Chapter 2 #2
A man could work a piece of wood until his heart knew every curve better than his hands did, but that didn’t make it easier to let go.
Most of the crew rode out at dawn to move the cattle to a sheltered coulee where the wind kept the grass clear, but someone had to watch the remuda. Rhett drew the short straw, but he was glad for the solitude.
The December breeze pushed through the gaps in his coat, but he stayed on the step, smoothing, refining as his thoughts drifted to the past.
Five winters ago, the fever took them both. Clara and her gentle smile that could ease the sting of any bad day, and Matthew, who clapped his hands at the sight of a top spinning across the floor of their old place back in Choteau.
The boy would squat low, nose nearly touching the boards, tracking every wobble. “Again, Pa. Make it go again.”
Clara would laugh from the kitchen, telling them both to mind the furniture. But she’d watch too, wiping her hands on her apron, that soft look on her face that said she was storing the moment away.
Rhett vowed to his boy he’d show him how to make another, smoother, better balanced. “When you’re older. When your hands are steadier.” The promise still sat in his bones, though the boy’s laughter was long gone. Matthew never got older.
The knife slipped, stabbing the tip of his thumb. A bead of blood welled. He sucked it clean, tasting copper and salt. His own fault for working when his mind wandered to empty places.
From the corral, Paloma nickered. Cade’s horse, taken over now by a kid called Jeffers, after Cade vanished a second time in a week. Rhett still missed his friend and wondered if he’d ever see him again.
The first time Cade disappeared was during a short blizzard. Then, a few days later, he returned looking haunted and hollowed out like a man who saw something beyond explanation.
Whatever happened to Cade out there, wherever he’d been, whoever touched him, it left marks deeper than skin.
And then he left again in the middle of the night, and no one had seen him since.
“Pulled right out of time,” Cade whispered to Rhett. “One minute I’m here, the next...” He trailed off, shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
But Rhett would have. Because sometimes, late at night, he could feel the world thin around the edges. Felt something watching. Waiting.
The air shifted.
Not the breeze. This was thicker, heavier, like the sky itself pressing closer.
In a heartbeat, the temperature dropped ten degrees.
Rhett stilled. Every instinct honed from years of reading weather and land screamed at once.
The horses lifted their heads in unison. His mare, Buttercup, backed three steps, ears flat, the whites of her eyes showing. The other horses bunched together, milling, making lowing noises. Even the camp dog, usually lazy as a fed tick, stood rigid by the shack, hackles raised.
A sound bled through from somewhere unknown. High-pitched. Piercing. A child’s scream.
The hairs on his nape stood up. He clenched the top in his fist.
“Matthew?”
For one wild instant, he thought he’d gone mad, that grief had finally cracked him open. But Matthew never screamed like that, not even when the fever burned hottest.
But then came a mechanical noise, like no windmill or forge he’d ever heard. It pressed against his teeth, vibrated in his chest, set his bones aching.
He stood and scanned the horizon. Saw nothing unusual. Just snow-dusted grassland rolling empty under a wide gray sky. The mountains stood, purple-gray in the distance. But between him and those mountains, the air itself rippled.
The top fell from his hand and spun once across the porch boards before wobbling to a stop at the edge of the step. For a moment, it balanced there, neither falling nor settling, suspended between choices.
“No.”
The shimmer spread wider.
His chest seized. The boards under his boots softened, became insubstantial, like standing on water. The wood grain he’d been studying for the past hour blurred, ran together like wet paint. He grabbed for the rail but instead found the wooden top. He clutched it. Panic flared, hot and primitive.
His stomach pitched as if he’d ridden clean off a bluff in the dark. Light split his vision, blinding, drilling through his skull until he thought it might crack.
Not bright like the sun, but a color that didn’t exist in any sunset or flame. It was the color of things that shouldn’t be, of spaces between seconds, of distances that folded in on themselves.
The scream came again, closer now, so close he could hear the ragged breath between cries. Not Matthew’s voice. A different child. A boy in trouble.
Other sounds leaked through with the scream. A woman pleading for help. None of it made sense, but the child’s terror needed no translation. The sounds pulled at something primal in him, older than time. A child needed help. That was enough.
Rhett walked into the light with nothing but instinct, his hand closing on air that felt thick as molasses, cold as January creek water. It resisted him, pushed back, tried to refuse his entry. He pushed harder.
If a child needed him, he was going. The world could sort itself out later.
The force seized him at the center of his chest, a fist closing around his heart, yanked him like a rope around his ribs.
His boots left the dissolving porch. His body stretched, pulled long and thin as taffy. The last thing he felt was the sensation of falling upward, of time itself coming undone like a horse throwing its rider into an endless sky.