CHAPTER 4
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The ground under the flatbed was frozen hard at ten past six.
Wyatt lay on it with a headlamp in his teeth and the trailer harness bunched in one fist. Two wires had corroded through where the loom rubbed the frame.
He stripped them with his pocketknife, twisted them, wrapped the splice in tape.
Cold diesel came off the tank onto his knuckles and would not wash off before noon.
He rolled out from under the deck and thumbed the switch on the dash. The left marker came on amber and held.
The kitchen window was yellow. Clara was already in it.
Inside, the woodstove had the room up past where a man needed a coat. She had the skillet going and Daisy’s lunch box open. She had also moved the calving book to the end of the counter under the window, spiral side out, pencil in the wire. It had lived by the toaster for four years.
“Half past six,” he said. “She has to be out the door at ten of eight.”
“She’s dressed except for boots.” Clara turned an egg. “Boots are a negotiation. There’s a right one and a wrong one and they look identical to me. I lost the first round and I’m told I’ll lose the next one.”
“Which ones is she wearing?”
“The pink pair with the frog on the side. I was informed the frog is a toad and that I should learn the difference.” She slid the egg onto a plate. “She’s not wrong. I went and looked at it.”
He put his gloves on the table. Out the south window the yard was white and hard, and it would be brown and bottomless by ten. Twelve miles of fence had come out of winter on its face, and he had one day and one man.
“You can run her in this morning,” he said.
“Okay.”
She cracked another egg against the skillet one-handed and did not turn around, and that was the whole of it.
No thank you. No question about the route or the drop-off line or what time Mrs. Finch wanted them.
She had said okay in that same flat cheerful voice at seventeen when he asked her to hold a fence post, and then she had held it for an hour without complaining.
Daisy came down in her school clothes with her braid half made and her notebook under her arm. She got up on the chair by the stove and put her chin on her hands.
“There was a bird on the water tank,” she said. “Not a magpie.”
“No?”
“Magpies have white on the wing when they fly. This one was all dark and it walked instead of hopping.” She said it to Clara and not to him. “It’s a starling. They aren’t supposed to be here but they are.”
“Who brought them, then?” Clara set a plate in front of her.
“Somebody let a bunch of them go a long time ago, back east. Now there are too many to count.” Daisy picked up her fork. “Dad says they’re trash birds.”
“Your dad says that about a lot of birds,” Clara said.
“He says it about anything that eats out of the feed bunk.” Daisy salted her egg with great care. “That’s an opinion. It isn’t a fact.”
“Then we’ll keep the two of them in different piles,” Clara said.
Wyatt went to the door for his coat and looked down the lane while he put it on.
From the cattle guard the county road ran three quarters of a mile to the bottom, and for four hundred yards of that it lay beside water with nothing between the gravel and the willows but a bar ditch.
He had counted it enough times that he did not have to count it now. He counted it now.
The road would be greasy by half past seven and worse by three.
“I’ll take her,” he said.
Clara set the spatula down. “You said I could take her.”
“I know what I said.”
Daisy looked up from her egg with her fork stopped, and then, because she was seven and not stupid, she looked at Clara.
“The road’s soft this time of year,” Wyatt said. “It slicks up on the grade and there’s no shoulder. That’s all.”
Clara wiped her hands on the towel. She took her time about it. Behind her the fire ticked in the stove and the wind came around the north corner of the house and rattled the storm door in its frame.
“Is it the road, or is it me? And if it’s the road, how long does the road stay a problem?”
“The road,” he said.
She looked at him. “Okay.”
That was all she was going to do with it.
He took his hat off the peg and put it on and did not say the other part, and she let him not say it.
Another woman would have made him stand there and produce it.
Clara pulled the towel off her shoulder, hung it on the oven handle, and said, “Then I’ll do the lunch box,” and went and did the lunch box.
“I could ride with Clara and you could go straight to the fence,” Daisy said. “That would save you the whole trip.”
“Eat your egg.”
“That’s not a reason. That’s a thing you say instead of a reason.”
“It’s the reason you’re getting.”
She ate her egg. Under the table her boots knocked the chair leg twice, which was as much argument as she ever made.
