Part 5
Nora wrote the number in the dust on the hood of her truck with one finger, the way her father used to figure hay, and made herself look at it.
It was the bank note in October with money left over. She knew exactly how much over, because she had done this same math on smaller numbers at the kitchen table every night since Christmas.
She didn’t say anything, and Preston filled the quiet the way salesmen do.
“Buyers are calling me about him,” he said, still watching the bull. “Men I’ve sold to for twelve years, asking what else I’ve been giving away out my back gate. I’d rather tell them he’s home.” Then the smooth voice came back. “It’s a fair offer, Nora.”
He reached his hand over the rail to shake on it before she had answered. She didn’t take it, and he left it there a second too long.
“No,” she said.
“Fourteen.” He said it like he was correcting a typo.
“No.”
“Nineteen thousand.”
This time he looked at her instead of the bull. Nora understood that he had driven out here with a ceiling in his head and had just gone through it.
She told him to wait. She walked to her truck, took the manila envelope out from behind the seat, and handed him the bill of sale.
“You priced him already,” she said. “Wade was standing right there, and so was Sam, and so was the girl in the scale house. You wrote two dollars and signed your name.” She held out her hand for the paper. “You’ve still got my father’s money, Preston.”
“It’s in my desk,” he said.
She hadn’t expected an answer, and from his face, neither had he. He read the paper the way men read a vet bill they can’t argue with. Then he handed it back without a word about the number on it, because anything he said about that number would be repeated at the co-op counter by Saturday.
“The offer stands through the fall,” he said.
In the side mirror of his truck she saw him sit with the engine running for a full minute before he backed out.
That night Nora sat at the kitchen table with the bank statement, the hay invoice, and the bill from the welding shop. She wrote 19,000 on the back of the hay invoice, looked at it, and turned the paper face down. She had given the right answer. It sat on her chest all night anyway.
Around midnight Tess came down for a glass of water, looked at the table, and looked at her mother.
“You said no, didn’t you.”
“I said no.”
Tess drank her water standing up. Then she turned off the overhead light and turned on the little lamp over the stove, the way Nora did when Tess couldn’t sleep, and went back upstairs without another word. Nora sat in the lamplight for an hour and found she could think again.
Six days later, at a quarter to seven in the morning, a dusty flatbed with Kansas plates stopped at her gate. The woman who climbed out was Marisol Tanner, fifty-two, short and sunburned. She had spent twenty years evaluating breeding bulls for bison outfits from Saskatchewan down to the Flint Hills. She had driven five hundred and twenty miles because Lyle Haugen’s brother-in-law had told the story over coffee in Dodge City. She didn’t apologize for the hour. She asked where she could park so she wouldn’t be in the way of the feed truck.
She didn’t walk the fence. She sat on her own tailgate with a thermos and watched Deuce for twenty minutes without speaking. Once she asked Nora to move him across the pen, and Nora shook a bucket at the far gate. Marisol watched him walk and nodded when his hind feet landed square in the prints of his front ones.
“How old?”
“Fourteen and a half months. Born May fourth. It’s on Ashby’s own ticket.”
Marisol asked for the birth month again and wrote it on the back of her hand in ballpoint. “I measure bulls in summers,” she said. “He’s had one. He walks like he’s had two. Can you prove what you just told me?”
“The bill of sale, with the date. Sam’s pictures from the first night. Ashby’s own scale ticket, with his birth date on it. And every measurement since day one.”
“Third Saturday of September,” Marisol said. “Kettle Butte Grazing Days. The extension office runs a certified scale out there every year. Put him on it, and all this stops being a story people tell.”
“No,” Nora said.
Marisol didn’t argue. She wrote her phone number on an empty feed sack in the back of Nora’s truck and drove back to Kansas.
By the middle of August, Nora had stopped counting the pickups. They came from Nebraska and Montana and the Dakotas, stock trailers still hitched behind them, with their engines ticking in the heat while the drivers leaned on the pipe. A woman from the Missouri breaks in North Dakota brought her own cloth tape, asked permission before she used it, and wrote each number in a pocket notebook. Tess lettered a feed sack and wired it to the gate: DO NOT FEED HIM. HE IS ON A PLAN.
One Sunday a man in a pressed shirt climbed onto the bottom rail to get a picture. Tess came across the yard at a dead run with the grass yardstick in her hand and told him, in her mother’s exact voice, to get down off that pipe before he ended up in a hospital in Rapid City. He got down. Nora, moving polywire in the paddock behind the barn, heard every word and didn’t turn around.
Curt’s cousin Gary stood at the rail one evening for twenty minutes and said three words, all of them about rain.
Curt Rasmussen came himself on a Thursday. He stood at the pipe with his hands in his back pockets, saying nothing, until Tess walked past with a bucket of water and stopped.
“Are you the pocket buffalo man?” she asked.
Curt went red to the ears and said that he was. Tess considered him for a moment, told him Deuce didn’t like people leaning on the gate, and went on with her bucket. Three weeks later Curt showed up with a load of good grass hay and charged Nora exactly what it had cost him. Neither of them ever said what it was for.
At the end of August, Bev called at suppertime.
“Preston’s telling buyers your bull came out of his program,” she said. “Three of them in my store this week used the same words. ‘Ashby premium program.’ Like it was printed on a card. He doesn’t say you’re lying. He says you got lucky with his cow.” The line was quiet. “And Nora? His October sale catalog has a page on ‘the Ekberg-cross bull we raised.’ The printer in Spearfish showed my nephew the proof…”
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