CHAPTER 14
◆
The home meadow gate stood wide and Wyatt stood in the gap of it. Pairs came through in twos and threes. The cows went first and the calves banged along behind them, and the grass on the far side was three days into being green.
His left hand rode the top rail. In his right he had a feed sack folded down to a corner and a pencil stub worn to the metal. A mark for the cow. A mark under it for her calf. Sun came across his forearms warm enough to matter, and the cold came up through his boot soles anyway.
Forty-one pairs, then forty-two. A killdeer ran the wheel track ahead of the last of them and stopped dead every four steps, head down, hunting something in the gravel that was not there.
He started to write the date at the top of the sack corner and got as far as the month. Then he turned the sack over and put the count on the clean side.
Forty-two out on green, out of two hundred and forty calving.
He set the calf count against the price the order buyer had said at the feed store in March, and set that against what the bank wanted the first of June.
The two numbers did not come near each other, and no run of good weather would bring them nearer.
He folded the sack small and pushed it down in his shirt pocket rather than leave it lying on the post.
The black cow with the cracked horn came through with a calf glued to her flank that had never been hers.
Her own stood hollering at the post with its head thrown up.
Wyatt swung the gate across in front of the next pair and cut the three of them out of the line.
The wrong calf broke off up the meadow to find the cow it belonged to, and the black cow put her head down and went after it, and that was the afternoon gone.
Daisy had the corral rail. One boot on the bottom board, both hands over the second, and a running account of how Ruthie Dawson got to ride in the bed of her father’s truck all the way to the feed store.
“I can get to the third rail,” she said.
“You can get to the second,” Wyatt said.
“Ruthie gets to the top of hers.”
“Ruthie’s corral is built out of pallets and it’s two rails high.” He made his mark and started the next one. “You’ve got a horse and she hasn’t. Trade you.”
“That’s not a trade, that’s a subject change.” She got her chin up over the second board to show him she was where she said she was. “Harlan says you should be able to see the whole pen from a rail. He says that’s what the top one is for.”
“Harlan is seventy-one. He gets to say what he likes.”
“Then when I’m seventy-one I’ll say it too and nobody will stop me.”
“Second rail,” he said.
“I heard you the first time.”
He turned his head to see where the black cow had taken herself. Four seconds. Five, at the outside. The rail took Daisy’s boot and gave it straight back to her.
She came off backward, turned halfway in the air, and hit chin first on ground packed hard as county gravel.
The sound of it was small. What came after was not. Blood came off her chin and down the front of her coat and onto both her wrists, more of it than a chin has any business making, and it kept coming.
He had her off the ground before he knew he had moved.
His hands went over her ribs, down both arms, over the whole of her skull front and back.
Then over all of it again. He was saying her name, all three parts of it, in a voice that had gotten away from him somewhere and was not coming when he called it.
“Daddy. Daddy, it’s my chin.”
“Don’t talk. Don’t move your head.”
“It’s my chin,” she said again, and got a hand up toward it.
Clara came off the porch at a run and crossed the yard in six steps. She went down on her knees in the dirt on Daisy’s other side and put two fingers under her jaw and lifted it.
“Chin up. Look at me. Say your whole name for me.”
“Daisy Ann Miller.” It came out thick and wet. “It’s my chin, not my brain.”
“That’s the right answer twice.” Clara pulled the dish towel off her shoulder and folded it into a pad and pressed. “Did you hit anything on the way down but your chin?”
“My hands, but not hard.”
“Palms or the backs of them?” She turned one wrist over and then the other and gave them up. “Did the sky go dark for even a second? Even the little dark, where you blink and the blink is too long.”
“No. It went sideways and then it stopped.”
“Sideways is falling. Squeeze my fingers. Hard as you can. Now the other side.”
Daisy squeezed. Clara counted under her breath and got what she wanted and let the counting go.
“Follow my thumb and don’t move your head. Good. What did you eat at lunch?”
“A cheese sandwich and an apple I gave to Ruthie.”
“And what day is tomorrow?”
“Saturday,” Daisy said into the towel.
Nobody in the yard said anything for the length of a breath, and then Clara went on.
“Wyatt. Let go of her arm. You’ve got her above the elbow and it’s going white.”
He let go. His hand stayed open in the air where her arm had been, and he put it on his knee to give it something to do.
