CHAPTER 9
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Clara pulled Marigold’s cinch up two holes, and the old mare let her breath out on purpose. The latigo went soft in her hand. She kept her knuckles against the warm barrel of ribs and waited, and when the mare gave it up she took the slack and buckled it.
“You have to lean on her,” Harlan said from the gate. He had the thermos lid in his right hand, hooked in the two fingers that closed. “She has been working that on people since before you went to Denver.”
“She can have one hole of it,” Clara said. “I am not going to win an argument with a horse in March.”
“Warm this morning.” He drank off the lid and screwed it down. “Wind comes west about four and takes it all off you again.”
“Is that a promise?” Clara said.
“It is a Sunday in March,” Harlan said. “That is all it is.”
Marigold swung her head around and put her nose in Clara’s coat pocket, found nothing in it, and gave up on her.
Daisy had Biscuit tied to the second rail. She had brushed his winter coat flat and combed his mane over to one side, every hair of it, and buckled the green halter on him, and nobody had said the word ride out loud yet. Her braid had come apart on the right already.
“I got the burrs out of his tail,” she said. “Both of them. They were up underneath where you can’t see them.”
“That’s the part everybody skips.” Clara pulled a hair off her sleeve.
“I don’t skip it.” Daisy set the brush on the rail, bristles down.
“I know you don’t.” Clara ran a thumb along the pony’s clean shoulder. “Who taught you to do the underneath first?”
“Nobody. It’s obvious.”
The barn door rolled and Wyatt came out with a coil of smooth wire over one shoulder and the fencing pouch swinging off his elbow. He set the coil down by the corral post. He looked at the pony for less time than it takes to look at a pony.
“Not today. Biscuit’s off on the near front.”
Daisy’s chin came up. “He was not off yesterday and nobody rode him yesterday.”
“He’s off today.” Wyatt did not look at the foot he was talking about.
“He walked from the gate to the rail this morning and he walked level on all four.” She had her hand on the pony’s neck and she left it there. “I watched his shoulder go. It went the same both sides.”
“Daisy.” He said it once and did not say it again.
“You looked at him for one second. You could look again.”
“I looked long enough,” Wyatt said.
She was working the thing through and losing it, and she knew she was losing it, and she went at it once more anyway.
“How far is it?”
“Up the meadow to where the fence turns, and some along the Six Mile trail,” Wyatt said. “Five hours of wire. There’s nothing in it for you.”
“There are birds in it.” Her voice had gone flat and careful.
“There are birds in the yard.” He picked the pouch up off the ground.
“Those are house sparrows and one magpie,” Daisy said. “They are not the same birds as up there and you know they are not.”
Wyatt set the coil down again and did not answer her, and the not answering ran on long enough that Daisy heard the whole of it.
“Go see if Harlan wants his lid filled,” he said.
Daisy went. She did not slam the house door, which was worse than slamming it would have been.
Clara crossed to the rail and ran her hand down the pony’s near front and leaned on his shoulder until he gave her the foot.
Mud was packed in hard all around the frog, a winter of it.
She dug it out corner to corner with the pick from Daisy’s coat pocket, and thumbed the frog, and set the foot down and picked it up again and squeezed the heels between her hands.
The pony leaned on her and went on chewing.
“There is nothing in that foot.”
Wyatt bent and got the coil up onto his shoulder.
“Bring the stretcher off the shop wall,” he said. “The long one with the good dog on it.”
He had not been looking at the pony when he said no.
He had been looking out past the corral and down the home meadow to where the ground falls away and the willows start, and then at the sky over the willows, and then at his own hands.
That was where the answer came from and both of them knew where it came from.
Clara dropped the hoof pick in her pocket and let it go by her.
Harlan came off the gate with the thermos under his arm. “I’ll have her fed and lying to me about her homework by dark,” he said. “Go on, before that wind finds you up there.”
“She brushed him for an hour, Harlan.”
“I know it.” He looked at the sky, which had nothing in it. “Snow’ll come back Tuesday, I expect.”
Daisy came out of the house with the spiral notebook and held it up at Clara with her arm straight out.
“Take it.” The cover was bent over from riding in a coat all winter.
“It’s yours.” Clara put her hands behind her.
“You have to write what you see.” She did not lower the arm. “The date, and where it was on the fence, and then the bird.”
“What if I get it wrong?”
