Part 3
“I got up too fast,” Caleb said, though the hay at his feet made a poor witness. Abby took out her phone. He told her there was no reason to bother Nora, then heard his wife’s voice before he had finished.
In Billings, the tests showed how much his heart had changed. The coronary disease had advanced, a section of muscle was damaged, and the rhythm could falter or slow when it needed to hold steady. Different medicine helped. A procedure improved things further, but at sixty-three Caleb could no longer assume his body would finish whatever he started.
The cardiologist prohibited solitary work, climbing into lofts, fighting heavy gates, and quietly waiting out chest pressure. Caleb nodded through the list. On the way home, he watched patches of snow pass in the coulees and tried to imagine a useful day with all those things removed.
Nora waited until they were twenty miles from the hospital.
“When you feel something, tell me.”
“You think I enjoy this?”
“I think you want to get through it without anyone noticing.” She kept her eyes on the road. “Abby shouldn’t have to come across you like that. Neither should I.”
The ranch began operating around decisions he hadn’t made. Abby changed the order of the morning feed runs. He changed it back, and she brought the monthly fuel figures to the kitchen table. He studied them while she stood beside his chair. The next morning, she used her order.
Owen replaced the troublesome latches with ones Caleb could open using one hand. Caleb complained that they belonged on cabinets built to keep toddlers out, then told Owen to buy six more. Rafael started carrying the emergency radio. Nora set the pills beside the coffee and went about her own morning, leaving Caleb to take them without an audience.
Flint objected to the changes more openly. When Abby moved the herd to the west pasture, he stayed at the gate and looked toward the house. Caleb could get him moving simply by coming outside, though the horse now matched a pace that gave Caleb nothing to complain about.
On mornings Caleb stayed in, Rafael brought his jacket for Flint to smell. After a long investigation of the sleeve, the horse would usually follow him.
“You’ve made him worse,” Nora told Rafael when she saw it work.
“Which one?” Caleb asked from the doorway.
She took the jacket back without answering him.
He began spending more time on the porch. After breakfast, Flint grazed the narrow stretch outside the near pasture while Caleb held his coffee against the cold. Toward evening the horse arrived without the whistle and waited for a scratch under the mane. Sometimes he lowered himself onto the ground several feet from the steps, folding all that weight with a care Caleb had begun to recognize.
Caleb knew the pale lashes around the poor eye, the warmer hollow beneath the jaw, the difference between a hoof resting and a leg favoring pain. Flint knew the complaining porch board and the old left boot, which had been resoled twice without losing its creak. Their days had acquired fewer places to go and more time in each of them.
Nora brought beans to shell, or mending. They discussed hay prices and frost dates, Owen’s new baby, and whether Abby truly required three backup copies of the accounts. When Nora read, she sometimes held the same page longer than it could take to finish. Caleb knew she was listening to him breathe.
In September, he followed her gaze toward the south ridge. His parents’ granite stones stood in the family plot, recorded with the county before he inherited the ranch. Beside them there was room for him. Under canvas in the machine shed lay Owen’s work from the previous winter: a casket assembled from the ranch’s pine boards.
Elaine Porter, the funeral director in Alder Creek, held the signed instructions. Caleb wanted no embalming. His family would wash and dress him, there would be a service on the ridge, and burial would wait for county authorization. Having written it down had made him feel considerate. Seeing Nora study the place made him wish he could take her attention somewhere else.
“I’ve still got things to do,” he said.
“I wasn’t disputing that.” She went back to the beans.
“Just keep Abby from issuing everybody an agenda.”
Nora smiled briefly. “She’ll want the spelling on the stone approved in writing.”
He laughed and felt pressure under his breastbone. His fingers went to it before he could hide the movement.
Nora put down the bowl. “Caleb.”
He took the small bottle from his pocket and put a tablet under his tongue where she could see. She watched until his hand came away, then stayed beside him while the discomfort passed. Flint rose and brought his face to the rail. Caleb laid his palm against the cheek and felt the horse lean into it.
Gray was appearing around the muzzle now. The white mark had become thinner, and seventeen years had passed since that small head had searched for Caleb’s boot in Roy Voss’s straw. At sixty-five, Caleb was still reaching through a fence to the animal he once expected to lose before morning.
Late October brought two dizzy spells in a week. On Thursday the clinic fitted a fourteen-day adhesive rhythm monitor high on his left chest. It recorded into its own memory. Nora examined the patch after they got home, pleased that something would keep a record Caleb couldn’t edit by saying he felt fine.
“Very trusting household,” he said, buttoning his shirt.
On Friday night, she asked him to leave the final row of potatoes for Owen, who was coming Saturday. Caleb agreed. Before dawn he woke, saw the clear sky, and began making the distinctions that had always got him into trouble: a few plants weren’t a day’s work; a crate wasn’t a feed sack; the garden was hardly away from the house.
His boot creaked through the mudroom. At the near-pasture fence, Flint lifted his head and gave a low nicker.
“Nothing for you,” Caleb whispered. “Go on.”
He took the digging fork and a shallow crate to the garden. Below the frozen crust, the soil loosened easily. He rested after each plant and had half the crate filled when the pressure returned, broad and tightening across his chest.
The fork slipped from his hand. He tried to reach the pill bottle in his coat, but his fingers would not gather around it. There was too little air to call Nora’s name.
Beyond the yard, Flint hit the fence once with a front hoof. Wire rang as Caleb went down beside the crate. Potatoes rolled across the disturbed earth, and one came to rest against his wrist as the frost filled his sight.
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