In Full

The ditch was running bank-full, and Nora could hear it from the branding fire, a quarter mile off.

She had pulled the planks at the headgate herself, on the first of May, with Maeve standing by to see that she did it right. The water had gone down the old cut brown and fast. Now it ran clear, and the six hundred acres below the Bench had turned a green so bright that it looked painted on. She had paid her half of the ditch cleaning in April. The bill had come in Maeve’s quick slant, forty-two dollars, with no note.

Nobody had ever thanked her for the water. She had been watching for it since January, and they had held to it, all twenty-three. They called her at three in the morning and argued with her about wormer, and Owen’s mother handed her the baby at every meal. She had come to prefer that to thanks.

It was Saturday, the twenty-second of May, sixty degrees at ten in the morning, with snow still on the Bitterroots and meadowlarks on every post.

“Hot iron!” Earl Pettibone sang out.

He stood at the fire in a leather apron, pulling irons from the coals and judging them by color. He had driven up from the highway at six with a thermos and a folding stool, and announced that he was seventy-one and would brand or go home. Maeve had given him the irons. He had not burned a calf too deep all morning, and he was unbearable about it.

Owen rode into the bunch on the bay. His loop went out from his right hand, low and flat, and came up around two hind feet. He dallied and turned the horse, and the calf slid to the fire on its side.

“That’s forty-one without a miss,” he said to nobody.

“Forty,” said Immy. “I’m counting the one that stepped out.”

Rhys and Immy were working the ground together. He took the calf’s head and she took the hind leg, and they had it stretched before Earl got there with the iron. They had been doing it that way since eight o’clock, and they had hardly spoken. Each of them knew by now where the other would be.

Nora knelt at the calf’s neck with a syringe gun in each hand. She gave both shots, slapped the calf’s shoulder, and said, “Go on.” It went, bawling for its mother.

She watched Rhys get up. He used the right arm to push off the ground and thought nothing of it. She had kept that arm in a sling for six weeks and out of a forge until the middle of March. The eleven had come out on the first of February, the morning the heifers were due to start. Under his collar on the left side, where his neck met his shoulder, there was a small silver mark. She had one to match, and she had taken to wearing her braid over the other shoulder.

She could feel him without looking. It had settled, as Billie had said it would. It was a steady warmth at the edge of her attention, like the stove in the next room. Just now it told her he was hot and thirsty and well pleased with his calf crop.

He had a right to be. All sixty-two heifers had calved. She had cut two of them, and he had pulled five, and for seven weeks one or the other of them had walked through that lot every two hours of the night. She had used the kit in the hardware-store carton until the box fell apart. Number two-eighteen, the cystic cow, was five months bred. Nora had told him so in the chute in March, and he had said he would never hear the end of it. He had been right about that.

“Doctor!” a child shouted. “Your mother wants to know if they feel that!”

Gail Pruett sat on the tailgate of the ranch truck in a new pair of jeans, with a clipboard on her knee. She had driven up from Scottsbluff on Thursday, eleven hours, with a ham in a cooler. She had been at the Bench twenty minutes this morning when Maeve found out what she did for a living and handed her the tally.

“They feel it for about as long as you’d feel a wasp,” Nora called. “Then they forget. What’s the count?”

“One hundred and twelve calves. Sixty-three steers and forty-nine heifers. Somebody wrote fifty and I’ve corrected it.” Gail looked over her glasses at the fire. “That man with the irons tells me you delivered one of his through the side.”

“Earl tells everybody that.”

“He says it’s the best calf in the county.”

“It’s the biggest. He’s sending the bill to Lindquist.”

Her mother had met Rhys on Thursday night at the kitchen door. She had looked him over from his hat to his boots, and then she had watched him peel potatoes for supper. She had waited until he went out for wood. “He peels them thin,” she had said. “I expect he’ll do.”

She had seen the buckle on its nail, too. She had stood in front of it for a while with her hand at her mouth. Nora had told her why it hung there now. It was so that he could see who came in. Her mother had liked that as much as she had.

Gail did not know what the Mulvaneys were, and she never would. That was Maeve’s rule, and Nora kept it. Earl did not know either, though he could count to two hundred.

The yews were gone. Copperline Land Company had withdrawn its plan for Mulvaney Creek in February. It had sent a one-page letter on the cream paper, signed by somebody whose name Nora did not know. The twenty-one hundred acres had gone in March to a conservation buyer out of Missoula, who wanted elk on it and no houses. Maeve had a ten-year grazing lease on the whole of it, recorded. The new people had pulled the hedge in April. Immy had gone down to help, and she had counted two hundred into the fire. The iron letters had come off the gate, and Earl had them in his shop. He said he meant to make something of them.

