CHAPTER 4 #2
“That’s a job,” Mitch said.
“It is.”
“You driving them all down with a maul?”
“Frost took every one of them.”
“Took mine, too. I’ve got two men on my south line with a skid steer and an auger. Started Monday, they’ll be done a week Thursday.” He said it with no edge on it, because it was only true. “Your ground’s wetter than mine.”
“It’s lower.”
Mitch nodded and looked north, up past the shop and the corrals and the long tan run of the home meadow to where the country stood up and got serious about itself.
“I’ll come to it,” he said. “Nine thousand for the season on the high pasture. I’ll fix the water gap myself and I’ll pay you in March instead of October.”
Then he quit talking.
Wyatt stood in the hole with the bar in his hands and did the arithmetic he did not want to do, and it did not take long.
Nine thousand covered the spring feed bill and better than half of what was coming due at the bank.
Paid in March, it landed ahead of the note instead of behind it.
He ran two hundred and forty pairs. He could carry an eight per cent death loss and no more, and the high pasture was ninety head of summer grass he would otherwise have to buy hay to replace.
The number was right. That was the trouble with it.
“It’s a fair number,” Wyatt said.
“It’s a fair number, you’re going to tell me no, and next March I’ll drive out here and say it again.”
“Probably will.”
“I ran ninety head up there for you in my head on the way out,” Mitch said. “You’d be buying hay to cover it.”
“Hay’s forty dollars a bale off the truck in a wet year.”
“Then it’s a wet year and you’ve got the money sitting in March.” He let that sit where it fell. “Every outfit in this valley leases something. I ran my dad’s place eleven years before I owned one acre of my own. Nobody in this county thought less of me for it.”
“I know it.”
“It’s grass, Wyatt. It’s not the house.”
“No.”
Mitch waited to see whether there was more, and there wasn’t, and he did not make him say it twice. He looked at the hole again.
“You want a hand for an hour? I’d charge you nothing, which is about what my time’s worth on a Friday.”
“I’ve got it.”
“All right.” Mitch went up the ditch to his pickup. Halfway there he turned around. “Your girl doing all right in school?”
“She’s fine.”
“Mine liked Finch.” He got in and shut the door and drove north, and his truck did not throw a spatter of mud, because he stayed up on the crown of the road where a man ought to.
Wyatt got the stub out at four and the new post set at five and the brace wire twisted by half past. He did not think about the offer while he did it. He thought about the twist, and about the fact that he had one hired man and the man was seventy-one.
At the barn the light was on already, which meant Harlan had been in there a while. Two pairs had come in the night and were out on the ground in the near pen, both calves up and sucking and both of them dry. A black heifer stood alone in the third pen with her tail cocked and her back roached.
“Two out, one to watch,” Harlan said. “She’s a first-calf heifer and she’s a fool about it.”
“How long’s she been at it?”
“Since about noon.” Harlan tipped his chin at the pen. “Lays down, gets up, walks the rails, lays down again. She’s making no progress and she’s not in trouble yet.”
“Water bag?”
“About an hour ago. If she hasn’t got feet showing by midnight I’ll bring her up the alley and see what she’s carrying in there.”
“Not on your own you won’t.”
“No, sir.” Harlan wiped his palms down the front of his coat. “Sadie and Caleb are on at ten. Sadie wants me to tell you the wedding’s the second Saturday in July and she’d like the day off for it.”
“She can have the day.”
“I told her that’s what you’d say. She wanted it in your voice.”
Harlan had a halter in his hands and was working the buckle with his thumb. The two smallest fingers of his right hand did not close all the way anymore and had not for two years. He got the strap through the ring twice and lost it twice, and then he held it out.
“Buckle that for me, son. Snow’s done for the week, anyhow.”
Wyatt took it and buckled it and handed it over. Neither of them said a word about the hand.
“Lawson stopped on you,” Harlan said. It was not a question.
“He did.”
“He put a number on it.”
“He did.” Wyatt hung the bar on the rail. “Nine thousand, paid in March.”
Harlan unscrewed the lid off his thermos and poured it half full and drank off the top of it. “That man has never been wrong about money in his life. He’s been wrong about plenty else. Wind’s out of the west tonight. That’s a thaw wind, and the ground’ll be worse tomorrow than it was today.”
“It will.”
“How’s she doing? The girl.”
“Which one.”
Harlan looked at him a second too long, then went and stood in the man-door and looked at the sky.
“Clear tonight,” he said. “Cold with it.”
Supper was elk steak and potatoes and a jar of green beans off a shelf Clara had found on her own. Wyatt came in at seven with his forearms scrubbed to the elbow and mud dried in the seams of his knuckles. There were three plates on the table and the plates were hot.
Daisy had her notebook beside her fork, which was against the rules, and he let it go.
“Clara moved your book,” Daisy said.
He looked at the counter. The calving book sat under the window, and the last three days of it were legible without a lamp, and he had been reading it under the range hood with his head tipped since November.
“It’s better there,” he said.
Daisy turned to Clara. “He doesn’t like things moved.”
“That’s true,” Clara said. “I moved it anyway.”
Daisy nodded once, filed that, and went after her potatoes.
Then Clara talked, and she did it on purpose, and she was good at it.
“There’s a board on the second porch step that is going to put somebody through it,” she said. “I stood on it twice today to be sure of my facts.”
“I’ll pull it Sunday.”
“I also have to report that the well pump runs a full minute after you shut the tap. I timed it off the stove clock, so the number’s good. Is that a thing it’s supposed to do, or is that a thing where a man comes out with a truck?”
“Pressure tank. It’s fine.”
“Good. I had that costing you a new pump and a bill all afternoon.” She passed the beans to Daisy without being asked. “Daisy. What does a starling eat?”
“Bugs and grain and other birds’ eggs,” Daisy said around a potato. “They push the other eggs out on the ground first. That’s why nobody likes them.”
“I like them. Somebody has to.”
“You can’t like everything.”
“I’ve been told,” Clara said. She turned her fork over. “How much of the fence did you get today?”
“Four hundred yards.”
“Out of twelve miles.” She did not make a question of it and she did not make it soft. “What does that come to, three weeks of days?”
“If it doesn’t rain.”
Wyatt ate and said yes and no in the right places. Under the table Daisy’s boots knocked the chair leg, slower now, running down.
Then Clara quit talking.
She did it deliberately, the way she had started, and the kitchen got very quiet, with only the stove ticking and the sound of forks. Daisy carried her plate to the sink, because she had been told to once, four days ago, and went up to run her bath.
Clara turned her water glass a quarter turn and left her hand around it.
“Can I ask you something that isn’t about cows?”
He had his coffee halfway up and he set it down without drinking any. Six feet of pine table lay between her hand and his. He put his own hand flat on the wood and left it there, and the not-reaching had a weight to it, like a gate held shut against stock.
“You can ask.”
“Who do you talk to about Annie and Levi?”