The Side Door

The telephone rang at eleven, and Nora was down the stairs before the third ring. She skipped the creaking step without thinking about it.

“Doc, it’s Earl. I’ve got a heifer down in the shed and she can’t have it. I’ve had my arm in her, and there’s two feet and a nose and they aren’t coming.”

“How long has she been trying?”

“Since supper that I know of. She’s a little thing. The Lindquist bull got through my fence in March, that big white Charolais, and I never knew he’d caught her until she started to bag.”

“Is the calf alive?”

“It pulled its foot back from me an hour ago.”

“Don’t pull on it. Keep her quiet and get me two buckets of hot water. I’m coming.”

When she turned around, Rhys was at the foot of the stairs with his boots on and her truck keys in his hand. He had taken them off the hook by the door. He held them out to her flat on his palm.

“There’s a ground blizzard on the flats,” he said. “I heard it start about nine. I know that road better than you do, and you’ll want your hands warm when you get there. I’m asking.”

She looked at the keys. He had asked, and he was right about her hands.

“You drive,” she said. “I’ll load.”

Since Thursday they had been careful with each other. They had been polite over the oatmeal and quick to give way in doorways. She had not minded it. She had asked for time, and he had handed it to her without one sigh. Tonight there was no room for careful. She threw the surgery tote, the calving chains and two bottles of lidocaine into the back seat, and he had the engine warm by the time she climbed in.

The sky over the yard was black and full of stars. Below the Bench it was a different night. The wind had picked up the top of thirty-four inches of old snow and was carrying it across the road at the height of the hood, thick as milk. The headlights lit a white wall ten feet out. Rhys dropped to fifteen miles an hour and drove with his window down and his head half out of it.

“What are you looking at?”

“Fence posts. I can see the tops on my side. If I keep them six feet off the mirror, we’re on the road.”

“And if you lose them?”

“Then I stop and you tell me what you hear.”

She laughed, and after that she watched posts out her own window and called them when they came too close. It took forty minutes to go six miles. Neither of them said anything that was not about the road, and it was the easiest forty minutes she had spent with him since Thursday night.
***
Earl met them in the yard with a flashlight as long as his forearm.

“The shed bulb’s been out since the big storm,” he said. “I never got up the ladder. Evening, Brannock. What are you doing in the doc’s truck at midnight?”

“I’m fixing her barn door.”

“At midnight.”

“It’s a big door.”

Earl gave that some thought and decided it could wait.

The heifer lay flat on her right side in the straw at the back of the loafing shed, out of the wind. She was a brockle-faced yearling, not much above seven hundred pounds, and she was worn out. Her eye rolled when the light touched her. Nora soaped her arm and knelt behind her.

She found two front feet and a muzzle, as Earl had said. She followed the head back and found a forehead as broad as a dinner plate, jammed against a pelvis she could barely get her hand through. She put her fingers in the calf’s mouth, and it sucked them weakly.

“He’s alive,” she said. “He’s also never coming out this way. That’s a ninety-pound calf in a heifer built for sixty. I’m going to take him out through her side.”

“Here?” Earl said. “On the ground?”

“She’s not getting up for me, and I’ve got no time to haul her. Rhys, I need her head. She has to lie exactly like this for an hour, and she isn’t going to want to.”

He was already going to his knees in the straw. He sat down at the heifer’s poll with his legs folded, slid his left arm under her jaw and drew her head into his lap. His hand came up over her top eye and covered it.

“Hello, sister,” he said, low. “You’ve had a poor night. It’s nearly over.”

The heifer blew out a long breath. Nora watched her ribs slow down.

She clipped the left flank and scrubbed it three times. She laid the block in, a long line of lidocaine down the flank and another across the top of it, and she counted the minutes on her watch while Earl propped himself against a post with the light.

“Hold it on my hands, Earl. Wherever they go.”

“I’ll hold it.”

She cut. The skin opened, and then the muscle in its three layers, and she felt the heifer’s hide twitch under her wrist and go quiet again. From the head end the low voice went on steadily. He was telling the heifer about the grass on the Bench in June. She got through the last thin layer and put her arm in, and the uterus lay under her hand, tight as a packed sack. She felt along it for the calf’s hind leg and found the hock. She worked that part of the horn up into the opening and cut along the curve of it over the leg.

The heifer felt it. She was blocked in the flank and nowhere else, and something inside her was being pulled. Her hind legs drove into the straw. Her head came up hard out of Rhys’s lap, and her whole body gathered to roll onto her chest.

“Hold her!”

