Part 2
“Ninety-six dollars.”
Sadie pulled her hands into her sleeves. Lydia told her she would cover the repair somehow, then heard how little that offered. The girl had helped haul water when the north well faltered in August; she knew exactly which work arrived when the money didn’t.
“You said it wasn’t empty.”
“It wasn’t.”
“You knew what I meant.”
Lydia closed the checkbook. Knight had left three long stems in the rack, and through the open door she watched him choose among them with absurd care.
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
They put the feeding instructions on the refrigerator that night. Beneath them Lydia attached the bill and the receipts, facing outward. Sadie didn’t help arrange them, but she brought in the auction envelope when Lydia asked.
“You don’t have to make this work,” Lydia told her.
“I’m not leaving him without water.”
“I know. I mean the money.”
Sadie sat at the table and flattened one corner of the envelope. “I don’t want another ‘I’ll handle it.’ I want to know if we’re hauling water again.”
Lydia had no useful reply. She made them eggs on toast, and afterward they worked the chess problem from the sale program. She lost her queen in four moves. Sadie looked almost pleased.
For several weeks, Knight gave them small, unconvincing improvements. He finished more hay. He lay down and rose without the frightened scrambling Lydia had seen at the sale. His foot needed further treatment, and twice Ruth changed the plan because something wasn’t healing as she expected.
Lydia kept each instruction sheet. Her kitchen began to smell faintly of the ointment that worked its way into the folds of the paper, though she tried to wash before coming in.
Sadie fed from outside the barrier. Sometimes she sat nearby afterward with her homework, her boots hooked on the lower rail. Knight learned the sound of the red can scraping the bin and began waiting by the feeder when she came out.
One evening he was there before she had opened the lid. Sadie held up the empty can.
“You’re early. I haven’t even done anything.”
He stretched his neck toward it, snorted, and showered her worksheet with damp flecks. She stared at the paper, then started laughing, and Lydia laughed from the doorway until her throat hurt.
The well quit the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. It gave them a last tank of sandy water, then a hum with nothing coming up the pipe. Lydia turned off the power and stood with her hand on the switch while the cattle began gathering at the tank.
Warren lent her a hauling tank. He had heard about the pump from the repairman and brought it himself, which prevented Lydia from deciding she didn’t want his help.
“I need it back Monday,” he said. “If you still need water after that, tell me Friday. Don’t wait till my driver comes for it.”
He didn’t ask about Knight. Lydia was grateful enough for that to thank him twice.
They hauled from the house well, filling the distant stock tank in trips that took longer than Lydia had allowed. A hose coupling leaked; the old trailer had to be positioned just right. By Friday night her hands cramped around the steering wheel.
Sadie’s regional chess meet was Saturday morning. Lydia had promised to drive her and stay for the final round, if she got that far.
“I called Mrs. Webb,” Lydia said over supper. “Told her we couldn’t make it.”
Sadie stopped with her fork halfway to her mouth. “You called my coach?”
“I can’t leave the cattle all day.”
“You could’ve asked her for a ride.”
Lydia looked at the empty chair across from her. Sadie’s tournament bag had been waiting there since Wednesday; beneath it was the permission slip with Mrs. Webb’s number at the top.
“I’ll call her back.”
Sadie picked up her phone and typed. A minute later, she turned the reply from Mrs. Webb toward Lydia.
“She already gave my place to Owen.”
Sadie carried her plate to the sink. The food was nearly untouched, but Lydia didn’t tell her to finish it.
The pump repair required selling two bred cows Lydia had planned to keep. She chose the animals herself, accepted a dealer’s offer she would ordinarily have negotiated harder, and paid the repairman before ordering anything else. The water came back; the cows did not.
That afternoon, she returned Warren’s tank washed out and ready for his driver. He checked the coupling Lydia had replaced and ran a finger over the new seal.
“You didn’t need to do that,” he said.
“It leaked.”
He nodded, and neither mentioned the bull.
At home, Lydia put the next chess date on the calendar. She arranged the ride first and the Saturday chores second. Sadie said thank you without looking away from the board, and Lydia left the room before she could turn that small courtesy into a request for forgiveness.
By February, Knight could walk the length of the lot without favoring his foot. His coat had thickened; flesh was beginning to soften the sharp places along his back. He still had bad days, and Lydia kept Ruth’s number on the first screen of her phone.
During a scheduled examination, Ruth removed the damaged yellow tag that had been rubbing behind his torn ear. The numbers were worn, but once she washed it beneath the barn tap, Lydia could read HC 632.
