Chapter 9 - The Work of the Living
By the time the autumn of 2027 rolled around, the north ridge didn't look like Voss Hill anymore.
The people in town called it Reed Ridge, though Claire never put up a sign to make it official. Country folks don't need signs; they know who owns the dirt by the way the fences are kept.
The iron gates were gone, replaced by a standard four-strand barbed wire fence with red cedar posts cut from our own timber swamp. In the pasture where Daniel had planned his private polo field, forty head of Black Angus heifers grazed peacefully on clover and orchard grass, their black coats gleaming like coal against the yellow autumn pasture.
The house had changed too.
The white paint on the columns had been toned down to a warm, soft cream; the circular marble drive had been surfaced in plain crushed river gravel that didn't crunch like salt; and every Tuesday and Thursday morning, the parking area was filled with old pickups and family sedans bringing children from all over the three-county area to see Doc Ellis and the two young resident doctors he had brought in from the medical college in Augusta.
Claire lived in the south wing—the four rooms that had once been the guest apartment above the garage.
She had built a large, light-filled studio on the second floor, with high north-facing windows that looked out over the whole expanse of the valley.
She didn't paint pictures of flowers or pretty houses.
She worked with wood. She had taken an apprenticeship with an old cabinetmaker in Dahlonega, and now her shop was filled with the sweet, sharp scent of walnut shavings, tung oil, and cherry lumber. She made dining tables—massive, six-inch-thick trestle tables built out of fallen timber from the river bottoms, tables designed to hold twelve people, three generations of children, and fifty years of Sunday dinners without ever wobbling on their pins.
People came from Atlanta, from Charlotte, from as far as Nashville to buy them.
They paid five thousand dollars for a table, but Claire didn't keep the money in a private account. Half of it went straight into the trust that funded the emergency shelter downstairs, and the other half went into the herd.
On an afternoon in mid-October, exactly two years to the day after the night she had crawled onto my porch, I walked up the hill with Old Blue.
The frost was coming again. You could smell it in the air—that clean, cold smell of dying leaves and hickory smoke that means winter is sharpening its knife on the ridge.
Claire was in the barn behind the clinic, helping a young heifer that was having trouble with her first calf.
She was down on her knees in the clean wheat straw, wearing her old canvas coveralls, her sleeves rolled up past her elbows, her forehead pressed against the heifer's flank as she worked the calving chains around the little hooves.
Doc Ellis stood by the stall door, holding a flashlight and a bottle of iodine, his old shoulders relaxed, watching her with that quiet, professional satisfaction that an old master has when he sees the work being done right.
"Easy, girl," Claire murmured, her voice low, rhythmic, falling into that ancient, soothing cadence that animals understand better than words. "Easy now. Just a little push. You're almost through it."
She braced her boots against the bottom rail of the oak stall, took the tension on the chains, and leaned her weight back with the heifer's contraction.
A long, wet slide of straw and steam.
The calf—a thick-legged, black bull calf with a white star between his eyes—spilled out onto the yellow straw, coughing twice, his little ribcage expanding as he drew his first breath of mountain air.
Claire didn't let go of the calf.
She cleared the mucus from his nostrils with her bare fingers, rubbed his chest with a dry burlap sack until he let out a sharp, indignant sneeze, and then laid him gently against his mother's flank.
The heifer turned her head, her big black tongue reaching out to lick the star on her baby's forehead, a deep, rumbling maternal lowing vibrating through the heavy timbers of the barn.
Claire sat back on her heels in the straw.
Her face was smeared with sweat and birth fluids, her hair tangled around her ears, her hands red from the cold air and the hot blood of new life.
She looked up at me.
Her hazel eyes caught the yellow light of the kerosene lantern hanging from the beam above.
"He's a good one, Daddy," she said, her voice soft, full of that deep, untroubled peace that only comes to people who have looked into the dark and walked out the other side with clean hands. "Eight-five pounds if he's an ounce. He's got your brother's star."
May you like
I leaned against the stall post, my old hands resting on the smooth hickory of my walking staff.
"He's a Reed, Claire-bear," I told her. "He'll do."
