CHAPTER 5
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The wind came down the barn alley and took the truck door out of her hand.
Clara caught it against her hip and held it there.
Wyatt lifted Daisy’s backpack over the seat and set it down in the footwell.
Last week had handed them two warm days and the ruts had gone to soup.
This morning the yard rang under a boot heel.
Her gloves were in her coat pocket. She left them there. Pulling them on in front of him would have been a report on how cold she was, and she had decided on Thursday not to file any of those.
Harlan had dragged the tack bench into the lee of the grain room door. A bridle hung off the nail in front of him with the headstall down. He went at the cheekpiece with a damp sponge in small tight circles. The saddle soap got into the air out there and stayed in it.
“You were already down here when I came out,” Clara said.
“I’ll still be down here at dinner.” He turned the sponge over and found a clean corner of it. “Soap first, every strap of it. Then the oil goes on the latigo and the billets and anything that carries weight.”
“How long does the whole rig take you?”
“Three hours, near enough.” The two smallest on his right stayed curled in against the palm. He pinned the cheekpiece under the heel of that hand and worked with the thumb and the two that still closed. “Three hours in March beats a billet letting go in April with a heifer on the end of that rope.”
“Is this the only barn job they’ll give you?”
“It’s the only one my hands still do right.” He tipped his chin at the thermos on the end of the bench. “Lid’s clean. Pour yourself some.”
She poured an inch into the lid and drank it standing. The coffee was strong enough to strip paint off a gate.
“How many of these are there?”
“Four saddles, six bridles, two sets of harness nobody’s used since I could close my fist.” He held the cheekpiece up to the light and turned it. “Every buckle gets run through my fingers before calving. Every one. You do that in March or you do it in the dark in a wreck.”
“What happens if the wind comes around northeast?”
“It comes down that draw and it doesn’t quit.
” He set the cheekpiece down and started in on the throatlatch.
“Cows drift ahead of it and they pile up in a corner and stand there being stupid. Shut the west gate and they’ve got the willows to get behind.
Leave it open and you’re counting pairs in the dark with a flashlight. ”
“Does he know that?”
“He knows it better than I ever did.”
Down the alley Daisy waited at the truck with her hood up. Her braid had already come apart at the bottom. Wyatt came out of the calving barn with his book under his arm and stopped to look at the sky the way a man looks at a bill.
“Ten of eight,” he said. “We ought to go.”
Harlan set the bridle down and pulled the next one off its nail. “You’ve hauled that girl in and hauled her home all week, son, and you’ve not sat down in this barn long enough to drink a cup of anything.”
“West gate’s froze open,” Wyatt said.
“There’s more than one way to be at a funeral, son.”
The wind came around the corner of the grain room and pushed the bucket an inch across the concrete. Harlan wet the sponge again and squeezed it out against the side of it.
“Wind’s coming around northeast tonight,” he said. “You’ll want that west gate shut.”
“I’ll shut it.”
Clara had a question sitting behind her teeth.
She kept it there, and it cost her the whole length of the alley to do it.
She screwed the lid onto the thermos and set it where his good hand would reach.
Then she got into the truck and pulled the door shut against the wind, and Daisy moved her knees over an inch to make room.
“Northeast,” Clara said. “I’ll bring the wash in off the line before dark, then.”
Wyatt put the truck in gear. “Appreciate it.”
Bear Creek Elementary sat low and long, and the flagpole line snapped all the way across the lot.
The lot was brake lights and exhaust standing up white in the cold.
A tan pickup backed out of a space without looking.
Wyatt put his hand flat on Clara’s back and moved her a step and a half toward the curb.
Then it was gone. He was already ahead of her with Daisy’s hand in his.
The shape of it stayed on her coat between her shoulders, warm for about as long as it takes to cross a parking lot. She put her hands in her pockets and left them there.
Daisy walked between them to the door and did not say goodbye, and did not need to. She went down the hallway with her hood still up and her notebook against her chest. A girl with two brown braids fell in beside her and started talking for both of them.
Mrs. Finch’s room at quarter past eight had a wall clock that clicked at the top of every minute.
A radiator under the window knocked twice and quit.
The low sun came in flat and yellow and lay across thirty-one years of bulletin boards, the felt gone pale along the top edges.
