CHAPTER 18
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Clara had her hand on the kitchen switch when the light went out under it.
The bulb over the pine table gave one tick and quit. The refrigerator wound itself down and stopped. The wind on the north wall came up loud, because there was nothing left in the house to cover it. Out the window the yard had gone the color of dishwater. Snow crossed it sideways and did not land.
She turned the switch off under her fingers. If it came on again at three in the morning, she did not want the kitchen announcing it to a sleeping child.
Daisy came down the stairs and stopped on the bottom step with her hand on the rail. She did not ask anything. That was how she asked.
“Power’s out,” Clara said. “It’ll be out a while, and the pump runs on the power, so you and I are going to work while there’s light and then we’re going to eat something hot.”
“Okay,” Daisy said.
“Lamps on the table, coats on the beds, nobody opens the freezer. Say it back to me.”
“Lamps on the table. Coats on the beds. Nobody opens the freezer.” Daisy pulled her braid over her shoulder and held the end of it. “And Pilot sleeps inside.”
“Pilot sleeps inside,” Clara said. “Go get the coats.”
The lamps came out of the cupboard over the washer with dust in the chimneys. Clara trimmed both wicks with the kitchen scissors and wiped the glass with a dish towel. The kerosene smell came up off her hands and stayed there for the rest of the night.
Then water, because water was the thing people forgot until the tap gave them air.
She filled the canner and the stockpot and the two blue buckets out of the mudroom and both sides of the sink.
She carried a bucket up and filled the tub as far as the pressure in the tank would take it.
The tap coughed once, ran thin, and quit.
“Why so much water?” Daisy said, up on the counter with a bucket between her boots.
“Because the pump quit when the light did, and the pipes will freeze before the sun’s up, and I would rather carry it now than melt it later.”
“How long is it going to be out?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. So I’m going to set us up for a long one and then be pleased if I’m wrong.” Clara handed up the lid. “That’s how you do weather.”
Wood came next. She hauled until the box beside the stove would not take another stick.
Then she stacked an armload on the floor against the wall.
Every trip brought snow in the door with her to melt black on the boards.
Her shoulders were shaking by the last load.
She damped the stove down so it would burn slow instead of bright, and hung Daisy’s wet gloves and both their scarves on the rail above it.
Daisy put the coats on the beds, hers and Clara’s and Wyatt’s, spread flat with the sleeves out.
“Why his?” she said.
“Because a cold bed is harder to warm than a cold room, and he’s going to want that one tomorrow.” Clara set a pot of snow on the stovetop for morning wash water. In the morning she was not going to have hands for hauling. She knew that already, the way you know a hill before you climb it.
They ate soup and the end of the bread at the pine table with one lamp between them and the window gone black by six. Pilot lay across Daisy’s boots. The wind held one long note against the north wall and did not change it.
“Is the first of May the day you go?”
Clara put her spoon down. The lamp made a low sound, and outside the note went on the same as before.
“That was the arrangement,” she said. “I’m not telling you a thing tonight I might have to take back in the morning.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No. It’s the true one, though, and you’d know if I gave you the other kind.”
Daisy took that and turned it over and set it down somewhere. “Where’s my dad sleeping?”
“In the cabin at the top with Sadie and Caleb, with ninety head shut in below them. He said twenty-four hours.” Clara reached over and moved the lamp so it was not in the child’s eyes. “He’ll be cold and he’ll be cross and he’ll be back.”
Later, with Daisy asleep upstairs under two quilts and a coat, Clara opened the calving book on the counter and held the lamp over it.
Two hundred and forty pairs, and the ones still to come written down the margin in pencil.
Every calf that did not get up was money the June note would want anyway.
She read the line for number eleven twice.
Wyatt had put her a week out. Clara had said sooner, out loud, standing right here, and he had said a week.
The knock came at half past one, and she was already awake in the chair by the stove with her boots on.
Harlan stood on the porch in snow to his knees, white to the hat brim, one shoulder into the wind.
“Number eleven’s been up and down since noon and she’s not getting anywhere,” he said. “My hand won’t close, Clara. Hasn’t closed right since Christmas.”
“Then tell me what your hand would do, and I’ll be your hand.”
He looked at the boards a second. “All right.”
“Give me two minutes. I’m not leaving a seven-year-old alone in a house with a stove in it.”
