One Lollipop Owed

Somebody put a bowl of mashed potatoes into Nora’s hands before she had her second arm out of her coat.

“Down the far end, by Maeve,” said a broad woman with flour on her chin. “Mind the dog.”

There was no dog that Nora could see. There was a boy of about six under the nearest table, on all fours, and he growled at her ankles as she went by.

Billie’s low log house had three tables pushed end to end, running from the kitchen range through a wide doorway to the front-room window. Twenty-three people were finding chairs along them, and every one was talking. The windows had steamed over. The whole place smelled of turkey and sage and coffee and hot rolls. Under that was the cold metal note they all carried, so many of them together that she ought to have been dizzy with it. A month ago it had been a thing she had no name for. Today it smelled to her like this kitchen.

She had brought a bottle of whiskey and a pie from the bakery in Hamilton. Billie had taken the whiskey with approval. She had looked at the pie with Christian charity and put it at the back of the sideboard.

“You’re there,” Billie said, pointing with a carving fork. “Between him and Immy. Owen, get your elbows in. You’re not the only one eating.”

Nora sat. Rhys was already in the next chair, in a clean white shirt with the sleeves turned back. His knee came to rest against hers under the cloth and stayed there.

Maeve stood at the far end with her glass.

“I’ll keep it short, because the gravy won’t. It’s been a hard month. There’s a harder one coming, and Billie has ruled that nobody is to speak of it at her table, so I won’t.” Her eyes went down the length of the tables and came, for a second, to Nora. “We’re all here, and that wasn’t certain in November. Eat.”

After that it was only noise and dishes.

Nobody asked Nora whether she wanted anything. Things came down the table from the left, and she took some and handed them on to the right, the same as everyone else. A platter of dark meat went by, and then the stuffing and creamed onions and a bowl of something orange with marshmallows on it. A man across from her, one of the two who had shoveled lime on the Bench, wanted to know about his gelding’s cough, and she told him between mouthfuls to wet the hay. The broad woman, who turned out to be Owen’s mother, got up to see to the rolls and put a baby in Nora’s lap on the way, without a word, as she might have set down a purse. The baby was eight months old, and it smelled of milk and iron. It took hold of Nora’s braid and held on for the rest of the meal.

“Ninety-one,” Owen said, to nobody in particular. “Ninety-two.”

He was squeezing his rubber ball under the edge of the table with his right hand and forking potatoes with his left.

“He’s been doing that for a week,” Immy said in Nora’s ear. “He does it in church.”

“He’s supposed to.”

“We know. He tells us.”

The boy from under the table surfaced at her elbow. “Did you really wave at Immy when she was a wolf?”

“I did. She waved back.”

“With what?”

“Ask her.”

He went off to ask. Nora ate and listened, and kept the baby’s fist out of the gravy.

Nobody spoke of the twenty-second of January, and Billie’s rule held. But the meat platter came down the table a second time and a third, and each time whoever had it stopped at Rhys and waited until he had taken more. He had been out of her bed before four on both of the last two mornings. He had come back at daylight with frost on his eyebrows and his breath sawing, and he had eaten six eggs. She had gone over his shoulder with her fingers both times and found nothing wrong, and she had said nothing more. It was twenty-eight days. She had counted them twice.

She had also restocked her suture, and she had not told him that.

When the pie plates were scraped, the children got their presents, and the noise doubled. A girl got a pair of spurs and put them on over her socks. Under cover of it Rhys reached down beside his chair and laid a small parcel next to Nora’s plate. It was wrapped in a clean flour sack and tied with baling twine.

“It isn’t much to look at,” he said.

The table had gone noticeably quieter on their side. Nora gave the baby back to its mother and untied the twine.

It was a hoof knife. The blade was narrow, grey and plain, curved along its length, with the tip turned back in a neat tight hook. She touched her thumb to the edge and took it away quickly. The handle was pale close-grained wood, oiled and rubbed until it was as smooth as a creek stone, and it was an odd shape, with a swell in the middle and a shallow flat on one side.

She closed her right hand on it.

Her fingers went into four hollows she had not seen. Her thumb lay down on the flat. The swell filled her palm, and the hook sat forward of her knuckle exactly where she would have put it to pare out an abscess. She had bought hoof knives for eight years from a catalog, and every one had been made for a man with a hand like a shovel.

“You forged this.”

“The blade was a rasp. I’d worn it out on that bay of Maeve’s. The handle’s apple, off the old tree behind this house.”

“How did you get my hand?”

“I carved it to mine first.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Then I took wood off until it was wrong for me by the right amount. I know how much smaller yours is. I’ve had hold of it.”

Somebody down the table said, “Oh, Lord,” with feeling.

“He made me a hoof pick once,” Immy said. “It bent.”

