34. Catalina
Chapter thirty-four
Catalina
Bonita goes into labor at nine, and I know inside two minutes it’s the bad kind, because she won’t lie down.
A mare foaling drops. Gets down in the straw and gets to the work of it, hard and fast and mostly done inside a half hour, because a body built to be prey can’t afford a long birth.
Bonita won’t go down. She’s up and circling and kicking at her own belly the way she did the day she colicked, lathered along the neck, and when I get a hand on her, she swings her head around with the white showing at the edge of her eye, and I know.
Something’s wrong in her, and it’s wrong in the way that doesn’t wait for morning.
I call Salinas and he’s forty minutes out.
I call Vicente and he’s four, because he’s always four, twenty years of always four, and he comes across the dark in his undershirt with a coat thrown over it and takes one look at her and his face does what I’ve watched it do exactly twice in twenty years.
“Breech.” Not a question. He’s already rolling his sleeves. “She’s trying to push it and it won’t come, and every push is costing her.” He doesn’t say the rest. He doesn’t have to. Eight years running this place, I know the shape of a foaling that’s stopped being a birth and turned into a race.
Salinas is still twenty minutes out and she’s getting worse, and I don’t decide.
I take out my phone and I text Finn.
I’ve got no right to it. I cut him eleven days ago, clean and cruel, called him a good worker to his face and drove him off my land to save a life I’ve since decided I don’t want. Every rule I own says put the phone down and handle it alone.
And I think about the way he stood at this mare’s rail every night for months. The way she chose him, the restless one, out of every soul on this ranch. She’s his horse as much as she’s ever been anybody’s, and she’s dying, and he’s an hour south. If it were me, I would want to know.
So I break the one rule I’ve got left. I text him first, knowing it drops into a bin in some locker room an hour south and won’t be in his hand until the horn.
The reaching is the thing, not the being answered.
Then I do the part that’s more me than the first: I find the way around the wall.
Sierra’s at the game, the way she’s always at the game, and her Mack can put a message in a man’s hand when a bin can’t.
Get to Finn, I tell her. It’s Bonita, it’s bad, and he’d want to know.
Salinas makes the drive fast and by the time he’s here she’s down.
Not because the birth’s moving. Because her legs quit, and that’s worse, that’s so much worse.
He gets his arm in her to the shoulder trying to bring the hind legs into line, and Vicente drops in beside him to work it with him, and me, I go to her head.
That’s the one call I make without being told, and I make it out loud, because saying the cold necessary thing is the job that’s always been mine.
I know how to say the necessary thing. Tonight knowing doesn’t make it easier.
I’ve said the cold necessary thing my whole life. I’m the woman who says it. So I say this one too, kneeling in the straw with her big head coming heavy into my lap, and I mean every word of it, and it’s the worst sentence I have ever said out loud, and I say it clean and I do not take it back.
Salinas doesn’t argue. He heard me choose, and choosing is a mercy I handed him, so he takes it and puts everything he has into the one he can save.
It’s most of an hour into it before my phone buzzes against my hip, and I steal the half-second to look because I can’t help it. It’s him. His own words this time, four of them, thumbed out in some intermission where Sierra’s message finally reached him. Coming when it’s over.
He’s coming.
He won’t make it. I know the road and I know the clock and I know he won’t make it for her, and I hold the two words anyway, he’s coming, and I put the phone away and put both hands back on a dying horse.
It goes fast at the end. That’s the only mercy on offer.
Salinas gets the legs and pulls with everything he has, and Vicente pulls with him, and the foal comes out of her in a rush of blood and water and long tangled limbs, dark and slick and impossibly still for one second that stops my heart.
Then Salinas clears its nose, and it kicks, all at once, a whole life arriving in a single jerk of motion. A filly. Breathing.
And Bonita doesn’t get up.
Bonita’s head comes heavy into my lap. Her hide is slick beneath my hands, the heat already changing. I press my cheek to the white blaze I have known for years, and tears fall into her mane before I can decide what to do with them.
