CHAPTER 15
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The calf’s head lay across Clara’s knee and weighed about what a sack of feed weighed.
She sat on the mudroom floor with her shoulders against the dryer.
She worked the rubber into the side of its mouth, past the gap behind the front teeth, and held it there until the pulling started.
Milk replacer ran warm over her wrist and soaked her cuff.
The whole room smelled sweet and a little scorched.
“Your mother quit you,” she said. “So I’m what’s left. Take it.”
The calf pulled hard enough to knock the bottle sideways. Clara braced her elbow on her knee and let it have what it wanted.
The outside door opened and let in the cold, and Wyatt with it.
“She eating?”
“Third time since four,” Clara said. “She quit fighting the bottle about the second one.”
“Good.” He stood on the mat with his hat in his hand. Down his right cuff ran a white stripe of dried milk replacer, stiff as starch, from where the calf had fought him in the dark. “Last heifer’s checked. Harlan’s got one springing in the east pen.”
“And the rest of them?”
“Two hundred and forty pairs don’t know what day it is.” He turned the hat once in his hands. “They want feed at noon. They’ll get it at four.”
Clara looked at the cuff. Then she looked at the clock over the dryer, which said quarter of six.
“You could change that shirt,” she said.
“I could,” he said.
He didn’t go up the stairs. He filled Harlan’s thermos at the sink instead and screwed the lid down with the heel of his right hand.
Harlan came in behind him and took it without being handed it. He was already dressed for town under his barn coat, white shirt, no tie.
“That heifer’s got her tail up and nothing else,” he said. “She’ll go this afternoon and not before.”
“Can she wait till dark?” Wyatt said.
“She can wait until she can’t. That’s all anybody can tell you about a heifer.” Harlan poured a lid of coffee and drank it standing. “Frost’s off the south side already. Wind’ll come up by nine and lay down again about four.”
“You eating anything before we go up there?” Clara asked.
“I’ve had coffee.”
“That isn’t what I asked you.”
“No,” Harlan said. “It isn’t.” He put the lid on the thermos and went out.
Feet came down the staircase one tread at a time, the careful way.
Daisy stopped in the doorway in her church dress with her barn coat over the top of it and her boots already on.
The braid had been done by somebody seven years old and it showed.
The strips on her chin had gone gray along the edges.
“Is today the day they died,” Daisy said. She didn’t put a question mark on the end of it.
“Yes,” Wyatt said.
“The day the water came over the road.”
“Yes. Four years ago this April.”
Clara’s hand kept moving on the calf’s neck, up and down, the same speed it had been moving before. That was the only thing she let it do.
“Okay.” Daisy crouched and put two fingers on the calf’s ear. “Does she have a name?”
“Bum calves don’t get names,” Clara said. “You name one and you’re up at four every morning for the rest of your life.”
“You’re already up at four.”
Clara laughed once, and it was not much of one. “That’s true.”
“Then you should name her,” Daisy said.
“Ask me tomorrow.”
Daisy thought about that with her chin down. “Tomorrow is Sunday.”
“Then Sunday.”
The calf finished and butted the empty bottle. Clara let it push her hand around a while before she got up off the floor. Her knee had gone to sleep. She stood at the sink and rinsed the bottle in cold water so the milk wouldn’t set into the seams.
“Are you coming to the cemetery?” Daisy asked.
“I am.”
“All of it?”
Clara shut the tap off and dried her hands on her jeans. “All of it.”
“And after?”
“I’m taking you home after,” Clara said. “That part I know.”
Behind her, Wyatt put his hat on the table and picked it up again.
“People start at eleven,” he said. “Loretta set it. I didn’t.”
“I’ll take my car.”
“There’s room in the truck.”
“There’s room in the truck,” Clara said. “I’ll still take my car.”
“Why.”
“Because she’s seven, and there’s going to be a point in that day when she wants to go home. It won’t be your point. If there’s one rig, she can’t, and you’ll want to stay past when she can, and you should get to.”
He looked at the floor between his boots a while. Outside a diesel came up the lane and slowed at the cattle guard, and then another one behind it.
“Fine,” he said. “Feed at four, then the night check. The first of June doesn’t move for the twelfth of April.”
“No,” Clara said. “It doesn’t.”
By seven the lane was full. The porch was full. Not one person came through the door.
They handed things over the rail. A roaster of scalloped potatoes wrapped in two towels.
A ham. Four pies with the names taped on the underside of the plates.
A five-gallon bucket of cut flowers with the stems wet, which somebody set on the step and nobody claimed.
