Part 3
“Everybody,” Nora said. “Wade’s scale. Preston. The whole co-op.”
“They read the scale, not the calf.” Sam pointed with his chin. “Runts are built small. That’s not a runt. Look at his cannon bones and then look at his ribs. One of those two things is lying to you, and it isn’t the bones.” He spat a hull. “One’s built small. The other’s got the house framed. He’s just missing everything that goes inside it.”
He had Tess hold the book open while he took a picture of the page with his phone. “First time I’ve seen this outside a textbook,” he said. “I could still be wrong. Keep measuring the hips.”
Winter came down in January the way it does in western South Dakota, with the wind doing most of the damage. A drought in Nebraska had sent hay buyers north since August, and by the middle of the month the hay man was quoting Nora a price he apologized for.
The man who came for her father’s roping saddle drove a new pickup with Wyoming plates and collected old saddles the way other men collected guns. He turned it over on the tailgate, thumbed the worn place on the cantle where Arlo had carved his initials at nineteen, and offered her a number low enough that she knew he’d sell it on for twice that. Nora said yes before she could hear herself say anything else. She stood in the yard holding the check until his taillights were gone, and the check went to the hay man before it cleared.
Tess wore through the left toe of her winter boots before New Year’s. They fixed it together at the kitchen table with duct tape, Tess insisting on silver over black because it matched the buckles.
One night in mid-January, Tess came to the table with a pint jar and set it down between them. It held sixty-one dollars in birthday money and bottle deposits, smoothed flat and rubber-banded by denomination.
“For his mineral,” Tess said.
“No.”
“He’s half mine. I named him.” Tess slid the jar an inch closer. “You said whoever does the work owns the thing.”
Nora had said that, about the garden. She took a twenty out of the jar, wrote Tess: $20 mineral on the inside cover of the feed book, and put the jar back in Tess’s hands. Tess read the entry, nodded once, and seemed satisfied.
In the middle of February, Ashby Bison Company held its annual bull sale in a heated sale barn with a catered lunch and an auctioneer flown in from Oklahoma. The Kettle Butte paper ran a photograph of Preston on the auction block with his arm around the top buyer. Nora didn’t read past the headline.
The next Saturday she walked into the co-op behind four men in good coats, still talking about the sale, and Preston Ashby was in the middle of them, buying nothing. He let her get a mineral tub up onto the counter before he turned around.
“Nora. I keep hearing my name next to that calf of yours. Is he still with us?”
“He’s mine. And yes.”
“Good for you.” He glanced at the tub, then at the two sacks of protein she had set beside it. “Just be careful. I’ve seen people go broke keeping something alive out of pride.”
Curt Rasmussen said “pocket buffalo” under his breath, just loud enough, and the man next to him coughed to cover a laugh. When Nora picked up the tub, Preston stepped ahead of her and held the door, smiling, and that was worse than anything he’d said. She carried the tub out to the truck herself and let him keep the last word, because it cost her less than taking it from him.
When she came back for the protein, the men were gone. Bev had the co-op’s account ledger open on the counter, a green clothbound book she kept by hand because, she said, computers forgot things on purpose.
“Preston figures you’re under by calving season,” Bev said.
“He might be right.”
“He might, if he’d read this.” Bev turned the ledger around. “Your last sack of range cake was October thirtieth. Since then, trace mineral, the kind with copper and zinc that actually does something. January ninth, you special-ordered native seed.”
She ran her finger down the column. “And every twenty-one days, near enough, a spool of polywire and a bundle of step-in posts.” She let her glasses drop on their chain. “I clerked cattle sales for twenty-eight years, Nora. I know a plan when I see one written in somebody’s bill. What are you growing out there?”
“Grass,” Nora said.
Bev waited. She had waited out auctioneers.
So Nora told her, with the sack of protein still on her shoulder, and it was the first time she’d said it out loud to anyone but Sam. In October, when she’d been too poor to buy hay for an extra mouth, she had started splitting her two big pastures into smaller paddocks with polywire. There were nine of them by Christmas and eleven by now.
She moved her eight cows and the bison calf every three or four days instead of turning everything out on eighty acres for the season. Each paddock rested afterward until the grass had grown its roots back down. She had overseeded the bare spots with big bluestem, sideoats grama, and western wheatgrass. All winter she’d been grazing the stockpiled growth she’d let stand in the fall.
On Sundays, she said, Tess measured the grass left standing in each paddock with a yardstick and wrote the heights in the back of the feed book in square, careful numbers.
“It costs me work instead of money,” Nora said. “Work I’ve got.”
Bev closed the ledger. “I’ve sold mineral to every outfit in this county,” she said. “You’re the first one buying it like the grass is the herd.”
“It is.”
Bev considered that. “I’m putting you on the co-op’s ninety-day terms,” she said. “Nobody’s asked for them since 2009, so nobody’ll notice.” Bev had her own margins and her own boss in Pierre, and they both knew it. But Nora drove home with the numbers a little less tight.
Spring came up Plum Creek the way it always did, one muddy degree at a time, and Deuce came up with it. His numbers rose every week, and Nora’s eyes never once caught him doing it. Then, on the last Tuesday in March, she walked out at a quarter past six with a bucket of mineral and saw a dark animal standing broadside at the water tank in the low pink light, an animal she didn’t know.
She had to walk all the way to the rail before she could read the tag…
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