CHAPTER 23
◆
The calving book lay open under his right hand. His rib would not let him hold a calf, so Sadie ran the tag gun and Caleb did the holding and Wyatt called the numbers off the page. Green manure, wet hair, the bite of the bander. The pen smelled like the end of a thing.
“Second to last,” Sadie said. She had the calf against her knees with a grip that would have embarrassed a bigger man. “Sorry, buddy. Two seconds and you’re done.”
“Left ear,” Wyatt said.
“Left ear.” The gun snapped. The calf bawled once and Sadie let him up and he went sideways into the mud and found his mother in four strides. “There. That’s not so bad, is it. Look at him telling on me.”
Caleb brought the last one up the alley on a rope halter with his heels planted.
The calf was a big bull calf out of the black cow that had come in late and he did not want any part of the process.
Wyatt braced a hand on the rail. He did not put the other one out.
Reaching across himself with that rib had cost him a full minute on his knees in the alley in April and he was not paying it again in front of the help.
“Get his head against the post,” he said. “Let him push. He’ll quit.”
“He’s not quitting.”
“He’ll quit.”
The calf quit. Sadie got the tag in and the bander on and stepped away, and Caleb slipped the halter and sat down on his heels in the mud with his forearms on his knees.
“That’s him,” Caleb said. “That’s the whole crop, unless somebody’s hiding one.”
“Nobody’s hiding one.”
“He’s telling everybody,” Caleb said. He was wiping his hands down his jeans, which did nothing, which he knew.
“That’s a thing they do. The bawl carries better than you’d think out here because there’s nothing to stop it, no trees, so a cow can pick her own calf out of forty head at the top of the meadow. I read that.”
“You told me that in March,” Sadie said.
“It was true in March.”
Wyatt swung the gate. The pairs went out of the corral in a loose brown river, mothers first, calves cutting back twice before they committed, and the dust came up off the county road behind them in a flat sheet.
Daisy sat on the second rail with her boots hooked under the first one.
She had been counting since the second bunch and she had not missed one.
“Forty-one,” she said. “That’s them all.”
“Forty-one.” He put the pencil to the page. “Daisy, get down off there and go in front of me.”
“I can count better from up here.”
“You can count from the ground.”
She hooked her boots tighter under the rail. “Sadie let me sit on the chute this morning and she said I was fine.”
“Sadie doesn’t own you.”
She looked at the ditch the runoff was going through at the far corner, brown and loud and running full, and then she looked at him, and she got down.
That was the whole argument. It cost her something, and she paid it, and she went in front of him with her braid coming apart at the tail, which it did by four every afternoon of her life.
“The gate’s open,” she said.
“I know it.”
She waited three steps. “You’re going to walk all the way over there and shut it and then walk all the way over here again.”
“I am.” The rib made him take the breath in two pieces on the word.
“I could shut it.”
He counted the ground between the gate and the ditch. Sixty feet, and the ditch was three feet deep and running like a hose. “You can hold the book,” he said, and gave it to her, and she took it in two hands the way a person takes something that matters, and he went and shut the gate himself.
Harlan came along the rail, working the lid off the thermos left-handed, and stood there while Wyatt did the last line of the book.
“Read it out,” Harlan said.
“Two hundred and forty pairs. Two hundred and twenty-nine calves on the ground. Eleven lost, and that’s inside eight per cent, which is the number the bank asked me for.”
“Say it again.”
Wyatt said it again. The numbers came out of his mouth the same both times, which was the point of saying them twice.
Two hundred and forty. Two hundred and twenty-nine.
Eleven. Inside eight per cent, with the heifer that went down in the blizzard counted in it and the twin that never got up counted in it.
“Eleven’s eleven,” Harlan said. “I stood in this corral with your dad the spring we lost thirty and he went to the bank in a borrowed coat.”
“I know it.”
“Well.” Harlan screwed the lid onto the thermos. “Wind’s laid down some. It’ll blow again Saturday.”
Wyatt shut the book. The wire spine was sprung and the cover had a hoofprint on it from the second week of March, and there would not be another line written in it until the last week of February.
“Sadie. Caleb. That’s the crop.”
“That’s the crop,” Sadie said. She took her cap off and put it on again. “I’m going to go sit down for a year.”
“You’re on nights Tuesday.”
