CHAPTER 20
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The heat lamp over the far pen hung on a chain from the rafter, and it had been the right height on Monday. Monday had been wet snow blowing sideways through the man-door. Today the gravel outside was steaming, and the pen under the lamp was too warm for a calf two days old.
Wyatt reached up left-handed for the hook. The rib caught him at the top of the reach and stopped his breath in the same place it had stopped it since Friday.
He held there with his arm up and waited it out, because there was no hurrying it and nothing to be got by trying.
Half a breath came in and would not come any further.
He worked the chain off the hook one-handed and let the lamp down slow until it hung well clear of the straw, and then he pulled the plug on the cord.
The calf raised her head at him. Her ear tag was bright yellow yet, and her mother stood over her chewing at nothing at all. She had come backward at two in the morning on Tuesday and the pair of them were alive, and he was not going to ask this week for anything more than that.
He counted the pens down the row on his way out. Six pairs, two empty, and the last of the heifers due inside the week. The note at the Gallatin bank came due the first of June, and the calf crop would be enough or it would not, and he would know by then either way.
Pilot came in the man-door with his nose down, deaf ear turned to the light. Daisy was behind him with her braid half out of itself.
“Clara says the deputy’s truck is coming up the road,” she said. “I can see the dust from the porch rail.”
“All right.”
She came down the alley to the far pen and put her chin over the top rail. “Is that the backward one?”
“That’s her.”
“Her tag’s yellow and everybody else’s is white.”
“The white ones ran out Tuesday night.”
“You could write on the yellow one with a marker.” She turned that over. “Then she’d match.”
“She’ll match fine by fall.”
“Can I go down and look at the water? Pilot would come with me.”
The water was three hundred yards down the two-track and over the slabs at the low-water crossing, brown and loud and running a foot up the gauge with the snow coming off the high country. From the barn door to the road was about a two-minute walk for a girl who stops for rocks.
“No,” he said.
“How high is it?”
“Higher than it was yesterday.”
“That isn’t a number.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
“Ruthie’s dad lets her stand on the bank at theirs.”
“I know it.” He dropped the gate chain in the hasp and pushed it home with his thumb. “Go up on the porch and wait for him there. I can see you the whole way from here.”
She weighed it. She was seven, and she had learned to take the part of a thing she could get when she could not have all of it.
“Can I let him in when he knocks?”
“He won’t knock.”
“He might.” She got a hand into Pilot’s ruff. “He knocked at Ruthie’s.”
“Then let him in and sit him at the table.” Wyatt pulled the man-door wide and hooked it. “Is Clara up at the house?”
“She’s doing the apples for tomorrow.” Daisy scraped the toe of her boot along the concrete. “Is she staying for supper?”
“She lives here.”
“I know that. I mean the other kind of staying.” The boot went on scraping. “Ruthie says nannies go home at the end.”
“Ruthie’s got a lot of information,” Wyatt said.
She went. He came out into the light behind her and watched her the whole way to the porch step, and she stopped once over a rock and did not pick it up.
Tate Callahan had his hat off and the folder squared in front of him before Wyatt got his boots off at the door. Wyatt put his own hat down on the pine table, and Tate slid the folder over to make room, and the corner of it went under the brim.
“Sit down and say it,” Wyatt said.
“I’ll say it sitting. That’s about the only good news I brought.”
Clara had the blue pot off the stove before either of them asked her for it. She poured for Tate and then for Wyatt, and the smell of the coffee came up over the smell of wet gravel through the open door.
“You’re a hard woman to say no to,” Tate said.
“I didn’t ask you anything.”
“That’s how you do it.”
Clara set the pot back on the stove. “Drink it before you tell him. He listens better with his hands full.”
Tate turned his cup a quarter turn without drinking out of it.
“Loretta’s got the county engineer coming to the hearing on the eighth.
He won’t put his name to the easement drawing until the hydrology page in this folder gets signed off.
I told her I’d run it out here so you’d know what was in it before you were sitting in a room with it. ”
“Then leave it with me.”
“Can’t. It’s county paper and it goes back in her box tonight.” Tate got a thumb under the cover and laid it open flat. “So I’ll sit here and drink this, and you read every page of it twice if that suits you.”
Wyatt turned the folder around. The top sheet was a table of gauge heights with a paragraph of type under it. He read the paragraph, and then he read it again.
“What’s in it?” Clara asked.
“The county recommended taking the slabs out and putting a box culvert in. Four years ago in April.” He kept his finger on the line. “The recommendation went in a drawer.”
