Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Collins Kitchen, the South Fence, and the Chapel on the North Pasture
The letter sat in the pocket of Zoe’s apron through the whole of the morning.
She had barely slept on it. She had lain in the small bedroom at the south end of the upstairs hall the better part of the night with the folded paper on the chair beside the bed and the wrong words going around in the back of her head.
She had come down in the gray of the dawn before the men were stirring and made the coffee and the porridge with the letter back in her apron and a resolve in her chest she had little intention of speaking aloud at the breakfast table.
Wade came down the stairs at six with an apology already in the set of his shoulders.
“Zoe.”
“There is coffee on the warming shelf, Wade.” She set the porridge pot at the center of the table. “Sadie will be down at the half hour. George is at the barn.”
“Zoe. The thing I said—”
“I have set it aside.”
“You have not set it aside. You have folded it up small and put it where you put the letter, and the both of them are in your apron at this minute.” He came an inch into the kitchen.
“I was tired past the keeping of my own tongue. The matter of the letter is a true matter, and I had no business making light of it, and I had less business making light of you. I am sorry for the half of it that was the worse half.”
Zoe held the spoon still in the porridge.
“I have heard you, Wade.” She set a bowl at his place. “Eat your breakfast. We will carry the letter to Ben after, the both of us, and we will set the whole of it before him in the daylight like you wanted. That is the half of last night you had the right of. The morning is the better hour for it.”
Wade sat down at the bowl.
He had the look of one who knows an apology has been received and small yet forgiven, and had the wit to leave the matter at the received and wait on the rest.
***
The trouble came at the fence at nine.
George rode up from the south line at a hard gallop with the bay lathered and his hat gone and his voice up before he had the horse stopped.
“Wade! The south wire is down at the dry wash—the whole of two hundred feet of it, cut and pulled flat on the ground, and there is sign at the wash of a man digging at it through the night with a pick. There’s a horse’s track off toward the chapel road, fresh, not an hour cold.”
Wade was off the porch and at the barn before George had the bay turned.
Zoe came out the kitchen door with the dish towel in her hands and the cold thing in her chest climbing up into her throat at the word chapel.
Jameson had dug the wash through the night. Jameson had found the wash empty, one hard year’s wage long since dug out. And Jameson, finding the wash empty, had turned his horse at the chapel road.
He did not have the letter to tell him where the gold had gone.
He had only the empty wash to tell him where it was not.
Dig all night at the wrong place and find nothing, and you go next to the one place left. The one place left, in the whole of the valley, was the small white church on the north pasture; the gold in its walls, the rose at its foot.
Zoe went back into the kitchen at a run.
***
Wade and George rode for the south wash with the Henry and the Sharps, on the word of George’s eyes and the fresh sign at the ground.
It was the wrong direction.
Zoe knew it was the wrong direction the moment the two of them cleared the south cottonwoods at a gallop.
They had gone to the place the trouble had been.
The trouble itself had moved on to the chapel an hour since, and there was little at the chapel road this morning to stop it but a locked church door and a rosebush.
She stood at the kitchen window with the letter in her apron and the whole of the thing laid plain before her eyes.
The men were forty minutes south at the wash and would be another forty in the learning of their mistake.
Ben was across the creek with the road half closed by the snow.
Sadie was upstairs at her lettering primer with Henrietta on the sill.
The chapel was twenty minutes north with the pony cart at a hard drive, and the rose at the south wall of it was the whole of the fortune of the dry wash bloomed out in white.
The man at the chapel road had a pick and a night’s failed digging and little left to lose.
Zoe took the letter out of her apron and set it in the center of the kitchen table under the sugar bowl, where Wade would find it the moment he came in through the door.
She took the pencil off the shelf and wrote three lines on the back of an old flour-mill receipt.
Wade. The wash is empty and he knows it now. He has gone to the chapel for the rose. I have gone to stop him knowing the rose for what it is before you come. Bring Ben and Henry. — Z.
She set the receipt and the letter under the sugar bowl.
She went up the stairs and looked in through Sadie’s door.
“Sweet girl.” She kept her voice steady with the whole of her strength.
“I am driving the pony cart to the chapel on an errand of your uncle’s.
You are to stay in this room with Henrietta and the primer and the door bolted on the inside, and you are to open it for no soul but your uncle or Mr. Greene, and you are to do your letters the whole of the time I am gone so the time goes faster. Can you do that for me?”
Sadie looked up from the primer with a small grave concentrating line at her mouth.
“Is it the man at the corner of the garden, Auntie Zoe?”
“It is the end of the man at the corner of the garden, sweet girl, if the Lord is kind and your uncle is quick.” Zoe crossed the room and set a kiss at the part of the yellow braids. “Bolt the door behind me. Do your letters. I will be home before supper with the whole of it finished.”
“I will pray, Auntie Zoe,” Sadie said. “I have little skill at the letters today. I have better skill at the praying.”
“Then pray, sweet girl. Pray the whole of the time. The Lord and I will both of us be the better for it.”
She went down the stairs.
She heard the bolt slide home on the inside of Sadie’s door behind her, small and final. The sound of it near broke the resolve clean out of her. She set it back in her chest with the whole of her two hands and went on.
***
The pony cart was in the barn.
Zoe had the gray pony in the traces in the time it took her heart to climb up into her throat and sit there.
She set the Henry’s smaller cousin, the old single-shot fowling piece Wade kept at the barn wall for the foxes, on the floor of the cart under a feed sack.
She climbed to the seat, took up the lines, and turned the gray pony toward the chapel road at the north pasture at the fastest drive the cart would bear.
The snow of the night before had turned to a thin, hard crust on the road.
The cart wheels broke it with a steady crackle.
The cold air burned her throat. The gray pony’s breath came white and fast at the cold, and the north pasture opened out long and empty and white at either side of the chapel road, and at the far end of it, small and dark against the snow, the white church stood at the rise with its square belfry and its one bell and its rose gone bare and brown for the winter.
There was a horse tied at the chapel fence.
A tall, narrow bay, with a white forefoot, blowing hard.
At the south wall of the chapel, at the foot of the bare rosebush, a man was bent over the frozen ground with a pick in his two hands.
The steel of it came up and went down at the rose’s root, and came up, and went down, and the small distant sound of it carried across the pasture to Zoe at the cart like a clock striking out the last of the hour she had left.
She put the pony to a gallop.