CHAPTER 8 #2
“Good.” He wiped his forearm across his jaw and left iodine on it.
“He’s got an opinion,” she said. “That’s a live calf’s opinion.”
“That’s a live calf.” He said it to the pen and not to her.
“How many more of these between now and May?”
“More than I care to lay out on the table at two in the morning.” He picked wet straw off the calf’s ear and dropped it.
“You’ve never stopped counting a thing in your life.”
“No.” He did not look up from the calf.
“Then say the number to me instead of saying it at your ceiling.” She sat back on her heels in the straw.
“Two hundred and forty head to bring through, and I’m one man short of doing it right.”
“You were one man short. You aren’t tonight.” She put her hand flat on the calf’s wet shoulder and left it there.
She scrubbed him with the burlap. Wyatt got the iodine cup off the ledge and dipped the navel and held it a slow count of ten, the calf’s wet weight leaning against his knee.
The heifer had her head around. She was talking to him already, a low rolling noise they make for nothing else in their lives.
Wyatt got his boot under himself and stood up. The heifer rocked onto her front end and then all the way up. She turned in the pen and put her nose on her calf and started at his ear and worked down.
“Is that it?” Clara said. “Is that the whole thing?”
“That’s the whole thing.” He hung the chains over the rail and they knocked once against the boards.
His hands were wet to the shoulder and they would not stay where he put them. He ran them under the tap in cold water and they still would not. He quit watching them and looked at the pen instead.
“Get the book,” he said. “Pen four, heifer, live bull calf, half past two.”
“The book from the kitchen counter.”
“That’s the only book there is.” The man-door went, and her boots crossed the frozen yard at a run.
She was gone four minutes. She came back with the calving book against her chest and an upended bucket swinging in her free hand. She set the bucket in the red circle under the lamp, and the book on top of it, and knelt.
The calf got his front end up, and folded, and got it up again. The heifer stepped over and put her head down and pushed him along the ribs until he swung around into her flank and got hold and started. His tail went, and that was that.
Clara slid the pencil up out of the spiral.
“Your book, your pencil,” she said. “I’m putting the leg in it too, so you’ll know next year.”
“The leg doesn’t go in the book.”
“What goes in the book?”
“Pen, dam, calf, time. Live or dead.” He watched the calf’s tail going.
“That tells you nothing in October,” she said. “That tells you a number you already cried about. The leg tells you she’s a heifer who needed help her first time and might need it her second.”
“Put it in, then.”
“I was going to.” She was already writing.
She wrote it out on her knees on the barn floor. Pen four, the number off the heifer’s tag, live bull calf, the time. Then a line under it about a front leg retained at the elbow, in a small square hand that leaned backward.
Every line in that book was his. Now there was one that wasn’t, and it sat there under the lamp looking like it had been there all along.
“You could have woken me at midnight,” she said. “You could have woken me when you saw the one foot.”
“You’re hired to look after Daisy.”
“I’m hired for eight weeks. Nobody wrote down which end of the clock.”
“No,” he said. “Nobody did.”
“Then next time you knock on the east room door,” she said. “I don’t care what hour it is.”
“All right.” He looked at the heifer instead of at her.
The heat lamp hummed. Out past the man-door the yard had gone the color of dishwater along the east fence, which meant they were done and it was tomorrow.
Clara stood up off the bucket. Her arms were red to the elbow, there was iodine dried in her knuckles, and straw was stuck down one side of her jeans. She was standing about a foot and a half from him. He was not moving away from that, and neither was she.
“You’re shaking,” she said.
“It’s the water.”
“Okay.” She let him keep it, which was worse.
“Clara. I want to ask you something, and you can tell me no and we never say it again.”
She had the pencil in her hand. She turned and put it into the wire of the book, squared the book on the bucket, and left her fingers on it.
“Ask me,” she said.
He had counted a great many things in this barn. The pens, the head, the hours to daylight, the miles between here and a man with a truck full of drugs. He counted the inches between the toe of his boot and the toe of hers. There were not many, and every one had been his own idea.
“Can I put my hands on your face.”
The lamp hummed over them. Down the alley a cow shifted in the straw and blew out through her nose.
“You’ve had them on worse tonight,” Clara said.
She turned the rest of the way around and looked up at him with her hands open at her sides. She did not do one thing to close the last of it. She left all of it to him, and that was more than he had asked for.
He put his right hand along her jaw. Her skin was warm under the cold sitting on top of it, and his fingers were not warm at all. She turned her cheek into his palm half an inch and stopped there.
Then he bent down and put his mouth on hers.
She came up to meet him. Her fist got into the front of his coat and shut on it, and she held there. She kissed him back slow, in the manner of a person who has decided something and will not be hurried out of it.
He got his other hand at the small of her back and spread it there and did not move it anywhere else. Her hair came the rest of the way out of the knot and dropped over his knuckles, heavy, cold on the outside from the walk across the yard and warm underneath.
She tasted of coffee she should not have been drinking at that hour. She smelled of iodine, and so did he, and neither one of them would smell of anything else before noon.
He had known this woman since he was six years old.
There was a barn floor under his boots that he had swept ten thousand times, and a heifer up behind him, and a calf that had come out blue and was not blue now.
His mouth was on Clara Gables’s mouth. None of the rest of it was any realer than that.
She said his name into it. One syllable, more breath than name.
That was what did it.
He straightened up and took his hands off her. He went backward a step, and two more, and did not stop until there were six feet of alley between them and the toe of his boot was against the bottom rail of pen three.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was mine not to do.”
Her hand was still up in front of her chest, curled where his coat had been, holding a fistful of nothing at all. She looked at it. She put it down at her side and opened it and closed it once.
The color came up her throat into her face and then went out of it. What was left underneath was worse.
She did not cry. She was not going to give him that, and he stood there in the cold with his arms hanging and let her not do it.
“Clara.”
“Don’t you dare apologize.”