Sixty-Two

The first heifer into the chute was number seventeen, and she came in at a walk with her ears forward.

“Morning,” Nora said to her. She pinched up a fold of skin on the heifer’s neck, slid the needle under it and pushed the plunger. “That’s for your calf. You won’t thank me, but he will.”

Immy opened the head catch. The heifer strolled out and stood in the lane, looking back to see what the others would do.

It was Saturday, the second of January, eighteen above and overcast, with a little dry snow sifting down. Sixty-two first-calf heifers stood in the holding pen behind the long shed. They were due to start on the first of February, which was thirty days off. Rhys had given them their first scour shot himself before Thanksgiving, out of a box Doc had left. This was the booster. What the heifer made from it would go into her first milk, and the calf would drink it in his first hour and keep his feet under him through March.

Nora had billed the vaccine at cost with the receipt stapled on. She had the syringe gun in one hand and a bottle inside her coat to keep it from freezing.

“Seventeen,” Owen said, and made a mark. He had the clipboard today, since she would not let him near a head catch until the middle of the month. He held it in his left hand, and the rubber ball was going in his right.

Immy ran the catch. She did it gently, and she was quick about it.

Rhys was at the tub.

Nora gave the shots and watched him, and she could do both. The tub gate was eight feet of pipe on a center post, and he swung it behind each draft of five to close them into the alley. He swung it right-handed, because the latch was on that side. The gate weighed perhaps eighty pounds, and it turned on greased pins. A child could have pushed it.

Each time he pushed it, his right shoulder dropped a half inch before the arm took the load. Each time he pulled it back, his elbow came in against his ribs first, as if to brace. His face did not change. He looked off toward the creek and let the heifers find the alley by themselves, as he had in November. But she had sewn that shoulder, and she knew where every layer of it lay. She saw the muscle under his coat gather late.

By the twentieth heifer he had begun to step in close and lean his hip on the gate before his hand touched it.

“Twenty-six,” Owen said. “Twenty-seven.”

She ran her free hand over each heifer while the needle was in. They were in good flesh, neither thin nor fat, with clean eyes. He had fed them right. She checked each bag as it went by.

Number forty came in near the end. She was a long-bodied heifer with a white spot on her brisket, and her udder was tight and shiny, with the teats beginning to stand out.

“There you are,” Nora said. “I’ve heard about you.”

“She’s going to go in January to spite me,” Rhys called from the tub.

“She’s going to go in about ten days. Her ligaments are slack already. Put her where somebody can see her from a window.”

“She’s in the near pen from tonight.”

“Sixty-two,” Owen said at last, and held up the clipboard like a prize. “And nobody fell down.”

Nora capped the gun. Rhys was latching the tub gate. He did it with his left hand.
***
Maeve’s kitchen in the white house was plainer than Billie’s and nearly as warm. Immy poured coffee into three mugs and carried one out to the shed for Rhys, who was setting a shoe on the bay. Owen had gone to the lot to move number forty. Billie was across the yard in her own house. Nora could hear her radio.

“Tell me the law again,” Nora said when Immy came back. “I heard Leona say it on the Bench. I’ve been turning it over for ten days, and I want it from somebody who’ll let me interrupt.”

Immy sat down across from her and pulled the sugar bowl to the middle of the table.

“That’s the headgate. A pack has to water its stock from water held by wolf blood. Held means the deed. It’s whose name is on it.” She set the salt beside the sugar. “That’s the claim. He marked at one full moon and laid it at the next. That was the twenty-third.” She moved the pepper up. “This is the twenty-second of January. That night we have three choices. We show the water, or we sell at his price, or the seconds fight.”

“Show the water how, exactly?”

“The holder stands up in front of Billie and Leona and gives it to the pack out loud. Open word. It doesn’t need paper. But the holder has to be wolf blood, and she has to have held it on claim night, and she has to still hold it when she speaks.”

“All three.”

“All three.”

“What does given mean? Is a lease enough? I’ve given you the water for a dollar.”

“A lease is fine, if it’s a wolf’s lease. Billie says the old ones didn’t care how it was given, only who gave it.”

Nora turned her mug. “Then what about before me? Doc held it for forty-one years.”

“Doc’s human. It’s been a hole in our fence since 1985. Nobody walked through it, because the Tierneys were over the mountains and nobody else wanted a fight.” Immy pushed the salt an inch. “Then Vaughn bought the bottom of the creek.”

“Could the law-keepers count something else as your water? A spring, or a well?”

“There are two stock wells and the creek hole. The creek hole’s in the same right as your ditch, and the wells wouldn’t water forty cows in August. Leona would laugh at us, and she’d be right to.”

Nora had known most of it. She had hoped, the way she hoped over a bad X-ray, that if she looked at it from another side there would be a line she had missed. There was no line. She was the hole in the fence. She had bought it in September for the price of a house in town, and she had been pleased with herself.

The back door opened, and Maeve came in, stamping snow off her boots. She looked at the sugar bowl and the salt and the pepper lined up on her table.

