Chapter Six
Collins Ranch, near Bozeman, Montana Territory
Wade was in the barn at four in the morning with a lantern and a perfectly sound bridle he had decided needed oiling, and he knew, even as he pulled the first strap through the rag, that the bridle was an excuse.
He oiled it anyway. He worked the rag down the length of the cheekpiece, then the brow band, then the headstall, and somewhere between the second and third pass he started oiling harder than the leather needed.
The buckle of the throat latch caught his thumb against the iron of the hook on the wall and laid open a thin red line at the meat below his knuckle.
He looked at the cut. He looked at the dog at the door.
“Job,” he said, low.
Job lifted his head.
“You saw that,” Wade went on.
The dog set his chin back on his paws without comment.
“I deserved that,” Wade told him, pressing his thumb against the front of his shirt to stop the bleeding.
Patience, who had been pretending to sleep, opened one eye and shut it again.
He went back to the bridle. The rag moved down the headstall slower now.
The trouble was that he had been right at the supper table.
He had been right about the water, and about the table manners, and about the principle of the thing.
He had been right about every separate piece of it.
And somewhere in between starting to be right and finishing being right, he had looked up and seen Zoe’s face across the supper table and understood, in the bottom of his chest, that being right was not the same as being good.
“Job,” he said again, his voice quiet now.
The dog opened his eyes.
“I should not have done it in front of the woman,” Wade said.
Job tilted his head a quarter inch.
“I should not have done it in front of the child either,” Wade added, his voice gone rough.
Job did not contradict him.
Wade set the bridle down on the hay bale and looked at his hands.
The cut had stopped bleeding. The lantern light moved across the hay, the two dogs, and the slow shifting of the gelding in his stall.
Wade held on to the picture that had occupied his mind for the past hour.
It was the moment after Zoe had said his name across the supper table, level and steady, in the same voice his mother had used when she wanted his father to look at her without a fight.
Zoe was not going to fight him.
Zoe was going to say his name calmly across a table.
That was worse.
He hung the bridle on the peg, blew out the lantern, and walked back through the cold yard with Job and Patience at his heels and a decision made.
The decision was not yet a sentence. It was nearer to a direction.
He would speak to Sadie first, before breakfast, and he would speak to Zoe after.
The voice he had used at the supper table was not coming back into the kitchen with him.
He lit the kitchen lamp. He built up the fire from the banked coals.
He set the coffee pot on the hot edge of the stove and stood at it with his hands on the iron rail.
The screen door at the back opened with a low creak and George came in with his hat in his hand.
He set his hat on a peg and took a mug down off the shelf without asking.
He poured himself coffee, sat down at the table across from Wade, and looked at the cut on Wade’s thumb.
“That bridle must have needed a great deal of oiling,” George remarked, the corner of his mouth moving.
Wade gave him a look.
George took a swallow of his coffee.
“George,” Wade said, a warning at the edge of the word.
George took another swallow.
“She would let you say it, you know,” George said after a moment, not looking up.
“Who would?” Wade asked, lifting his eyes.
“Either of them,” George answered evenly.
Wade set his mug down. George set his down, too.
The first pale grey of morning had begun at the east window. Wade looked at the larger of his two hands lying on the pine, at the cut on the knuckle, and opened his mouth with the intention of trying something he had not done in a long time.
Lord…
He started, inside himself, and stopped.
George went out to the south pasture at half past five.
Wade stayed at the table until the kitchen began to gather light at the east window. Then he rose, set his empty mug in the basin, and crossed the kitchen toward the back door.
At the foot of the stairs, he stopped.
The south bedroom was at the top of the landing, the second door on the right. The door was closed. He could not hear Zoe moving behind it, but he knew the shape of her morning by now; she was up at quarter to six. It was twelve minutes before that.
Wade laid his hand once on the newel post at the foot of the stair.
I will say it when she comes down, he thought.
Then he turned and went out to the barn to feed the stock.
He was at the corral gate at half past six when the back door of the house opened.
