Six Feet

By Saturday morning Owen’s toes were warm.

Nora knelt in the straw of the kennel run with the splinted leg across her knee and pinched the two bare pads, one after the other. The big red wolf jerked his foot and gave her an injured look.

“Don’t complain to me,” she said. “That’s the best thing you’ve done since Thursday. If you can feel that, you’ve got nerves and blood, and I can work with the rest.”

She put her nose down near the bandage, since nobody was there to see but a wolf. It smelled of clean gauze and healing skin and nothing worse. She rubbed him behind the ears, which he had decided to allow, and refilled his water.

Across the yard a hammer rang on iron. Rhys had taken the barn door off its track at daylight. He had done it by himself, by some arrangement of a plank and a fence post that kept his right elbow where she had told him to keep it, and she had been listening to him ever since.

She had been listening to him for two nights as well. The wall between the bedrooms was one board thick. She knew now that he slept on his left side and turned over about two, and that he was up before five and went down the stairs in his socks, skipping the third step because it creaked. Both mornings there had been coffee made when she came down. Both mornings he had looked at her across the kitchen a second longer than a boarder would, and then gone out to earn his oatmeal.

She found she liked it a great deal. Liking it made her nervous.

“Ten days,” she told Owen. “Eight, now. Then you can go home and tell them all how I boss people.”

His ears went up. He was not looking at her.

She heard it then. An engine was coming up the creek road, and she did not know it. It was quiet and new, on tires that had never carried a bale. It slowed for her lane.

A growl started in Owen’s chest, so low she felt it in her knees.

“Hush. You’re a patient. You don’t have opinions.” She let herself out of the run and latched it, and shut the kennel-room door behind her.

The car in the yard was a dark green Land Cruiser with Gallatin County plates and no mud on it. The man who got out wore a camel overcoat and good boots. He was in his late forties, with a lean brown face and dark hair gone silver at the temples. He stood a moment looking down the creek toward the headgate before he came to the clinic and knocked.

She smelled him as she opened the door. There was good wool and saddle soap and some expensive shaving thing. Under those was the cold metal note she had found on every Mulvaney, and with it a dry, sunny smell, like grass in August.

“Dr. Pruett,” he said. “I’m Vaughn Tierney. I’ve written to you twice, and it seemed rude to write a third time.”

“You’d better come in. You’re letting the heat out.”

He came in and took off his gloves. He looked at Doc’s desk and the drug cabinet and the stove, pleasantly, as a man looks at a house he has heard described. Behind the kennel-room door Owen growled again, and Tierney’s eyes went to it.

“How is young Doyle’s leg?”

“I don’t discuss my patients.”

“No, of course. That’s as it should be.” He smiled. It was a good smile, with nothing oily in it. “Then let’s not pretend with each other. You’ve had Mulvaney’s enforcer in your barn and Mulvaney’s alpha at your table. You know what they are, so you know what I am. It saves a good deal of time.”

“It does. What do you want, Mr. Tierney?”

“To raise my offer. One million four hundred thousand dollars for the forty acres and the water right. You can have it in writing on Monday.”

She did the sum, because she always did. It would pay off the bank and leave her better than a million dollars. She was a woman who had been five hundred and forty short on the twenty-fourth of November.

“That’s three hundred thousand more than you offered eleven days ago,” she said. “The place hasn’t improved. The barn door’s lying in the snow.”

“Eleven days ago you didn’t know what you held. Now you do, and I’d rather deal with someone who knows. I don’t want it said later that I bought a creek from a woman who thought she was selling a house.” He turned his gloves over in his hands. “May I tell you why I want it? You haven’t asked. I’d like you to hear it from me, since you’ve heard the rest from Billie Brannock.”

“Billie told it straight.”

“I’m sure she did. She’s an honest woman, by every account I’ve had. Did she give you the price?”

“Forty dollars an acre. Sixty-four thousand, for sixteen hundred acres.”

“Yes.” He was quiet for a second. “My grandfather was Hugh Tierney. He was born in that cabin on the Bench. He cleared the lower meadows with a team and a stump puller, he and his father. He left two fingers of his left hand in a hay mower down there in 1948, and he finished the field before he went to the doctor. He told me that himself, and I believed it, because I knew him. In 1961 the creek went dry, and his own cousin stood up under a full moon and told him to sell. The law was on Dermot’s side. Forty dollars an acre was Dermot’s price, and under that law it’s the buyer who names it.”

