Part 6
This time Nora drove all the way to the Ashby gate.
She sat in the truck under the iron arch with the engine running and the envelope on the seat beside her. A feed truck came down the ranch road toward the gate with Wade Kittredge at the wheel. He saw her. He lifted two fingers off the wheel the way men did on gravel roads, and his face didn’t change, and he didn’t stop.
She watched him in the mirror until the dust closed behind him. Then she turned around and drove home.
That evening she called Sam and Bev, and they came, and she sat them down at her kitchen table with the three feed books and read them out loud. She read day one and the scale ticket. She read the ninth day when Deuce wouldn’t eat, and the sixteenth day when he scoured, and every mineral change with Sam’s reasons beside it. She read every paddock move. Then she turned the books over and read Tess’s grass heights, Sunday after Sunday in square numbers, with the soil analyses stapled in.
On page four of the second book, Bev put her hand flat on the table.
“That’s enough,” Bev said. “I’d buy him off page four.”
Sam had been chewing sunflower seeds the whole time and hadn’t spat a single hull. “Preston can have the cow,” he said. “Let him try to have Tuesday, November ninth.” He tapped the page where Nora had written drank 3 gal, ate all, stood 40 min. “He can’t claim one line of this. He wrote that calf off in his own handwriting, and it’s in your envelope.”
When they had gone, Nora went upstairs. Tess was reading in bed.
“If I take the feed books to the fairgrounds,” Nora said, “your grass numbers go too. Strangers will read them. Some of them will copy them.”
Tess put her finger in her book to keep her place. “They’re good numbers,” she said. “I didn’t skip any Sundays.”
Nora went back downstairs, found the feed sack in the truck, and called the number Marisol had written on it.
“Tell the extension office we’re coming,” she said. “And tell them to bring a bigger table.”
The extension office set up the scale beside the sheep barn at the county fairgrounds, and by nine-thirty on the third Saturday in September, Nora couldn’t see the sheep barn for pickups. Preston had come in a pressed shirt and a good hat. He worked his way along the rail shaking hands as if it were his sale, with Wade a step behind him. Tess had her taped boots on. Nora had laid out sneakers for her that morning, and Tess had put them back in the closet without a word.
While the handlers eased Deuce up the alley toward the chute, Preston turned to the buyers around him and spoke just loudly enough to carry. “Good to see Ashby blood on a certified scale.”
Two of the men nodded. One of them was the buyer from Gillette who had called Bev’s store asking about the catalog.
Nora didn’t answer him. She walked to the folding table beside the scale, which was bigger than last year’s, and set down one thing at a time: the bill of sale, then the scale ticket, then the three feed books with Tess’s grass numbers sticking out of the backs on yellow tabs. Sam stood beside the table and held up the photograph from the first night, a calf in the straw of a box stall with his head down.
The crowd stopped talking in small groups and started watching in one.
The extension agent read the scale first. Eight hundred and sixty pounds. Then the measuring stick: height at the withers, heart girth, and width across the hips. Marisol stood with her arms folded and listened to every number without writing any of them down, because she already had them. She had brought her own breed chart and laid it on the table. On it, most bulls his age landed between six hundred fifty and seven hundred fifty pounds, and his height at the withers was off the top of the page.
“Nobody’s going to tell you breeding doesn’t matter,” Marisol said when the agent finished. “It does. That frame came from somewhere.” She tipped her head toward the folding table. “But I’ve put my hands on a lot of well-bred bulls that never got where this one is. That table did as much of this as his mother did. Maybe more.”
Preston smiled at the buyers around him, easy and patient, the way a man smiles when a child has said something cute. “Ask her where he was born,” he said…
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