Chapter Ten
Three Forks Creek, Returning to the Collins Ranch
“She ran,” George panted, his words coming faster than his breath allowed. He worked his jaw once. “I had her by the hand. She pulled free at the gate and ran. I followed, but she’s fast and small. She went for the trees at the north end of the yard.”
“How long ago?”
“Four, maybe five minutes.” George’s hand went to the back of his neck and gripped there.
Wade turned. “George,” he said, “take the south side. Pasture, creek bank, outbuildings.”
“Aye,” George said, already moving.
“Zoe, go up to the house,” Wade said. “Stay there.”
Zoe was at his right elbow before he had finished the sentence, the empty laundry basket on her hip and her wet sleeves cold against her wrists.
“I’m not going up to the house,” she said evenly. “I am staying out here for Sadie.” Her tone left no room for argument.
George went south without further comment. Wade went north.
The cottonwoods at the north end of the yard were old growth, planted by his father’s hand the first summer of the ranch. They’d grown into a stand that provided enough hiding places for a determined eight-year-old. Wade moved through the cottonwoods at a walk, watching the ground.
Job ranged ahead in long sweeps, his nose working the ground. No child.
Sweet girl, Wade said inside himself. Where are you?
Job swept right. Wade followed.
Sweet girl. I have been a poor uncle to you, and I will take whatever account the Lord wishes to keep on the matter when this afternoon is over. Show me where you are.
Job stopped.
Wade stopped.
The dog’s hackles came up at the base of his neck and stayed up. His nose lifted a quarter inch off the ground, and his head turned five degrees toward the northwest.
Wade’s pulse beat hard at the side of his neck. He came out the other side of the stand and stopped.
The small church sat at the edge of the north pasture.
His father had built it the third year of the ranch, log and mortar, a narrow white painted door with a pine stave cross above it, and two shuttered windows on either side.
His mother had filled it, once, on Sunday mornings.
Nora had filled it after her. Wade had helped carry the pews in with his father’s hands on one end of the pine bench and his own hands on the other.
He had been twelve years old and proud, and he had sat in the second pew from the front every Sunday morning for nearly twenty years.
That door had stayed closed for three years and now stood ajar.
He crossed the pasture.
Patience had come up beside him, silent, her grey coat catching the cold light.
She stayed at his knee as he covered the ground and stopped at the church door.
Through the gap of the open door came the slant of afternoon light across a plank floor, the smell of pine and candle wax, and the cool faint smell of old prayer.
He set his hand on the door and pushed it open.
Sadie was in the second pew from the front.
She sat with her knees pulled to her chest and her boots leaving a trail of creek mud across the seat.
Her braids had come entirely undone. Her yellow hair was loose and tangled around her face.
She was very small in that pew. Much smaller than she looked in the kitchen or the yard, where she was always in motion.
Something gave way in Wade’s chest. He stayed in the doorway and let it give.
Three years of carrying the child at arm’s length, three years of telling himself that the arm’s length was for her sake and not for his.
Three years of standing at the porch step at supper time and hearing her at the rag rug with the chicken and going on past the kitchen door.
Those three years sat in his chest in a flat hard weight.
The weight pulled down and broke at the bottom of his ribs and went out of him at the seams.
She lifted her face when he stepped through the door and looked at him with her mother’s eyes. He crossed to the second pew and sat beside her.
The bench was cold. He set his hands on his thighs and looked at the front of the room, at the simple cross Nora had embroidered in white linen and hung above the pine lectern.
She had done it the summer before she died.
The embroidery was neat and even, and her initials were stitched in the lower right corner.
He looked at those initials for a long moment.
He remembered that summer. Nora at the kitchen table with the linen in her hoop, her tongue pressed to the corner of her mouth in the manner it had always pressed when she was concentrating.
Sadie at the rag rug at her feet with the small wooden horse George had whittled for her fourth birthday.
The kitchen was warm with bread, and the light came in low across the table at three in the afternoon.
Wade had walked through the kitchen thirty times that summer and said nothing to either of them about the embroidery.
He had been twenty-nine.
He’d had other things to think about.
Now he was thirty-three. The cross was here. Nora was three years and four months in the ground. The weight of all the small things he had walked past without stopping pressed down on him.
