CHAPTER 19
◆
The bale came off the stack and got as far as his knees before it stopped.
He set it down in the trampled snow and stood there with one hand on the twine.
Sun was full on sixteen inches of new snow.
Every roof edge on the place ran water, and the yard under the eaves had gone to gray slush.
Behind him a slab let go off the barn roof and hit the ground with the sound of a table dropped on its side.
Four bales on the sled. He needed nine.
Harlan came around the corner of the hay shed drinking off the lid of his thermos. He looked at the bale in the snow, and he looked at Wyatt, and he set the lid down on the post.
“Give me that. Wind’s gone south, you notice. Be mud by Tuesday and you’ll wish the snow back.”
“I’ve got it.” He did not take his hand off the twine.
“You’ve got the twine.” Harlan brought the bale up against his chest and put it on the sled without any hurry at all. “Cut strings. A man can do that with one arm and a poor attitude.”
So Wyatt cut strings. The knife went through frozen twine with a pop. The strings came away stiff and curled and he coiled them into his coat pocket out of thirty years of habit. Harlan stacked. Harlan drove the tractor down the lane with the sled behind it.
The pairs stood humped along the windrow where the wind had scoured a lee, black backs steaming in the sun.
Forty of them down here, calves tucked under the bank out of what wind was left.
Wyatt broke flakes off the bales and pushed them in tight against the windrow so the little ones could reach hay without walking belly-deep to get it.
Pushing he could do. Lifting was another thing. Every time his left elbow came up past his ribs, something under his arm closed like a gate and his breath stopped at the bottom.
“Stand there and count,” Harlan said. “You’re good at that.”
“I’m fine.” He said it to the hay and not to Harlan.
“You’re gray in the face and it’s eleven in the morning.” Harlan hooked a flake with his boot and kicked it into place. His right hand stayed curled. Two fingers on it had quit closing years ago and he had quit mentioning it before Wyatt was born. “How many did you get down off that mountain?”
Wyatt knew the number without reaching for it. He had said it to himself all the way home yesterday, once a mile, seven times.
“Ninety head. Eighty-six down. Four we didn’t find and won’t.”
“Four,” Harlan said.
“Four.”
Harlan drank out of the thermos lid and looked off east at the mountains.
“Twenty-four hours, that storm,” he said. “Twenty-four hours and it took four off you. There’s outfits in this valley took thirty.”
Wyatt pushed a flake in tight under the bank. “Those outfits aren’t carrying a note that comes due the first of June.”
“No. They are not.” Harlan screwed the lid back on. “Where do you put them?”
He folded the knife shut against his leg. “Timber above the salt ground, or a drift on the north side of the saddle. Either way they’re under something.”
“You going up to look.”
“When the trail opens.”
“The trail won’t open for a week and you couldn’t sit a horse to the mailbox today.” Harlan let that sit, then walked down the windrow and kicked another flake loose. “Wind’s south, though. It’ll be running water off the high ground by Wednesday and then you’ll have the ditch to worry over.”
That was Harlan all the way through. He would say the one true hard sentence and then go straight to weather, and a man could stand in it and be grateful.
Wyatt worked the four while he broke hay. Four he would not sell in October. Four the man at the bank would find on the sheet without being told where to look. Four out of ninety, and the ninety were the ones he had gone up for.
“Heifer calf in the far pen’s up and sucking,” Harlan said.
“Which one?” Wyatt asked.
“The one out of the little red cow that came in Friday in the dark. Clara had her under the lamp before you were off the trail.” Harlan pulled his gloves back on, right hand first, awkward. “Toweled her dry with a feed sack and got a bottle into her and never asked a soul what to do.”
“In the dark.”
“Power was off till nine yesterday morning. She did it with a flashlight your daughter held for her, and your daughter held it steady, and I sat in a chair and slept through the back half of it like a dead man.”
Wyatt stood with a flake against his chest and did not put it down.
“Say something, son.”
“Nothing to say. The calf’s alive.”
“That’s a thing a man could say out loud to the woman who did it.” Harlan pushed the last flake in with his boot. “Say a thing out loud and it quits sitting on you. That’s been true my whole life.”
It had never once been true. Wyatt went to the gate at the end of the windrow to swing it shut, got his hand on it, and could not.
He stood with his palm on the cold pipe and his arm out straight and did not move.