“Write the color and how big and I will tell you what it was,” Daisy said. “Don’t write it pretty. Write it true.”
Clara buttoned the notebook into her coat pocket. Daisy walked over to Biscuit and put her forehead against his neck and stood that way, and she did not watch them ride out the gate.
Two hours out, the sun was high and thin and had no weight in it. It came warm along the left side of Clara’s face and did nothing whatever for her feet. The smell was horse and leather and wet sage lifting wherever a hoof broke the ground.
They rode the low fence line where it runs the home meadow and bends toward the Six Mile trail.
The coil of smooth wire was lashed behind Clara’s cantle.
When Marigold dropped off a cut bank the coil rang, one clear note, and rang again at the next bank, and Clara got to liking the sound of it before the first mile was out.
Wyatt found the first broken span. The top wire lay in the grass with the rust flaked off it in a long stripe, the second wire was down with it, and a cedar post leaned out at the shoulder.
“Elk,” he said. He had his hand under the wire, lifting it. “They come through in February and they don’t jump it, they lean on it. Three of these between here and the bend.”
“Move the fence,” Clara said.
“Move it where?” He walked the leaning post with his boot.
“Up on the bench. Where they aren’t walking.”
“They walk there too. They walk wherever the wind takes the snow off.” He straightened up with the wire in his fist. “My father had it up on the bench. It came down here because he got tired of climbing to it.”
“So you inherited the walking,” Clara said.
“I inherited the fence.”
She held the two ends together while he set the stretcher and cranked it, and the wire came up out of the grass and off the ground and sang when he quit. He tied a splice into it, wrapping tight against the wrap.
“Slant the staple. Drive it home and the wire can’t travel.”
“Slant it which way?”
“Down and across the grain,” he said. “Straight in and the post splits, and then you’re doing the same post twice.”
She set one and hit it and it went in on the second hit, and the sound came off the post flat and short and pleased her more than it had any business pleasing her.
She did four more. Two she had to pull and reset.
Wyatt let her pull them without saying a word about it, which she put down as a kind of manners.
“How much of this is there?”
“Twelve miles.” He said it the way a man says a price he has paid.
“And how much have we done?” She had the hammer hanging in her hand.
He looked up the line and down it and did not lie about it. “Not a mile.”
“Harlan can’t close his hand on a hammer,” Clara said.
“I know it.”
“Does he know that you know it?” Clara set another staple and hit it.
“He knows I gave him the gate and the calving book and the truck.” Wyatt drove a staple in one stroke, which was the third one he had done that way and the first she had let herself count. “That’s how it gets said out here.”
“That is a whole language for one word.”
“It works.” He wrapped the tag end down and cut it off short.
“It works until somebody wants the word.” She got the next staple out of the pouch. “I’m not saying it doesn’t work.”
“What does a mile of this cost?”
“Wire, staples, posts I have to buy because the good ones are gone.” He held the splice while she drove. “Call it four hundred a mile if the work is mine.”
“And twelve miles of it.”
“And two hundred and forty pairs to get on the ground first, and the note at the bank comes due in June.” He moved down to the next post. “The fence waits. It has waited before.”
“Until the elk come through and your cows are on the county road.”
“Then it doesn’t wait.”
“That is not a plan. That is a coin.”
“It’s the plan I have,” Wyatt said. “I could say it prettier. It wouldn’t come out truer.”
They walked the horses a quarter mile and started the second span. The wind had not turned. The sun sat warm on the one side of her and cold came up through her boot soles wherever she stood in the shade of a brace.
“Mrs. Finch has them doing a bird a week,” Clara said. “Daisy got the great horned owl and she is not pleased about it.”
“Why not.”
“Because everybody wants the owl and she wanted the dipper. She says nobody in that room has looked at a dipper.”
“Nora Finch had me in that same room,” Wyatt said. “She had me do a bird a week too.”
“Which one did you get?”
“Killdeer.”
“That’s a good bird.”
“It’s a loud bird that runs on the road,” he said. “She gave me a C.”
“On a killdeer.”
“On the handwriting.”
Clara laughed with two staples in her teeth and had to take them out. Down the line a meadowlark started and quit, the way they do in March when they have not decided yet.
She reached through the old wire to hold a splice steady while he cranked, and a barb she had not accounted for opened the back of her left hand along the knuckles. She said a word. She kept hold of the splice until he had the tension on it.
“Let me see it.”