“I’m going to go sit down until Tuesday.”
The hall doors were propped with two folding chairs and the coffee was already going bitter in the urn by ten to seven.
Chair varnish and hall coffee. Somebody had run a floor fan out onto the boards between the front row and the tables and taped the microphone cable down with a long X of silver tape so nobody would catch a boot in it.
A hundred and forty people, near enough.
Wyatt counted the rows because his hands had nothing else to do.
Eleven rows of twelve and the back wall standing.
Half of them had come for the entertainment and the other half had come for the bake sale, and the ones who had come about a bridge could have ridden in one truck.
Gemma had a card table by the door with a pan of lemon bars on it and a coffee can for the school.
Nora Finch sat on the aisle with her reading glasses pushed up.
The county engineer had his drawings unrolled across two tables at the front with a rock on each corner, a footing detail and a span in blue line, and he was not going to get to say a word for another half hour, because Loretta had the agenda.
Harlan took the chair beside him and put his hat under it.
“Big crowd,” Harlan said.
“It’s free.”
“It’s free and it’s you.” Harlan looked at the ceiling tiles. “That fan won’t reach past the fourth row. Never has.”
Loretta stood up at ten past and the room came down to nothing without her raising her voice.
“Council of Bear Creek, eight May, and we start on time because I said we would. Two items, and the second one is the bake sale, so hold on to your seats.” She put the reading glasses down her nose.
“For the four of you who are new, and I can see all four of you, it’s Gable, no S, and no relation, and I’ve quit explaining it.
Are we here to build a bridge or hold another meeting? ”
Somebody in the back laughed. Mitch Lawson was two rows up on the far side in a clean shirt with his hat on his knee.
“Bridge,” Tate said from the doorway.
“Then we need the easement across the Miller ground on the north bank, which we have needed for four years, and which the county cannot survey, fund or pour a footing on without.” She did not look at Wyatt when she said it.
She had looked at him plenty in March. “The state money is good through October and not a day past it, and I would rather not stand up here next spring and tell six hundred and forty people we gave it back. Mr. Miller.”
He stood up. The floor fan turned and the tube overhead ticked, one tick every second or so, and a hundred and forty people did not talk.
Wyatt said, “I’ll sign it. It should have been signed four years ago, and the reason it wasn’t had nothing to do with water.”
Loretta had the pen out of the box before he finished.
It was a county pen, cheap, and the barrel was slick in his hand from somebody else’s afternoon.
He went up the aisle and put his name on the line where her fingernail was and then on the second line under the date, and the paper made a sound against the table that carried in that room.
“Thank you,” Loretta said. “That’s a bridge. Two slabs and a depth gauge served this valley for forty years and they served it badly, and I will be calling every one of you about a culvert before I’m done. Next.”
The room let out its breath in a mutter of chairs. Somebody two rows behind him said something about time, and somebody else said something shorter, and Wyatt kept his eyes on the blue line of the span on the engineer’s drawing until it stopped.
He did not go and sit down. He went along the front and stood by the tables, because Mitch was already getting up.
“Mitch,” Loretta said. “The high pasture lease. You asked for the floor and you may have ninety seconds.”
Mitch came to the front with his hat in his hand and did not take the microphone.
“Wyatt and I have talked twice,” he said.
“His terms. My cattle come off the fifteenth of September, not October. I fix the north fence at my cost, and I don’t run more than a hundred and twenty head on it.
” He stopped. He let it sit the way he always did, and it did not feel like a trap this time.
“Nine thousand for the season, first year up front, in your hand.”
Wyatt had his thumb on the sprung wire of a rolled drawing. “That’s the number I gave you.”
“It’s the number I’d take.”
“Then we’re done.”
Mitch did not go back to his seat. He turned a quarter and spoke to the room instead, and it took him five seconds.
“And for the record, my offer on his deeded ground is off the table. It came off in the blizzard. I ought to have said so out loud then.”
Nora Finch said something quiet to the woman beside her. The fan turned. Mitch sat down and put his hat back on his knee, and that was the whole of it, and it was more than any man in that room had gotten out of Lawson Land and Cattle in twenty years.
Harlan had come up the side aisle and was standing close enough to talk under the noise of chairs.
“Nine on the grass, and the crop,” he said. He had the thermos lid in his hand in a public building, which was Harlan. “Against the note.”