CHAPTER 11
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Clara had both hands under the heifer’s jaw, and the head weighed more than anything she had ever carried.
The mud was over her boot tops. Going in, it had been cold enough to burn. Now it was only cold, which was worse. Brown water stood in the hollow, six inches of it. The heifer’s nose rode above the water by the width of a wrist.
“Higher,” Harlan said. “Under the cheekbone. Not the throat.”
Clara slid her hands up until she had the bone. The jaw was a hard ridge under wet hair. It kept trying to go down.
The heifer blew out, fast and wet, then pulled the next breath in before she had finished the first one.
“She’s breathing too quick,” Clara said.
“She’s been laying in it since dark.” Harlan came down the slope sideways, one boot at a time, testing each step before he gave it his weight. “They don’t drown in a creek, girl. They drown in six inches of their own meadow. Head first. Everything else on this place can wait an hour.”
The sun came up orange through the willow whips along the fence line. It put no warmth anywhere. Clara set her feet wider in the muck and took more of the weight.
“How long has she got?”
“Longer than you have, dressed the way you’re dressed.” Harlan crouched and ran his arm under the surface along the heifer’s shoulder. It came up black to the elbow. “She’s in past the hocks. Both sides. Yesterday’s warm softened it and then the frost came out of it overnight.”
“That isn’t an answer.” The heifer’s ear flicked water onto Clara’s wrist and then did not flick again.
“No. It isn’t.”
“What does she weigh?”
“Nine hundred. Second calver.” He wiped his forearm on the grass, which did no good at all. “Don’t try to hold all of her. Just her nose. Her nose is the only part of this asking anything of you.”
“My hands quit a while ago.” She worked her fingers against the bone and got nothing out of them.
“Then use your forearms and don’t tell me about it.”
The smell was wet manure and creek mud together. It was in her mouth as much as her nose. She counted the heifer’s breaths against her own to keep from counting minutes.
“Where’s Wyatt?” Her own voice came out with a shake in it that the cold could take the blame for.
“Shed. He had a backwards calf out of the black baldy at four this morning and he got it.” Harlan looked up the meadow. “He’ll have heard the tractor start.”
“You started the tractor before you came down here.”
“I did.” He said it to the willows and not to her.
“So you knew what you were going to find before you found it.”
“I knew where the wet ground is,” Harlan said. “I’ve known that since before his father owned it.”
Wyatt came down the fence line with a coil of rope over one shoulder and did not slow at the soft ground.
“Ear tag.”
“Can’t see it,” Clara said. “It’s under my arm.”
“Is she fighting you?” He was rolling his right sleeve above the elbow as he came.
“She’s not fighting anything. That’s what worries me.”
He waded in beside her. He took the head out of her hands with his forearm against hers and held it up without any apparent effort. She stepped away, and her fingers stayed in the shape of the jawbone for a while after there was nothing in them.
“Get the meadow gate,” he said. “I’ll bring the tractor down.”
Harlan reached the latch ahead of her, up on the firm ground.
Frozen mud had packed the slot and the pin was stiff in it.
He got his right hand around the pin, and the two smallest fingers stayed open where they always stayed open, and the pin did not move.
Clara reached past his arm, lifted it, swung the gate wide and hooked it.
“West by noon,” Harlan said, looking off at the willows. “Wind. This whole bottom will be froze hard by dark.”
“Okay.”
The tractor came down along the fence in low gear. Wyatt shut it off at the top of the bank. He got off with the rope already running through his hands, and he was looking at the short way, straight up the cut bank where the grass held.
“Behind the front legs,” he said. “Never the neck.”
“I know it.” Her arms were shaking low down in a way she could not stop.
“Then get her front end braced and stay off my rope.”
Clara looked at the bank he was measuring. It was steep and it was greasy. There was nothing on it a cow could put a foot against.
“Not up the bank. Take her down along the gravel—she’s got nothing on that side to push off of.”
“It’s forty feet farther.” He was already measuring the short way again with his eyes.
“It’s forty feet she can walk.”
He stood there with the rope in his fist and did not answer her. Down the hollow the old gravel apron ran from the stock tank to the water gap, gray and hard and rough. Somebody had laid it in years ago after getting tired of pulling cows out of exactly this.
“She’ll go up that bank,” Wyatt said. “It’s twelve feet of it.”
“It’s twelve feet of grease and she’s had a night of laying in cold water. Ask him.”
“Harlan.” He said the name without turning his head.
