Take My Name

The cows had been fed since ten, and Marisol Kerr had been telling herself since ten-thirty that she would go in and eat something.

She sat in the idling feed truck at the top of the lane instead, both hands on the wheel, watching the tail end of the herd drift off the windrow of hay she'd rolled out along the flat. A hundred and forty pairs' worth of mothers, though they weren't pairs yet, all that weight walking around out there carrying next year inside it. The heavies had come up first and were eating with their heads down and their backs to the wind, steam lifting off them in the flat February light. Beyond them the ground ran white and grey-brown down to the willows, and past the willows the valley opened out, and past that the mountains stood up on the west edge of the world with their tops in a cloud that had been sitting there since Sunday.

It was a good sight. She made herself look at it a minute longer than she wanted to, because if she stopped doing that she'd be a woman who just fed cows.

Her breath had already fogged the inside of the windshield. She wiped a hole in it with the side of her glove, put the truck in gear, and went down the lane to get the mail.

The Half Moon's mailbox sat at the county road on a post Danny had set in concrete the first spring they were married, on the theory that a post set in concrete would outlive the both of them. He'd been half right. The box hung a little now where the county plow had clipped it two winters back and she had straightened it with a fence bar and never got around to doing it properly. She left the truck running, walked over in the ruts, and pulled the door down.

Feed-store flyer. The co-op statement she already knew the number on. A seed catalogue addressed to Mr. D. Kerr, which was the third one this winter, and she had stopped calling about those because it turned out that saying he's deceased to a stranger with a headset on was a chore she could simply decline to perform.

Then the mail Jeep came up out of the dip from the Redfern end of the road and stopped nose to nose with her truck, and Arlie Voss put his window down into the cold and said, "Hang on, Marisol, I've got one wants signing."

He handed the clipboard out to her and a pen with a plastic flower taped to it, and she signed her name on a line without reading what was printed over it, the way everybody does. Arlie peeled the green-and-white card off the front of the envelope, licked his thumb, laid the card in the tray beside him, and gave her the envelope: her name typed out in full — Marisol A. Kerr, operator, Half Moon Ranch — and a return address in Billings she had never seen before.

"Cold one," he said, and put his window up, and went on down the road to the Halvorsens'.

Odell, it said. V. Odell.

She stood in the road with the wind coming up her sleeves and turned the envelope over twice, the way you turn over a calf you're pretty sure is already gone, hoping the other side will tell you different.

Certified mail was never a person. It was always a process, already in motion somewhere, and by the time the paper found you it had been moving for a while, and now there was a card with her own signature on it going back to Billings to tell somebody the exact day it had caught her.

She got back in the truck and drove up to the house with the envelope on the seat beside her, not touching it, and the whole quarter mile she was doing the arithmetic of who could be sending her anything at all in February. The bank was current, barely. The FSA paperwork had gone in on time. Her insurance was paid to July. The only thing out there with her name on it that she couldn't put a hand on was the lease.

And the lease was fine. The lease had been fine since the day Danny won it.

The house was cold because she kept it cold. She came into the kitchen through the mudroom with the envelope in her teeth, hauled the door shut against the wind with her shoulder, and stood on the mat a second, stamping.

Danny's coat still hung on the second hook. She had moved it once, about a year in, into the closet in the spare room, and then two nights later she had got up at eleven o'clock at night and gone and hung it back on the hook, and she had never told a living soul about either trip.

The kitchen smelled like coffee gone to tar on the burner and like the wet-wool-and-molasses smell that came off her own clothes in the warm. She set the mail on the table, sat down, and got the letter open with her thumb without taking her gloves off, which was how she knew, later, exactly how the whole thing had gone: that she'd read it four times through with a pair of dirty roping gloves on and never once thought to take them off.

The letterhead was a name and a Billings address, no firm behind it. The typing was clean. The tone was — courteous. That was the first thing that snagged on her. Nobody courteous had ever sent her a certified letter.

Dear Mrs. Kerr, it said.

My uncle, Emmett Dray, died on the 14th of November. I am the trustee of his estate. I am writing to you because the Half Moon Ranch holds a grazing lease from him on the creek-bottom pasture south of the county road — the ground the neighbours call the Dray bottom — and because that lease comes to the end of its term this year.

Marisol read that far and felt her shoulders come down about an inch. Emmett had been ninety-one and had been dying for four years the way stubborn old men die, in installments, with the phone off the hook. She had taken him half a beef every fall and he had taken it like a tax and once, exactly once, told her that her husband had been a decent hand and a fool about horses. The lease had been won at that old man's kitchen table, out of four envelopes opened with a butter knife and the numbers read out loud, and it had run through Emmett's dying the way it had run through everything else. She had assumed — she looked at the word in her own head and did not like it — she had assumed that the renewal would come across a kitchen table somewhere with a niece who wanted the cheque to keep coming.

