Nine

The shoulder had held four mornings running, and Rhys had begun to trust it.

Nora had been at the scar with her thumbs every night for a week. She laid hot towels on it first and then worked along the hard band under the skin until he swore at her, as she had promised he would. It had gained something. On Friday he had turned right under Immy’s full weight three times, and the leg had stayed under him.

So on Saturday he asked for two.

Owen had been running on four legs since New Year’s Day, by Nora’s leave. His orders from her were to run and not to wrestle, and Rhys had added his own. The boy was to come in from the left, snap and get out, and never set his teeth. All Rhys wanted from him was a second thing to watch. Pascoe would press him hard, and he needed to learn how the leg did when he was hurried.

It was four above zero on the Bench, with the sky going grey behind the Sapphires. The pale wolf came from his right and the red one from his left. For ten minutes it went well. He kept his hind feet under him and made them come to him, and twice he put Immy on her side in the snow.

Then Owen feinted at his flank, and Immy came in low at the same moment. Rhys spun right to meet her and landed square on the foreleg with all two hundred pounds.

He felt it go. It did not fold as it had before. Something deep in the shoulder parted, like a wet rope giving under a load, and heat ran down the inside of the leg. His chest hit the snow. Immy’s jaws were already at his neck, and she never closed them. She had smelled it before he had.

There was blood on the snow by his elbow, bright red, and more coming.

Owen backed off with his ears flat and began to whine. Rhys got up on three legs. He looked at the truck, with its engine running by the cabin wall, and he did the sum Nora would have done. She would have to sew this. If she sewed it on a wolf, he would tear it the first time he changed. If he changed now, he would pay for it once, before the needle.

He changed. It was the worst one he could remember. Every bone in the arm lengthened against the torn place, and he came up on his knees in the snow with his teeth shut and his left hand clamped over the shoulder. Blood ran warm between his fingers.

“Don’t look at it,” Immy said. She was beside him in her coat and nothing else, with his shirt wadded in her fist. “Hold this on it. Owen, get his boots.”

She drove the mile and a half up the creek faster than the road allowed. Owen rode in the middle with Rhys’s hat in his lap, and nobody talked.
***
Nora was standing in the clinic door when they pulled into the yard. She had her sleeves rolled. She had heard the truck from the Bench, and she had heard how it was being driven.

She came down the steps and lifted the shirt away from his shoulder. She looked for about three seconds.

“Table,” she said.

He sat on the edge of it with his coat off. She washed her hands to the elbow. She cut what was left of his undershirt away with bandage scissors and dropped it in the bin. She scrubbed the shoulder, drew up the lidocaine and put the block in on both sides of the split.

She did not say “sting, then pressure.” She did not say anything.

He had been on this table for her twice, and both times she had talked the whole way through. She had talked to him when he was a wolf with no opinion to give. Now the stove ticked and the kettle steamed, and the only sound she made was her breathing. Immy stood by the drug cabinet with her arms crossed. Owen stayed in the doorway and squeezed his ball without counting.

She put a gloved finger into the wound and felt along the bottom of it. Her jaw was tight. She flushed it. Then she picked up the needle holder.

She did not count them aloud, so he counted them himself, by the tug. There were nine. Each one was tied on its own, with the first throw doubled.

She taped a pad over the top and stripped her gloves. She went to Doc’s desk, unlocked the bottom drawer and wrote three lines in the green ledger, standing up. Then she put the pen down and turned around.

“Immy. Tell me exactly how he landed.”

“Turning right. All his weight on it, with me coming in. It wasn’t any different from yesterday, except that Owen had him hurried.”

“Thank you.” Nora looked at Rhys. Her hazel eyes were perfectly level. “The skin split because the muscle under it tore, and it tore inside its own scar. I can’t sew that. It has to knit again, and it’s back where it was at Christmas, or behind that. What I closed just now is the lid.”

“How long?”

“Thirteen days is not enough. I told you a week ago that it wasn’t fit, and that was before this. It will carry you at a walk on the twenty-second. Pascoe made that tear, and he knows to the inch where it is. He’ll go for that leg before you’ve finished circling. It will fold, and you will lose.”

