Page 38 of Devoted

Judge came along the rail, the whole length of the east pen at his own pace, black and enormous, steaming in the cold, and stopped at the corner post and put his head over. He'd made that trip east eleven Aprils, up the ramp, into the trailer, down again at her gate. He'd come home slower every fall. There was grey around his eyes now, and this was his last spring in this pen too.

Owen put his hand flat on the wide black forehead.

"You'd have gone," he said. "I know it."

The bull blew and stood there. Owen stood with him until the light came up enough to see the hay he hadn't put out. Then he went in the house, got the notebook out of the kitchen drawer, the one with the bull records in it, dates and weights and which cows and how many calves, sat down at the table, wrote something on a clean page, put the notebook back in the drawer, and shut it.

He put his hat on and drove to town, because he couldn't stand in his own kitchen.

Pearl's was the diner, the one block of Soluno with the lights on before anything else, and Owen hadn't sat at that counter on a weekday in years. Pearl had a cup down before his seat hit the stool.

"Honey," she said. "You look like you've been up since Monday."

"Near enough."

"Gary said." She poured. "Said you pulled a leg-back calf at the Bateman place at three this morning and had it on the ground before he'd got his boots on."

"Gary wasn't there."

"Gary's never there, honey. He knows anyway." She set the pot down. "Live?"

"Bull calf. Stood before I left."

"Judge calf, he said."

"Judge calf."

"Course it was. They don't come small off that bull." She topped the cup she'd just filled. "How's the heifer?"

"She'll raise him."

"And Edna?"

"Slept through it."

"Good. That's the one thing that woman does that I'd have told her to do." Two men off the elevator were at the end of the counter with their eggs. Pearl wiped a stretch of counter that didn't need it and said it to the room, flat, the way she said the weather. "A man that'll drive nine miles at two in the morning for somebody else's heifer has got no business driving the nine miles back."

The elevator men ate their eggs. Owen drank his coffee.

"You want the pie? There's a peach left from yesterday."

"It's six in the morning, Pearl."

"Honey, I've served that pie at five and been thanked for it." She went to the pass-through and came back with a plate he hadn't ordered, eggs and sausage, a biscuit split with the gravy over it, and set it down in front of him. "Eat that. All of it."

He ate it. Pearl filled him twice more and didn't ask him one thing. When he was done he put a ten on the counter, and she took it and didn't make change, and he went.

The following Tuesday she was in his alley at twenty past three, on time, hair up under the cap, mouth set, and she got out of her truck and went to the headgate without a word and stood there with her hand on the lever.

"Pairs first," he said. "Twelve. Tag and cut. Then we'll mouth the old ones off the trap."

"I can count twelve."

"Then bring them."

She brought them. She walked the pen the way her daddy had walked it, wide and quiet, and the pairs came up the alley in twos and threes with the calves bawling for their mothers. He worked the tail end. She worked the gate. He called it, she did it, and there wasn't a thing her hands did that wasn't right.

"Catch her."