Part 4
Deuce lifted his head from the tank and looked at her, water running off his beard, and Nora set the bucket down in the mud because she didn’t trust her hands with it.
The hump had come. It rose over his shoulders in a hard, real line of muscle. His chest had dropped and spread so that his front legs no longer looked borrowed from some other animal. His winter coat lay thick and dark, nearly black along the cape, with the faint grease shine across the ribs that a healthy bison carried and a sick one never had.
Sam came out that Friday with a cloth tape. He put it around Deuce’s heart girth through the pipe rails, read it, and then made Nora hold her end and read it herself, as if he wanted a witness.
“Compensatory gain,” he said. “Starve a young one in the wrong window, then give him what he needs, and if you’re lucky his body runs flat out until it catches up to where his bones meant him to be. Most never get the chance.” He nodded at the feed book on the tailgate. “You fed him to grow, not to fatten. If he holds this through the summer, there’s a lot of people in this county who’ll find something interesting to look at on their boots.”
In the middle of May, Lyle Haugen came by with a gooseneck full of yearling steers. He braked so hard at her fence that his trailer swung on the gravel. Lyle ran stockers on the place north of hers and had played pinochle with her father every Thursday for twenty years. He got out and stood at the fence and stared past her at the pen for long enough that Nora finally walked down.
“Your dad would’ve hated that I’m the one who has to say this,” he said.
“Say what?”
“I bet Curt twenty dollars in November that calf’d be dead by Christmas.” He dug in his shirt pocket, came out with a twenty, and passed it to her through the wire. “Figure it’s more yours than his.”
Nora took it. She didn’t know what else to do with it.
“Preston told the stockgrowers last week you’re pouring feed into that animal,” Lyle said. “Said anything looks good in a picture if you pour enough into it. I stood up and said there aren’t any pictures. That’s when I figured I’d better come look.” He squinted at Deuce. “What in the world are you putting in him?”
Nora didn’t answer. She turned and pointed past the pen, to the paddock beyond it, where the polywire ran in straight lines across new grass.
Lyle looked at the grass for a while, like a man reading a menu in a language he didn’t speak, and then he drove off with his steers.
By June, the men who’d laughed in November were asking Bev what Nora charged and cornering Sam at the post office to ask whether she was slipping something into the feed. Sam settled that without meaning to. In late June he scored Deuce’s body condition for his own records, pressing along the ribs, the spine, and the tailhead, where a pushed animal carries its extra. He gave him a five out of nine, dead center. Everything that had come onto Deuce since October was frame, muscle, and lung.
In the second week of July, the transmission on Nora’s truck went out at the end of her lane. Bev drove the mineral order out herself in the co-op flatbed. She had a slow afternoon, she said, and she’d been listening to talk about this animal for eight months and wanted to see it before he got famous.
“Something else,” Bev said, while Nora unloaded the tubs. “Wade Kittredge bought two bags of your mineral in June. Same kind, special order. Wouldn’t say what for.” Then she walked down to the pen.
She stood at the rail a long time. Then she moved along it until she could see the ear tag clearly, leaned in, and took her glasses off as if they’d lied to her.
“Ashby kept the Ekberg letters,” she said.
Nora didn’t understand, so Bev told her. Seven years ago this coming November, when old Walt Ekberg died and his heirs dispersed the herd off the Moreau River breaks, Bev had clerked the sale at Pinecrest. Preston had bought sixty bred cows that day, lots fourteen through thirty-one, at an average she could still quote to the dollar. Ashby’s people had kept the Ekberg letters as a prefix on every calf out of those cows, and Deuce’s tag had them.
“Walt’s cows weaned light and finished late,” Bev said. “Thirty months to slaughter weight, when everybody else’s did it in twenty-two. But you could turn them out on the breaks in a January blizzard and count the same number in March.”
She put her glasses back on. “Preston sells bulls by the pound and the month. Walt’s cattle never did either one. He’s been sending them down the road a lot at a time for five years.”
Nora sat on the tailgate of the flatbed. She was thinking about a hot day in July a year ago.
She had worked one day on the Ashby place sorting old cows for the packing plant. One cow had stayed with her: an old Ekberg cow with one horn broken off short, who kept turning back on the flags toward the far draw and bawling for something there. Nora had asked Wade about it. Wade had said the cow had a calf hidden somewhere in the draw, two months old maybe, and it would make it on grass.
Then Nora had pushed the cow up the chute and onto the truck, because that was the job, and had been paid at the end of the day.
She told Bev. She hadn’t meant to.
Bev picked a burr off her sleeve and dropped it over the rail. “You didn’t sell her,” she said. “You worked the gate.”
“I know who worked the gate.”
While Bev was strapping down the empty pallets, Nora went into the house and took the bill of sale and the scale ticket out of the kitchen drawer: one bison bull calf, the tag with the Ekberg letters, two dollars consideration, Preston Ashby’s signature with its flourish. She slid them into a manila envelope behind the seat of her truck. She told herself it was so the papers wouldn’t get wet in the kitchen, and didn’t believe it. Bev watched her from the flatbed and nodded once, as if Nora had answered a question.
On the third Wednesday of July, a little before noon, Preston’s silver pickup came up her lane and stopped at the cattle guard. He was alone, and he wasn’t wearing a hat. Nora had never seen Preston Ashby outdoors without one. His hair lay flat where the band usually sat.
He went to the pen and stood with his hands in his coat pockets. Deuce came to the far rail, swung his head once, and went back to the windbreak, as if he’d checked and wasn’t interested.
“Nine thousand five hundred,” Preston said. “Cash. My trailer here Friday morning…”
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