Evan let him look, and Caleb ran his hand carefully along the forearm and wrist. Not a full break, or it would have been worse, but a bad sprain at minimum, possibly a fracture in the wrist. His hand was already swelling. He needed to be seen.
Mara came out of the bunkhouse at a run, having heard Caleb call, and when she saw Evan's arm, she went practical immediately. No panic, just assessment. She looked at the arm, looked at Caleb, said, "Doc Riley in town?" "Yes." He said.
"How far?" "40 minutes." "Then we go now." She said, and went to get her coat. Doc Riley confirmed a fractured wrist.
Small fracture, he said, not displaced, but it needed to be wrapped and rested for 6 weeks at minimum, and it needed to stay dry and stay still, and the boy needed to stop climbing things for the foreseeable future, which was a sentence directed at Evan with the particular authority of a man who had said it to particular boys before. Evan bore the wrapping without complaint, which Caleb respected, and bore the instruction about not climbing things with the expression of someone hearing something they were going to take under strong consideration and probably not fully follow, which Caleb also respected. On the drive back, the four of them in the wagon because Mara had driven and brought the children, it was Owen who broke the silence from the back by saying, "Does it hurt a lot?" "Some." Evan said.
"More than when you fell off the fence at the old place? Different, Evan said. Worse? Quit asking. Owen was quiet for a moment, then he said, I could help with the horses while your arm is bad.
I know how. You're five, Evan said. I'm almost six. You're not almost six. Your birthday is in March.
That's almost six, Owen said with the inarguable logic of a small child. Mara made a sound that was very nearly a laugh and turned it into a cough. Caleb kept his eyes on the road and said nothing because there was nothing to say that wouldn't interrupt something, and he was learning, slowly, imperfectly, when to let things be. The fracture set the work schedule back. Evan couldn't do the heavy work, which meant Caleb absorbed it, which meant the days got longer and the nights got shorter, and by the end of the first week his back was informing him in strong terms that he was 45 and not 30, and that there were limits to what could be absorbed.
He didn't complain. There was no one to complain to that would have made any difference, and complaining had never been something he was built for, anyway. But Mara noticed. She didn't say anything directly. She wasn't that kind of person, the kind who comments on things before she knows what to do about them.
But one morning he came into the kitchen to find that she'd rearranged the order of what she was cooking so that breakfast was ready earlier than usual, which gave him an additional 20 minutes of morning time. And without any discussion, she started doing the chicken coop herself, which was a small thing, but was 30 minutes. He got back in his morning. He noticed these things and didn't mention them, the same way she didn't mention that she'd noticed him slowing down by evening. They were, he was coming to understand, people who operated the same way.