The Nanny He Never Forgot (The Wild Sky Legacy #21)

CHAPTER 1

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Wyatt had both arms in the heifer past the elbow, and the thing he had hold of was a foot, and the foot was pointed the wrong way entirely.

He walked his fingers up the leg until the joint bent under them, and it bent the wrong direction. Hock, not knee. The hair lay backward under his palm, and the sole of the hoof turned up at the roof of her.

One hind foot where a nose ought to have been, and the second leg folded away somewhere out past the length of his arm.

She strained and his arm went dead to the shoulder and the foot slid out of his hand.

“All right,” he told her, with his cheek down on her flank and his eyes shut so that he could work by his hands and nothing else. “All right. We’ll go again.”

The heat lamp over the far pen laid orange down the alley. He had the barn light off its nail and hung on the rail beside her hip, and it swung a little each time he leaned into her, so the shadows walked out across the straw and walked home.

Iodine. Wet straw. The flat sweet smell of birth fluid that never left the inside of his nose from the last week of February to the second week of May. Thirty-one degrees in the pen and his forearms steaming.

Under her breathing there was the truck out past the man-door, idling with the choke set high, running rough on fuel he had been stretching since Christmas.

He went in again to the shoulder. He found the hock and followed it down and got the sole cupped in his palm, and he walked that second foot up and out with his fingers over the toe so it would not tear her going by.

“There,” he said. “There you are.”

Both feet came up into the air together, soles turned toward the roof, steaming in the light.

He lifted the chains off the gate hook with his elbow. A loop above the fetlock, a half-hitch below it, so the pull came off two bones instead of one.

Then he waited on her, because a cow tells a man when. When she pushed, he pulled, down and toward her hocks and never straight out, and the calf came a hand’s width and stopped.

The hips came on the next one, and that started the clock. Cord pinched between the calf and her pelvis, and a minute and a half in it before the thing had to breathe air it did not have yet.

He counted while he pulled. Out to the ribs at thirty. Clear of her and into the straw at fifty-some, ninety pounds of wet black calf, and he went down on his knees with it.

It did not breathe.

He cleared the mouth with two fingers and swung the head down to let the fluid run and rubbed the ribs hard enough to bruise a grown person. Nothing. He pulled a stem of straw out of the bedding and ran it up the near nostril and turned it.

The calf coughed. It shook its head and drew a breath that went all the way to the bottom of it.

“There,” Wyatt said, and sat down in the wet straw with his hands hanging off his knees while the heifer got her legs under her and came around to see what she had.

Forty minutes. He did not have forty minutes to give anybody.

He dragged the calf up to her head by the front legs and she went to work on it, and the rasp of her against wet hair was the best sound in that barn.

Twenty feet from the man-door to the truck. He walked it with his sleeves rolled and his forearms going from steaming to stinging in the wind.

The dome light was on. He had left it on so his daughter could see where she was if she came up out of sleep, and it had been burning since half past three, and the battery in that truck was not new.

Daisy had gone over sideways against the seat belt with her cheek on the strap. Her braid was coming apart at the bottom. Her mouth was open and one boot was off and lying on its side in the floor mat.

He did not open the door. The cold air in there was worth more to her right then than a look at him would have been.

So he stood in the mud and did the arithmetic, because the arithmetic was always running and it did not need him.

Two hundred and forty pairs to get on the ground.

Eight per cent death loss was all he could carry and still be here in the fall, and past eight the bank did the rest of the thinking for him.

The operating note came due the first of June.

His hand had drawn his pay Friday and gone north to a rig job that paid, and Wyatt had shaken his hand and meant it.

That left him, and it left Harlan, and Harlan’s right hand had quit closing sometime last winter.

Gray light came up behind the corrals with no color in it at all. Harlan was at the man-door by six with the thermos in the crook of his arm, pouring coffee into the lid and holding the lid in his left because the right would not make a circle anymore.

“Backward,” Wyatt said. “Both hind feet. She’s licking it.”

“By yourself.” Harlan said it to the lid and not to him.

“There wasn’t anybody to call at four in the morning.”

“There was me at four in the morning.”

“You’d have held the light.”

“I’d have held the light.” He drank, and looked out at the weather instead of at Wyatt. West of the corrals the clouds had gone the color of dishwater and they were moving. “My hands quit before I did, son. Wind’s out of the west and it’ll swing north by supper.”

