Page 7 of Devoted

It didn’t matter what Brody felt now. Nobody would understand that, so nobody had ever been asked to. A man does not take a thing off his own blood because the blood stopped looking at it.

Owen worked the rest of the morning, and it didn’t help, so after dinner he loaded the stretcher and the wire and drove out to his west sections and worked fence.

It was the stretch that ran down to the Bateman line, four sections of Royston grass ending at her mother’s sagging five-strand. He’d been meaning to get to it before April anyway, the way he’d been meaning to get to it before April for eleven years, every year the program had been his, always the west fence, always before the bull went over. If anybody had ever asked why the fence a quarter mile from his own cattle got more of his winter than any fence he owned, they’d have got an answer about wire, and it would’ve been true, and it wouldn’t have been the answer.

There was no bull going over this April.

He worked until the light quit, and east across her mother’s grass the Bateman place sat small in the grey with the kitchen light on. He did not look at it more than a few times an hour. The morning had stayed in his hands. Two seconds of her weight on his arm, and his body had carried it all day, low and insistent, wanting the rest of her, and he stretched wire until his shoulders burned because the burn was the only want in reach he could do anything about.

Somewhere across her mother’s grass a pump was running. It was still running twenty minutes later, and he marked it the way a stockman marks a sound that ought to have quit, and filed it with everything else in that direction he had no business tending. He was still there, tying off in the dark, when he remembered supper.

The big house had its lights on all down the front porch, and his was the last truck in the yard.

His mother kept Sunday supper like the county kept Christmas, and mid-week supper besides when the weather held everybody close, and you came, over the cattle guard with her family’s name in iron above it, to the long table that sat twelve without adding a leaf. Owen came in through the mudroom with his hands raw from the wire, and the noise of his family met him in the hall. Knox at volume. Ainsley calling him a liar in the pleasantest way. His mother’s laugh over the top of it. Jace’s chair stood empty, him in Midland on the contracts until Friday.

His father was carving at the head of the table, and looked up.

Clay Royston was fifty-nine years old and looked like Owen would look, everybody said so, and he took in his third son, the hour, the raw hands, the cold coming off him, and set the knife down.

"There he is," Knox said. "We were fixing to drag the tank for you."

"We’d have sent Mason to look," Ainsley said, "but Mason eats at the Merritt place now. We lost him to flowers."

"Fence," Owen said.

"In January," his father said. "In the dark."

"Wanted it done."

"I had four sons I could account for." Clay picked the knife back up, and there was no heat in it. There was attention, which off his father was worse. "Sit down. Your mother held the good part."

He sat. Ainsley pushed the potatoes at him and looked at him a second longer than the potatoes called for. His mother filled his glass and touched his shoulder on the way past, one press of her hand, the way she’d done since he was six and came in off the yard the day the old dog didn’t. Nobody asked him anything. They were his family, and they knew what asking got out of Owen, which was less.

"So the horse," Ainsley said, to the table. "Tell them what you paid."

"I’m not telling them what I paid." Knox pointed his fork at her. "It’s an investment."

"It’s a gelding with one bad eye."

"He’s got character."

"He bit the man selling him," Ainsley said. "While Knox was counting out the money. The man was honest enough to let it happen where we could see it, and Knox paid him anyway, and now we own a horse that holds a grudge."

"Every good horse holds a grudge," Knox said. "Dad. Tell her."

"Leave me out of it," Clay said, comfortable, a man who had been leaving himself out of it since before either of them could walk. "Owen. That front’s supposed to be rain by Thursday. Real rain, they’re saying, first since October. You want to move the heifers up before it gets here or after?"

"Before."

"That’s what I said." Clay nodded at the table like a point had been won. "Knox can help you, seeing as his investment won’t let anybody catch it."

"He’ll come around," Knox said.

"So will Thursday," said his father.

"And he already bit Gary," Ainsley said. "Tell them that part. Two weeks that horse has been on the place, and Gary came out to float his teeth, and now Gary’s bill has a line on it that says handling. Twenty years he’s been our vet and he’s never billed us for handling."

"He was fine by the time Gary left."