CHAPTER 6 #2
Six Mile Road was gravel gone to grease. He came down the last mile behind her taillights with the sacks riding heavy and the back end talking to him at every washboard, and the road bent and dropped to the low-water crossing.
He read the gauge painted on the culvert wing before he knew he had.
Water a hand and a half below the slab, brown, moving.
It had been a hand at noon. The cottonwood on the downstream side stood with its scarred bark four feet up out of the wet and it did not tell him anything he had not already counted.
He crossed at a walk. In the mirror the green hatchback came over behind him and its taillights swung and steadied and followed him up the lane.
The calf in pen four was the one that had come backward Tuesday, and it had not sucked all day.
He mixed the replacer at the kitchen sink with the water hot enough on his wrist to be blood and no hotter, and stirred it until the lumps quit, and carried it out with the tube and the bag under his coat to keep the chill off.
The calf fought him the way a weak one does, all neck and no legs.
He got it kneeling between his boots, ran the tube down the left side of its throat, felt for the rings of the windpipe with his thumb, and let the bag run.
He sat on his heels in the straw with his shoulder against the panel and let it run.
The calf would take it again before bed and again in the morning, and it would either turn the corner by Sunday or it would not.
The kitchen was warm when he came back in and Clara had the woodstove opened up and supper started and Daisy sent upstairs to get out of her school clothes.
The check had been folded in his shirt pocket since Tuesday.
He set it on the counter beside the calving book and put the pencil back through the wire.
“That’s the week,” he said.
Clara dried her hands on the towel. She did not look at the counter and she did not move toward it. She hung the towel on the oven bar, squared it, and turned around with her back against the sink.
“You set it down like a bill. Pick it up and put it in my hand.”
The stove ticked. He came the three steps and picked it up. She took it, and their fingers were a folded check apart, and he did not move his hand and she did not move hers, and the woodstove went on ticking while the cold came off the window over the sink.
“Six hundred dollars a week is what we agreed to,” she said. “It is not what I’m owed.”
He had a sentence ready. It was about the morning school run, that she could take it herself now, that he would ride out to the high fence instead. It was a good sentence and he had been carrying it since the bottom of the grade and it did not come out.
Clara put the check in her jacket pocket and did not look at it once.
“Wyatt.”
“Feed’s not done.” He got his gloves off the shelf by the door and put them on standing up.
“That isn’t what I said.”
“I know what you said.”
He went out and counted the mineral sacks in the bed. Eight. He counted them again into the shed, one at a time, and stacked them off the floor on pallets, and by the time he was done his shoulder was wet through and the yard light had come on by itself.
Headlights turned in at the cattle guard and came up the lane slow, the way a person drives who is not sure of a road. The car stopped square in front of the house with its wipers still going.
Loretta came into the kitchen with the folder in one hand and did not take her coat off. Clara set a mug of coffee in front of her and Loretta put her glasses on and pushed the papers across the pine table.
“You’re out here now,” she said to Clara.
“I am.”
“Good. Somebody in this house ought to answer a telephone.”
“The plat, the description, and the signature page,” she said. “Do you know why I drove out here instead of mailing it? Because a thing in a mailbox is a thing you can be busy about.”
“I’ll look at it.”
“You have looked at it.” She said it the same as she said everything, in the same voice she used to read minutes.
“Wyatt. There are four families on the west side and their children ride a bus that will not run the creek in high water. It has not run it three times this spring. The county cannot take your ground without a hearing and a lawyer and two years of everybody in this valley being ugly to one another at the post office, and I will not be the woman who starts that.”
Clara stood at the stove with the spoon in her hand and did not put it down.
“I sat in your mother’s kitchen and asked her for the snow fence,” Loretta said. “Do you know what she did? She sent me home with a pie plate I had brought her in the first place, and the paper signed inside the lid.”
“So I am asking you,” Loretta said. “And I would like a reason if there isn’t a signature, because I have to say something to nine people on Tuesday and I would rather say a true thing than a kind one.”
“I’ll put them in the drawer,” he said.
Loretta looked at him over the glasses for a while. Then she capped her pen and put it in her purse, which was the loudest thing she did.
“All right.” She stood and got her gloves.
“Thank you for the coffee, dear, it was terrible.” At the door she stopped with her hand on the knob and half turned, the way people do when the thing they came to say is not the thing they are leaving with.
“I had the boxes out at the courthouse Monday, hunting the old survey. County’s still got the file on the twelfth.
Boxed and numbered, same as everything.”
Then the storm door, and the car backing around, and the red of it going down the lane and out at the cattle guard.
Wyatt stood with his hand on the drawer pull.
He put the plat and the description and the signature page in on top of the fuse box key and the church directory and pushed it shut with his hip.
The stove ticked. Upstairs Daisy was walking around in her socks and Clara was saying something to her that had a question at the end of it.
Nobody had told him, in all that time, that there was a file.