7. Blue
blue
The blizzard began to die down. Even I could see that as I stood at the kitchen window and looked at the patterns in the wind.
I thought I saw the faintest glow beyond the swirl of white.
This fact was proven when, just after lunch, Wolfe laced up his boots, put on his coat, and began digging a path in the snow beyond the back door.
The snow was still going sideways, but it seemed to skim over the top of him, whispering rather than howling as he cleared a high-walled path to a little building he’d called his workshop.
The path had high walls to block off the wind, was narrow, and his digging of it caused snow to come inside the cabin.
Standing there, with my arms crossed over my chest, I felt useless. He’d done so much for me, and all I had done was become a weight around his neck. He never said as much, but I felt it.
I especially felt it now as I watched him lift mounds of snow to throw over the high walls of more of the same, the grunt of effort, the press of his thighs against the weight of each shovelful. He seemed to heat rather quickly and tossed his dark blue parka inside the cabin.
I hung it up on a peg in the wall and turned to watch once more. He had muscles all over him, along his thighs, his back.
The flannel shirt, rolled up to his elbows at one point, came off as well, leaving him only in a white t-shirt speckled with sweat.
He handed the flannel shirt to me, wiped his forehead on his bare, snow-flecked forearm, the edge of the gloves in contrast to the strength of his wrists, and continued digging.
His lifted arms revealed the elastic band of his briefs above the waist of his jeans. The dark line of hair from his belly button made me feel like I was watching a peep show, but hadn’t actually paid to get in. It was hard to look away.
“Can I help?” I asked when he’d come to the cabin end of the near-tunnel, turning to look at the effort he’d done so far, as if judging how much more muscle he needed to complete the task. He looked at me appraisingly.
“You standing on that foot all right?” he asked.
Shrugging, because if I said no, he’d tell me to go away and sit down, I said, “It’s okay.”
“Maybe you could—” He paused to point at the snow that had accumulated on the threshold and that was now melting in small piles on the wooden kitchen floor.
“Maybe you could sweep out the snow. I just redid those floors last summer.” He nodded at the boot tray near the door.
“Put those rubber boots on. They won’t fit, but they’ll keep your feet dry. ”
Glad to be of use, I made myself busy. My feet swam in the boots, but they had good traction, and I felt a whole lot more helpful, sweeping out snow and keeping the tea kettle full.
I started a pot of tea and, when he paused, shovel jammed into the packed snow, I brought him a mug of it, made sweet and milky, as he seemed to like it. He grinned as he sipped at it.
“This is very good,” he said.
I remembered that first mug of tea with lemon and brandy, the flavor of citrus mixing with the quiet flavor of smoke. And knew that forever afterward, I would associate that taste with him.
He made us stop around dinner, just as the wind was picking up, sending fleece-streams of snow from the top of the tunnel, opening it up to the sky.
A sky that, just before the sun set, was blending from eggshell-gray to eggshell white and, while I couldn’t swear it, I thought I saw patches of dark blue.
Dinner was quick. Fried egg sandwiches. He ate two to my one, and then got up from the small table, looming over me, in a hurry, rinsing off the dishes before setting them to soak, even though they didn’t need it.
“I’m itching to get out there,” he said. “The storm cut me off from my work.”
Out there was his workshop, which he’d mentioned to me but only in passing.
“Can I come?” I asked, standing up, using the table for balance.
His face told me he didn’t want to let me. A hard narrowing of his eyes, the stillness in his body. A tightness in his shoulders. The way he paused, the odd creaking sound of his weight on the wooden floor.
That’s when I realized that the reason I could even hear this was because the wind had died down. If he went into the workshop, I would be alone in the cabin with the silence.
“Please?” I asked. “I won’t touch anything.”
As he looked away from me, casting his eyes over the dishes in the sink, the frying pan cooling on the stovetop, I realized that touching wasn’t the issue.
It was the looking. The seeing. A man who lived all the way out in the country, away from town, certainly wouldn’t want anyone in a building that was separate from his home.