Nobody moved.

“You’ll lose the ranch along with the fight,” she said. “And how much else you lose depends on how long it takes you to drop your tail. I’ve seen what he does when he has hold.”

“Mom can name again,” Immy said. Her voice came out too loud for the room. “Billie says so. The law says second, and the alpha picks. She can change it right up until Leona calls them onto the ground.”

Nora’s head turned. “Is that so?”

“I’ve asked him every morning since the twenty-ninth.”

“Have you.” Nora looked back at Rhys. “I’ve had my thumbs in that shoulder seven nights. You didn’t think to mention it.”

“There wasn’t anything to mention. I’d said no.”

“I see.” She took a breath. “Immy, you’ve got four hundred cows standing at a fence. Take Owen and go feed them. I’ll bring him down later, or he’ll walk.”

Immy looked at Rhys for a long second. Then she took Owen by the sleeve, and the door closed behind them. The truck went down the lane.

Nora stayed where she was, by the desk, with ten feet of floor between them.

“I’m going to ask you something,” she said. “I’m asking it as myself. The doctor’s finished. Let Immy stand.”

“No.”

“She’s put you on the ground a dozen times in two weeks. She’s fast and she’s whole, and she wants it. She has as much right to that ground as you do.”

“She’s twenty-six.”

“So she’s a grown woman.”

“Nora.” He had his left hand on the edge of the table, and he found he was gripping it. “The last time I let somebody young take my place, I dug him out of an avalanche. It took three hours. I told you how that came out.”

“You told me. You told me in my woodshed, and I said what I thought, and you stood there with your mouth shut and agreed with me.” Her voice was still low, but it had begun to shake. “Immy isn’t Tate. A law fight in front of two packs isn’t a snow slope. She can yield, and a mountain doesn’t let you. You know all that, and it makes no difference to you, because none of this is about Immy. You would rather be dead than helped. And I care about a man who thinks that is a virtue.”

She stopped.

He watched her hear it. The color came up her throat and into her face, all the way to the freckles. In six weeks she had told him she wanted him, and she had given him five reasons she could write down. She had never said that word, or any word like it. She had kept it back as carefully as she kept her jars.

Her mouth closed. She looked at the stove, and at the ledger, and at anything in the room that wasn’t him.

“I’ve got a mare to feed,” she said.

She took her barn coat off the hook and went out. She did not slam the door. He heard her boots cross the yard, and the low hum of the barn door on its track.
***
He sat on the table for a while.

He was thirty-four years old, and he had been bitten, kicked, rolled on and half frozen. None of it had gone through him the way those two sentences had. The second one was the worse of the two. She had said it angrily, as a complaint, and it was the best thing anybody had said to him since he was sixteen.

His coat was on the chair. He got it on over the bare shoulder, left arm first, and followed her.

The barn was warm with horse. A buckskin mare had been in the box stall since Tuesday. She belonged to a schoolteacher in Darby, and she had put a hind foot through a wire gate. Nora wanted her where the bandage could be changed every day. The mare had her head over the stall door and her ears pricked at the grain bin.

Nora was forking hay down from the stack. She did not look around when he came in.

He took the water bucket off its hook with his left hand and carried it to the hydrant by the door. He broke the skin of ice with his boot heel, dumped it and filled the bucket fresh. He carried it back and hung it. She threw two flakes over the stall door, and the mare dropped her nose into them.

There was a manure fork on the wall. He took it down. She saw him do it, and he saw her decide not to say anything about arms and shoulders. He worked the stall left-handed, with the right hand low on the handle to steer, and he did not lift with it. She brought the barrow to the door without being asked and held it steady while he filled it.

She wheeled it out. He shook down clean straw.

When she came back she lifted the lid of the grain bin, and the little brass key swung on its nail. She scooped oats for the mare and kibble for the cat. Bolus came down the haystack one bale at a time and ate with his tail wrapped around his feet, watching the pair of them as if he had been asked to referee.

