Six men stood in a half circle by the barn door, and none of them would meet Ruben Shaw's eyes. "We ain't going out today," Lucius said, twisting his hat in hands the size of dinner plates, apologetic and immovable at once. "Nor tomorrow, neither, Mr. Shaw." "Not till there's a hot meal on that table. Man can't rope calves on jerky and hardtac forever.
We've been eating like that since Christmas, and my bellies near forgot what a biscuit tastes like." Since Christmas, Reuben repeated, and the words tasted like failure in his mouth, because it was true, and because his cook had dropped dead of a bad heart on Christmas Eve with nobody to replace him, and no money to spare for one until the spring sale brought in cash. Three months now of hardtac and salt jerky and coffee boiled so many times, it ran thin as creek water. "I can't pay a cook till May," Reuben said. "You all know that. Every dollar's tied up till the herd sells.
And a rancher who spends money he doesn't have is a rancher who loses the whole outfit by summer. Then we'll starve till May right alongside you, said another hand. Except we won't be working while we do it. A man needs fuel to rope and brand, Mr. Shaw.
Same as a stove needs wood. Reuben's shoulder achd where it always achd now. An old injury from a horse wrecked two winters back that never healed right and made his temper shorter than it used to be, shorter than he liked, shorter than was fair to men who'd worked loyally through a hard winter on food not fit for a dog. He looked at the mud in the yard, thick and gray with the March thaw, churned to a soup by hooves and boots, and at his six remaining hands standing there with their arms crossed like a jury, and had no answer for any of them. Give me a week, he said, with no plan behind the words at all.
No notion of where a cook might come from in a county this thin on people willing to work a bunk house for wages he couldn't yet pay. Nobody looked convinced. Lucius, at least had the decency to look sorry about it, shifting his weight and mumbling something about no offense meant before the men filed off toward the corral anyway, out of loyalty more than obedience. Iris Callen knocked on the ranch house door at dusk with her son Tom's hand gripped tight in hers. Both of them soaked through from two days of walking between towns that had no work to offer a widow with a child.
Her husband had died in January of a fever that took him in 4 days flat. And since then Iris had learned exactly how fast a family's fortunes could collapse when there was no man's wage coming in and no kin nearby to help carry the weight of it. They'd sold the wagon first, then the good mule, then most of what furniture they'd owned, and still the money had run out somewhere around the second week of March. Tom was eight and thin as a fence post and trying, with the fierce dignity only a child could manage, not to shiver in the wet March wind. Reuben opened the door to a woman with mud to her knees and a boy behind her who looked like he hadn't eaten a full meal in a week, which Reuben would learn later was close enough to the truth.