Part 7
The hoof came down where Boone had been a half second earlier, and dirt sprayed across his flank.
He ran then, a lumbering, hip-sprung run Jo had never seen from him, straight for the gate. Jo kept humming because she was afraid to stop. The cow came after him in three long strides. Jo got up onto her knees and grabbed his collar as he came through, and threw her weight backward into the lane, and dragged a hundred and twenty pounds of dog over her own legs. She got her left hand on the gate to swing it shut.
Opal’s second strike hit the top rail of the gate an inch from her fingers and drove the steel back against her wrist. The rail held. The bones under her watchband didn’t.
The latch fell. She got the snap clip through it with her right hand, and then she sat in the lane with Boone half on top of her, panting, and stared through the chain-link at a giraffe cow who was snorting and stamping and swinging her head six feet above the wire. Her own left hand had already started to swell.
Boone stood up off her. He shook the dirt out of his coat, walked three steps to the gate, and lay down facing the yard with his chin on his paws, as though he had never left his post.
“You son of a gun,” Jo said. “You absolute son of a gun.”
Out in the yard, Wren had moved. She came out from behind the water trough, alone, the cow’s attention all on the gate. She crossed twenty yards, then thirty, her head high and turning, toward the place where the humming had stopped. She came most of the way to the fence before Opal snorted once, sharply, and the calf halted and turned her ears back toward the cow.
She stood there between them. Jo watched her decide.
Wren turned and walked back to Opal. The cow lowered her head and put her chin on the calf’s back, and the two of them moved off toward the river together. At the gate, Boone watched them go, and sighed, and didn’t get up.
The wrist was broken in two places. Mags drove her to the emergency room in Uvalde with Jo’s arm in a bag of frozen corn, and they rode the first twenty miles in silence.
“You sat down in a giraffe yard,” Mags said at last. “And hummed.”
“I left the clip off.”
“I know you did. Ray told you the clip goes on every time.”
“He was right,” Jo said. “It was me. I was on the phone. I hung it on the post.”
Mags drove for another mile. “Well,” she said. “Now we’ve got a padlock and a vet with one hand. I’ve had worse Fridays.” Then, after a while: “Your hum is terrible,” she said. “He came anyway.”
Jo had a plate put in her wrist and two weeks of a cast that itched in the heat. Ray put a padlock on the crew gate and an alarm on the latch that rang his phone. Becca called from Kansas, told Jo she was an idiot, and then asked three times whether the wrist hurt. Gil called too, and didn’t say he’d been on the phone that night, and Jo didn’t say it either. They finished the grant report over three evenings with Jo typing one-handed.
Boone never left the lane again. He kept the head of it by day and the crew gate at dawn and dusk, and when the giraffes drifted out past the live oaks, he lay down and waited for them to come back. Most days Wren came to the fence at least once and stood there breathing on him through the wire before going back to Opal. Some days she didn’t.
Four years later, in October, Jo’s wrist told her when rain was coming, a full day ahead of the radio.
Wren stood nearly fourteen feet now, dark-patched and long-necked, with the milk still in her eyes. She and Opal had a three-year-old bull from a zoo in Arkansas in the yard with them, and she put him in his place with a shove of her neck whenever he crowded her at the feeder. She walked the whole yard by sound and smell and the feel of the ground. She found the trough without a bell.
Boone was fourteen. His hind legs went out from under him on cold mornings now, and he needed a sling of beach towel under his belly to get up the two steps into his shelter. Last spring the cataracts had come in, first one eye and then the other, and by summer they were as white as the calf’s had been on the day he met her. The vet who came down from Kerrville to check them shook his head, and Jo, who had already looked, nodded.
He’d lost the lane in the dark. He woke at night, confused, and walked the chain-link with his nose to it, and bumped the posts, and stood still in the middle of the run, turning his head.
Jo had been lying awake listening to him do it for a month.
On a night in October with the windows open and the rain still a day off, she heard him get up out of his shelter and go down the lane, slowly, sniffing. Halfway along, he stopped. She heard his feet shuffle on the gravel, lost.
Then from inside the dark barn came a sound so low it was mostly in the floorboards of the trailer house. It was steady and long, like a compressor coming on.
Wren was humming.
Jo held her breath. Out in the lane, Boone’s feet stopped shuffling. He stood, and then he turned, and she heard him come back up the run toward the barn end, stopping, listening, coming on again. The hum went on, steady. He found his shelter. He found his carpet. He let himself down onto it with the long groan of a big dog settling his hips.
The hum went on a while longer after that. Jo lay in the dark with her wrist aching against the sheet. After a time she began to hum along with it, very low, in whatever key she had. Nobody was there to tell her it was wrong.