Daisy Tucker and Mr. NYC novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Hayloft

My father met Rhodes at the gate with a shotgun he didn't load.

It was a tradition, he told me later, for any man who came up that road.

He held it crossways.

Rhodes got out of the rental truck in a city overcoat and loafers, with snow coming down on his shoulders.

"Mr. Cartwright."

"Son."

"I'm Rhodes."

"I know who you are. I read the paper." My father looked him up and down. "You got boots?"

"No, sir."

"Huh."

He leaned the gun on the fence.

"Dinner's at six. Chores are at five."

"I'll be there."

"In what?"

"In whatever you lend me."

My father almost smiled.

At five the next morning my husband stood in the barn in the old hired man's boots.

He held a pitchfork on a pole.

I watched Rhodes Hargrove, chairman and chief executive officer, muck the stalls of eleven horses.

He hauled forty-pound bales.

He slipped once in the straw and landed flat on his back.

He lay there, looking at the rafters.

"I think I broke my pride," he said.

I laughed so hard I had to sit on a bucket.

My father leaned in the barn door with a mug of coffee, and for the first time since Sunday, he didn't look worried.

"That's a clean stall," he said to Rhodes.

"Call me Dale."

"I'd have done it different."

"How?"

"Slower."

That evening a heifer started calving in the south shed and the vet was an hour out in the snow.

I pulled the calf.

Rhodes held the lantern and the rope.

When the calf slid into the straw, slick and shaking, he said "Oh."

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