Albin started to speak. Arne lifted a hand, and Albin stopped.
"All right," Arne said. "Then I'll sell her to you. Five hundred and fifty dollars, which is what I gave. You can work it off. I've got a barn to take down and another one to put up, and I can't climb a ladder with this knee, and I need somebody who'll paint a door so it matches."
The boy's ears went red. He looked at the floor. After a while he said, "Yes, sir," very low, and then he went out to the calf shed to see his heifer, and Fly got up off the floor on three legs and went with him.
When the boy was gone Arne sat down at the table across from Albin. The Zenith was on again; the power had come back at a quarter past eight, and the man on KRVN was reading the cattle losses, county by county, in the same kind voice he had used for the warnings.
"Fenske's going to want to know about the barn," Arne said. "It won't help my review any."
"No."
"I'm going to tell him something else while I'm at it." He had his hands flat on the oilcloth. "I'm going to tell him I want to lease the creek meadow out. To a neighbor. At whatever Farmers Home would've charged if they'd kept it, and with the hay counted toward my base, since it's still under me. And with the grazing on the north end for whoever runs it. You'd have to talk to him. He'd have to agree to it. I don't know if he will."
Albin looked at him for a long time across the table.
"I've got a job lined up," he said. "At the Monfort plant in Grand Island. Night shift on the kill floor. I start the fifteenth of April. Dorit's sister has a house there."