Chapter Fifteen #3
The brass clapper moved inside the bell housing at the same patient pace it had been moving since Reverend Atkinson had hung the bell in fifty-three, and the sound of it carried across the boardwalk, and Wade understood that the bell had been ringing the whole time.
Wade had been the one who had stopped listening.
Lord, he said inside himself. I am listening.
He let the bell ring out its fifth note. Then, he untied the gelding from the hitching post and rode home.
He came up the creek track at twenty past four. The shadows had lengthened across the pasture. Smoke rose thick and steady from the chimney.
Wade came around the bend at a working trot.
Zoe was on the back porch with her shawl pulled tight at her shoulders. Her hand shaded her brow against the late sun. As he came clear of the cottonwoods, her arm lifted in a small quick wave that he answered with a tip of his hat. She set both palms on the porch rail and leaned forward.
The gelding picked up its pace at the smell of the barn. Wade let it.
By the time the gelding reached the porch step, Zoe was already down off it, with her shawl loose at one elbow and the dogs at her side.
Patience pressed her grey shoulder once against Zoe’s skirt, decided that was sufficient acknowledgement of Wade’s return, and trotted off to investigate the smell of the parcel on his saddle.
“She has been sleeping,” Zoe said. The wind moved a loose strand of dark hair across her cheek bone. She brushed it back.
Wade swung down off the gelding.
The dust of Bozeman was on his coat. The brown paper of Morrison’s parcel was pressed flat against the inside of his ribs.
Zoe was two feet from him at the gravel of the porch step.
The sun came in low across the side of her face and lit the small gold strands at the back of the dark coil at her neck, and Wade looked at her with the reins still in his hand and a great deal in his mouth that had no intention of organizing itself into a sentence in the next minute.
“Inside,” Zoe said, the dry edge gone warm at the back of her tongue. “Supper has been on the back of the stove for two hours and is beginning to have an opinion.”
She came down the porch steps as he swung off the gelding.
“How is she?” he asked, the parcel still under his arm.
“Sleeping,” Zoe answered, drawing her shawl tighter against the cold. “The fever has come up, but slowly. The doctor was right about the timing. She woke for water at three and went back to sleep. Henrietta has been on the bed since one.” She drew a breath. “There’s something you should see.”
Zoe led him along the path that ran between the kitchen garden and the south pasture.
Past the spent squash bed where she had been working that morning.
Past the small white-painted church at the edge of the north pasture and out to the east fence line where the property turned and ran along the creek toward Jameson Dawson’s quarter section.
At a place where the fence ran along the back edge of the small church, twenty feet from its south wall, she stopped. She kept her hands at her sides and waited.
Wade saw it the moment he stopped beside her.
The fourth post from the corner of the fence had been worked loose at the base, and the lowest two strands of the wire above it had been cut clean through with a tool.
Wade stood very still.
His eyes moved from the post to the laid grass to the south wall of the church twenty feet away, where Sadie had been that morning, then to the long grass beside the wall where a rattlesnake had been waiting.
He breathed once through his nose.
His hand closed around the top wire above the cut.
The barb caught the meat of his thumb through the glove and bit.
He let it bite. The bite was useful and gave him something to count against the slow, hot anger that had begun under the breastbone the moment his eye had touched the bent wire and the worked dirt.
It was the same anger that had ridden home with him beside his sister's body from the Helena road. It had been quiet ever since on the assumption that the wagon had been an accident.
Lord, he said inside himself, steady me at this fence. I will not bring this anger into the house.
He breathed out.
The anger went down a notch and stayed there at the breastbone. He turned to Zoe.
Her face was calm, but the line of her mouth had gone tight. Her right hand had come up and closed around her left wrist at the front of her shawl. Her thumb worked once at the bone of her own wrist. He turned his eyes back to the post.
His hand stayed at the top wire above the cut.
Dawson.
The name landed flat under his breastbone.
“Zoe, go to the house. Bolt the back door. Go to Sadie’s room and stay there with her until I come in. Call Job and Patience to the porch on your way.”
“Wade…” she protested.
“Please, Zoe.” The anger gave a slow, steady pull at the cut wire between them, and Wade closed his eyes for the count of two and opened them at the post. “Go back,” he said. “We have a snake to keep out of the kitchen.”