CHAPTER 14 #2
The black cow was in the near pen with the right calf and no interest in it.
He put her in the chute and got a leg rope on her and stood there in the last of the yellow light while the calf hunted and quit and hunted again.
It took nearly an hour. He kept his shoulder into her flank so she could not swing off, and the calf found it at the end and got a long pull, and its tail went around like a crank handle.
A pair turned out unmothered is a dead calf by Sunday.
By the time he turned them into the alley the ridge was black.
Supper had been on the table at seven. He came in at a quarter to eight and ate it cold and did not say anything about it being cold.
Daisy had the spiral notebook out of her coat pocket and open beside her plate, and she pushed it across the table with the pencil laid in the gutter. Talking pulled at her chin, so she made every word count.
“Killdeer. On the wheel track by the mailbox. Write it where I can read it.”
“Your handwriting’s better than mine.”
“I know. Write it anyway.”
He wrote it into the bird list in block letters like a man filling out a form, and put the date beside it, and Daisy turned the notebook around and read it and did not say anything about the date.
“Was it running, or was it doing the wing?”
“Running.”
“Then it doesn’t have eggs yet.” She put her fork down to say it.
“How do you figure.”
“Because the wing is for eggs.” She got a spoonful of potatoes past the sore side of her mouth. “It’s a broken wing that isn’t broken. They do it so you follow them instead.”
“Instead of what.”
“Instead of the eggs. The eggs are on the ground with no nest and they look like rocks, so you’d step on them and never know.
That’s why they don’t build one. A nest is a sign.
” She put the spoon down and pushed the notebook an inch toward him.
“Put down the wheel track. Not the mailbox. The mailbox is where I was.”
Clara took the plates off the table one at a time. “Where the bird was is the entry, and where you were is the note.”
“Yes.”
“So he needs both of them.”
“He needs both of them in the right order,” Daisy said. “That’s the whole reason for a list.”
He wrote the wheel track in and turned it around and she read it and pulled her chin in against the strips.
“Does it hurt to chew or does it hurt to talk?” Clara asked.
Daisy held up two fingers and then folded one of them down. “Both. Talking is worse.”
“Then quit talking.”
“Then who’s going to say things.”
At nine the house was down to the kitchen. Daisy had been up the stairs an hour, and the woodstove was ticking as it cooled, and Clara stood at the sink washing the last two plates with the window black in front of her.
Wyatt had the calving book open on the counter and her pencil in his hand and nothing to put in it. He had already put in everything. He shut it and squared it against the counter edge and put the pencil back in the wire.
“Clara.”
She turned around with a plate in one hand and the towel in the other. She did not say what. She waited, which was worse, because it left the whole width of the room open and he had to walk across it himself.
The clock over the door went on with what it was doing.
“Wind’s supposed to lay off by morning,” he said. “Clear and cold, forty by noon.”
She set the plate down in the rack. She took a while over it, longer than a plate needs, and when she had it standing where she wanted it she put her hands on the rim of the sink and left them there.
“Then it’ll be a good day for it,” she said.
That was all of it. She was four feet off with her back half turned and her hands on the sink rim, and there was nothing between him and those four feet but four feet.
His hand came off the counter and got as far as the corner of the table.
He put it down on the wood and left it there, and the not-going cost him more than the day had, more than the tank and the cow and the hour in the chute, and he stood in his own kitchen and paid it.
Somebody knocked twice on the door frame, which is what Harlan does instead of knocking on the door.
“Coffee’ll be on at four,” Harlan said from the step. He had the thermos lid hooked in the two fingers of his right hand that close. “Sadie and Caleb are on tonight, so it’s only the second check and the morning one, but I’ll have it on at four.”
“You don’t have to be up at four.”
“Nobody gets through tomorrow by being ready for it, son. Wind’ll drop about four.
” He turned and looked off toward the ridge, and his mustache moved the way it does when he has said all of a thing he means to say.
“It’s been out of the west since noon and that’s why it hasn’t laid off.
West wind on a dry meadow. There’ll be dust in that trough by dinnertime and you’ll be brushing it out again inside a week. ”
“I set the float.”
“I heard it knocking from the bunkhouse. It’s a good float.” Harlan put the lid on the thermos and screwed it down with the heel of his hand. “Your dad set that same rod three summers running and never got it to shut off clean.”
“He put in the pipe.”
“He put in the pipe in one day with a shovel, and he was fifty.” The wind came up the step and Harlan put his shoulder into it.
“That’s the west end of it right there. It’ll go around north an hour before it lays down.
Sadie’s on till two and Caleb behind her, and I’ll take the morning one. Four, then.”
“Four.”
The door shut. Clara had not moved from the sink. She reached up and got a mug down out of the right-hand cupboard without turning her head to find it, and set it on the counter for morning, and said good night, and went up.
He did the barn at eleven and there was nothing in it that needed him.
Sadie had a heifer in the far pen under the lamp and had it well in hand and told him so twice.
He came back across the yard and up the stairs and pushed Daisy’s door open two inches.
Flashlight going under the quilt. He let it go.
He did the barn again at two. The wind was still out of the west and it had teeth in it and the yard light swung on its wire. Sadie’s truck was gone and Caleb’s was there. Nothing needed him.
At four the kitchen light came on under the door downstairs. The kettle went on and came off. A chair moved and did not move again. Across the yard the bunkhouse window was yellow, and the bunkhouse door opened and shut twice before five, which is not a thing a man does for a reason.
He pushed Daisy’s door open again on his way down. She was on her side with the quilt to her chin and both eyes wide open in the dark, and she shut them when the hinge went, and he stood there and let her be a good liar about it because she needed the practice more than she needed the truth.
The window seat in the east room had a light on it too. He did not stop on the landing.
First light came up gray with the wind finally down out of it.
He was on the porch with a mug going cold on the rail beside Levi’s jar, and his right palm had closed to a pale line he could run a thumb across without catching.
Harlan crossed the yard with the thermos and did not come up the steps.
Clara came out with her coat over her nightgown and her hat in her hand and stood at the other end of the porch, and nobody said good morning.
At seven the first car came up the lane with a covered dish sliding across the passenger seat, and before it had stopped rolling there were headlights behind it in the gray.