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Behind me, 62 rolled up onto her brisket, turned her head, and began to low at her calf — that deep, ridiculous, brand-new mother sound — and I dragged the little one around where she could reach it and knelt back out of the way while she started licking.

Twenty minutes to five. Nobody in the world knew this had happened, but the three of us, and two of us wouldn't remember. That suited me fine. I sat in the straw with my bare arm steaming and watched a heifer fall in love with the thing that nearly killed her, and thought, not for the first time, that this was the only kind of strong I'd ever wanted to be.

***

By the time the calf found the udder and latched on — bunting hard enough to rock her mother's hindquarters, the way they all do, like the milk's being kept from them out of spite — the windows at the far end of the barn had gone from black to a dirty gray. Dawn coming, somewhere behind the Madison Range. I washed my arm at the sink until the water ran clear, got my shirt back on, and went into the office to write it down.

The office was a corner of the barn with walls, and calling it an office was generous. A cot with a wool blanket nobody's washed since the Carter administration. A hotplate. A desk buried under ear tags and syringe boxes and a coffee mug used as a pen cup and a pen cup used for nothing. And the calving book — a fat spiral ledger with a coffee ring burned into the cover, going back years, the whole season's history in columns: date, dam, sex, ease of birth, notes.

I sat down and found the next open line. Wrote the date. Wrote 62 — heifer calf — breech, chains — live. Sat back.

And then, because I'm a fool who never learns, I flipped back through the pages to check what 62's mother had thrown last spring, and the handwriting changed under my thumb, and it was October.

Dad's hand. Big blocky letters, pressed so hard into the page you could read them by feel on the sheet behind, the way he did everything — like the world might argue with him if he didn't bear down. Preg checks, culls, a note about a fence line in the east pasture. The last entry was three days before he died, and it said: "Winter's coming early. Get the boys on the wood." Nothing else. No period at the end, even. Like he'd been called away mid-thought and meant to come back to it.

I sat there with my thumb on the page for a while.

The whiteboard above the desk still had his tallies on it. Heifers bred, by pasture, in his handwriting, the marker gone faint and brown with age. Five months, and none of us had erased it. We'd started this season's counts on a sheet of butcher paper taped up beside it instead, all three of us pretending that was a system and not a superstition. This barn was the heart of the place — his words, said maybe four times in my whole life, which for him was practically a speech — and this March was the first calving in thirty years it would run without him in it. First calf of my life I'd pulled without knowing he was up the hill if it went wrong. Not that I'd have woken him either. But there's a difference between not asking and having no one to not ask, and I was learning the size of it one night at a time.

I capped the pen. That was as long as I let it be.

The dregs on the hotplate had been coffee around midnight and were something else now, black and thick and vengeful. I poured them into the cleanest mug and drank them anyway, and I was standing there with my back to the door when Cash's voice arrived ahead of him, the way it always does.

"Tell me that's not what I think it is."

He filled the doorway in the loose-jointed way he fills everything — hair standing up in six directions, boots unlaced with the tongues flapping, coat thrown over what was clearly still half pajamas. He'd have looked comical if his eyes hadn't gone straight past me to pen three, to the chains I'd left coiled over the rail, still wet.

"Breech," I said.

"A breech." He came the rest of the way in, and there was something under the cheerfulness now, a real heat. "You pulled a breech. Alone. In the middle of the night. In a first-calf heifer."

"She's fine. They both are."

"That is spectacularly not the point, Boo." He dropped onto the cot, which shrieked. "You wake me for that. That's a two-man job and you know it's a two-man job, and instead you're down here playing midwife solo like some enormous martyr while I'm up the hill dreaming about — never mind what I was dreaming about. The point is I have a phone. It rings. It makes a delightful sound."

"Wasn't time."

"There's never time." He said it fast, and then heard himself, and grinned to soften it, but he didn't take it back. "You know how I even knew you were down here? I got up to take a leak at five and the barn was lit up like Christmas. Third time this week, by the way. You think I don't count? I count."

I drank the terrible coffee and didn't say anything, which with Cash is a full participation strategy. He talks enough for any three men; all a conversation needs from me is a place to bounce off.

He gave me another second of the stern look — Cash's stern look has the structural integrity of wet paper — and then it collapsed and he was up off the cot and hanging over the rail of pen three, making the low clucking sounds he makes at every animal on the place, the same voice he uses on barrel horses and barmaids.

"Well, look at you," he told the calf, who was standing now, splay-legged and wobbling, chin dripping milk. "Look at this gorgeous disaster." He tipped his head, appraising. "She's ugly as Wyatt before coffee."

"She came out backwards. She's earned it."

"Backwards and sideways, looks like." But his hands were already through the rails, steadying her when she teetered, checking the cord, running a thumb along her ribs where I'd rubbed the life into her — checking my work without ever calling it that, because we don't. He glanced at 62, at the way she stood over the calf watchful but not wild, and I saw him do the arithmetic on how bad it had been by how calm she wasn't. He looked back at me, and for one second, the grin was gone entirely.

"You good?" he said.

"Yeah."

"Course you are." The grin came back like a light switching on. He straightened, wiped his hands on his pajama pants, which were now a loss anyway. "Hey — you see the big house on your way down? Lights on in the office."

"This morning?"

He waved vaguely toward the yard. "Wyatt's been up there doing whatever it is he does to numbers. In the dark. Alone. Which is his version of your little barn hobby, so between the two of you, I'm the only Calloway in this family who sleeps, and frankly, I think that's why I'm the handsome one."