“Girl’s right,” Harlan said. “That bank will peel her, and she’ll quit on you halfway up, and then you’ve got her on her side with her head downhill.”
Wyatt moved the tractor. It took eight minutes, and Clara stood in the mud for all of them with her hands under the jaw again. Water crept up inside her left boot and settled there.
He came down with the rope and laid it in the muck behind the heifer’s front legs. He worked it under her chest with the flat of his hand. His sleeve went under. His jaw was set hard.
“Harlan, you’re on the head. Clara, hand me the tail of that rope and get up on the gravel.”
“I can hold the head.”
“You’ve been holding it an hour.” He did not raise his voice for any part of this.
“Then another five minutes won’t kill me.”
“Get up on the gravel,” he said, and did not look at her while he said it.
She handed him the tail of the rope. He took a wrap of it around his right palm to hold the tension while Harlan changed sides.
“Don’t wrap that on your hand, son,” Harlan said. “West wind by noon and this’ll be froze hard by dark.”
Wyatt kept the wrap.
The tractor took up the slack. The mud started giving her back one leg at a time, and each leg came out with a long wet sucking noise that went up Clara’s spine. The heifer felt the pull and quit being an object. She lunged.
The rope ran.
It went through the wrap and out of his fist. He shut his hand on it anyway, because that is what a hand does.
It burned him from the base of the thumb clean across to the little finger.
He made a sound with his mouth closed. Then he had the rope again, and he was walking, and the heifer was walking, and nobody stopped.
They brought her up the gravel at a walk. She went down once on her knees and got herself up. On dry grass she stood with her head low and her sides going. Wyatt loosed the rope off her and coiled it left-handed.
Harlan came up the gravel behind them with the halter over his shoulder. He looked at Wyatt’s hand first and then at the sky.
“I told you.”
“You did.”
“She’ll want to lay down again tonight, and it’ll be froze under her by then.” Harlan hung the halter on the gate post. “Don’t leave her the wet ground.”
“I’ll shut the water gap after dinner.”
Clara forked hay onto dry ground where the frost had not come out yet, three good forkfuls. By then the sun was over the willows and the wind had started to move.
“Where’s her calf?”
“In the shed with a bum,” Wyatt said. “Since yesterday.”
“So you knew she was missing yesterday.”
“I knew a calf was in the shed.” He put the coil over his shoulder. “That’s not the same as knowing where his mother is. Now I know where his mother is.”
“Show me your hand.”
“It’s fine.” He kept walking.
“That’s a different word than the one I used.”
He put the coil in the tractor bucket and started up the meadow. His right hand hung at his side with the fingers half open. He did not put it in his pocket. He did not look at it either, and he walked as though he had two good ones.
By ten the wind had come around west, exactly as Harlan promised, and it dried the mud on Clara’s jeans to a gray crust that flaked off on the corral rail.
At nine he had come into the shop with his right hand held out from his side and run it under the cold tap for a long time. Then he reached down a pair of gloves off the nail.
“Let me look at it.”
“It’s a glove day.” He shook the water off and reached for the leather with the hand that worked.
“It is not a glove day. It’s the first warm wind since February and you know it.”
“Then it’s a glove hand.” He got the cuff over the heel of the burned one and stopped.
“Wyatt.”
“Ma’am,” he said, and worked the leather on over the burn with his teeth in the cuff, and held the other hand out for the second glove.
She gave it to him. That was all she did about it.
Mitch Lawson’s truck came up the county road at a quarter past ten. It stopped short of the gate, the way a man stops when he means to talk across it. He got out in a clean pressed shirt with no coat over it. Clara had a bucket of milk replacer in each hand and she did not put them down.
“Wyatt.”
“Mitch.” Wyatt came out of the near pen and pulled the chain over behind him.
“You look like you had a morning.”
“Heifer in the bog. She’s up.”
Mitch nodded and looked past him at the pairs in the near pen. He did not hurry. Then he said the thing he had driven out to say.
“Twenty-two dollars a pair a month on the high pasture, June through September. I’d pay the same to anybody and I wouldn’t pay more.”
Nobody spoke for the space of one breath. The wind moved the loose end of the gate chain against the post twice.
“That’s a fair number,” Wyatt said.
“It’s a good number and you know it. That’s why I brought it out here myself instead of calling you about it.”
Clara set the buckets down after all. In her head the number ran out across seven miles of high grass and multiplied by four months and came home as a figure that would matter. Behind it stood the other half of it. His own pairs would have nowhere on this earth to spend the summer.