Part 5
The drive was two hours in good weather. Tonight it would be four, if the interstate stayed open. He’d be in the shed by three with his hands on that cold engine, the cows would get milked, and the tank would be saved. Owen could see the whole night laid out like a row of stalls. He had done it a hundred times, and he’d been good at it every time.
Sam’s chest rose and fell to the ventilator’s count. Across the room, Renata was pretending not to listen.
“Dad. Is Gil Bouchard’s number still on the fridge?”
There was a silence on the line. “The nurse?”
“He grew up on the Bayley road. His father milked a hundred head in a tie-stall barn till ’09, and Gil did the mornings till he left for school. He lives eight miles from you. He plows half the driveways in Caledon Falls with that truck.” Owen made himself say the rest. “I’m not coming, Dad. I’m going to call Gil.”
“At eleven o’clock at night.”
“Yes.”
Walt was quiet for so long that Owen thought the call had dropped. Then his father said, in a different voice, “It’s on the fridge,” and read the number off. Owen wrote it on the back of his hand with the pen from Renata’s cart.
He had never asked Gil Bouchard for anything in his life. He had once sold Gil’s father two springing heifers, the year before the Bouchards sold out, and had been a little too pleased with the price. Gil picked up on the second ring.
“It’s Owen Thibault. I’m sorry to call this late.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’s all right. It’s the farm.” He told it fast: the power, the tractor, Dylan in the ditch, his father’s knees on that ice. He didn’t know how to finish, so he just stopped. “I can’t leave him.”
He heard a door, then wind, then the jingle of keys.
“Forty minutes,” Gil said. “Tell Walt to put a pot of coffee on the woodstove and stay out of that shed till I get there.”
For the next hour Owen sat by the cooling mattress with one hand cupped over his son’s head and the phone on his knee, on speaker, turned down low, while Gil and his father worked on the tractor two hours south. He knew that engine the way he knew his own teeth.
He told them to pull the pickup in nose to nose and use the heavy jumper cables in the bin behind the seat. Let the pickup run five minutes to give the battery something. One short spray of starting fluid into the air intake, Dad, one, not the whole can. Wait. Try again.
On the third try the old diesel caught, coughed, and ran ragged, then ran smooth. Over the speaker Owen heard his father make a sound he hadn’t heard out of him since Owen’s wedding.
“She’s going,” Gil said. “We’ll get the generator on and start at four. Your milk’s not going to stay cold, though, Owen. The tank compressor won’t run off that generator with the parlor going. You’re going to be dumping.”
Owen did the arithmetic without wanting to: two milkings, a full tank, several thousand dollars running down the drain into the manure pit. But the cows would be milked and their udders emptied. Nobody would be standing in the dark bawling with a bag like a stone.
“Dump it,” he said.
He hung up and put the phone back in his pocket. Renata came over and checked a line that didn’t need checking, then set a cup of hospital coffee on the shelf beside him without a word.
The snow kept on. Around one, the unit went quiet the way it did between the midnight checks and the two o’clock ones. Pumps clicked. Someone’s monitor chimed and was silenced. A mother down the row was singing something in Portuguese under her breath.
Owen painted Sam’s cheeks at midnight and again at three, because those were the hours. In between he kept his hand over his son’s head and told him about the farm in a voice nobody else could hear. He told him about the heifer with the bad left horn who opened the gate latch with her tongue, and how the barn smelled in May when the doors came off their tracks. He told him about Rudy, who’d been waiting for him all winter without anybody knowing that was what he was doing.
At 3:20, under Owen’s left hand, Sam’s foot began to move.
It was a small motion, a jerk and a release, then another, as regular as the pulse of a milking machine. Owen watched it happen twice before he understood that it wasn’t a startle and it wasn’t stopping. On the monitor, the green band bunched up and went tall. “Renata,” he said…
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