Part 4
“Yes.”
He’d expected to need more time than that to say it. It came out as quick as a kick from a nervous heifer.
“Doing what?”
“Watching the heifer.” He looked at the cooler of syringes on the shelf. “Her calf came backward. It was dead before I got to it at four. She wouldn’t let me take it out. She just kept licking it. I sat there and watched her lick it, and I couldn’t make myself get down.”
Renata, who had been writing at the end of the bed, found a reason to check a pump across the room.
“You left me,” Jess said quietly, “holding our son, to go watch a cow hold hers.”
He kept his hands on his knees and let her finish.
“I asked you,” she said. “Once.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t ask you once after Wren. Not the whole year.” Her voice stayed low, the way she talked when the dog was loose at a house and she wanted the mail in the box without anybody getting bit. “You slept on the cot in the parlor office all through calving season. You put a camera in the maternity pen so you could watch the cows on your phone at supper. I’d get home from the route at four and the kitchen would be dark, and I’d see the barn lights on and think, well, he’s busy. I fixed my own dinner for eleven months, Owen.”
“I know.”
“I know what you did for me, Owen. You kept my car running. You paid off my student loan before you bought your father’s tractor. After I threw Wren’s ultrasound picture out, you found it in the truck and had it framed, and you never said a word about it.” She looked down at the hand she had on Sam’s feet. “But I’d have traded every bit of it for one supper with you across the table. Just one.”
Then Renata came back, said “Three o’clock,” and held out a swab. Jess looked at it, then at Owen.
“You do it,” she said. “My hands are shaking.”
He did it, both cheeks. Jess watched. When he finished, she reached over without a word and fixed the collar of his flannel shirt, which had been folded in on itself since Tuesday morning.
Wednesday turned into Thursday in the cold. Sam lay on his chilled mattress, his skin faintly mottled, the green band moving across the monitor. Jess had a bed on the fifth floor, in rooms the hospital kept for parents. She came down every three hours, pumped in a curtained corner, and went back up when the nurses made her. Owen slept on the vinyl chair in forty-minute pieces.
Walt called Thursday at noon. A nor’easter was coming up the coast, eighteen inches in the hills, with wind behind it. Dylan, the nineteen-year-old who helped evenings, would stay over. The generator was the old kind that ran off the tractor’s power takeoff, and Dylan knew how to hook it up.
“I can talk him through it, if you want,” Owen said.
“I know how to hook up my own generator,” Walt said. “You stay where you are.”
Before he hung up, Walt added that Rudy had carried the striped blanket from the kitchen to the empty bassinet by the woodstove and lain down on the floor beside it. He’d eaten for the first time since Tuesday.
By nine that night the snow had reached Burlington. Owen could hear it against the big windows of the unit like sand thrown at glass. Jess had gone up to sleep at eight, because Renata had told her that a mother who’d lost that much blood and didn’t sleep would end up in a bed on a different floor. The room was dim. Somebody’s baby down the row was crying in the thin, offended way of the very small.
At ten fifty-two the phone in his shirt pocket buzzed against his chest.
“Power’s been out since nine,” Walt said, with no hello. He was breathing hard, which he never did. “Tractor won’t turn over. The block heater’s no good with the power gone, and it’s six below in that shed. Dylan put his truck in the ditch on the Bayley road. He’s all right, but he’s not getting up the hill tonight, and nobody’s plowing it.” There was a pause, and wind in the background. “Sixty-four cows need milking at four, Owen. I can’t milk them by hand and neither can you. You know that tractor better than anybody alive.”
Owen looked at his son on the cold mattress. “I need you home,” his father said…
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