CHAPTER 16
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The calf’s ear was cold between Wyatt’s fingers, and that was the part he did not like.
He knelt in wet straw with the head in his lap and the bag of replacer lying warm along his forearm.
He had carried it out from the kitchen inside his coat so it would still be blood temperature when he got here.
The heifer that had thrown this calf stood in the second pen with her back turned, chewing, done with the whole business.
“She quit him clean. Some of them do. Wind’s staying west a while yet,” Harlan said.
He came down onto one knee slower than he used to and put his left hand under the calf’s jaw. His right hand stayed curled on his knee. The two smallest fingers had not closed all the way since before Christmas, and neither of them had ever said a word about it out loud.
“Hold him level,” Wyatt said.
“I know how.”
“I know you know how.”
Wyatt laid the tube along the outside of the calf’s face, from the point of the shoulder up to the jaw, and marked the length with his thumb.
That was the whole trick, and a man who guessed at it drowned a calf in his own lap.
He wet the end, worked two fingers into the mouth, and slid the tube straight back along the jaw.
The calf swallowed. Wyatt ran his thumb down the outside of the throat until he found the tube riding alongside the windpipe, both of them there under the skin where they were supposed to be, and only then did he lift the bag.
“Coming up on ten o’clock,” Harlan said. “Loretta starts on the hour whether the hall’s full or not.”
“Then she starts.”
“I’m only telling you what the clock says, son.”
The replacer went down in a slow warm weight and the calf’s eye rolled and settled.
Wyatt watched the bag empty and did the arithmetic he was going to be doing for a while.
Twice a day, morning and night, a month of it, and every one of those feedings on top of the checks and the fence and the miles he was already short on.
The heifer would not take him back. They almost never did once they had made up their minds in the first hour.
He drew the tube out slow and clean and let the calf’s head down into the straw.
“He’ll suck a bottle by Tuesday,” Harlan said. “Some of them figure it out fast when they’re hungry enough. Wind holds west, that pen’ll dry by supper.”
Harlan got up off the knee in two stages, with the rail in his left hand.
“You want him named or numbered?”
“Numbered.” Wyatt rolled the empty bag and pushed it into his coat pocket.
“She’ll name him by Thursday.”
“I know she will.”
Boots at the man-door. Clara stood in the light with her hand on the frame and Daisy under her arm, braided, coat zipped, one boot already unbuckled from something.
“It’s ten,” Clara said.
“I know what it is.”
“I’m not arguing with you, I’m telling you the number.” She came in two steps and stopped where the straw started, because she had learned in six and a half weeks that the barn floor ate shoes. “Do you want to be late, or do you want to be late and have Loretta say your name twice?”
Wyatt got up off his knees. Straw came with him, both knees soaked through, and the smell of iodine was in the seams of his hands where it lived from February to May.
“Daisy,” he said. “Wash.”
“I washed at the house.”
“Wash again. You were in the pen.”
“I was on the rail,” Daisy said. “The rail isn’t the pen.”
Clara turned her head so he could not see the whole of her face, which meant she agreed with the kid.
The white truck took the ruts easier than it had a week ago. The road was drying in the tracks and holding wet in the middle, and the low meadows on both sides had come up green enough that a man could see it at speed.
Daisy sat in the back with her boots straight out in front of her. Clara had her window down two inches and her elbow near it, and she had not said anything since the cattle guard, which for Clara was a long time.
The road bent and the water came into the glare, white off the standing sheets in the borrow ditch, and Wyatt read the gauge painted on the culvert wing as the truck rolled through the low-water crossing without slowing.
Six inches on the slab. Two inches on the gauge. Down four from Thursday and dropping.
He did not say it. He did not look in the mirror after.
Bear Creek was full up in front of the community hall, trucks nose-in on both sides of the street and one stock trailer parked where nobody should park. Wyatt found a spot at the end and shut the engine off.
“Dad.”
“What.”
“Ruthie’s going to the café with her mom after. Can I walk down with her? It’s two blocks and there’s a crosswalk and Ruthie’s allowed.”
He had the door handle in his hand. The café was two blocks. Gemma opened at five and closed by two, and the crosswalk was painted, and the whole distance was less than the length of the home meadow.
“You stay where I can see you,” Wyatt said.
