CHAPTER 7
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Clara turned the dough out onto the pine table and pushed it away from her with the heels of both hands. It came back under her palms, warm and slack. Flour had dried tight across her knuckles, and it cracked open when she spread her fingers.
The woodstove ticked as it took the draft. Outside the snow came sideways and wet, the kind that would not lie an hour on the ground. The window over the sink had gone black by half past four. The one bulb above it threw the whole kitchen at her, yellow and doubled.
In the mudroom the calf knocked a hoof against the side of his box.
“He’s up,” Daisy said.
“He’s standing.” Clara folded the dough over and gave it a quarter turn. “That’s a different thing.”
“How is it different?”
“Standing is what he does when he hears a door. Up is when he wants something.” Clara pushed the dough out flat and hauled it home. “Is he pulling at the towel?”
“He’s chewing it.”
“Chewing isn’t eating.” Clara leaned into the heels of her hands and the table took it and creaked. “I’ll warm his bottle when the bread’s in the bowl.”
“He ate the towel this morning too.”
“Then he’s consistent. That’s more than I can say for this bread.”
Daisy got up on the rail of the chair to see over the table, which she was not supposed to do, and Clara let her do it.
“Does he know his mother won’t come?”
Clara turned the dough once more before she answered that one.
“He knows he’s hungry,” she said. “That’s about the size of what he knows.”
“That’s sad.”
“It is. It’s also Tuesday’s problem, and it isn’t Tuesday.”
Daisy had the calving book open on the counter under both elbows. It was spiral-bound and soft at the corners, and the pencil rode down through the wire with its point cut long and flat by a knife. Nobody in this house owned a sharpener.
“Fifty-eight,” Daisy read. “Then the line. Then three.”
Clara came around and read it over her shoulder without taking her hands out of the dough. Wyatt’s live column marched down the page in small square pencil, tag numbers and dams and a word or two. The other column had three marks in it and a lot of white under them.
“The dead ones only get half a column,” Daisy said.
“That’s how he ruled the page.”
“He should have made them the same size.”
“Tell him.”
“I did.” Daisy turned the page flat with one finger. “He said the paper came that way.”
The pencil sat there in the wire with its long knife-cut point. Clara wiped her thumb down her apron and put her hand back in the dough.
“My braid came out,” Daisy said.
It had been coming out since breakfast. White hair hung down both sides of her face and got in the book when she leaned over it.
“It comes out because it’s slick,” Clara said. “Give me a second to get the flour off.”
She washed to the wrist, dried her hands on the towel by the stove, and stood Daisy in front of her with her shoulders square. She parted the hair and took up three pieces and worked down. Over, over, over. The braid came out fat and easy and hung there.
Daisy reached back, took hold of it, and pulled the whole thing apart.
“You did it too loose. Do it again.”
“Okay.”
Clara started higher this time, up at the crown where it pulls, and she took the pieces thin and kept the tension the whole way to the end. Daisy stood and let her. When it was done she reached back and ran her thumb up the underside of it.
“That’s right,” Daisy said. “That’s how it’s supposed to be. Ruthie’s mother does it that way.”
“Then I’m in good company.”
“Will you do it in the morning?”
“I’ll be here in the morning.”
Daisy held on to the end of the braid with both hands and did not let go of it.
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“It’s the part I can answer.” Clara turned her around by the shoulders and looked at the braid straight on. “Yes. I’ll do it in the morning. Bring me the good elastic and not the one that’s been chewed.”
“Pilot chewed it.”
“Pilot chews everything and hears nothing, and I’ve stopped holding either against him,” Clara said, and put the dough in the bowl and the cloth over the bowl, and that was as far as she went.
The replacer came out of the bag in a cloud that got in her nose and stayed there. She mixed it in the pitcher with hot water off the stove, stirred until the lumps quit, and tipped the bottle over her wrist. Too hot. She stood in the mudroom door counting the stove ticks until it came down.
The calf was four days old and his mother had no milk in her at all. He was up at the far end of the box with his hips sharp and his ears cold, and he did not come when she crouched.
“All right,” Clara said. “You and me.”
She held the bottle low, down under his chin, so he had to reach up for it the way he would have reached up for the heifer.
He put his nose on it and pulled his head off it.
She got two fingers into the side of his mouth and he took those, hard, and while he was working on her fingers she slid the rubber in behind them.
