Page 40 of Devoted

"Cull." She chalked it. "Next is Opal."

"I know who's next."

"Then you know where she goes."

"Catch her and I'll look."

"You looked in February."

"I'm looking again."

"Look all you want," she said, and caught her, and Opal stood in the headgate with her one good eye on him while he read her teeth, and they were fine, and Olivia had chalked her in the good lot before he said so.

"Three's a cull."

"Three's got a calf on her."

"Three's got no teeth."

"Neither did Daddy the last two years, and he ate fine."

He looked up at her over the cow's head. She looked back, level, chalk in her hand, and there was nothing friendly in it, and it was the best thing anybody had said to him in a week.

"Good lot," he said, and she chalked it.

Thursday came in cold, twenty-six on the gauge on his barn at three o'clock, with a wind out of the north that went through a coat, and she was there at twenty past with her sleeves down and no gloves.

"Where's your gloves?"

"Gloves on a lever are how a woman loses a finger. I told you that when I was nineteen."

"I've got a pair in the truck."

"Then wear them."

They worked the last of the heavies through, then the pairs, and by the second hour the steel had a bite to it that came through a man's palm, and she was on the lever every cow. He saw her hands go red. He saw them go white after that, the knuckles bunched on the cold bar, and he said nothing, because she'd have bit him. By the fourth cow after that she brought the lever down and there was blood on it.

"Hold up."

"She's caught. Bring the calf."

"Liv. Hold up."

She looked at her hands. The skin over the knuckles had split across three of them, the way it does in a dry cold, and the blood was running down between her fingers onto the lever.

"It's the cold," she said. "It'll quit."

"It won't quit. Stand there."

"I've got a cow in the chute, Owen."

"She'll keep."

He went to the calving box in the truck and got the tape, and she was still at the lever when he came back up the catwalk. He took her right hand off the bar, and she let him, and he held it in his left and wiped the blood off with his thumb and started the tape at the wrist, wound it up over the knuckles, one, two, three, firm, the way he'd wrap a horse's leg, not tight enough to stop the blood in her, tight enough to hold the skin shut, and tore it, and pressed the end down with his thumb. She stood there. Her breath came warm on the inside of his wrists in the cold, every breath, and neither of them said one word. He took her left hand. It was worse than the right. He turned it over and looked at it and she let him look, and he wrapped that one slower, and she stood there breathing on his wrists and didn't move her hand and didn't pull it back and didn't say his name, and he could feel the pulse in her wrist against his fingers going faster than the cold called for, and his own going with it, and when he'd pressed the last of the tape down he held onto her hand one second past done, and let go.

She put it back on the lever.

"Bring the calf," she said.