Chapter 6: The Barn

The barn was warm and dim, and it smelled of hay, wet hide and iodine.

I had been watching the first-calf heifer in the end pen since midnight.

Iris was sitting on a hay bale beside me with a thermos, her feet tucked under her.

She had come out without being asked, the way she had every night that week.

She wore my old canvas coat over her flannel nightgown and her rubber boots.

"She's tired," she said. "Listen to her."

"She'll do it."

"You said that about the last one."

"And the last one did it."

The heifer groaned and pushed.

Iris was off the bale before I was, kneeling in the straw with her hands ready.

"Feet first," she said. "Both of them. That's right, isn't it?"

"That's right."

"Then we wait for the head."

I looked at her, and the heifer strained again.

Her hands were steady.

She had learned that from me.

The calf came all at once in a rush of fluid and slick black hide, and it lay steaming on the straw.

Iris cleared its nose with two fingers.

It sneezed, and she laughed out loud.

"Jack, look at her!"

"I'm looking."

I was looking at her face.

Her cheeks were pink and her hair was falling out of the braid, and she had blood on her wrist and a smear of it on her jaw.

She was happier than I had seen her in three years.

I was thinking that, and then I was thinking nothing at all.

I took her by the wrist and pulled her up out of the straw.

"What?" she said.

"Come with me."

The tack room is a narrow space at the end of the barn, with a plank door, saddles on racks and a single bulb.

I pulled the door shut behind us and pushed her up against the wall.

She stared at me with her eyes bright.

"Is this a lesson?"

"Take off the coat."

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