Cattle Stop by Kit Oliver

Chapter Four

In Whit’s bathroom,Cooper rinses mud and grit from his hands, warming his fingers under the hot water. Sell the farm rings through his head, too loud and harsh.

He picks up the mug of coffee he set on the edge of the sink, then sets it down again without taking a sip.

Work clothes. He came up here to get dressed, so he needs to put on his jeans and hope the dew and cow snot on his sweatpants dries before he leaves.

Right. ’Cause he’s leaving. Though he just slowly strips off his sweatpants and stares down at his legs, winter pale and now goosefleshed in the chill of Whit’s room, trying to swallow the fact that he might never, not ever, come back here.

He sets his sweatpants down. Picks them up again, lays them over the foot of the bed, and plucks a piece of hay from the fabric. Someone else would live in this house if Drew sold the farm. Mow the fields, work in the barn, tend the flower bed that Drew’s aunt used to weed every summer, dirt up to her wrists and her huge, floppy hat bobbing among the blossoms.

Or no. Maybe whoever buys this place will tear the front yard up. The fields too, subdividing the land for a housing development. There’ll be tiny quarter-acre lots dotting the hills and a paved road cutting through what’s now stone walls and tumbling creeks.

But that’s impossible. It’s Drew’s farm. His uncle’s before him, and his grandfather’s before that. Cooper takes a bite of the toast he brought upstairs with him for his breakfast. The butter’s warm and the sweet peach jelly’s made from the fruit of the trees that line the backyard. This is Drew’s place, just like Caroline’s is Caroline’s, and Brad’s is Brad’s.

Was Brad’s. And isn’t, now.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Cooper looks up slowly at Whit. “I thought you were working on the fences.”

“It’s going to be warm out today, so I came to get a different shirt.” Whit glances over Cooper, in his sweatshirt with his legs bare where his boxers end mid-thigh. “Though you’re apparently dressed for the weather, I see.”

Cooper looks down at himself too. Work jeans. Socks. He should get on that. Instead, he takes another bite of toast and frowns as he chews, his stomach knotting. Sell the farm. What an awful set of words to string together.

“Are you eating up here?” Whit asks.

Cooper looks down at his toast, jelly smeared over his finger, and a drop of melted butter pooling on the plate. “Is that a trick question?”

“There’ll be mice.”

“Drew’s really selling the farm?”

“Can you not get hay all over?” Whit asks and with the side of his foot, pushes a couple pieces across the floor, away from his own bed. “I told you, he’s thinking about it. Mice added to the squirrel issue might seal the deal, though.”

“He can’t sell it.”

Whit picks up a shirt off the floor and shakes it out. It’s Cooper’s, clearly, a size too small to be Whit’s. One autumn when he’d swung by on a visit, Cooper had mixed up their jackets and found himself swimming in Whit’s, the cuffs falling past his hands and the shoulders too roomy. Unfair, he’d thought at the time, like by virtue of also living a life working outside all damn day, Cooper should have the same build to fill out clothes like Whit does. Now, he just stares at the shirt as Whit throws it on top of Cooper’s sweatpants.

“Thought you were heading out to your new job.” Whit turns his back to Cooper, grabs his own sweatshirt by the back of the neck, and hauls it over his head, taking the long-sleeved shirt underneath with it and leaving his back bare.

Oh man. Shifting muscles in the morning light streaming through the window. The narrow taper of Whit’s waist and the breadth of his shoulders. Brown skin that doesn’t pale like Cooper’s does over the winter, just looks smooth and soft over the sharp jut of his shoulder blades and the long dip of his spine.

Cooper would never see Whit again. He shifts a step back, dropping his toast onto his plate. He’d stay in touch with Drew. But Whit? No, if Drew sells this place, then when Cooper steers his truck down the dirt lane that leads away from the farm, that’ll be that between him and Whit. All those years of getting under each other’s skin, of bickering and annoyance and—and that kiss.

“Drew can’t sell the farm.” Cooper grabs for his jeans. There’s stiff, dried mud on the cuffs and it falls in dusty clumps onto the floor. Whatever, he’ll deal with that later. First things first. “We’ll get those gates fixed, and I’ll talk to Drew when he’s done with the house today.”

“I’ve talked to Drew, and he—”

“And I’ll get that back pen fixed, too, so it’s not an entire summer of chasing cows.”

“Cooper.”

“Look, you do you. But I’m going over to Brad’s to get some new gates.”

