Chapter 16
On the fourth of June, a year to the day after the snake, Rae was arguing with her husband about the rent.
“You’re overpaying,” Cole said.
“I’m paying what it’s worth.”
“It’s an old hay barn with a new roof.”
“It’s a six-stall barn with a round pen, a covered arena, and water to every stall,” Rae said. “Which you know, because you poured the concrete.”
They were standing in the aisle of her barn at six in the morning, with coffee.
It was the old hay barn on the east side of the ranch, two miles from headquarters.
It had stood empty for twenty years, until last winter.
Now it had six stalls with fans, and a tack room that smelled like saddle soap, and a round pen with high panels so a colt couldn’t see out.
Out front there was a covered arena with good sand that Cole and the hands had built in February, in the mud and the sleet, arguing the whole time.
Over the gate at the road there was a steel sign on two chains, with the letters cut clean through so the sky showed behind them.
RAE DAWSON TRAINING
It was the sign from Kincaid’s. Travis had brought it over himself in January and hung it.
He said it had never really belonged on his gate, and he was glad it had somewhere to go.
He’d had a new one made for his own place that said the same thing, smaller, under his, for the colts she still started for him three days a week.
In the third stall was Kim Tolbert’s bay mare from Brownwood, the one no one there had been able to bridle. She took a bridle now as if she had invented it.
“Dad cashed the check,” Cole said. “Did you know that? He cashed it the same day. He framed the stub.”
“He framed it?”
“It’s in the barn office. On the wall. Next to the picture of me on the pony.” Cole drank his coffee. “Mama says he shows it to people. He says, That’s my daughter-in-law. She pays rent.”
Rae laughed. She could not help it. “He does not.”
“He showed it to Earl Tate on Sunday. Earl told me.” Cole looked at her over the cup. “I still think you’re overpaying.”
“And I still think you should mind your own business.”
“You told me to fight with you out loud,” he said. “This is me fighting with you out loud.”
“This is you losing out loud.”
He grinned at her. He had a big slow grin these days. It came easily, all the way up to his eyes, and she had not seen it for years before last winter. She had not known how much she missed it until it came back.
“Fine,” he said. “Overpay. See if I care. I’ll take the difference and buy you a horse.”
“I don’t need a horse.”
“Everybody needs a horse.”
She took his coffee cup out of his hand and drank from it, because hers was empty. He let her. He always let her. Then he took it back and drank from the same side she had.
* * *
Her hand was better.
It was not all the way better. Hope said it might never be, and Rae had stopped minding that.
She had most of her grip back now, enough to hold a lead rope and a rein and a hoof knife.
She could saddle a horse on her own again, if the saddle was not too heavy.
She could pick up a dime. She could pick up a penny most days.
She had graduated from therapy in April.
Hope hugged her in the hallway and cried, and then made her promise to keep doing her putty.
She did, every night, sitting up in bed.
The two fingers on the end were still mostly numb. Some mornings she could feel a little tingle in them, like pins and needles. The surgeon said that might be the nerves coming back, very slowly, or it might be nothing.
She had decided not to wait to find out.
She had learned to do everything she needed without those two fingers.
She worked a horse a little differently than she used to, the way her father had after his fingers were gone, off her other side, with the horse coming to her.
She was better at it than she had been before, and she was not ashamed of that.
The scar had gone from pink to white. It ran up the back of her hand and past her wrist, and she did not hide it anymore.
People asked about it sometimes, at the feed store and at horse sales.
She told them a rattler got her at a water tank.
That was all she said, because that was all it was now.
It was a thing that had happened to her hand.
The rest of it had happened to her marriage. That was a different story, and she did not tell it to people at the feed store.
* * *
At a little after seven, the helicopter went out.
Rae was in the round pen with a big gray colt of Travis’s, and she heard it first. It was a low heavy thudding, coming up out of headquarters two miles away. She stopped the colt and turned around and put her hand up over her eyes.
It came up over the ridge low and fast, red and white against the blue. The county seal was on the tail. Its light was going. It turned north, toward the highway, and was gone in about a minute.
