Page 68 of Devoted

"No."

"Good. Then it's nine miles from anybody and it stays that way."

"It has so far."

He didn't tell her about the roof. He'd say it with the sun up one day or he wouldn't, and Earl had him at five to one that he wouldn't, and standing on his own porch with her beside him he couldn't have told anybody the odds were wrong.

The road went brown, then dry on the high spots. He squared the plank on the well. She got in the truck, and he got in his side and started it, and they sat with the engine running and the roof in the windshield shining wet.

"Still selling?" he said.

"Ask me in the morning."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

By nine the pens at John's were full of smoke and calves and everybody in two families who could hold a leg, and Olivia was flat on a heifer calf with her knee in its neck.

"Hold her," Remi said, and came down the calf with the vaccine gun. "Hold her, Liv, she's a wiggler."

"I've got her."

"You've got most of her."

"The part that bites."

Remi put the needle in behind the shoulder, pulled it, and was gone. Down the pen Dean sat his sorrel with a rope built, Ainsley sat her own little bay across from him, and between them Jett and Knox had a bull calf by both ends, losing a discussion with it.

"Knox. Head."

"He hasn't got a head. He's all neck."

"Then hold the neck."

"Chase. Iron."

"Coming." Chase came up out of the smoke with the iron glowing, set it on the calf's hip, held it. The calf said what a calf says, and the smell went over the pen. He took it off, looked at it, and went back to his fire.

Levi went by under Olivia's elbow with a bucket of ear tags and no reason to have it. "Miss Bateman, I'm on tags."

"Who put you on tags?"

"Giana," Levi said, like that settled it, and went off toward the fire.

Giana sat on the top rail with a tally book on her knee and a pencil behind her ear, ten years old, looking at the whole pen with her grandmother's eyes. Nobody argued with her book.

"Ninety-four," Giana said.

"Ninety-five," Knox said. "You missed one."

"I didn't miss one. You dragged one twice."

Knox looked at Jett. Jett looked at the calf. "We did drag that one twice."

"Ninety-four," Giana said, and wrote it.

John sat on the porch with his coffee in the hand that still did what he told it. Sixty-seven, one side of him slow. This was the first branding on this place he hadn't run. Helen and Lara went back and forth behind him from the kitchen out to the long tables with the church women. Dean had the pen. He'd had it since September and nobody had had to say so.

Ainsley trotted the bay past and pulled up beside Olivia's calf. "I left something at your mama's this morning," she said. "On the table."