Nora said nothing. She had heard this over turkey soup, from the other end.

“He took his people across the divide. He worked for wages on other men’s ranches until his hands gave out. He died in 1990 in a rented house on a back street in Ennis. I was eleven. I carried boxes out of that house the week after the funeral, Doctor, because the landlord wanted it empty by the first of the month.”

She kept her face still. It took effort.

She had been eleven once, carrying boxes. There had been six houses, and thirty days’ notice each time, and a mother counting what was left after the deposit. He could not know that. He had told it plainly, without any shine on it, and she could hear his heart. It had not sped up at all.

“I’m sorry about your grandfather,” she said, and meant it.

“Thank you. I didn’t tell you for sympathy. I told you so you’d understand that I’m not a speculator.” He set his gloves on the counter. “I have made Maeve Mulvaney an offer too, or I will have by Monday. Nineteen million two hundred thousand dollars for the ranch. That’s six thousand an acre for thirty-two hundred acres, and no appraiser in Montana would put it that high. She could buy twice the ground east of the mountains and take all twenty-three of them with her, and never owe a bank again. It is a great deal more justice than Hugh was shown.”

“And if she says no?”

“Then there are older ways, and I’ll use them. They’re harder on everyone.” He said it without any heat. “I will have this creek back. I’d rather buy it than break it. That’s why I’m standing here in a clean coat instead of leaving it to other people.”

“You’ve left a few things to other people already.” Nora folded her arms. “A man with Madison County plates hung a cable in a trail on Monday. On Thursday it was around a twenty-two-year-old’s leg, and it stayed there six hours.”

“A licensed trapper set a legal snare on public ground in an open season.” He met her eyes. “I’m sorry for the boy. Tell him I said so. I’d have been sorrier still if he’d lost the leg, and I understand I have you to thank that he won’t.”

“I didn’t say he won’t.”

“No. You didn’t say anything. I admire that.”

“And Rhys Brannock’s ribs?”

“I was in Bozeman on the twenty-fourth. I’m told he took a bad fall on the rocks.”

“I sewed that fall, Mr. Tierney. It had tooth marks in it, and they came from three different mouths.”

He was a moment slow in answering. It was the first thing she had said that he had not had a reply ready for.

“Three,” he said.

“I know jaws. It’s my trade.”

He picked up his gloves again and looked at them. If he had not known, he would not say so in front of her. If he had, he hid it well. Either way she had learned something, and she did not yet know what.

“There’s one more thing, and then I’ll leave you to your patient,” he said. “You wouldn’t need to go anywhere. I have no use for a farmhouse and a clinic. Copperline would lease them back to you for as long as you cared to practice here. At a dollar a year, if you like that figure. I’m told it’s customary on this creek.”

“Then I’d be renting.”

“On very easy terms.”

“I’ve rented on every kind of terms there is,” Nora said. “The easy ones still end when the landlord says so.”

He inclined his head, as if she had scored a fair point at cards. “Then take the money and buy something no one can ask you to leave. Anywhere you like. I’d only ask you one question first. Maeve Mulvaney let you sit at the top of this road for twelve weeks without a telephone call. Then inside of a week you were her vet and her neighbor and a guest at her law-keeper’s table. What changed, do you think?”

It was her own question, the one she had put to herself on Monday with the engine running. Hearing it in his calm voice was worse.

She did not trust him. A man whose enforcer circled barns at night had not earned that. But she found that she half believed him, and that was a different thing. She believed in the grandfather and the two fingers and the boxes. She believed he would truly rather write a check than do the other thing. A man could have a real grief and still be coming to take what was hers. Both could be true at once, as Billie had said of 1961.

The hammering had stopped. She did not know how long ago.

The clinic door opened, and cold air came in with Rhys.

He had no coat on. There was rust on his hands, and the claw hammer hung from the left one. He shut the door behind him quietly and stood in front of it.

Tierney had turned. Neither man said anything.

Nora had seen two bulls put in one pen by mistake, and it had looked a good deal like this. Neither one pawed or bellowed. They stood six feet apart and went still all the way through, and the room got smaller around them. Rhys’s eyes had gone flat and pale. Tierney’s pleasant face was the same as before, except that nothing in it moved. She could hear both their hearts. They were slow, and that frightened her more than fast would have. Behind the kennel door Owen had stopped growling and started to whine.