Zoe came out with her shawl pulled close, her dark hair braided and the grey morning light on her face.
She walked to the kitchen garden and stopped at the gate.
She pulled a small piece of paper from her apron pocket and studied it a moment.
She had heard him at the corral, he thought, and was choosing not to look.
Something tightened low in his chest. He set the bucket down harder than he needed to. The gelding at the rail flicked one ear at him without turning.
He stood at the corral a moment longer with his hand on the top rail and looked at the closed south window of the house—at the pale square of curtain behind the glass, at the lamp she had not yet lit—and the inside of his chest did the thing it had done at the supper table the previous evening, the unsteady pulling that he had taken for anger at the time and was beginning to understand had not been anger at all.
He kept his eyes on the south pasture.
A rooster came around the corner of the henhouse at a flat-footed trot with his red comb up and his whole demeanor that of an animal whose territory had just been violated. Wade watched, with interest, as the rooster fixed his attention on Zoe’s ankles and changed course, charging toward her.
Wade opened his mouth.
The rooster reached her before he got the word out.
Zoe made a sound he had never heard a grown woman make before.
It was a very short, very high sound, cut off immediately.
She stepped sideways, and the rooster adjusted.
She took two rapid steps backward into a fence rail.
The fence rail caught her across the back of both knees.
She grabbed the rail. The rooster strutted past her toward the kitchen garden gate with the complete satisfaction of a creature who had made his point.
Zoe stood at the garden fence with both hands on the rail and her chin down and her shoulders trembling.
Wade came across the yard.
“Zoe,” he said, the corner of his mouth working against something that was nearly a laugh.
She straightened. Her face was very pink. “Wade,” she said, in a tone that made it entirely clear his assistance was both noted and unwelcome.
She tucked her list back into her apron pocket, turned on her heel, and walked back to the house.
“Zoe—”
The word came out of him before he had decided to let it. He took two long strides after her, the gravel grinding under his boots, and then he stopped himself short of a third with his hand already half lifted at his side.
She did not turn.
The screen door at the back of the kitchen swung shut behind. Wade stood in the gravel of the yard with his hand still half lifted and his chest tightening again.
The rooster regarded him from the garden gate.
Wade lowered his hand.
He looked down at the heel marks her boots had left in the gravel.
He had come across the yard to apologize.
That moment had passed, and the next one was going to have to be earned harder than this one had been.
***
He spent the morning at the north fence line with his pliers and a fresh coil of wire.
The first staple went in at the corner post with three flat strikes of the mallet. He pulled the wire taut against the second post, set the next staple, struck it home. He twisted the splice tight, clipped the ends, moved on.
The image of Zoe at the dishpan rose up in front of him at the third post; her back straight, her voice steady, the soap suds working at her wrists. The mallet came down crooked, and the staple bent against the post.
Wade pulled the bent staple out with the pliers, dropped it in his coat pocket, and reached for another.
He worked his way down twelve feet of wire before he understood, with his pliers in one hand and a fresh staple between his teeth.
He set the pliers down on the top of the post. He stood at the wire with his hand on the wood and looked east at nothing.
Each of the three women before Zoe had come up the creek path, and Sadie had given each of them the same careful, distant look he remembered from the morning she arrived on his buckboard from the Helena road.
Each time, he had told himself the child needed more time and someone in the kitchen who would meet her where she was, instead of asking her to be some other way.
He had brought three previous women who had each looked at her as a project.
Zoe had looked at her as Sadie.
Wade picked up the pliers and went back to the wire.
Time, it turned out, wasn’t the variable.
His sister had understood Sadie. Nora had been the same creature as her daughter, fire and curiosity and joy, and she had never sent that joy to its room for knocking over a water cup.
She had handed her child a cloth, said, clean it up, and gotten back to the supper, and the table had moved on.
He had watched his sister parent her daughter for five years, taken in the whole of it.
Then, Sadie had come to his house and he had done everything he knew how to do, and he had done it wrong.
He hammered the next staple flush and moved on down the line.