He went out to start the truck and let it warm, and got halfway down the porch steps before his keys turned up missing from his coat.
They were on the table by the sugar. He came in for them quiet and stopped where he was, because Clara had Daisy in front of her by the woodstove and was going at her like a man wrapping a calf.
Coat on, both arms, one sleeve inside out and pulled through without either of them looking at it.
Zip to the chin. Hat down over the ears, left ear covered first, and Daisy said nothing about her ear because Clara had already covered it.
Boots, the right one on the right foot, first try.
Notebook out of the chair and into the coat pocket. Done.
Eleven seconds. He counted them out of habit and it came to eleven.
Four years he had done that job every morning of the school year. It took him three minutes and it usually took a raised voice. She had been in this house since Thursday.
He picked up his keys and went out.
The yard was cold enough to burn the inside of his nose.
He stood at the fender with the truck running and counted the posts down the lane, which he could see from where he was, which he had set himself the summer before Levi was born.
Thirty-one from the cattle guard to the house.
Nineteen from the house to the corral gate.
He was at fourteen when the door banged and Clara brought Daisy out, and he was at eight or nine when the house dropped out of the mirror and there was nothing left in that yard at all.
“Dad,” Daisy said. “You’re driving slow.”
“Roads are soft.”
“You said that at the house.” She looked out her window at the willows going by. “It was true then, too.”
He put two fingers up off the wheel and set them down again. Below the mailbox the willows came right to the ditch and the water in it ran brown and loud with the day’s melt.
“Clara knows this road,” Daisy said. “She grew up on it. She told me where the pheasants are.”
“I know she did.”
“So why can’t she drive it.”
“Get that shoulder strap up under your arm. It’s riding your neck and it’ll saw your ear off.”
Daisy pulled the belt down and held it there with one thumb. “That isn’t an answer either.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
Daisy worked on that for a mile of gravel. “Are you going to let her drive me ever?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“When I say so.”
“That’s the same as no.” She turned her face to the glass and watched the fence posts come and go, and she did not sound angry about it, which was worse.
The fence along the county road had come out of winter the way it always did, which was badly.
Frost had lifted the posts an inch and a half out of the ground, every last one, so the whole line stood a little proud and the wire ran slack between them.
Nothing can be stretched to a post that is floating.
He worked the first quarter mile with the maul, driving each post down by hand, eight to twelve blows apiece depending on whether the ground under it had let go of the frost yet.
The maul head came up loaded with wet clay by the fourth post and he had to knock it clean on the running board.
By nine his gloves were soaked through. He pulled one off to fish a staple out of his shirt pocket and the wire took the skin off two fingers where he touched it, cold enough that it read as a burn.
Two hundred yards of the north stretch lay under an old drift, gray and rotten and sagging in the middle, with the wire under all of it.
He dug it out with a shovel and then with his hands, following the line by feel, and the drift gave up a fence stay, a plastic sack, and a length of somebody else’s twine.
The wire came up kinked in eleven places.
Wire that has spent a winter under snow fights its way to a straight line, and he sat on the tailgate at half past eleven with the stretcher and worked the kinks out one at a time.
He kept the tally in pencil on the back of his left glove. Posts driven. Yards restrung. Staples used, because a box of staples cost three dollars and there were a hundred boxes between here and June.
Four hundred yards by two o’clock. Twelve miles to go.
The corner post at the county line was the one he had been not thinking about all morning.
He put the shovel in and the ground came up black and sweet with rot, and the H-brace post was gone off clean at grade, the bottom of it turned to punk that came away in wet red strings.
Two hundred and forty pairs would be on this side of that wire inside three weeks.
He could not get a tractor within forty yards of that corner in March without burying it to the axles, and he knew it because he had buried it there once.
So it came out by hand. He dug a hole around the stub the size of a washtub and levered the rot loose with a bar, and every shovelful he took out came half in again as soup.
He was down past his knees in it when a clean white pickup slowed on the county road and pulled off onto the grass.
Mitch Lawson got out in a pressed shirt with the sleeves buttoned at the wrist. He came down the bar ditch, put a boot on the good side of the hole, and looked into it.