One of the ranch's mares was in a difficult labor, had been since early afternoon, and by evening, when she went to the barn to call the men in for supper, she found Briggs and Dolan standing outside the stall, looking helpless, and Calhoun inside with the mare doing what he could and it clearly not being enough. "How long?" She said. "Since two," Calhoun said.
He didn't look up from the mare. Foal's turned wrong. "Has she passed anything?" "Not enough."
Evelyn set down the kettle she'd been carrying and rolled up her sleeves. Briggs said her name, her last name, sharp, like a warning, and she ignored it. She'd helped with difficult births on her father's farm. It wasn't the same as a ranch operation.
A mare was not the same as a sow or a cow, but the principles were principles, and she knew enough to know what Calhoun needed from her, and she helped steadily, without drama, doing what needed doing because it needed doing. The foal came at twenty minutes to seven in the evening. Small but breathing. The mare exhausted but alive.
Calhoun looked at her afterward with a different expression than she'd seen from any of the men so far. You've done that before, he said. Not with a horse, she said honestly. But the idea is the same.
Could have gone bad. It could have. She started pulling her sleeves back down. But it didn't.
He nodded once, the kind of nod that meant something. Briggs didn't say anything, but she noticed that he stopped making comments at the edge of the yard after that. Nathan found her that night sitting on the back step of the house after Caleb was down and the kitchen was cleaned, just sitting with her hands in her lap and the night air cold and clean after the close warm work of the barn. He came out and stood for a moment, not crowding the step, and then sat down on the step above her, which put them at roughly the same level, which she thought was either unconscious or deliberate, and she wasn't sure which.
Calhoun told me, he said it was Calhoun who did the hard part. I just helped. He said different. She was quiet.
I want you to know, Nathan said that I don't think of what you do here as he stopped, tried again. You're not just a cook and a cleaning woman. I know that. I just wanted to say that.
She looked out at the dark yard. She could hear one of the horses moving in the corral. Somewhere further out, a coyote said something brief and moved on. "I appreciate that," she said.
"It's just the truth." She nodded. He didn't leave immediately. They sat there for a little while in the kind of quiet that happens between two people who are both tired and don't feel the need to fill the silence.