CHAPTER 7 #2
“The heifers are what’ll tell it. I’ve got sixty-some heifers left to calve and every one of them’s a first-timer.”
“That one in the box will need tubed,” Wyatt said.
“He took three swallows off the bottle.”
Wyatt looked at the mudroom door.
“He wouldn’t take the bottle cold and he wouldn’t take it high,” Clara said. “Held low he takes it. Not much. But he takes it.”
He was quiet long enough for the stove to tick twice.
“Then he’s had three more than he had,” he said, and put the pencil back down through the wire.
Supper was beef and potatoes and a jar of green beans, and bread that came out of the oven heavier than it had any business being, with a seam split down one side where it had gone over.
Daisy sat with her heels hooked on the rung of her chair and ate the potatoes first, and then the beans, and then the beef, in that order and no other.
“This is heavy,” she said, holding up her piece.
“It is. It went up and then it gave out on me.”
“Why did it give out?”
“Because it sat too long in the bowl while I was arguing with a calf.” Clara reached over and pressed her thumb into the crust to show her. The dent went in and stayed in. “See that? A good loaf pushes your thumb out again. That one’s forty minutes on the mudroom floor.”
“Then it’s his fault.”
“It’s mine. I’m the one who left it.” Clara passed the butter down. “Put enough on it and it won’t matter.”
Harlan took a third piece and did not comment, which was the kindest thing anybody had done all day.
Somewhere in the middle of it Daisy started to hum. Four notes and then the turn at the end that goes down instead of up. She hummed it into her plate with her fork going around the rim.
“Her mother sang that one to her,” Wyatt said. “Annie must have.”
Harlan was up by then, over by the door with his cap in his hand and his thermos under his arm.
“Annie Miller could not carry a tune in a bucket, son.”
Wyatt sat back in his chair and laughed. It came up out of him rough, like a thing he had not used in a while and had to knock the dust off.
“No,” he said. “She could not.”
“God love her for trying. Wind’s coming around.”
Daisy laughed because they were laughing, and banged her heels on the chair rung, and Clara laughed too and got up with the plates.
“Coming around out of where?” she asked.
“West by dark. It’ll dry the top inch and freeze the rest.” Harlan put his cap on. “Then we’ll all be dropping calves onto a skating rink.”
“How long does that last?”
“Till it doesn’t. A day. Three.” He pulled the cap down over his ears. “March gives you two warm ones and then comes and takes them off you at the door.”
“You could say that about a lot of things.”
“I could,” Harlan said. “I’d rather say it about March.”
Clara ran the water and started in on the dishes. She washed a plate and set it in the rack. Then she took it out of the rack and washed it, and set it back, and reached for the next one.
“There were three little gray birds on the wire this morning,” she said. “They’ll come back around when it warms up.”
“Chickadees,” Harlan said. “They’re gone south with everything else. They come through in April.”
“They went in November,” Wyatt said. “Same as the rest of them.”
Daisy put her fork down.
“Chickadees don’t go anywhere in winter,” she said. “They get fatter and then thin again. They’re here the whole time. They’re in the hay shed right now.”
Nobody argued with her, because there was no argument in it.
“Well,” Harlan said. “There you are.” He got the door open and let a shovelful of cold in. “Night, Daisy Miller.”
“Good night.”
The door shut and his boots went off the porch and the sound of them quit at the gravel. The kitchen sat there ticking.
Wyatt took the towel off the nail. He stood at Clara’s left shoulder with a good foot of air between them, and took each plate as she put it up, and dried it, and stacked it.
It went along like that without either of them saying anything for a while, and the not-saying was easy, which was its own kind of trouble.
“He’ll want feeding at ten,” Wyatt said. “I’ll do it.”
“You’ll be in the barn at ten.”
“I’ll come in for it.”
“You’ll come in at midnight and he’ll be flat and cold.” She handed him the roasting pan. “I’ll do the ten. You take the two.”
He turned the pan over and dried the bottom of it, which did not need drying.
“Okay,” he said.
Daisy carried the forks over one at a time, four trips for four forks, and put them in the water and pushed them under with a finger to watch them go.
“I want to hold his bottle,” she said.
“Tomorrow, in the daylight,” Wyatt said.
“I could do it in the mudroom. It’s three steps.”
“Tomorrow, in the daylight.”
Daisy weighed that up against what she was likely to get if she pushed, and took the win she had. She went and got her coat off the peg, and dug in the pocket, and came back with her notebook to write the chickadees down while she still had them.
“Spell hay shed,” she said.
“Two words,” Clara said. “Same as it sounds.”
“How many were there?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one who saw them.”
“Then I’ll put down four and a question mark.” She printed it with the pencil held down near the point, the same grip her father used. “That’s allowed. Mrs. Finch says a guess has to look like a guess.”
“That’s honest work.”
“Everything is not the same as it sounds.”
“No,” Clara said. “It isn’t.”
She rinsed the last of the cups and stood them upside down in the rack.
The kettle went on the stove for the ten o’clock bottle.
Somebody had put a fresh split of pine in the firebox without her hearing it go in, and the room came up another degree, and the smell of the bread had got into the walls and stayed there.
Behind her Daisy printed slowly with her mouth open at one corner, and Wyatt hung the towel back on its nail and did not go out the door yet, and the stove ticked down toward the hour when somebody would have to fill it.
In the mudroom the calf got up on all four legs and stood there, no surer about any of it than he had been at four o’clock.
The black window over the sink held the three of them, doubled and small, and the water ran on over her hands.