C.D.

Nora had it worded by the time she passed the stoplight in Darby. She had lost every word of it by Hamilton.

Sapphire View had a plastic tree in the lobby with the lights still on, in the middle of January. A girl at the desk pointed her down the hall. The day room smelled of floor wax and coffee and old wool, and it was full of plain human skin. She noticed that now. Six weeks ago she would not have known there was any other kind.

Doc Teague sat at a card table by the window, pegging a cribbage hand against himself. He had gotten smaller since September. His moustache had not.

She walked up and laid the newspaper photograph on the board, over the pegs.

He looked at it for some time. He looked at the hat pushed back and the grin and the buckle in its box, and at the way the boy held his head.

“So that’s the bronc rider,” he said.

“That’s Calvin Dunmore, of the Wind River pack. Vaughn Tierney brought him to my clinic yesterday in a leather folder, with a contract underneath.”

Doc shut his eyes for a moment. When he opened them he glanced at the next table, where a man in a cardigan was pretending to read.

“Not here. Hobart reads lips.” He got his hands on the arms of the chair. On the way out he stopped at the bookshelf and reached behind a row of condensed novels, and a bottle with a green label went into his sweater.

His room was number fourteen. It had a bed, a recliner, a shelf of veterinary texts and a window onto the parking lot. He gave her the recliner and took the bed, and he poured an inch of whiskey into a tooth glass. He held the bottle toward her.

“I’m driving. And I’m not here to be sociable.”

“No. You’ve come to shout. I told Rhys I’d enjoy it. I find I don’t expect to.”

“You guessed in April,” Nora said. “On the Sunday, at the Alderson place. I heard that cow’s stomach from across the corral, and I said so before I could stop myself. You turned around and looked at me. I thought, here it comes, he’ll find another stool to sit on. And you smiled.”

“I did.”

“I thought you were pleased with me.”

“I was. I’d found my vet.”

“You’d found your headgate.”

“Both,” Doc said. “I won’t dress it up for you.”

She had meant to keep her voice down. It got away from her.

“I had my head scanned, Dr. Teague. I paid for it out of a student loan. I have gone thirty years thinking I was built wrong, and you stood in a corral in Corvallis and knew what I was in the time it took to uncoil a stethoscope. You asked me about my father. I remember that. I thought you were making conversation. Then you sold me a practice with half of it locked in a drawer, and a ranch I’d never heard of hanging on my ditch. You let me sign for all of it. I gave a dying man a dose I worked out on the back of an invoice, because the right one was hanging on a nail and you’d patted your pockets.”

“For that last I’m sorry, with nothing after it,” he said. “I hung that key where the first hurt wolf through your door would tell you about it. I pictured a cut foot. I didn’t picture forty-three stitches in a blizzard. If you’d lost him, that would have been mine, and I’ve thought about it most nights since Maeve telephoned.”

“And the rest of it?”

“The rest I’ll explain. Whether I’m sorry depends on you.”

He turned the glass in his fingers.

“The night Dermot handed me that deed, Billie Brannock stood in his office and recited the Water Law at the pair of us. She told us we were fools. She was right, and for forty years it didn’t matter. Then Vaughn bought Hendry’s, and I knew what he’d reach for. I offered Maeve the forty back. She wouldn’t take back what her father had paid a debt with. So the gate was going to be sitting in a human’s name on whatever night he chose, unless I found somebody with the blood to put it under. I’m a human, Doctor. I can’t smell what they smell. I had a girl who tilted her head and a dead father out of Wyoming, and that was all I had.”

“You could have told me.”

“Told you what? I’d have had to start with what a wolf was, and that’s Maeve’s to give. And I had no proof. If I was wrong, I’d have turned a stranger’s life over on a guess.”

“You could have told Maeve.”

“I never told Maeve. I never told Billie. I want you to hear that plainly.” He leaned forward from the edge of the bed. “Maeve is a good alpha. That means she’d have had you to supper by the tenth of September, and every kindness that creek showed you would have had a ditch behind it. You’d never have known which were real. So I did the one thing a human could do. I put the land in your name, at a figure your bank would lend, and I kept quiet. When the night came, the thing would be yours. You could give it or keep it or sell it, and nobody would be able to take it.”

She did the sum. She had done it before, and she did it again.

“Tierney offered you a million one. You took three eighty-five from me. You left seven hundred and fifteen thousand dollars on the table.”

“I’m seventy-nine. I’ve a room with a view of a parking lot and nobody to leave anything to. His money would have bought me a better parking lot.” He drank half the inch. “That’s why I sold cheap. Nobody else has had the whole of it but Rhys.”

