She kissed his fingers. When she began telling him what she had not known she would say—that she loved him, and Henry too, and wasn’t it possible to love two men at once—she saw that he was sleeping.
The next day McKay’s breathing worsened and Pinkey called Dr. Hoffman at the hospital. Betsy, the nurse, answered the phone.
“Betsy, I think McKay Allison over here has taken a real bad turn for the worse. Where’s Doc Hoffman, sleepin’?”
“Who is this?” she asked.
“Pinkey, over at the Allison ranch.”
There was a silence. “You’re sober, aren’t you?”
“Yea, I’m sober and we’ve got a problem with this kid. Could you tell the damned sawbones to get over here soon as possible. I think he needs something … he can hardly breathe.”
“Right away, Pinkey,” she said seriously.
“That’s better …,” Pinkey said, his voice trailing off.
He hung up the phone and dialed another number.
“Who’s in charge over that outfit? I need to speak to him.”
“The Camp director?”
“You bet …”
“I’ll ring Mr. Roberts.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
When Mr. Roberts came on the line, Pinkey tried to make his voice sound gruff and official.
“This is the cow foreman over at the Allison Ranch. I’d like … well, you’ve got a gal over there who’s being called for by my boss, McKay Allison. He’s awful sick and they don’t know if he’s going to make it through the night. He’s been callin’ and callin’ for her.… It’s Mr. Abe’s daughter. How about letting her come on over for a very short visit to a kid who might die. He’s kind of all alone out here, parents are dead, see, and it’s just me and one other hired man is looking after him. I’d be obliged.”
When the details of the visit were agreed upon, Pinkey gassed up McKay’s truck and drove out of the yard.
Bobby watched Pinkey from the bedroom window, wondering where he was going. He applied another hot compress to McKay’s chest. The room smelled like eucalyptus and the steam made his hair damp and his breathing came hard. He’d been up all night with McKay. Sometimes McKay talked—and sometimes he called out for people, once for his mother, a few times for his dog, and for Mariko.…
Who is this woman? Bobby wondered. To think of McKay with a Nisei … what a strange thought.
“Bob …?” Pinkey called out.
Bobby heard footsteps in the hall.
“Bob, I’ve brought Mariko Abe.”
Bobby looked at the woman. She was taller than any Japanese woman he had ever seen, but then, she was American, he reminded himself. Her stern face frightened him. No, this was not a woman like his mother, and she did not bow to him as he approached.
“Come this way,” Bobby said.
Mariko looked at Bobby, equally astonished. “Who are you?” she asked, squeezing past Pinkey.
“Hell, that’s Bobby,” Pinkey interjected. “Everyone knows Bobby.…”
“Not from the Camp?” Mariko asked.
Bobby looked at her. “No. Not from Camp.”
“God, he’s been here since the Punic Wars,” Pinkey said.
Bobby looked Mariko up and down. “McKay never say you so tall.”
Mariko leaned close to Bobby. “Is he going to die?” she whispered.
Bobby stared at her wide-eyed.
She went to McKay.
Kneeling beside his bed, she stroked his forehead. “I’m here; I’m here now.”
McKay opened his eyes and searched her face.
“I met Bobby,” she said.
Finally he smiled. She put her hand on his chest. “Breathe,” she said. “You must breathe.”
The fever went down. After, McKay had the sensation of having passed through a cavernous body, like the body of a horse. The day he saw Pinkey sitting in a chair by his bed, whittling on a piece of wood, he knew he would live. Pinkey looked up.
“Hell, you’ve been in that bed so long, I thought you was homesteading,” he drawled. “Them heifers are starting to calve.…”
“Turn on the lights,” McKay whispered. He sat up. “Who’s calving nights?” he asked. His chest rattled when he talked.
“Madeleine.”
“Then what are you doing up?” he said, clearing his throat.
Pinkey laughed. “God, you are growly … you must be healing up.”
McKay looked out the window. It was night and he could see no moon, no stars. “I feel like I’ve been out somewhere and came back in.”
