The Name of It

He left at six, by headlamp, with the snowshoes over his left shoulder and a thermos in his coat.

Nora stood at the kitchen window and watched the light go up through the lodgepole until the timber closed over it. She had not offered to go with him. He had told her what the day was, and she had her own opinion of his going alone, and she had kept it to herself. A man was entitled to one day a year at his brother’s grave.

It was Thursday, the fourteenth of January. The thermometer on the porch said two below.

Immy’s truck had been at the mouth of the lane since half past five, with its parking lights on. At seven she came in for coffee, as instructed. She stood at the stove with her hands around the mug and looked up the creek through the window.

“He was a pest,” she said. “Tate. He put a garter snake in my lunch pail in the fifth grade. I cried for a week when he died, and then I got so mad at him I couldn’t see.”

“Does Rhys ever talk about him?”

“He talked about him to you. That’s one more person than he ever did before.” Immy rinsed her mug and set it in the rack. “I’ll be at the road.”

Nora spent the morning in the clinic. The buckskin mare had gone home on Tuesday with a clean leg. The heifers would start in eighteen days, and number forty, who had made a liar of her by four days already, was pacing the near pen with her tail kinked. Nora laid out the calving kits on the counter. There were three of them, one for the lot, one for her truck and one to hang in Rhys’s shoeing shed. Each had chains and handles, a jug of lubricant, iodine cups for navels, a stomach tube and a bag of dried colostrum. She checked each kit against a list and then checked it against the next kit.

At noon she ate a sandwich standing up. Now and then she went to the door and listened up the creek. She heard a raven, and wind in the high timber, and nothing else.

A little before two she heard a car at the Bench.

She knew the engine. It was quiet and new, and she had listened to it leave on the fifth of December. It came on up the road and stopped at the mouth of her lane. A door opened. She heard Immy’s voice, short and hard, and a man’s voice answering, pitched too low to carry through the idling of the ranch truck.

Then Immy’s boots came up the lane at a run.

“It’s Tierney,” she said at the clinic door. Her face was stiff. “I’ve got my truck across your lane and he isn’t coming through it. He says to tell you he’s raised his offer. And he says he has papers about Calvin Dunmore, and that you’ll know the name.”

Nora put down the stomach tube she was holding.

She had never said that name on this creek. She had told Rhys the buckle was her father’s and that she had never met him. In thirty years she herself had said it aloud perhaps twenty times.

“Let him up,” she said.

“Nora, no. Rhys would—”

“Rhys asked me if you could sit at my road. He didn’t ask if you could mind my door, and I wouldn’t have said yes.” She kept her voice gentle, because Immy was frightened for her. “I want you back in your truck with the engine running. If I open this door and shout, you come. Otherwise it’s my business. He has something about my father, Immy. I’d let the devil in for that.”

Immy looked at her. Then she nodded, once, and went back down the lane.
***
He wore the camel coat. He carried a flat leather folder under his arm, and he wiped his boots on the mat before he came in.

“Dr. Pruett. Thank you for seeing me.”

“You’re letting the heat out again.”

He shut the door. He looked at the calving kits lined up on the counter, and something crossed his lean face that might have been respect. His card was still lying where he had squared it in December, at the end of the counter by the wall. She saw him notice that as well.

“One million six hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “The same forty acres, the same water right. It stands until moonrise on the twenty-second.”

She did the sum. She could not help doing it.

“That’s two hundred thousand more than you offered six weeks ago. What’s changed this time?”

“What I know.” He laid the folder on the exam table and opened it. “I’ll tell you how I came by it first, because you’ll ask. A man who works for me telephoned your mother on the thirtieth of December and said he was with a title company. He asked for your parents’ names. I’m not proud of the pretext. I’ve been reading your deed since September, Doctor, and I read everything behind a deed.”

The clerk catching up after the holidays. She had told her mother there was no cloud.

“You don’t call her again,” Nora said. “Not you and not anyone you pay.”

“You have my word.”

“Go on.”

He turned the first sheet toward her. It was a photocopy of a newspaper column, grey and a little crooked on the page.

Calvin “Cal” Dunmore, 25, of Dubois, died March 9 in a highway accident on Interstate 80. He was born in Dubois in 1970 and rode saddle broncs on the professional circuit. He is survived by his parents and a sister, Fay Dunmore, of Dubois.

She read it standing very straight. It was eleven lines long. It did not mention a bookkeeper in Scottsbluff who was four months along.

The second sheet was a photograph out of another paper, dated July of 1995. A young man stood in front of a chute gate with his hat pushed back, holding up a buckle in its presentation box. The print was coarse. She could make out a wide grin and a scatter of freckles across his nose. His head was tilted a little to the left, as if he were listening to something off the edge of the picture.