He went over the heifer’s neck with his left arm and his chest, and his right hand came down flat on her shoulder. Nora saw him take that weight on the side she had unstitched two days ago. He did not make a sound about it. He put his mouth by the heifer’s ear.

“No, now. No. You lie still, and she’ll have it done. Listen to me. Lie still.”

His voice went all through the shed. It was not loud. Nora felt it in her own breastbone, and her hands, which had been holding an open uterus up out of a belly, stopped wanting to shake. The heifer groaned. Her head went down by inches into his lap, and her legs slackened.

“Got her,” he said. “Go on.”

Nora went on. She looped a chain above each hind fetlock and handed the handles up.

“Earl, put the light on that rail and take these. Lift straight up toward the roof when I say. Slow.”

“I’m seventy-one.”

“You’re built like a fence post. Lift.”

He lifted. She guided the hocks and then the hips through, and the calf came up out of the heifer backward, long and slick and steaming. He was enormous and he was limp. They laid him in the straw. She cleared his mouth with two fingers and pushed a stem of straw up his nostril.

Nothing happened for one second, and then two.

The calf sneezed. He shook his wet head so that his ears slapped, and he dragged in a breath that she could hear from his nose to the bottom of his lungs.

“Well, look at you,” Earl said, and his voice cracked.

“Rub him with that sack. Hard. I’ve got a cow to close.”

Closing took her forty minutes. She sewed the uterus in two layers, turning the edges in so that they would seal. Then came the muscle, one layer at a time, and the skin. Her fingers were stiff and the flashlight was going yellow, and she finished the last third by headlamp. The voice at the other end of the heifer never stopped for longer than a breath.

When the last knot was down, she sat back on her heels and looked at him properly.

He had been sitting cross-legged on frozen ground for an hour with a heifer’s head in his lap. There was straw on his hat. His right hand was on the heifer’s neck, stroking it, and his face in the bad light was tired and perfectly content.

“You used that arm,” she said.

“Some.”

“I’ll look at it later.”

“I thought you might.”

Earl dragged the calf around to the heifer’s nose. She smelled him and made a small rumbling sound, and began to lick. At half past one the calf got his hind end up, fell over, and got it up again. Ten minutes later the heifer heaved herself onto her chest and then to her feet, and stood swaying with Rhys’s shoulder against hers. By two o’clock the calf had found a teat and had his tail going like a pump handle.

Earl looked at him for a while.

“White as his daddy,” he said. “I’m sending Lindquist the bill.”

“He ought to be proud,” Rhys said. “He’s the only calf on the place who came in by the side door.”

It was a terrible joke. Earl wheezed, and Nora laughed until she had to sit down on a bale.
***
The wind had dropped a little by the time they started home. The snow ran across the road in long low snakes, and now and then she could see a hundred yards of post tops in a row.

Nora sat with her hands in her lap. They smelled of scrub and blood and birth fluid, and so did her sleeves and her hair. She was tired in the good way, the way that came only after a live calf.

She looked at him. He had his window down again, and his hat pulled low, and he drove her truck as he did everything else, without hurry.

She had told him on Thursday that she would have to be sure which part was her and which part was cedar. She had meant to take weeks over it. She had told him her reasons would be ones she could write down, and she found, somewhere past the Copperline gate, that she was writing them.

He had held out the keys on a flat hand and asked. He had sat in the straw for an hour and talked a frightened animal into lying still, and he had thought nothing of it. He had never once reached for a tool in her hand. He had stopped her on Thursday, when stopping her cost him the very thing he wanted, because he would have known the difference. He made jokes about side doors.

None of that was a smell. She had seen every bit of it with her eyes.

She was a careful woman, and she checked a sum from both ends. She cranked her own window all the way down. The wind came through the cab from side to side and took everything with it. For a minute there was nothing in her nose but snow and cold iron and the cow on her own sleeves.

She looked at him again. She wanted him exactly as much as she had before.

“You’ll freeze,” he said.

“I was checking something.”

“Did it come out?”

“Both ways,” Nora said, and rolled the window up.

He glanced at her. He did not ask what she meant, and she thought he had a fair idea.
***
It was three o’clock by the kitchen clock when she hung her coat on its peg. Rhys fed the stove. Bolus came down from the couch to smell her boots and went away again, offended.

She did not let herself wait.

“Rhys.”

He straightened up from the wood box.

“I’m asking again,” she said. “I told you I’d say it in words, so here they are. Your stitches are in a saucer. The road’s open and your truck’s in the yard. I could throw you out of this house tonight, and I’ve considered it carefully, and I’m choosing not to. I’ve got reasons I could write down. There are five so far, and one of them is that joke, God help me. I want you. I’d like you to come upstairs with me.”