Pinkey leaned back and rocked. The piece of pine he was trying to whittle split and he put the two pieces in his pocket.
“Bobby’s all fired up about something,” he said, wiping the blade of his pocket knife on his pants.
“About what?”
“Some girl you was calling for.”
“What girl?” McKay asked indignantly.
Pinkey grinned. “You tell me.”
McKay fell silent. Pinkey fumbled with the pieces of wood in his pocket. Then he looked up. McKay’s face was contorted.
“Yea, that’s the one.”
“I didn’t, did I?” McKay asked, embarrassed.
“You bet your ass you did. I had a hell of a time jerking her loose from that sonofabitchin’ camp to come see you.”
“Come on, Pinkey …”
“Hell kid, we were giving you your last rites.”
“She came here?” he asked incredulously.
“Sure did.”
McKay slumped back and pulled the covers up on his chest.
“What did you go do that for?”
Pinkey threw the pieces of wood into the wastebasket.
“Well, I’ll be go-to-hell … you could show a little gratitude. If I’m ever about to die, you better bring me some girls … lots of them.…”
“Hell, Pinkey, I’d have to blindfold them to get them near you.…”
Pinkey grinned. “Why do you think them lights was out in here?”
Winter nights in Wyoming come early like a form of blindness, Madeleine thought, even though she knew there was nothing to see when you had a husband missing in action for one year, then two, because there was no landscape in which to imagine him, no future to contemplate, and, like an iceberg, very little of the present showed. She was happy working nights because she couldn’t sleep. She thought night fed off her, clung to her, tarnished her.
Every two hours she and Pinkey checked the heifer pen, their flashlights riding over the bodies of pregnant cows, and the little circle of light worked as a sounding line with which to fathom her future and the darkness. At least, that’s what she told Pinkey, to which he retorted, “Hell, you don’t look calvy at all.”
She saw no sky or mountains, and hardly any faces other than Pinkey’s that winter. Jesse and Bobby worked days. Watching the young heifers struggle in labor—switching their tails and rubbing their rumps against trees—Madeleine came to think waiting was one of the things that go with being a woman, and she hated it. But during a war, everyone is waiting, everyone is powerless, everyone is offering himself up to become dead in some way—all because someone who had power felt impotent and struck out against the feeling. But by the end of calving she came to think of waiting as a slow gathering, a prodigiousness. She had exhausted all her thoughts about Henry. She tried to visualize “missing in action” and ended up with a string of unkempt images: Henry tossed into the air by a blast; Henry doing a nose dive out of an airplane; Henry’s swept-back hair.…
“Pinkey,” Madeleine yelled. “We’ve got one here.”
The heifer had fallen to her knees and rolled onto her side. She lifted her head and bellowed loudly and her sides heaved. When the feet showed they were upside down, the hooves pointing skyward, not down toward the ground as they should have been.
“There’s a backward calf here,” she yelled out again, rolling her sleeve up above her elbow.
She looked up. Pinke
y rode through the heifer pen. Two bottles with black nipples for suckling calves stuck out of his saddlebags: one milk, one whiskey. He stepped off his horse with a groan.
“I’m feeling kinda gant myself,” he mumbled and reached for one of the bottles. He opened his mouth and stuck the long black nipple between his lips and drank.
“Jesus, Pinkey … help me push this calf back.”
Pinkey stood at the back of the cow and peered under her tail. “Does he feel real big?”
“No.”
“Last time I tried to turn one of them calves around I got him all tangled up. Let’s just go with it now,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
Madeleine pulled her arm out and held the two back hooves in place while Pinkey attached the rope, which was tied hard and fast to his saddle. He looked at his mare. “Eleanor … you ready?”
Madeleine rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Let’s get this calf out before he drowns in there.”
Pinkey shook the rope which stretched between the horse and the calf’s feet. “Hey, you old bitch, wake up,” he growled.
The mare backed slowly and the rope stretched taut. Pinkey and Madeleine supported their feet on the cow’s rump. The calf’s back legs came, then the body, and the neck.…
“Eleanor … back up …,” Pinkey commanded, and the mare buckled her haunches, dug in, and pulled.
