Page 62 of Devoted

Eleven years, the first week of April, before school. Owen's truck and the gooseneck behind it with the black bull standing in it, up the drive slow so as not to rattle him, and Owen out of the cab and the ramp down and Judge walking off it into her trap like he owned it, because he did. Owen had made that handshake himself at this gate the spring after the funeral, nineteen years old, and kept it every April since without a word from anybody or a dollar over the first year's number.

Tuesday she stood at the kitchen window at daylight with her coffee and her school clothes on and watched the road.

The road was empty. The sign was on the fence by the cattle guard. The pump ran. The trap was full of pairs with orange numbers on their hips and the light came up on all of it, and no truck came around the bend, and no trailer, and nothing was going to, because the cows in that trap were sold in lots and there wasn't anything for a bull to do out there but stand and look at them, and Owen Royston knew that better than she did. At nine his truck would come up this drive with nothing behind it, to put her cows up in the trap for a man Charla Denton was bringing at ten to price them, and she'd be at school with the letter N. She stood there anyway till the coffee was cold.

Edna came in on her cane and looked at the window, and at the road, and at her.

"He's not late," Edna said. "He's done."

"I know it, Mama."

"You knew it Saturday. You bought the cubes anyway."

"Duke eats them."

"Duke's Ainsley's." Edna sat down at the table. "Quit standing there. You'll be late yourself."

She put the cup in the sink and went out and fed the horse she'd already sold.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The notebook was open on his kitchen table at nine, bull records in the front, water in the back, and Owen sat over the back pages with his supper coffee gone cold. He didn't need to read them. He'd written every line.

The first entry was the second of March, her well, a weighted line dropped down the casing till it went slack, the cord marked with tape at the top of the pipe. Every week since, the tape went further into the dark before the weight found water. Six feet in five weeks. His own two wells west of hers, read the same day every week, and the mark hadn't moved a finger's width.

Her pump ran four minutes before it caught now. In January it had been one. The green tank lost two feet at night and got one back by morning, and the water tasted like somebody else's ground.

He turned to the page with Jett on it, and under it the part he'd written Wednesday, what Jett said when Owen went back with a question like he'd been told to. The crews that put the new wells down weren't Clay's. Clay had hired them off a Burchall contract, Burchall's name on the door of every rig, four months on Royston ground while Owen fed hay a section away and didn't look west.

He shut the notebook. He could take the numbers to a well man with a list, or to his father, who'd hired the crews, or to the one man he knew who read water for a living, and that man had a Burchall truck in his daddy's yard and Owen's word in his pocket.

He put the notebook in his shirt and went to find his hat.

John's shop had one bulb on a cord over the bench, and Brody was under it sorting a coffee can of bolts by size for no reason a grown man would admit to.

"Twice in a month," Brody said, and didn't get up. "Dad's going to think I've been paying you."

"Where is he?"

"Bed. Nine o'clock, every night, like the army. Dean's got the house lights and Helen's got the porch, and I've got a can of bolts and a lizard." He pointed with a bolt at the window ledge, where a little grey one sat with its throat going. "He's been up there since Tuesday. I named him."

"What'd you name him?"

"Owen. Four days on that ledge, looking at the same thing, and he hasn't done one thing about it."

Owen took the notebook out of his shirt, opened it to the back, and set it on the bench facing him.

Brody didn't pick it up. He put his hands on the bench either side of it and read a page in one look, then the next. The grin went off him. Owen hadn't seen that face since they were seventeen, reading a calf's feet in a snowstorm.

"These are yours."

"Since March."

"That's a well casing. Weighted line, once a week. Whose?"

"Bateman."

"Two hundred feet."