What I actually did was doctor cattle, fix the loader, and put up the last of the early hay. The weight sitting on my chest the whole time like a second man riding double, because the work was the only prayer I ever learned and I said it with my hands.
And I did the things a man did instead of asking.
I called a hay broker and priced the next cutting on the stump, at a robbery of a number that turned my stomach.
I sat up with the ledger like staring at it would shame the figures into moving, but they didn't move.
I looked up what the saddle Gus gave me at twenty would bring.
I would not hang a dying ranch around the neck of a man who'd be in Los Angeles by the weekend. I called that mercy, and I was merciful about it all day long, every day, right up until dark.
I got greedy about the nights.
I'd wake at one or two, and instead of going back to sleep I'd take stock of him. The heat coming off his back. The way he ran his foot up my shin in his sleep and left it there. I put my hand flat over his heart one night and counted it out to a hundred, and when I lost the count I started over.
One of those nights he woke up and caught me. He didn't say anything. He just turned over and put his mouth on mine, half asleep, no hurry in it and nothing on the other end of it. Then he went back to sleep with his face against my shoulder.
Nobody had ever kissed me for no reason. Not one time in thirty-six years.
After that I quit waiting for a reason.
I'd wake him with my mouth on the back of his neck and he'd come up out of sleep already turning over and reaching for me.
We'd go at each other slow and quiet in my old bed with the house full of sleeping people down the hall.
Half the time we didn't finish anything.
We'd just kiss until our mouths were sore and our hands were everywhere.
One night I got him half out of his shorts and then just held onto him like that, my hand still on him, my face in his hair, not moving.
"What are you doing?" he asked, laughing at me.
"I don't know."
That was the truth.
I was hoarding a man like hay in a bad year. I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew it wasn't smart and I did it every night.
One night neither of us slept at all and we didn't do a thing about it but lie there in the dark talking about nothing.
The road down. Whether Dez had ever once been in love.
The way the peaks looked from the bunkhouse window at four in the morning, which he described to me for about ten minutes and I let him.
"I had a dog when I was seven," he said, out of nowhere. "For three weeks. My mother said it was a distraction."
I didn't say anything.
"I've told that story before. It gets a laugh." His voice was flat in the dark, no shine on it at all. "It isn't funny, is it?"
"No."
"No," he said back, and after a while his breathing evened out. I kissed the top of his head. He was already asleep and never knew about it. I did it twice more before morning, and I had no explanation for any of it except that he was there and I could.
I had the place I was about to lose and the man I was about to lose lying warm against me, and I couldn't save either one of them.
On the last of those nights, I went out to the barn at two in the morning, because I didn't know where else to go.
Trouble came to the rail. She was grown out, slick and healthy, worth maybe four hundred at the fall sale.
Four hundred dollars against fourteen thousand.
She pushed her wet nose into my palm hunting for a treat I hadn't brought, and I stood there in the dark with a heifer calf breathing on my fingers.
I put my forehead down on the cold of the top rail and left it there. The iron ached against the bone of my skull and I pressed into it harder because it was the only thing hurting me that I could make stop.
The calf gave up on the treat and wandered off.
Down the alley a cow shifted her weight and lay back down.
Somebody was chewing. Off in the far pen one of the new calves was doing the thing they did in their sleep, a little sucking noise at nothing.
The whole place breathed around me in the dark, forty head of it, every one worth money I was going to have to take.
There wasn't anybody in that barn to hear me but forty head of cattle.
I did not let myself make a sound anyway.