Part 4
“I don’t know,” Josie said through the screen.
Cole nodded. It was probably the answer he’d been getting all week. Royce lowered himself into the seat and pulled the door closed, and Cole took the truck back down the drive at a crawl, easing it over every rut.
The next morning Royce’s spotlight was still in the bed of her father’s truck. Wade reached for it, and Josie said, “I’ll take it.” He looked at her for a second and handed it over.
She walked the field edge to the Gaskins place. The duck pen sat behind the equipment shed, and Cole was on an overturned bucket inside it with a brown duck in his lap, one of its wings wrapped in purple vet tape. The chicken wire had been peeled back at a corner, and beneath it the dirt was scooped out in a trough just wide enough for something low and determined.
A clipboard hung wired to the gatepost. Across the top, in careful block letters, it said 4-H POULTRY PROJECT RECORD — C. GASKINS, and below that were ten names with hatch dates, weights, and egg counts. Nine of the names had a single line through them, ruled straight, as if with the edge of something.
“Spotlight,” Josie said.
“Bench is fine.” He didn’t get up. The duck shifted in his lap and settled. “That’s Dot. She hid under the feeder.”
Josie wanted to give him something. She reached for the most helpful thing she knew. “The feed store gets ducklings every March, right? You could start over in the spring. You’d have a whole new batch by fair time.”
Cole unwired the clipboard and held it out to her.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Pick which one the new batch is for.”
She looked at the names. Pancake. Admiral. Little Bit. Mrs. Pickett. She didn’t take it.
Cole wired the clipboard back to the post. He didn’t seem angry, only tired in a way that didn’t belong on somebody his age. “Granddad says coyote. The wolf man says it could be a lot of things. Mink go under wire. So do raccoons.” He smoothed the top of Dot’s head with one finger. “Doesn’t much matter which. They’re the same amount of gone.”
She walked home along the corn with her face hot. Halfway, she heard her own voice again, bright and helpful, and recognized it. It was the voice of the cashier at the feed store in April, ringing up a bag of senior dog food that nobody would ever open: well, sweetie, you’ll get you another one. Her mother had meant the same thing with the printout she left on Josie’s pillow, a shelter puppy with one brindle ear up, which Josie had folded into a square too small to unfold and dropped in the ditch.
In her desk drawer there was still an envelope from Nana in Plymouth. Two hundred dollars, and on the front in Nana’s slanting hand: For when you’re ready for the next one.
That evening her father was at the kitchen table with his toolbox open beside him. He had a leather punch out, a utility knife, a little bag of copper rivets he used on tractor seat straps.
“Thought we could try,” he said. “If you want.”
He didn’t reach for anything. He waited. Josie went and got the two pieces of the leash.
He shaved the cut ends thin with the knife, so they would lie flat when they overlapped. Josie held them while he lined them up. The handle was still dark from Moose’s puppy teeth, and the leather smelled like the hook by the door.
“He used to howl at the noon siren,” Josie said. “In town. Every single day.”
“Eleven years.” Her father almost smiled. “You’d howl with him, and when you got tired of howling you’d whistle him in, low then high, the way I showed you. He never came that fast for me.”
He punched the first hole. The punch made a small clean sound, and a little circle of leather fell onto the table.
“Tell me about that night,” Josie said.
He set the punch down. Dana was at the sink, and her hands went still in the water.
“He went down in the kitchen around eleven,” Wade said. “Couldn’t get his breath. Your mom was at work. I got him in the truck.” He turned the leather over in his fingers. “I came to your door first. I stood in the doorway. You were turned toward the wall, and you weren’t moving, and I told myself you were asleep. I said it to your mom on the phone after. She’s asleep. Saying it made it true enough for me.”
“And I took it,” her mother said from the sink, without turning around. “I didn’t ask him to go back and look. I wanted it to be true too.”
Josie looked at her mother’s back for a long moment, then at the leather. “What happened at the clinic?”
“The emergency place in Washington. Forty minutes. The vet said it was his heart. Fluid around his lungs. She could drain it and buy him a day, maybe three, and every one of them worse than the last.” He looked at the hole he’d punched. “I told her no. I stayed with him. I had my hand on his chest when it stopped.”
“I was awake,” Josie said.
“I know.”
“I heard him and I didn’t get up. I thought if I got up, it would be real.” Her voice broke, and she let it. “I just lay there.”
Her father was quiet for a long moment.
“If I’d come in, you’d have asked me to let them try,” he said finally. “And I’d have— I’d have said yes. Anything you asked me that night. And he’d have spent three more days drowning in a kennel so I didn’t have to tell you no.”
“You could’ve told me no. I can hear no.”
“I didn’t trust that.”
“You didn’t ask.”
He took that without arguing. He punched the second hole, set a rivet through both pieces, and struck it twice with the small hammer. The leash lay whole on the table, with a stiff ridge where the ends overlapped and two copper heads bright against the brown.
Josie reached into the coffee cup where he kept his markers. She uncapped one, took his right hand, turned it over, and below the gray smear of N DITCH TRAPS she wrote ASK J.
Her father looked at it a long time.
“That’ll be gone in a few days,” he said.
“Then you’ll write it again.”
Luis called the next afternoon. The vet expected to clear the wolf within days. The program wanted to release her at the north woods edge, the nearest dry ground to the den, and that meant Royce’s land. They had asked him to pull his remaining traps first, since she’d be coming home right through them. Wade put the call on speaker, and Luis’s voice came through slow and careful.
“He said no. He said he’s got one duck left and a grandson who sleeps with his window open, listening for her. The traps stay.”
When the call ended, Josie went to her room. She came back with Nana’s envelope and set it on the table next to the mended leash.
“Dad. How much does hardware cloth cost?”
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