“Brad doesn’t sell gates. Cooper, the financial reality that Drew’s facing is—”

“You know, you might have a more positive attitude if you didn’t clear out of here at dawn o’clock and bothered to sleep more. Brad sold his herd, so ergo, Brad has no use for the gates he has. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than going to the co-op. Closer, too. Money saved, that’s how you do it.”

“You’re going to just take Brad’s gates?”

“I’m going to ask Brad nicely for his gates, and then I’m going to come back here and talk to Drew and get this entire situation fixed.”

Whit puts his hands on his hips. It bulges out the muscles in his shoulders. Cooper doesn’t let himself admire the sight of Whit’s pecs or the flat line of his abs, just jerks on one sock and then the next.

“You’re going to just fix it? Just like that?”

“I’m going to do something more than putter around like everything’s the same as it always is. So yes, I’m going to Brad’s, and you can sit around here with your thumb up your butt, doesn’t matter to me.”

Whit sighs loudly and grabs a shirt from his dresser. “I’ll drive.”

On the shady side of the street, snow sits under the trees and in the shadows of the houses they drive past. Cooper turns away from the window so he doesn’t have to look at those tidy, neat little lawns with their swimming pools and basketball hoops and swing sets.

“Have you been by Brad’s place since he sold off his herd?” Cooper asks.

“You could’ve just called Brad, not dragged us across town.”

“This is so much more fun.” Cooper waves a hand between them. “When else would we get to spend such quality time together?”

“I’m serious.”

“Oh, I know, ’cause being serious is what you’re best at.” Cooper shrugs and turns back to the window. “Don’t worry. One blaze of farm-saving glory, and then I’ll be out of your hair, so you’re welcome, bud.”

And Whit can go back to his life without Cooper. The second Cooper drives away after each visit, Whit probably comes up with a damn laundry list of complaints for Penny and Drew, complete with a presentation and handouts laying out all the reasons Cooper shouldn’t be allowed back next time.

Next time. Cooper touches his fingers to his stomach, frowning at the houses that whizz past the window.

The domed tops of the silos come into view over the trees first, and then the roof of Brad’s barn. It’s a pretty spot. The house peeks out of the forest and an old lichen-crusted stone wall runs along the driveway. Cooper’s always thought so, the handful of times he’s dropped by, though without cows sticking their heads out of the barn, it just seems lonely. Quiet too, when Whit turns off the truck and Cooper jumps down to the muddy gravel of the driveway.

The door to the house opens and Brad waves. “Cooper!” he calls, both arms held out. Cooper gets hugged again and the smack on his shoulder is just as hard. Whit just gets a lift of Brad’s chin and Cooper’s shoulder smarts in jealousy. “Whit. Hey.”

“Morning,” Whit says.

“Didn’t know you’d both be coming,” Brad says. He’s got gum in his mouth again and he snaps it loudly.

“Well, two’s a party,” Cooper says and puts on a smile. This was a shitty plan, not dragging Drew along and getting stuck with these two, of all people. “Thought we’d take you up on your offer to look at some equipment.”

“Anytime, Coop.”

“We’re looking for some new gates,” Cooper says.

“We’re repairing the gates we have,” Whit says.

Cooper waves a hand. “Same thing.”

“I sold off most of our fencing,” Brad says. “A couple guys from Pennsylvania came and took it all down.”

Whit steps back and jangles the keys in his pocket. “We should just go, then.”

“We’d love to take a look at anything you’ve got left,” Cooper says.

Whit sucks his cheek in, like he’s chewing it between his molars. “I have work to get to.”

“We all have work to get to,” Cooper says.

Though, not Brad, maybe. But Brad’s still smiling as wide as ever and he snaps his gum again. Well, smiling at Cooper, because nobody in their right mind would turn a smile on Whit, not with that pinched glower on his face.

“You can leave Cooper here for the morning,” Brad says.

“No.” Whit releases his cheek to shake his head. “It’s fine.”

Cooper leans towards Whit as they follow Brad across the barnyard. “Why don’t you like Brad?” he asks quietly.

“I like him fine,” Whit says, his words sharp.

“He’s annoying, you can say it.” Cooper raises his eyebrows. “Wait, I know, did he turn you down? Did you ask him out for a romantic evening of hauling tiny hay bales and folding baling twine and he offended your delicate pride?”

Whit brushes past him, into the dark mouth of the barn. “I have better taste than that.”

