Part 5
Clara began taking up the line. Daniel felt it against his waist and got his left elbow under him, then a knee. He moved when she drew him forward and stopped when he had to, until a hand caught the back of his coat at the doorway.
She got him inside the passage and shut the outer gate. For a while he could only sit against the boards, trying to make his fingers bend. Clara loosened the rope without asking whether the work was finished.
“There’s a pole across it,” he managed. “It ought to last till morning.”
She looked out through the narrow opening. “All right. We’ll look again in the morning.”
By the fourth day the wind had fallen enough for Daniel to see the next building. The thermometer had reached twenty-nine below during the worst of it. He followed Clara into the stalls, touching each animal as they counted. Every animal was alive. Mabel’s calf was nursing, though a small damaged patch on its ear would need watching.
Clara put the milk pail where he could lift it with his good hand. The doors had opened without digging, the line was running, and there was dry hay beneath the stack. He carried the milk to the house, past the wood still waiting beside the stove.
Before taking off his coat, he tried to write what had failed. His shoulder made the pencil awkward: a brace too light, two shallow posts, cloth stitching torn loose. The coupling cover needed a better roof. Clara found him studying that last entry.
“Have you counted anything you don’t need to do over?”
He looked at the milk she’d set beside Lucy’s cup. “Those cows,” he said, and put the pencil down. His gloves dried beside the stove while he warmed his sore hand around the coffee she brought him.
When the roads opened, Reed arrived with Foster and several neighbors, and Daniel took the notebook outside again. They followed the route from the screen to the stalls. At the marked post, Ben lifted the torn cloth for Reed to examine, moving carefully where the snow had crusted.
“I saw that when I couldn’t see the house,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”
Reed held the cloth against the broken stitching Daniel had noted. In the barn, while Foster examined Mabel and the calf, Clara opened her ledger to the storm entries. Dry bedding, sheltered cattle, unspoiled feed, reachable water: Reed had them show him each part of the work before he compared what remained with what they had started with. He asked to see the broken lashing, too.
The corrected marks stayed in Daniel’s notebook. They were the ones he would show men from neighboring ranches through the rest of winter, including Hollis’s crew, when they came to lay out screens of their own. Nobody who asked for measurements would get them without the places Daniel had crossed out.
Hollis arrived while the others were still walking the fence. Part of his north barn roof was gone, and he had lost cattle. Daniel watched him examine the screen, waiting for a familiar remark.
“How did you pick the distance?”
Daniel showed him the drift edge. They walked along it, and he explained how the first squall had made them thin the willow and change its lay. Hollis listened without apologizing; Daniel didn’t ask him to, and Clara signed away no water rights. When they reached the gate, Hollis stopped to look back at the posts before mounting. A bundle of straight willow stakes would appear beside that fence the following spring, Hollis’s only acknowledgment beyond the questions he asked that day.
After the visitors left, Clara took Daniel into the little room where Thomas had kept the ranch papers. She put an agreement on the desk and turned it so he could read. The first lines gave him a share of the profits and responsibility for the water systems, structural repairs, and winter preparation; farther down, Sam and Lucy were to have a home at Willow Creek regardless of whether the adults continued their partnership or chose any closer life together.
“You’d keep them here even if you and I couldn’t work together?”
“They shouldn’t have to pack every time grown people have a difficulty.” She left the paper facing him. “The work needs your name on it, too.”
He looked at the space for his signature. On the road he had learned to keep their belongings bundled, even beside a borrowed bed.
It took him longer to put the pen down than it had to sign.
They sat by the stove that night after the children were asleep. Daniel heard Lucy shifting behind Anna’s curtain. Clara had left the lamp low so it wouldn’t reach the cradle; the signed agreement was in the desk.
“I don’t know how to pay you back for all this,” he said.
Clara turned the cup in her hands. “I wasn’t asking you to stay as payment.”
He waited until she looked at him. “I could stay past the snow.”
“That still sounds like a man deciding when to pack.”
He set his cup beside hers. “I’m trying to tell you I don’t want to.”
In early May, Daniel and Clara married at the kitchen table, with Reed and Foster as witnesses. They had hardly finished signing before they were back in the barn helping with a calving, their witnesses left at the table with the coffee.
Daniel was using one of those stakes to mend the pen while Sam cut a mark in the barn post for the height of the snow. Lucy stood between Daniel’s boots, holding his finger. From the kitchen came the sound of Clara setting down the ledger and finding their cups.
Sam still called her Clara. He had asked, a few days after the wedding, whether he had to change that, and she had kept her finger beneath his column of figures while telling him he could use the name he knew. Daniel had been glad she asked for nothing else.
Once the boy had tripped near these posts and called, “Ma—Clara!” She had checked his palms and knees, then gone on talking about his work. Now he held the knife carefully against the timber, deepening his mark. Daniel steadied the post with his free hand.
Clara came across the yard with their coffee. Lucy let go of Daniel’s finger and called to her.
“Ma.”
Clara put the cups on the step and knelt. Lucy took two steps, steadied herself, and made the last little distance without being lifted. Daniel watched Clara’s hands close around her only when she arrived.
Clara settled on the step with Lucy and reached for the cups. Beyond the open barn doors, Mabel lowered her head into the grass; a loose end of willow clicked against the screen. Daniel glanced toward the sound, and Clara passed him his coffee.
“I know,” she said. “It still needs work.”
He sat down beside her to drink it while it was hot.