CHAPTER 24 #2
He looked at the panels and then at the gate and did not say anything, because there was nothing to say.
He had tried on Tuesday with his right arm alone and had set it down again halfway and had not talked for an hour after.
So she carried them. Six-bar panels, sixteen feet, heavier at the ends than a person expects, and she walked them one at a time out of the mud and up onto the dry with her arms straight and her spine locked and her boots making a sucking noise every step.
Her shoulders were on fire by the fourth one.
“Four,” he said from the gate.
“I can count.” Her arms were shaking by then and she let them shake.
“Five.”
“Wyatt.”
“Six.” He had his hands on the top rail and his thumbs going, and he was counting because counting was the only end of it he could hold. “Seven.”
She set the eighth one and stood up and put her fists in the small of her back. “Say nine and I’ll drop it on your foot.”
“Nine,” he said.
“That’s the last one,” she said.
“I know it is.”
“Then you said nine like there was a ten.”
“There’s a ten.” He knocked one knuckle on the gate and left his hand on it. “It’s this.”
“Then say ten when I’m done,” she said.
“Ten,” he said, after she had it up on the dry and hung.
Daisy brought the bottle out from the house in both hands, held level, the way she had been shown, and stood outside the wire until she was told she could come in. The calf took it hard enough to move her a step, and she leaned into him and did not let go.
“He’s pulling too fast,” she said. “He does that.”
“Pinch it a little.”
“I am pinching it.” She pinched it. The calf slowed down and got noisy about it. “He sounds like Pilot.”
“Pilot’s quieter than that.”
“Pilot is not quieter. Pilot is deaf, so he doesn’t know how loud he is.” Daisy shifted her grip and got her shoulder into the calf. “That’s a different thing than being quiet.”
Harlan came off the porch with the thermos lid balanced in his left palm, the two smallest fingers on the right long past closing around anything, and stood at the corral and watched a bum calf drink until the bottle was empty.
“He’s been counting panels,” Clara said.
“He counts.” Harlan drank off the lid. “That’s what there is to do with a cracked rib. Your dad has stood at that gate an hour, Daisy, and not one word out of him about the fence.”
Clara looked over. Wyatt was still at the gate.
“Wind’s going around south,” Harlan said. “It’ll dry by Sunday.”
Inside, the kitchen smelled of coffee gone to tar. She took the telephone off the wall hook at ten past five with the door open onto the porch, and she stood where the porch could hear her and dialed the office in Bozeman.
“It’s Clara Gables, on Larkspur Street.” The agent started in about Monday and about the number and about how the number would not come around again this year, and she let him have every bit of it. “I know what it’s worth. That isn’t the trouble.”
He said the thing about Monday again.
“I heard you. The offer’s good through Monday and then it’s gone, and I’m telling you now so you can quit working on it.” She wound the cord around her finger and let it go. “No. Take it off the market and tell them thank you.”
He asked her a question she had asked herself in a parking lot the night before.
“Because I’m not leaving,” she said. “Yes, I’m sure. Yes, I know what the roof costs. I’ll put it in writing in the morning and you can have the sign back off the fence any day this week. Thank you. You were good to me.”
She hung the receiver on the hook. Out on the porch nobody said anything at all, which from that porch was applause.
Daisy was on the top step with her chin on her knees. “Does that mean you live here now?”
Clara sat down beside her on the boards. She had spent two months not answering this exact question, and the not-answering had a taste, and the taste was gone.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what it means.”
“Okay.” Daisy thought about it with her chin still on her knees. “You’ll have to get a different coat. That one isn’t a winter one.”
“I have a winter coat.” Clara put her elbows on her knees and looked out at the corrals with her.
“Where is it?”
“Denver.”
“So you don’t,” Daisy said.
“I’ll get one in Bozeman,” Clara said.
“Get one with a hood on it. My ear hurts in the wind.”
“I know which ear,” Clara said.
Harlan went down to the barn to walk the pens, and the barn light came on behind him, the switch inside the man-door on the left where it had been since before Wyatt was born, and it laid a yellow stripe across the churned ground.
Levi’s jar stood on the porch rail at the north end where it had always stood, half full of creek rocks and rain and four years of dust in the water.
Daisy had a rock in her fist. She had been carrying it since the corral.
She opened her fist and turned the rock over on her palm.
“This one’s flat. Levi only liked the flat ones, so it has to be a flat one.”
Nobody had ever told her she was allowed. She looked at her father and her father looked at her and did not say a word, and she reached up on her toes and dropped it in, and the water went over the top and down the outside of the glass.
Clara went in and came out with the mitten off the kitchen windowsill, small and stiff at the cuff where it had dried the wrong shape.
“Put it in your pocket,” she said.
“It’s May.”
“I know what month it is.”
“Then why do I need it?”
“Because that’s where it goes,” Clara said.
Daisy put it in her coat pocket and patted the outside of the pocket twice, and left her hand there. Then Wyatt came up the steps and stopped, and took his hat off, and held it out to his daughter without looking away from Clara.
“Hold that.”
Daisy took it in both hands, one on each side of the crown, and held it out from her chest like something that had come out of the oven.
He had the ring already. He did not go for a pocket.
Her mother’s ring, thin and yellow and worn smooth on the inside, off its chain, and she would find the chain later in the sugar bowl.
“This was your mother’s and it’s been in your pocket since April. I’d like it on your hand. I’m asking you. I’m not hiring you.”
Her eyes went. She let them.
“Dad.” Daisy had the hat gripped in front of her. “You have to say the whole thing, Dad. You didn’t say the word yet.”
“I was getting there.”
“Ruthie says you’re supposed to kneel down.”
“Ruthie’s eight.”
“So the ground’s wet,” Daisy said, “and you have a rib.”
“I have a rib.” He had the ring pinched between his thumb and one finger, up where she could see it.
“You’re also holding it wrong.”
“Daisy.”
“You’re holding it like a bolt,” she said.
Clara laughed and it came out wrong and wet, and Wyatt did not laugh at all. He was looking at her hand.
“Clara Gables. Marry me.”
She put her left hand out, palm down, the crescent scar white across the heel of it in the light off the barn, and it was steady, and he got the ring over the knuckle on the second try because his fingers were not.
She said yes on the porch boards with his hat in his daughter’s two hands, and then she went inside and put the big pot on the stove, because there were still calves to get through May.