Vaughn Tierney had not been back. Billie had a letter from Leona every month. The last one said he was building fence for wages on a ranch east of Ennis and had asked for nothing. In April a short note in a neat upright hand had come to Maeve, asking whether he might stand at the stone in June. Maeve had written back one word.

“Hot iron!”

Nora gave two more shots and looked across the fire at the lawn chair.

Doc Teague sat in it under a straw hat, with a rug over his knees and Bolus on top of the rug. Rhys had driven to Hamilton for him at six and stopped at the forty for a jacket. The cat had climbed into the old man’s lap in the truck and would not be moved. The two of them had watched the whole morning with the same expression. The green ledger lay on the grass beside the chair. Doc had spent an hour over it, reading with his nose close to the page.

She walked over while Owen built a new loop.

“You’re giving that seven-way too far forward,” Doc said. “I’d go a hand back.”

“You’d go a hand back and hit the shoulder. I’ve read your notes. You had three abscesses in 2011.”

The moustache twitched. “I’ve been through your tendon entry twice. A locking stitch, and a twenty-minute wait for the blood. I’d not have had the patience.”

“You’d not have had the hands. You told Rhys so.”

“I did. It’s a pleasure to be right about something.” He scratched the cat’s ears. “Have you finished shouting at me?”

She had gone to Sapphire View every other week since February. She had shouted twice more. After that she had played cribbage, and she had brought him the ledger a month at a time.

“Mostly,” she said. “I’ll let you know.”

“The boy keeps his elbow up now when he ropes. That’s your doing, too.” Doc looked out over the Bench at the green below it, and at the water shining in the ditch. “Forty-one years I drove past this. I never saw it look better.”

She left him there and went back to the fire.
***
They broke at noon. Billie’s dinner came up from the house in two trucks, and they ate it sitting on the grass along the cabin wall.

Nora sat with her back against the logs. The hearthstone was swept, and somebody had set a coffee can of lupine on it. The wedding would be here, inside these four walls, on Saturday the eighteenth of September. Billie would say the words, and Leona Stroud had sent word that she would drive over to hear them. Gail had already asked who was doing the books for the supper.

Rhys came and sat down beside her with two plates. He handed her one. His knee settled against hers.

“Maeve says the steers go a little light this year,” he said. “I told her it’s the calves off the heifers pulling the average down. She says an enforcer ought to have a better excuse.”

“What did Immy say?”

“Immy said she’d have a better one by Monday.”

He had sat in Maeve’s office with the door shut, on the first Monday in February. Nora had felt him the whole hour from two and a half miles off, tight as a fence wire. He had come home and told her all of it. He kept the place. In return he did not run the boundary alone, or stand a challenge alone, or keep a thing from his alpha again. Maeve had named Immy his second. On the last full moon the two of them had gone up to Sawmill Saddle together, a dark wolf and a pale one. They had come down at midnight, and he had said it was the first time in four years that he had looked at the view.

Maeve had asked Nora a question that same month, standing at the headgate with a shovel. She had asked whether Nora wanted in. Nora had said she would check it from both ends. She had taken until the March moon. Then she had stood on the Bench and said yes, on the understanding that she still owned her own door and would still tell the alpha when her bull was no good. Maeve had said she expected nothing else.

Nora took the envelope out of her shirt pocket. She had carried it since Tuesday.

It had a Dubois postmark and four pages inside, in a round blue hand. Fay Dunmore had written back in February, the week she got Nora’s letter. She had written six times since. She was sixty, and she ran the feed store their parents had run. For thirty-one years she had put flowers on her brother’s grave on the ninth of March and believed there was nobody else left to do it.

I am sending you the good one, the last page said. It was on Mother’s dresser until she died. He is twenty-five in it. It was taken at our kitchen door the Christmas before. You will see he is listening to something. He always was. You have his freckles, by the picture you sent, and I think you have his chin. Come in July when the river is down. Bring your man, and bring your mother if she will come. I have waited a long time to tell her we would have been glad of her.

The photograph was in color, gone a little orange. A young man leaned in a doorway with a coffee cup, laughing at whoever held the camera. He had his head tipped to the left.

She had shown it to her mother on Thursday night. Gail had looked at it for a long time without touching it.