Cooper snorts out a soft laugh. No, Brad probably wouldn’t top Whit’s list—and besides, interested in men or not, Brad’s not dour enough for Whit, who’d choose a guy as bland and forbidding as himself. Brad, with all of his enthusiasm and gusto, would just grate at Whit. A second thing we see eye to eye on, Cooper could say, but it’s no use trying to joke around with Whit, so he just follows him into the barn’s dusty, dim interior.

“Not gates,” Brad’s saying to Whit as Cooper picks his way over to them, past the pieces of a disassembled rototiller and the shanks of a rusted plow. The snap of Brad’s gum is loud in the dark space. “Cattle stops.”

“They look like gates,” Whit says. He sounds as waspish as ever. “And aren’t they called cattle guards?”

“I worked at a farm down south that used them,” Cooper says. Grids of bars as long as Cooper is tall, laid flat on the ground and just as effective as a gate for keeping cows in a field. Stock gaps, the farmer he’d worked for had called them, though Cooper turns to Whit and says, “Cattle stops, that’s the right term.”

“It’s not.”

“Is,” Cooper says. “Brad, you’re getting rid of them?”

“I meant to get them installed, then never got the chance before selling the herd off,” Brad says. “They’re perfect for our pastures. You dig a ditch, drop the grate over it, and you can drive right over them. The cows won’t go across it.”

“We’ll take them,” Cooper says.

“We won’t,” Whit says. “We need to ask Drew if he even wants cattle guards.”

“Cattle stops,” Cooper corrects. “And what does he care? He’s busy with cheese and the house.”

“The cost?” Whit tips his head and gives him that look.

Cooper sighs. It’s the same look he used to give Cooper when Whit was on one side of twenty years old and Cooper was on the other, like Cooper, perpetually two years younger, was some kid Whit had to put up with.

“Fine, let us know what you want for them, Brad, and we’ll be back for them after we talk to Drew.”

“We might be back for them at some point.” Whit’s got his keys out of his pocket already.

“You’re welcome to stay for a bit,” Brad says. “I’ve got some coffee on. Coop, I haven’t seen you in ages.”

“We have work,” Whit says before Cooper can answer, already heading for his truck.

He’ll probably leave Cooper behind and have a good time doing it if Cooper doesn’t hustle, so he gives Brad a wave and follows Whit.

“Another time,” Brad calls after them. “Hey, Coop, let me give you my number at least.”

“Oh.” Cooper shrugs. “I can just stop by again.”

“Or I’ll take yours,” Brad says. He’s still smiling and once more snaps his gum.

“We have work, we can’t stay,” Whit says again.

“Yeah, okay,” Cooper says and recites his number for Brad.

“Cooper,” Whit says before Brad’s done typing it in. Cooper turns, half-surprised that Whit isn’t also tapping his foot.

“I’m coming,” he says and opens the truck door as Brad smiles at him again.

“I’ll call you, so you have mine,” Brad says.

“Now?” Whit asks.

“Can I get a printed itinerary,” Cooper says, “if the schedule’s really that tight?”

Brad waves to them, still grinning. Whit’s lips purse, and he twists the keys in the ignition hard. Any harder and he’d probably snap the key in half, and then where would they be? Stuck here with Brad and his gum and his empty farm that’s slightly creepy with no cows milling around.

Cooper waves back, just to annoy Whit. “Those cattle stops could be good, if you don’t get your undies in a bunch over them.”

“It’s Drew’s decision.”

“Those stops are easier than a gate. The cows won’t walk across them, ’cause with the hole beneath the grate, they think there’s a cliff, when really—”

“I know how cattle guards work,” Whit says with a snap to his words that makes Cooper raise his eyebrows.

“Okay,” he says slowly, drawing the word out. Cattle stops, he could add, though for once he doesn’t.

Whit stares out the windshield as he drives. Once, his mouth opens, but he shuts it again before saying anything. Cooper turns to the window, ignoring him and the silence in the truck. Whit never did like Brad. Well, whatever. Whit can be peevish if he wants to be. Probably wants to sit there and mull over his ruined day, what with cows escaping and having to see Brad. Just Whit’s luck that the only other farmer in these parts who, according to the scuttlebutt, is out and isn’t Cooper, is Brad of all people.

Well, it’s not like the lack of romantic options around here matters, ’cause Whit’s a loveless recluse who sleeps in his twin bed every night and wouldn’t know a date if it bit him in the ass. Always has been and probably always will be.

“What’ll you do if Drew really sells the farm?” Cooper asks.

“You can’t just go around making decisions about the fences and gates without asking him.”

