CHAPTER 3
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Clara stood on a kitchen chair with her mother’s curtain rod in one hand. Out on Larkspur Street a truck slowed and stopped. The engine ran rough at idle. It had run rough at idle when she was nineteen and had her bare feet up on the dash of it.
She got down off the chair. She folded the curtains, which did not need folding, and set them on the counter next to the tape gun.
Boots came up the porch steps. One knock.
Wyatt Miller stood in the door with his hat in both hands. His hair lay flat where the brim had sat all day. Iodine had dried orange-brown across two knuckles.
“You’re late,” Clara said.
“Heifer went down around noon and I had to pull it.” He turned the hat a quarter turn. “Live calf.”
“Come in, then. There’s nowhere to sit.”
He came in and stood on the mat and did not go further. The kitchen had been down to bare walls since the weekend and it sounded like it, every word bouncing off the plaster at her.
Clara ran water into a glass she was only going to have to pack again. That was the whole trouble with emptying a house. Everything she picked up had to go down somewhere worse.
“I’m asking. That’s what I came for.”
She set the glass in the sink without drinking it.
“Monday you said no before anybody asked you a question. What changed?”
“I did.”
He left it there. He had always left things there. Any other man would have spent five minutes explaining himself. Wyatt handed her two words in her mother’s bare kitchen and let them stand as the entire account.
“How bad is it,” she said, and it came out without the question in it.
“Two hundred and forty pairs to calve and I’m one man short. Harlan’s seventy-one and his hand doesn’t close.” The hat went around another quarter turn. “The operating note comes due the first of June. If the calf crop comes in light I don’t make the payment.”
“And if you don’t make the payment.”
“Then it goes on the market and Mitch Lawson buys the high pasture off the top.” He said it flat, the same as a mud depth or a temperature. “That’s the arithmetic. I’m not going to dress it up for you.”
“Nobody asked you to. How long have you known that number?”
“Since January.”
“And you’ve told who.”
“Nobody.” The hat went around. “Harlan can add.”
She dried her hands on the leg of her jeans, because the towels were in a box.
“What about Daisy. Every day, what does it look like.”
“School lets out at ten past three. I’m in a calving pen at ten past three most days.” His thumb went along the sweatband. “Mrs. Finch has kept her more times than I can put a number to and I’ve used that up.”
“Who gets her breakfast?”
“She has cereal.”
“Every morning?”
Clara let that sit. He turned the hat over and looked down into the crown of it, at the ring the sweat had made.
“Most mornings she has cereal,” he said.
“Then that’s the first thing that changes, and you don’t get a vote on it.” She put a hand on the counter beside the folded curtains. “And she’d have to want me there. A child who won’t talk to a stranger has to get some say.”
“She said your name at supper Tuesday.” He looked at the window, where the curtains were not. “That’s all she said, and she said it twice.”
The yes had been sitting in Clara’s mouth since Tuesday. Since the pickup line. Since that truck stopped at the curb and he did not get out of it, and she stood on the sidewalk saying barbed wire to a seven-year-old and meaning it to sound like nothing.
At eighteen she had loved him because he got through his father’s funeral without asking one living person for one thing, and because he told the truth in a town that would rather have a story.
Now he was standing on her mother’s linoleum with his hat going around in his hands, asking.
It was not the same thing and it never had been.
Being needed was a different animal. It had fed her for years in Denver and it had eaten her the whole time, and the two had looked exactly alike from where she was standing.
So she listened to her own voice come out level and cold and nothing at all like a yes.
“Eight weeks. Six hundred dollars a week, room and board. And I’m gone the first of May.”
His thumb stopped on the brim.
“That’s more than the hand I lost was drawing.” The hat quit turning. “Room and board on top of it.”
“It’s what it costs. You could go cheaper in Bozeman and she wouldn’t know their name by Easter.”
“I’m not arguing the price.” He set the hat on the counter, crown down, beside her mother’s folded curtains. “I came out here knowing what a person is worth.”
“Then take the terms out loud.”
“All right.”
“Say the date back to me.”
He raised his head. Gray-blue, steady, no argument anywhere in it.
“The first of May.”
She had put up a fence while she was talking, post by post, and the last one went in on the word May. She could hear it standing there in the empty room with her.
“Tonight,” he said. “If that isn’t too quick.”
“Six o’clock. The agent has a lockbox man coming Friday, and there’s nothing left in this house I’d cry over.”
