Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Stephen hauled the last of the leftover wire over to Hickory Hollow himself, on account of nobody else having the time and the spools being Bolton’s to return.
He found Elise Pollard at war with a gate.
The equipment-yard gate had been sagging on its hinge since who could say when, and she had both hands on the top rail, hauling it up and shoving it toward the latch post, and the thing wasn’t having it.
The dropped hinge had lowered the gate a good two inches.
She could lift, or she could push. She couldn’t do both and work the latch besides.
She’d jammed a flat rock under it to take the weight, and the rock had skidded out twice. A third go was loading up behind her eyes, the particular fury of a competent person beaten by a dumb object. Stephen had lost that fight to enough gates of his own to grant her the sympathy.
She didn’t ask for help. He’d have bet a week’s pay she wouldn’t.
So he didn’t offer.
He set the brake and pulled the spare hinge pin from the door pocket. A man who hauled enough gates learned to carry one.
Lifting the gate off her hands the way you’d take a tray from a tired waitress, he set the rail on his knee and drove the worn pin out with the new one in two taps of the wrench. The hinge rose, the gate swung true, and the latch caught clean as a key turning.
He stepped back and let it hang there, square and easy.
Elise swung it on the new pin and latched it, then swung it again, the way she tested everything.
“You carry a spare pin for somebody else’s gate.”
“I haul gates. Carry a pin or two for it.”
“Course you do.”
“Thank you,” she said.
That was all. No speech, no rush to paper over the silence the way most folks did. Stephen liked her the better for it than he had any right to.
She signed for the wire on a clipboard balanced on the tailgate, and somewhere between the signature and the goodbye, neither one of them left.
He’d meant to drop the spools and drive.
He had a fence waiting and a list long as his arm.
He stayed anyway, the way she’d stayed out at the fence line the day she figured he hadn’t marked her standing there. Fair was fair.
The afternoon sat easy, in no hurry to move anybody along. She hitched a hip onto the tailgate beside the spools, and after a moment he leaned against it too, a careful foot of daylight between them, and the talk came the way it had on the dark roadside with the flat tire. Slow. Unforced.
“You always make deliveries yourself?” she asked.
“When it’s my mess to close out. Wire was ours.” He shrugged. “Figured I’d finish the loop.”
“Most men would’ve sent a hand.”
“I’m not most men’s notion of a boss.” He let that sit. “The one who raised me ran it that way. You don’t send a man to do a thing you won’t do yourself.”
“The one who raised you.”
She tilted her head, inviting more without asking for it. He surprised himself by handing it over.
“Earl. My grandad. Took me in when I was nine, after my folks passed. Hard old man. Never said a tender word in his life. But he never once made me out to be a burden he got stuck with.” Stephen turned the wrench over in his hands.
“Taught me the land instead. Every fence line and low spot, where the good grass comes up come spring. Walked it with me till it sat in my bones same as his.”
“You talk about it as if it’s a person.”
“Closest thing.” He nodded at the line of country past the yard. “Land doesn’t lie to you. Doesn’t leave. You put the work in, it pays you back in its own time. Man could do worse for company.”
“Spoken by a fella who’d sooner have dirt than people.”
“Dirt’s never let me down.” He turned the wrench again. “People are a longer bet.”
“And me.” She said it light. “Which am I. The dirt or the people.”
It didn’t land as light as she’d pitched it. He looked at her a moment, the way he’d look at weather building off the caprock.
“Still working that out,” he said. “You keep surprising me.”
“Is that good?”
“Hasn’t been bad yet.”
She quieted at that, and into the quiet he gave her one more thing, the words coming on their own.
“He walked the line every evening of his life. Hands clasped behind him, reading the grass. I’d trail after him not saying a word, and somehow I learned more on those walks than a year of school ever gave me.
Last good one we took, he stopped at the south corner, looked it all over, and told me to keep it in the family.
” Stephen’s voice went rough at the edge.
“That’s the whole of what he asked of me. ”
That was more than he’d laid out for anybody in years.
The words came strange in his mouth, strange and not unwelcome.
He stopped there. He didn’t tell her about the drawer of county notices, or the weight of the promise that pressed down heavier every year.
A man could open a door without walking a body through every room behind it.
She was quiet a spell, turning her water glass in her hands. Then she gave him a piece of it in return.
“I had somebody once who let me run his whole life,” she said. “Bills, calendar, the lot. I was good at it. Too good. Made myself so useful he forgot I was a person and not a service.” A short breath. “Soon as the chaos cleared and he didn’t need managing, he didn’t need me.”
Stephen took that in without a word. He’d built his life so he’d never have to lean on a living soul. Here sat a woman who’d built hers so no soul could lean on her and leave her hollowed out. Two people armored against the same wound, from opposite sides of it.
He didn’t say that part out loud. Wasn’t sure she’d thank him for the comparison, and wasn’t sure he’d earned the right to draw it. But it settled in him all the same, the odd comfort of being read clear by a body who carried the matching scar.
“What a fool,” Stephen said.
“You’d have hated him. Never once got his hands dirty.”
“I’d have hated him on principle.”
That pulled a real laugh out of her, low and unguarded, and it did something to him he chose not to examine.
“Careful, Garrett,” she said. “Two whole jokes. People will talk.”
“Let ‘em.” The word came easier than he meant it.
She studied him a beat, and whatever she turned up there, she didn’t look away from it.
Off at the edge of things, two figures had drifted onto the Hickory Hollow porch and gone conspicuously busy with nothing at all.
He didn’t have to look straight at them to place who they were. Annie’s laugh carried across the yard. Kelly’s bright head swung their way and swung off again a touch too quick.
Not today.
Whatever the pair were angling to add to their collection, Stephen wasn’t of a mind to hand it over. He shifted on the tailgate, easy, no fuss in it, and set his shoulder between the porch and Elise, so anybody squinting from that distance got a view of flannel to study and not one thing more.
He’d grown up the object of a small town’s idle talk, the orphan Earl Garrett took in, and he’d learned young to give the nosy a closed face and an empty yard to chew on. The skill returned quick.
Some matters were between two people and the open afternoon, and wanted no audience.
Elise caught the move. Of course she did. The woman caught everything.
“Subtle,” she said.
“Never claimed to be.”
“They’ve been at this a while now.” Not quite a question.
“Reckon so.”
“Does it bother you?”
He weighed it. The honest answer and the careful one weren’t the same, and she’d earned the honest one.
“Not the part that’s you,” he said.
She didn’t answer with words. She let it settle there between them, warm as the long afternoon, and for a good while neither one moved to end it.
He could count on one hand the people he’d let this near the truth of him. Most he’d walled off out of habit, before they got close enough to matter. This one had walked up to the wall, leaned against it, and started talking, and he’d handed her bricks without once meaning to.
Stephen had spent the whole of his life keeping a careful foot of daylight between himself and the wanting of things. The gap on that tailgate had narrowed to a hand’s width, and he hadn’t closed it on purpose, and he was in no hurry at all to set it right.