He could not eat supper. He sat at the table with a plate of the canned peaches and a slice of bread and listened to channel nine, and at a quarter to seven a woman's voice came through the hiss, a voice he knew, thin and high and frightened.
"This is the Kasper place. This is Dorit Kasper. Is anybody—has anybody seen my husband? Over."
Werner Haumann's voice came back, slow and kind. "Dorit, this is Werner. We've got you. What's going on? Over."
"Albin went out on foot at about four-thirty. He took the big flashlight and the calving chains and a bottle of iodine and he said he had to go see about something and he'd be back in two hours, and it's been two hours and more and he's not back, and Dieter wants to go out after him and I won't let him. Over."
A silence. Hiss. Arne sat with the fork in his hand.
"Dorit, where was he headed? Over."
"He wouldn't tell me. He said it was something he should have done in the fall. Over." Her voice cracked. "Werner, he hasn't got any cattle. He hasn't got a single head left on the place. What would he want with calving chains? Over."
Arne put down the fork.
He looked at the microphone on its coiled cord. He knew what he should do. He should key it up and say, This is Tolstad, I'll go out and look. He should say, Dorit, he might be coming here. He knew that. He did not do it. He sat there with his hand on the table and he thought of the heifers in his barn with the Kasper brand on their hips. He thought of a boy who had sat up all night with a calf, and a word in red paint three feet high, and a man on the courthouse steps looking at him without any expression at all, the way you look at weather. He thought: calving chains. He thought: something he should have done in the fall.