That I realized, as he pulled a ring of keys from his jean’s pocket, was locked up.
Even though there was nobody for miles who might even be a little bit curious about it.
I opened my mouth to say Never mind, when he made a gesture with his hand, low, almost unseen. Shuffling into the oversized rubber boots, I followed him along the short, sheltered path, the outdoor light over the back door laying glowing shadows across the snow.
He unlocked the workshop and stepped inside, pausing for a moment, blocking me from entering. I was ready to turn around and go back into the cabin, a dutiful guest who had no curiosity whatsoever, when he reached to turn on the light.
In the space, a small triangle between his raised arm, his body, and the wooden doorjamb, I saw flickers of images. Brass. Neat tools on a pegboard. Bottles of liquid in a row. Like a treasure room, it beckoned me in. But I needed to wait. I had enough manners for that.
He went into the room, and I followed him, and then he shut the door behind us, locking out the cold.
Two walls were lined with narrow shelves, those pegboards that contained hammers, pliers of various sizes, spools of leather, dark, light, shiny.
Spools of narrow thread. Clear sleeves containing different sizes and types of needles.
Glass bottles of amber liquid. Slender containers with labels so grease-stained that it was impossible to see what was inside.
On the other two walls hung articles in various states of creation or repair. A slender peg of leather belts. Braided strips. Circular strips of leather, decorated with embossed stamps, colored on the inside, possibly by hand, one green, one blue. Two bridles, one fancy, one plain.
In the corner, sitting on a saddle horse with a strip of velvet beneath it, was a saddle.
The saddle was old, even I could tell that, but well cared for.
The leather along the saddle horn had been decorated, but the stamps and designs had been worn to ghost images.
The curved seat of the saddle shone as if it had been polished for years by a patient man. Or by a million cowboy bottoms.
“This is it,” he said, his voice almost perfectly level, as if the room had no meaning to him whatsoever.
“Oh,” I said.
The look Wolfe gave me over his shoulder was that of a man who wanted to tell me to get out.
I could easily see that not only was the workshop important, it was Wolfe’s heart.
The tidiness. The sense of industry. The smell of leather oil, the old metallic smell of two floor heaters, one under the scarred table that was bare except for a canister of pencils, a metal ruler, and a clipboard, and the other heater in the corner, far from the saddle. Both plugged in and ready to go.
There was a tea kettle, and an open, plain tin canister of tea bags.
Two mismatched mugs, one with a dragonfly etched into the green surface, the other with a printed image of a running horse, now faded.
There was also what looked like a black speaker, plugged into the wall.
I guessed it might be a player of some sort and swallowed a sudden, very urgent need to know what kind of music he listened to.
“What are you working on?” The question escaped me, and he looked at me with a slow gaze, a kind of tenderness growing as he shifted his gaze from me to the wall of tools.
Maybe this was okay then. To be interested in the work itself.
Rather than wanting answers to questions he might not want to answer.
Such as why was he all the way out here, when surely being closer to town and potential customers might be of more use.
Especially when I could see little paper price tags dangling from some of the items. They were meant to be sold. But who could he sell them to out here?
“I’ve got sketches inside,” he said, running his fingers through his dark hair, making it stand up.
Making him look wild. As though allowing me to stand in the room with him was a little like watching him peel off and step out of his own skin.
“Mabel wants a new collar for her dog.” He looked at me, a bit of laughter in his eyes.
“You might not think that kind of sale would make a difference, but it does. She might be older, but her opinion carries weight. And she—” He paused, blinking.
There was more to what he wanted to say. But he stopped. Maybe because it’d been a while since he’d said much of anything to anyone. Maybe I was the only person besides himself to step into this place in a long while. Maybe I was the only person ever.
“What’re those?” I asked, pointing like a distracted small child at the stack of small boxes, the top one crumpled in the corner, and the clipboard of papers on top.
“Gimp string,” he said. His shoulders went down as though he was defeated. “For lanyards.”