She knew the buckle. It was hanging on a nail thirty yards away.

She had never seen his face before. Her mother had no photographs. She had said so once, and Nora had not asked twice.

“The Dunmores have been on the Wind River for four generations,” Tierney said. He spoke quietly. “I asked one question of a man I know down there, alpha to alpha, and he answered it. Calvin Dunmore was born of that pack. He was a wolf, Dr. Pruett. He ran with them until he went on the rodeo road at nineteen.”

The stove ticked. She heard it very clearly.

“There’s an old word for a child like you. One wolf parent, and raised outside any pack. We say latent. She never changes shape, not once in her life. But she keeps a wolf’s nose and a wolf’s ears. And she carries no scent of the blood that any of us can find. I’ve stood in this room twice now with as good a nose as there is in Montana, and you smell to me like a human woman who has been handling iodine.”

She put her hand flat on the steel table. It was cold.

Since she was six years old she had believed that something in her had been put in backward. She had been tested by a doctor in Scottsbluff, and she had paid a machine in Fort Collins to look inside her head. She had told a cheerful man at a sale barn to get his blood checked, and after that she had eaten alone for four years. You get that from your father, her mother had said, with rolls in the oven. Cal could hear a truck a mile off. Her mother had gone white at a kitchen table twenty-four years ago and talked about imagination.

It had a name. It had always had one. The name was in a folder, in the hands of a man who wanted her land.

She listened to his heart, because she did not know what else to trust. It was slow and even. It had been the same when he told her about the boxes in Ennis.

“You heard my car at the Bench,” he said. “You’ve known every one of us by scent since November. Did you never wonder why you could?”

“I’ve wondered about it all my life.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “Why are you the one telling me?”

“Because you held that headgate on the night of the twenty-third. I heard Leona Stroud tell you the law. If you stand on the Bench on the twenty-second and give that water by open word, with this paper behind you, my claim is finished. I could have left that part out. You’d have had it worked out before I reached the highway.” He closed his hand on the edge of the folder. “I’d rather buy than break. I told you so. If you sell to me before that moon, the holder no longer holds, and nobody has to bleed. That’s worth one million six to me. It may be worth a man’s life to you. I understand his shoulder isn’t what it was.”

She did not give him anything for that.

“There’s one more thing, and I take no pleasure in it. I said no wolf can find the blood on a latent. The old ones make one exception. Her mate smells it. A mate always does, from the first breath.” He looked at her steadily. “I don’t know what Brannock is to you, and it’s no affair of mine. I know he has slept under your roof since the third of December. If he’s what I think he is, then he’s known what you are since the night you sewed him up. So ask yourself why the Mulvaneys’ enforcer moved into the house of the woman who holds the water.”

Her stomach had dropped at the word mate. She kept her face still. She had held it still over worse.

“That doesn’t add up,” she said. “If he’d known and meant to use it, he’d have said so on the Bench three weeks ago. You’d have gone home with a scar on a tree.”

Tierney was a moment answering, as he had been about the three mouths.

“Yes. I’ve turned that over. I don’t have his reason. His nose alone wouldn’t have stood, and he may have known it. He may be keeping it for the hearthstone.” He drew on one glove. “Whatever the reason is, he had it and you didn’t. He knew what you were for seven weeks, and you were not told. In your place I would want to hear why, from him, before I gave anything to anybody.”

He left the folder on the table. He said the sheets were copies and she was to keep them.

“My answer’s the same as it was on the fifth,” Nora said.

“I thought it would be, today. The figure stands until moonrise.” He stopped at the door. “I am sorry about your father. Twenty-five is no age.”

The Land Cruiser went down the creek. She stood at the table until she could not hear it any longer.
***
Immy came to the door. Nora told her that he had offered one million six and been refused. She told her the papers were about her father, and that they were hers and she was not ready to talk about them. Immy listened with her head on one side. She could surely hear that Nora’s heart was going like a mill. She said, “All right,” and went back to the road. Nora was grateful to her.

She went to the house and took the buckle down from its nail. She carried it back to the clinic and set it on the exam table beside the photograph.

Then she sat on Doc’s stool and went through it all, from both ends.

On Thanksgiving she had sat on her kitchen floor and told Rhys about the witch. He had said, You’re not crazy, and nothing more. She had stood by her stove with forty-three stitches in a saucer and asked him whether wolves ever bonded with someone who wasn’t one of them. He had said, Sometimes. His heart had been going so hard already that she had not been able to hear the word for what it was. On Christmas night she had told him the one thing she had never told anyone. He had held her as tight as he ever had and said that nothing was wrong with her. She had felt his breath catch on something more. In the morning she had watched him lie there with his jaw set, and she had thought he was lying awake over Pascoe.