Clara lifted a corner of the towel and looked and put it down again. “It’s a split, not a cut. Butterflies will hold it if she leaves it alone. She doesn’t need Bozeman.”
“You’re sure.”
“I’m sure. Ask me again in an hour and I’ll still be sure.”
“It’s forty minutes there,” he said. “Forty coming home.”
“It’s eighty minutes of a seven-year-old holding a towel on her face so a man in Bozeman can put on the same strips I have in the drawer upstairs. If she’d gone dark for a second I’d be in your truck now with her on my lap and you’d be driving.”
He put his palm down on his knee. “You’d have said.”
“I’d have said it before you got as far as thinking of it. That’s what you’re paying me for.” She got her hand under Daisy’s arm and stood the two of them up together. “Come on. Cold water first, and then it will sting, and I’m not going to tell you it won’t.”
He carried Daisy up to the house. She could walk and both of them knew it, and she rode with her arms around his neck and the towel held to her face and did not argue about it.
He put his own chin through a rail at nine years old and rode home with it and got scolded for bleeding on the seat.
He knew what a chin was. His hands had not gotten the word.
They were doing something at the small of her back that was not carrying, and he made them quit, and half a minute later they were doing it again.
At the kitchen sink Clara ran the water warm and washed the chin out and dried around it and put on four butterfly strips, and Daisy watched the whole operation in the black window glass and counted them out loud as they went on.
Wyatt stood behind them with his hands hanging and no work in the room he could take up.
The stock tank sat where the pipe came under the corral fence, and by five it was down to a foot of green water with last fall’s cottonwood leaves rotting in it.
He pulled the plug and let it out across the gravel.
Then he got in with the long brush, scrubbed the sides down to clean galvanized, and set the float rod so the valve would shut before the water came over the lip.
The valve knocked while it filled. Knock, and a pause, and knock again, all the way up.
Clara came down the yard with two mugs and stopped ten feet short of the tank.
“These boots are three sizes past having an opinion I’d trust. Give me a second.
” She scraped one sole on the gravel and then the other, and came the rest of the way and set his coffee on the rail, and the wind took the steam off it sideways.
“How many out?” she said.
“Forty-two.”
“Out of two hundred and forty.”
“Out of two hundred and forty.” He ran the brush down the seam and up again.
“And what’s in your shirt pocket.”
He bent the float rod down a quarter inch and let it come up. “It’s a number.”
“Okay.” She drank her coffee. “Is it a number you can say out loud in a kitchen, or is it the other kind.”
“It’s the other kind.”
“Then I won’t ask it twice.” She turned the mug around in her hands. “She’s going to have a mark on that chin. Not a big one. She’ll want to show it at school on Monday, so don’t act like it’s nothing, and don’t act like it isn’t.”
“Mrs. Finch will send a note.”
“Mrs. Finch taught you. She’ll send a note that says she’s surprised it took this long.” Clara looked up the yard at the house. “She asked me whether you were going to take the rail down.”
“I’m not taking the rail down.”
“I told her that. She wanted it from you.” The wind came across and she got her collar up with one hand. “She also wanted to know if a person can break a chin. I told her the chin is part of the jaw, and she made me say it twice so she’d have it right for Ruthie.”
“Is that so.”
“It’s near enough to so.” She drank. “Ask me the other one.”
“What other one,” he said, and kept his eyes on the float rod.
“The one you’ve been holding since you carried her in. Whether she’ll get on the rail again.”
He set the brush across the tank. “Will she.”
“She’ll be on it Sunday and she’ll make the third one, and I’ll be stood under it when she does.” She put her empty mug down beside his full one. “That’s my half of the work. You do the counting.”
The valve knocked. He watched the water come up the inside of the tank and did not look at her while he said it. “You were on the ground with her in six steps.”
“I was standing at the door with a towel in my hand. It wasn’t skill, it was geography.”
“It was six steps.”
“Okay,” she said, and let it be.
Her hat had been in her car since Tuesday, she said, so he went up the yard and opened the passenger door of the green hatchback.
The hat sat on the console under a child’s blue mitten.
He moved it off, took the hat, shut the door with his hip, and came down the yard reading the ridge, because the wind had been up since noon and would want watching if it held past dark.
He gave her the hat. She put it on and pushed the pencil harder into the knot of her hair and went in to start supper.