“If he does sell it, what’re you going to do for work?” Cooper tries again. Though if Whit’s not talking, he’s not talking. Whit’s like a cow that won’t walk into the barn when she sets her mind to it, feet dug in and head thrown back, clammed up good and tight with a stubbornness that would make even the most ill-mannered heifer in the herd seem sweet and docile.

“I’m serious,” Whit says. “Drew’s got the farm set up the way he wants it. You can’t just show up here and change it all around.”

“Drew has only ever worked on his own farm his entire life, which sounds exactly like someone else in this here pickup truck. He doesn’t even know how other farms out there might be doing things better. The systems his uncle set up years ago aren’t the be all and end all of farming.”

Whit makes a low noise in the back of his throat. “Then it’s just so fortunate you’re here to save us from ourselves.”

When they reach the farm, Cooper jumps out of Whit’s truck before he’s even shifted into park, tossing the door closed behind himself with a loud slam. Ass. Giant, fucking, unremitting asshole. Cooper shoves his hand into his hair and blows out a long breath.

The one he draws back in is cool with the chill of spring. He takes a long look around at the familiar shape of the barnyard, breathes in the scent of cows and hay and melting mud. Behind him, Whit neatly parks his truck in the exact, precise spot he always does, the tires retracing their own ruts in the wet slush.

“You don’t want to leave, do you?” Cooper murmurs to a heifer. She arches her neck so he can scratch it, her tail flicking lazily in the spring sunshine. Fuck you, he thinks toward Whit as Whit softly closes the driver’s door. Cooper will fix this, thanks very fucking much.

He finds Drew washing his hands in the cheese room at the back of the barn, his shoulders bent and his head down.

“Hey,” Cooper calls from the doorway.

“You taking off already?”

“No, no, I—” Cooper scrunches up his nose. The words don’t even feel real. “Whit said, uh, the farm? That you’re not, maybe, going to keep it?”

Drew scrubs harder at his hands. “Whit said that?”

“It’s true?”

“What’s truer is that I told him to keep his damn mouth shut.” Drew turns off the water with a hard twist. “It’s just a thought.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“You just got here. I wasn’t going to dump this on you.”

“You could’ve called. I’ve got this newfangled thing called a cellular telephone, real fancy like.”

“You never work on farms that have service. And besides, it’s not a big deal.”

Cooper licks at his lips. Selling the farm is a hell of a big deal. Five generations it’s been, and if Drew ever settled down and had a family, it’d make six.

“You okay?” Cooper asks.

Drew waves toward the house. “Absolutely. What about the giant hole in my attic isn’t fine?”

“Drew…”

“You guys get the cows back all right?”

“Whit didn’t want you to know about that.”

“Kind of obvious when a dozen cows sprint by the window and then you and Whit chase after them.”

“Well, Whit did a shitty job on their fencing.”

“Whit’s done a lot to take on the farm so I can focus on the house and having some damn cheese to sell to a farmers’ market that now no longer exists.”

“Yeah.” Cooper scrapes his foot over the threshold, leaving a mat of manure and hay that he kicks away. “I—sorry. I do want to help with the gates. We went to Brad’s, he’s got some stuff that could be useful.” Cooper squints down the hall toward the rest of the barn. He can’t see them from here, but he can hear the cows shuffling through their pen and there, over the low murmur of the milk pump, Whit’s voice as he talks to one of them. “Drew, you can’t sell this place.”

Drew closes his eyes. “It’s not like I want to.”

“I can stay.” Cooper hears the words before he’s really thought them through. “At least for a bit, until the cows go out on pasture and the season’s underway, if it’d make a difference.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to.”

“Coop, that’s, no. I can’t—I can’t even really pay you much, so it’s not a good—”

“Pay me what you can. The rest? Compensate me in cheese, my man, you know I’d do anything for you.” In it to win it, he thinks. What had Drew said to him? Never planning more than five minutes in advance? Well it’s not like this is the first time Cooper’s pivoted on a dime. “Plus, you know how much cheese I can eat when I set my mind to it, and that’s the one thing in this good world I ever want.”

Drew stares somewhere to the left of Cooper. “Don’t you have a job to be getting to? Oregon, right?”

“I only interviewed with them. I haven’t even heard back yet, but don’t tell Whit that, it’d make him too happy.”

Drew gives a weak sort of smile. “Where would you sleep?”

“Fuck.” Cooper lets out a laugh. “That’s just details. Is that a yes? Want a hand for a bit?”