She had sat in Maeve’s kitchen and said, Then I’m no use to you. She had offered to sell the first thing she ever owned and go back to renting. She had told him across this table that his shoulder would not hold and that telling him so was the only use she had left. He had opened his mouth, and shut it, and said he would fight on it anyway.

Five days ago she had stood by that desk and told him he would rather be dead than helped.

She had been the help. She had been the help the whole time, and he was the only person alive who knew it.

The light went out of the window by degrees. She did not light the lamp until she had to.

She heard him a little after five. The snowshoes came down the creek trail slowly, with the left pole working and the right one hardly at all. He stopped at the lane to speak to Immy. Then he came on fast.

He opened the clinic door, and the cold came in around him. His eyebrows were white with frost. His face was grey and worn, and it was the face of a man who had spent the day on a ridge with the dead. She was sorry for that. She was sorry for the day. It did not change what she had to ask.

He had smelled Tierney before he was through the door. She saw his eyes go to the folder, and the buckle, and then to her.

“He came at two,” she said. “He offered me one million six, and I told him no. He brought this.” She turned the photograph toward him. “That’s Calvin Dunmore, of the Wind River pack. He says there’s a word for what I am. He says a mate always smells it. I know what day this is, Rhys, and I’m asking anyway. I’m going to ask you once, and I’m listening. Did you know?”

He did not look at the photograph. He looked at her.

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

“Since twenty to seven on the twenty-fifth of November. It was the same breath I knew the other thing.”

She had thought that hearing it would be easier than waiting for it. It was not. Her chest hurt as if she had been kicked.

“Who have you told?”

“Nobody. I haven’t told Billie, and I haven’t told Maeve.” He took his hat off and held it. “There’s something about Doc you ought to—”

“I’ll get to Doc myself. I don’t want any more from you tonight than what I ask for. Why?”

“To keep you out of it until it was won.” His voice was hoarse from the cold. “Nobody could smell it but me. It would have been my word, and Tierney would have wanted proof, and the proof was you and your mother on that hearthstone in front of forty strangers. And once it was said, you were the one thing in his way. You’re six miles up a dead-end road. I’d seen what they did to the cows. I meant to tell you after the twenty-second.”

“After.”

“Yes.”

“I asked you in my kitchen whether your kind ever bonded with someone like me. You said, ‘Sometimes.’”

“I did.”

“I told you in the dark that I’d thought since I was six there was something wrong with me, and that I’d never learned the name of it. You had the name in your mouth. I felt you not say it.” Her voice shook, and she let it. “I’ve wanted one thing for thirty years, and it wasn’t a mate, and it wasn’t a ranch. I wanted to know what I was. You knew before I’d spoken ten words to you. You watched me check every sum I ever did twice, and you let that one sit.”

He stood there and took it. He did not look away.

“You told me in this room that what you’d like didn’t get a vote. You said nobody got to tell me to go or to stay. I believed that. It’s on the list I wrote, Rhys. It’s near the top.” She got off the stool. “Then you turned around and decided what I was allowed to know about my own blood. You chose it for me, for my own good, the same as Doc did, and you’d told me to my face that he was wrong. I offered to sell my home. I told Maeve I was no use. You let me say it. You’d have let Pascoe take your leg off on the twenty-second before you’d have let me help you. I don’t know what to call that. I know it isn’t what I thought I had.”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t. I knew it was wrong, and I did it anyway. I haven’t got a better thing to tell you than that.”

She had half wanted him to argue. He had never once argued when he was in the wrong, and tonight she could not stand it.

“I told you the day you moved in that I could put you out of my door any day I chose,” she said. “I’m choosing. Get out.”

His face went still. He nodded.

“Immy’s at the road,” he said. “Will you let her stay?”

“Immy can stay. Immy never lied to me.” She picked up the photograph, because her hands needed to hold something. “And you say nothing to Maeve. You’ve kept it for seven weeks, and you can keep it until I’ve decided what I’m going to do with it. It’s mine.”

“It was always yours.”

“Then you should have handed it over.”

He put his hat on. He stood one more second with his hand on the latch, and she could hear his heart. It was going hard and slow, like something being driven uphill. She kept her eyes on the freckled boy in the newsprint.

The door closed quietly. She heard his truck start in the yard. It stopped at the mouth of the lane for the length of a few words and went on. She followed it past the Bench and down to headquarters, two and a half miles, until it shut off.

The room still smelled of cedar and cold stone. Her shoulders came down at it, out of six weeks of habit, and she stood in her own clinic and hated that they did.

She had the name of it at last. She was thirty years old, and the one person she would have run across the yard to tell had known it all along.

Nora set the photograph down beside the buckle and looked at her father’s head, tilted a little to the left. Then she sat down on Doc’s stool and cried, for the first time since she had come to Montana.
***