“I didn’t go to the funeral,” she had said. “I’ll go in July.”

So there would be three of them in the truck, on the second weekend of the month. Cal’s people would take some explaining. What they explained to Gail, and how much, was for the Wind River alpha to say. Fay had written that he was a sensible man.

“Read me the part about the chin again,” Rhys said.

“You’ve heard it five times.”

“I like it. It’s a good chin.”

She put the letter away and leaned her shoulder into his. Across the grass her mother was showing Maeve a column on the clipboard, and Maeve was listening with real attention. Earl had Doc cornered and was describing a Caesarean. Owen lay flat on his back with his hat over his face, opening and closing his right fist out of habit.

“A hundred and forty to go,” Rhys said. “You want to trade? I’ll give shots and you can flank.”

“I want to see you find a vein.”

“I found one last week.”

“On an orange. Get up, cow boss.”
***
The last calf went back to its mother at half past four. The irons cooled in a bucket. Rhys took Doc back to Hamilton with a plate of Billie’s pie on his knee, and Gail rode along for the drive.

Nora went home ahead of them, up the mile and a half of creek road with the windows down.

Rhys’s truck had stood in her yard every night since January. His razor had moved from the spare-room windowsill to the shelf by her sink. His stock papers shared the pine shelf with the Herriots, and there was a second shelf now, beside the first, that he had built in March out of a wind-felled larch. The barn door still rolled under one finger. The radio had come back from the kennel room and sat in the kitchen window.

She had made the June payment on the loan on the third of May, and the July one sat ready behind it. Her mother had gone over the practice books on Friday morning with a pencil. She had found nineteen cents and declared herself satisfied.

Nora washed and fed the cat. Bolus had come home from the Bench in her truck, worn out with being admired. She set the hoof knife on the windowsill, where she kept it. The apple-wood handle had darkened with four months of her hand. She had opened a dozen abscesses with it and had been as unbearable as she had promised.

Then she went out to the clinic for the green ledger. She brought it in to the kitchen table and opened it under the lamp.

The book had filled a good deal since November. There was Owen’s leg, and a cut pad on Immy. There was a child with a fishhook, which Doc swore was hereditary. She turned back through them to the first entry in her own hand. It was dated Tuesday, the twenty-fourth of November.

Wolf, male, 200 lb. Bite wounds, right side and left haunch. Full anesthesia (see dose). 43 sutures.

Owner unknown.

The Paid column was blank. She had left it that way for six months.

She felt him coming before she heard the truck. The warmth at the edge of her mind grew nearer and stronger, and she knew he was tired and content and thinking of supper. She heard the engine at the Bench. He dropped her mother at Billie’s, where the pie was, and came on up the lane.

He hung his hat under the buckle. He looked at the open ledger and at the pen in her hand.

“What’s that?”

“Bookkeeping. Sit down. This concerns you.”

He sat. She drew one neat line through the word unknown. Above it she wrote, in her square hand, Dr. N. Pruett.

Rhys read it upside down. One corner of his mouth went up.

“There’s a grandmother who’ll contest that.”

“She told me in her kitchen that I could put her down. That was in November. I took too long, and she’s lost her claim. I asked the law-keeper.”

“You asked Billie if you could cut Billie out.”

“She said it was sense, as far as it went. She said she’d keep the visiting rights.” Nora turned the book around and slid it across to him. She laid the pen on the page. “The account’s still open. I told you for weeks that you hadn’t seen your bill. That’s the bill. There’s forty-three, and six reset, and nine, and eleven. There’s a fever, a wick, an IV I held up on a porch, and two cans of chili.”

“That’s a long bill.”

“I’ve left the column for you. I thought the patient ought to say what he’s good for.”

He looked at the blank for a while. She could feel what went through him. It was slow and deep, and there was laughter in it.

He picked up the pen. He wrote slowly, in the careful hand of a man who made his letters mostly on feed tags.

One lollipop. In full, for life.

He blotted it with the side of his fist, and he handed her the pen.

“That’s root beer,” he said. “I’m particular.”

“I know the flavor. I keep the records.”

She closed the ledger. She did not take it back out to the clinic drawer yet. It could lie on the kitchen table for an evening, between the lamp and the photograph of a freckled man in a doorway. Her mother was laughing somewhere down the creek, and she could just hear it.

Rhys got up to peel the potatoes. Nora put a split of pine in the stove and set two plates in the rack.