CHAPTER 18 #2
Clara got out from under it and cleared the mouth with two fingers and hooked the mucus out of the nose. Harlan said straw. She took a piece of straw and worked it up one nostril until the calf coughed and shook its head and started swearing at all of them.
“Is she all right?” Daisy said from the bucket, with the beam holding steady.
“She’s mad,” Clara said. “Mad is the best thing she could possibly be right now.”
“Heifer calf,” Harlan said. “Well.”
They rubbed her down with feed sacks. Clara did the iodine on the navel with her left hand, because her right one had opened up and she wanted the iodine where it belonged, and the smell of it went straight through the barn cold and stayed.
“Are your arms tired?” Clara said, without looking up.
“I’m holding it. I won’t drop it,” Daisy said. “He has my list—he’s writing down gray jays.”
“He’ll get the spelling wrong.”
“I know. I’ll fix it.”
Number eleven got herself up, turned around, and started in on her calf with a sound cows make and nothing else does. By two in the morning the calf was up on all four legs and hunting, and she found what she was hunting for, and her tail went round in a circle.
Clara stood at the rail with the chains hanging off her good hand and did not move.
Out past the north wall there was a shape in the wind that was not the wind. A low rise and fall in it, the pitch a truck makes coming up a grade in second gear, off the county road, coming this way.
Nothing was on that road. Nothing was going to be on that road until somebody plowed it, and the man she was listening for was seven miles up a mountain in the dark with ninety head.
She had been careful for eight weeks about which sounds in this yard she let herself turn toward.
She stood there with the chains dripping and turned toward that one until her fingers went numb around the links.
Harlan was watching her when she came out of it.
“Wind does that against the hay shed,” he said. “It’ll do it all night. It’s backed round to the northeast, which is why she’s blowing this hard.”
“Right,” Clara said, and hung the chains on the nail, and went to get more straw.
Daisy had the beam on the calf now, which was allowed, because the job was over.
“Clara.”
“Mm.”
“Did you know my mom?”
Clara kept forking straw. The wind pushed the north wall and let it go.
“From the summer she came to Bear Creek,” she said. “I knew her nine years.”
“I can’t remember her voice.” Daisy said it the way she gave the temperature. “I try at night. I get somebody else’s.”
Clara set the fork against the rail and came and sat on her heels in front of the bucket, so the child was the taller of them.
“You were three years old,” she said. “That’s not a thing you did wrong and there’s no fixing it, and I’m not going to tell you there is.”
“Dad remembers.”
“He had her longer. That’s the whole of the difference.”
Daisy turned that over. “Is it going to keep getting further away?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Daisy said.
“So here’s a true thing for you to keep, and you can have it because it’s yours.
” Clara put her elbows on her knees. “Your mother could not sing. Every note came out somewhere she hadn’t aimed it.
She knew, and she did it anyway, the whole road to Bozeman and home again, with the windows rolled up so the valley didn’t have to sit through it. ”
Daisy’s mouth moved. It was not a smile yet, but it was next door to one.
“That isn’t in my notebook,” she said.
“Put it in when your dad brings it home. Not with the birds.”
“In the front,” Daisy said. “The birds go in the middle. I have a system.”
They banked the pen deep and dry. Clara took her own coat off and put it over the calf’s back for an hour while the calf’s own hair came up.
At three she carried a sleeping Daisy across the yard with the flashlight still in the child’s fist. Inside the house the frost had grown up the inside of the kitchen window in feathers, following the grain of the old glass in long lines that all leaned the same direction.
First light came gray and slow and without a wind in it.
Clara was at the stove with the pot of snow-water going and both hands wrapped around a mug when the engine sound came, and this time it was not the hay shed. She went to the window and rubbed a hole in the frost with her sleeve.
A yellow blade at the top of the lane, throwing snow off to the right in a long curl. A plow truck. Behind it a pickup with two men in it, and the men did not get out.
Mitch Lawson was standing in the yard by the time she got the door open, in a clean shirt under his coat, snow to his shins.
“Sixteen inches,” he said. “We’ll take the lane, the barn road and the school bus turn.”
Clara held on to the door frame. Lawson Land and Cattle wanted the high pasture and had wanted it since March, and Wyatt would not sit in a room with the man for ten minutes.
“He isn’t here,” she said. “He’s up top. I don’t— that’s a lot of road. Thank you. That’s—”
“Coffee’d be fine.”
“Okay.”
She brought it out to him. He drank it standing up in the yard beside his truck with his back to the wind, and he looked at the barn and at the house and at the sky over the ridge.
He did not say one word about any of them.
When he handed the mug back it was empty.
He got in the plow truck and took the lane in two passes.
The pickup went behind him with a shovel crew of two, and then the sound of them went off down the barn road and got small.
Harlan came as far as the porch and watched the truck go.
“Huh,” he said. “That’s his own truck with the blade on it. Nobody called him and nobody’s going to be able to pay him.”
“How’s the hand?”
“Cold.” He screwed the lid onto the thermos with the heel of his palm. “Wind’s laid down out of the northeast. It does that once it’s through with you.”
At nine the yard light came on over the corral in broad daylight, and the refrigerator inside started up, and the pump kicked in under the floor with a knock.
Clara went straight out to the barn and threw the switch by the man-door and put the heat lamp on over the far pen.
She stood under it a second herself, with her right hand open and the split across the base of the thumb gone stiff and dirty and untaped.
Daisy came out in her nightgown and boots and her coat over the top of it. The flashlight was still in her fist, though the sun was up on the snow and the whole world had gone white and flat and painful to look at.
“She’s standing,” Daisy said.
“She’s been standing since two. You watched her do it.”
“Does she get a number?”
“She gets a number and a tag, and your dad writes it in the book, and I’m going to let you hold the ear tag pliers if he says yes.” Clara pulled the child’s coat closed at the throat. “Turn the flashlight off, sweetheart. We’re going to want it again tonight.”
Daisy looked at it. Then she pushed the switch with her thumb and kept it in her fist anyway.
Behind them, through the kitchen window, Harlan had gone to sleep sitting up in the chair by the stove with his hat on his knee.
Clara walked out to the middle of the yard because the yard was hers this morning and she had not lost anything on it. Twenty-four hours, and the lane was open, and the calf was under the lamp, and the child was warm.
Then the white at the top of the lane came apart, and a horse came up out of it.