One swallow. Then a second. His tail went once.
Then he quit, and stood there with milk on his muzzle, looking at the wall.
She tried him again with her fingers and got a third swallow out of him and no more.
After that he would not open his mouth for anything on earth.
She sat back on her heels on the cold concrete with the bottle still three-quarters full and the smell of sour milk coming up off the towel, and the stove ticked away on the other side of the wall, and the bread went on rising past the point where rising does it any good.
The outside door banged.
“A man can stand this wind or he can stand that snow,” Harlan said, stamping. “He does not get to pick.”
“There’s a third choice. It’s in here and it’s warm.”
“That’s not a choice, that’s a reward.” He got his cap off and shook it. Snow came off him onto the concrete and started going to water. “How’s the orphan?”
“Three swallows.”
“Three’s three.”
Clara set the bottle on the shelf where it would keep some heat.
“Three is nothing, Harlan.”
“Three is three more than none, and none is what he had at noon.” He worked his boots off against the jack, one and then the other, and left them where they fell.
“I’ve seen them come off a bottle on the fourth day and go on to make a cow.
I’ve seen them take a whole quart and be dead by supper. There’s no telling with a bum.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It wasn’t comfort, it was information.” He hung his coat and looked at the box. “You held it low.”
“I held it low.”
“Whoever taught you that did you a favor.”
“Nobody taught me.” She pushed the hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist. “He wouldn’t take it any other way. So I quit offering it any other way.”
“That’s the trick with a bum,” Harlan said. “Quit doing what doesn’t work and go on to the next thing you’ve got.”
He went through to the kitchen and she heard him unscrew the thermos, and when she came in behind him with the bottle he was pouring coffee into the lid, holding it in his right hand with the two little fingers standing off it because they would not come around anymore.
He drank it where the heat was, hip against the warming shelf, cap in his other hand.
“That heifer of his is dry as a boot,” he said. “Wind’s out of the north and it’s got wet in it. That’s the worst kind for a young one.”
Clara ran the water hot and started on the bottle. Daisy had the calving book down on the floor now, on her stomach with her heels in the air.
Then the door again, and the cold with it, and Wyatt came through the mudroom with snow standing on both shoulders and more of it in his hair.
He stopped in the kitchen doorway with one hand on the frame.
He looked at the stove, and the bowl on the shelf with the cloth over it, and his daughter flat out on the floor with her braid down her back, and the window black behind the sink.
The snow on his shoulders started going dark and running.
His mouth opened a little way and then it did not do anything.
He took his gloves off, one and then the other, and pushed them into his coat pocket, and hung the coat on the peg by the door. The far peg. The cold one.
“There’s coffee,” Clara said, “or there’s the pot from this morning, which I wouldn’t.”
“The pot from this morning’s fine.”
“It isn’t, but it’s yours.”
She poured it and set it on the counter and took her hands back to the sink.
He came and got it from where she had set it, which put four feet of counter between them, and neither one of them made that four feet any shorter.
She kept her hands under the running water long after the bottle was clean.
The water went from hot to warm to cold on her wrists and she did not turn it off, because turning it off meant turning around.
“Daisy,” Wyatt said. “Book.”
Daisy brought it up off the floor and put it on the counter and got out of the way. He took the pencil, licked his thumb, turned two pages, and wrote standing up with his hat still on.
“Sixty-one on the ground,” he said. “Four in the ditch.”
“Four.”
“One this afternoon in the willows at the bottom. She calved out where I couldn’t see her and it was down in the wet before I got there.” He set the pencil in the crease. “Two hundred and forty pairs to get through. We’re not a third of the way in.”
“And how many days are left in it?”
“All of them.”
Harlan turned his cap over in his hand and said nothing, which for him was a whole speech.
“What’s the number you can stand?” Clara asked.
“Eight per cent.”
“And where does that put you tonight?”
Wyatt looked at the page a while before he answered. He did not touch the pencil to do it. The stove door popped as the wood shifted down inside it, and Harlan reached over and shut the damper a quarter turn without being asked.
“Under it.”
“Under it by how much?”
“By enough that I’d rather not hear it out loud in my own kitchen.” He said it flat, the way he said everything, and there was no edge on it anywhere. “Ask me again at the end of the week and it’ll be a different answer. Might be a better one.”
“Might be.”