CHAPTER 13
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The water jugs banged her knees the whole way across the corral. It was dark yet. The mud held the shape of her boots instead of pulling at them. At the far end Caleb had the propane burner lit, a low blue roar with the irons racked over it, and the light off it did not reach her hands.
She set the jugs on the tailgate of the feed truck and turned the handles out. Somebody always wanted water before six and nobody should have to hunt for it. Past the corrals the low meadow had gone green in the last week. The wind coming off it smelled of sweetgrass and cold dirt.
“You want to stand a step off that,” Caleb said. He had a wrench in one hand and no gloves on at all. “A propane fire won’t hold heat like wood will, so if you leave an iron sitting—”
“Caleb,” Clara said.
“—it draws down and you get a smear instead of a brand, and then you’ve got a calf out there wearing half a letter for the rest of its life. That’s all I’m telling you.”
“Okay,” Clara said.
Caleb turned the wrench over twice, which was what he did instead of stopping.
“Wood’s better. I’d have built a wood fire. Rick’s width of dry pine and you’d have coals holding all morning.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Wyatt said propane, and Wyatt’s usually right about it, which is the aggravating part. You can’t even get a good argument going.”
A heifer came up the alley on the wrong side and put her shoulder into the gate. Sadie got there with one boot on the bottom board and both arms over the top. The gate swung shut against the animal’s hip and held.
“Dammit, Caleb, the gate. Sorry, girl—not you, him.”
“I was explaining the fire to Clara.”
Sadie let the heifer through and dropped the chain over the post.
“Explain it to her at the wedding. She’ll have a chair and a drink and nowhere to go.”
Caleb went. Clara counted the rigs coming down the lane while the ridge behind the house went from black to gray to the color of a nickel. Nine trucks along the fence by sunup. Sixteen people on the place, which was more people than had stood in this corral in four years.
Wyatt came out of the shop with the vaccine cooler on his shoulder. He set it on the open tailgate, where the sun would be by nine. Both gloves on. His right hand did not close all the way around the handle.
“That needs to go under the truck,” Clara said.
“It’s in the shade,” he said.
“It’s in the shade now.” She pointed east, where the light was already up over the far end of the corral. “That sun comes around the shop at nine and it’ll be sixty degrees on that tailgate by ten. Ask Bram what he thinks about warm vaccine.”
Bram was ten feet off with his kit open on a straw bale.
“Under the truck,” he said, without looking up. “A warm bottle by noon is water with a label on it. You’d be paying for water and calling it protection, and you wouldn’t know you’d done it until October.”
Wyatt picked the cooler up and set it under the rear axle. He said nothing about it, and Clara let that be the end of it.
That was one. She had decided in the dark, hauling the jugs, that she would keep a count today. Every time she did not put a hand on him. She was at one before the sun cleared the ridge.
They worked the cool while they had it. Sadie ran the ground crew like a woman who had done it since she was nine, which she had.
Nobody argued with her, including the men twice her age.
Two on the ropes and two on the ground, Bram at the head with the syringe gun, Wyatt at the fire with the irons.
Harlan had the gate, because Harlan’s hands would not do anything else anymore.
“Clara. Irons,” Sadie said. “You’re my runner. Hot one out, cold one in, and don’t you ever hand me the cold end.”
“Which end is the cold end?” Clara asked.
“The one you’re holding, or we’ll find out together. Keep your sleeves down and don’t walk behind a roped calf, and if I holler your name you stop where you are.”
That was the job she got, and she took it. Four feet off the fire the heat came at her forearms like a flat hand. By the third hour the skin there had gone pink and tight and she had stopped rolling her sleeves.
“Hold her flat, knee out from under her,” Bram said, kneeling in the churned dirt with his shoulder against a calf’s ribs. “She’ll be up and mothered in ten minutes.”
“She’s kicking,” Sadie said.
“She’s supposed to kick. You’d kick.”
“I’d kick harder.”
Bram put the tag in and let the ear go.
“You’d kick smarter. Left ear on all of them, and read the number back to the girls on the fence, because if it isn’t on that sheet it didn’t happen.”
The dust came up around ten, the way it does when forty animals move in a small space. It got in Clara’s teeth. The fire went pale in the daylight until it was only a shimmer and a smell. The smell was scorched hair. Nobody gets used to it and everybody stops mentioning it.
She hauled water twice. She hauled tags. She held a calf’s head with her knee braced in the dirt while Bram worked, and when he was done he said her name in a distracted way and moved to the next one.
