Part 4
“She’s sound now,” Beth said. “You said last winter was harder on her. Nell’s bottom field is flatter.”
Cora drew the list back. Midge was eleven, still nursing a good calf, still the first through a familiar gate. Cora knew exactly why the cow belonged on the list. She also knew the three other pairs she could sell without stripping the younger breeding herd she had been trying to build.
“I’ll ask about boarding.”
Beth put her pencil down. She didn’t cross anything else out, and she didn’t offer to stay while Cora called. She rinsed their mugs, laid the dish towel over the sink, and left for a house where her bed stood beside the dining table.
Cora called Nell before she could decide that eight o’clock was too late. Nell was at her own barn, and asked her to speak up over the noise of a feed cart. Cora explained the well, then offered to supply hay if Nell could keep four pairs until the weather broke.
“How much hay have you got?” Nell asked.
Cora gave her the amount. Saying it aloud to somebody who fed cattle made the shortage harder to disguise.
“I can’t do an open-ended arrangement,” Nell said. “I’ve been holding room for four I can buy. I need to know what’s mine to manage when winter comes.”
“Just until we get rain.”
“Cora.” Nell stopped the cart. “I’m not taking your cows on a forecast.”
Cora let her hand drop from the map. Beyond the kitchen window, she could see the pale rectangle of the storage tank. They had put it there years ago, when their mother’s knees stopped letting her walk down to the old trough with a hose.
“It would be Midge,” she said.
Nell was quiet for a moment. She had helped Cora check Midge after a difficult spring calving three years earlier, and she knew the cow’s age. She asked about her condition now, her feet, the calf, and what the veterinarian had said about the harder breathing that afternoon.
“It eased,” Cora said. “She’s eating. I’ll check her again before we move anything.”
“All right. I can come look in the morning. I won’t load an animal that shouldn’t travel.”
“Would I still be able to—” Cora stopped.
“Come see her? Of course. But if you sell her, I make the decisions here. You know that.”
On a scrap of paper Cora had written Midge—Nell until fall. She crossed out until fall and asked whether Nell wanted the calving records before she came.
Nell named a fair price for four suitable pairs, subject to seeing them. It would cover Beth’s thirty-two hundred and leave money for the next hay and water bills. It would also mean fewer calves to sell the following year, and Cora would have to plan for that before she spent anything else.
“Come look,” Cora said.
After the call, she went outside with a flashlight and the list. She checked the stored water, then walked along the fence to where Midge stood beneath an open gap in the canopy. There was a little air moving there; the leaves above the cow shifted, although the grass at Cora’s boots barely stirred.
Midge lifted her head and pushed her wet nose toward Cora’s empty hand. Cora scratched the rough place under her jaw, keeping her own feet outside the fence. The cow stretched her neck and closed one eye.
Their mother had bought Midge as a young heifer the year Beth’s store cut everybody’s hours. Beth had spent that summer here most afternoons, asking Cora for jobs and refusing cash until their mother started paying her for fencing. They had named the heifer after a customer Beth liked, a tiny woman who bought one onion at a time and counted her change twice.
Cora had remembered the name. She had forgotten how carefully their mother found work Beth could accept.
The calf bumped Midge’s side, impatient for her to stand differently. Midge shifted a hind foot and returned to him. Cora took her hand away and checked the other cows, watching until she was satisfied that Midge’s breathing remained easier.
In the shed she found the spare gate key underneath a box of electrical connectors. Beth’s old key had stopped working when Cora changed the padlock after a theft down the road. Cora had meant to give her this one, then got used to being called whenever Beth needed to get in.
She cleaned the key on her jeans and put it beside the cattle list. She laid out the health records Nell would need and wrote the cows’ numbers clearly enough that somebody else could read them. When she reached Midge, she added the calving note without softening it.
Beth answered her text before Cora finished washing her hands. She could be there at six, she wrote, but she had work at ten and couldn’t stay past nine. Cora typed that she would manage, erased it, and sent the time Nell had agreed to come.
She slept badly, listening for the pump even when it wasn’t running. Twice she got up and checked the water levels. The second time, she left her phone on the kitchen counter so she wouldn’t call Nell to suggest a different four.
Near dawn she sat on the porch steps to pull on her boots. The pasture beyond the lane was still mostly dark, its trees showing as uneven shapes against a lightening sky. She could keep those trees and still lose something she had expected to see beneath them every morning.
Beth’s headlights came up the drive. Cora stood, took the cleaned key from her pocket, and held it out before her sister could ask her to open the gate.
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