Cole had not driven a tractor in thirteen years. He had not done much of anything with his left leg in two.
He pulled the tarp off his grandfather's old John Deere and climbed up into the seat one rung at a time, pulling himself with his arms, his cane hooked over his shoulder. The engine turned over twice, coughed, and caught. Beulah had kept the battery charged. Of course she had.
He hooked the front loader to a round bale, because the cows had to eat first. His grandfather would have done it that way. You feed the stock before you go looking for trouble, because trouble will still be there, and the stock might not.
Then he drove out the gate and turned down the gravel road toward Beulah's place, into the snow.
He found her truck four miles out.
It had slid off the road into the bar ditch, nose down, half buried in a drift. The driver's door was open. The cab was empty.
Cole stopped the tractor and sat in the howling wind and made himself think.
She was eighty-one. She had been out here at least two hours, maybe three. She had tried to walk. He looked at the snow around the truck. The wind had wiped out most of it, but behind the truck, in the lee of the cab, there was one clear boot print, small, heading east.
Not toward her house. Toward the old line shack on the Mabry east pasture, a mile off.
His grandfather's line shack had a woodstove and a cot. Beulah would know that. She had been feeding cattle on that pasture for nineteen months.
Cole turned the tractor east and drove into the open pasture, following the fence line, the way Lyle Mabry must have followed Glen Ricketts's tracks in 1977.
The shack was a gray shape in the white. There was no smoke from the chimney.
He found her on the floor inside, sitting against the wall beside the cold woodstove, wrapped in an old horse blanket with her knees pulled up. She had gotten the door shut behind her. She had not been able to light the stove. Her hands were too cold to strike a match.
She looked up at him and tried to smile.
"You're late," she said.
Cole lowered himself to the floor beside her, bad leg and all, and pulled off his grandfather's sheepskin coat and wrapped it around her. Then he got the stove going with the kindling stacked behind it and the matches from his pocket, his hands steady for the first time in two years.
"You fed the cows first," Beulah said, watching him. Her voice was faint. "I heard the tractor."
"Granddad always said you feed the stock before you go looking for trouble."
"He did say that." She closed her eyes. "Good boy."
He got her up into the tractor cab when the shack was warm and she could feel her fingers again. She sat on his lap in the cramped seat, because there was no other place to sit, and he drove the eight miles back to his grandfather's house at four miles an hour through the drifts with one arm around her.
The county plow came through at noon. The ambulance from Prineville came behind it. The paramedics said Beulah had been lucky, but Beulah said luck had nothing to do with it, and Cole did not argue with her.
She was home in her own kitchen by Sunday, with her hands wrapped in gauze, ordering him around her woodstove.
He did the chores at both places that week. Hers in the morning, his at noon, hers again at dusk. He did it in his grandfather's coat, with his cane hooked on the tractor seat. By Thursday, he noticed he had not used the cane once all day. By Saturday, he noticed he had slept six hours straight without dreaming.
He did not tell Beulah. She noticed anyway.
"You're walking better," she said from her kitchen chair, watching him carry in wood.
"Cows'll do that," Cole said.
"Your granddad used to say that too," said Beulah.
The buyer called on Monday. He was sorry about the weather. He wanted to reschedule.
Cole stood in his grandfather's kitchen and looked out the window at the low meadow, where the cattle were working through the hay he had put out that morning, alone, from the tractor.
"I'm not selling," he said.
There was a pause on the line. "Mr. Mabry, if this is about the price."
"It's not the price," Cole said. "I owe somebody. And I'm going to need about forty years to pay her back."
On Christmas Day, he drove down to Beulah's house in his grandfather's pickup with a pot roast in a roasting pan on the seat beside him. It was the first thing he had cooked in two years. It was a little dry.
Beulah ate every bite.
Afterward, she poured them both coffee and sat back in her chair and looked at him over the cherries on the oilcloth.
"Lyle never let me thank him," she said. "Near fifty years."
"I know," Cole said. "So I'm not going to let you thank me, either."
Beulah laughed so hard she had to put her coffee down. Then she reached across the table, took his hand in her bandaged one, and held on the way Lyle Mabry must have held on to Glen, all eight miles home.
