CHAPTER 13 #2
“God, no.”
“Then, all right.” He looked out at the alley. “I rewired a heater in that shop one whole winter. Heater worked fine when I started. I’d go out after supper and sit with it until the light went.”
“Did you.”
“Twice. Took it apart twice and put it back the same both times.”
He wiped his palms down his knees and left them there.
“That’s not the same thing as eleven dead plants on a windowsill.”
“It’s the same thing.”
That was four. Four, and the fourth was the worst, because his hand lay on the dirt eight inches from her knee. There was a scab across that palm under the glove leather and she knew exactly what it looked like. She sat on her own hand instead.
The last of it went fast because everybody wanted it to. By four the alley was empty and the pairs were out in the home meadow finding each other. Forty cows and forty calves called at once until each one had the right one. It was the loudest the place had been since she came home.
Clara took the empty jugs to the hay shed and set them inside the door. When she came out, Wyatt had his shoulders against the shed boards, out of the wind, pulling the glove off his right hand with his teeth.
The whole county was fifty yards away. Sadie was rolling the vaccine cooler up a tailgate. Gemma was arguing with Caleb about a pan. A radio was going in a truck cab. The fire was down to coals with a thin gray line of smoke standing straight up out of it.
Clara walked over and stood in front of him with a foot of daylight between them.
“Your hand’s bleeding again.”
“It isn’t.”
“It was this morning, and you carried a hot iron on it anyway.”
He held it up. The scab had cracked at one end and dried again, with dirt worked into the edge of it. He turned the hand so she could see, then let it drop.
“It’s closing,” he said.
She had counted twenty-two by then. Twenty-two times since dark that she had not reached for him. Going past him in the alley. Taking the iron out of his hand. Standing at the fire with her shoulder six inches from his sleeve.
She had thought the counting would settle her. It made a stack, and stacks go over.
“I’m going to,” Clara said. “Say a word and I won’t.”
He did not say a word. He stopped against the boards and his bare hand came up off his knee and hung open in the air, waiting on her. She took hold of the front of his jacket and kissed him.
He tasted like coffee and smoke. His hand came to her jaw first, careful, only the fingers. Then his whole palm was against her cheek, rough where the scab was, warm, and she turned her face into it and kissed him again with her hand flat on his chest. The boards creaked behind him.
It was not a dark barn and it was not three seconds long. It was the middle of the afternoon in April with the town fifty yards off. She did it in the daylight, where she could see his face while it happened.
His other hand came to the small of her back and stayed there, open, holding nothing tightly.
Her fingers went up into the hair at the base of his skull, damp, smelling of woodsmoke.
When she drew away an inch he came after her.
She laughed against his mouth, and he made a sound that was nearly a laugh too, which she had not heard out of him since she was eighteen years old.
“Clara,” he said, once, into her hair.
“I know.”
They stood there breathing. He put his forehead down against hers and left it while somebody out by the fire called for a shovel. She smoothed his collar flat with two fingers and stepped away into the wind.
Sadie got up on the running board of the feed truck with the clipboard and read it out so everybody could hear.
“A hundred and six done. Two we’ll get in the morning.”
“Which two?” Caleb said.
“The heifer with the bad eye and that little bull that got under the panel. They’ll keep till breakfast.”
Somebody clapped somebody on the back. Somebody else said it was a good crop, said it out loud, in front of everybody.
And every person in that corral could do the arithmetic on a hundred and six calves on the ground, and what that made in October, and what was owed at a bank in June.
Wyatt stood in the open with his glove on and let sixteen people do it in their heads in front of him.
Harlan came up beside him with his thermos lid in his good hand.
“Sixteen people and one fire,” he said. “Your father would have called that a good day. Cold’s coming early.”
“It is,” Wyatt said.
Harlan drank off the lid and screwed it back down.
“Wind’s swinging north tonight. You’ll want that windbreak gate open before you sit down.”
“I’ll get it before I sit down.”
The last trailer went up the lane at half past five with its lights on.
The temperature dropped like something had let go of it.
Clara walked the corral picking up tag backings and a glove somebody had left on a post. Wyatt came along the fence toward her with the sun all the way down behind the shop.
“Stay past the eight weeks, Clara. I’m asking you.”
She stopped with the glove in her hand. Down in the meadow a cow was still calling for a calf that had already found her.
She said nothing. She had a whole sentence ready and it was a promise, and she did not know whether she could keep it. So she stood there and let the wind take the smoke smell off the coals.
Wyatt waited. He was a man who counted things, and he counted whatever it was he counted.
“Cold in an hour,” he said. “Bring the jugs in.”
He took the glove out of her hand and turned toward the house. He did not ask twice.
On the porch, Ruthie was waiting on her mother with her boots off. Daisy sat beside her on the step, with Levi’s jar up on the rail above them both. Clara came up the steps with the jugs and set them inside the door.
“Somebody sang to me one time when I was cold,” Daisy said, to the yard, to nobody. “I don’t know who it was.”
“Biscuit’s got a burr in his tail,” Ruthie said.
“I know it. It has to come out with the comb and not the brush.”
“The brush is faster,” Ruthie said.
“The brush pulls.”
Headlights came down the lane for Ruthie. Out by the shed Gemma’s voice went up, calling somebody about a pan she wanted returned. Clara stood with her hand on the doorframe and the cold coming through her sleeves, and she did not move until Daisy got up and went in to wash.
Wyatt came in at eight and ate standing up. Harlan took his coffee out to the bunkhouse. Daisy fell asleep on the front room floor with her boots still on. Clara carried her up, and Wyatt took the stairs behind them, and he said good night from the hallway without touching either of them.
In the east room she sat on the window seat and pushed her sleeves up. Her forearms were scorched pink from wrist to elbow and would peel by Thursday. Downstairs a door shut. The house made the noise it made when it was full and settling.
She took the bag out from beside the window seat and put it all back, one thing at a time, then folded it flat and slid it behind the dresser where she would not have to look at it.