She counted five seconds and decided that was enough.

“Nobody does anything in this building that I’ll have to sew up afterward,” she said. “I’ve got one table and it’s been busy.”

Rhys’s eyes came to her and went back.

“Brannock,” Tierney said. “You’re looking well, considering.”

“Considering.”

“I came to speak with Dr. Pruett. I’ve spoken.” Tierney drew on one glove and then the other, without hurry. He took a card from his breast pocket and set it on her counter, squared to the edge. “My own number is on the back. It rings on my desk and nobody else’s. Good morning, Doctor.”

He walked toward the door. Rhys stood in front of it for one more breath. Then he stepped aside, exactly one step, and Tierney went past him close enough to touch and out into the yard.

The Land Cruiser started. Nora listened to it go down the lane and turn west. She listened until it had passed the Bench.

Rhys let his breath out. He laid the hammer on the bench by the stove with a good deal of care, and she saw that his right hand was pressed flat against his ribs.

“Did you pull anything?”

“No.”

“Let me see.”

“I didn’t pull anything, Nora. I walked across a yard.” He rubbed his face with his clean wrist. “I smelled him when I was up the ladder. I’d have been quicker, but I had forty pounds of door track in my hand. Are you all right?”

“He was polite. He offered me a million four.”

He nodded slowly. He did not ask what she had said.

“He told me about his grandfather,” she went on. “The mower, and the rented house in Ennis. He’s putting nineteen million two hundred thousand in front of Maeve by Monday. He says he’ll have the creek back, and he’d rather buy it than break it.” She leaned against the counter. The card lay by her elbow, cream stock with black letters. “I believed about half of it. I want you to know that. I’m not going to pretend to you that I stood here and felt nothing.”

“The half about Hugh is true,” Rhys said. “Billie will tell you so herself. He was done hard by.”

She had expected him to argue. He seemed to keep on not doing what she expected.

“All right,” she said. “Then here it is. You’ve got four hundred and twenty cows and six hundred acres of hay on my water. I’ve got a loan and a handshake and a dollar bill on my dashboard. You’ve lived on this creek your whole life, and I’ve lived here three months. What do you want me to do?”

He looked at her for a while. He looked at her the way he had looked at that rawboned cow at the tub gate, without crowding. Then he shook his head.

“It’s your land. It’s your answer.”

“That’s easy to say.”

“It isn’t easy at all.” His voice was rough. “I know what I’d like. I’d like you up this road when I’m an old man. If I said different you’d hear the lie, with those ears. But what I’d like doesn’t get a vote. You bought this place so nobody could tell you to go. Nobody gets to tell you to stay, either, or it’s the same thing turned around. If you take his money, I’ll help you load the truck, and I’ll go on thinking well of you. Maeve can hate me for that if she wants.”

She listened, and she did not try to hide that she was listening. His heart was going a little quickly, as it generally did when she stood this close. It did not stumble anywhere. He had not once looked at the card.

On Monday she had sat in her truck and wondered whether she had been welcomed for herself or for a gate made of planks. She still could not answer for Maeve. But she had her answer for this one man, standing in her clinic with rust on his hands. He meant it. He would have carried the boxes.

The tight thing she had been holding in her chest since Monday let go a little.

“I’m not selling,” she said. “This is the first thing I’ve ever owned. I’ve had it for three months, and I haven’t finished finding out what’s in it. I’m not handing it to a man in a good coat because he tells a sad story well. Not for now.”

The last three words were out before she had looked at them.

She heard them land in the quiet room. They were the same sort of words as a box of books with the tape still on it. She had said them out of thirty years of habit, the way she hung a buckle by every door so it would be easy to take down.

Rhys had heard them too. She saw it in his face. It was a small thing, a stillness around his eyes that came and went. He did not flinch, and he did not ask her what she meant by it.

“All right,” he said quietly.

He picked up the hammer. At the door he stopped with his hand on the latch.

“The track’s up,” he said. “Come and see if it rolls, when you’ve got a minute.”

“I will.”

He went out. Through the window she watched him cross the yard to the barn, bareheaded, with his right arm held close.

Nora stood at the counter. The card lay where Tierney had squared it. She did not pick it up, and she did not put it in the stove.
***