CHAPTER 11 #2
“You’d want it early,” Wyatt said.
“I’d want it green.” Mitch set one boot on the low rail of the gate. “June through September. I’d take my cattle off before the weather turns, and you’d get it back with grass on it, because I don’t ruin ground I have to lease again.”
“And my pairs?”
“That’s your arithmetic. I won’t do it for you and then tell you it comes out.”
Wyatt stood with the gloved right hand hooked by the thumb in his belt, out of the wind and out of sight.
“Bank wants a calf count off you,” Mitch said. “Mine wants one off me the same week.”
“How many did you lose?”
“Nine. Two sets of twins I couldn’t keep on a cow. Weather.” Mitch turned his hat once in his hands. “You?”
Wyatt looked at the pairs in the near pen and counted something and stopped counting.
“I can carry eight per cent. That’s what I can carry.”
“I know it.”
The wind came across the corral and neither man moved out of it. Mitch was not enjoying one minute of this. That was the whole trouble with the man.
“Think on it a week,” he said. “After that I go ask the outfit north of me, and once I ask I’m committed. I’d rather have your grass. It’s closer and it’s better and I’ve been looking at it my whole life.”
“I’ll call you.”
“You won’t. But you’ll stand next to me at the sale barn and say something about the wind, and I’ll know.” Mitch put his hat on. “Ma’am.”
“Mr. Lawson.”
He drove off south. The dust went sideways off the road in the west wind. Wyatt watched the truck until it was past the cattle guard.
“He’s not wrong,” Clara said.
“No.” Wyatt pulled the glove straight on his right hand.
“That’s the trouble with him.”
“That’s the trouble with him.” Wyatt picked up one of her buckets with his left hand. “Twenty-two dollars a pair a month is money I could put against the note in June.”
“You’d have the money in hand by then.”
“I’d have the money and no grass.” He set the bucket down on the rail plank without spilling any of it.
“And if you keep the grass?”
“Then I’ve got grass and nothing to put against the note but calves.” His thumb went over the wire on the gate latch and stopped there.
“And then what’s on the high pasture in July?”
“His cattle,” Wyatt said, and went into the barn.
The bus dropped Daisy at the mailbox at twenty to four with the wind coming straight down the road at her. Clara was already outside with the wool hat, the one with the flaps that tied under the chin, and she held it out before Daisy got to the gate.
“Take the one with the flaps. It’s the wrong wind for you.”
Daisy pulled it on and tied it without arguing, which was rarer than the hat.
“Ruthie says magpies can count to seven. They can count to four.”
“That’s more than I’d have guessed.”
“It’s a lot for a bird,” Daisy said, and went past her at a trot, and the screen door banged.
Supper was elk stew and biscuits. Daisy went up at eight without being told twice, because she had spelling in the morning and had decided on her own that this mattered.
Bram Ellison’s bill lay open on the pine table where Wyatt had left it before supper. Clara cleared the plates around it. She did not move it and she did not turn it over. She read it anyway, because it was face up under the lamp. The line at the bottom of the invoice read 1,412.00.
Wyatt came in from the barn and stood at the counter with his back to her, running cold water over his right hand for a long time.
“Sit down,” she said.
“I’ve got the two heifers to look at.” The water kept running over the hand.
“Harlan’s got the two heifers. He told me so himself, at the door, with his coat already on.”
The water kept running.
“Did Bram come out twice?”
“Three times,” Wyatt said. “The prolapse, the twins, and the one Tuesday I couldn’t turn. He’s fair. He didn’t charge me the second trip.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t fair.”
“No.” He shut the water off. “You didn’t.”
“Will he wait on it?”
“He’ll wait until August if I ask him to.” Wyatt shook the water off his fingers and did not reach for the towel. “That’s the part I don’t care for.”
“Because you’d owe him.”
“Because he’d let me.”
He sat down. He put his right hand on the table palm up, because there was no other way to put it, and it was worse than she had let herself expect.
The red line of the morning had opened into a broad wet stripe from the base of the thumb across to the little finger.
The skin at both sides was rolled and white.
“Give me your hand.”
“It’s a rope burn.”
“That wasn’t what I asked you.”
He turned his wrist over another half inch and left it there.
She washed it first, with the water as warm as he could stand, and he made no sound at all.
She did not hurry. The tendons in his forearm came up and went down and came up again.
She dried it along the edges with the corner of a clean towel.
She put the ointment on with two fingers, working from the thumb across. Then she started the gauze.
One turn. Around the palm, under the knuckle of the thumb, across the heel of his hand. Flat, no wrinkle, no pull. She smoothed the turn down with her thumb before she laid the next one over it, and the next, and the next after that.
It did not need eleven turns. It needed four.
The woodstove ticked. Over their heads Daisy turned over and the bed frame spoke once. His hand lay open in both of hers, heavy, warm along the wrist and cold at the fingertips. He did not close it. He did not take it away. He said nothing whatever about the number of turns.
She had a dozen things she could have said, and every one of them would have ended this, so she kept her mouth shut and kept wrapping. What it cost was that her breath would not go all the way down, and it did not go all the way down for a long time.
She tied it off at the wrist. Then there was nothing left in her hands to hold, so she put them flat on the table on either side of his.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” he said.
He got up. He took his coat off the hook with his left hand and went out to the barn. The door shut, and the wind took it the rest of the way.
Clara put the ointment and the gauze in the drawer under the counter. She wiped the table down around the bill. Then she picked the bill up to wipe under it, and the sugar bowl was sitting on a folded sheet of paper with a bank’s return address showing at one corner.
She moved the sugar bowl.
She should have set it down again on top. Instead she unfolded the sheet under the lamp with the dish towel still over her shoulder, and she read it the way she read everything, straight through and then a second time.
The letter had been under the sugar bowl since Thursday, and the last paragraph did not use the word renew anywhere in it; it said the Gallatin bank would decide against the calf count on the first of June.