“You were eleven. You used it on a paint can.”

Nora turned the knife over. He had stamped a small N into the steel near the handle. She could feel every person at three tables watching her. She understood that a farrier did not make a tool like this for a woman in front of his whole pack by accident.

“It’s the best knife I’ve ever held,” she said. “I’m going to be unbearable about it.” She laid it on the flour sack. “Now it’s my turn, and yours is a business matter.”

She took the thing out of her shirt pocket and set it on his plate.

It was a root-beer lollipop, a flat one in cellophane, from the jar on the drugstore counter in Hamilton. It had cost her twenty-five cents.

Rhys looked at it. Color came up slowly from his collar.

“The records of my practice show a debt,” Nora said, loudly enough for the far end. “‘Brannock, R., age nine, October 2001. Porcupine quills, thirty-one removed. Paid: one lollipop owed.’ I bought that practice on the first of September, with its debts along with its drawers. It’s carried this one for twenty-five years. I’d like it noted in front of witnesses that it’s settled.”

There was a second of silence.

Then Billie laughed. It began as a kind of bark, and it went on. She put her fork down. She laughed until her small shoulders shook and her bun came loose from two of its pins, and until she had to press her napkin to her eyes. Then she began to cough, and Maeve got up and thumped her between the shoulder blades, and she waved Maeve off and laughed again.

“Thirty-one,” she got out. “He came home with his face like a pincushion. He told me the porcupine started it.”

“It did,” Rhys said.

“Amos promised him that sucker to make him hold still, and then he hadn’t one in the truck. The child asked after it every visit for two years.” She wiped her eyes. “Eat it, boy. You’ve waited long enough.”

He unwrapped it and put it in his mouth, with the whole table hooting. Around the stick he said to Nora, very low, “You went through that ledger for this.”

“I didn’t have to go through it. I knew the page.”

His knee pressed against hers. She pressed back.
***
The telephone rang in the hall while the women were stacking plates. A child got to it first.

“Doctor! It’s your mother, and she says it’s long distance so hurry up!”

The hall was narrow and lined with coats, and it was a little quieter than the kitchen. Nora put her back against a row of sheepskin and her finger in her other ear.

“Mom. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas, honey. Who was that? She sounded about four.”

“She’s about four. I told you I’d be at the ranch down the road. They’ve got a houseful.”

“That’s the account. The one on retainer.” Gail Pruett had kept books for thirty years, and she had her priorities. “Are they paying you on the first?”

“They pay ahead.”

“Well, hang on to them. Did you get the sweater?”

“I’m wearing it tomorrow. Are you at Ruth’s?”

“I’m going over at three. I’ve got rolls in. The news had snow all over western Montana last night. Are your roads fit to drive?”

“We got four inches. The county came up the creek before breakfast.” Nora smiled at the coats. “I heard him turn off the highway at six, from my bed. That’s six miles. I was awake before anybody.”

Her mother laughed, a short surprised laugh, with something else in it.

“You get that from your father. Cal could hear a truck a mile off.”

Nora stood still.

Her mother had spoken that name perhaps a dozen times in thirty years. Nora had learned as a small girl not to fish for it. Asking about him had made her mother go quiet at the kitchen table and stay quiet until bedtime. So she had the buckle on the nail and a year on a gravestone, and that he had ridden broncs and had a nice smile. That was the sum of it.

“You never told me that,” she said.

“Didn’t I?” There was the clank of an oven door. “He’d say, ‘Here comes somebody,’ and I’d stand there a full minute feeling silly before the headlights showed. I thought he was teasing me, the first few times.” The voice turned brisk. “My rolls are going to burn. Are you eating enough? You sound thin.”

“You can’t hear thin, Mom.”

“I can hear it on you. Go back to your dinner. I love you, honey.”

“I love you too.”

She hung up and stood with her hand on the receiver.

When she turned, Rhys was at the kitchen end of the hall with a stack of pie plates in his hands. He was not going anywhere with them. He was looking at her, and for a second his face had the careful stillness it had worn up the creek, the day she asked him about his other job.

“Was that your mother?”

“She says I get my ears from my father. She’s had thirty years to mention it, and she picked today, with rolls in the oven.” Nora shook her head. She found she was pleased, in a puzzled way, as she would have been to come on an old photograph in a coat pocket. “A truck at a mile, she says. I’d have had him beaten.”

It was a moment before he answered.

“Then I’m obliged to him,” he said, and took the plates on through to the sink.
***
They drove home at nine under a moon two days past full. The knife rode on the dashboard in its flour sack, where the dollar bill had ridden.

Bolus had let the stove go down to coals, which he seemed to feel was her fault. She fed it. Rhys hung his coat and hers. When she turned from the stove he was standing by the pine shelf with his hands at his sides, waiting to see what she wanted. He always did that.

