Part 6
Maggie pulled onto the shoulder, asked him to say it again, and told him she’d call him back.
By Monday night there were four more offers on the back of a feed invoice: two seedstock outfits wanting breeding rights, a man wanting to lease Burdock for a season at a price she was embarrassed to write down, and the syndicate, which had called again and gone up. She sat at the kitchen table with the list, and Ruby sat across from her doing fractions, pretending not to read it upside down.
On Tuesday, Cole called with a different kind of offer. It took her a minute to understand what he was asking for.
He and four other operators didn’t want the bull. They wanted the notebooks: the paddock map, the rest intervals, the seed mix, the mineral analyses, and the recovery schedule, with the reasoning behind every change. They wanted her to walk their ground and tell them what she saw, and they would pay her by the day plus mileage. Two of them, Cole said, had been trying to fix thin ground for six years with a checkbook and had gotten nowhere.
“The bull got us down your road,” he said. “But I was out there at the end of the driest August we’ve had in years. There’s nothing within forty miles that looks like your side of the fence.”
When she hung up, Ruby had stopped pretending to do fractions.
“If we sell him,” Ruby said, “do we still do the grass?”
“We’d still do the grass.”
Ruby thought about it with her pencil in her mouth. “Then what are they buying?”
Maggie didn’t have an answer that satisfied either of them. She went out to the porch and stood there until the light went purple over the paddocks, looking at the polywire lines stitched across the pastures and the step-in posts Hazel had watched her buy one spool at a time.
Wednesday morning she called the syndicate back. The man went up again before she’d finished her first sentence, and she said no to that number too. Then she sat in the truck with the phone in her lap and let herself feel what she had just turned down: the note paid off, the winter covered, and a year of not doing arithmetic on a bucket in the dark. Then she called Cole and told him yes, six days a month and no more, because the ranch came first.
By December the money had changed only small things. There was a water tank where there used to be a hose, and a note that was still mostly owed and would be for years. Ruby had boots that fit, and the old pair went into the burn barrel in a ceremony of her own design. Burdock wintered in heavy pipe behind good gates, handled as little as possible and never as a pet. Next summer he would go out with a few cows under a contract Ray read twice before she signed it.
Graham still ran a good program and still spoke well at sales. But around Harlan Creek, men had started calling Burdock the Tolliver bull, and Hazel reported, without any particular expression, that Graham’s own hands said it too, most of the time where he couldn’t hear.
The last morning of that year brought two inches of dry snow and a sun not yet over the ridge. Maggie stood outside the pen with her coffee going cold in her glove, and Ruby stamped beside her in the new boots. Burdock came out of the shelterbelt with frost along his shoulders and his breath rolling off him in clouds. He was big enough now that Maggie couldn’t picture lifting him into a trailer on a tarp. Some mornings she had trouble believing it had been the same animal.
An unfamiliar pickup slowed at the gate. Two men climbed out, stiff from a long drive, and one called down the fence line.
“This the place with that bison?”
Maggie handed Ruby her cup. She walked down, opened the gate, and led them past the pen to the nearest paddock. There she knelt, pulled off a glove, and brushed the snow away from a clump of wheatgrass until they could see it, green at the crown and alive underneath, waiting on spring.
“He’s here,” she said. “Look at this first.”