Second Pull

The quiet woke her.

Nora lay in bed and listened for the wind, and there was none. For three nights it had leaned on the house, and now she could hear the stove ticking downstairs and a chickadee somewhere in the yard. The light at the edge of the curtain was pink.

She went to the window. The sky was clear from one end to the other, a hard cold blue going gold in the east. Down the creek to the west the whole Bitterroot Range stood up white and sharp, as if somebody had cut it out with scissors. Her yard was gone. The fences were gone to the top wire. Her truck was a smooth hump with a mirror sticking out of it.

She breathed in, out of habit, and the house smelled of wood smoke and coffee and of him. The hot sweet note was gone.

He was standing at the stove when she came down, with a quilt over his shoulders and the percolator in his left hand.

“You’re supposed to be lying down.”

“I laid down for two days. I’ve got it memorized.” He poured a mug and held it out to her. “It broke around three. I soaked your quilt. I’m sorry about that.”

“Sit, please.” She took the coffee and got the thermometer. It read ninety-nine even. She looked at his hip, where the wick had done its work and the swelling had gone down by half, and she looked at his eyes, which were clear. Then she peeled the tape off his forearm and drew the catheter out and held a square of gauze over the place.

“You’re off fluids,” she said. “You are not off the couch.”

“What’s the refrigerator reading?”

She had been trying not to think about that until she had finished her coffee. “I haven’t been out yet.”

“It’s going to be a bright day. That lean-to faces south, and the clinic will warm up some.” He said it mildly. “Bread bags won’t hold it.”

Nora went out on the porch instead of answering. The cold closed her nostrils. Doc’s yardstick on the post showed two inches of wood above the snow.

“Thirty-four,” she said when she came back in. “It’s well below zero, and I have to dig to the clinic before I can do anything.” She looked at him. He was sitting where she had told him to sit, with both hands around his mug, and everything about him said he was a man waiting to be turned loose. She knew that look. She saw it on stock dogs in pickup beds. “What would you need?”

“A ten-millimeter wrench, a screwdriver and a coffee can. Something fine and stiff to clear a jet. And you, for anything that takes two hands.”

“Here are my terms. You use your left hand. Your right elbow stays against your ribs. I do the lifting and I do the pulling. If you go grey on me, we stop.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t call me ma’am. You’re four years older than I am, I read it in the ledger.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“That’s worse,” she said, and went to find her shovel.
***
It took her half an hour to cut a trench to the clinic and around the back wall to the lean-to. He came behind her in the rubber boots and Doc’s short coveralls, with her barn coat over the top and the sleeves ending well above his wrists. He looked ridiculous, and he did not seem to know it or care.

The Honda sat on its frame under the lean-to roof. He lowered himself onto an upturned bucket beside it with a breath through his teeth.

“Fuel valve off,” he said. “It’s that lever. Now hold the can under the bowl. I’ll get the drain.”

She held the coffee can. He reached in left-handed with the screwdriver and backed out a screw she had never noticed, and gas ran into the can in a thin stream. It was the color of strong tea. The stink of it rolled up at her, sour and sticky, like old paint.

“That’s what’s been in there all along?”

“Under your fresh gas, yes. That’s the summer’s worth. The bowl never emptied.”

He took the cover off the air cleaner and handed it to her, and then the filter, and then two nuts off two long studs. He worked without looking at his hand most of the time, by feel, the way she found a vein. A thin spring went into his shirt pocket. The carburetor came away in his palm, a lump of aluminum no bigger than a baseball.

“That’s it?” Nora said. “I pulled that cord twenty times over two days and swore at it in two languages, and the trouble was that?”

“What’s the second language?”

“Feedlot.”

He grinned. It changed his whole face, and she looked at the carburetor instead.

They took it inside to the bench by the clinic stove. He had her pour an inch of fresh gas into a clean can. He opened the bowl, and the inside of it was coated with green-brown gum. He scrubbed it out with a toothbrush from her surgical sink. Then he held a brass fitting up to the window and squinted through it.

“Plugged solid. I need the fine thing now.”

She thought, and went to the cabinet, and came back with a twenty-five-gauge needle still in its wrapper. He looked at it and at her.

“That’ll do it better than anything I’ve got at the shed,” he said.

He worked the needle through the jet a little at a time and rinsed it in the gas. He did the same with a second, smaller one, and held each to the light until she could see a clean pinhole of sky through it. She kept the parts in order on a towel as he handed them to her, the way she laid out a surgical pack, and she handed them back in order when he put it together. He noticed that. He did not say anything, but he quit telling her which piece he wanted.

Back in the lean-to he hung the carburetor on its studs and she held it while he started the nuts. He hooked the spring with one finger. She fitted the filter and the cover.

“Valve on. Choke over to the left. Switch on.” He sat back on his bucket. “It’s yours.”

Nora set her foot on the frame and pulled. The engine turned over and said nothing.

“Again,” he said.

She pulled again. The Honda caught with a bang and a cloud of blue smoke, stumbled, and settled into a flat steady roar that shook snow off the lean-to roof.

