The woman rang up their purchases. She said, Will this be cash or charge?
I’ll sign you a bank check, Raymond said. He bent over the counter, leaning on his elbow, and wrote stiffly into his checkbook. When he had finished he inspected what he had written, then he folded it once and tore it off and blew back and forth over it and handed the check to the woman. She looked at it.
May I see some identification, please?
He took out his old wallet from the inner pocket of his coat and picked out his driver’s license. She read it, then she looked up at him.
I didn’t know they would allow you to have your picture taken with your hat on, she said.
They do in Holt, he said. What’s the trouble? Don’t it favor me?
Oh, there’s a clear resemblance, she said.
She handed the license back to him and he put it away. Then she finished ringing up their purchases and gave them the receipt. And we thank you very much, she said.
The stock boy started toward the front of the store, dollying the new mattress and the new crib in the flat cardboard boxes printed with the bright factory lettering, moving out into the main aisle in a flourish. He advanced only a short way.
Son, Harold said. You can hold up there. That won’t be necessary.
I was going to take them out for you.
That’s all right.
The McPheron brothers hefted the two boxes and together carried them ladder-fashion under their arms, one old man in his good hat following directly behind the other, out onto the sidewalk and up the block toward the pickup. The girl came after, with the store bag of sheets and blankets. Together they made a kind of parade. People on the square, shoppers, women and teenage girls and old retired men, watched them pass, turning to stare as the two old men and the pregnant girl went by. Out in the winter air it was colder now and the sun was already starting to lean toward the west, while across the street the granite-block courthouse loomed up gray and solid under its green tiled roof. At the curb they set the boxes in the bed of the pickup and lashed them down with yellow binder twine from the toolbox. Then they backed out into the street and drove slowly out of town, riding up out of the South Platte River valley onto the cold winter flatlands of the high plains.
It was evening when they got home. The early dark of late December. That low sky closing down. As they drove up over the last little rise before the turnoff to the house they saw that there were cattle out on the gravel road. Their eyes glinted red as rubies in the headlights—one of the old mother cows and three of the heavy-bodied two-year-old heifers. Wait up, Raymond said.
I see em, Harold said.
The cow stood broadside in the middle of the road, her head lifted in the lights, staring as the pickup came closer, then she wheeled and dropped down into the ditch and the heifers dropped down with her.
You make it four?
Harold nodded.