She has spent her whole life searching the fence, pacing a line, watching for the next fight. Even carrying this filly didn’t teach her how to rest.
Tonight she used the last of that restlessness for the one fight that mattered. She held on long enough to get her daughter breathing.
For the first time since she came to me, Bonita isn’t looking for a gap.
“Good girl,” I tell her, my voice breaking against her ear. “You got her here.”
Her next breath is shallow. The one after it barely moves her ribs.
“You earned it,” I whisper. “You can rest now.”
She goes between one breath and the next, not defeated and not abandoned. Finished. I hold her head in the straw and cry for the strongest thing on this ranch finally being allowed to sleep.
And then there’s no time for any of it, because the filly’s up.
She’s up before I’d have believed she could be, all legs and instinct, wet and swaying and brand new to the whole idea of standing, and she goes straight for her mother the way they’re built to, nose down along Bonita’s still side, hunting for milk that isn’t going to come.
She noses the flank. She noses lower. She lifts her head and makes a sound I’ve never heard a foal make, high and lost, and makes it again, and starts to move faster, frantic, pacing the length of her dead mother for the milk that would keep her alive and finding a cooling body with no answer in it.
A newborn doesn’t have days. She has hours. Salinas says it fast, already moving. “She needs colostrum, and soon. The longer we wait the less of it does her any good. What she doesn’t get in these first hours, she never gets.”
Vicente moves before anyone has to name what comes next.
He gets up off the delivery and he kneels at the dead mare, at Bonita still warm, and he strips the colostrum out of her by hand, milking a horse that’s gone so her filly can live, those big scarred hands working slow and sure and gentle at a thing there is nothing gentle about.
He doesn’t say a word. His face is wet, and I have known this man twenty years and never seen his face wet.
“Get a bottle,” he says, low. “Something to warm it. She’ll take it or she won’t, and if she won’t we tube her. But she’ll take it. Somebody has to be still enough that she trusts it.”
Somebody still enough that she trusts it.
I look at the filly wheeling and screaming in the straw, wild with a fear she’s too new to have a name for, and I understand that I am not the one.
I’m shaking. I’ve got a dead mare’s blood to the elbow and my own heart coming apart in my chest, and a foal reads what comes off you the same way her mother did, and what’s coming off me right now is grief and the wound I tore myself.
She can feel every ounce of it. It’s the exact wrong thing to bring near a terrified newborn.
There’s one person alive who walks into a scared animal’s storm and carries the calm in the door with him. I watched him do it in this barn. I cut him loose two days later for the trouble of it.
And he’s on a black road right now with his foot in it, coming north toward the worst thing, because I broke my own rule and reached for him.
So I do the part I can do. Not the calm.
The calm was never going to be me tonight, not with a dead mare’s blood to my elbows and my own wound coming off me, and she reads every ounce of it.
But calm isn’t what the clock measures. Colostrum is.
So Vicente holds her and I get the tube down her, steady and careful and sick about it, because a newborn who won’t take a bottle still takes the colostrum or she doesn’t see morning, and steady is the one thing this ranch built into me that holds even when the rest of me is coming apart.
She fights us. We win it. It goes in. Whatever else tonight takes, she got the one thing there’s no second chance at, and she got it because three people who loved that mare wouldn’t let her lose her daughter in the same dark.
But the settling I can’t tube into her. She’s alive and she’s wild, wheeling and screaming the length of a cooling flank, wanting the one thing left that I am not: a body that walks into her fear without bringing more of it through the door.
Then Vicente’s head comes up. He hears it before I do.
Tires on the county road. A truck downshifting hard for the turn onto the drive, too fast, a man who’s driven an hour toward the worst news with his foot flat the whole way.
Headlights swing across the barn wall.
He came.
I get out of the way of the door.
For the first time in my life, on my own land, I get out of the way and let somebody else be the one who can.