CHAPTER 17
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The switch was inside the man-door on the left, and Wyatt kept his hand on it after the lights came up.
All week the wind had come down off the timber out of the west, steady enough to lean on. It hit the corral gate now from the other side and lifted the top rail against the latch. He counted three gusts before he let go of the switch.
Behind him a heifer heaved up in the second pen and lay down again.
Eight pens, five of them full, the heat lamp buzzing over the far one.
Two hundred and forty pairs to calve out on the home place.
Ninety head on the high pasture, seven miles up the Six Mile trail, two hours horseback in good going.
He put his face out into the dark. The cold came from a new quarter and there was water in it.
He crossed the yard and took the phone off the kitchen wall. Tate answered on the fourth ring, awake, with paper moving under his hand.
“Callahan.”
“Wind’s gone around,” Wyatt said.
Paper turned over. “I was going to call you at five.”
“Give me what you’ve got.”
“Northeast, sixteen inches, eleven degrees by dark. You have twenty-four hours before anybody comes back down that trail.”
The window was black. Wyatt put his thumb along the sill where the paint had gone soft with age. “Say that first part again.”
“Sixteen. It could be twenty on the north side of the ridge and nobody will know until it’s done.”
“When does it start?”
“Snow by mid-morning down low. On the ridge sooner.” Tate stopped, and when he came again his voice had squared itself off. “This is not a spring system. Wind is forecast northeast at thirty, sustained, from about four o’clock. Visibility is expected under a quarter mile after that.”
“All right,” Wyatt said.
“You’ve got ninety on the lease.”
“I’ve got ninety on the lease.”
A chair moved on the other end of the line, and when Tate came again he was not reading off anything. “Then you’re going up.”
“I’m going up.”
“You want me to put somebody on your road?”
“I want the road plowed,” Wyatt said.
“The county will plow the bus road. That much I can tell you. Everything else is going to depend on how many trees come down on the Bozeman side.”
He hung the phone on the wall and stood there with his hand on it, the same as he had stood with his hand on the switch.
Clara came down with her boots in one hand. Her hair was up off yesterday, the pencil through the knot of it, and she took one look at him and one at the phone and put the coffee on without saying good morning.
“How much?” she said.
“Sixteen inches. Wind northeast.”
“That’s the bad direction.”
“That’s the bad direction.”
“Because of the ridge,” she said, “or because of the fence?”
“Because of the fence. They walk with a wind. Northeast puts them straight down against the north wire and there’s nowhere for them to go from there.”
He took the calving book off the counter and did not open it. He turned it over in his hands and set it down square with the edge of the counter.
He said it to the black window over the sink and not to her. “Ninety head. They’ll drift into the timber, hang on the north fence, pile up and smother.”
“How many do you lose if that happens?”
“Depends how long they stand there before they go down.” He looked at the stove. “Eight per cent is what I can carry. That’s the number the bank did its math on in January.”
“And if you go up?”
“Then I push them off the bench before it starts and put them down in the willow bottom where the timber takes the wind off them. They stand it. They’ve stood it before.”
Clara dried her hands on the front of her coat. “Who goes with you?”
“Sadie and Caleb. Harlan stays. He’s seventy-one and I’m not putting him on that trail in this.”
Clara set two mugs on the table. She did not tell him he was right about any of it.
He set his knuckles on the pine and leaned on them. “That’s the calf crop, and the calf crop is the note. There isn’t a version where I stay home.”
“I didn’t say there was,” Clara said.
“You were going to work up to it.”
“No,” she said. “I was going to ask what time you’d have wanted to leave if nobody lived in this house but you.”
He put the mug down. “Five.”
“Then you’re already behind, and you’re standing in your kitchen arguing with a person who hasn’t argued.”
The house ticked. Upstairs the floor took a small amount of weight and gave it up again, and he counted the steps between the bed and the window without meaning to, the way he had counted them every night since she was three.
“School called it off,” Clara said. “Six o’clock, on the radio. No buses on the county roads.”
He put his eyes on the window and kept them there. “Good.”
“So she’s here all day.”
“That’s what I want to talk about.” He got his hand around the mug and did not pick it up.
“The stove works. There’s a rick of split wood on the porch and three more in the shed.
Harlan sleeps in the bunkhouse and he’ll be in this kitchen before dark and he won’t leave it.
Tate’s four miles off with a county truck and a blade on it.
