Part 5
“Then he can call it that,” Nora said. “And when the deputy comes out, I’ll show him the trough they were drinking out of and last night’s vet bill, and he can decide who he’d like to talk to.”
The cup stopped clinking.
“My client’s intention,” Lyle said, more carefully, “was to sell the animals at auction to offset the estate’s tax obligations.”
“What would they bring?” She looked down at the barn, where Bev was leading Hazel out into the early sun. “A mare past twenty. A gelding that goes lame in the cold. A three-year-old you can count the ribs on. Take off the hauling, the brand inspection, and the yard’s commission. Whatever’s left, I’ll write you a check for it. Today.”
“You understand you’d be taking them as is.”
“I’ve seen as is, Mr. Lyle. I sat up with it all night.”
He said he would need to confer with his client. Then, just before he hung up, he asked how the animals had come to be on the property in the first place, and who had been caring for them all this time.
Nora watched Rook walk out of the barn behind Hazel, stop at the door, and turn his head to look up the hill at her.
“That’s a question for Mr. Gentry,” she said, “when he’s able to talk.”
It took them most of that week. Junie was too weak to haul until Saturday. When the time came, getting her into Cody’s stock trailer took an hour, most of a bag of carrots, and Bev sitting cross-legged in the front compartment talking nonsense to her the whole time. Hazel loaded as though she’d done it a hundred times, which she probably had. Tinker kicked the divider twice on principle. Rook walked in last of his own accord and rode the four miles home with his head over Hazel’s back.
The letter came in the second week of November. Nora found it while casing her own route in the back room of the post office: a long envelope from the law office in Salem, with a green certified card attached, addressed to her.
She held it up. “Glenda. I have certified mail.”
Glenda looked up from her notebook. “Then go sign for it, Haskell.”
So Nora walked around to the front counter, and Glenda walked around the other way, and Nora signed the green card and handed it back across the counter. Glenda stamped it with great ceremony.
Inside was a bill of sale for three horses, sorrel, buckskin, and dun. The estate had accepted her figure of six hundred dollars, less her receipts for hay and for Dr. Lindqvist’s night call, which together came to four hundred and eighty-eight. Nora wrote a check for the hundred and twelve that remained. The rest of the money she had been saving for a new car had already gone to the vet and the feed store, one bill at a time, so the wagon would have to see her through another winter. She found she didn’t mind as much as she’d expected.
She went to the Grange supper that year, with the rolls Bev had assigned her, and stayed until Merle had finished telling her everything he knew about hay prices. None of it fixed her all at once. There were still days she let the phone ring, and Saturdays when Bev’s truck turned in at the gate and Nora’s first instinct was to say she was fine. But Bev kept turning in. Somewhere around Christmas, Nora started leaving the coffee on.
Arlo came at the end of April, on the drive from the rehabilitation hospital in Bend to his daughter’s house in Boise, where he would live now. His daughter was the gap-toothed softball girl from the wallet photo, grown up, in her forties, with his jaw. She parked by the pasture gate and unfolded a wheelchair from the trunk. The ground was too rough for the chair, so she and Nora pushed him as far as the fence, and he did the last few feet on a cane, his right leg swinging stiff.
Hazel was at the far end of the pasture with the others, grazing new grass under the cottonwoods.
Arlo didn’t call her. He leaned on the top rail with his good arm and made a soft, wet clucking sound, the kind nobody could have heard from twenty feet away.
Hazel’s head came up anyway.
She walked the whole length of the pasture. She didn’t trot, because she didn’t trot anymore, but she didn’t stop either. At the fence she put her nose against Arlo’s chest and blew, and he stood there with his good hand flat on the white hair of her face. His daughter turned around and walked back to the car for something she didn’t need.
Junie came next, round now, with a shine on her. Tinker ambled up after her, hoping for something in a pocket. Rook came last, the way he did everything. He looked at Arlo for a long moment over the rail, then moved down the fence to where Nora stood and set his chin on her shoulder.
Arlo made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Told you,” he said. “Picked.”
Before they left, Nora went into the barn and came back with the clipboard. She’d had to add pages, punched and clipped on behind his. Arlo propped it on the fence rail and read with one finger, moving it down the columns line by line, his entries and then hers. Line cleared. Arlo’s hay. Junie up 3 a.m. There were six months of it in two handwritings, his large and careful, hers small and quick.
When he reached the bottom of the last page, he tapped the empty line beneath it twice and held out the pencil on its baling twine.
Nora took it. She wrote the date, and under it, Arlo came. Hazel knew him.