She let herself into the stall and crouched at the mare’s near hind leg. Rhys went to the mare’s head without a word and took the halter. He put his palm on her forehead, and she sighed and stood square. Nora unwound the bandage and looked at the cut. She put her nose near it and breathed in, and then she wrapped it again in clean cotton. Her hands were quick and sure. She smoothed the last turn of tape down with her thumb.

Once, when she stood up, her shoulder came against his arm, and neither of them moved away. She stayed there for a breath or two before she went to wash her hands.

It took them twenty minutes. Neither one spoke in all that time. He had worked beside a good many people in his life, and he could not think of one he would have chosen over her, even on a morning when she was too angry to talk to him.

She rolled the door shut with one finger. They walked back to the house a yard apart.
***
She brought him down to headquarters at ten and told Billie about the stitches in six words. The day went by. He sat in the heifer lot on an upturned bucket and watched number forty, who was still holding out on him, and he gave Owen orders about the feed. Billie fed him at noon and said nothing whatever about his shoulder. That was how he knew Immy had told her every bit of it.

At supper Nora talked about the mare and about a dog at Conner with a broken tooth. He answered. It was polite, and it was thin, and they both knew it.

She went up first. When he came into the room the lamp was already out.

He lay down on his left side, as he always did. For a while there was only the dark and the stove ticking below. Then the springs moved. She fitted herself against his back, and her arm came over him. She laid her hand flat on his right shoulder, over the pad and the nine stitches under it, and left it there.

It was warm through the gauze. She did not press. She held it the way she held her palm to a cow’s flank when she was waiting for a drench to work.

He could hear her heart, and it was not at its sleeping pace.

He lay with his eyes open and knew that he had never been as near to saying it as he was then.

She had asked him to let somebody help him. She had no notion that she was the help. She thought the only use left to her was a suture pack and a pair of thumbs, and she had spent both on him. The thing that would have ended it all was lying against his back with its hand on his shoulder. Doc had told him in Hamilton what the word “after” was worth. He had driven home agreeing, and he had sat down to her stew and kept quiet.

He had thirteen days and a foreleg that would carry him at a walk.

The sentence was in his mouth, whole. Nora, you’re one of us. You’ve been one of us all your life. He got as far as her name.

“Nora.”

“What?” She said it quietly. Her hand did not move.

He saw the Bench, and forty wolves along a wall, and Pascoe’s shaved head turning to look at her. He saw the six miles of dead-end road. He saw a January morning and a slope with a clean line across the top of it.

“Thursday’s the fourteenth,” he said.

She was silent. She knew the date. He had given it to her in the woodshed.

“I go up to the saddle that day. I’ve gone every year. I’ll go on snowshoes, as I am. I won’t change with these in, so you needn’t tell me.” He swallowed. “I go by myself. It isn’t the boundary and it isn’t the job. It’s only the day.”

“Alone,” Nora said.

“That one day. Yes.”

He felt her breathe in and out against his back.

“I’ve asked Immy if she’d sit at the road while I’m gone. She’d be at the mouth of your lane in the ranch truck, from dark to dark. I told her it was your lane and I’d have to ask you. So I’m asking.”

She took a long time over it. He thought she was weighing more than Immy.

“Immy can sit at my road,” she said at last. “Tell her there’s coffee, and that she’s to come in and get it and not wait for me to carry it out.” Her voice was flat and tired. “Take the poles. Keep the right one short. If that pad’s wet when you come down, I’ll want to know.”

“All right.”

“Go to sleep, Rhys.”

She said nothing else. She did not take her hand away, and after a time her breathing slowed, though her heart took longer.

He stayed awake. He lay under her hand and went over his reasons once more, and for the first time they did not come out the same at the bottom. She had said she cared about him, and she had said it in front of the stove with her face on fire. A woman who could say that was owed the truth about her own blood, whatever it made of her on that road.

He thought that he might tell her when he came down off the mountain. He would have the day behind him then, and Tate would have had his due. He would come into her kitchen at dusk and say it.

He held on to that until he slept.
***