Agnes slammed the cover of her book. “Agnes,” I said. Those fingers of mine pulsed as if my heart beat in them.
“Another chance,” I repeated, as if such a thing were easy. “With the girls gone?”
The kitchen door banged, a rush of wind. Ray stomped his boots on the mat and found us in the parlor. He held up his hands to the fire. His cheeks glowed as if feverish, his bad hand gnarled in the light of the flame. Without a word, he dropped another piece of wood on the pile.
“Ray, did you see to the stockyard fence?” I asked. “I thought I saw a post down.”
Ray grunted and swiped at a lock of hair on his forehead. He put on his cap.
“Aren’t you staying?” Patricia asked.
“Can’t,” he said. He brushed by her hand and went out. Past the windows again, my brother stumbled through the drifts, a blur of darkness.
“He misses them too,” Patricia said. “I know you don’t believe me, but that man is just as sorry as the rest of us.”
It was late the next morning when I spied Ray far off in the pasture, kicking at the snow. It was a blustery day, ice in my collar. In such weather as this, we feared for storm. Ray kneaded at the back of his neck. As I walked closer, the hindquarters of our brood cow showed by the barbed fence, her legs twisted and bloodied where she must have fallen. Ray took the animal’s head in his hands and tried to move it, tried to place his fingers beneath her stomach, but she was frozen in the snowmelt. He stood, the wind hard against him.
I touched his shoulder.
“Nan.” He wiped his eyes before he turned.
“Is she gone?”
He nodded.
“What was it?”
“Caught her foot on the barbs. I don’t know why she would have wandered so far. Went off by instinct and got into trouble. Probably didn’t see the wire until it was too late.” He lifted her hoof with the wire wound tight, the skin bloody and bitten through to the bone. Her mouth was bloody too. “She tried to free herself.”
I touched the cow’s flank. “What should we do?”
“I can’t carry her myself. She’s well frozen.”
“What about the horses?”
“We’d have to clear a path for them all the way from the corrals.”
I sighed. “She couldn’t have been out more than one night. Agnes told me she heard her calf crying only this morning.”
Ray nodded.
“We’ll have to leave her.”
“I thought of that. But it could be May before we’d have her out. The dogs might get her. Wolves, too.”
“Then the wolves will get her.”
“This close to the barn, those wolves might think there’s more.” Ray went quiet, looking into the white of the fields. “Get the knives.”
“It’s too cold, Ray. You’ll get nothing from her.”
He studied the cow again, letting her chin rest on the lip of his boot as if he didn’t want to drop her snout. “Just bring them, why don’t you?”
I walked back to the barn. A butchering, so late in the season, when even the river was frozen to a standstill. My lantern we would need and torches. Something to keep a fire going. Inside, Agnes sat cross-legged in the hay, the calf quiet at her knees. It was loose-legged and weak, far too young to be feeding by hand.
“Will she eat?” I asked.
Agnes shook her head.
I opened a canvas sack and loaded our saw and knives. “We found the mother by the fence.”
My sister looked up. “What are you doing?”
I threw the sack over my shoulder. Agnes had never done a butchering, had never seen more than a chicken on a block or used such a knife herself. None of my sisters had.
“We need your help.”
Through the morning and into the early afternoon, we stayed by the fence with the cow. She was hard as bone, but Ray thought if we held the torches close, we could free just enough, and she wouldn’t be such a waste. There might be something warm in her yet.
“Too good an animal to go,” he said. Lee would have said the same.
His gloves turned bloody, his face grim. He didn’t look at anything but the box saw in his hand. I held my knife, but it was Ray who cut at the animal with a vengeance, bent to get it done. The hide was thick with ice, but the saw was sharp, and when it finally broke through the belly, it cut straight and fine. Deeper in, the innards steamed. Ray stopped to shake his hand and started again. My own grip didn’t have such strength, my cuts thin, and always the rush of bile in my throat. Agnes crouched near us with a torch, her head turned away. Ray had to remind her to hold the fire close, to look at what she was doing, but she never looked much. I tried to distract myself with numbers and meals — how this work might help us in the months to come, how good the meat would be to store in the smokehouse, saving another animal down the line. The cow’s face had turned an icy gray, the ground around her melted to mud. Soon there was only the stillness of the fields and the snow stained under our boots. Agnes pressed her hand over her nose.
“Ray, isn’t it enough?” I asked.
He stretched his fingers. “Agnes, if you’re just going to stand there. ”
“I’m holding the torch as close as I can.”
“She’s worried about the calf is all,” I said.
Ray grimaced. His chin was trembling, but he bent to cut again.
“Agnes,” I explained, “you have to try.”
Her eyes shone. “Lee’s the one who should be here.”
“You know very well where Lee is,” I answered.
“It’s not fair, all of them leaving us to do everything. What if they never come back?”
“Stop sniveling,” Ray said.
“But Lee is coming,” I told her. “As soon as he can.”
Ray wiped his nose. “She doesn’t want to do the work.”
“You never thought about going to Chicago.” Agnes glared at him. “You never even tried.”
Ray wrenched the torch in her grip closer to the open stomach. She nearly fell.
“Don’t you care about anything?” Agnes cried. She dropped the torch. The skin on her fingers had blistered under the flame. I pulled her quickly to her knees, buried her fist in the snow, but she only cried out again. “You don’t, do you?”
Ray raised his arm to strike her, but I caught his elbow.
“Ray!”
The shout came from far across the yard, a figure pressing through the snow. Father was bound in his coat and hat, walking with the wind. When he reached us, he tore the saw from my brother and bent to cutting, signaling to me with his chin to take up the torch. “Agnes, go home,” he said, his eyes down. He cut with steady blows. “Nan, the torch.” I lit it fresh. Soon Ray joined in with my knife, and Agnes stood in the snow, sniffling. She spun toward the house, her skirts wet and her hair sticking to her cheeks.
“I should go after her,” I said. “She’s burned.”
Father lurched back and mopped his forehead. The cow was nearly quartered now, the meat greasy in the snow. He stared at me, his eyes cold, such a lost look on his face with the frost clinging to his beard. I bent my head and held the torch close.
Later in the washhouse, I leaned against the wall, if only to rest. We had finished with the cow well enough, and the house through the open door blazed with light, but I wasn’t in any hurry to reach it, not in any hurry to sit at the dinner table and bring a fork to my mouth. I closed my eyes. It was rags I needed to dress Agnes’ burn. We kept them in a bucket in the washhouse for scalding. They would want bleaching, yes, but already they would be torn in long slivers, a dozen or so for changing day and night. I dug into the bucket. These were our old long johns and underskirts, our coarser linens. Most were too threadbare to take a needle to again — though I had often tried — too outgrown to pass onto another child. Despite my every stitch, they ended up rags. Now from the bottom of the pile came something else. In my hand was one of Myrle’s good dresses, a blue crepe I had made her for Easter the year before.