CHAPTER 21
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The milk replacer had gone the temperature of a bath by the time Clara got it down the alley.
She carried the bucket in her left hand and kept her right thumb up off the wire handle.
The tape on the thumb had gone gray and she had not changed it.
Iodine, wet hide, milk turning sweet, and under all of it the culvert a quarter mile down the road running full.
The far pen had the heat lamp. The orphan stood under it in another calf’s skin, and the baling twine she had tied across his brisket yesterday had slid down over his hip. Clara set the bucket in the straw and knelt and worked the knot loose with her good hand.
“He’s rubbed it half off,” Harlan said from the gate. He had the lid off the thermos and was drinking out of it left-handed. The right hand would not hold a thing that size. “Second day. She ought to have taken him by now.”
“She will.”
“Might not.” Harlan tipped the lid and looked into what was left in it.
“She will, because he smells like the one she wants.” Clara drew the twine under the calf’s chest and tied it high on the withers, where he could not get a hind foot up to it. “It’s the hide slipping that’s the trouble. Not the hide.”
The skin had stiffened overnight into the shape of the calf it came off, and it did not want to lie down along the live one’s ribs.
She worked it flat with the heel of her hand and got the second string around behind his elbows.
He leaned into her the whole time, warm and stupid with hunger, and put his head under her arm.
Harlan came in and put a hand on the heifer’s hip and she swung her head around at him. The hobbles were on the rail. He worked the buckle with the two fingers that still closed and got nowhere with it, and after a while he handed the strap across without saying what for.
Clara took it. She crouched at the heifer’s near hind and got the strap around, and the heifer picked the foot up and set it down on the toe of Clara’s boot.
She waited. She waited until the foot moved, and then she pulled the buckle through and got the pin seated, and stood up with her spine complaining about all of it.
“He said pull the hide off and start over,” Harlan said. “Skin a fresh one when we lose one.”
“We’re not going to lose one today, and this calf hasn’t eaten since five.” She picked up the bucket. “Get out of the way, Harlan.”
He got out of the way, slower than he wanted to, one hand on the pen divider the whole way.
The hide had come off the dead calf yesterday with a skinning knife and most of a morning, and by now it smelled like what it was, and the smell was the entire point of it.
A cow will feed a stranger if the stranger is wearing her own.
The orphan hit the bucket hard enough to knock her elbow into the rail, and she braced her arm on the pipe and let him have it. Milk ran down his chin and off the dead calf’s hide in a white string. The heifer swung her head twice more and did not kick.
“Further than yesterday,” Clara said.
“It is that.” Harlan screwed the lid down on the thermos. “Wind’s out of the south. It’ll be warm enough this afternoon to want a hat.”
Daisy came down the alley with her coat open and her braid coming apart on the left side, which was where it always came apart, and stopped at the pen gate with both hands on the middle rail.
“He looks like two calves,” she said.
“He’s borrowing.”
“From the one that died.” Daisy got her chin up over the middle rail to see better.
“From the one that died. She has to smell her own on him or she won’t let him eat.” Clara pulled the empty bucket off the calf’s nose and he went on sucking air. “Give it till dark.”
“Ruthie’s mom says grafting doesn’t work.”
“Ruthie’s mom keeps horses.” Clara tipped the bucket to see how much he had left her, which was nothing. “A horse won’t take another one’s foal if you paint it. A cow goes by her nose and her nose can be lied to.”
Daisy considered the calf for a while. Then she looked at Clara instead, which was worse.
“Are you coming to supper, or is that one of the things nobody’s saying?”
Clara set the bucket down on the concrete and made herself take the time to do it right. Harlan had gone very interested in the lid of his thermos.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “When I know, you’ll hear it from me first and not from anybody else.”
“That’s not a yes.” Daisy’s hands stayed on the rail where they were.
“No. It isn’t.”
Daisy took that like a fact about weather, which is to say she filed it and went on.
She pulled her braid over her shoulder and started undoing it to do it again.
Harlan got the truck door for her and she climbed up without being lifted, and the diesel turned over and went out the gravel toward town, and the sound of it thinned out and was gone before Clara moved.