She stood there with the cord handle in her fist.

“Doc said the second pull,” she shouted over it. “He swore to me. Every time, he said.”

“He was right about a few things.”

“I’m still mad at him.”

“You ought to be.”

Inside, the refrigerator had started to hum. She opened the door and looked at the thermometer hanging from the shelf, which said forty-four. She took out the bread bags of slush one by one and dropped them in the sink. She stood with her hand on the cold door for a moment after she had shut it.

That was two thousand dollars of product. She was five hundred and forty short on a payment due Tuesday, and if those bottles had cooked she would have been ordering replacements on a credit card with every spring herd on her books still to vaccinate. She had lost two days to that machine. He had fixed it in an hour with a toothbrush and one hand.

It ought to have stung her pride. She looked for the sting and found she was only glad.

“Thank you,” she said when he came in. “I mean that. What do I owe you?”

“Put it against my bill.”

“You haven’t seen your bill.”

“I saw the column. You left it blank.”

“I haven’t finished adding,” Nora said, and he laughed and had to put a hand to his side.
***
The barn was fifty yards off, and the snow lay between it and the house as smooth as a bedsheet. She had waded it twice a day through the storm, and every trail had filled behind her.

“You’re not shoveling,” she told him.

“No. I’m walking behind you and packing it down. That’s all I’m doing.”

It was a fair offer and she took it. She cut the snow in blocks and threw them clear, and he came after her, tramping the floor of the trench flat with the scoop shovel as a walking stick. It was slow work. The sun came over the Sapphires while they were at it and lit the yard so bright it hurt. Bolus followed them down the finished trench with his tail straight up, stepping in Rhys’s boot prints, complaining the whole way.

“Tell me about this ranch that never calls me,” she said, between shovelfuls.

“What do you want to know?”

“What a vet wants to know. How many, what kind, what goes wrong.”

“Four hundred and twenty mother cows. Black, mostly Angus, some baldies. Thirty-two hundred deeded acres on both sides of the road, from the Copperline fence to the Bench above the house.” He stopped to get his breath, and she let him pretend it was to think. “We’ve got sixty-two first-calf heifers due to start the first of February. I breed them to calve ahead of the cows so I can watch them. Somebody’s in that calving lot every two hours from then until April, and most nights it’s me.”

“Who pulls the hard ones?”

“I do. Doc cut the ones I couldn’t pull.”

“How many was that last year?”

“Three.”

“Out of how many heifers?”

“Fifty-eight.”

Nora threw a block of snow. “That’s good. That’s better than good. Somebody’s picking the bulls right.”

“That’s me too,” he said, and she could hear that it pleased him to have it noticed by someone who knew what it meant.

“And you shoe.”

“Eleven saddle horses and anything the neighbors bring. That’s the shed with the stovepipe. I’ve watched your truck go by it since September.”

“You could have waved. Immy waves.”

“I was told not to.”

She cut another six feet. The barn wall was close now, red above the drift.

“And the other job,” she said. “The one that had you on a ridge on Tuesday.”

He was quiet for a few steps. “The old word is enforcer. It sounds like more than it is. If there’s a fight in the pack, I stand in the middle of it. If there’s a bull in the brush that’s hurt somebody, or a stranger on the boundary, or a thing that has to be looked at and nobody knows what it is, I’m the one who goes first. I’ve had it since 2019.”

“Who goes second?”

“On a good day, somebody.”

“And Tuesday?”

“Tuesday it was only me.”

She straightened up with the shovel in her hands and looked at him. He was looking up the creek, to where the timber climbed toward a ridge she had never thought of as anything but scenery. His face had gone careful. Then he looked back at her, and it was only tired.

“That’s a job that gets a person killed,” she said.

“It can. Mostly it gets a person cold.”

She reached the barn door and put her shoulder to it. It dragged, as it always did.

“I could hang that straight for you,” he said.

“You could sit down on a bale. That’s what you could do.”

He sat. She forked the stained straw out of the calving pen, because she could not stand to leave it, and shook down clean. She lifted the lid of the grain bin and scooped cat food into the pan. The little brass key hung on its nail on the underside of the lid, where she had put it back on Wednesday. Bolus ate as though he had been neglected for a month.

Nora sat down on the bale beside Rhys with her elbows on her knees. She was sweating under her coat, and her arms shook pleasantly.

“Why Montana?” he asked. “You had a job.”

“I had four years of a job, in a clinic with another man’s name on the trucks. Before that there was school, and before that my mother and I rented. We lived in six houses by the time I was eighteen. The landlord sells, or the rent goes up, or somebody’s nephew needs the place, and you get thirty days.” She watched the cat. “I’m very good at packing. I can do a kitchen in an hour.”

He waited. He was good at waiting, she had noticed. He did not fill a silence just because it was there.

“I wanted to own one thing nobody could ask me to leave,” she said. “That’s all it was. It didn’t have to be a good thing. I saw the listing in March, and I drove up in April and stood in that kitchen, and I thought, if I sign this, the only person who can ever make me go is me. It was the one I could afford. So here I am, with a generator that hates me.”