When the calf’s head popped out, the cow bellowed again and looked around. Madeleine slipped the rope off the calf’s hind feet and cleaned his mouth with her finger, then stuck a straw up one nostril to get the breathing reflex going.
“Christ, he sounds worse than McKay. Let’s swing him.”
They stood and held the calf by the back legs, then swung him in a half circle and laid him down again. The calf coughed and shook his head, and after the cow stood and began licking him off they swung him again and cleared his mouth, until finally his breathing came more easily.
When the snow started again, the flakes were small and hard because of the cold. While they were pulling the backward calf, another one was born in the corner of the corral and froze to the ground before the cow could lick him off. Pinkey took the gunny sack out of the other saddlebag and rubbed the calf dry, then threw him onto Eleanor, who carried him to the barn.
They had been working thirty-two nights in a row, and there were fourteen or so more to go, Madeleine thought as she sat on the bench by the stove and rubbed the calf with a towel. It was a little black bull calf—black because the neighbor’s Angus bull had bred a few of their Hereford cows—and as she rubbed him she thought he looked like Henry—stocky, shiny, dark, hard-muscled—but the way he breathed reminded her of McKay.
Between births they suckled weak calves, milked out cows with tight bags, doctored calves for scours and pneumonia, and logged in pertinent information about each calf: birth weight, mother’s number, sex, color, and remarks about calving problems when they occurred. There had been a calf with a crooked neck, a strangled calf, one with no tail, one with crooked legs; calves whose presentations at birth were breech, backward, one leg back, upside down; or else calves too big to be pulled, requiring a cesarean.
It wasn’t just the problems Madeleine noted in the notebook, but temperament and behavior of cows and calves—how long it took to stand and suck, how aggressive or sluggish they were, how quickly the cow accepted them, how much milk she had, how difficult she was to handle in the corral—so that in the fall, when they shipped the calves, McKay could also cull the cows whose traits he did not care to perpetuate: extreme belligerence, big teats, bad mother, calves with birth weights too high or with deformities.
From the bench by the stove, Madeleine could see Pinkey riding through the corrals, stopping every once in a while to pull the nippled bottle of Cobb’s Creek from his saddlebag and satisfy his thirst. She had laughed the day he tried to suckle a calf with the wrong bottle. He jammed the nipple into the calf’s mouth, and when the calf refused again and again he let out a string of expletives longer than the calf was tall. She tapped him on the shoulder and gave him the bottle containing milk.
The week the weather turned to twenty below, she and Pinkey built a small pen around the stove and filled it with weak calves. They opened all the gates in and out of the sheds and spread straw anywhere the cows found shelter—under trees, in ditches. Jesse and Bobby fed oat straw along with grass hay and cake—a protein supplement—and for two nights no calves were born at all.
“I believe they’ve closed up shop for a while,” Pinkey said about the cows. Madeleine wondered if it was cold where Henry was—if he was—then she wondered what it felt like to be dead.
Pinkey brought in a heifer. She had been in labor for a few hours and was straining hard. He leaned toward his mare’s ear. “Eleanor, you got your pulling hat on?” The horse flicked one ear back and one ear forward toward the cow. He made a loop and roped the cow around the neck and one front foot, and she rolled onto her side. When the calf’s front feet appeared, Madeleine grabbed them and put the loop of a second rope around them. When the calf’s head came, they saw how big it was. The cow strained and moaned. She was opened up as far as she could go without tearing, and when the shoulders hit against her pelvic bone, Madeleine poured mineral oil over her hands and tried to loosen the opening.
“Come on, baby … push a little harder,” she said.
When the shoulders were out they let the cow rest a few minutes, because they knew the hips would be bigger. Madeleine reapplied the oil, then Pinkey told Eleanor to back up and the rope went tight. When the hips came, the cow bellowed. Madeleine could see where the skin was tearing.
“Pull real steady now, Eleanor,” Pinkey said to his horse. Then he turned to the half-emerged calf. “Come on, you little hip-locked sonofabitch … squeeze on out of there,” and the calf came.
