Part 5
Emilio told Blake he would call the next morning. He did not.
For three days he repaired gates that did not need repairing and found reasons to drive past Agustín’s trap. The bull’s appetite improved. His voice carried across the pasture at dawn. Each small gain offered Emilio another excuse to believe twelve days might be enough.
Linda did not repeat the numbers. She moved the calendar from the refrigerator to the kitchen table, where Emilio had to lift it each time he opened his grandfather’s notebook.
On the fourth night, rain came hard from the Gulf. It drummed on the metal roof and ran from the house in silver sheets. By morning, the caliche lane had turned soft at the edges, and cattle stood steaming under the clearing sky.
Emilio made his usual circuit before breakfast. In the east pasture, he noticed heifer 614 rubbing her neck against a fence post. She stopped when he approached, then started again. Her ears drooped. When he brought her into a small pen and looked beneath her tail, he found more ticks than the previous week’s count had predicted.
The old impulse arrived whole: watch her until evening, check whether the rain and heat had made her dull, give the birds time to work. He took out his phone while he still had reasons not to.
Ana answered from her truck. “What do you see?” He gave her the number, the gum color, the temperature, and what the chart had shown five days earlier.
“Keep her separate,” Ana said. “Check the five animals from the same grazing group. I’ll be there after this call.”
She arrived to find six heifers in the pen, their numbers written on a feed sack nailed flat to the gate. Emilio had not treated them. He had also not turned them back out.
Ana examined 614, then the others. “You caught it early. She’s not in crisis.”
“But she crossed the line on the plan.”
“She did.”
They treated 614 under Ana’s direction and left the other five under observation. Emilio moved the grazing group to a drier pasture and cleaned the holding area. The caracaras watched from two telephone poles, then flew off toward the highway before the work began.
By noon, 614 was chewing hay and swishing at flies with enough irritation to reassure Ana. The five heifers below the threshold returned to pasture after their final checks. The work ended with a page of numbers, a bag of discarded gloves, and no trailer headed for the clinic.
When they finished, Ana wrote the new counts in the ranch log. Emilio placed Agustín Garza’s oilcloth notebook beside it.
“I used to think this proved he had the answer,” he said.
Ana opened to a page from 1969. Beside a note about five caracaras in the south pasture, her great-grandfather had recorded that he dusted two weak cows and moved them closer to water.
“Looks like he used more than one answer,” she said.
“Looks like it.”
She turned another page. Agustín’s records were incomplete, idiosyncratic, and sometimes impossible to interpret, but they were records. He had written down what failed along with what worked. Emilio had inherited his sayings more faithfully than his doubt.
“Can I borrow this?” Ana asked.
He almost said it did not leave the house. Instead, he pushed it across the table. “Put it in a plastic bag. The binding’s loose.”
Ana slid the notebook into her case. “I’ll bring it back Sunday.” It was the first time in four years they had made a plan for seeing each other that did not involve an emergency.
That afternoon, Emilio called Blake. “The west fence,” he said. “I provide posts, you provide wire.”
“I provide the bull,” Blake replied.
“After Ana examines him, and he goes into a separate arrival pen.”
“I expected nothing less from the man who bought a quarantine with horns.”
Emilio could hear the smile and let it pass. “Bring him Monday.”
Blake arrived before sunrise with the young bull and every record Ana had requested. While she checked identification and drew blood, Blake stood beside Emilio at the outer gate, his clean shirt already marked with trailer dust.
“My first year running cattle without my father,” Blake said, “I changed three things at once because I was sure his system was old. Quit one treatment, moved cows earlier, changed mineral. Then I stopped counting because the numbers made it harder to blame the weather. By the time I called a vet, I had sick cows and a dead yearling.”
Emilio looked at him. Blake kept his eyes on the bull in the arrival pen.
“That’s why I laughed at the sale,” he continued. “A bull like Agustín looks expensive to me even when the auctioneer says one thousand. I wasn’t laughing because I knew more than you.”
“You still laughed.”
“I did.” Blake rubbed the dust from his cuff and only spread it. “I’m trying to explain it, not erase it.”
Emilio considered making him work harder for forgiveness. Then Ana called for the gate, and both men moved without finishing the conversation.
After Ana examined the loan bull, Emilio kept him apart for the agreed observation period. When turnout day came, the Garzas gathered the cows at sunrise.
Agustín paced the inside of his trap as the borrowed bull passed on the far lane. He was strong enough now to strike the ground with one front hoof. Dust lifted around his legs, and the hair along his neck stood high. Emilio rested his hand on the latch.
All he had to do was open two gates. Agustín wanted the herd. Emilio needed a herd sire. The bull looked magnificent compared with the creature from the auction, and no one was standing beside Emilio to stop him. He removed his hand.
The borrowed bull continued toward the south pasture. Agustín called after him until the sound became hoarse, but Emilio kept both gates closed…
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