“It likes you fine now.”

“It likes you.”

She thought of the two cream envelopes in the kitchen drawer. Somebody was asking her to leave already, very politely, for one million one hundred thousand dollars. She did not say so. That was her arithmetic to do, and she had not done it yet.

“I’m glad it was this one,” Rhys said.

She turned her head. He was looking at the cat too.

“So am I,” she said. It was the first time she had said it out loud to anybody. She had been afraid of jinxing the place, and she found she was not afraid of that today.
***
She did his dressing after supper, in the kitchen. The house was still on lanterns, since the Honda’s cord reached no farther than the clinic, and she set two of them on the table and had him sit on the edge of it with the coveralls pushed down to his waist.

The tape came away clean. She bent close with the light.

It was Friday night, and she had sewn him on Tuesday. The wound looked a week old. The edges had knit pink and flat the whole length of it, and the six stitches she had reset at the shoulder sat snug in healthy skin. There was no heat anywhere under her fingers. The worst of the bruising over his ribs had already gone from black to yellow-green.

“That’s remarkable,” she said. “I want you to know I’m taking the credit for that with nobody to tell.”

“You can tell me.”

“I did beautiful work on you.”

“You did.”

She laid a clean pad over the top third and taped it. To smooth the last strip down she put her left hand flat on his chest for something to push against. It was a thing she did with every animal she had ever bandaged.

His heart was under her palm. She had been hearing it for three days, and she had told him so yesterday on the kitchen floor, and he had not looked at her sideways. She felt it now as well as heard it. It had been slow when she started on the tape, and it was not slow any longer.

The tape was down. She did not take her hand away.

“Your heart’s going fast,” she said.

“I know it.”

“Your fever’s gone. So it isn’t that.”

“No.”

She looked up. Sitting on the table, he was nearly level with her. The lantern was behind him, and it put his face half in shadow, the scarred eyebrow and the three days of beard and his mouth. He was holding very still. He had held still for the needle too, she remembered, in the barn. Both his hands were flat on the table edge, and the knuckles of the left one were white.

All day she had been warm in a way that had nothing to do with the stove. She had been easy in her skin, as she never was around people. He had cleaned a jet with her needle and told her she was not crazy and packed a path behind her without once trying to take the shovel. She was thirty years old and she knew what she wanted when she saw it.

Nora leaned in and kissed him.

For one second his mouth was only warm and surprised under hers. Then he made a low sound in his throat and kissed her back, and there was nothing careful about it. His left hand came up off the table and into her hair at the back of her neck. He kissed her like a man who had been waiting for it a long time, for years, and had quit believing it would come. That made no sense for someone she had met on Wednesday. She did not stop to think about it. She put her other hand on his good shoulder and opened her mouth to his, and his skin was hot under her fingers, and the smell of him went through her like a drink of whiskey.

Then his hand left her hair. He took her gently by the wrist and moved her hand off his chest. He slid down off the table and stepped away from her, backward, until he fetched up against the counter by the sink.

He was breathing hard, and so was she.

“No,” he said. “Not like this.”

“Like what?” Her voice came out sharper than she meant. “I started it. In case you weren’t paying attention.”

“I was paying attention.” He dragged his hand down over his face. “I’m going to be thinking about who started it for a good long while. That isn’t the trouble.”

“Then what is?”

“You’re my doctor. Your stitches are holding me together. And I’m snowed into your house with three feet of it outside the door and no road.” He said it slowly, and he looked right at her while he said it. “If you wanted me gone tonight, Nora, you couldn’t do it. You’d have to keep me whether you liked it or not. I won’t kiss a woman who can’t throw me out.”

“I don’t want to throw you out.”

“I know. I want you to be able to.”

She folded her arms. Her mouth was still tingling, and she was furious about that, and about how reasonable he sounded, and about the fact that she could not find the hole in it.

“That’s very noble,” she said.

“It isn’t. It’s about the hardest thing I’ve done this week, and I got chewed on by three wolves.” One corner of his mouth went up, though his eyes stayed serious. “Ask me again on a day you could put me out the door. If you still want to.”

“What makes you think I’ll ask again?”

“Nothing does. I’ll just hope.”

She picked up the roll of tape and the scissors and the old dressing. She put the tape in the tote and the dressing in the stove, and she took one of the lanterns.

“Your temperature gets checked at six,” she said. “Don’t lift that arm.”

“Good night, Nora.”

“Good night.”

She went up the stairs with her back straight. She undressed in the cold and got under the blankets and lay staring at the ceiling, thoroughly annoyed. He had been right, and she did not have to like it. The county would plow the creek road tomorrow or the day after, and he would go home to his four hundred and twenty cows. Then she would have a house she could throw him out of.

She heard him settle on the couch below her. She heard him let out one long, unsteady breath.

Nora pulled the quilt up over her face. She was smiling, and she lay there in the dark for a good while and could not make herself stop.
***