At the door he put the hat on and then took it off again, which she had never once seen him do.
He reached for the knob at the same time she did and pulled his hand back to his side.
Her fingers closed on cold brass. That pull-back was the loudest thing that had happened in this house since November, and it cost her the next thing she was going to say, which was gone now, whatever it had been.
“Clara.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Whatever it is, hold onto it. I’ve got curtains.”
He put the hat on for good and went down the steps into the mud, and the truck ran rough at idle for a second before it caught.
The ranch kitchen smelled like woodstove and wet wool, and under those, warm and sweetish, a smell she had not put a name to in years.
Something knocked. Knocked again, hollow and hard, twice.
Behind the woodstove a calf lay on a feed sack with her legs folded under her, driving an empty bucket into the stove surround with her nose. White face. Ears down. Mud dried gray to the hocks.
“Is that a calf in your kitchen, or am I tired?” Clara said.
“Her mother won’t have her.” Wyatt set Clara’s bag inside the door. “Second-calf heifer. Cleaned herself up and walked off and left her lying in it.”
“And a heifer that won’t claim her calf is one more head eating your hay.”
“Eating my hay and not paying for it.” He shut the door with his boot. “That’s about the size of it.”
In the doorway to the front room a girl stood with one sock on. White-blond, the braid coming apart on the left side, a hand flat on the door frame. She said nothing. Clara had known she would say nothing, and had decided on the drive out that she would not make her.
So Clara talked to the calf instead.
“You’re a loud one,” she said, and crouched, and put the back of her hand against the calf’s ear. Cold. “What’s she taking?”
“Two quarts of replacer twice a day. She won’t hold it down half the time.” Wyatt lifted the sack of milk replacer off the counter. “I’ve been getting it in her, more or less.”
“Mix me one and let me see it.”
He mixed it in the bucket, whisking with a wooden spoon, and handed it down. Clara turned her wrist over and let a little run onto the inside of it.
“That’s hot,” she said.
“It’s got to be warm.”
“Warm. Blood heat, not tea.” She stood, ran an inch of cold in, swirled it, tried her wrist again. “Hotter than your own wrist and she quits on you. Then you’re tubing her twice a day for a week and standing on her while you do it.”
Wyatt did not answer that. He put the spoon in the sink, which was as close to being told as he was going to come.
Clara sat down on the floor by the stove with the bucket between her knees.
She put two fingers into the calf’s mouth.
The calf took them, hard, working, and Clara walked her hand down slow until the calf’s nose went under the milk, and held it, and slid the fingers out.
The calf lost it, found it, and kept going.
The bucket rang against the surround and then went quiet with the pulling.
“There,” Clara said. “You knew all along.”
Daisy had come three steps into the kitchen without a sound in either of them.
“You can have the east room. Nobody sleeps in it.”
She said it in one piece, the whole sentence, the way she had said barbed wire back to Clara on the sidewalk.
“Then that’s where I’ll sleep,” Clara said. “Thank you.”
“It’s cold. There’s a heater in the closet and it ticks all night. It doesn’t mean it’s broken.” Daisy looked at the calf, not at Clara. “She was born on Tuesday. She hasn’t got a number yet.”
“Does she get one?”
“She gets a tag. Dad puts the tag in.” A pause with something under it. “I don’t like that part.”
“Neither do I,” Clara said. “I’ve never liked it, so we’ll be no help to each other.”
“Dad says it doesn’t hurt them.”
“It stings for about a second.”
“That’s what I said.” Daisy pulled her loose sock up to the knee. “He says it doesn’t hurt and I say it stings. Those aren’t the same thing.”
“No,” Clara said. “They’re not.”
Daisy sat down on the wood box and put her chin on her knees and watched the calf drink.
The stove had gone low. Clara built it up again, four splits and the damper open a turn, and washed her hands, and filled the pot and put the coffee on. She took two mugs down out of the right-hand cupboard without looking up and set them by the stove.
Then she went at the counter. There was hamburger thawing in a bowl of water and half a bag of onions gone soft at the top, and a can of tomatoes, and enough rice to make it stretch. She got the burner going and the onions in and the whole kitchen changed inside of a minute.
The calving book sat under the sugar canister, spiral-bound, a pencil shoved through the wire. Clara lifted the canister off it and moved the book down to the end of the counter, where nothing could get set on top of it and nothing would be spilled into it.
Daisy came and stood at the end of the counter with her arms folded on it.
“Are you making the kind with tomatoes in it?”