Eleven

Number forty calved at four in the morning, in the corner of the back pen, without help from anyone.

Nora found the calf by lantern, already up on her knees and steaming. She was a black heifer calf with a white spot on her brisket like her mother’s. Owen ran to the shoeing shed and came back with the carton from the hardware store. Nora dipped the navel from the kit that was in it and thought that a dollar ninety-eight had seldom been better spent.

She had been in the calving lot since seven the night before. She and Owen had gone through both bunks by hand, an armload at a time, and burned every forkful in a barrel behind the long shed. She had walked through the sixty-two heifers four times, listening. None of them had eaten a needle.

Rhys had sat on an upturned bucket by the gate the whole night, because nobody could make him go indoors. She had flushed his left arm at Billie’s sink and packed the punctures with a wick in each. She had strapped his right arm across his chest. The skin over the shoulder had opened again along the line of the nine, and she had closed it with tape and told him it would wait for her own table.

The sun came over the Sapphires at ten past eight. The truce ended with it.

Leona Stroud walked out of Billie’s kitchen into the yard at headquarters, with Billie beside her. The two of them had sat at that table since first light. The Madison pack stood by their trucks along the lane, all forty, on two legs. The Mulvaneys stood in front of the long shed. Nora stayed at the lot gate with rumen and iodine to her elbows. She was sworn to nobody, and this part was theirs.

Vaughn Tierney stood alone in the middle of the yard. Somebody had found him a pair of jeans too short in the leg and a green wool shirt she had seen on Owen’s father. He wore the camel coat over them, with snow stains down the front. His face was grey, and his eyes had the dull look of a man coming up from heavy drugs. He stood straight all the same.

“I’ll say it once, and it’s for my own pack to hear,” Leona said. “The claim on this creek is forfeit for twenty-five years. No Madison wolf marks here, or claims here, or buys here under any name, until the full moon of January 2052. I’ll be dead, and the rule will hold without me.”

Nobody along the lane spoke.

“Jory Pascoe.” He was standing between two of his own people, with his shaved head down. “You poisoned stock under a truce, and nine head before that, and you went three on one at a challenge. You’re barred from this valley. If you come west of the divide again, on two legs or four, any wolf here may answer you as he likes, and I’ll rule for him.”

“I did what I was told,” Pascoe said.

“You did more than you were told, twice. He’ll answer for the telling.” Leona turned her spectacles on the man in the camel coat. “Vaughn. A pack can’t follow an alpha who broke truce at his own grandfather’s hearth. I’d sooner you said it than I did.”

Tierney looked at the forty of them. Not one face in that line gave him anything.

“I step down,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “As of now.”

“Heard. I’ll hold the seat until there’s somebody fit for it. I’m seventy and I don’t want it, so you’d all better grow up quickly.” She looked across at Maeve. “There’s the stock, and the boy’s leg.”

Tierney was already walking to the Land Cruiser. He wrote the check on the hood with a pen from the glove box, and his hand was not steady. He carried it across the yard and held it out.

“Thirty-one thousand five hundred,” he said. “Nine bred cows at thirty-five hundred. It’s on my own account. The company’s had no part in it.”

Maeve read it and put it in her shirt pocket. She took something else out of her coat. It was the brass tag off the snare, and she laid it in Leona’s palm.

“That’s for the leg. Owen, what do you want for it?”

Owen went scarlet. He flexed his right hand and looked at it.

“It works,” he said. “I’d like that trapper’s truck off the creek. That’s all.”

“It’ll be gone by dark,” said Leona.

“One thing more, Vaughn.” Maeve had not raised her voice. “The cabin stands. I’ll not pull a log off it. That stone is Hugh’s, and any Tierney may come and stand at it, if he asks first. I should have said that thirty years ago.”

Tierney looked at her for a long moment. He nodded, once.

Then he came across the yard to the lot gate. Rhys got up off his bucket. Nora put her hand on his good arm, and he stayed where he was.

Tierney stopped six feet from her. Up close she could smell the drug still coming out of him, and under it the iron and the dry August grass.

“I had you counted,” he said. “I had the price, and the law, and what you’d been through with him. I’d have sworn you’d sign. You went to the courthouse first and gave it away for a dollar, and then you stood on his stone and beat me with my own law.” His mouth moved, without humor. “You fought like a Tierney.”

“I’m a Dunmore and a Pruett,” Nora said. “I’ll take it the way you mean it. Your grandfather finished the field before he saw a doctor. I thought about that all week.”