The bus road got plowed Tuesday and it’ll get plowed again. ”
“Wyatt.”
He kept going, because stopping meant starting the whole count over. “There’s a hand pump on the well casing if the power quits. It will quit. The shop radio runs off a battery and it’s charged and it’s on the bench by the door.”
“Wyatt.”
“Two adults in this house,” he said. “That’s the count.”
She turned around then. She had the pot in her hand and she set it down on the iron so it rang.
“Say it the way you mean it. Are you asking me to keep her, or telling me you have to?”
He looked at the ceiling, at the boards over which his daughter was sleeping.
“I’m asking.”
“Okay.”
She could have told him the two of them would be fine. She poured his cup instead and filled it too full, so that carrying it anywhere would have cost him something, and she went to the window and looked at nothing.
He drank it standing up and burned his mouth and did not set it down.
By half past six the sky over the east ridge had gone the color of skim milk and the wind had swung another two points.
Wyatt saddled Jubilee in the lee of the hay shed.
The latigo was stiff enough with cold to fight him through the ring, and he cinched the horse up, walked him four steps, and cinched him again, because cold leather stretches once it takes a body’s heat and a loose cinch on a sidehill puts a saddle under a horse’s belly.
Caleb had the panniers spread out on a hay bale, weighing them by hand.
“You want your heavy side to the tree,” Caleb said.
“That’s what people get wrong. They load pretty instead of loading even.
So your salt goes on the off side, and your grain sacks go on the near side, and it rides fine for a mile, and then it doesn’t ride fine, because the horse has been carrying it all on one set of ribs and he starts to tell you about it, and by then you’re up in the rocks and you can’t—”
“Balance them,” Wyatt said.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Caleb said.
“Then say it shorter.”
“He can’t,” Sadie said. She was tying her slicker on and she had her cap pulled down over the ponytail. “I’ve tried. Ask him about a fan belt sometime.”
Caleb balanced them. He was slow and he was right, and Wyatt let him take the time, because a pannier that shifts at the top of the bench is an hour he does not have.
“What are we taking?” Sadie said.
“Wire and a fencing tool. Two rolls of it. Enough oats to get a horse home if one of them quits on us, and salt if there’s room.”
“Not hay?”
“Hay’s no good to me,” Wyatt said. “If they’re standing still long enough to eat, they’re already dying.”
Caleb looked up from the pannier with a grain sack in his arms. “That’s a cheerful thing to say at seven in the morning.”
“It’s the true thing.”
He went along the fence line and threw his slicker over the cantle and tied it there, and pulled the string twice to be sure of the knot, which was the third knot he had checked twice since the lights came on.
The wind had a wet edge on it now. It came at his ear from a direction the ranch had no windbreak for, because the trees his father planted went in against a west wind and had done that job for forty years.
At seven Caleb backed the stock trailer to the corral gate. The wind came in the open end of it and rolled the loose straw out at their feet, and Jubilee got one foot on the ramp and read the whole thing wrong.
Wyatt had the lead in his right hand and the trailer gate in his left. The horse came off the ramp sideways, all of him at once, and drove Wyatt into the top rail of the corral with his left side flat against the wood.
Something in there let go. He heard it inside his own head and not with his ears, a short dull sound like a green stick.
He kept the lead. That was the first thing. Jubilee hit the end of it and stopped, blowing, head up, one ear on Wyatt and one on the trailer.
He got a breath in and the breath stopped about halfway. He took the half.
“Easy,” he said, to the horse. He walked him a circle and brought him at the ramp again with the trailer gate hooked open and Sadie standing at the off side, and the horse went in.
Then he reached for the divider gate. It hung on a stiff pin and he had swung it one-handed a thousand times. His arm came up and the rest of him would not come with it.
Sadie was there before he got it latched.
“You’re gray. Sit down. Damn it. Sorry, girl.” The mare tied at the fence had thrown her head up. Sadie put a hand on her neck without looking at her.
“I’m fine.”
Sadie did not move out of his road. “You went white and then you went gray. That’s two colors in about a second.”
“I’m fine,” Wyatt said, and got the gate over with his right arm and his shoulder behind it, and dropped the pin, and stood with his hand on the trailer while the pain got done with the top of its arc.
Sadie stood there with the mare’s lead in her fist and her mouth open on something and then shut on it.
“Say it,” he said.