“Hawthorn Creek,” Ruth said. “I wondered when I first saw the color. Calvin Ross might know.”
She had worked with Calvin before Hawthorn Creek dispersed its herd. He was retired now, living forty miles away with the records nobody had wanted when the cattle left. Ruth sent him a photograph with Lydia’s permission, and he asked for one of the whole bull, including the ear.
The following Sunday, he came with two old notebooks in a grocery sack. Lydia offered coffee, but he asked to see Knight before coming inside. Sadie met him at the lot and showed him where they could stand without crowding the bull.
Calvin studied the torn ear and the worn tag in Lydia’s palm. “He caught that on a feeder. We changed the feeders after.”
“You remember him?” Sadie asked.
“I remember having to change twelve feeders.”
He watched Knight turn toward the hay, then asked Lydia how long she had owned him. When she told him, he took off his cap and wiped the inside band with his thumb.
“He didn’t look like that when he left us.”
In the kitchen, Calvin opened a notebook to a page that had gone soft along the bottom edge. The entry for 632 included a birth weight, a dam number, and later measurements. Someone had written HOLD in red beside the line.
“Our owner wanted him kept back,” Calvin said. “Then she got sick. Her nephew sold the young bulls in a group, and after that I can’t help you.”
Lydia studied the figures. They described a calf that had started at a sensible size and grown well, from a cow that had stayed sound and productive for years. No number on the page explained the animal she had found trying to get off the concrete.
Calvin brought out a photograph of that cow, taken for a sale catalog. She had an ordinary black face and mud to her hocks. A small calf was reaching beneath her for the udder.
“That’s him?” Sadie asked.
“No. Her calf the year before. She had a good one nearly every year.”
Sadie set the photograph beside the notebook. “So somebody was looking after him once.”
Calvin rubbed a crease from the grocery sack. “We were.”
They stayed at the table a while without discussing what Knight might be worth. Lydia refilled the coffee, and Calvin told Sadie that Hawthorn Creek’s owner had numbered calves with a pencil tied to her coat because she could lose three pens between the house and the barn.
Before leaving, he explained what the notebooks could and couldn’t establish. Knight had never been registered as far as he knew. His tag and scar made the identification convincing to Calvin, but they weren’t a pedigree certificate.
He helped Ruth obtain permission for a laboratory to compare Knight’s DNA with an archived profile from the sire named in the book. The result supported that paternity. They had no sample from his recorded dam, and Lydia put no stronger claim in her records.
Ruth called with the result while Lydia was repairing a used feed bunk she’d bought cheaply enough to justify the welding. Lydia listened, put the phone down, and ran her hand over the rough weld.
“Does it change anything?” Sadie asked.
“It gives us a reason to find out more.”
“How much more?”
Lydia nearly answered before she understood the question. She took off her gloves and went inside for the checkbook.
The cows already bred when Knight arrived calved that spring. As Lydia worked through them, she considered which could safely be used to evaluate an unfamiliar bull that summer. Ruth examined Knight again well before turnout, checked his recovery and breeding soundness, and arranged the separate health testing she considered necessary.
He passed. Ruth closed her case, then made Lydia look at the date beside the result. “That’s what I can tell you today. You still watch him out there. If he’s limping or cows keep coming back into heat, call.”
Sadie made a spreadsheet from their herd records. Unfilled cells turned orange, a color she chose because it would show on their aging printer. She included a column for assisted births and another for calves that didn’t survive.
Lydia frowned at the last heading. Sadie kept typing.
“If we’re doing it, that has to be there.”
They planned to use Knight on sixteen experienced cows. Twelve others would go into Lydia’s usual breeding program, kept separate so they could be certain which bull had sired each calf. A poor result would cost more than the examination and the feed, and Lydia wrote that down where Sadie could see it.
Knight’s group still needed its sixteenth cow: yellow 26, the first heifer Lydia had bought with money earned from her own calves. Sadie had shown her at a county youth event before deciding that chess was more her kind of competition. In the spreadsheet, the row was labeled by tag number; on the handwritten barn sheet, she was Nell.
“You’re keeping her out,” Sadie said.
“I haven’t decided.”
“You picked all the others.”
Lydia looked through the kitchen window. Nell was standing in the near lot, rubbing her forehead on a post she’d nearly polished white.
She moved the cow’s number into Knight’s group. Sadie reached for the print button, then drew her hand back.
“Mom?” Lydia turned toward her. The girl was looking past the computer, through the window toward the calving shed. “If his calves aren’t any good, do we still keep him?”
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