“Did you.”

“I carried boxes at eleven too, Mr. Tierney. Six houses. I’m sorry about Ennis, and I’d have said so sooner if I’d thought you’d hear it. It still doesn’t give anyone the right to poison cattle.”

He had no answer ready. He looked past her at the heifers, and at the wet black calf nosing along her mother’s flank.

“No,” he said at last. “It doesn’t.”

He walked back to the Land Cruiser and got in by himself. It went down the lane first, and the Madison trucks followed it, with Leona in the last one. Nora listened to them all the way to the highway, where they turned south for the long road to Ennis.

Billie was standing at her elbow.

“Take him home,” the old woman said. “I’ve rolled that shoulder for a week, and I’m done with it. It’s yours.”
***
In the clinic she built up the stove and washed to the elbows.

Vaughn Tierney’s card still lay at the end of the counter, where he had squared it in December. She picked it up with two wet fingers and put it in the firebox. Rhys watched her do it from the edge of the table.

“I kept it because I wasn’t sure,” she said. “I’m sure now.”

She did the arm first. The punctures were clean, and the wicks were drawing. She left them open and wrapped them fresh. The claw marks on his thighs were long and shallow, and they had already scabbed. Then she unstrapped his right arm and peeled the tape from the shoulder.

“Sting, then pressure,” she said.

“I missed that last time.”

“I was too angry to talk. Hold still.”

The split ran along the old line and an inch past it at either end. She closed it with single stitches, the first throw doubled, and she counted them aloud.

“Nine. Ten. Eleven.” She cut the last thread. “The muscle under it is torn worse than before. That’s six weeks at your speed, with the arm in a sling, and I don’t want to hear a word about it. You’ll shoe nothing until March. Owen can swing your gate.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“You held him on that arm for three heaves. I counted those too.”

“It wasn’t enough.”

“It was enough to shout on.” She laid the pad over the stitches and taped it. Her fingers had begun to shake a little, now that the work was done. “I’ve wanted to hear you shout for somebody since the woodshed. I’d have liked it under better circumstances.”

She unlocked the bottom drawer and wrote three lines in the green ledger. Under Paid she wrote, Retainer. She put his coat around his shoulders and walked him across the yard.
***
Bolus was on the pine shelf. The kitchen was cold, and she lit the stove before she took her coat off. Rhys stood inside the door, under the buckle. It had ridden home from the Bench in her coat pocket, and she had hung it back on its nail as she came in.

He did not sit down. She understood that he would not until she told him he could stay.

“I’ve got some things to say,” she said. “I’d like to get to the end of them. I’m not good at this either.”

“Take your time.”

“I’m staying. I want that said first, and separately, because it’s got nothing to do with you. This place is mine. I knew it on Wednesday when I burned his paper, and I knew it last night with my hand on that stone. If you went to Texas tomorrow, I’d still be here in February with my sleeve on.”

“I know that.”

“Good. Here’s the other.” She folded her arms, and then she unfolded them, because she did not want them folded for this. “I was angry for nine days. I’ve got some of it left, and it’ll come out the next time you say the word ‘after.’ But I had a list of reasons before you ever hurt me, and I went over it last night at the lot while you sat on that bucket. You told the pack the worst of yourself and asked for nothing. You brought me the part that went against you. You asked Immy, in front of everybody. Last night you opened your mouth and yelled for help. Every one of those is something I asked you for and didn’t expect to get.”

His heart was going hard. She let hers go with it.

“So I want you. That isn’t because my shoulders come down when you walk in, though they do, and I’ve stopped fighting them. I want you because you’re mine too. I’ve picked you twice now, and the second time I knew everything.” Her voice cracked, and she let it. “I love you. You’d better come away from that door.”

He crossed the kitchen in three strides. He had one arm strapped to his chest and the other bandaged to the elbow, so he put his forehead against hers and stood there breathing.

“Say it again sometime,” he said. “When I’m not so tired I might have dreamed it.”

“You didn’t dream it. There’s more.” She put her hand on the left side of his neck, where it met the shoulder. His pulse jumped under her palm. “I want the bite. You told me it belonged to a day I asked for it, knowing what it was. I know what it is. It’s once, for life. It leaves a scar, and I’d feel you afterward and you’d feel me. I’m asking, in plain words.”

He lifted his head. His grey-green eyes were very bright.

“Are you certain? It can’t be taken back, Nora. There’s no sixty days’ notice.”