She stood there with her hand over her eyes until she could not hear it anymore.
She always stopped. She had stopped every time, for seven months, since the first call in November.
The hands teased her about it. Clem said she looked like a bird dog on point.
She did not care. Somewhere north of here somebody was lying on the ground on the worst morning of their life.
And help was coming in twenty minutes, instead of four hours.
It had flown more calls in seven months than anybody guessed it would.
Renee said so. Car wrecks on the highway.
A roughneck who fell off a rig. A woman in labor on a ranch too far from anywhere.
A little boy who fell off a hay trailer in February and would have died on the drive to San Angelo, and did not.
Two snakebites already this spring. One was a hand on the Crowley place, and one was a girl of nine, bitten on the ankle in her grandmother’s garden.
They were both home now. They both had all their fingers.
The county had two ground ambulances now as well. One of them had been paid for with a six-foot cardboard check.
No one in the county knew whose helicopter it had been.
Cole had made sure of that, and the county judge had kept his word.
People had guesses. Most of them guessed wrong.
Russ had never said a word, not even to Earl Tate, and Rae understood that it was the closest thing to an apology Russ Ashby was ever going to make to his son.
She turned back to the gray colt. He was standing where she had left him, watching her with his ears pricked.
“Okay,” she told him. “Where were we.”
* * *
Cole came by the barn at noon with lunch in a paper sack from the café in Pardee. He did it most days now.
They ate on the tailgate of his truck in the shade of the barn, like the hands did. He had chicken-fried steak, and she had a club sandwich, and they split the fries. He told her about his morning. He had been at the east pasture since four with Manny and Chuy, working his cows.
They were his cows. That was new too.
It had happened in March, at the kitchen table in the main house. Russ had asked Cole to come back on the board of Ashby Land and Cattle. He had not said he was sorry. He had said the ranch needed somebody who knew what he was doing, and Manny could not do the books. Cole had said no.
Then he had said he would come back on one condition. His mother would sit on the board too, with a vote of her own. Russ had stared at him across the table. Then he had looked at Sharon. She was sitting very straight in her chair, with her hands folded, looking back at him.
“Well,” Russ said finally. “Hell.”
Sharon had been on the board since April.
She said what she thought at every meeting.
She said what she thought at supper, too, which Russ was having a hard time getting used to.
Last week she had told him in front of the whole table that his new hat made him look like a used-car salesman.
Clem had laughed so hard he had to leave the room.
The Houston people had come back in February, on Russ’s terms and at a worse price. Russ had signed it himself, and then walked down to the east pasture to tell Cole about it, which Sharon said was the first time in forty years he had told anybody anything before it was done.
And Cole had leased the east pasture from the ranch, at a fair rent that Rae had negotiated for him, over his objections.
He had bought his own cows with his own money, two hundred head of black baldies, with a brand he had registered with the state in January.
It was an R and a C, joined at the back.
He had asked her before he registered it.
He had drawn it on a napkin at the yellow table in her rented house in December and slid it across to her and said, “Is this all right? Or is it too much?”
She had looked at it. Then she said it was all right.
“Manny says the calves look good,” Cole said now, with his mouth full. “He says they’re the best-looking calves on the place.”
“Manny says that to be nice.”
“Manny has never said anything to be nice in his whole life.”
That was true. Rae stole the last of the fries. Cole let her.
“Dad came out,” he said. “To look at them.”
She looked at him.
“He sat his horse at the fence for the best part of an hour,” Cole said. “Didn’t say anything. Then he said, You’re running too many on that grass, and rode off.”
“Are you?”
“Probably.” Cole grinned. “I’m not going to tell him that.”
“You’ll tell me, though.”
“I’ll always tell you,” he said. And then, more quietly, not grinning: “That’s the deal.”
She put her hand on his knee. Her right hand, the one with the scar. He put his hand over it, the way he did now, without thinking about it. He did it at the supper table, in the truck, in church, and at night in bed. He did not seem to know he did it.
She knew. She noticed every time.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Anything.”