“Law school,” she said.

“She asked,” said Immy.

“I’d think she would.” Maeve poured her own coffee and stayed standing, with her hip against the counter.

Nora had done the next sum driving down that morning, and she had done it twice.

“Mrs. Mulvaney, I want to put something to you as the owner of that forty. I’ll sell it to you, the land and the headgate and the right. I paid three hundred and eighty-five thousand, and I’ll take three hundred and eighty-five thousand, not a dollar over. I can have the papers drawn in Hamilton on Monday.”

Immy’s head came up. Maeve did not move.

“I heard what Leona told me on the Bench,” Nora went on. “I know a deed made now doesn’t answer this claim. I’m not a fool. But if Rhys wins on the twenty-second, the claim falls, and the next morning that headgate still belongs to a human. Anybody with forty wolves and a grievance can cut a mark on your larch and start over. I don’t want my name to be the way in. I’d rent the house and the clinic from you, if you’d have me. I’ve rented before.”

It cost her something to say the last part. She kept her voice level.

Maeve set her mug down.

“No,” she said. “And I’ll give you both reasons, because you’ve earned them. The first is that a vet should own her own practice. My father was wrong about a good many things, and he was right about that. A vet who rents from the people she treats will think twice before she tells them their bull is no good. You told me in your kitchen that I wasn’t your alpha. I’d like that to stay true, and it won’t if I’m your landlord. Amos offered me the same thing last winter, and he got the same answer.”

“That’s pride.”

“It may be. It’s also thirty-five years of watching what he could say to me because he owned his own door.” Maeve folded her arms. “The second reason is the one that matters. The law counts whoever held the water on claim night. On the night of the twenty-third that was you. A sale on Monday changes nothing on the twenty-second, and the twenty-second is the only day I’ve got. If we lose it, there’s no ranch left to water. If we win it, you and I can sit down in February and talk about paper, as you said we might.”

“There must be something I can do with it before then.”

“You can’t do anything with it. I couldn’t in forty-one years.” Maeve’s dry voice was almost gentle. “It wants wolf blood on that headgate, Doctor, and there isn’t any. That’s all that’s wrong, and no check will mend it. I thank you for the offer. I know what it meant for you to make it.”

Nora looked at the sugar bowl.

“Then I’m no use to you,” she said.

“You saved a leg and you put a name to nine dead cows. You’ve got sixty-two heifers vaccinated before ten in the morning.” Maeve picked up her mug again. “You’re a good deal of use. You’re just not that particular one.”
***
She drove up the creek at noon with the windshield wipers pushing dry snow.

At the Bench she did not slow for the cabin. She had looked at it enough.

She had been useful all her life. It was the thing she had instead of belonging. A witch who could find a twisted gut was still asked to the corral, even if nobody sat by her at the café. She had come to this creek with her hands and her nose and a loan, and inside of six weeks they had put a baby in her lap and passed her the stuffing. A boy told her in church what number he was on. An old woman had laughed until her bun fell down. And there was the man who had carved a knife handle wrong for his own hand by the right amount.

She had come to love them. She could say that much to herself in a truck with nobody listening.

She could do nothing for them on the one night that counted. She held the thing they needed, and she was the wrong sort of person to be holding it. Leona had said so kindly, and Maeve had said so kindly, and it came to the same either way. The best she could do was lay out suture.

She pulled into her yard. The creek ran black under its ice in the corner of the place. She sat a minute and looked at the plank gate, and then she went in and fed the cat.

Rhys came up at dusk and put his truck beside hers. She heard him get out, and she heard the small catch in his breath when he reached back with his right arm for his coat.

The telephone rang while he was washing.

“Happy New Year, honey,” her mother said. “I tried you yesterday at four and it rang and rang.”

“I was at Earl Pettibone’s. He had a dog swallow a sock. Happy New Year, Mom.”

“On a holiday. I hope you charged him double.”

“I charged him the sock.”

Gail made the sound she made when a column would not balance. Then she talked about Ruth’s ham, and the furnace man, and a client who had brought her a shoebox of receipts on the thirty-first of December and expected a miracle. Nora leaned on the wall by the door, under the buckle, and let it wash over her. It was restful after the morning.

“Oh, and before I forget. A man called here Wednesday about your place.”

“What man?”

“From a title company. I wrote the name on the pad and now I can’t find the pad. He was very polite. He said they were finishing the file on your property and there was another Nora Pruett somewhere in their index, a judgment or something, and they needed to tell the two of you apart. He wanted your date of birth and your parents’ full names.”

“They do that,” Nora said. She had signed an affidavit of the same kind at her closing in September, a whole page swearing she was not six other people. The title office in Hamilton still owed her the final policy, and she had been meaning to call them. “Did you give it to him?”

“I gave him mine. And I gave him your father’s, since he asked for it.” Her mother’s voice went a little careful, as it always did on that ground. “Calvin Dunmore, of Dubois, Wyoming. He had me spell Dubois. I said it’s spelled like the French and they say it like a cowboy would.”

