Chapter 3 #2
Kristin was already putting her boots on. "Is it a front foot or a back foot?"
A pause. "I don't know."
"That's all right. I'll be forty minutes. Get her somewhere with light and don't let her get up and down anymore if you can help it."
She got Tilly down the stairs, which took a minute she didn't have, and put her in the truck because she was not leaving a thirteen-year-old dog alone in two rooms, and drove west out of Mound with the sun coming up over her shoulder into a sky the color of the inside of a shell.
It was a back foot.
The calf had come at it backward and then given up halfway and the heifer was done — flat out in the near corner of a pole barn with her sides going like a bellows and her eye showing white, and she had been done for a while.
Ray Sundstrom was sixty and alone. His son farmed in North Dakota. His wife was in a memory unit in Buffalo. He told Kristin all three of those things in the first two minutes without being asked, in the way of a man who had not talked to anybody since Wednesday.
She got her arm in.
The left one. That was the thing she had not planned and did not decide — she just went in with the left, because the right was going to be doing everything else, and it turned out that a hand which will not close is a perfectly good hand for going up a birth canal, where what you need is a flat palm and a long reach and no fist at all.
Two back feet, hocked and jammed. A tail.
She got the chains on by feel, one at a time, the loops set above the fetlock and half-hitched below, which is fiddly work for two hands and was slow for hers.
Ray held the light and did not say anything and did not offer to help, which she was grateful for and told him so later.
"Okay," she said. "Now you pull when I say and stop when I say and I mean stop."
It took twenty minutes. Backward calves come out or they don't and there is no third thing, and there is a point maybe two-thirds through where the cord goes and you have a number of seconds after that, and you either get the head clear or you have a dead calf and a live heifer, which is a job you can do half-asleep. She did not want that job.
She got the hips through with the heifer helping and Ray hauling and her own left forearm braced across as a bar because the hand would not grip the chain, and the whole thing came in a rush the way it does, and then there was a calf on the straw not breathing.
She was on her knees. Straw in her mouth.
She got the sac off the muzzle and got two fingers in and cleared it and picked up a hind leg — the good hand — and swung him half off the ground, and set him down, and rubbed his ribs hard enough to hurt, and said the thing her father used to say, which was not a prayer and was not a curse and was just come on now, come on now, come on now.
The calf coughed.
It was a small, ridiculous, wet sound. Then he shook his head, which is the thing they do, the single most confident gesture in the world from an animal four minutes old, and Kristin sat back on her heels in the straw at twenty past six in the morning and laughed out loud.
Ray Sundstrom took his cap off and put it back on.
"Well," he said.
The heifer got up on her own at seven and started licking, which was the whole ballgame. Kristin flushed her out and gave her calcium and stood there another twenty minutes watching, because she wanted to, not because she had to.
Her left arm was shaking. Not from the work. It had started shaking sometime around the hips coming through and had not stopped, a fine tremor from the elbow down, and she stood in the doorway of a pole barn holding it against her stomach and waiting it out and feeling absolutely tremendous.
Ray followed her out to the truck.
"What do I owe you."
"Call the office Monday, they'll bill you."
"No," he said. "What do I owe you."
Kristin looked at him. Sixty, alone, a wife in Buffalo, a barn that needed a roof.
"You got a chest freezer?"
"Ya."
"Quarter of beef in the fall," she said. "When you do one. That's it, and we're square, and don't tell Dale Prewitt because he'll want one too."
Ray Sundstrom laughed — a short surprised bark, exactly like Blake's, which was an unfair thing for the morning to do to her — and shook her right hand with both of his, and stood in the yard while she backed the truck around.
She got out to the road and stopped at the end of the drive.
Tilly was asleep on the bench seat with her chin on the vinyl. There was blood and straw up Kristin's left arm to the shoulder and she could smell herself, and the sun was properly up now over a bean field, and she sat there in an idling truck with her wrists on the wheel.
fw, her father had written. Four or five times a year, n/g.
She got out her phone.
The listing had been up since March, because nothing on that road sells fast, and she had looked at it maybe forty times since April the way you look at a thing you are not going to do.
Lake Road Veterinary. Fourteen hundred square feet, two exam rooms, a treatment room, and a surgical suite she had put in herself at twenty-nine with a loan she had signed alone.
The new owner had let the sign go gray. She had driven past it every single day for two years without turning her head.
Kristin looked at it for a long moment with her arm still shaking.
Here was the arithmetic, and she did it right there at the end of Ray Sundstrom's driveway, because she was her father's daughter and the arithmetic is the whole job.
She had money. Not Ellison money — she had refused all of that on a Sunday in April and had the letter to prove it.
She had the money from selling the practice five years ago, which she had never touched, which had sat in an account gaining nothing while she went to galas, and which was the single stupidest and luckiest decision of her adult life.
She had a license back since the end of May.
She had a hand that could not hold clippers and could deliver a backward calf.
And she had a building on the lake road with a gray sign on it that she had signed a loan for, alone, at twenty-nine, in a year when she had been so happy she could not sleep.
It was not a good plan. It was a plan she could do by herself, which was a different thing, and which was the only thing she was interested in that summer.
Then she called Brynn, at ten past seven on a Sunday morning, and Brynn picked up on the second ring already sounding wide awake and furious about something, and Kristin said, "I'm going to buy it back."