Chapter 6 What James Breck Did Not Say
He came every morning through the first week and into the second, and she was waiting for him each time with the stove lit and coffee on, which had become the form of the mornings without being discussed as a form.
What he told her over the course of those mornings was: everything he knew about the property, which was comprehensive; everything he knew about the valley’s agricultural calendar, which was detailed; everything he knew about the practical requirements of surviving a Colorado winter on an isolated property, which was specific and occasionally alarming.
He told her about the water supply and the backup plan for when the creek froze.
He told her about the woodpile that was not large enough and would need to be supplemented before January.
He told her about the way the wind came through the northwest gap in the hills on serious cold days and what the windbreak caught and what it didn’t.
What he did not tell her was what he was thinking.
This was not deliberate concealment — he was not a man given to concealment.
It was simply the distinction between practical information and interior information, and the practical information was what she had asked for and what he had therefore provided.
What he was thinking was complicated and he was sorting it in the methodical way he sorted complicated things, which was slowly and without forcing the sort.
He had been in the valley for four years.
He had come from eastern Colorado, from the flat land that produced grain rather than cattle and that had seemed, after the death of his wife Catherine in the spring of 1882, too flat and too familiar and too full of the specific character of a life that was gone.
He had sold the farm. He had bought the adjacent property to what would become the Vance place and built his operation from the beginning, which was the kind of work that left you too tired to think about anything else, which was, he would admit now, part of why he had chosen it.
Catherine had been dead for three years and eight months.
He had not, in that time, thought about another woman in the specific sense that the word thought covered in this context.
He had worked and managed and been present in the community in the ways that a man could be present while remaining personally sealed off, and this had been sufficient.
He was finding that it was becoming insufficient.
He was finding this specifically, in the specific context of a woman who said I don’t want to sell it and then explained that the reason was a feeling she’d had under an apple tree, and who then asked him what the feeling meant in practical terms with the same organized attention she brought to questions about soil drainage.
He was finding that he was interested. Not in the general way of finding a person interesting, not in the professional way of finding a situation interesting.
In the specific way that was about a specific person and what she did when she encountered something she didn’t know, which was to ask the direct question and receive the direct answer and build on it rather than pretending she knew or retreating from the not-knowing.
He was sorting this slowly and without forcing the sort.
On the eighth morning she said: “Tell me about your wife.”
He looked at her. She had not looked at him with the careful quality of someone who was asking a delicate question. She had looked at him with the quality she always used, which was the direct quality of someone who wanted to know something and was asking about it.
He said: “Why?”
She said: “Because you’ve told me everything about this valley and this land and you haven’t told me anything about yourself beyond the professional version, and I find I’d like to know more than the professional version, if you’re willing.”
He was quiet for a moment. He was not often surprised. He had the experience of a man who assessed situations before they arrived and who was therefore rarely caught by what happened. He was caught by this.
“Her name was Catherine,” he said. “She was from Illinois. She was practical and funny and she had an opinion about everything and she was usually right.” He paused. “She died in the spring of 1882. A fever. Fast.”
“You came here after,” Holly said.
“I needed new,” he said. “The old was too much of her. I couldn’t see the land without seeing the life we’d planned for it.”
“And here was new,” she said.
“Here was very new,” he said. “New in every way. Different land, different climate, different people. No history of her.”
Holly was quiet for a moment. “Does it help?” she said. “The new.”
He thought about this honestly. “The first year,” he said. “The work helped more. When you’re too tired to think about anything except the next thing that needs doing, the grief doesn’t have room.”
“And after the first year?” she said.
“After the first year,” he said, “you have to think about it whether you want to or not. The work isn’t enough anymore.”
“What do you do with it then?” she said.
He looked at the mountains through the kitchen window. “You put it in the right place,” he said. “It doesn’t go away. But it gets smaller relative to other things, if you let the other things grow.”
She looked at the same mountains. “That’s a good way to think about it,” she said.
“It took me a year and a half to work it out,” he said.
“Most things worth knowing do,” she said.
He looked at her. She was looking at the mountains with the particular quality she had when she was thinking about something beyond the immediate — not absent, still present, but looking at something he couldn’t see from where he was sitting.
He thought: she is the most direct person I have met since Catherine.
Not in the same way — Catherine’s directness had been warm and funny and slightly sharp.
Holly’s directness was organized and precise and had the quality of a well-calibrated instrument.
But both of them said what they meant and received what you said and made you feel, in their presence, that the full version was the appropriate version.
He had not felt that in three years and eight months.
He thought: I am sorting this too slowly.