“That’s fine, Mom.”

“I didn’t like to say it to a stranger. But it’s for your deed, and I’d hate for there to be a cloud on it after what you paid.”

“There’s no cloud. It’s just a clerk catching up after the holidays.”

“Well, that’s what I thought. Are you eating?”

“I’m about to. There’s a man in my kitchen peeling potatoes.”

There was a short silence from Scottsbluff.

“Is there,” said Gail. “Does he have a name?”

“He does. I’ll tell you about him when I’ve got an hour. He’s the cow boss on the ranch down the road. He fixes things.”

“On the account that pays ahead.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Well,” her mother said, and Nora could hear her deciding to be pleased. “Don’t let him peel them too thick.”

She hung up. Rhys was at the sink with his back to her and a potato in his left hand. He had gone still. Then the peeler started again.

“What was that about a deed?” he asked.

“Nothing. A title company called my mother to make sure I’m not some other Nora Pruett. They wanted my parents’ names.” She took the pot down from its hook. “She had to say my father’s name out loud to a stranger, and it cost her. Twice in two weeks. That’s a record.”

He set the potato in the pot. He did not ask what the name was, and she did not think to offer it. She was watching his right arm, which he had not lifted from his side since he came in.
***
After supper she moved the floor lamp to the kitchen table.

“Shirt off,” she said. “Sit backward on that chair.”

He looked at her.

“I watched you swing a gate sixty-two times this morning. I’ve been your doctor since November, discharged or not, and I’m looking at it.”

He hung his shirt on the doorknob and sat. The scar ran from the point of his shoulder to his last rib, straight and flat, and it had gone from pink toward white in the three weeks since the stitches came out. The skin was as good as she had ever closed. She was not interested in the skin.

She put her fingers into the muscle behind the shoulder and felt along it slowly. Under the scar, where she had drawn the torn edges together in a deep layer by headlamp, there was a band as hard as a rope. Normal muscle gave under her thumb and came back. This did not give. It was tied down to the ribs beneath it, and when she moved his arm the whole band dragged.

“Hold your arm straight out in front of you. Palm down. Keep it there.”

He held it. She counted. At eleven seconds a fine tremor started in the back of the upper arm. At twenty the elbow had begun to sink.

“Now push down on my hands. Both arms. Hard as you can.”

His left arm drove her hand down like a jack. The right followed it a full beat later, and with perhaps two-thirds of the force. She had him do it again and got the same result.

“Now lean on the table. Hands flat, arms straight, all your weight. Turn your body to the right.”

He did it. She had her palm on the back of his arm, and she felt the muscle fire, shudder and let go. His elbow buckled. He caught himself on the left.

Neither of them said anything for a moment. In the stove a log settled.

“That’s the one you land on,” she said. “As a wolf. Turning right.”

“Yes.”

“Has it done that under you?”

He was a while answering. “Twice on Tuesday. Once Thursday. Immy’s been coming at it.”

“Good for Immy.” She came around the chair and sat down facing him, as she had for his stitches. She made herself use the voice she used on a rancher with a favorite horse. “Then here it is, and I’m telling you as your doctor. The skin is healed. The muscle has knit, and it’s knit with scar. Scar is short and stiff, and it doesn’t fire. You tore that muscle through to the ribs six weeks ago. You heal twice as fast as anything I ever treated, so call it twelve weeks’ worth. On a horse I’d want six months before I let anybody race him. The nerve to the back of that arm is slow as well. It was either bruised or it’s caught in the scar, and I can’t tell which with my fingers.”

“It’s stronger than it was a week ago.”

“It is. It’ll be stronger again in twenty days. I’ll give you heat and stretching and I’ll work that scar loose with my thumbs every night until you swear at me. I can get you maybe another tenth.” She put her hand on his knee. “It won’t be enough. That shoulder will swing a gate and set a shoe and hold a heifer’s head. It won’t take the full weight of a big wolf landing on it, and he’ll land on it, because he’s the one who tore it and he knows where. It is not fit for a fight on the twenty-second. If you were a horse I’d scratch you.”

“I’m not a horse.”

“No. I can’t scratch you. I can only tell you.” Her throat had tightened, and she waited until it was steady. “I offered Maeve my forty this morning at what I paid for it, and she turned me down flat. So this is the only use I’ve got left. I know that shoulder better than anyone alive, and I’m telling you it won’t hold.”

He looked at her. His grey-green eyes were tired, and something was moving behind them that she could not read. His mouth opened, and for a second she thought he was going to tell her something that would change it all. She heard his heart take three hard beats.

Then he shut his mouth and looked down at her hand on his knee.

“I know it won’t,” he said. “I’ve known since Tuesday.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“Fight him on it.”

She had expected that. She got up and put the kettle on for the hot towels. Her hands were steady, as they always were when the news was bad.

“Twenty days,” she said, with her back to him. “Lie down on the couch, on your left side. This is going to hurt, and I’m going to do it anyway.”
***