Part 2
“How little?” Nell said. “Wes, I need the real number.”
He looked at the can and his face started to fold. “Some. Then he kept going. I thought if he was eating, that meant he was okay.” He stopped. “All of it. Maybe all of it.”
She was already dialing. Annie picked up on the second ring, sounding like she hadn’t been asleep either, and listened without interrupting. Then she said they couldn’t take it back out, not in any way that helped. They could get ahead of what it would do. She’d be there in twenty minutes, and Nell should get water heated and keep the boy calm, because the calf would read him.
Annie came in with her hair still flattened on one side. She drew blood by lantern light, ran it on the little machine in her truck, and came back with her mouth set. Nothing had crashed yet. It would. She clipped the hair on the calf’s neck and put in a catheter while Nell knelt on his shoulder, and he was too weak to fight it. She hung a bag of fluids from a baling-twine loop on the rafter, laced with the minerals his blood would try to dump, and showed Nell how to watch the drip.
“He’ll look better tomorrow,” Annie said. “That’s the trap. Day two and three are when they go.”
Nell called the postmaster at five and asked for a substitute carrier. Darlene Kopp said she’d find somebody, in the voice that meant this would be discussed at the counter all week. Whatever the sub cost would come out of Nell’s pay one way or another. Three days would eat most of a payment on the wagon.
On the second day the calf stood up by himself for the first time, braced against the pen, and drank warm water out of a pan Wes held. He looked better. Annie’s numbers came back worse. She changed the bag and came back at noon and again at eight. That night his breathing went shallow and fast, and Nell sat on an upturned bucket with her palm flat on his ribs, counting, while Wes slept sitting up against the feed room door because he refused to go inside.
Hollis came out at three in the morning on his walker. Nell didn’t scold him. He lowered himself onto a hay bale and stayed until it was light, and the three of them kept watch over the calf without talking about it.
On the third day the blood work turned. On the fourth, the calf ate his paperback flake of hay and looked around for more. Annie pulled the catheter and sat on the tailgate with her eyes closed for a full minute before she drove away.
Wes waited until she was gone to ask Nell what he could do.
“You already know what you did,” she said. She wasn’t trying to be hard on him. He needed it said plainly, so it would be finished. “You thought you were being kind. That’s how this kind of thing almost always happens. Now you know.”
He nodded. “Can I keep the chart?”
So the chart became his. He moved Annie’s instructions off the barn post and onto a clipboard, and he added columns: time, hay offered, hay left, water, whether the calf was standing when he came in. When Annie mentioned you could estimate weight with a soft tape around the heart girth, Wes asked for one for his birthday, which was in March, and then asked if he could have it now. He took the measurements every Sunday after that and photographed the calf from the same spot by the gatepost, so the pictures lined up. The school had given him a refurbished laptop the year before, and the numbers went into a spreadsheet with a graph he was not allowed to show anyone until it was “real.”
He also named the calf. Nell had pinned the bill of sale to the kitchen corkboard, and Wes stood reading it one night with a bowl of cereal.
“Two-Forty,” he said. “That’s what he cost. That’s his name.”
Nell made one rule and repeated it until Wes could say it back in his sleep. They fed from outside the pipe. They doctored him when they had to and talked to him whenever they liked. But nobody rubbed his poll, nobody stood where he could pin them against a panel, and nobody ever let him find out that a person would give ground if he shoved.
“Anything he gets to do to us once,” she told Wes, “he’ll try to do every day for twenty years. And in twenty years he’ll weigh as much as the wagon.”
Hollis had his own rule, which he demonstrated rather than said. Whenever he came out to the pen, he stood where the calf could see him coming and never once reached over the top rail. Wes noticed and started doing the same.
The calf went off feed twice in January, and both times Nell sat up at the kitchen table at midnight with the hay bill and Hollis’s prescription list. The gooseneck trailer went first. In February, after the hay dealer in Strong City raised his price twice in a month, Hollis pushed the title to his old three-quarter-ton across the table toward her and tapped it until she understood. That truck had been to every sale barn between Dodge City and Joplin. She sold it to a kid from Cottonwood Falls who promised to keep the toolbox.
At the post office, the calf picked up a second name.
“Signed for anything good lately?” Darlene said one February morning, sliding the Route 2 tray across the back counter. Two men from the elevator were drinking coffee by the wall of boxes, and she made sure they could hear. “Or just that dead letter of yours?”
The men laughed. One of them said it again to the other, trying it out, the way you’d test a new pair of boots.
Nell squared the tray against her hip. “He’s eating,” she said.
By Valentine’s Day the name had gone through the elevator and the Methodist potluck, and men she’d known since grade school asked her in parking lots how the dead letter was doing. She gave all of them the same answer.
It was the truth. Wes’s line on the laptop climbed a little every Sunday and never once went sideways. Annie, who stopped by every couple of weeks and had stopped charging for it, studied the graph on the tailgate one afternoon and said that usually, with starved calves, she saw a sugar high and then a long flat plateau. This one wasn’t doing that. This one was climbing like he had an appointment.
By late March, though, the hay was nearly gone, and there were still five weeks until the grass came.
Nell spread the numbers out on the kitchen table one Sunday night. Nine cows heavy with calves and a growing bison calf, against what was left in the stack and what was left in the account. Whichever way she ran it, she came up a month short. She could sell three of the cows, which meant selling next year’s calves inside them, which meant she’d be shorter next year too.
Hollis watched her from his chair. After a while he got up, which took a full minute, and went to the drawer by the phone where the county papers lived. He came back with a form and laid it on top of her figures.
It was a burn permit application. He had already filled in the parcel number in his ruined, careful handwriting, the letters climbing uphill.
“Dad, we haven’t burned that ground since Mom,” Nell said. “There’s nobody to run a line. If it gets away from us, it takes the Pruitt barn with it.”
Hollis pushed the form an inch closer. “Burn,” he said…
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