“Bring a light, then. The pole light’s out, the barn’s out, and the road’s out from here to the highway.” He turned his shoulder into the wind again. “And I can’t work the catch on that chain box, so don’t count on me for it.”
“The chains are on the nail by the gate. I hung them there Tuesday.”
“So you did,” Harlan said.
Daisy came down already awake, the way children are awake at the exact hour you would rather they weren’t.
She put on her coat and her boots without one question.
Clara found the long flashlight in the drawer by the door and gave it to her to carry.
Daisy carried it in both arms like a load of firewood.
The wind took the yard away between the porch and the barn.
Eleven degrees, and the snow was dry and it went where it wanted.
Clara put her hand on the switch inside the man-door, on the left, and threw it twice.
The barn light did not come on. She stood there half a second, annoyed at herself for expecting it.
“Bucket,” Harlan said. “Set her up on that bucket by the rail where she’s out of the gate.”
Clara upended it and put Daisy on it and crouched to get level with her face. “Your job is the light. Not me, not the cow. My hands. Wherever my hands go, the light goes, and it does not go anywhere else, and it does not go off. That’s the whole job and it’s the biggest one out here.”
“Okay,” Daisy said, and put the beam on Clara’s hands, and it did not move again.
Number eleven was down in the second pen with her neck stretched out in the straw. She was a young cow with a young cow’s hips. She had quit trying somewhere in the last hour. The straw behind her was scuffed into a circle where she had gotten up and gone down and gotten up again.
“Coat off,” Harlan said. “Roll that sleeve past your elbow. There’s soap in the box and iodine behind it. Warm water, not hot.”
Clara washed to the shoulder, standing in a barn at eleven degrees with her sleeve pushed up, and the cold came into her arm and set there. Harlan kept his hands in his coat pockets. That cost him something and neither one of them said a word about it.
“Now go in slow,” he said. “Slow, and tell me what you’ve got.”
She went in. It was hot inside, so much hotter than the world that her whole arm reported it at once. The heifer pushed against her, and she waited the push out with her eyes shut.
“A nose,” Clara said. “And a foot. One foot. There’s only one, Harlan, I’ve gone all around it.”
“Then the other one’s back at the knee. That’s why she’s been at this since noon.” His voice did not change at all. “Push the calf away from you first. Back toward her tail head. She’ll fight you and you push anyway.”
“Push it back in.”
“That’s the whole trick. You have to make room before you can take anything out.”
She pushed. She was pushing a wet thing uphill against a cow that outweighed her by half a ton. Her arm went to the shoulder and past it, and her cheek came down against the heifer’s flank in the straw.
“I’ve got the knee.”
Harlan came a step nearer the rail. “Walk your hand down that leg to the foot. Cup the hoof in your palm and keep it cupped. That hoof does not touch her anywhere, do you hear me. Then bring it up and over.”
“It’s not coming.”
“Wait for her to quit pushing, and then move. She’ll quit. Everybody quits.”
She waited. She lost track of how many times she waited.
Twice her hand slipped off the foot and she had to find it again from the knee down.
The second time she heard her own breath going and made it slow down.
Then the leg came up under her palm and forward, and both feet were where feet belong.
She pulled her arm out to the elbow, and her arm was steaming in the flashlight beam.
“Chains,” Harlan said. “In the bucket. Two chains. One above the fetlock, one below. When she pushes, you pull. When she quits, you quit.”
The chains went on cold. She set them the way he said, one loop above the joint and one below it, so the pull would take the leg and not the joint. Then she braced her boots against the gate rail and waited for the heifer, and when the heifer came, Clara went back and down with everything she had.
Two feet. Then a nose, blue-gray and swollen. Then the whole head at once, and Daisy’s light never wavered off her hands.
“Shoulders,” Harlan said. “That’s the wide part. Keep coming.”
The chain handle had been eating the base of her right thumb for a while. On the next pull the blister there split and went slick and hot under the wet.
“Clara.”
“It’s a blister. Keep talking, Harlan.”
“Then keep your grip and stop looking at it. She’s hipped. Now down toward the hocks—down, not out. Down, like you’re pulling her under the floor.”
Down. Down, and the calf came out of that cow in one long rush and took Clara over backward into the straw with it, and the barn went quiet in a way it had not been quiet in an hour.
The calf did not breathe.