CHAPTER 22
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The brush was in his right hand and his daughter’s hair was in his left.
He had two parts where there needed to be three.
Sun came straight in over the sink and put a white line down the side of her head.
Her scalp was warm under his knuckles. He drew the brush through and it caught halfway down, and she pulled air in over her teeth.
“Sorry,” he said.
She got a fistful of her own hair and held it down against her collarbone. “You’re going too fast.”
“I know it.” He worked the bristles loose and started again at the crown, slower.
The toast in the oven went from brown to something well past brown while he was not looking at it.
A magpie walked the porch rail outside the window and took its time about the whole business.
Daisy sat with her heels hooked in the chair rungs.
Her hands were folded on the table like a woman waiting on a bank officer.
He laid one rope of hair over the other. It held flat for about four inches. Then it quit and came apart in his fingers.
“It’s too tight and it isn’t even. Clara does three parts. You keep doing two.”
“Three.” He looked at what he had, which was two ropes of white-blond hair and no third one anywhere. “How do you get three out of two.”
“You don’t. You start with three and then you keep going.” She turned her head to check his progress, and the whole thing slid out of his hand. “Now you have to start over.”
“I’ve got it.”
“You don’t have it. Start over.”
He started over. The oven ticked and the burnt smell spread through the kitchen and settled in. He parted her hair with the end of the brush and made three of it. Holding three took every finger he owned. There was no hand left over to work with.
“Dad.”
“I’m thinking.”
“You’re not thinking, you’re holding.” She reached up and tapped his wrist. “You trade them. Outside over middle. Then the other outside over middle. It’s the same two moves the whole time, forever, until you run out of hair.”
“Who told you that.”
“Clara. She said the trick isn’t the braid, it’s not letting go.”
He got the third rope wrapped over his little finger and it held. “That sounds like her.”
“She did it once with her eyes shut to prove it. It came out better than yours does with them open.”
He traded them. What came out lay low and lumpy and set off toward her left ear. But it stayed. He wound the rubber band twice, went for a third turn, and it snapped off his thumb and shot away under the stove.
“That was the last one,” Daisy said.
He got down on one knee and put his cheek near the floor and looked under the stove, and there was nothing under there but dust and a jack of hearts. “There’s a bag of them in the drawer.”
“There isn’t.” She did not turn around. “I looked on Sunday.” She put her hand up and felt along her own head, all the way down, slow, hunting the break in it like a man on a fence line. “It’s better than yesterday.”
“That’s not saying much.”
“No,” she said. “But it’s true.”
He scraped the black off two slices of toast into the sink and buttered them anyway.
She ate them standing at the counter, which she was not supposed to do, and which he let go.
The calving book sat by the bread box with the pencil shoved through the wire.
He set his coffee down on the far side of it.
“Dad.”
“Mm.”
“Is she coming back? You can say no. I’d rather know than be handled.”
Clara had stood in that doorway with her keys on Saturday and gone out to the green hatchback and not come back. Four miles into town, then the turn, then Larkspur Street, which was half a mile more. He could have driven it in fifteen minutes on any hour of any day since.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “That’s the true answer and it’s the only one I’ve got.”
Daisy chewed and swallowed and looked at the crust in her hand.
“Did you do something.”
“Probably.”
“What did you do.”
“I don’t know that either.” He picked her coat up off the chair back and held it open. “When I find out, I’ll tell you. That’s a promise and you can hold me to it.”
She put her arms in the sleeves. “You always say the second part.”
“What second part.”
“The part where you promise.” She got the collar straight herself. “You don’t have to say it every time. I already know you don’t lie. It’s the only thing about you that never changes.”
“There’s other things.”
“There’s two,” she said. “That, and you’re bad at hair.”
She dug in her pocket to be sure of the spiral notebook, the bird list, which went where she went.
“Mrs. Finch says a magpie is a corvid and not a blackbird,” she said. “Ruthie keeps writing blackbird.”
“Then Ruthie’s wrong,” he said.
“She is. I told her twice.”
They walked out the lane together. The low meadow had come on hard in the last week, greening from the ditch up.
