Part 7
“On your place,” Nora said.
The crowd turned toward her. Eight feet away, the scale still showed Deuce’s weight in red numbers. Her father had told her to wait until there was a scale between them. She had waited eleven months.
“His mother was an Ekberg cow with a broken horn. I loaded her on your cull truck myself in July of last year, because I was working your pens that day, and Wade told me her calf would make it on grass.” She didn’t look at Wade. “In October your scale said a hundred and fifty-eight pounds, and you said back trap. Bev says you’ve been selling Ekberg cows down the road for five years because they’re too slow to make you money.” She put her hand on the bill of sale. “So he’s yours, Preston. Which day are you proudest of?”
Nobody answered. Preston opened his mouth, and Wade stepped out from behind him.
“I printed that ticket, Preston,” Wade said. He didn’t say it loudly. He said it the way a man reads a weight off a scale. “I flagged him in August, and I never went back for him. I’ve got two more like him in a pen behind the shop right now, on her mineral, because I didn’t want to explain it to you.”
Preston looked at the buyers around him, and Nora watched him discover that none of them were looking back. The man from Gillette was studying the feed books on the table.
“We’ll settle it somewhere else,” Preston said.
He turned and walked out through the crowd and across the parking lot alone. Nobody went with him. Somewhere behind the grandstand a dog was barking, and for the space of a long breath, it was the only sound.
Nora’s hands were fine through the loading. They went when she tried to fit the key into the ignition and missed. Tess got in on the other side and didn’t say anything. She reached over, turned the heater to high on a warm September afternoon, took her mother’s wrists in both hands, and held them in front of the vent until they stopped.
Nora’s phone buzzed in her shirt pocket before they cleared the fairgrounds gate. She let it ring.
At home that evening she listened to the voicemail at the kitchen table with the volume turned low. A man representing a group of seedstock producers in Nebraska named a number with more zeroes than she had ever heard said about anything she owned. Nora stopped the message partway through and sat there for a minute before she let it finish.
On Monday, Marisol drove up with two people in the cab of her flatbed: a married couple from the Sandhills, both in their sixties, whose ground had been blowing out a little more every dry year for a decade. Nobody asked to see the bull. The three of them walked Nora’s paddocks with Tess’s yardstick, crouching to look at the bases of the grass clumps. The wife pulled a stem of sideoats grama and turned it in her fingers.
“We don’t want your bull,” she said finally. “We want to know what you did in October.”
They wanted the books, the paddock layout, the rest periods, the seed mix, the mineral program, and the reasons behind every change. They wanted Nora to come walk their ground and tell them what she saw. Marisol said three other outfits wanted the same, and they would all pay by the day plus mileage.
When the flatbed had gone, Tess was at the end of the kitchen table, recounting the pint jar for the third time that week.
“Do they want my numbers too?” Tess asked.
“They want all of it.”
Tess stopped counting and set down a stack of ones. “Then they have to pay me too.”
Nora laughed for the first time in a week. Then she saw that Tess wasn’t joking, and she stopped laughing and wrote it down. She agreed to Tess’s terms: a dollar for every Sunday of measurements, paid into the pint jar, and the right to say no if somebody she didn’t like asked to see them.
Tuesday morning Nora called the Nebraska number back. She told the man no in one sentence, thanked him, and hung up before he could answer. Then she called Marisol and said yes, four days a month, and never during calving. After that she walked out to the north paddock and moved the polywire a day early, just to have something in her hands.
The money showed up in December in places nobody else would notice. There was a new water line to the pen and a heated tank where the hose used to be. The bank note had shrunk by an amount the loan officer called “a start.” Tess picked out her own boots in Rapid City, a size too big on purpose, and nailed the old pair, tape and all, to the post beside the pen gate as what she called Deuce’s first trophy.
Deuce spent the winter where he’d spent the last one, behind her father’s pipe, fed from a bucket on the ground and never from a hand. Next summer he would go out with six bison cows the Sandhills couple were sending up on lease. Sam went over the lease line by line before he let Nora sign it.
The Ashby October catalog came out without the page about the Ekberg-cross bull. Bev started writing for the Hulett bull on Nora’s mineral tickets, and nobody at the counter corrected her.
In the second week of December, an envelope came in the mail with the Ashby Bison Company return address in the corner. There was no letter. Inside, folded once, was a two-dollar bill. Nora stood at the mailbox in the wind trying to decide whether he was paying a debt or refusing to owe her one, and finally decided it wasn’t hers to figure out. She put the bill back behind her driver’s license where it belonged.
That Sunday it snowed six inches overnight. Tess went out after breakfast anyway, because it was Sunday, and Nora watched her from the shop door with a wrench in her hand. Tess walked out to the north paddock with the yardstick on her shoulder and the feed book in a bread bag against the wet. Behind her, at the pen, Deuce stood in the windbreak with snow along his back and steam rising off him, watching her go.
A pickup with Colorado plates slowed at the gate. Two men got out and looked around the empty yard, and then at the bull, and then, because there was no one else to ask, at the girl in the paddock.
Tess got to them first. Nora could hear her from the shop.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Tess told them. “You can see him after.” She knelt, scraped the snow back with her mitten until she reached the ground, and stood the yardstick up against the grass. “Four inches standing. Last December you couldn’t find any on this paddock. That’s the part you have to see first.”
The older man looked at the yardstick, then at the girl, and crouched down in the snow beside her.
Nora set the wrench on the bench and wiped her hands on a rag. She didn’t hurry. Her daughter had it.