CHAPTER 10 #2
Clara came out with two cups and sat down on the step with a hand’s width of board between them.
Pilot came around the house, looked at the two of them, and went under the steps where it was cool.
Nobody had had the lid off the jar since the boy put it on.
Rain got in around the rusted ring and went out again and left a tide line on the glass.
Wyatt looked at the gravel, which was still throwing light.
“He filled it wrong,” he said. “All the ugly ones and none of the good.”
Clara held her cup and said nothing at all.
“You could hand him a good one. Flat, or that green they go when they’re wet. He’d take it, and set it on the rail, and pick up a brown one out of the pile. Every time. I stopped handing him good ones and he never asked why I quit.”
Wyatt put his elbows on his knees. “Fifth one down is quartz. White. Big as a loaf. He couldn’t lift it. Carried it up the bank against his chest and set it down twice on the way and would not let me take it off him, and then it wouldn’t go in and he cried about it, and then it went in.”
He turned his cup on the board and did not drink it.
“He counted them out loud every time. If he lost the count he started at the bottom again. One night it took him past supper and Annie let it, and I came in and the two of them were on the floor by the door with the whole jar out on a towel.”
“He couldn’t whistle. He’d blow. He’d blow at a dog until he got dizzy and sat down in the dirt, and Pilot would come anyway because Pilot comes for anybody.”
“He wouldn’t wear the boots we bought him. He put a pair of Harlan’s wool socks over his sneakers and called them his barn feet and went out in them all winter and I let him.”
“He ate the crust first. Every time, off every piece of bread, all the way around, and then the soft part in one go with both hands.” Wyatt turned his cup on the board. “He asked me once if the calves knew their own names. I said no. He kept using them anyway.”
“He hated the sound the squeeze chute makes. He’d stand at the far gate with his hands over his ears and watch the whole thing through his fingers, and he would not go inside where it was quiet.”
Clara did not touch the jar. She did not look at it and she did not look away from it either.
“That summer I was going to put him up on Biscuit by himself,” Wyatt said.
“He’d only ever been led. He was going to hold the reins and I was going to walk at the shoulder and let him think I wasn’t holding anything.
” He rubbed the scar at the base of his thumb with the other thumb.
“And the gate. Leaning off and pushing a gate open from the saddle. He’d been practicing it on foot off an upside-down bucket by the corral, leaning way out with his arm stuck straight, falling off the bucket about every third try. ”
The creek was too far down the road to hear from the step. A magpie came along the fence and left.
“I can’t get his voice back,” Wyatt said. “I get the rocks going in the jar.”
He stopped. Then he said the rest, because stopping was worse.
“That’s the sound. Him dropping them in one at a time on top of the others. Four years and that’s what’s left, and it isn’t him.” He looked at the north end of the rail. “I never told Daisy she could put one in.”
Clara set her cup on the board beside her foot.
“Then that’s a thing you still get to do,” she said.
She leaned over and put her forehead against his shoulder. Her hand went flat on the warm board between them and he put his own down beside it, and there were two fingers of board between his hand and hers, and he counted it and left it there. He could have moved it. He counted it again.
He got to forty and she had not moved and he had not either.
Two fingers of board is a distance a man can close without thinking about it.
He thought about it. His hand stayed where he had put it down, and the warmth came up out of the board into his palm, and the sun went off the south end of the porch and took the warmth with it by inches.
Then he took the checkbook out of his coat, wrote it on his knee, tore it off, and put it in her hand.
“Second week,” he said. “In your hand, since that’s how it’s done now.”
“Okay.” She folded it in half without reading it and put it in her jacket pocket, and her fingers stayed in the pocket a second longer than the check took.
“You could have left it on the counter,” she said.
“I did that once.”
“You did.” She picked her cup up off the board. “Six hundred a week is what we said, and it’s six hundred, and you didn’t round it up to make yourself feel better about the last hour. I want you to know I noticed.”
“It’s what we said.”
“That is what I mean,” Clara said.
The bus came up Six Mile with its brakes going and stopped at the end of the lane. Wyatt stood up when he heard the brakes and let the brakes be why. They were not why.
Daisy came up the lane with her braid mostly out of itself and her coat open and her pack dragging by one strap. She stopped and pulled her hair out of her mouth.
“Mrs. Finch says it’s strep,” she said. “Two people in my row were gone today. I didn’t sit by either of them and I didn’t drink out of the fountain, and I didn’t share the green marker with anybody, either.”
“Good.”
“I got a hundred on the spelling.” She said it to Clara, not to him. “Except I spelled it the English way on one and she counted it anyway because it’s a way.”
“It’s a way,” Clara said.
Daisy looked past them both, at the barn.
“Can I go down and look at the sick one by myself?”
“I’ll come.”
“That isn’t by myself,” Daisy said.
“No,” Wyatt said. “It isn’t.”
She thought about it with her chin down, the way she did when she was deciding whether a thing was worth the rest of the afternoon, and decided it was not.
She went past him up the steps and into the house, and the screen banged, and her boots went across the kitchen floor and stopped at the sink where she had been told they should stop.
Clara stood in the doorway with her shoulder in the screen and Daisy’s pack hanging off two fingers. She stayed there.
“Do you remember what you said to me in the barn?”
Wyatt looked up at her from the step. “No.”
“It doesn’t matter.”