"She talked about you," he said. "That morning. Before. I come over at seven to borrow your post-hole digger and she was out there with that heifer and we talked across the stall a minute. She said you'd gone to Thedford to fight for the place. She said, he's so stubborn, Albin, he'll fight for this place till it kills him, and I hope it doesn't, because I'd like to have him around." He turned his cup on the table. "Then I went home. And Fly come for me at nine."
Arne looked at the dog asleep against the calf, her bandaged foot stuck out in front of her.
"She went for you," he said. "Not me. She knew where to find you."
"She knew who was home," said Albin. "That's all."
The storm blew itself out a little after sunrise. Arne went out at seven and stood in the yard in snow to his waist under a sky so blue it hurt, and looked at his barn. The north end was still standing, and the south end, and in between there was nothing but a long white heap with timbers sticking out of it at angles, and tin sheets curled like paper, and in the middle of it, where the third stall had been, the broken ridge beam pointing at the sky. You could see the split in it from the house. It ran eleven feet.
The sliding door on the north end had held. In the low morning sun, under the barn red that did not match, he could still read the word.
Werner Haumann came at nine on his John Deere, plowing the section road, and Dieter Kasper rode on the drawbar behind him with his face set like a fist. The boy jumped down in the yard and stood looking at the barn for a long time. Then he went into the house, and found his father in the chair by the stove with his leg on the woodbox, and the calf on the feed sacks, and he stood over the calf with his hands in his coat pockets and did not say anything. The calf got up on its long legs and wobbled over and butted him in the knee looking for milk, and the boy's face came undone.
Arne had thought about it most of the night. He said it before he could think about it any more. "She's yours. The heifer and the calf both. I'll write it up."
Dieter looked at him. He had his mother's eyebrows and, Arne saw now, his father's way of holding still. "I don't want her given to me," he said. "Not by you."