Page 8 of Cattle Stop
“You’re feeding the cows these bales?”
“Do you see any others up there?”
“These bales are tiny. How many of them do you have to feed out a day? Ten? Fifteen? What happened to the round baler, or do you just enjoy wallowing in misery and driving yourself nuts doing this?” Cooper grabs the nearest one, hoists it up onto his hip, and then drops it into the aisle. The bale lands a couple feet from Whit, showering him in chaff. “Wow, this actually, literally, hurts my soul to feed an entire herd of cows like this.”
“The baler broke.”
“Ah, must be on the list to fix after you get to the spigot.”
“So we used the old one and only have these smaller bales.”
“Drew really stands for schlepping these damn things all day, every day?”
“Drew’s making cheese.”
“Lucky Drew.”
Cooper tosses two more bales down before he just gives up. He’ll drive the tractor into the barn, set a pallet on the forks, and load it up with bales so he can bring enough down for tonight and tomorrow morning. The rest, he’ll leave to Whit, who can sling bales by hand to his heart’s content once Cooper leaves.
When Cooper jumps down the last rungs of the ladder, Whit’s already pulling the baling twine off the bale, which is just absurd, because then Whit has to carry the flakes to the cows one armful at a time. It’s easier to grab the entire bale by the strings, toss it into the feeder, then cut the twine with a pocket knife. But Whit’s Whit, and he ignores the fact that Cooper’s finished with three bales by the time he’s done with one.
He just does things his own way, Drew had said once, years ago. Not bad, or worse, just different. Cooper had brushed Drew off then and would do it again now, already shoving a handful of baling twine into his pocket and asking, “Pig grain?”
Whit carefully folds the string he’s holding. “Scoop and buckets are outside the cheese room.”
“Scoop and buckets?”
Whit folds yet another length of baling twine in half and then in half again. “You scoop the grain into the buckets, unless they do it differently in Vermont.”
“I was working on a farm in Maine this winter.”
“Sure.”
“Can you not get yourself a damn grain bin? Or is hauling buckets of grain part of your master plan to keep yourself busy while the water fills?”
“The water system’s fine.” Whit tucks the twine into his pocket and straightens his coat. “Why don’t you help Drew with the house? I can handle this.”
Cooper opens his mouth, but Whit wipes his forehead with his sleeve. It pulls the hem of his jacket up, and with it, the bottom of his T-shirt. Cooper snaps his eyes away to where a cow’s chewing a mouthful of hay, because otherwise, he’s going to look at how Whit’s belt and waistband sit against the flat plane of his stomach just so, beneath the jut of his hipbones.
Yeah, helping Drew is a good idea. A better one than being here in the too-quiet barn with Whit already bending down to pick up another bale, his bicep curving against the canvas of his coat.
In the backyard, Drew is bent over a sawhorse and a stack of lumber, his pants coated with a fine layer of sawdust.
“Hey, Drew,” Cooper yells over the whine of the circular saw. “Whit sent me to see what I can help you with. He said I did so well in the barn, he doesn’t need me anymore.”
“Is that what he said? Yeah, you can grab the wrenches and take apart the bed in the guest room,” Drew says. “We gotta get all the furniture cleared out. Sorry I don’t have anywhere better for you to sleep.”
“We gonna snuggle tonight?” Cooper asks.
“Only if I get to be little spoon.”
“Nah, I’ll share the couch with Sadie, in that case.”
“She snores.”
Cooper pokes a finger into the side of Drew’s nose. “So do you.”
The shop’s as cluttered as it ever is, the combination of Whit’s organization and Drew’s whirlwind leaving a neat pegboard on the back wall labeled for each individual tool, yet most of them hanging empty. Cooper sorts through the handfuls of screwdrivers and hammers Drew dumped on the workbench, but wherever the wrenches are, they’re not hiding beneath that pile nor on their appointed peg.