“I’m certain.”

“You’ve been up all night, and you’ve had a week I wouldn’t wish on a dog. I’d wait until spring. I’d wait until you’d met your aunt and slept on it a hundred times.” He swallowed. “Are you certain, today, as you stand there?”

“I checked it from both ends. I did it at four this morning with a wet calf in my lap. Yes, Rhys. Do you want it?”

“Since twenty to seven on the twenty-fifth of November.”

“Then come upstairs. You’ll have to let me do most of the work.”

“I’ve been letting you since the generator,” he said, and she laughed, and found that she was crying a little as well.
***
The bedroom was full of thin winter sun. She had never had him there in daylight.

She undressed him as she would have undressed a patient, and then not like that at all. She worked the shirt off around the sling and kissed the tape on his shoulder. She unbuckled his belt and eased the jeans down over the scabbed lines on his thighs. He was bruised across the chest where the wolf had hit him, a wide dark bloom from collarbone to ribs. She laid her lips against the middle of it.

“Your turn,” he said. “I can manage buttons, if you stand close.”

He managed them left-handed, slowly, with his bandaged arm. When her shirt was open he bent and put his mouth to her breast, and she held his head there with both hands. Her jeans came down, and he saw her knees. They were black and blue from an hour of kneeling on frozen ground beside a sleeping wolf.

“Look at that,” he said. “We’d neither of us pass a sale ring.”

“I’d bid on you.”

“You’d be the only one.”

She put him on his back, with a pillow under the bad shoulder. The springs complained, and no radio played anywhere. She took one from the box on the night table. Then she lay down along his left side, skin to skin, and for a while they only held on. His hand moved over her back in long slow strokes. She could feel every callus. She kissed his throat and his mouth and the white line through his eyebrow.

“Tell me if anything pulls,” she said.

“It all pulls. Don’t stop.”

She did not hurry. She touched him everywhere that was not bandaged, and he touched her wherever one hand could reach, her breasts and the curve of her hip and the warm inside of her thigh. He knew by now what she liked there, and he was patient about it, until her breath went short and she caught his wrist.

She moved over him and took him into her, carefully, with her weight on her own arms. He said her name. She stayed still a moment, looking down at him in the sun, at the bruises and the two scars and his whole tired face turned up to her. He looked at her the same way. Neither of them had anything left to hide, and she felt that all through her body, as plainly as she felt him.

She set a slow pace and kept it. His hand stayed on her hip. When the warmth began to gather low in her and climb, she bent down until her breasts were against his chest and her neck was at his mouth.

“Now,” she said. “Please.”

His lips opened at the place where her neck met her shoulder. She felt his breath, and then his teeth. He bit down.

It was a sharp, bright pain, clean as a needle. It lasted one heartbeat, and then heat poured out from it, down her arm and across her breasts and into the place where they were joined. She cried out. Everything she had been climbing toward broke over her at once and went on breaking.

“Yours,” he said against her skin, roughly. “Do it now.”

She put her mouth to the left side of his neck. She had a woman’s teeth, small and blunt. She thought for a second that she could not do it, and then she set her jaw and meant it. The skin gave. She tasted iron and salt. His whole body arched under her. His good arm locked around her back, and he followed her over with a sound she felt in her own chest.

She felt the rest of him then, and it was like a door coming open in a wall of her own house.

They lay tangled and shaking. She kept her face in his neck. The place on her shoulder throbbed warmly, and so did the place on his. It took her a minute to understand that she was feeling both.

“Rhys.”

“I know. I’ve got you too.” His voice was full of wonder. “You’re right here.”

He touched his breastbone. She laid her hand over his.

It did not come in words. It was nearer to the way she knew where her own hands were in the dark. He was there, steady and close, a second warmth alongside her own. She could feel that his shoulder ached and that he did not care. She could feel that he was happy, with a great quiet happiness that had her at the center of it. There was no doubting any of it, because none of it had to reach her through his face or his voice.

All her life she had listened to hearts through walls and guessed at what they meant. She had waited at café counters to see who would take the next stool. She would never have to guess about this one again. She was wanted, and she knew it now as surely as she knew a weight across a corral.

“Does it stay like this?” she asked.

“Billie says it settles, like a new shoe. It doesn’t go.”

“Good.”

She drew the quilt over them both, mindful of his arm. The cat came up and lay across their feet. Outside, the creek ran under its ice toward six hundred acres of hay, and for the first time since November neither of them was listening for anything on the road.
***