CHAPTER 2 #2
The wind came up Main and pushed the screen door shut behind her.
Across the street the feed store had its bay open and Caleb O’Neill was working a pallet jack with his cap turned around and his coat off in the wind.
Sacks of colostrum replacer went up onto the truck bed two at a time, one under each arm, fifty pounds a sack.
He set them down square instead of dropping them.
It took twice as long and it was the reason the stack was not leaning, and his forearms were shaking by the top course.
“Miss Gables.” He got the last two up, put his palms on the tailgate, and breathed. His face was red from the collar up. “Is that pie.”
“It’s pie. Gemma says you’ll eat drywall.”
“I would.” He took the box and set it on the fender and did not open it. “You want me to move your car? You’re in the loading zone.”
“I’m going.”
“It’s fine, nobody’s coming.” He turned and looked at the stack and counted it over again with his chin.
“Replacer and cake, four pallets. You only buy that much bum feed if you’re figuring on losing mothers.
I’m not saying anything against anybody.
It’s a good order. It’s just that four pallets is a heifer number, is all, and a fella orders it in March when he’s already run the count and he doesn’t like how it comes out. Sadie says I explain things too much.”
“Who’s it going out to.”
“Six Mile.” He pulled the strap off the rail and threw it over the load.
“Cake is for the cows, that’s the range cake, that’s just feed.
Replacer is for calves that don’t get a mother, and you mix it warm and you feed it every few hours around the clock, and somebody has to be awake to do that.
That’s the part people don’t picture. It isn’t the sack that costs you.
It’s the man standing up at two in the morning with the sack. ”
“And he’s already run the count.”
“He’s already run the count.” Caleb hauled the strap down and cranked it. “Sadie and me are out there three nights a week starting next week. She signed us up. I didn’t get a vote and I wouldn’t have voted different.”
“Sadie’s not wrong.”
“She has yet to be wrong about anything.” He grinned and pulled the door of the cab open. “Tell Gemma the booth screw’s coming out Saturday.”
Clara got in her car. The arithmetic got in with her.
It would not get out, and it rode up the hill to the school in the passenger seat: four pallets, two hundred and forty pairs, one man awake at two in the morning.
A note at the bank that everybody in this town knew the month of.
She turned the radio on and it did not help.
Bear Creek Elementary smelled exactly as it had smelled when she was seven, floor wax and radiator dust, and the office still had the counter you had to reach up over as a child. Clara set the first box down on it and went back for the other three.
The boxes went up on the counter in two trips and then a third for the one with the mysteries.
Clara’s arms were done by the last one. The woman at the desk took a lid off, looked at the paperbacks, and said the library would take the westerns and the rest could go on the sale table in the fall.
She did not open a single cover, which was a mercy, and she slid a volunteer form across with the pen already lying on it.
Clara filled the boxes’ worth of information in and stopped at the line for credentials. “I ran a preschool room in Denver and I’m certified in this state. That was never the part that worried anybody.” She wrote it in the box, printed her name, and turned the form around.
The woman filed it. The clock over the trophy case said 2:47. Nobody said anything else about it at all, and the radiator came on under the window.
Outside, the pickup line was already three cars deep along the fence.
Clara had meant to be gone before the bell.
She stood by her hatch with her keys in her fist instead, because the boxes had to come out of the trunk and because a woman who leaves the second she is done is a woman with something behind her, and Bear Creek notices that kind of thing.
The bell went. The doors opened and the noise came out. Coats, backpacks, one lost boot. A mother two cars up leaned on her horn and waved at nobody.
Ruthie Dawson reached the fence first, two braids and a coat unzipped, and started talking before she had finished arriving.
“You’re Miss Gables. My mom said you were back and she said don’t say anything about the house, and I’m not, I’m saying about the program.
It’s in the gym in May and there’s risers and Mrs. Finch says you can’t lock your knees or you’ll faint, and last year a boy did faint, and there’s a part where the whole second grade does birds. ”
“Birds.”
“Birds. Nobody picked it, it’s just what it is.
” Ruthie hung her elbows over the fence rail and swung.
“I know who you are because you were in the picture in my mom’s kitchen with the horse.
She says you and Mr. Miller used to get in trouble at the same time, which she says is different from being in trouble together, and then she quit talking about it because I was standing there. ”
“That’s about right.”
“I’m going to be in trouble in May. Mrs. Finch says if you talk on the risers you’re done.”
Daisy Miller came out the second set of doors with her braid half undone and her hood down.
She stopped on the sidewalk where the other kids went around her.
Then she crossed the whole width of it, past two mothers she knew and one she did not, and stood in front of Clara close enough to have to look up.
“That’s a scar on your hand.”
“It is,” Clara said.
“What’s it from?”
“Barbed wire.”
“Daisy’s not singing in the spring program,” Ruthie said. “I am. I have eight words by myself.”
Daisy pulled a spiral notebook out of her coat pocket, bent open along the wire, and worked the pencil out of the spiral. She did not sit down to write. She held the notebook against her forearm and put a date at the top, which somebody had taught her to do.
“There’s one on the fence,” Ruthie said. “A blue one. Bluebird.”
Daisy looked where Ruthie was pointing for as long as it took, and then she wrote something down before she answered.
“That’s a mountain bluebird. Regular bluebirds don’t come here.”
“Okay,” Clara said.
Daisy turned the bird list around so Clara could see it, and then she took it back and put it in her pocket and stood there with her shoulder about four inches from Clara’s coat sleeve, not touching it, watching where the road came in.
Ruthie had gone on to whether the risers would hold everybody. The wind came across the parking lot with a spit of wet snow in it that quit before it landed on anything.
The white three-quarter-ton came around the corner of the building with one wiper going and pulled in ten feet from where they stood.