“Whose drawer?”
“Doesn’t say. That’s the trick of it.”
“Loretta didn’t put it in the drawer,” Tate said. “She’s the one who went and dug it out again. Give her that much.”
“I’ll give her that much on the ninth.”
Clara stayed at the stove with her arms crossed on her apron. “What does the easement actually give them? I’ve heard the word for two months and nobody’s ever said what’s in it.”
“Thirty feet either side of the water,” Wyatt said. “The right to bring equipment across my ground. The right to come back in ten years and do it again without asking me.”
“And if you sign it?”
“Then the county takes the slabs out and puts something in that the water can go under.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Then the road stays how it is,” Tate said, “and the county isn’t on the hook for it, and every person in that hall on the eighth knows whose road it is.”
“It’s been how it is for four years.”
“That’s the sentence Loretta’s going to say out loud.” Tate turned the folder a little so the light came off it. “I’d rather you heard it here first.”
“What time on the eighth?” Clara asked.
“Seven, at the hall. She’ll have the drawing up on an easel and she’ll put the question to him in front of his neighbors.” Tate ran his thumb down the folder. “That isn’t her being hard on him. That’s her getting a road fixed.”
“She can ask,” Wyatt said.
Clara brought the pot around behind his chair, and stopped there, and read the page over his shoulder. “That line isn’t for you,” she said. “Look who it’s addressed to. That’s the engineer’s sign-off. It isn’t the landowner’s.”
Wyatt read it a third time. It said what she said it said.
“She’s right,” Tate said. “The page is the engineer’s. The easement’s yours. Nobody’s waiting on you for that one.”
“I know what’s mine.”
“I never said you didn’t.” Tate finally drank. “How’s the rib?”
“It’s there.”
“You get it looked at?”
“I got it wrapped.” Wyatt squared the page under his hand.
“That isn’t what I asked you.”
“No,” Wyatt said. “It isn’t.”
Clara turned an apple under the peeler. “He can’t pick his daughter up off the floor,” she said. “That’s what the rib is. He’ll tell you it’s there.”
“Ma’am,” Wyatt said, to the page in front of him, and Clara let it go by her and ran more hot water into the sink.
“You feed this man, or does he just drink coffee standing up?” Tate asked.
“He eats standing up. I quit fighting him on it in March.”
“Annie used to make him sit down.”
“I know she did,” Clara said, and set a plate in the rack, and that was all that got said about it.
Tate looked out at the corral. “There’s a killdeer running around your pens like she owns the deed to them.”
Under the table, Daisy had Pilot’s head on her knee and her back against the leg of it. “She has a nest on the ground,” she said. “They put them right in the gravel. If you walk at her she’ll drag her wing like it’s broke.”
“That so,” Tate said, and put his cup down.
“It isn’t lying,” Daisy said. “It’s a trick. There’s a difference.”
Tate looked at Wyatt over the cup. “Second grade.”
“Mrs. Finch has her hands full.”
“Daisy,” Clara said to the floorboards. “Elbows off my clean boards.”
“They’re Pilot’s elbows.”
“Pilot’s excused.”
“Then I’m sitting on my own,” Daisy said, “and my elbows are up here with me.”
Clara dropped a peel into the sink and did not turn around, and the corner of her mouth went where Wyatt could not see it and he knew it anyway.
Under the table Daisy went on telling Pilot about the nest, low, in the voice she kept for the dog and for nobody else. Then the telling turned over into something else, and she sang.
“down in the meadow where the cold creek runs”
She sang it low and a little off the note and the whole way through, words and all. Nobody had sung in this kitchen since Annie. Annie had not been able to carry a tune, and every soul in Bear Creek had known it and had loved her for other things.
Nobody moved. Tate held his cup where it was, halfway up off the table. Wyatt kept his hand down on the page and did not turn it, because turning it would make a noise, and a noise would be the end of this.
Daisy came to the end of the verse and went straight on into the next one.
Clara came in underneath her.
She was at the sink with her hands down in the water. Her voice came in a note below the girl’s and half a beat behind her, and it fit, and it had been fitted to that tune a long time before today. She got four words in.
For about two seconds it was the finest sound that had been in this house in four years. A child under the table and a woman at the sink, and the water running, and the coffee, and the door standing open on a warm afternoon.
Then she stopped. The water ran. Daisy carried the rest of the line by herself, the way she had carried all of them.
Wyatt put his cup down on the table and stood up.