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CHAPTER NINE

The heifer had been at it since midnight, and by two o’clock Olivia knew it had gone wrong.

She was a black baldy, a first-calf two-year-old carrying a Judge calf, and Olivia had kept her home instead of hauling her to Owen’s Monday night because she was close, and because the way she kept looking back at her own flank had put a worry in her. She’d brought her into the barn at eleven when the wind came up cold out of the north. The water bag came a little after midnight. Then one small yellow-white hoof, slick in the lantern light, a nose on top of it.

Then nothing. An hour of it, the heifer straining herself hollow, the one foot coming out to the fetlock with every push and sliding back after, no second foot anywhere.

Olivia had stripped to her T-shirt in the cold barn, scrubbed her arm to the shoulder in a bucket of soapy water, gone in alongside the calf’s head, and found what she was afraid she’d find. One front leg coming right. The other one back, folded under the calf behind the rim of the pelvis, where her fingers could brush the knee of it and do nothing else. A calf couldn’t come like that. Every time the heifer strained she drove it tighter. Olivia had braced her palm against the calf’s wet forehead and pushed with everything she had and moved it maybe an inch, and the next push took the inch back.

The calf had sucked on her fingers. In there, in the dark of its mother, jammed and drowning slow, it had felt her hand against its mouth and sucked, and Olivia had pulled her arm out and stood in her mother’s barn with it steaming in the cold and heard herself say, out loud, “Okay. Okay. Think.”

The heifer swung her head around and looked at her, and Olivia looked back. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “You’re the one who picked the big bull.”

Gary’s answering service picked up on the first ring and Gary didn’t. On a Tuesday night in March, with calving running wide open in every direction, she’d be lucky if he was an hour and a half out. The heifer didn’t have two hours. Her mother was asleep in the house with a pill in her and a cane by the bed, and even awake, Edna Bateman was seventy-one years old.

There wasn’t anybody. There was the wind working at the tin and a two-year-old dying by inches, and there wasn’t anybody.

There was Owen. Nine miles west, in a bed she’d never seen, with a calving box in his truck and hands that had turned more calves than she’d been alive to count.

She stood with the phone in her hand longer than she had any right to. His name was on the screen under her thumb, and her thumb wouldn’t come down, and she knew exactly why. In thirty years she had never dialed a phone to say help me. She’d stood at her daddy’s grave eleven years ago this month with her mama on one arm and nobody on the other. Asking was the one thing she’d never learned to do. She’d built her whole self around not needing to learn it, and the last time this man had put his hands on her he’d kissed her against a cottonwood, set her back, called it a mistake. Three nights ago she’d walked away from him across Harvey’s gravel with nothing in her hands. Now she was going to call him at two in the morning and beg.

The heifer went down in the straw with a grunt she felt through the boards, and Olivia pressed the phone to her ear.

He answered on the second ring, awake the way stockmen come awake, no fog in it. “Liv?”

“Owen.” Her voice came out wrong and she heard it and couldn’t fix it. “I’ve got a heifer calving and it’s bad. One foot and the head, the other leg’s back, and I went in and I can’t shift it, I’m not strong enough, and Gary’s out on somebody else’s and she doesn’t have that long, and I.” She stopped. She made herself say it. “I need help. I’m asking you to come.”

Bedsprings, already. Boots on a floor. “How long’s she been pushing?”

“Two hours. Water bag around midnight.”

“Is she up?”

“Down right now. She’s been up and down.”

“You went in?”

“Twice. I can get to the knee. I can’t get past it.”

“Which heifer?”

“The baldy out of the tank pasture. Judge calf.”

“Big calf, then. Where’s your mama?”

“Asleep. She’s staying asleep.”

“Good. You got a lantern out there or just the overhead?”

“Both. Owen, she’s down again.”

“I heard her. Get the heifer up if you can and keep her moving slow, don’t let her wedge it tighter. Get more hot water going.”

“I’ve had hot water going since midnight, Owen. I didn’t call you for a recipe.”

“Twelve minutes,” he said. “Don’t go back in. Keep her on her feet and wait on me.” An engine turned over under his voice, and he hung up.

She stood one second longer with the phone against her ear and her chest doing something she had no time for, then went and got the heifer up.