Chapter Twenty-Six
The Collins Kitchen and the Cottonwoods at the South Fence
The lamp was lit and the door was bolted by the time the wagon came out of the grey.
Zoe had supper warm at the back of the stove and Henry at the warming shelf and the whole of the gold story sitting at the back of her mind, when George set the brake at the gravel and Wade came down off the porch into the sleet to take the bay’s head.
She watched the two of them through the wet glass of the south window; the dark shapes of the brothers at the gravel, the steam off the horse, Wade’s hand at the bridle and his face turned up at George on the bench for the news of the road.
She set three bowls on the table.
The cold in her chest had ridden the whole of eight miles of creek road home with her, and it had little intention of leaving her before she had set it down.
***
Sadie was put to bed at half past seven. Zoe came down the back stairs.
Wade was at the pine table with the lamp at his elbow and a cup of coffee gone cold at his hand and the day’s tiredness sitting heavy on the line of his shoulders.
He had taken his wet coat off and hung it on the peg.
The thin red line at his cheek had begun to scab where a splinter had caught him at the fence two nights gone.
Zoe drew the second chair out and sat across from him.
“I have a thing to set down to you, Wade.”
The corner of his mouth pulled, tired and ready.
“Set it down, Zoe.”
She set the whole of it down, plain and in order: Mrs. Morrison at the counter with her voice low; old Caleb with the notion already fixed in his head; the gold under the southeast quarter he had read plain as scripture; the parcel sold off in fifty-eight.
She told him the note unpaid and the son at the bedside.
She told him of the son six weeks from the loss of this home with a dead father’s story.
Then, she folded her hands at the wood and waited.
Wade was a long count answering her.
He turned the cold cup once in his hand. He looked at the lamp flame, and then at the dark glass of the south window where the sleet had begun to turn at the edges to a small dry tick of the first snow, and then at her across the pine.
“There is no gold, Zoe.” He set the cup down.
“My father walked the wash. There is red rock and a dry spring and a seam of fool’s gold at the south face that will catch a low sun and break a poor man’s heart at forty paces.
My grandfather knew it for fool’s gold the day he bought the parcel.
He bought it for the grass and the water and the dry-wash crossing, and he paid old Caleb a fair coin for the lot.
Old Caleb spent the rest of his life deciding the fair coin had been a swindle, on account of a swindle being an easier thing to carry to a grave than a bad bargain freely made. ”
Zoe drew a slow breath.
“Then there is nothing under the parcel.”
“There is fool’s gold and a dead man’s regret under the parcel.
” Wade’s jaw set at the corner. “And that, Zoe, is the worse of the two cases, not the better. Put a man at a true seam of gold and you can buy him off at a price. Put a man at a story of gold his father swore on a deathbed and there is no price on the whole of the Earth that will move him, on account of the story being worth more to him than the gold ever would have been. The gold he could spend. The story he can only avenge.”
The cold in Zoe’s chest had eased little.
“I had hoped,” she said, voice unsteady, “to come home with a thing that made the man in my garden smaller. I have come home with a thing that has made him larger.”
“You have come home with the truth of him, Zoe.” Wade reached across the table and set it over her folded hands. “That is the more useful thing at the end of it.”
His thumb moved once at the back of her hand.
She turned her hand over under his and let her fingers fold up into his palm.
***
Ben came across the creek at full dark with the first snow whitening the brim of his hat.
He came in the kitchen door, stamped the wet off his boots at the threshold, and took the cup of coffee Zoe pressed into his hand without a word of asking for it.
He set his back to the warmth of the iron stove and looked at the two of them at the table.
The news of the road was already in the set of his face before he said a word of it.
“There is a sign at the cottonwoods, Wade,” he said.
“I walked the line at dusk before the snow came down. There is a place at the south end of the willows where a man has left his horse three nights running. The ground is worked at it. There is ash at it from a small fire built low and quick and put out fast. He has been watching the house. He has been watching it since the wedding night, and he has been watching it from the one place at the whole of the south line a man can sit ahorse and see your kitchen window and your barn door and the road to town all at once.”
Wade stood. “Tonight, then.”
“Tonight,” Ben agreed, setting the coffee down.
“The snow will show his sign fresh for us if he comes, and it will lay ours down with it, so we go careful and we go now, before the dark sets. George is in the barn saddling the bays. I’ve sent Cord up the Bozeman road to sit at the bend in case the night sends our man toward town instead of toward the house. ”
Zoe was already at the peg with Wade’s dry coat. She held it up at his shoulders while he shrugged into it, and she smoothed the collar straight at the back of his neck with her two hands.
She turned him by the lapel to face her.
“Aster,” he said, low. “You bolt the door behind us. You keep Sadie at the back wall of the upstairs room if the night gives you any cause at all, and you keep yourself there beside her. Not a shot brings you down the stair. Not a shout. Only the word, and no other sound the night can make.”
She set the flat of her hand briefly on the scab on his cheek. “Come back and say it to me at the bottom of the stairs, and I will come down and put a hot supper in front of the three of you and no questions until the morning.”
The corner of his mouth pulled, the exhaustion gone briefly out of it.
“That is the right answer,” he said.
He set his hand over hers at his cheek. Then, he took the Henry off the warming shelf, set his hat on his head, and went out the kitchen door Ben at his shoulder.
Zoe bolted the door. She set her back to the cold wood of it and stood a long count in the warm lamplight of the kitchen with the second Henry heavy in her right hand and the snow ticking at the south glass and the small dry sound of Henrietta resettling on the sill above the stair.
Lord, she said inside herself, steady. There are two men of mine gone out into the snow toward the cottonwoods, and a third in the barn with the bays, and a small girl asleep at the top of the stairs.
I am at the bolted door of my kitchen with a rifle I have little skill at and a great deal of resolve.
I am asking You to walk the south line with them.
I am asking You to bring the three of them home to the bottom of the stairs with the word in their mouths.
I am asking standing up, on account of having little intention of being found at my knees if the night sends the trouble to the door instead of to the fence.
Out at the south line, past the white of the yard and the dark of the cottonwoods, a single shot came flat through the falling snow.
Then the night went silent again, and the snow came down. The lamp burned in the kitchen, and Zoe took up the Henry and turned her face to the south window and waited for the word.