CHAPTER 12
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Wyatt stood at the counter with the calving book open and ran the pencil down the tally column for the third time.
The number at the bottom did not move. It had not moved on the second pass either, and he had known that before he started.
Rain had quit sometime before five and gone to a drip off the eave, one drop about every two seconds at the low corner where the gutter pulled loose in November.
Wet wool steamed on the stove rail. Out the window the yard lay gray and flat with no shadow anywhere in it, the top of the ground drying and the bottom of it still soup.
The pencil in the wire of the book was yellow and sharpened to a point. His own was a flat carpenter’s pencil out in the door pocket of the truck, where it had been all week. He wrote with hers anyway.
Two hundred and forty pairs to calve, and two of them gone this week. He set the point at the head of the column and started down again.
Behind him Daisy dragged her chair out and sat on one foot.
“Clara, is my green shirt dry?”
“Rail by the stove, second one down.” Clara didn’t turn around from the toaster. “The collar’s still damp. Wear the flannel over it till lunch, and don’t take the flannel off at recess.”
“It isn’t cold at recess.”
“It’s cold at recess. The wind came around north in the night.” Clara turned the toast over on the rack with two fingers and put it back under the coil.
“My boots are wet inside.”
“Then double the wool socks,” Clara said. “Gray pair off the rail. Not the red ones, the red ones are damp in the heel.”
Three seconds, question to answer. Every time. He counted them because he counted everything, and because it had taken him a day and a half once to tell his own daughter where her boots were.
Daisy chewed the corner off her toast.
“Is the bum calf still alive?”
“He is,” Wyatt said.
“Is he going to stay alive?”
“Harlan’s got him on a bucket.” Wyatt laid the pencil down across the open page.
“That isn’t the same question.”
“It’s the only answer anybody’s got before supper,” Clara said. “Eat the crust, bug.”
“Harlan says a bum calf takes the bucket by the third day or he never takes it.”
“Then today’s the day we find out.” Clara put the lid back on the jam and set it behind the salt, out of reach. “Crust.”
“Does he have a name?”
“He has an ear tag.”
“That isn’t a name.”
“Nobody names one before the third day,” Clara said. “That’s the rule in this house and I didn’t make it up.”
Daisy ate the crust. She looked at him across the table with Annie’s eyes in her face and no expression on it at all.
“Are you coming out to the bus, or is Clara?”
“Clara is.”
Daisy pushed her plate an inch to the left and squared it against the edge of the table.
“I could walk down by myself. It’s straight the whole way and you can see me from the window.”
“Not by yourself.”
“Ruthie walks to hers.”
“Ruthie’s is at her kitchen window,” Wyatt said.
She nodded. No argument, no second ask. She put her plate in the sink on her own and got her coat off the hook without being told, and the whole thing took less than a minute.
Clara pulled her jacket on and held the door. “Lunch is in the front pocket. Don’t trade the apple.”
“Ruthie doesn’t want the apple.”
“Then nobody has to trade anything.”
The door shut. Wyatt stayed at the counter and watched them go down the drive, past the shop and out to the cattle guard where the bus stopped. Four hundred yards there and four hundred back. Eight or nine minutes in the mud, going by how she walked.
He looked at the column again. Thursday’s line said one thing and today’s said another, and the difference was two.
The scab across his right palm had gone tight overnight. He shifted his grip on the pencil and it split at the base of the thumb, a thin hot line under the wrap, and he kept his hand where it was.
Boots on the step. The door, the stamp, the jacket back on the hook.
Clara came in on a draft of cold air that smelled like wet gravel, went to the sink, and washed her hands.
Then she stood at his elbow and read the page upside down, which she could do, and had been able to do since they were nine.
“Your count’s off by two from Thursday. Did you lose two, or did somebody forget to write them down?”
“I lost two.”
He closed the book with his hand flat on it.
She didn’t move away. She got the dish towel and dried between her fingers, one at a time, still reading the cover of the book like the number was printed on the outside of it.
“Then let me see the page and I’ll keep it straight for you.”
“The numbers are mine.”
“I’ve been writing in that book for two weeks.”
That was true. It was her hand on the last four days of the heifer column, and she had caught the ear tag he’d entered twice and fixed it without saying so.