He stood very still. She could hear his heart from across the room, and it was going like a horse on a hill.

“Are you sure?” His voice was not quite steady. “I can wait, Nora. I’m good at it.”

“I know you are. It’s one of the five. Yes, I’m sure.”

He let his breath out. He crossed the kitchen and put his hand along her jaw, and she turned her face into it.

“Then yes,” he said. “Yes, please.”

“Good. Now I need fifteen minutes and all the hot water. I smell like the inside of a heifer.”

He laughed so hard that he had to hold his side. “I wasn’t going to say.”

“You were going to be a gentleman about it. That’s on the list as well.”

She washed fast and thoroughly and came out in a clean flannel shirt with her hair damp and loose. He had washed at the kitchen sink. He was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, barefoot, and he let her go up first.

Her room was cold. She lit the lamp by the bed and turned to him, and for a moment they only stood there. Then he kissed her, and it was the kiss from the kitchen table over again, with nobody stepping back at the end of it.

He undid her buttons one at a time, slowly, and he looked at what he uncovered. She had been looked at before, but never by a man who took that long over it. When his hands closed over her breasts they were warm and hard with callus, and so gentle that she made a sound she had not planned on.

“Your turn,” she said, and pulled his shirt off his shoulders.

She stopped with it halfway down his arms, because the scar was there in the lamplight, pink and straight from shoulder to rib. She put her mouth to the top of it.

“That arm stays below your shoulder,” she said against his skin.

“You discharged me.”

“I can readmit you. I’ve got the forms.”

They got into the bed laughing. The springs cried out under his weight, and they both went still and listened. Thirty yards away, very faintly, the radio in the kennel room was playing a fiddle tune.

“Owen,” she whispered.

“He’s asleep.”

“He’s twenty-two. He’s never asleep.”

“Then he’ll learn something.” He drew the quilt over them both. “You bought those in Darby?”

She had put the box on the night table. “In Hamilton, on Wednesday. I’m not a fool. In Darby they’d have rung your grandmother before I got to the truck.”

“Wednesday. That’s the day before you told me not tonight.”

“I plan ahead. I count twice.”

He was still laughing when she kissed him, and then he was not laughing. She put him on his back, because of the shoulder, and he went without argument and looked up at her as if she had hung the lamp herself. She took her time, and he let her. She learned the hollow of his throat and the long muscle down his good side, and where his breath caught. His hands moved over her back and her hips and the insides of her thighs, patient and sure, until she was the one who could not wait.

She could hear his heart, and he could hear hers. Neither of them could have bluffed the other, and she had never had that in a bed before. When she moved over him and took him into her, he said her name once, low, and held her hips, and his eyes stayed on her face.

It was not quick. They found the pace together and lost it and found it again. The springs complained the whole time, and once she laughed out loud at them with her forehead on his chest. Then she had no breath left for laughing. The warmth that had been gathering in her all night broke and went through her in long waves. She heard herself cry out, and felt his arms come hard around her, both of them, the mended one too. He followed her a moment later with his face pressed into her neck.

They lay still. His mouth was at the place where her neck met her shoulder. She felt his lips open there, and the edge of his teeth rest against her skin, so lightly that it was hardly a touch. His whole body tightened under her.

He lifted his head away, and it looked like hard work.

“What was that?” she asked.

“That’s the last thing I haven’t told you about mates.” He was breathing unevenly. “There’s a bite. It goes right there, one from each of us, and it’s done one time in a life. It leaves a silver scar. Afterward each one can feel the other. You’d know where I was, and how I was, with your eyes shut.”

She thought about it. Her skin still tingled where his teeth had been.

“You wanted to.”

“More than I’ve wanted much.” He smoothed her damp hair back. “It isn’t for tonight. That belongs to a day you ask for it, knowing what it is. If that day never comes, tonight is still the best one I’ve had.”

She had come up these stairs because he was a man who stopped. He had just done it again, at the worst possible moment, with her whole weight lying on him.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said. “It’s mine too, tonight. The best one.”

Later he turned onto his left side, as he always did, and she fitted herself against his back with her arm around his waist, below the end of the scar. His skin was warm, and the smell of him was all through her bed. She had chosen it, and she lay there pleased with herself.

Bolus landed on the foot of the quilt, turned around twice and lay down on her ankles.

She was nearly asleep when she noticed that Rhys was not. He lay quite still and breathed slowly, but his heart had not eased down as hers had. It was beating at a waking pace, like the heart of a man doing a sum that would not come out. She meant to ask him if the shoulder hurt. She was asleep before she could get the words together.
***