At the fence, Daisy and Ruthie Dawson had the tally sheet on a clipboard wired to the second rail, with a pencil on a string.
“You do the marks and I’ll do the fives,” Daisy said.
“Why do you get the fives?” Ruthie asked.
“Because the fives go across and I do a straighter line.”
Ruthie leaned over the clipboard and studied the evidence.
“You could do the marks straight too.”
“I could. But then who does the fives?”
Ruthie considered that and evidently found it fair.
They put their heads together over the clipboard, two braids and one braid coming loose.
Clara went past them four times that morning.
Daisy did not say one word to her, or to Sadie, or to any of the nine neighbors on the place.
She talked to Ruthie the whole time, in whole sentences, about the fives.
Wyatt came down the fence line twice to look at his daughter and count the rails between her and the alley gate. The second time Daisy said something to Ruthie without turning around.
“She says can we go stand by the fire,” Ruthie said.
“No,” Wyatt said.
“She says just to see it up close, one time.”
“She can see it from there.”
Daisy put a fifth mark across four and did not argue, and that was the end of that too.
Gemma Brooks came at noon with a car full of pans. She nosed it up to the hay shed, opened the hatch, and started handing things out before anybody offered to help.
They ate off tailgates. Ham and scalloped potatoes, two roasters of beans, a sheet cake with the frosting sliding off one corner from the drive out.
Somebody set a coffee cup down on the tally clipboard and left a wet ring spreading on it.
Daisy moved the cup and put her hand over the ring, and then gave up and let the paper go soft.
Clara ate standing, with a plate on the fender. She got four bites in before Gemma came around the truck and stood too close, which was Gemma’s whole method.
“Sit down.”
“I’m fine,” Clara said.
Gemma took the plate out of her hand, looked at what was left on it, and gave it back.
“You have been carrying iron since it was dark out and your arms are the color of that ham. I watched you fill a thermos for a man you’ve never been introduced to.
Do you know he’s from Manhattan? The town, out past Three Forks, not the city.
He came because Sadie’s uncle asked him, and you poured him coffee like he was family and then you found him a chair. ”
“He’d been standing since six.”
“Everybody has been standing since six.” She took a breath she did not need. “Clara Gables. When are you going to say one true thing to that man?”
Fifty yards off, Wyatt was tipping the last of the irons into the fire with his glove pushed up his wrist.
“Not before dinner, Gemma.”
“This is dinner. I made it. I got up at four and made it.”
“Then not before cake.”
Gemma pointed the serving spoon at the tailgate without turning her head.
“There’s cake now. It’s losing its frosting by the minute and Ruthie Dawson has been at it twice already, so you tell me how long you think you’ve got.”
“Then I’ll have some cake, and I’ll have it standing up, and you can watch me do it.”
Gemma picked up the pan of potatoes and went off to make somebody else eat.
Clara took two more bites and set the plate on the fender. She sat down in the dust against the rear tire. Three things within reach needed doing. She looked at all three and stayed where she was, and that was the strangest thing she had done in a month.
Wyatt came over with a plate he had not started. He stood there a second, then sat down too, a foot and a half off, forearms across his knees.
“You’re on the ground.”
“I am,” Clara said.
“Something wrong with the ground?”
“Nothing at all. It’s a good ground. I recommend it.” She dug her boot heel in. “I want to tell you a thing, and I don’t want you to do anything with it.”
He set his plate on the dirt beside him. He did not ask what kind of thing.
“After Mama died I sat in that house and did nothing useful for weeks,” Clara said. “I want somebody here to know that about me.”
Away down the corral somebody dropped a gate chain and swore and apologized to the cow.
“I mean nothing,” she said. “I wasn’t grieving nicely and I wasn’t sorting her clothes. The mail came in and I put it on the table and it got to be a stack. One day the stack went over onto the floor and I stepped over it for eleven days.”
Wyatt turned his plate a quarter turn on the dirt and left it there.
“I ate crackers,” she said. “I let her plants die, every one, and she had eleven of them, and I watched them go brown on the sill one at a time. People here think I’m the one who shows up.
That’s the part of me that’s any good to anybody, and I’ve been spending it hard around here for a month so nobody would get around to asking what else there is. ”
“All right,” Wyatt said.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” He picked a piece of gravel out of his boot tread and flicked it away. “You want me to argue you into being useful?”