“It’ll be wet by dark, then.”

“It’ll be wet by dark.” Harlan poured the lid full again and did not drink it. “Hire somebody.”

“With what.”

“The same nothing every outfit in this valley pays with. You feed them, you house them, and you settle up in the fall when the calves go.” He set the lid on the fence post. “You’re checking heifers every two hours and hauling that child out here at three in the morning in a truck with a bad choke.”

“She sleeps through it.”

“She sleeps through it now.”

“She’s warm and she’s twenty feet from me.”

“I know how far she is. You told me how far she is on Thursday, and again on Sunday, and I expect you’ll tell me on Wednesday.” Harlan turned the lid a half turn on the post. “Get somebody in the house. Not out here in the cold with you. In the house, where the stove is.”

“I’ve got it handled.”

“You’ve got it carried. That’s a different animal.” He looked west again. “Clara Gables is home and idle till her mother’s house sells.”

“No.”

“Wind like that,” Harlan said, “dries the mud by noon and then it snows on top of it, and a man can’t do a thing about either one.”

Wyatt went past him and took a halter off the nail. There was a pair to move out of pen four and a bum calf to get a bottle into before the school run.

Harlan reached for the second halter. He got the strap through the buckle and could not push the pin down into its hole, and he tried it twice with the two little fingers of that hand standing out stiff, and then he stood there holding it.

Wyatt took it off him, buckled it, and handed it over.

“Obliged.”

“I’ll trade somebody’s Saturday for a load of hay,” Wyatt said. “That’s not the same as hiring.”

“No,” Harlan said. “It isn’t.” He picked the lid up off the post and screwed it down on the thermos. “Bed the far pen deep. It’ll be coming down on you by dark and it’ll be coming sideways.”

Daisy ate her toast standing at the kitchen counter with her coat already zipped, which was how she had eaten every morning since the fall. She got in on the passenger side and buckled herself and put her hands in her pockets.

“Is the new one a heifer calf or a bull calf?”

“Heifer.”

“Then she gets to stay.” She said it as a fact and waited on him anyway.

“If she does all right.”

“She’ll do all right. She came out backward and she’s here anyway.” Daisy watched the fence posts go by. “What did you name her?”

“We don’t name them.”

“Harlan named the one with the white face.” She had her boots up on the dash, which she was not allowed to do, and she put them down before he got to it.

“Harlan’s been here longer than the rules have.”

“Then I’m naming this one, because I was here when she came.”

“You were asleep.”

“I was here,” Daisy said, “and asleep is a thing you can be while you’re here.”

“We don’t name them because we sell them in the fall.”

“That’s not a reason not to name her.” She thought about it for a mile of gravel. “That’s a reason not to sell her.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“I know how it works. I said it anyway.”

Six Mile Road was gravel and frost boils and two ruts of standing brown water, and the truck walked in them. A big black bird lifted off a carcass in the borrow ditch and went up over the wire.

“That’s a crow,” Wyatt said.

“That’s a raven. Ravens have a wedge tail and crows have a fan tail. That one was a wedge.”

“A raven, then.”

“You can tell by the sound too, but it didn’t make any.”

The road dropped toward Mill Creek at the bottom of the hill and he came off the gas without deciding to.

The low-water crossing was two concrete slabs with a depth gauge painted up the culvert wing, and there was brown water over the near slab and none over the far one, and the paint showed at the second mark and maybe a finger above it.

He read it going in. Then he was over and up the far bank, and his hands had not moved on the wheel the whole time.

At Bear Creek Elementary he pulled out of the line, got out, went around, and opened her door for her.

“Ruthie’s mother lets her walk in from the line.”

“Ruthie’s mother sits in the line while she does it.”

“That’s still walking in by yourself.”

“It isn’t.” He crouched and got the pack straps up over her shoulders and squared them. Her left ear had already gone red in the wind, so he put her hood up, and she put it down.

“It makes my ear cold either way,” she said. “The hood makes it cold slower.”

“Then wear it.”

“I’m going to wear it after you drive off, so you won’t see it, and that’s the part you won’t like.”

“Daisy.”

“I’m telling you so it isn’t a secret,” she said, and shrugged the pack up her shoulders and went.

She walked in without looking around, the same as every day since September, and she was through the door before he had the truck door shut.