Free Spooner by Pete Dexter Page B

hands,” he said.

    “For the sake of argument,” Calmer said one night, indicating the pasture beyond the fence, “let us say that yon cow is in
     need of shoes, a pair of saddle shoes perhaps.” They’d all driven to Macon that week for shoes; Margaret was beginning first
     grade on Monday. They were sitting at the picnic table in the backyard, an hour after he’d finished the dishes. Spooner, Margaret,
     Calmer. The air was hot and wet and full of insects, and no fresher to breathe, even though the sun had dropped into the cloud
     of awful, sweet smoke that hung over the sawmill, completely out of sight.
    Spooner turned to look and saw the last few stragglers ambling downhill to the pond, where they spent the night together in
     a pile. A pile of cows. Calmer reached under the table and took Margaret’s bare foot in his hand. “Now, the problem, my dear,”
     he said, “as you may already know, cows have quite dainty feet—like yourself.”
    Spooner squinted, trying to make out the cows’ dainty feet, and Calmer turned to him. “But the real problem is that yon cow
     will not ride in the family car. It’s undignified, it thinks, and they push and pull and beg and cajole, but the animal will
     not budge, and in the end it has its own way and it walks. Thirty-two miles.”
    At the edge of his vision, Spooner saw Margaret write down the number thirty-two. These days she carried a notepad and a pencil
     everywhere she went, getting ready for school. Calmer had gotten him a notepad too—like his new shoes, so he wouldn’t feel
     left out—but Spooner had used it only once, balling up a few pieces of paper, trying to set fire to the patch of briars at
     the edge of the woods. He had very little use for a notepad otherwise—he couldn’t write yet, not numbers or letters, and wasn’t
     even much at drawing.
    “And so beginneth the journey,” Calmer said. “But miles pass, and time, and eventually, exactly halfway to Macon the cow stops.”
    “Why?” Spooner said.
    Calmer shrugged. “Well, his feet hurt,” he said. “He
is
barefoot.” Which bent Margaret over until her nose touched the notepad, and as she giggled, a line of drool dropped from
     her mouth onto the paper and pooled. She’d lost one of her front teeth the week before and another one was looser every day.
    “And after the cow has rested its feet,” Calmer said, “it starts out and walks half the distance to Macon again, and again
     stops and rests its feet.”
    “When does it sleep?” Spooner said.
    “It sleeps while it rests its feet, and then eats breakfast, and then walks half the distance left to Macon again. And the
     cow proceeds in this way, walking and resting, each time covering half the distance left. And one day it comes to a post office
     and drops a card to its friends back in the pasture, saying the weather is fine and the grass is sweet and it should be in
     Macon by…”
    Calmer paused, looking from Spooner to Margaret. “But it doesn’t know when it will be in Macon, and that,” he said, “is the
     question. How long should yon bovine say it will take, each day walking half the distance left, to arrive in Macon?”
    Margaret thought a moment and began her calculations, writing careful, perfect numbers down the page, writing and erasing,
     subtracting and adding and dividing. Numbers all over. Spooner watched her work a little while and then looked away, back
     to the pasture, and presently, feeling Calmer’s eyes on him, he picked up his pencil and drew a cow. This was a distraction
     of course, as most of everything he did and said around Calmer was, hoping this time around that Calmer wouldn’t notice that
     he didn’t know how to do problems, or even write numbers, hoping somehow not to disappoint him. And the last thing he would
     do, or even think of doing, in the face of this convolution of time and miles and cows and saddle shoes, not to mention his
     sister’s furious calculations as she closed in on