The folded paper was in her coat pocket where it had been all week. The agent wanted an answer by Monday and the number on it was more than her mother’s house was worth to anybody but a stranger, and saying yes to it was the only door Clara had ever been sure of.
She checked the twine on the calf one more time. It had not moved. She checked it anyway.
She wrote the orphan’s feeds in the calving book with the pencil out of the wire, sitting on an upturned bucket at the end of the alley where the light from the doorway came in white and stopped about four feet inside.
Wyatt’s boots on the concrete. He came as far as the pen and put his hands on the top rail and stood there looking at the heifer, breathing the shallow way he had been breathing since the rail went into him.
“She’s still hobbled.”
“She is.”
“You want the hide up on the shoulder, not the hip. He’ll walk out of it where you’ve got it.”
“It’s on the shoulder, and there’s a second string on him.” Clara closed the book on the pencil. “You could come in and look.”
He did not come in. He put his weight on the rail and let it hold some of him, and that was the whole answer. From the gate he could tell her how to do the job. In the pen he could not have gotten out of that heifer’s way, and the two of them knew the arithmetic of it, and nobody said it out loud.
“Harlan wanted to skin another one,” she said.
“Harlan’s been wrong about a graft since before I was born.”
“He said that was your order.”
“It was.” Wyatt put his hand out for the book. “I was wrong about it at six this morning and you were right about it at seven.”
“Loretta called the house.”
“I know what Loretta wants.” He shifted his weight off his sore side and the rail took it. “The hearing’s on the eighth whether I like the date or not.”
“She wanted to know if you’d read the notice.” Clara had written the message on the back of an envelope and left it under the sugar, and it was still under the sugar.
“Tell her I can read.”
She gave him the book. He took it and turned it over and started reading the last page, and he did not look up, and he had not looked at her since Thursday afternoon in the kitchen.
“I’m going to tell you all of it today. Once. Then I’ll never say it again in this house.”
The page did not turn. His thumb sat on the corner of it, the flat white scar across the base of it gone paler than the rest of his hand in the cold coming off the concrete.
“All right,” he said.
“Not out here.”
“No.”
He tucked the book under his arm and stood a second longer than the conversation needed. His right hand came off the rail about two inches. It went down on the pipe again and stopped there.
“I’ll put coffee on,” he said, and went up the alley toward the white doorway, walking the way a man walks when he cannot get a full breath and is not going to make a thing of it.
The kitchen door was propped open on a chunk of firewood and the woodstove was cold for the first time since February.
Clara sat down at the pine table on the side nearest the stove.
Wyatt stood at the counter with the calving book squared up on the wood behind him, and the coffee he had put on went on dripping, and nobody poured any.
“Sit down,” she said.
“I’ll stand.”
Six feet of floorboards between the table and the counter. She had crossed that six feet a hundred times a week for eight weeks, carrying plates.
“All right,” Clara said. “I’m going to do this in order and I’m not going to stop in the middle. If you stop me I’ll answer you and then I’ll go on from where I was.”
“Go ahead.”
She put her hands flat on the pine. The left one had the crescent on the heel of it, white and about three inches, and she left it where he could see it, because there was no point in anything else now.
“It was the twelfth of April. I was driving out from the school and it was raining on old snow and the creek was over the low-water crossing.” Her voice came out level, which she had known it would, because she had said all of it to the ceiling of her mother’s house more nights than she had not.
“I came around the bend by the willows and there were taillights down in the water where taillights are not supposed to be.”
Wyatt did not move.
“I left my car on the gravel with the door open and the engine running. The water was brown and it was going faster than it looked. It came up over my belt about ten feet in and it took my feet twice before I got a hand on the box side.”
“You went in.”
“I went in.” She turned her hand over and set it down. “It was nose-down against the cottonwood. The back corner on her side was the only part still above the water, and I had about ninety seconds of it.”
The coffee finished. The house got very quiet with the machine off.
“The glass was gone out of that window. I got the handle and the door opened about a foot before it hit the tree. She was on the high side, still in the seat, still buckled, with her arms up.” Clara took the breath she needed and went on.
“I opened the door I could open. The cab went under while I was carrying her up the bank.”
He put both hands on the counter behind him. That was all he did.