WHEN THE CALVES CAME IN FEBRUARY, RAYMOND ROSE two and three times in the freezing night to check on the cattle he had noticed were showing springy and had begun to bag down, having moved the cattle into the corrals and loafing shed next to the barn in the days before. Once he was there he would check that the nose and the front feet were exposed and started out as normal, or he would catch the laboring cow and pull the calf with the calf-chain, ratcheting the calf out, and sew the cow up afterward and doctor her with antibiotics. So, for weeks of these indistinguishable days and nights, he was exhausted, he was worn out almost beyond thinking. He still had the ordinary daily chores and the hay-feeding to do as always, which by themselves would have been almost too much for one man to do and keep up with, but he was doing all of it alone now, since his brother had been killed in the previous fall. He went on regardless. He went on in a kind of daze. He found himself falling asleep at the kitchen table, noon and night and sometimes, though he’d just risen, in the mornings too when he sat down to his meager solitary hurried meal. Then he would wake an hour or two later, with his neck stiff and his hands numb and his tongue as dry as paper from having breathed through his open mouth for too long with his head lolled back against the chair back, and with the food before him already long gone cold on his plate and the black coffee on the table no longer even tepid in his cup. Then he would sit up and rouse himself and look around, study the light or the lack of it in the kitchen window, and push himself up from the old pinewood table and get into his canvas coveralls and overshoes again and pull on his wool cap and step outside into the winter cold once more. And then walk across the drive to the corrals and calving shed to begin it all again. This routine, day and night, lasted for something over a month.
So it was already the start of March before he felt rested enough to think he might allow himself a single night’s vacation in which to drive to town once again to the tavern on Main Street.
HE SET OUT ON A COOL FRESH NIGHT, DRESSED AGAIN IN his town clothes and his Bailey hat. He had shaved and washed up and had put on some of the cologne that Victoria had given him at Christmastime. It was a Saturday night, the sky overhead clear of any cloud, the stars as clean and bright as if they were no more distant than the next barbed-wire fence post standing up above the barrow ditch running beside the narrow blacktop highway, everything all around him distinct and unhidden. He loved how it all looked, except he would never have said it in that way. He might have said that this was just how it was supposed to look, out on the high plains at the end of winter, on a clear fresh night.
In Holt he parked at the curb in front of the Holt Mercury newspaper offices, closed and darkened for the night, and walked up the block past the unlit stores to the corner. Inside the tavern it was just as before. The same noise and desolate country music, the men shooting pool at the tables in the back and the TV blaring over the bar, the long room just as crowded and smoky as it had been in December—all of it the same, except maybe a little more of it now, a little more gaiety, since it was a Saturday night.