Madeleine tore the delicate placental sac. It was blue, and from its confines the calf lifted his white face and shook his ears.
“Hello, you little rat,” a voice said.
Madeleine and Pinkey looked up. McKay pulled the cashmere scarf from his mouth and smiled.
When McKay gained back some of his strength, he worked the night shift with Madeleine, and Pinkey worked days. The cold had lifted, then a chinook blew in and the tops of all the drifts loosened, and the snow underfoot melted to mud. Sometimes he was so weak he lay down on the straw with a cow and calf, and Madeleine would find him there, bundled up and sleeping.
The rest of the calves came more easily despite swings of weather—from short blizzards to snow-melting days. McKay kept his cashmere scarf wrapped around his neck and mouth and wore four sweaters under a long wool coat. He made sure the coffeepot was full and the potbellied stove hot and hung a piece of baling wire where they dried their gloves in the rising heat. The cold and wind chapped their faces and hands, and the tips of their fingers cracked painfully. They dipped their fingers into a can of axle grease McKay found in the shop.
“Ain’t this ranching life glamorous?” Madeleine quipped.
McKay dabbed grease on her cheeks and nose.
She looked at him. “Are you warm enough?”
“Yes,” he snapped. He was tired of being mothered. He looked at Madeleine sheepishly. “I’ve always loved your nose.”
She butted her forehead against his shoulder, over and over, and McKay put his arm around her.
“I’m so tired …,” she said. “God, I’m tired.…”
17
Abe-san beckoned me in as I was on my way to dinner. When I stepped inside, I saw three bowls and three pairs of chopsticks set neatly on a straw mat.
“You eat here tonight,” he said gruffly, and I sat where he told me to sit.
He and Mariko had cooked a pot of rice on the wood stove. On top of rice, we had Chinese greens which he had grown under a cold frame made from old windows. He stirred the rice, greens and three eggs into a frying pan, then served it. Mariko made Mormon tea from the twigs of a plant that grows here, muc
h milder than the usual green tea.
“You know these?” Abe-san asked, picking up his chopsticks, and when I nodded, laughing, he looked relieved—one less thing to teach me.
We ate in silence and I found it pleasant after the din of the mess hall. But I felt a little guilty, thinking how much Mom and Pop would have liked that meal.
When I put my bowl down, Abe-san started laughing at me. He put his hands on his thighs and lifted his chin. What strange, delicate noises he makes! Then he looked at me.
“Your mind—so loud!” he said. “Must learn to be quiet.”
His remark bewildered me. Here, I’d been quiet as a mouse all during the meal.
“No … I mean all the time, it’s noisy. You come back—sit with me.”
With my eyes, I appealed to Mariko for help, but she gave me none.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
“When should I come?”
“Three.”
“Tomorrow?”
Abe-san laughed.
“This morning.”
Had to hide the alarm under my pillow. What was I doing, getting up in the middle of the night for this crazy old man? Dressed and went next door at three. Tried to open the door, but couldn’t. It must have been barricaded. “What the hell?” I said aloud. Tried again. Wasn’t he in there? No luck, so I stood in the middle of the frozen lane. Then I saw Abe-san’s face at the window. His hair was loose and he gestured angrily for me to go away.
“What’s wrong with you?” I yelled. “Are you crazy or something?”
Just then, Mom came out. She shook her head when she saw me because she thought I was drunk, then shuffled to the latrine, stooped over.
The next day I didn’t see Abe-san at all. He wasn’t in when I finally woke up and he wasn’t at meals. Dropped by Iwasaka’s. Emi was there, showing off a new dress she had made to one of Ben’s sisters, but really, she was flirting with me. Had to work on the paper for a few hours, ate dinner, then went to bed. In the middle of the night I felt someone shaking me. “Get up. Get dressed.” I thought it was Mom or Pop, but it was Abe-san. So I dressed and followed him. When I asked what had happened the night before, he looked at me as if he hadn’t heard.
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