“You’ve got a heifer in pen three that’s been up and down since Wednesday and nobody has written a word about her either,” Clara said. “I’m not asking to run your ranch. I’m asking to hold a pencil.”
The bank’s paper was in the drawer under the phone book.
He knew the last paragraph of it by heart, and he knew she did too, because she’d had it in both hands under the lamp with her thumb holding the fold down and had not brought it up since.
Eight per cent was what he could carry. Two this week put him over the line for the week and the week was not done, and the first of June did not move for weather.
His hand pressed down until the cover buckled.
“You’re paid, Clara. That’s the arrangement. Mind my daughter and let the rest of it alone.”
The furnace came on under the floor. She hung the towel on the oven handle, squared it, and put her hands in her back pockets.
He should have stopped there. There was a version of this where he stopped there, and he could see the shape of it, and he went past it anyway, because the other thing was already up in his throat and had been climbing since Tuesday.
“When the eight weeks are up you’ll get in that car, and I’ll still be standing in this kitchen with this same page in front of me. There’s no sense in you learning it.”
The drip off the eave went on. One, and then another.
“Okay,” Clara said.
That was all. She didn’t raise her voice, and she didn’t ask him the second question, the one she always asked, the one he had spent since March bracing for and never once minded.
She rinsed Daisy’s plate. She set it in the rack, tipped so it would drain. She wiped the table down and folded the cloth over the tap, and she went past him and up the stairs, and her tread on the fourth step was the same as every other morning.
Wyatt opened the book and looked at the column and could not have said what any of it added to.
The north fence had three posts down and forty feet of wire in the mud where a cottonwood limb had come across it in the night.
He got the spinner and the stretcher out of the truck and stood in the borrow ditch with water over his boot tops. Twelve miles of fence to walk this spring, and this was the run that mattered, because on the far side of it was the county road and on this side of it would be pairs.
He cut out the smashed section and spliced in new. The wraps he could do. The staples he could not, because the right palm would not take the hammer handle, and every time he tried it the wrap went wet and his fingers opened on their own.
So he drove them off-handed. Left hand, short strokes, the hammer choked up almost to the head. He bent nine staples for every one that went home clean and had to pull the bent ones back out with the claw, and the ground was too soft under the corner post to hold anything without a shim.
It should have been a two-man job. Harlan could have held the stretcher, and Wyatt did not go get him.
Noon went by somewhere. The wind came steady out of the north and dried the top inch of everything, so the ground looked walkable and then took his boot to the ankle when he stepped on it.
By the time he set the last post the wrap had gone through and there was blood on the hammer handle and on two of the staples. He wiped the handle on his jeans. He tightened the brace, walked the run, and put his weight on the wire twice.
Three o’clock, near enough.
The bulb over the man-door was still burning when he came down through the corrals with the spinner in his left hand.
Harlan had the bum calf in the alley on a bucket, up to its eyes in it, tail going in a circle. He stood over it with his thermos lid steaming in the hand that still closed all the way.
“He’s taking it,” Harlan said.
“He is.”
“Third day he’s taken it. Second day he only thought about it.” Harlan drank. “What’s the fence.”
“Three posts and a run. It’s back up.”
“Alone.”
“It’s back up,” Wyatt said.
“Caleb’s on tonight. Sadie’s got the dress fitting in Bozeman and she’ll tell you about it twice.”
“Then I’ll take the two o’clock check.”
“You took Wednesday’s and you took Thursday’s.” Harlan turned the lid in his fingers. “A man goes a good long while on four hours. Then he don’t, and nobody hands him a card that says which night it is.”
The calf pulled its head out of the bucket, slung milk at both of them, and put its head back in. Harlan looked at the wrapped hand instead of the calf. He looked at it long enough that Wyatt shifted the spinner to hang on the outside of his leg, out of the light.
“The spring Annie died you never said a word to a living soul for—” Harlan stopped.
The calf sucked and the bucket knocked the boards.
“—wind’s come around north. It’ll dry the top and leave the bottom soup underneath. You’ll bog the tractor if you go out through the meadow gate. Take it around by the shop.”
There was a question sitting on the ground between them and Wyatt could have picked it up. Ten words would have done it. He counted the staples left in his coat pocket instead, eleven of them, and moved them to the other hand.
“I’ll go around by the shop,” he said.
“That girl was out here at six with a flashlight, going down the pens, before you were off the stairs.”
“I know it.”