CHAPTER 10
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Wyatt turned his coffee cup a half turn on the saucer and did not drink any of it.
The Blue Spruce smelled of fry grease and a bleach rag, which was how it had smelled since he was a boy.
Out the front glass the gravel of the lot was wet and throwing white light up under the awning.
Clara sat across from him with her coat still on and both hands around her own cup.
They had come in for two sacks of electrolyte powder and a box of tubes, and the feed store had one sack and a promise about Friday. So there was time to kill and Gemma had seen the truck through the front glass, and that was the end of any plan he had about killing it somewhere else.
Gemma came out of the kitchen with two plates nobody had ordered and set them down hard enough to jump the forks.
“Meatloaf,” she said. “Don’t tell me you ate, because you didn’t.
Strep is going through the second grade and Ruthie Dawson’s mother had her home with it, so watch Daisy’s throat and don’t let her tell you it’s nothing.
” She tucked a rag into her apron string.
“The council has the bridge on the agenda again, which means the hall will be full of people who never drive Six Mile Road in their lives. How are your calves?”
“Scouring,” Wyatt said.
“That’s a word. It isn’t an answer.”
“They’re scouring,” he said, and turned the cup another half turn.
Clara set her fork down. “We moved the pairs onto clean ground yesterday, up on the bench where nothing has calved. He burned the bedding out of the two bad pens this morning and stood in the smoke until it was gone.”
She turned her cup by the handle. “I tubed electrolytes twice between the milk feeds. Never in the milk. Separate, in between, an hour either side. He told me four times.”
“Three times,” Wyatt said.
“Four. You said it twice at the gate and you counted that as one.”
Gemma filled two cups that had not been touched. “And who pays for the powder and the burning and the standing in the smoke?”
“Bram was out Tuesday morning,” Wyatt said. “He’ll bill the call-out. And the bench is a truck trip. Night check used to be a walk out the door with a flashlight.”
The screen door banged and Tate Callahan came in with his hat in his hand. The scanner in his coat pocket muttered along at a volume set for one person. He took the end of the booth without asking, and Gemma had a plate down in front of him before he was all the way seated.
“Wyatt,” he said. “Clara. I told you Sunday I’d catch you in town.”
“You caught me.”
Tate turned his fork over and put it down. “Loretta wants the flood file pulled. The engineer won’t stamp a drawing for that bridge until he has a hydrology page off the county’s own record, and the only record the county has of that water coming up over a road is four years old.”
“That’s my forty feet he’s drawing on.”
“It is.”
“He can draw whatever he wants,” Wyatt said. “I’m not signing it.”
“Nobody sent me to ask you to.” Tate salted his plate. “But the drawing goes in the packet with the file, and the file has a date on it, and people who read the packet will put those two things next to each other. That’s not me doing that. That’s just how a packet reads.”
Wyatt set the cup down square in the ring it had made on the saucer.
“Then they can read it.”
“That’s between you and Loretta. I’m the clerk in this part.
” Tate ate a while. Then he sat back with the flat voice he used when he was reading a thing off a page in his head.
“Strangest document I ever handled, and I’ve handled a lot of paper about that water.
Reads like a weather report until the last page.
Minor child recovered from vehicle by a passerby prior to arrival. Passerby declined to be named.”
Wyatt turned the cup.
“Declined.”
“A civilian’s a witness. A witness can decline to be identified.”
“And the county lets that stand.”
“The county has let it stand ever since,” Tate said. “There’s no rule that makes a person put a name on a line. It’s a curiosity. Every county’s got a drawer full of them.”
Gemma came by with the pot and set her hand on Tate’s shoulder on her way past. “You are going to talk about filing in my café at one o’clock in the afternoon.
There is pie and then there is the last of the pie, and I close at two, and the last of it goes home with somebody today.
” She looked at Clara. “How’s the house on Larkspur? Any word out of that Bozeman woman?”
“Two showings,” Clara said. “Neither of them got out of the car.”
“In March they don’t,” Gemma said. “In June they will and they’ll pay too much for it and put a hot tub on your mother’s porch. And then what? Then you’ve got a check and a suitcase and a room in Denver with somebody else’s name on the lease.”
