Prologue #2
That's what we've had instead of a conversation, for twenty-eight years. I bring him coffee. He drinks it.
I'd like to say the winter after was hard. It wasn't. That's the thing nobody believes.
It was the best winter of my life.
Six of them in my barn and my kitchen from November to March, snowed in twice, and my husband four years dead and the house too big, and every morning there were boots by my door that weren't mine.
Marcus rewired the whole downstairs and did it wrong and then did it again right.
Otis and Early built a lean-to on the barn out of pallets that stood for nineteen years.
Priest read every book in that house including the ones about canning.
And Roman went quiet.
He was sixteen and he'd been a mouthy child in October and by February he was a boy who did the dishes without being asked and didn't say much and stood at a window a lot.
I did that. I want it written down that I know I did that.
They left in the spring. Went east and got a charter and got patches and got a name, and I heard about it the way you hear about weather in another county.
They put a wolf's skull on a crown, and Deacon called me to ask what I thought of it.
"It's a lot of skull," I said.
"It's meant to be."
"Are you a wolf or a king, Deacon?"
Long pause on the line. "We're the ones that ate him."
"Well," I said, "that's not going to fit on a jacket."
Deacon's been dead since 2011. Otis went in '06. Early's in Nevada and doesn't call, and Priest went so far into something that even Marcus lost him, and Marcus — Marcus I don't speak about.
Which leaves one.
One out of six, and he's president now, and he rides past the end of my road twice a week and doesn't turn in.
He's been doing that for four years.
I know the sound of that bike. I know it the way I knew my husband's cough. And I'll be at the sink and I'll hear it come up the ridge and slow — it always slows — and then not turn.
The first year I set a plate.
The second year I stopped.
The third year I got mad, and being mad at seventy-seven is a full-time position with benefits.
The fourth year I got tired, and that's the one that worries me.
So here's where we are, and then I'll leave you to it, because I have a shotgun to clean and a granddaughter coming that I have not told about any of this.
Last month a man came up my drive in a very clean car. Wore a coat too nice for the weather and shoes that had never been outside before. Pleasant. Called me Mrs. Bly with the emphasis on the Mrs., which is a thing men do when they've read a file.
Said he'd bought the Vaughn place. Said he'd bought the Kesler place. Said he was buying the whole ridge, and wasn't it wonderful, and did I know my forty acres sat right across the only road that connects the north half to the south.
I said I did know that. I said I'd known it since Eisenhower.
He smiled at me and he asked what it would take.
And I said, "Son, what's your name?"
And he told me.
And I stood there on my own porch with my hand on my own door and I felt the years go out from under me like a rug, because it was the dead man's name, and he had the dead man's mouth, and he was standing in the exact place where Deacon Ross bled on my step in October of nineteen ninety-eight.
I didn't let it show. I've had practice.
I said, "It'll take more than you've got."
He said, "Everyone says that."
He said it kindly. That's what I can't get past. There was no threat in it anywhere. He said it the way you'd tell a child that the ice cream truck comes on Thursdays.
Then he got back in his clean car and he backed down my drive without turning around once, all four hundred feet, in reverse, at speed.
That's the part I'd tell Deacon about, if I had Deacon. A man who won't turn his back on a house.
The next week there was a fellow on my porch in a Grimm Riders cut two sizes too big for him, sitting in my husband's chair like he was owed it.
I know that cut. I sewed the bottom rocker on that cut at this table in 1999 with the same mending basket.
That cut went in the ground with Deacon Ross in 2011. I watched them close the box.
And the boy wearing it now has Pike's chin.
I've stopped answering the phone. Not out of fear — I want that clear, I'm not afraid, I'm seventy-nine and I have a shotgun I have used and a name for it and everything — but because my granddaughter Scarlett calls on Sundays and she has a voice that goes up at the end when she's worried, and if she hears one wrong thing in my voice she will get on that ridiculous motorcycle in that ridiculous red hoodie and come three hundred miles.
Which is exactly what she's done.
I know she has. I can do arithmetic and I know that girl.
So she'll come up the ridge in the next day or two, twenty-four years old and stubborn as her mother and braver than either of us has any business being, and she will find a man in a dead man's cut on my porch and an old woman lying to her face.
And somewhere down in that town there's a forty-one-year-old man who slows at the end of my road twice a week and doesn't turn in.
Well.
He'll turn in now.
I've been waiting twenty-eight years for somebody to come dig up my pump house.
I just always assumed it'd be one of mine.