Fly got up off the floor and went to the back door and stood there, facing out, with her one good ear up. She was not asking to go out. He knew what that looked like. She was standing guard.
He fed the heifers at eight, and Fly did not come.
She came as far as the machine shed again and sat there, very upright, the way a dog sits when it has been told to stay. Nobody had told her to stay. He forked hay into the bunks along the east wall and broke the ice on the tank and stood a long while watching Notch, who was lying down and getting up and lying down again, turning her head to look at her own side with an expression of pure offended surprise, the way first-calf heifers do. She was one of the six he had bought at the Kasper dispersal in December. It was harder not to think about that with her standing in front of him.
The dispersal had been at the Valentine Livestock Auction on the eleventh of December. Arne had not meant to buy anything. He had gone because when a neighbor sold out you went to his sale, and stood in the stands with your hat on, and did not bid against the people who were bidding to help him. The Haumanns had done that and the Pospisils had done it and Lafe Ostermann, who did not own a cow, had raised his card at the start of every lot to give the price a floor. And Arne had sat in the third row with the auctioneer's chant going over him and the smell of the ring coming up, sawdust and cigarette smoke, and watched six Kasper heifers come in, black baldies, bred, the K-Bar-Lazy-K on their left hips, and the order buyer from Omaha had started them at four hundred and ten a head, which was a slaughter price, and Arne had put up his hand.
He had not decided to. His hand had gone up the way your foot goes for a brake. He could not stand to see twenty years of Albin's careful breeding go to the killing floor because nobody in the stands could afford more. He bid them to five-fifty and got them. Down by the ring Albin Kasper sat on the bottom bench with his hands between his knees and his son Dieter beside him, and Albin turned and looked up at him, and Arne could not read his face. Dieter he could read. Dieter was seventeen and had his mother's dark eyebrows and nothing in his face but hate.
It turned out that one of the six was Dieter's. A 4-H heifer. He had raised her on a bottle from a twin and shown her at the county fair in Mullen and she had stood second in her class. The notch in her ear was from a barbed-wire fence she had gone through at six weeks old, and Dieter had sat up with her all night in the Kasper barn putting salve on it. Arne knew all this because Lafe Ostermann had told him, a week later, standing at the counter of the feed store with a sack of mineral between them and his voice very careful, as though he were handing Arne something hot.
"I thought you ought to know," Lafe had said. "The boy's taking it hard."
"I paid fair for her."
"I know you did, Arne. Better than fair. Better than Omaha." Lafe had scratched the back of his neck. "I'm just saying. The boy's taking it hard."