She held on another second. Then she let go, and backed away from him, and sat down in the snow by the corner of the machine shed, and whined. A high, thin sound, nearly lost in the wind, and it went through him like a wire.
He went into the barn without her.
Everything was fine in the barn. That was what he would remember afterward, with a kind of sick amazement. The lights were on, the single row of bare bulbs his father had hung down the center alley on porcelain fixtures in 1951, when the REA line finally came out from Mullen, and the pair of floodlights Arne had added over the calving pens, and the place glowed like the inside of a lantern. It smelled of hay and wet hide and the sweet sharp smell of birth from Sunday. The heifers lay in the straw chewing their cuds. One of them, the one with a notch in her left ear that he thought of as Notch because he was not a man who named cattle, had her tail cocked a little to one side and was looking at her own flank in the way that meant later today. Above him the roof made its usual noises under the wind, the tin rattling in its screws, the purlins ticking. A barn talks in a storm.
He looked up once, at the ridge. He did not know why he looked up. He looked at it for a while, the long dark beam running the length of the barn forty feet over his head, its underside furred with seventy years of dust and cobweb, and then he looked away from it and checked the water tank and went back out.
Fly was still sitting by the machine shed. She was covered in snow. When he came out she stood up and shook, and then she ran to him and leaned her whole weight against his legs, the way she did, and walked beside him all the way to the house pressed so hard against him that twice he nearly tripped over her.
"Silly old woman," he said. He said it fondly. He believed it.
In the kitchen he stood at the stove in his stocking feet with his coveralls unzipped to the waist and drank a cup of Folgers that had been sitting on the burner since four, and the coffee was bitter and hot and exactly right, and he looked out the window over the sink at the yard light on its pole, swinging in the wind, and at the barn beyond it, a long red shape under the snow, and he did not think about the third stall on the east side.
He thought about money instead, which was easier.
He thought about it every morning, the way you probe a sore tooth with your tongue. In 1979 he had borrowed a hundred and forty thousand dollars from the Farmers Home Administration, at the encouragement of the Farmers Home Administration, to buy the Wahlgren quarter and put down a new well. Everybody had been borrowing in 1979. The man from the government had sat at this kitchen table and told him land in the Sandhills had never been worth less than it would be worth next year. Then the interest had gone from eight and a half percent to something he did not like to say out loud, and cattle had gone from seventy dollars a hundredweight to fifty-eight, and the Wahlgren quarter he had bought at two hundred and ten an acre would not, Ardell Fenske at the county office had told him in January, bring a hundred and twenty at sale. He was not behind. He had made every payment, the last one in November with the steer money and two hundred dollars of Kirsten's that she had sent without asking. But he was not ahead of anything either. He was standing exactly where he was, holding very still, the way you stand on river ice in March.