Part 7
Jo didn’t know, and the question rode home with her and stayed through Christmas.
Teague’s foreman delivered the hay the week before the holiday, eighty small bales on a flatbed, and stacked them in the pole barn himself without being asked. His son was at the high school, he said, and wanted to come out some Saturday. Jo told him there was a waiting list, and he said the boy could wait. Lorna canceled the Nebraska load with one phone call and a sigh. Jo mailed Renee the formal letter that human resources needed, and Renee wrote back on a card with a lighthouse on it: Somebody’s already using your headset. Be well out there. For the first time since September, the steno pad on the refrigerator showed a balance that would get the herd to April.
She did the barn inventory in January, when there was nothing to do outside but break ice on the water tank twice a day. In a feed-store calendar hanging behind the tack room door, Mags had written a figure in every Thursday square going back six years: 40, 85, 112, 60. The coffee can. Jo took down all six calendars and added them at the kitchen table. In every one of those years, the can had paid for between half and two-thirds of the winter hay.
In the back of the last calendar, on the blank page for notes, there was a short list in her aunt’s hand.
Stop breeding — 2nd year. Sell the young sound ones to Meyers, keep the old.
Take the Kansas animals. All of them that will settle.
Bleacher from the Tigers gym. Face it at the shed. Thirty ft. Do NOT face it at the mountains, people will look at the mountains.
No more than 15.
And at the bottom, underlined twice: Write the feet down every year or you will lie to yourself about which ones are ready.
Jo read it several times. She thought of Teague on his ridge, selling the western view at six hundred dollars a night, and of Abe, who had come to the Pruitt place three months after burying his wife. The mountains would have let him look away. Mags had turned him toward something that would look back, eventually, if he was patient, from eight feet off and chewing.
She folded the calendar page into the envelope with the permit. Some of it she would tell Teague one day at the co-op. Most of it she wouldn’t need to.
The answering machine had been running on the same cassette the whole time, Mags’s greeting with Jo’s booking message squeezed after the beep. In the third week of January the tape began to stretch. Her aunt’s voice slid down half a step in the middle of a word and came back up, like someone on a bad line.
Jo sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets and played it one more time.
You’ve reached Margaret. If you’re calling about Thursday, it’s on unless it’s snowing sideways. If you’re calling about anything else, it can probably wait.
She ejected the cassette, wrote MAGS on the label in marker, and put it in the drawer beside the stove with the matches, the birthday candles, and Dean’s spare truck key, which she had carried down from Denver without knowing why.
Then she put in a new tape from the pharmacy in Durango, so old its price sticker was in a typeface nobody used anymore. She pressed record and stood there with her mouth open and nothing coming out. Sixteen years and ten thousand calls, and she couldn’t think how to begin.
She stopped the tape and tried again, and again. On the fourth try she gave up on the voice Renee had praised and used her own.
This is Jo, at the Pruitt place. If you’re calling about sitting, Thursday’s on, and so are Saturday and Sunday. Leave me your name and how many. If you’re calling about anything else, it can probably wait.
The first Thursday under the permit fell on the last day of January. It was eighteen degrees at noon, with a hard blue sky and the San Juans so white they hurt to look at. Jo shoveled the gravel apron by the west gate and spread a bucket of ash on the ice by the hinge. At 1:40, without anyone calling them, the old ones came down the trail: Hollis first, stiff in the hips, then Pearl, then the crooked-jawed gelding, then the rest.
The cars came at 1:52. There were nine of them, one more than the plan allowed, and she let the extra one park on the edge of the apron. It was Abe’s daughter’s car, and Abe had told her this would be his daughter’s first time back since she’d brought him six years ago.
Jo opened the chain. She didn’t need to explain the rules. Abe did that at the gate, in a murmur, for the four people who were new.
She didn’t sit on the bleacher this time. She stood at the west gate with the chain over her arm, where she could see the road, the shed, and everyone between them. She counted heads without meaning to, and stopped when she reached fourteen.
The wind dropped. The jaws went on grinding. Behind her, through the kitchen window she had left cracked to let out the woodstove heat, the phone began to ring. It rang four times. Then, faintly, across the snow and over the heads of fourteen people who weren’t speaking, she heard her own voice pick up and tell someone it was on.
Out by the shed, Hollis walked to within eight feet of Abe’s daughter, folded himself down into the snow, and stayed.