Chapter 14 #3
They had the coffee, the two of them, because there was no arguing Mae Henderson out of feeding a person under her roof. Marielle could see plain that the doing of it steadied the old woman, gave her hands a thing to be about that wasn’t the packing up of sixty years.
She moved about the kitchen cutting bread and setting out butter and a crock of preserves, talking the whole time, small things, the price of coffee and a wedding in the town and her sister’s bad hip, and Marielle understood that the talk was the same thing the food was, a way of holding the night at the size of an ordinary night a little longer.
David sat quiet at the foot of the table.
Mae loaded a plate in front of him without once asking whether he wanted it, bread and butter and cold ham and a slab of pie besides, and he thanked her for it with a quiet gentleness that made the old woman look at him a second time, longer, and decide something in his favor that softened her the rest of the evening.
When she passed behind his chair she set her hand on his shoulder a moment, the way she’d have done to one of her Sunday children. David went still under it and then eased, and Marielle looked away to let him have the moment unwatched.
“You take care of this one,” Mae said to him at the door when they were leaving. “She’ll not take care of herself, she never would. Took after her father in that too.”
“I’ve noticed it,” David said. “I’ll do what I can. She’s a hard one to keep ahead of.”
“They’re the only kind worth the trouble.” Mae pressed his hand the way she’d pressed Marielle’s. “Go on, now. God keep you both.”
When they rode out at last the sun was down behind the western hills and the first hard stars were pricking through, and the windmill behind them had gone to a black turning shape against a sky bruising from gold to purple to the coming dark.
“They’ll go,” David said, when the house was behind them.
“They’ll go. Tom won’t think well of himself for the going, not for a while. He’ll lie awake in Uvalde thinking of his father’s stones with no one to keep the weeds off them. But Mae’ll have him in that trunk-laden wagon by first light and he’ll go.”
She looked back the once at the lit yellow square of the kitchen window falling away behind them, small now, and then gone behind a rise.
“Mae always was the one of the two of them who knew the difference. When to dig in and fight a thing, and when to step back and live so you’d be there to fight it later.
Tom’s brave. Mae’s wise. There’s a world of difference between the two, and a marriage runs smoother when it’s got one of each in it. ”
“Which are you?” David said.
“I haven’t decided yet.” She thought about it honestly. “I’d like to be the wise one. I keep finding myself being the brave one instead, and brave is mostly just what wise looks like before it’s learned anything.”
They rode a while in the cooling dark, the horses easy under them, the only sound the fall of the hooves and the first of the night insects starting up in the brush.
“Your father,” David said, after a long stretch of it, “he warned that old man years back. Warned your own father’s self, through Samson, twice over. Saw the whole of this thing laid out coming down the road before any of it got here.”
He looked across at her in the dark. “A man who could see it all that clear, that far out ahead. Why’d he walk up that road to Nash’s anyhow? Knowing what he knew. Seeing what he saw. Why put his own head in it?”
She’d asked herself that very thing a thousand nights running, lying awake listening to her mother move through the dark house, and she found she had the answer ready, worn smooth from the handling.
“Because he thought he could win,” she said.
“Plain as that. He’d been winning twenty-eight years.
He walked into rooms full of men who wanted him dead and he walked back out of them, twenty-eight years running.
A man wins that long, that often, against those odds, and somewhere along the way he loses the ability to truly picture the night he doesn’t walk back out.
“He knows it could happen. He’d tell you it could happen, would’ve said it plain if you asked him. But he can’t feel it as a real thing anymore, down where a man feels the truth of his own death. It’s worn away in him from never having come true.”
She watched the pale road come up under the bay in the starlight.
“That’s not a flaw I’ve got. Maybe the only piece of him I didn’t inherit.
I’ve never once in my life been sure I’d win at anything.
Not once. I went into every one of these two years certain I’d most likely fail at it, and most days I was right to be.
” She paused. “Maybe that’s the whole reason I’m still alive to ride this road in the dark, and he isn’t. ”
David didn’t answer that one, and the not-answering was the right answer. They rode on toward the house with the stars coming out thick overhead and the dark land breathing the day’s heat back up around them.