It came out flat and fast, and it sat in the cab after him with the doors still shut. Daisy did not argue. That was the worse part. She unbuckled and got out and stood by the fender with her chin down and her hand on the dented spot in the rear panel, waiting on him.
Clara got out on her side and shut her door with two fingers, quiet, and did not look at him over the hood.
The hall smelled like coffee and floor wax and somebody’s wet dog.
Folding chairs were going up all down the long room, that flat clack of the hinge and then the scrape as somebody dragged one back into line, over and over, and at the front the urn on the folding table had started to tick as it heated.
Loretta Gable stood behind a card table with her reading glasses down on their beaded chain and a clipboard against her middle.
“Are we going to read the minutes of the March meeting? We are not,” she said. “Nobody has asked me for them since the year the roof leaked. Sign the sheet if you want your name in the record, and if you don’t want your name in the record, sign it anyway, because I’ll put it there.”
Wyatt got a chair against the side wall where he could see the door and both windows. Daisy sat on his left with her hands in her lap. Clara took the chair on his right and hung her coat over the back of it, and the sleeve came across and touched his arm and stayed there, and he left it.
The first item was the hall roof. A man in the second row wanted metal.
A woman by the window wanted shingles, and said so twice.
Loretta let the two of them go at it for as long as it took the urn to quit ticking, and then she said the roof would be looked at in June and wrote it down as looked at.
Wyatt sat with his hat on his knee and ran his own numbers while the roof went on.
The note came due at the bank the first of June.
Calves sold in the fall, which was after that, which was the whole trouble and always had been.
Two hundred and forty pairs, and the loss so far was under where it had to stay.
He got to the end of the arithmetic in about the time it takes to tie a boot. Then he ran it again, because there was nothing else to do with his hands.
The second item was the sign at the highway turn, which had been shot at again.
“Do we replace it? We do not, at four hundred dollars a sign,” Loretta said. “We paint it and we let the Lord sort out the shooter. Ruthie Dawson, take that hat off indoors. Your grandmother would come back for it.”
Ruthie took the hat off. Two rows up, somebody laughed into their coffee and got looked at.
“Item three. The Dawson dog,” Loretta said. “Is the Dawson dog a council matter? It is not. Is somebody going to raise it? She is, and she has her hand up already.”
A woman near the door raised it anyway. It took her some time, and there was a part in the middle about a garbage can.
“Noted and entered,” Loretta said. “Ruthie, tell your father the council thinks the world of that dog and will not be discussing him again before August. Now. Coffee is not ready. Nothing in this hall is ever ready.”
Then Loretta put her glasses on, which she had not done for the roof or the sign, and pulled a manila folder square in front of her with both hands.
“County easement,” she said. “Mill Creek at Six Mile. The engineer says a bridge, the county says a bridge, and the bridge needs forty feet of Miller deeded ground on the west approach. Wyatt has had the papers since the year we buried his family, and he has not signed them, which is his right, and I am not going to stand up here and pretend it isn’t. ”
The room went quiet in a way that folding chairs do not help.
“The hearing is the eighth of May,” Loretta said. “You may come and say your piece, or stay home and let it be said for you, dear.”
Wyatt turned his hat once by the brim.
“If you don’t sign, we start a process that runs two years, and for two more years that crossing is what your daughter rides over to school.”
She did not raise her voice for any of it. She never had, not for thirty years of these, and that was what made it land. Somebody behind him shifted a boot. Daisy’s hands were still in her lap and her eyes were on Loretta and she had gone as quiet as a room can make a child go.
“That’s a fair statement of it,” Wyatt said.
“I know it is. I wrote it down twice to be sure.” Loretta made a mark on the clipboard. “Anything else on the easement? There is not. Mitch Lawson, you asked to be on the agenda.”
Mitch stood up in the middle of the room in a clean shirt with his hat in his hand. He was three rows behind and Wyatt did not turn around to look at him.
“High pasture lease,” Mitch said. “Miller ground above the trail. I want it on the record that the offer stands through the end of the month.”
“And the figure?”
“Same number I gave you at the corner post in March. It does not get better in May.”
Then he sat down. That was the thing about Mitch. He put the number in the room and then he stopped talking and let a man carry it, and there was nothing in it to fight, because every word of it was true.