He lit the kerosene lamps. He went out along the rope he had strung from the porch to the generator shed in November and started the Onan his father had bought used from the REA in 1962, which would run the house circuit but not the barn, because the barn had always been on its own line from the transformer and nobody had ever gotten around to changing it. The kitchen window came up yellow behind him. Inside, he picked up the phone and heard nothing, not even the hum. The lines were down too.
That left the CB.
It was a Cobra 29 base station on a shelf by the back door, hooked to an antenna on the roof he climbed up to straighten every spring. Half the ranches along the Mullen road had one. In a storm, when the phones went, it was how you knew who was alive. He switched it on and the kitchen filled with the hiss of channel nine and then, under the hiss, voices.
Werner Haumann's slow voice, saying they were running the tractor generator and had a cow calving in the yard. Ludvik Ruzicka's boy, saying the river road was closed at the bridge. A trucker pulled over at the elevator in Seneca, saying anybody thinking of driving to Mullen tonight ought to think again. Arne did not key the mike. He sat and listened, the way he had listened on the party line all his life, to other people's voices coming in out of the dark.
He went out again at half past four with the kerosene lantern and his big six-volt Rayovac. The barn without power was another building. The lantern made a little gold room around him in the alley, and outside the room was black, the black of the inside of a closed fist, and the heifers' eyes floated in it, green and then gone. The roof was louder now, a long moaning creak down the length of the building with every shove of the wind, and twice he heard the dry cracking sound up near the ridge, and both times he held the lantern as high as he could reach and stared into the dark over his head and could see nothing at all.
Notch was down and straining. He watched her for twenty minutes. Nothing showed. She would strain and groan and rest and strain again, and nothing showed, and he knew what that could mean, and he knew that a heifer could also go two or three hours like this and then have it in four pushes like a cow that had done it ten times. He decided to give her until eight.
Fly had come all the way to the door this time. She stood in the doorway with the snow blowing in around her and would not cross the sill. When he came back up the alley toward her she began to bark, steady, urgent barks, not at the heifers and not at the dark, but at him, straight at him, and when he reached the door she jumped up and put both paws on his chest, which she had not done since she was a pup, and pushed.
"All right," he said. "All right. I'm coming. I'm coming out."
He slid the door shut. She walked him back to the house so close that she was nearly underneath him.