Part 6
“You mean Tucker,” Nell said. “He already knows. So do I.”
Carter stayed bent at her window a moment longer. Behind him, through the open barn door, somebody had finally switched off the projector, and the screen above the block had gone a plain dull white. Carter straightened and took his hand off her door, and she watched him decide the rest of it wasn’t worth saying in front of the boy. He walked back toward the barn without looking at her again.
Ida called on Tuesday and read her offer off a sheet of paper so she wouldn’t have to say it twice. She wanted to lease Two-Forty for two breeding seasons, her cows coming to him, and she wanted Nell up in the Sandhills three times a year to walk her pastures and tell her what to burn. Nell said yes before Ida got to the end, then said Annie would have to look at it first.
The first week of December, a flatbed from a hay outfit in Cottonwood Falls came down Nell’s road with Tucker Moody behind the wheel.
He’d been let go the Monday after the sale, just as he’d said. He backed the load up to the stack lot without being told where, got out, and stood a while at the pen looking at the Kessler cows. There were four of them now, the three old girls and Ida’s, rough-coated and unbothered, grazing with Two-Forty along the creek.
“Ida Harlan hired my boss to haul you hay through March,” Tucker said. “Said to tell you it comes off the lease. Said she’ll be down in July with her own cows, and you’d better have the burn plan wrote up neat because she’s bringing her son-in-law, and he doesn’t believe in fire.”
Nell laughed for the first time in a while. “How’s the new job?”
“I sleep.” He pulled his gloves off and slapped them against his leg. “Carter took the picture down off the website a week after the sale. Didn’t say a word to anybody. And I heard he called Ida last week, asking what she’d want for a straw of semen off your bull.”
“What’d she tell him?”
“Told him to call the owner.”
Nell asked if he’d run the sprayer for her in April, when they burned the south forty. Tucker said he would, if she made the coffee herself instead of Lyle, and they unloaded the hay together without saying much else.
The lease money was enough to put the transmission back in the wagon and catch up the taxes. It also meant the woman from Emporia could come three mornings a week, so Nell didn’t have to lift her father off the bathroom floor by herself. That turned out to matter more than she had let herself think, because Hollis was weaker that winter. Annie saw it too, and she started staying for coffee when she came by. Some days he didn’t get out of his chair. Some days he didn’t seem to know which month it was. But he still knew the bull, and every morning he asked for the window shade up so he could see the pasture.
On the last Sunday of December, the sky came up clear and cold after a dusting of snow. Hollis made it clear at breakfast that he wanted to go out. Not to the porch. Out.
It took Nell and Wes twenty minutes to get him into the wagon, coat and blanket and stocking cap. Nell drove across the pasture at a walking pace, through the gate and across the pale winter grass of the south forty, where they would burn in April, down to where the Kessler cows were grazing with Two-Forty along the creek.
His hump stood level with the wagon’s side mirror now. The frost had settled on his shoulders and his beard and steamed off in the sun. He raised his head and watched them come, unhurried, the way the old cows did, and then went back to grazing.
Nell stopped the wagon and rolled down the passenger window.
Hollis worked his good arm free of the blanket and put his hand out the window, palm down, flat, the way he’d held it out to a thousand cattle in a thousand pens so they could smell him before they decided anything about him. The oldest Kessler cow, the one with the broken horn, lifted her head. She stood looking at the hand for a long time. Then she walked over through the snow, stretched out her neck, and breathed on it.
Hollis left his hand there until she had finished. Then he drew it back into the wagon and looked at Nell, and the working side of his face did something that was almost a smile.
“Keep,” he said.
Wes, in the back seat, wrote the date on his clipboard, and under it, without being told, the single word.