Part 3
He had his father’s ears and none of his father’s ease. He stood in the barn doorway in a school windbreaker with the leash in one hand, not coming in, as though there might be a fee.
“You said Wednesday,” Jo said.
“I know what I said.” He looked down the aisle at the white shape against the gate. “I didn’t sleep. I thought I’d better see this before I did anything.”
She walked him down. Boone lifted his head when Dale got within ten feet, and his tail moved, but he didn’t get up. Dale stopped. He crouched with his forearms on his knees, the leash dangling, and looked past the dog through the panels at the calf lying in the straw.
“Good Lord,” he said. “She’s bigger than I thought.”
“She’s smaller than she ought to be.”
He watched for a while without speaking. Wren’s ear had turned toward the new voice and then turned back toward the dog.
Becca came down the aisle with the three o’clock bottle. The side door into the pen was a narrow man-door beside the main gate, and to reach it she had to step past Boone’s chain. She’d done it six times since yesterday. This time, with a stranger in the aisle and the dog already on his feet to greet him, she stepped between Boone and the calf.
He didn’t growl. Jo would think about that later. He came off the concrete in one smooth, silent move and took Becca’s forearm in his mouth through the sleeve of her canvas coat. He held it for a second, then let go and stood there with his head low, looking at her.
Becca didn’t drop the bottle.
“I’m fine,” she said, very evenly. “Jo, I’m fine. Get his chain.”
Jo got it. Dale had taken a step back into the aisle with the leash clenched in both hands.
Under the coat sleeve there were two red dents and the beginning of a bruise, the skin unbroken. Jo cleaned it anyway and wrote it down, because Gil would need it written down. Becca sat on an overturned bucket with her arm in her lap and drank a Coke from the office fridge.
“That’s what he did to Cody,” Dale said. “Exactly that.”
“I know.”
“Then you know I’m not wrong.”
“You’re not wrong,” Jo said. “I’m asking you to be wrong for a while anyway.”
Becca set the can down. “He didn’t do it to hurt me. He did it because I was standing where he thinks he’s supposed to be.” She looked at Dale. “What did your dad do with him? Around calves. Around anything new.”
Dale didn’t answer right away. He looked at Boone, back on his chain now, lying down with his head on his paws and his eyes on the calf.
“Dad never let him in the calving pen,” he said at last. “Not once. Boone lay at the gate. That was his spot, and Dad built it for him, a pallet with a piece of carpet on it. When Dad went in to pull a calf, he’d hum at the gate first so Boone knew it was him coming through. Anybody who walked up to that gate without humming, Boone met them.”
“The hymn,” Jo said.
“The hymn.” Something almost like a smile crossed Dale’s face. “He hummed it for forty years and everybody said he was off-key. He wasn’t. He hummed it in B-flat, and the church piano was in C. I figured that out when I was fifteen and never told him.”
He hummed a few bars. It was nothing like Jo’s version. It was low and sure and in tune, and it had the same shape as Walt’s in a way she couldn’t have explained.
Boone got up. He walked to the end of his chain toward Dale and stood there wagging slowly, from the shoulders back, as he used to when Walt’s truck came up the drive.
Dale stopped humming. He looked at the floor.
“He let him in the house the last week,” Dale said. “Did you know that? Ten years outside, and the last week he’s in the bedroom. I came down Thursday. Friday Dad told me to go on back to Topeka, I had a concert. He said the dog had it covered.” He turned the leash over in his hands. “He died Sunday.”
Jo let the silence stand. In the pen, Wren’s ear swung toward Dale’s voice and stayed there.
They moved Boone’s chain that afternoon. Becca’s idea, Dale’s spot. The ring went into the wall by the main gate, but on the far side of it from the man-door, so the dog lay at the gateway and nobody had to walk past him to reach the calf. Gil came down to inspect the bolts and Becca’s arm in that order and didn’t say anything about Wednesday.
At the six o’clock feeding, Dale stood in the aisle and hummed in B-flat as Becca went through the man-door. Boone lifted his head, put it back down, and let her pass.
Wren drank the whole bottle standing up.
Dale left at seven. In the doorway, with his car keys out, he stopped and reached into the inside pocket of his windbreaker.
“Dad’s lawyer read this at the house on Thursday,” he said. “You’d gone home already.” He held out a folded index card. “I told myself I’d lost it…”
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