Beside him, Sadie breathed slowly. She had been crying, and the skin around her eyes was swollen. A small dried track of salt ran down from her left eye to her jaw.
“You ran from George.”
“Yes,” Sadie replied to the cross.
“That was unkind to him.”
“I know.”
A long silence settled in the church.
Lord, he started, inside himself, and stopped.
Lord, I have little business asking You for words.
I am asking anyway.
He drew a slow breath. He turned his face toward the small yellow head three feet from his shoulder, and he understood, with the cold clear honesty of a man who had been refusing to look at himself in any honest mirror for many years, that the right thing to say to her would not be a sentence he had practiced.
It would be a sentence she had been waiting three years to hear.
He had to find the sentence.
He set his hat back on the bench beside his hip and turned an inch further on the pew toward her.
“I told Auntie Zoe she was boring. And that I wanted Mama back.” She paused. “I meant the second one. I did not mean the first one. She’s not boring at all.”
“No,” he said. “She’s not.”
“I was very tired,” Sadie offered, her voice gone small at the edges and her eyes on the chain stitch in his hands.
“I know, sweet girl,” Wade answered, low.
“And cold,” she added, the corner of her mouth pulling down.
“I know that, too,” Wade returned, his good hand coming a careful inch closer to her along the pine of the pew.
He looked at the cross his sister had stitched and breathed through his nose. He tried to remember when the last time was that he had sat in this pew with any portion of peace in his chest.
“Sadie.” His voice came rougher than he had pitched it. “Look at me.”
She looked at him.
“I am going to say something difficult,” he said, “and I need you to hear it from start to finish before you decide how to feel about it.”
She turned to look at him, holding his gaze patiently.
“Your mother was the best person I have ever known,” Wade said, his throat working once around the words before he could let them go.
“She was funny, and warm, and she made every room she walked into a different room from the one it had been. Her laugh was the loudest thing in the house, and I miss her every day of my life. Every day, Sadie. And there is not a morning I do not walk through this ranch and know that she is not here and never will be, and feel the size of that.”
Sadie’s chin trembled.
“I have also,” he said, keeping his voice steady, “done a poor job of letting you say so. I’ve been so busy holding this place together that I have not given you room to be as broken as you need to be, and that was wrong of me, and I am sorry for it.”
The trembling spread from her chin to her shoulders.
“I don’t blame you,” she said, very small. “For her being gone. I know you didn’t cause it.”
He held very still.
It was a sentence a child should not have had to say.
He set his hand on the back of her thin neck, gently, the same way he had set it the first night she had come home with him from the road outside Helena, when he had carried her in his arms and felt how small and limp she had been, too exhausted to cry anymore.
She leaned into his hand.
“I know you miss her,” he said, rough-voiced now, and no longer entirely in control of the steadiness he had been holding.
“And I know Auntie Zoe is not her, and I am not asking you to pretend otherwise. But Sadie.” He paused.
“She came a long way for us. She’s trying very hard.
And today she held you when you were broken, and she deserved better from you than what you gave her. ”
“I know,” Sadie said, the words coming out small.
Wade kept his hand at the side of her head. He could feel the warmth of her scalp through the loose tangle of her yellow hair. The warmth went into his palm and stayed there.
“You are going to apologize to her, sweet girl. Tonight. Before supper.”
Sadie’s chin came down a careful eighth of an inch against his thumb.
“Yes, Uncle Wade.”
“And you are going to mean it.”
Her chin lifted again, and her pale blue eyes came up to his face.
“Yes, Uncle Wade.”
He kept his hand on her. The church held them in its cold and its quiet. The light through the north shutter moved by slow degrees across the planked floor.
“Do you pray anymore?” Sadie said, after a long moment.
He looked, again, at the embroidered cross his sister had made with her careful hands.
“Not in some time,” he answered.
“I pray for you,” she said gently. “I pray every night.”
The sentence landed in the quiet of the church and settled there, simple and serious, as Sadie said everything she meant.
Somewhere at the back of Wade’s chest, the lock his father had set on the door of all the things a man keeps gave a small dry click and went slack.
“Sweet girl,” he said, his voice gone rough, “you will have to do the praying for me a while longer. I have no skill at it just now. But I am going to try.”