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“Then say it quieter, you’re scaring the calf.”

“Almost. I’ve got to cup the hoof in my hand while I bring it over the rim, or the hoof tears her.” His arm turned, slow. “One chance at this before she strains again. Come on, little man. Give it to me.”

The heifer bawled and went down, and Owen went down with her into the straw with his arm still in her to the shoulder. Olivia went to her knees at the heifer’s head without being told and held it flat so she couldn’t get up wrong, and for a second the three of them lay there breathing in the straw, woman and man and cow, with one more between them not breathing at all yet.

“Got it,” Owen said. “Foot’s coming. There. There.” His arm came back with a second yellow-white hoof, laid up alongside the first, the nose on top of both like it had been that way all along.

“Two feet,” she said.

“Two feet and a nose. Now he’s a calf.”

“Chains.” He said it with his hand out, not looking, and she had them out of the box and into his palm, warm, because she’d held them inside her shirt against her stomach the whole time he was in there, because you warm the chains, her daddy had said so, and something crossed his face when he felt it. He looked at her for one breath. Then he looked at the calf. He looped a chain above each fetlock and threw a half hitch below each joint to spread the pull, and hooked on the handles. “You take that one. When she strains, we pull. When she quits, we quit. Down toward her hocks, not straight back. He comes out in a curve like he went in.”

“I know how a calf comes, Owen.”

“Yes ma’am, you do.”

They pulled. Kneeling side by side in the wet straw, her shoulder jammed against his, both of them leaned back on the handles with their heels dug in, and the heifer strained and the calf came, the legs to the knees, then the head, a wet black head with its tongue out the side and swollen, and Owen said, “Head’s out, worst is done, breathe,” to her or the heifer or himself, and they rested, and pulled, and rested.

“Wait on her,” he said. “Wait. Now.”

The chest came free and the ribs sprang and Olivia thought done and it stopped.

“Hips.” Owen was already moving. “He’s locked at the hips. Don’t pull, you’ll wedge him.”

“I’m not pulling.”

“You’re leaning.”

“I’m kneeling in a puddle, Owen, there’s nowhere to lean but you.”

“Then lean the other way. Give me room.”

He took both handles in one grip, got his other hand under the calf’s slick chest, and rolled it, the whole weight of it turning sideways so the hips came at the mother’s pelvis on the angle, the wide way through the wide place, and said, “Now,” and the heifer strained one more time and the calf came all at once, the whole back half of him in a rush of fluid and heat, and Owen caught him against his chest and sat down hard in the straw with a wet dead-weight calf in his lap.

It wasn’t breathing.

“Oh, hell. Straw.” She was already there, on her knees in the mess with a stiff clean stem of it in her fingers, and she ran it up the calf’s nostril the way her daddy had taught her before she was tall enough to see over the chute, and Owen cleared the mouth with two fingers and hauled the calf up onto its chest with its legs folded under and raked his knuckles hard down its ribs, once, twice.

“Come on,” he said. “Come on, now. You’re out. Breathe.”

The calf sneezed. It jerked its head and snorted a spray of slick over the both of them and took a breath, a big ragged rattling pull of cold barn air, and shook its ears.

“There he is,” Owen said, and his voice broke on it, just a little, just once. “There he is. Look at him, Liv.”

“I’m looking. I see him.”

Olivia sat back in the bloody straw and started laughing. It came up out of her from somewhere under her ribs with no permission at all, and Owen looked over at her, wrecked, filthy to the shoulder, straw in his hair, steam coming off the calf between them like off a stock tank at daybreak, and he grinned, and it was seventeen again, both of them, one heartbeat of it, before either of them remembered anything.

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing. Everything. He’s alive.”

“He’s alive,” Owen said. “You did that.”

“We did that.”

“Bull calf,” he said.