Her hands closed on the arms of the recliner.

“When did he get it?”

“The twenty-ninth of December. He brought me this bottle and sat down to cards. I told him about the Alderson cow, and he never asked me what a latent was. He sat there like I was reading him the hay price. So I knew he’d had it since your barn.” Doc’s pale eyes were steady on her. “He hadn’t told a soul. I asked. His grandmother didn’t have it, and his alpha didn’t, and that boy was three weeks off a fight he could have called off with one sentence on the Bench. I told him to tell you before somebody else did. He said after the twenty-second. I told him what I thought of that word.”

“He tried to say something about you last night. I wouldn’t let him.”

“Then I’ve said it for him.”

“Don’t plead for him.”

“I’m not. I’ll tell you what I saw, and you can do your own arithmetic. He kept it off Maeve’s table so it couldn’t be made a lever on you. It was the same end I was after. There’s a hundred and thirteen years between the two of us, and in all that time it never crossed either of our minds to ask the woman it belonged to.” He set the glass down on the blanket chest. “We were both wrong. I was wrong first, and longer. He was wrong from closer in. I expect that’s the one that hurts.”

It was. She did not say so.

She looked out at the parking lot. Her truck sat in it with last night’s frost still on the hood.

“I don’t know what to do with it,” she said. “He’s offered me a million six to say nothing. If I stand up on that Bench and say what I am, I’ve handed my whole self to twenty-three people who needed it by a certain date. What would you do?”

“Oh, no.” The moustache moved. “I’ve just been shouted at for deciding on your behalf. I’m not fool enough to do it twice in a morning.”

She had not expected to laugh, and it was not much of one.

At the door she stopped. He had picked up the photograph from where she had laid it on the bed, and he held it out.

“He’d have been proud of that tendon,” Doc said. “Bring the ledger next time. I want to read how you did it.”

“I haven’t said there’ll be a next time.”

“You haven’t finished shouting. I could tell.”
***
Her phone found three bars in the parking lot. She sat in the truck with the engine running and called the office in Scottsbluff. January was her mother’s hard season, and she picked up on the second ring.

“Honey? It’s eleven in the morning. Who’s hurt?”

“Nobody’s hurt. Mom, that man who called you about my deed wasn’t from a title company. He works for a land outfit that wants to buy my place. He’s promised not to call again. If anybody does, hang up.”

There was a silence on the line.

“I gave him your father’s name.”

“I know. You didn’t do anything wrong. He went and looked Cal up, and yesterday I was handed a newspaper picture from Cody. He’s holding the buckle. It’s the first time I’ve seen his face.”

She heard her mother’s chair creak. She heard a door being pushed shut.

“We never took one,” Gail said. Her voice had gone small. “You don’t, when you think you’ve got time.”

“I’m not going to fish, Mom. I’ve never fished. I’m asking you straight, one time. Tell me about him.”

Her mother breathed in and out. Nora had expected the careful voice. What came was younger than that.

“I was keeping the books for the rodeo committee at Oregon Trail Days. July of ’95. He came to the office for his check, and he stood there twenty minutes after he had it. He’d won at Cody the week before, and he was wearing that buckle. I told him it was vulgar. He said he’d take it off if I’d have supper with him.” She laughed, and it broke in the middle. “He’d be gone three weeks, and then he’d be in my kitchen. He ate like a harvest crew. He could hear a truck a mile off, I told you that. He knew about you before I did. He put his face in my neck one morning in December and said I smelled different. I told him that was no way to talk to a lady. Two weeks later the doctor said he was right.”

Nora pressed her knuckles against her mouth.

“Did he ever say anything about his people?”

“He said they’d take some explaining. He was going to drive me up to Dubois in the spring. He said there were things about him I ought to hear, and he wanted to tell me there, where I could see for myself. I thought he meant they were poor, or peculiar about church.” Paper rustled. She was hunting a tissue. “He never got to it. He was on his way to me from a rodeo in Texas. There was ice west of Sidney, and a truck across both lanes. A boy he traveled with called me the next day. That was March the ninth. You came in August, five months after.”

“You never knew what it was he meant to tell you.”

“I never did. I didn’t go to the funeral. I was twenty-five and four months along and nobody’s wife, and I thought his family would take me for someone with her hand out.” She blew her nose. “You asked me once why you could hear the neighbors’ television. You were six. You had your head on one side just the way he held his, and I couldn’t get a breath. I told you something foolish. I’ve been sorry about it for twenty-four years.”

“It’s all right, Mom.”

“It isn’t, but thank you. He left that buckle on my dresser the last time, so he’d have to come back for it.” Her voice steadied. “He’d have been wild about you, Nora. He was wild about you when you were the size of a walnut. He used to talk to my stomach about horses.”