The instrument my uncle executed provides an option to renew, exercisable by written notice not later than turnout. He drafted the operative language himself and declined counsel on the point. I enclose it exactly as written, as I am obliged to administer it as he wrote it, and I do not wish you to hear it from me in paraphrase.

There was a second sheet. She turned to it.

It was a photocopy, and it was not typed. It was Emmett Dray's own hand, hard-pressed ballpoint going up the ruled line at the end of every sentence the way it had on every check he ever wrote her, and it said:

The option to renew shall run to the operator and spouse, the said ground being intended by me to be run as a family outfit and not otherwise, and to no other person, assignee or estate.

Marisol read it.

Then she read it again, because the first pass had gone through her like cold water through a screen and left nothing behind, and on the second pass she caught on and spouse and stopped there and could not get past it.

Third time she read the whole letter start to finish, hunting for the part that fixed it — there is always a part that fixes it, a clause that says provided however, a phone number, a please contact my office. She found: I am aware that Mr. Kerr passed some three years ago and I am sorry for it. I am not able to read the sentence as though he had not.

Fourth time she read only the line in Emmett's handwriting, and by then it had stopped being words and become a fact about the world, like a bridge out.

She sat back. The chair complained. Out the window over the sink the wind was moving the top of the cottonwood by the corrals, and the sky beyond it was that hard washed blue that means it is going to be colder tonight than it was last night.

The operator and spouse.

She was the operator. There was no question about that, whatever the county thought, whatever the brand inspector's paperwork still said in the box where it said owner. She had been the operator since the week of the funeral, when the water froze and there was nobody to go break it but her, and she had been it every day since — hiring, firing, hauling, doctoring, sitting up with the sick ones, signing the notes, eating the losses. Three years. She had made the Half Moon into a thing that ran, and she had made herself into a woman who needed nothing from anybody, and she'd have told you those were the same job.

And she was not the other half of that sentence. That was the whole of it. One dead man's careful handwriting, and she was half of a thing.

She got up and stood at the sink with her hands on the edge of it.

Because here was the part underneath, and it took her about ninety seconds to walk all the way down to it, and every step of the way down she wanted to be wrong.

The Dray bottom was where the herd went in June. It was the only summer grass on this end of the valley with water on it — Dray Creek came out of the hills cold and ran all season, and the ground it ran through held green into August when the benches were the colour of a paper sack. Danny had gone after that lease the way another man goes after a woman. It was the only thing he'd ever done in the way of business that she'd been unreservedly proud of.

Take it away and she had her deeded ground and the bench, and the bench was hay ground and dry pasture, and the two of them together would summer — she made herself do the number, standing there, out loud, in the empty kitchen, because there was nobody left to make it kinder for her — "Eighty," she said.

Eighty of a hundred and forty pairs. The other sixty went down the road in a stock trailer in June, and every one of them was a decision she had made and paid for and stayed up nights with, and once they went she was not an outfit any more. She was a woman with some cows on a place.

Turnout was the seventh of June. Four months. Four months to acquire a spouse or lose the ground under sixty of her pairs, and she had exactly as many of those on hand as she'd had at breakfast.

She laughed once at the ceiling — a bad noise, and she didn't do it twice.

Then she came back to the table and did what she'd have done with any other piece of bad news, which was reach for the thing she could do next. She could call the number. She would call the number. She would call and be pleasant and explain, and a reasonable person in Billings would hear the words widow and hundred and forty head and find the give in it, because there is give in everything if you get the right person on the phone.

Her hand was on the letter. She noticed the gloves then, finally, and pulled them off one finger at a time and set them on the table beside the envelope, and her hands underneath were red and chapped at the knuckles and had grain dust in the seams, and they were shaking, some, which she chose to attribute to the cold.

Because there was the other thing, and it had been standing quietly at the back of the kitchen since the second reading, waiting for her to be done with the arithmetic.

If she called anyone in this valley — Royce, the bank, anybody — the news would be all the way to town before the phone was back in its cradle. Everyone would know that Danny Kerr's widow was in trouble, and everyone would be kind about it, and by branding there would be men she had known for twenty years standing around at her fence line with their hats in their hands wanting to help, and she would rather have gone broke on a Tuesday than watched that happen on a Wednesday.

Three years of never once asking. Three years of I've got it, I'm fine, no, we're all right down there, and the only currency she had left in this county was that every one of those had been true.

Marisol picked up the letter, squared it against the tabletop, and set it under the sugar bowl where she would have to look at it.

"All right," she said to Emmett Dray's handwriting. "All right, you old son of a bitch."

Then she put her gloves back on, because the water tank in the corral needed chopping and it was not going to chop itself, and there was still the better part of a day out there with her name on it.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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