Page 44 of Devoted

“Sixty-two. He’s got a wart on that ear. Tag the other one.”

“I can see the wart, Owen.”

“Then you know which ear.”

“Caught. She’s a kicker, mind your hand.”

“I’ve had it kicked before.”

“Not by this one.”

He got the calf. She let the cow out. The gap in the tape on her left hand had opened up by the fourth cow, the bar was cold on the split skin, she didn’t say so, and at the seventh cow she caught him looking at it and he went back to the calf. Thursday sat in the alley between them and neither of them touched it.

She’d asked him in the barn. She’d gotten her answer, and she wasn’t asking again, not in his alley and not anywhere, and holding to that cost her something every hour she stood on his catwalk and it was going to keep costing.

“That’s the trap,” he said, at the last one.

“Yeah, that’s the trap.” She put the chalk down. “Mama says thank you for the pairs.”

“Tell her she’s welcome.”

“I will.”

She went to her truck, and he stood in the alley and watched her go.

Sunday she came in from feeding with hay in her hair and found Brody Royston at her mother’s kitchen table with a fork in his hand and a slab of pecan pie in front of him the size of a Bible.

“Well, Bateman.”

“Well, Brody.”

“Your mama’s trying to kill me.”

“She’s been trying for years. Nobody’s dead yet.” Olivia hung her cap on the hook and looked at her mother, sitting across from him with her cane against the table and a look on her face Olivia hadn’t seen since her daddy was alive. “Mama. You gave him the good plate.”

“He came all the way out here.”

“He’s got a truck. It’s not exactly a pilgrimage.”

“He’s been gone seven years eating out of a can,” Edna said, “and he came to my kitchen before anybody else’s. Sit down. There’s coffee.”

“I fed the horse, I need to look at the pump.”

“The pump’s been doing what it’s doing since New Year’s.” Edna pointed the cane at the chair. “Sit.”

Olivia sat. Brody pushed the pie plate two inches her way with one finger and went on eating off it. Edna asked him about Africa. He told her the one with the lizard and the broom, shorter than at Harvey’s, tuned for a woman of seventy-one, and Edna laughed out loud in her own kitchen, and Olivia sat with her taped hands around a coffee cup and watched him do it and couldn’t hate him for it. He’d done it at fourteen in this kitchen with the same woman and a different pie.

“Well,” he said, when the plate was clean. “I’m going to go look at this pump with your daughter, Miss Edna. As a geologist, I think I’m qualified.”

“But a geologist studies rocks.”

“And a pump sits on rocks,” Brody said, and Edna laughed again.

Outside the wind had come back some. He walked beside her down to the pens, put his forearms on the top rail of the pipe fence, and looked at the trap, the twenty-two pairs Owen had hauled over Friday grazing along the far side of it with their calves. He didn’t say anything about the pump, and she hadn’t expected him to.

“Good calves,” he said.

“They’re Judge calves. They come good or they come dead.”