Harlan came around and swung the gate and dropped the chain over the post and said nothing about it, which was worse.
The house was warm before he got the door open. He could smell it in the mudroom, bread and something with onion in it, and under that the woodstove running hard, too hot for April, the way Clara ran it.
He got his coat off in two stages. Right arm first, then a long careful pull.
“Daddy.”
Daisy came out of the kitchen at a run with her braid mostly out of itself and her arms already going up over her head.
She had been doing that since she could stand.
He had put his hands under her arms and swung her onto his hip ten thousand times without one thought passing through his head about it.
“Pick me up.”
“I can’t.”
She stopped two feet out, arms still up. She let them down slow.
“Why?”
“A rail got me in the ribs on the left side. If I pick you up I’ll drop you. That’s the first time in your life I’ve had to say that, and I don’t like the sound of it.”
She stood there working on it. The scab was gone off her chin. He had not gone looking for it and found it gone anyway.
“Is it cracked or is it broke?”
“Cracked,” he said.
“What’s the difference?”
“Not much.” He put his hat on the table. “A crack means the bone’s still in one piece and it hurts you every time you breathe. A break means it isn’t in one piece.”
“Then I’d rather you had cracked.”
“So would I.”
He got down.
He went to one knee first, and the knee was fine, and then he put his right hand on the floorboards and let himself over onto the other one.
Somewhere in the middle of that his left side turned into hot wire and he stopped and waited it out with his head down and his palm pressed to the boards.
It took him a while. Nobody talked while it was going on.
When he was down he was down, both knees, sitting back on his heels with his face level with hers.
“There,” he said.
Daisy walked into him and put her arms around his neck and held on. She was careful of the left side without being told, careful of it the same as she was of the dog’s deaf ear.
“You smell like hay,” she said into his collar.
“That’s the general idea.”
She thought that over. “Harlan smells like coffee and hay.”
“Harlan’s older. He’s had longer to work on it.”
She let go and looked at him from four inches away. Blue eyes, Annie’s eyes, that flat unblinking assessment she had come by honestly.
“How long until you can pick me up.”
“A while.” He put his hand on the end of her braid and let it go.
“That’s not a number.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
“Clara said your bone has to knit. She said it like knitting a sweater.”
“It’s not much like a sweater.”
“I know that.” Daisy pulled the loose end of her braid around and looked at it. “I held the flashlight for the red cow’s calf. Two hours. My arm went dead and I didn’t say.”
“Harlan told me.”
“Clara rubbed her with a feed sack till she got her head up. She said cold kills them faster than anything else does, and she was right, because the calf got up.”
“She was right,” he said.
Clara was at the sink with her back to them, running water she did not need. There was a roll of tape on the counter beside the calving book and she was doing a poor job of not turning around.
“Bram says there’s nothing for a rib but time and small breaths,” she said.
“When did you talk to Bram?”
“He called about the twin heifers. I asked him a question that had nothing to do with twin heifers.” She shut the water off. “He said don’t tape it. He said taping a rib is how a man gets pneumonia, and that if you go on lifting, the ends grind and it takes twice as long to knit.”
“I’m not lifting,” he said.
“You put a bale off the stack an hour ago. Harlan told me before he told you he wouldn’t.”
“Harlan tells everybody everything.”
“Harlan tells me the things I’d have to find out by watching, which saves me the trouble of watching.” She turned the tap on again and turned it off. “Sit down.”
Wyatt got a hand on the chair and came up off the floor in stages, and the stages were loud, and Daisy went out to the porch to let Pilot in, which was a kindness and she knew it was.
Clara had her right hand out on the counter, palm up. The blister at the base of the thumb had split open Friday night hauling wet rope in the dark and she had not done one thing about it since.
“Give me the tape,” he said.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
“You can’t do it one-handed.”
“I can do most things one-handed. Watch me do this one badly.”
He tore the end loose off the roll and held the roll out at the right height, and she laid the strip across her own thumb and wound it, and pulled the next length off him without looking up.
Her hair was coming out of the knot at the back with the pencil still through it.
Her forearm was six inches from his and the freckles ran up it and stopped at her sleeve.
He stood holding a roll of tape and measuring that six inches instead of closing it, and it was the same six inches it had been in February, and he had gotten no better at it.
“Sit down, Wyatt.”
“I’ve been sitting.”