Coat hooks ran the length of the back wall with names above them in cut-paper letters.
Daisy’s was fourth from the end. The hook under it was empty.
Nora Finch took one of the small chairs and sat down in it with her knees up.
She pulled the cardigan around her and did not apologize for the size of the chair.
Wyatt stood behind the one across from her with both hands on the back of it.
He was not going to sit, and then he did.
His knees came up too. He put his hat on the floor beside his boot.
“Thank you for coming in,” Nora said. “I know what your mornings are.”
“It’s fine.”
“It isn’t, but you came anyway.” She folded her hands in her lap and let a little of the clock go by. “She has not used her voice in my classroom since September. Not once, not to anyone.”
Nobody said anything for the length of that. The radiator knocked and gave up.
“She talks at home,” Wyatt said.
“I believe you. She talks in the truck, she talks at your table, and I expect she talks to that dog.” Nora nodded slowly. “In here she writes. She nods. She points at the board when I ask her to. Her reading is the strongest in this room and I have that in writing from the county already.”
Clara put her elbows on her knees. “Does she use anything with the other children? Notes, gestures?”
“She wrote three lines to Ruthie Dawson yesterday and slid them across.” Nora’s mouth moved a little. “Two of them were about a hawk.”
“Was it a hawk?”
“It was not, and she said so in writing, and she underlined it.”
That got something out of Wyatt that was not quite a sound. He turned his hat over with the toe of his boot and set it right again.
“The spring program is coming,” Nora said. “Every child in second grade sings two songs on that stage. I put a sheet out for the parts nobody wants. She took my pen and wrote her name on the line for holding the door.”
The clock clicked. Clara kept her hands where they were.
“I’d like the county to evaluate her,” Nora said.
Wyatt’s hands came off his knees. He picked up the hat and set the brim between his fingers. He turned it a quarter turn, and then another quarter, all the way around. He did not put it on.
“Evaluate her for what.”
“For what she needs. That is the whole of what the word means.” Nora waited through two clicks of the clock.
“It is not a judgment on your house. I taught you in this building and I taught her mother’s people besides, and I have watched a great many children go quiet for a year and come out of it.
Some of them did that on their own. Some of them needed a person whose job it was. ”
“Who does it.”
“A county woman out of Bozeman. The first part happens here, in this room, with me sitting in it.”
Wyatt’s thumb found the seam inside the hat band and ran the length of it and came back.
“What’s it cost.”
“That part costs you nothing at all. If they want more than that, it’s Bozeman.”
“Forty minutes each way,” Wyatt said. “How many trips.”
“More than one. I won’t give you a number I’d have to take back.”
“And when.”
“They set it, not me. I can ask. I can’t promise.” Nora let the clock click twice. “She would not have to be told what any of it is called. To her it is a lady from town who plays a game with picture cards.”
“She’ll know,” Wyatt said.
“She would. She knows most things in this room before I do.” Nora’s voice held the pitch it had held all morning, low and unhurried, and she left the end of it open on purpose.
Wyatt turned the hat another quarter. His thumb went across the flat white scar at the base of it and came away, twice, and stopped.
“My note’s due the first of June, Mrs. Finch. That’s the shape of my year.”
He did not argue with her and he did not agree with her. He set the hat crown down on his knee and squared it there with the flat of one hand. Then he squared it again, though it had not moved.
Clara had run a room of nineteen four-year-olds in Denver. She had sat on the parent side of that same chair with that same word on the table. She knew what it does to a man when it lands as a verdict. She kept her voice easy and pitched it at Nora and not at him.
“Mrs. Finch, can I ask it the other way around? What would you have to see from us before you’d take that word back off the table?”
Nora’s eyebrows came up half an inch. She took her glasses off the beaded chain and put them on, which she had not needed to do for anything else that morning.
“One word out loud to a grown person in this room. Not to me, necessarily. The aide, the librarian, anybody.” She counted it off against her fingers.
“Her name out loud when I take attendance. One partner activity where she says the thing rather than writes it. And it has to hold. A single good Tuesday is a Tuesday.”
“What about the ones she does talk to? If Ruthie’s at her table, and you’re four feet off and not looking at her.”
“Then I’d hear it and I would take it and be glad of it.”