Oddly, I knew what a lanyard was. Lanyards were strips of colorful cloth that held clear plastic sleeves for name tags. But I couldn’t see the problem. Was he supposed to make name tags? I could help. I had pretty good handwriting, or at least I thought I did.
He looked at me. I could see right away by his expression that I simply didn’t get it.
With a deep sigh, he put the clipboard on the edge of the table he used as his desk, and put the topmost box on top of that.
The box looked heavy, a dense cube of something.
He tore open the box, though by the edge of the lid I could see it’d been torn open before. By a hasty hand. A careless hand.
Inside the box were spools of what looked like flat plastic thread, all colors of the rainbow.
One of each. The other boxes must contain the same, which meant that there were miles and miles of bright plastic thread.
Which seemed out of place in his treasure cave of leather and oil and shiny steel needles.
“They want lanyards,” he said. He didn’t touch the spools, but he glared at them. “Lanyards for the Christmas bazaar.” He picked up the clipboard, shoving the box roughly aside, and showed me a piece of paper that had light sketches on it. “Woven lanyards.”
That’s when I got it, what he meant by lanyards, rather than what I meant.
He meant things woven out of flat plastic thread to hold keychains and ID holders and so forth, into square or round—lanyards.
One of the sketches had been drawn to look like Santa Claus’s face had been woven into the lanyard, but the effect was muddied by many erasures.
The insight into what this meant was written on Wolfe’s face.
Gone was the concern I had seen when he’d tended to me.
Gone was the mindless pleasure of the physicality of shoveling the path between the cabin and the workshop.
Gone was the half-lidded attention on his breakfast or the dishes.
Instead, was a pained, focused awareness that he was being asked to work with plastic rather than the supple, more visceral feel of leather beneath his fingers.
I could have wagered that the influential Mabel herself had asked him to do this thing. For the church. For the town. And he was going to do it, even if it killed him. Because maybe he had no other choice.
“I could help,” I said, an offer so spontaneous it surprised me. “I could weave or braid or whatever.”
With a wave of his hand, he dismissed my offer. “I’ve been contracted to do this, not you.”
“But why not?” I asked.
I stepped up to him because that was the way I dealt with things.
With people. With ideas I didn’t like. It had gotten me in trouble before; I sensed this.
He could have swatted me away like a fly.
But he didn’t. He stood his ground, looking down at me from beneath his dark brows, as if contemplating how fast he could get rid of me before he actually had to answer.
“I’m eating your food. Causing you extra work.”
Something in my memory laughed at me for even wanting to help because, in an older life, a dreamy gray-edged memory of a life, if I wanted something I’d called down to Bettina.
In my former life. In a big house. Me, the golden prince with nary a concern in the world except whether or not it was worth it to expend the energy to even call down for what I wanted.
“I’d like to help,” I said, brushing all of that away. “I can learn. I can make them. Then you won’t have to touch the plastic at all.”
To my surprise, this made him laugh, a short, high sound in his throat.
“That’s the truth of it,” he said. “When I was—” Then he stopped, and I sensed he’d been about to tell me a story about himself.
Which might have been good to know because I had the wild idea that if I knew more about him, then I could find out more about myself.
“I was an apprentice to a man named Ricky Patterson,” Wolfe said as he began reassembling the box, placing it on top of the stack of cubes of plastic thread. “He taught me everything I know. Plastic just doesn’t belong.”
As to his reasons for not explaining this to Mabel, they were his own. I knew this because he changed the subject.
“On Wednesday, I need to go into Hysham. For food. To drop off some sketches to Mabel.” He looked at me, eyes stern.
“We’ll zip into Billings to get you some boots.
No, don’t argue.” He raised his hand to stop me.
“I was also supposed to have finished samples of the lanyards. Also for Mabel. Maybe you can help me with that.”
“Okay,” I said, the word coming out of my chest, throaty and deep, as though it had been rescued from oblivion by his simple approval and the idea of having a purpose. Maybe not forever. But for now. And that was better than nothing.