Nora could not answer for a while. Her mother waited. She had always known how.

“I love you,” Nora said at last. “I’ll call Sunday.”

“Is it that man? The one with the potatoes?”

“Some of it’s him.”

“Well,” said Gail, and blew her nose again. “Your father was a good deal of trouble too.”
***
She stopped at the hardware store on the way out of town. She told herself it was for stove gasket. She came out with the gasket and one moving carton, folded flat, which had cost a dollar ninety-eight. She put it behind the seat and did not look at it for twenty-nine miles.

The ranch pickup sat across the mouth of her lane. Immy got out when she saw the truck. She was bundled to the eyes.

“Nobody’s been up,” she said through Nora’s window. “Owen had it from six to noon. We’ve split it between us.”

“Whose idea was that?”

“His. He came down the creek last night and went into Billie’s house and hasn’t said ten words. He put Owen and me on your road in shifts. He said to tell you he won’t come up unless you send for him, and that it’s still your lane, and if you want us gone you only have to say.” Immy’s eyes were worried above her scarf. “I don’t know what he did. He looks like a horse that’s run through a fence.”

Nora looked up the lane at her own house. No truck stood beside the place where hers went. He would hate being two and a half miles off. She knew to the foot how the distance sat in him, because he had told her. He had gone anyway and set other people to the watching, because she had put him out and he had taken her at her word.

It was the right thing to have done. That did not make her feel any better.

“You can stay,” she said. “There’s coffee. Come and get it.”

The house was cold. Bolus was on the pine shelf, on top of the Herriots. She built up the stove. The door on the left at the top of the stairs stood open, and she could see the foot of the bed made up square and a razor on the windowsill. She did not go in.

Tierney’s folder was where she had left it at one in the morning, on the kitchen table. Under the two photocopies there had been three sheets of the good cream paper. It was an agreement to buy forty acres more or less, with all appurtenant water rights, for one million six hundred thousand dollars. The seller could lease the house and clinic back at one dollar a year for as long as she practiced. The offer ran until moonrise on the twenty-second of January. He had already signed it, in black ink, in a neat upright hand. The line beside his was empty.

She fetched the carton from the truck. She opened it out and taped the bottom, because a box left flat was only cardboard. Then it stood on the table next to the contract with its flaps up.

She fed the cat. She walked out to the clinic and counted the calving kits again, and that used up an hour. She ate something standing at the counter and could not have said afterward what it was. When she passed the shelf by the stairs, she squared the spines of the books with the side of her hand.

It was after nine when she looked at the nail by the door.

She had hung the buckle back last night, before she went up, out of a habit so old she had not noticed doing it. She took it down now. She carried it to the lamp on the table and sat, and laid it on her palm with the bucking horse up.

She had owned it for twelve years. In all that time she had polished the front twice and never done anything with the back but hang it. There were scratches behind the loop, and she had taken them for the wear of a belt.

She turned it over and tipped it to the light.

Two letters had been cut into the silver with the point of a knife. They were an inch high and a little crooked, with a deep period after each. C.D.

He had done it himself. She could see where the blade had skidded on the curve of the C and he had gone back over it. He had been a young man in a locker room full of other young men, and he had marked what he had won so that nobody could walk off with it. Then he had left it on a dresser in Scottsbluff on purpose, to have a reason to come back.

She ran her thumbnail down the groove of the D.

He had meant to tell her mother, too. He had picked his place and his season for it, and he had run out of road forty miles short. Nora thought about that for a long time. She was not ready to think about what it had to do with anybody else, and she noticed herself refusing.

The stove burned down, and she fed it. The cat moved from the shelf to the chair beside her.

She could do a kitchen in an hour. The carton would take the plates and the two mugs and the percolator, and by morning she could be a woman with better than a million dollars in the bank and a lease on easy terms. Nobody on the Bench would know what she was. It would be hers alone, the first thing in her life that had been.

She could also drive down the creek and say four words to Maeve Mulvaney. Then she would belong to that ranch’s need for the rest of her days. A week ago she would have given a year of her life to be useful to them. Now she could be, and she had learned it from a man in a camel coat.

Or she could do neither and let a wolf with a torn shoulder walk onto the snow.

She uncapped her pen and looked at the empty line. She capped it again. She picked up a mug to wrap it, and she set it back in the rack.

The clock over the sink said midnight. The contract lay unsigned on the table, and the box stood empty beside it. The buckle was face down under the lamp with her father’s two letters showing. Nora had checked every sum in her life from both ends. She sat there and did not know which she would do.
***