“There’s nobody in the kennel run,” she said.

“No.”

“There isn’t a radio on, and nobody’s got a heifer down. I’ve got no surgery tonight, and I didn’t get in at three in the morning.” She walked over to him and took hold of his shirt front. “I was in a hurry last time. I didn’t know it until afterward. Tonight I’m not, and I’d like to be in charge of it. Is that all right with you?”

“Nora.” His voice had already dropped. “That’s about all right as anything I ever heard.”

She led him up by the hand.

She lit the lamp and left it burning. She undressed him herself this time, standing by the bed, and she did not rush a button. She had sewn this body and bandaged it and taken its temperature, and she had never yet had the leisure to simply look at it. She looked now. She ran her palms over his shoulders and down his arms, and over the hard flat of his stomach. She followed the scar with her mouth from the top to the last rib. It had begun to pale, and she was a little vain about it.

“Lie down,” she said.

He lay down. She took off her own clothes, with his eyes on her and the lamplight warm on her skin, and she liked being watched like that.

She showed him what she wanted, and where she had no way to show him she told him in plain words. He listened to her as he listened to everything. His mouth was slow on her breasts. His hand moved up the inside of her thigh as patiently as he worked a cow toward a gate. When she said, “There,” he stayed there, and when she said, “Softer,” he made it softer, until she had to stop talking.

“Now come here,” she said, when she could. “Over me. I want your weight. You’ve got two good arms, and I’d like the use of them.”

He came over her on both elbows. She drew him down and into her, and held still for a moment with her legs around him, just to feel it. He was heavy and warm and shaking a little with the effort of waiting.

“You set it,” he said against her temple.

She set it, and she made it slow. She kept her eyes open, and so did he. The long climb went on so gradually that she could not have said when it became more than she could hold. She felt it gather low in her and spread upward through her belly and her breasts. She said his name and heard her voice break on it. He stayed with her all the way through, and he did not let himself go until she had gripped his shoulders and told him he could.

Afterward he lay with his face in her hair. Her lips were against the place where his neck met his shoulder, and she felt his pulse there, hard and quick. She thought about what he had told her that place was for. She did not do anything about it. She had said to herself a moment ago that it was not yet, and she noticed that “yet” was the word she had used.

She blew out the lamp.

They lay in the dark for a long time without speaking. He was on his back, with her head on his good shoulder and his arm around her. The cat arrived and settled across their feet.

“I want to tell you something,” Nora said.

“All right.”

“On Thanksgiving I told you about my nose, and about getting my head scanned. I made it sound as if I’d looked into it and closed the file. I didn’t close it.” She spoke toward the ceiling. “I’ve thought since I was six years old that there was something wrong with me. I don’t mean something odd. I mean wrong, as if I’d been put together with a part in backward. I asked my mother once why I could hear the neighbors’ television from my bed, and she went white and told me I had a big imagination. At fifteen I asked a doctor. He gave me a hearing test and said it was excellent. Later I asked a machine in Fort Collins. After that I stopped.”

His arm had tightened a little. He did not interrupt.

“I check every sum twice. You’ve watched me do it. That’s the one sum in my life I left sitting. I told myself it was like a heart murmur, that a person could live with it and never learn the name. The truth is I was afraid of what the name would be.” She breathed in and out. “I’ve never said that out loud to anyone. Then today my mother tells me, between one pan of rolls and the next, that I get it from him. So it came from somewhere. It’s been in a drawer for thirty years, like the buckle, and he’s thirty years dead. I can’t ask him what it was. I still don’t know what’s wrong with me, Rhys. I only know now that he had it too.”

He turned toward her. Both his arms came around her and pulled her in against his chest, tighter than he had ever held her. She could feel his heart going against her cheek.

“Nothing is wrong with you,” he said.

She waited for more, because he sounded as if there were more. His breath caught once and went on. Nothing else came.

It was enough. She had needed to say it far more than she had needed it answered, and he had not laughed or told her she was being foolish. The warmth of him was all around her. She slept.

She woke once, when the window had just begun to turn grey. The stove had gone cold below, and the cat had moved to her pillow.

He was lying exactly as she had left him, with his arms around her. His eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling boards. His jaw was set like that of a man holding something in his mouth that he could neither swallow nor spit out. His heart was beating at the same hard waking pace it had kept when she fell asleep.

“You haven’t slept,” she whispered.

“Some.”

It was the first plain untruth she had ever heard from him, and she let it pass. She thought she knew what was keeping him awake. It was twenty-eight days off, on the Bench, and it had a shaved head and a soft voice.

She laid her hand flat on his chest, over the breastbone, and kept it there until the sun came up.
***