She slid the pie plate onto the table between them and stood there with the pot going cold in her hand. “You could say the thing, Clara. Out loud. To me. I’ve kept worse than whatever it is, and I’ve kept it longer.”
“I could,” Clara said. “Your crust is better than it was in the fall.”
“It is not, I changed nothing.”
“Then it’s the weather,” Clara said, and cut the pie in half and pushed the bigger half at Wyatt, and Gemma let her have it because Gemma had a screen door full of people at the register.
Six Mile Road came up wet and the glare off it lay in a long white band under the visor all the way out of town.
Wyatt drove with one hand. The heater ran on the low setting because the high one smelled like a burning sock.
The one sack of powder rode behind the seat and the box of tubes rode on Clara’s lap because there was nowhere else for it.
South of the cattle guard the ditches were running and the ground on the sunny side of every fence post had let go, and on the shady side it was gray and hard yet. Two warm days in late March meant nothing. The country took them back on the third one and charged interest.
He heard Mill Creek before the road bent down to it.
Then it was there, brown and fast and hauling willow trash, running loud between the two concrete slabs of the low-water crossing.
He slowed. He had not decided to slow. The gauge painted on the culvert wing showed water partway up the second band, and he read it out of habit and put the number where he put numbers.
Clara looked out the far window from the bend down to the top of the far grade. The truck came up onto dry gravel and the sound dropped off behind them.
“I like this window,” she said. “Yours has a crack in it.”
“Rock off a gravel truck.”
“Well. Mine’s a better window.” She pulled her knot of hair tighter and set the pencil back through it. “Gemma is going to feed us until one of us confesses to something. What time does the bus put Daisy at the lane?”
“Twenty of four. It’s late when the road’s soft.”
“And you’ll be where.”
“Corrals, or the third pen.” He counted the run of it without wanting to: the lane end to the porch, the porch to the corral gate, the gate to the pen door. “I hear the brakes from either.”
“I know you do,” Clara said.
They went a while with only the washboard under the tires.
“That page Tate wants,” Wyatt said. “The water page.”
“What about it.”
“I couldn’t tell you one line that’s in it. I don’t know who the county talked to. I don’t know if they talked to me.” He put his hand back on the wheel and left it there. “I don’t remember that spring. Not the church. Not the weeks after it.”
Clara was quiet long enough that he checked the mirror for something to do.
“Two years, once, you and me,” she said, “and I never heard you say that.”
“Say what.”
“That there was something you couldn’t account for.”
“Harlan says I ran the whole calving. He says I pulled a backwards one in the dark and told him what to hold.” Wyatt watched the road. “I’ll take his word. I slept in the shop that spring, on the cot, and I know that because the cot was still made up wrong in June and I don’t remember making it.”
“Okay,” Clara said.
She asked him nothing else, which was not her habit, and she looked out her window at the fence line running past, twelve miles of it waiting on him with the frost coming out of the posts.
He did the barn before the house. There was a calf in the third pen with its ear down and its eye sunk back, and he warmed the water at the hydrant and mixed the powder in and got the tube down it while it stood there and let him, which was the part he did not care for.
A calf that fights you has something left.
He hung the bag up and counted while it emptied.
Then he washed the tube out at the hydrant until his hands went numb, and hung it on its nail, and forked the wet bedding out of the pen and into the barrow and wheeled it to the burn pile and lit it with the road flare that was cheaper than doing it twice.
The smoke went flat along the ground and came back at him and he stood in it because standing upwind meant walking around the pile.
That was the whole of it. Powder, water, warmth, clean straw, and a truck trip up to the bench at midnight because the pairs were no longer a walk from the door.
Bram had said the same four things and then written a call-out on a pad, and the pad copy was on the kitchen counter under the calving book where Wyatt had put it face down.
The south boards of the porch had been in the sun since noon.
The warmth came through his jeans when he sat down on the step and it did not last past the first inch of shade.
The north end of the rail never got the sun.
Levi’s jar stood there where it stood, a two-quart glass jar with a rust ring on the lid, packed to the shoulder with creek rock.