Men Clara had known since grade school stood at the bottom of the steps with their hats off.
They said one sentence each and went and sat in their trucks.
Gemma Brooks came up last with a foil pan on each forearm and flour on her sleeve.
“Nobody makes anybody talk today, that’s the whole agreement,” she said. “Where do you want it all?”
“Porch table for the cold, oven for the hot. I’ll shut the oven off at nine so nothing dries out, and put the pies up where the dog can’t reach.”
“You’ve done this before.”
“I have,” Clara said, and took the top pan. “Who brought the flowers?”
“Six people went in on them and every one told me not to say so.” Gemma pushed a dish an inch to the left. “Don’t put them in water. They’re not for the house.”
“I know what they’re for.”
“And there’s no ice. Somebody always brings ice and nobody ever brings a cooler, and then it turns into my problem at two o’clock.”
They worked down the line together. Clara wrote names on masking tape and stuck the tape under every dish. In three days somebody would want her roaster and would be too polite to ask.
“He hasn’t eaten,” Gemma said.
“He won’t,” Clara said.
“Then carry him a plate at two whether he wants it or not.” Gemma squared the last pie up with the table edge. “You’re here.”
“I’m here.” Clara straightened a lid that did not need straightening.
“Eight weeks was eight weeks. I can count, and so can the whole café.”
“It was eight weeks, and the café can count all it likes.” Clara tore off another piece of tape and smoothed it down with her thumb. “Do you want that roaster Tuesday or Wednesday?”
Gemma looked at her a good three seconds and then let it go, which was the kindest thing anybody did for Clara that morning.
At half past ten Clara turned the green hatchback around in the yard and pulled in behind the white truck. They went down Six Mile Road in a line with the gravel popping under the fenders.
Daisy sat behind her with her hands folded in her lap.
“Runoff’s high,” Daisy said.
“It is,” Clara said.
“Dad says brown means it’s carrying the hill.”
“Your dad’s right about that.”
The water was over the low-water crossing.
It stood an inch deep on the near slab and thinned out across the far one, brown and moving fast. Wyatt took it at a crawl ahead of her and threw a wake off his front tires.
Clara put both hands at the top of the wheel, one crossed over the other.
She drove through behind him at the speed he had used and came out and kept going up the grade.
“How many people are going to be there?” Daisy asked.
“I don’t know. A lot of them.”
“I don’t want to talk to any of them.”
“Then don’t,” Clara said.
“Dad says you have to say thank you when somebody brings food.”
“You can say it tomorrow,” Clara said. “In the store, one at a time, where there’s a door. That counts as a real thank you and this isn’t the place for one.”
“Is Dad going to cry?” Daisy asked.
“I don’t know, sweetheart.”
“He doesn’t.”
“Then he doesn’t.”
Daisy turned her face to the glass and watched the willows go by.
“I don’t want to go down there,” she said.
“Down where, sweetheart?”
“Where the water is. Ruthie’s mother told her that people go down after and put flowers in.” Her reflection swung around. “You have to say it out loud or it doesn’t count.”
“We won’t go down there,” Clara said. “You and me stay up top.”
“Okay.”
The cemetery sat on a rise east of town with a wire fence around it and one gate.
By eleven there were trucks nosed in along that fence for two hundred yards, and the sun came off the windshields hard enough to hurt.
Forty people stood outside that gate with their hands down and did not talk, which is a sound, and it is not the same sound as quiet.
Loretta Gable waited at the gate in her good coat with her glasses on their chain.
“Do we stand around in the wind, or do we get on with it?” she said. “We get on with it.”
They went in. The two stones were up near the top corner where the ground was driest. The second one was small and set low. The grass over both of them was a younger green than the grass anywhere else on that hill.
Daisy walked as far as the second stone. Then she turned around and put her arms straight up without a word.
Clara took her. Seven years old and small for it, and still a load taken all at once. Daisy locked her ankles at Clara’s spine and put her face into the side of Clara’s neck.
“Put your head down, sweetheart,” Clara said. “I’ve got you.”
Wyatt stood at the stones with his hat in his left hand and his right hand hanging open, and the pale line across that palm had gone white in the sun.
He had not changed the shirt. The milk replacer had dried on his cuff into a stripe you could see from the fence.
He stood at his wife’s grave with it, and nobody said one word about it, and Clara loved this whole cold county for that.
“She’d have hated the flowers,” Wyatt said. “She’d have said put it in the ground where it does something.”
Behind him, people made a sound that was not quite laughing.