CHAPTER 5 #2
The sun had come off the bulletin boards and lay along the floor between the two of them.
Clara kept her eyes on Nora and did not turn her head toward the man in the small chair, because there was a way to be right in front of him and a way to be right at him, and only one of them was any use to a child.
“Do you call the roll out loud?”
“Every morning of my life.”
“Would you take a hand up from her instead, for a while, and not make anything of it?”
“I would.” Nora studied her over the top of the glasses. “You’ve done this.”
“I ran a preschool room. I had a boy who talked the whole way to the door and not one syllable past it.” Clara turned her hands over in her lap.
“It wasn’t stubbornness and it wasn’t shyness.
Nothing I did in the first two months touched it.
What moved it was the room getting smaller.
Two children and a job to do, and me not looking at them while they did it. ”
“And how long did that take.”
“Longer than anybody wanted. You’ve tried most of this already, I’d guess.”
“I have. It isn’t the trying that’s short around here.” Nora took the glasses off. “It’s that I have twenty-one others, and in June she goes on to a teacher who has never heard her.”
Wyatt wrote nothing down. He had no pen out and he had not asked for one. Clara knew for a fact that every word of that list was in him now the way a gate count is in him, and would still be in him in April.
“I’ll want to think on it,” he said, and stood, and the small chair came up an inch off the floor with him.
“I’d expect nothing else.” Nora rose and smoothed the cardigan down. “She held this door for me on Friday afternoon. She made a sign for it out of a piece of card. It says door. It’s taped over the handle and I have not taken it down.”
At the back wall Wyatt stopped. He put two fingers on the cut-paper letters of his daughter’s name. The D was coming loose at one corner. He straightened it and pressed it flat with his thumb until it held.
“She keeps her coat on all day,” Nora said. “I stopped asking her about it in October.”
Six Mile Road ran gravel and washboard for the first three miles out of town.
The wind pushed the truck a little sideways every time the borrow ditch opened up.
Clara rode with her hands on her knees. Between her shoulder blades her coat had gone cold again miles ago, and she could still say to the inch where his hand had been.
“Stop a second,” she said.
He stopped. He did not ask why, which was its own kind of manners. He left it running with his wrist over the top of the wheel while she got out.
The ditch was full of last year’s sweetgrass. It stood pale and bleached and dry as paper, bent all one way from the winter. She pulled up a handful out of the mat of it and got in and shut the door on the wind. The smell came up off it warm and sweet, out of all proportion to how dead it was.
“That’s a year old,” Wyatt said.
“It’s better a year old. That’s the trick of it.” She laid the handful across her lap and started to braid the stems while the truck came up to speed. “My mother hung it over the door every winter and never told me why.”
He drove. The county grader had been through and the road ran dry and rattling under them.
“Are you all right?” Clara said.
“Road’s dry.”
She let that sit exactly as long as it deserved. “That wasn’t the question.”
“It’s the one I’ve got an answer to.”
She turned the braid over and started the second half of it. “What are you going to do about the county?”
“Feed at four,” he said. “Then I’ll shut the west gate.”
Clara finished the braid and laid it on the dash, where it held its curve against the cold glass. The cattle guard came up and rattled the whole truck through.
“I’ll say one more thing and then I’ll quit on it,” she said.
“Say it.”
“That word she used isn’t a gate swinging shut on your girl. It’s a list of things somebody wants to see. She gave us the list for free.”
He drove a quarter mile of washboard before he answered, and what he said was not an answer.
“Wire’s down on the east side where the drifts sat.”
By noon the wind had teeth in it. Clara carried a sandwich and a jar of coffee down the alley.
Wyatt took them without stopping. He had a heifer in the far pen under the heat lamp and two hundred and forty pairs to bring through the month.
He ate standing up with his forearms on the rail and his eyes on the pen.
Harlan was on his third saddle by then. The latigo had gone dark and heavy with the oil. The bridle from the morning hung clean and supple on its nail, every buckle run through his fingers once.
At three o’clock the lot was full again and the flag was still snapping. Daisy came out of the double doors ahead of everybody. Her hood was down and her coat was buttoned to the throat. She got up into the truck between them and had the notebook out before the door was shut.
“Killdeer. Two of them, by the pump house. You write it, my hands are cold. K-i-l-l-d-e-e-r.”
Clara took the bird list and found the pencil in the wire. Every entry down the page was in Daisy’s square careful printing. Hers, when she put it there, was not.
“Two killdeer,” Clara said. “Pump house. Anything else about them?”
“They pretend a wing is broken so you’ll follow them.”
“Okay.”
“Away from the nest.” Daisy pushed her hands down between her knees. “It isn’t lying. It’s a different thing.”
Clara wrote that under the entry, all of it, and turned the notebook around so the page faced the right way.
Daisy read it through twice. “Your writing goes uphill.”
“It always has. My mother said it was on its way somewhere.”
“Will it still be in here after you go?”
The pencil was still in Clara’s hand. She put it back through the wire and closed the cover on it before she said anything.
“Yes,” she said. “That part stays in there.”
Daisy pushed the notebook down into her coat pocket without checking the spelling, which she had never done before with anybody. Out past the windshield the buses were pulling around the loop. Wyatt sat with the truck idling and one hand on the wheel and had not started to move.
Loretta Gable’s Buick came around the flagpole with a county folder squared against the windshield on the dash, and pulled in nose-out beside the truck.