He looked down at the dog on his foot. "She's fine," he said. "She's getting old."
"Aren't we all," said Kirsten, and then she said she had to get some sleep and he should call her if the lines held, and he said he would, and they both knew he wouldn't, and she hung up. He held the receiver for a moment longer, listening to the hum of the empty line and the wind, and then he hung it back on its hook.
That barn. Mom always said that barn.
He knew what Ilse had always said about the barn. She had said it every spring for thirty years: that a building his grandfather had put up out of cottonwood and lodgepole hauled by wagon from the railhead at Mullen was not a building, it was a museum, and the roof was too flat for the snow out here, and somebody who knew what they were looking at ought to look at it. And he had always said that it had stood through the blizzard of 1949, when you could walk off the drift onto the roof, and through '75, and a thing that had stood that long had proved itself.
And then, last October, at the Kasper branding, Albin Kasper had told him the same thing.
Arne stood up. He rinsed out the cup and set it upside down on the drainboard and looked at it there.
The branding had been at the Kasper place on the fourth of October, late in the year for it, because Albin had been holding calves back for a buyer out of Valentine who never came. All the neighbors had been there, the Haumanns and the Pospisils and old Ludvik Ruzicka and his boys from down on the Middle Loup, and Arne on his gray gelding roping heels, because his knee was bad but there was nothing wrong with his arm. They had done two hundred and ten head by three and eaten Dorit Kasper's fried chicken off sawhorse tables in the yard, and afterward, with the light gone long and gold across the hills, Albin had come over to where Arne was coiling his rope by the trailer and stood there with his hat in his hand.
Albin Kasper was fifty-one that fall, a short, wide man with a sunburned neck and big quiet hands, who had taken over his father's place in 1966 and run it carefully and well until the year he borrowed the way everybody was borrowing. He and Arne had known each other all of Albin's life. That did not make them friends. Their fathers had fallen out in 1938 over a windmill on the line fence, which a county surveyor finally found, in 1946, to stand eleven feet onto Kasper ground; and Arne's father had moved the fence and never forgiven anybody, and had told Arne at the age of twelve that you could trust a Kasper with your horse but not with your fence. It was a stupid thing. Arne had never said it to anybody. But he had grown up with it, the way you grow up with the shape of the hills.
"Arne," Albin had said, by the trailer, "I was up in your barn in August. When I brought back your post driver."