CHAPTER 19 #2
“You’ve been standing in a lane holding twine while a seventy-one-year-old man did your work. That isn’t sitting. That’s worse.” She bit the tape off. “Chair. Now.”
“In a minute.”
“Okay.” She said it flat and complete, one word, a whole sentence, and it meant she would ask again in ten minutes and get the same answer and ask again after that.
Daisy took the dog out on the porch and sat down on the boards with him in the sun. Through the window came the sound of her explaining the snow to him at length. Levi’s jar sat on the rail where it sat. Water ran off the roof in a line and hit the step, and the step was already bare wood.
“The red cow’s calf,” he said. “Harlan told me what you did with her.”
Clara ran the towel around the inside of a bowl and set it up on the shelf. “She was cold and I got her warm. That’s the whole business.”
“You had a heat lamp and no power to run it.”
“I had a lamp for when the power came on and a feed sack for until it did.” She picked up the next bowl. “And a good flashlight. And a very good person holding the flashlight, who did not put it down for two hours and did not complain once, which is more than her father would have managed.”
“Her father would have complained.”
“Her father would have counted out loud.” She was smiling at the bowl. “Say the rest of it or don’t, Wyatt. But don’t stand there working it into a number first.”
He said the rest of it. “Thank you.”
“Okay,” she said.
Clara went to the counter and stood at it with her back turned.
“You asked me something at the hay shed and I never answered,” she said. “I’m answering. I’ll stay.”
The stove ticked. Out on the porch the dog’s tail knocked twice on the boards.
“Say it again.”
She turned around.
“I’ll stay.”
He had a whole set of things he could have said, and every one of them was a count or a date, and every one of them was a way of asking her to prove it. He put them down.
Tomorrow was the day she had named in March, standing in this kitchen with her coat still on, saying it out loud so nobody could pretend later.
She had not said it since. He had waited three weeks for her to say it, listening for it under everything else she said, and she had let the date come at him empty.
He came around the end of the table. She had the dish towel in her hand and she did not step back and she did not step toward him, and he stopped where there was room for her to do either.
“I’m going to have to do this slow. Tell me to stop and I stop.”
“Don’t stop. Just don’t make me laugh.”
He put his right hand along her jaw. Her hair was warm on the backs of his fingers from the stove. He came down to her slow, slower than he had gone at anything in his life, because the other way meant pulling air in fast and there was no fast air in him anywhere.
She was laughing before he got there. It came up out of her against his mouth, and it went into him and hit the rib, and then he was doing it too, and the doing of it lit his whole left side up.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t. It isn’t funny.”
“You started it.”
“I know I started it.” Her hand was in his hair and the towel had gone on the floor. Her eyes were wet at the corners. “Start over. Start over and I’ll be good.”
“You won’t.”
“No,” she said. “Probably not.”
He started over. He kissed her slow, and it was daylight, plain yellow April daylight coming off the snow through the window over the sink and lying across the table and the calving book and the pencil on top of it.
His right hand went into her hair. His left stayed at the small of her back where it could reach without going up.
She held on to the front of his shirt. She was not laughing now.
When she stopped she put her forehead against his jaw and stood there breathing, and he stood and let her, and his left side took every breath and made him pay it out small.
“Bram’s right,” she said into his collar. “Small breaths.”
“Bram talks a lot for a man with his arm in a cow.”
She made a sound against his neck and he put his mouth in her hair. Wet wool dried on the stove rail. The bread was on the board with a cloth over it. He counted nothing at all for as long as that lasted.
Then he moved her back, one hand on her shoulder, and went to the cupboard.
The top shelf was above the plates, back where nothing got taken down. Reaching it meant putting his right arm up over his head and opening his left side out. He put his hand on the counter first. Then he went up.
It cost him. It cost more than the gate had and more than the kitchen floor had. He stood with his arm in the dark of the shelf and his eyes shut and his breath stopped somewhere under his arm, and his fingers found the handle, and the enamel was cold and gritty with four years of dust.
He brought it down and set it on the counter. Blue, chipped along the base and around the lip, down to the black underneath, in every place she had chipped it herself.
Daisy came in off the porch with cold on her sleeves.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a coffee pot. It was your mother’s, it makes terrible coffee, and we’re going to use it.”
Daisy came to the counter and put both hands on it and got her chin over the top and studied the pot.
“Can I pour?”
“When it’s done and cool enough, you can pour mine,” he said.
“It has to be all the way cool.”
“Then you can pour Harlan’s. He drinks his out of a lid anyway.”
“That’s not the same as a cup,” Daisy said. “A lid is smaller. I’ll need the little pitcher.”
He carried the pot to the stove and set it on the back burner.
Clara took it up again without a word and filled it at the sink, and got the grounds out of the can, and put it down on the iron over the flame.
The smell started almost at once, coffee coming up out of something that had not held coffee in four years.
Daisy dragged a chair over and climbed up on it to watch the water.
The blue pot stood on the stove with the window light coming off its side, and in the curve of it there were three of them, bent and small and warm.