Drew shakes his head. Then he steps forward, crushing Cooper in a too-tight hug. “I’m not going to say no, you jerk.”

Cooper hugs him back. “We’ll figure this out, okay?”

“Okay,” Drew says, and maybe it’s what Cooper wants to hear, but he sounds a little more certain.

Cooper leaves him to his wheels of cheese and tank of curds, making his way back to the center aisle with his hands in his pockets.

“Whit?” he calls. Maybe Whit’s already halfway out to the fields, intent on fixing the same fences that’ll just break in the same place they always do each summer. Time after time, the cows so well versed in the weak spots in every field that they just saunter out whenever the fancy strikes.

Though, no, there’s Whit crouched down next to a cow lying in a bed of straw and breathing in hard huffs. She grunts once, then settles as Whit strokes her haunch, his voice low as he murmurs to her.

“Whit,” he says again, leaning against the wall of the cow’s pen. “How’s she doing?”

“Fine,” Whit says without looking up. He keeps petting the cow’s rump, his hands as gentle as his voice as he talks to her.

Cooper braces his hand on the post next to him, rubbing his finger over an old nail worked into it. He and Drew carved their initials just up there, one summer long, long ago. Where would the herd go if Drew sold the place? Auction, most likely. Some other farm, somewhere else. Maybe they’d follow Brad’s cows out to Ohio. Most of these girls were born here, and their mothers before them. Cooper presses his lips together as the cow heaves herself to her feet.

She turns in a circle and huffs out a breath. Beyond her, the rest of the herd chews through their breakfast. It’s the same every morning and evening for these ladies, and soon enough their calves too. They spend their days concerned with the choicest bite of clover each summer, and through the winter all they care about is getting a prime spot at the feeder, where they can stuff their mouths with hay cut and dried from the season past, and as the weather turns come spring, they get ready to do it all over again.

The cow stretches her neck and lets out a bleat that rings in Cooper’s ear, her eyes wide.

“I told Drew I’d stay for a few weeks, help get the season started.”

Whit’s shoulders rise, though he keeps his eyes on the cow. “How great.”

You don’t mean that, Cooper could say. Though the fight drains out of him when the cow calls out again, her cry pealing through the barn.

“I can take some of the work off your plate.” Cooper pushes his hands deeper into his pockets. “And help Drew with the house too.”

Whit pets over the cow’s back and flank. Her udder’s full, ready for the little one inside of her. They both watch as she pushes her calf out, and it lands on the straw with a quick inhale and a bleary slow blink of its brown eyes.

“Welcome,” Cooper says softly.

“Well, this makes it officially spring,” Whit says. “Hi there, sweet thing.”

The calf rises to its feet, nosing until it finds where to drink. It’s a girl, Cooper can see now, and her birth will mean plenty to do this afternoon and tonight. Check the calf over, get the cow some fresh water, her own flake of hay, and move her to a smaller pen, away from the herd until the calf’s gotten her bearings. There’ll be more calves tomorrow, too, if not tonight, and soon enough an entire herd’s worth of them on skinny, too-long legs as they race each other up the length of the barn and back again, heads tossing and hooves kicking.

“Um.” Cooper shifts his weight, poking at a piece of straw with his foot. “So, can I maybe crash in your room a little longer?”

Whit finally looks up at him. Oh hell, this is a bad idea. Cooper can feel that truth as certainly as spring in the air, the season crashing down on them no matter if they’re ready for it. The last time Cooper spent more than a couple weeks here on the farm, it ended in firelight and his mouth against Whit’s.

Cooper turns away, staring at the milling herd. How fucking embarrassing that he did that. And how clear a response on Whit’s part, to never, not once mention it again, his firm no to any interest from Cooper coming through that silence loud and clear.

“I’ll try not to, you know, drive you too crazy.”

Whit just watches him with soft dark-brown eyes. His work pants are stretched across his knees from how he’s crouching, the cuffs neatly folded up above his boots. Fucking hell, this is going to be torture.

Cooper clears his throat and shifts his weight again. “I know. I get it that you don’t like me, but I swear I won’t be a total pain in the ass.”

“I don’t not like you.”

Cooper lets out a huffed laugh before he knows he’s going to do it. “Well, that’s news.”

“You can stay, if you’re really going to help.”

Of course I’m going to help, Cooper wants to snap. He swallows the words. “Anything for Drew.”

Including rooming with you, he thinks and when he looks back at Whit, he’s entirely sure the same thought is written on Whit’s face, too.