The wind was out of the west and warm enough that his heavy coat had stayed on the hook.
Twelve minutes to the county road at a seven-year-old’s pace.
He counted it every school morning and it never came out different.
She got up on the culvert lip and walked it with her arms out. He stayed off her elbow and let her, and put his own hand in his pocket to keep it there.
“Thursday you’re going in the community hall,” she said. “Ruthie’s mom said so at pickup.”
“Thursday morning,” he said.
“Are they taking our field.”
“Forty feet along the creek,” he said. “For the road.”
The bus came up out of the dip a half mile off. The sound of it arrived a second behind it.
“It’s not settled,” he said.
“You’ve been saying it’s not settled for a long time.”
“Four years.”
“What happens if they take it.”
“Then there’s a road where there’s grass,” he said. “And a culvert I never asked anybody for.”
She came down off the culvert lip and put herself on the road beside him. “Is that bad.”
He counted the posts between the lane and the willows, which he had done enough times to know the number before he started. “It’s forty feet.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
The doors folded open. She went up the steps without turning around, which she had started doing in March. He stood at the end of the lane while the bus pulled out and made the grade and dropped away.
The far pen still had the heat lamp over it from the twin heifer on Sunday.
He unhooked the cord, coiled it, and set the lamp on the shelf inside the man-door.
The barn without it ran cooler. It smelled like the tail end of calving smells, ammonia and old straw and the neatsfoot oil off the tack room wall.
Two hundred and forty pairs and all but nine of them out on grass. Nine to go. Then he could fork the whole run out and be shut of the barn until February.
He got the manure fork and started on the far pen. His left side let him know about it on the second load. He went shallow after that, half a fork at a time. He hauled it out on the plastic sled instead of the wheelbarrow, because the barrow wanted both arms up and the sled only wanted a rope.
Twice he stopped and put a hand on the top rail and waited until his side let go of him. Both times he counted the empty pens while he stood there. Both times he got a different number.
He brought two bales down from the shed on the sled and cut the strings and shook fresh bedding into the second pen, a flake at a time.
His left arm did almost none of it. Straw dust hung in the door light and would not come down.
By the time the floor was covered, his shirt was wet through under both arms, and outside the wind had not changed at all.
The calving book lay on the rail where he had set it down. He had carried it out with his coffee and never opened it.
The pencil through the wire was not his.
His were the yellow ones from the feed store, chewed at the ferrule, run through the little crank sharpener screwed to the kitchen door frame.
This one was a carpenter’s pencil, flat, cut to a point with a knife in short strokes.
Six or eight facets around the lead. She sharpened them at the pine table with a paring knife, shavings collecting in her palm, and then she fed the palmful into the stove.
He turned the book face-down on the rail.
Then he picked the fork back up and did four more forkfuls and set it against the wall. The pen was half done. He left it that way.
The man-door opened. Harlan came in with the thermos under his right arm, because the right hand would not close on it. He stopped inside the door. He did not talk about the wind.
“Son.”
Wyatt kept forking. “There’s coffee up at the house.”
“I’ve got mine.” He did not unscrew the lid. He stood there with the thermos against his ribs and the doorway light on one side of his face. “I was in the tack room, son. You never knew I was in there, and I never said.”
Wyatt set his hand on the fork handle. “When.”
“Three weeks after the funeral. You come in the west door and she was standing about where that sled is.”
The sled was nine feet from him. Straw on it, and a wet mark where the last load had sat.
“Say the rest of it.”
Harlan looked at the floor between them and did not hurry.
“You said, “You should go, Clara. I can’t look at you.” That’s it. That’s word for word.”
Wyatt heard it. It went through him and out the other side and did not stop anywhere, because there was nothing in him for it to catch on.
“Say it again.”
“Son.”
“Say it again, Harlan.”
The old man’s jaw worked once under the white mustache. He gave it back with nothing added to it and nothing taken out.
“You said, “You should go, Clara. I can’t look at you.” Word for word. It don’t come out better the second time and it won’t the third.”
It did not come out better. It was the same nine words, in the same order, at the same speed. This time they caught.