Chapter 16 #4
She came in the Land Cruiser with the windows down and four boxes in the back and she pulled into the yard and got out and stood there, and thirty one people who were no longer thirty one people came out of a house that was no longer four rooms.
They had added on in June. Two rooms and a real mudroom and a second stove, built out of lodgepole by eleven people in nine days.
"You built," Junie said.
"We built."
"It's ugly."
"It's extremely ugly."
"Good," she said. "Ugly lasts."
Imogen read the letter alone in the quiet room that night for two hours and came out with her eyes swollen and said only one thing about it, then or ever.
"It was smaller than I thought," she said.
"What was?"
"1991." She sat down on the step beside him. "All of it. Everything Danny was carrying for thirty five years. Joe, it was so much smaller than any of us imagined and it ruined a man's whole life anyway."
"Do you want to tell me?"
Imogen leaned against his shoulder.
"Someday," she said. "Not tonight. Tonight I want to sit here and not have it be a mystery anymore."
They sat on the step.
Down the bench, the lamps were lit in the shed where four of Crowe's families still lived because they wanted to, and somebody was playing a fiddle badly, and eleven children were doing something in the yard that involved a great deal of shouting.
Junie stayed.
She did not announce it and nobody asked her to. She simply did not leave, and by September she had built herself a cabin at the top of the north fence line with a view of both approaches, and she came down for dinner most nights and taught snowshoe making every November to whoever showed up.
She never told anybody her real name.
Joe asked her once, in 1930 by the co-op calendar, which everybody still used and nobody bothered to correct.
"Why does it matter?" she said.
"It doesn't. I just wondered."
Junie thought about it.
"Ask me when I'm dying," she said. "I'll tell you then and you can put it on the stone."
He did, eventually, and she did, and it is on the stone, and it is not in this account because she asked that it not be until everyone who knew her was gone.
Joe Henfry got up at four twelve in the morning on the ninth of October, one year to the day, because the habit had never left him.
He lay in the dark and listened first.
The house made its sounds. Beams settling. Wind combing through the pines on the ridge. The tick of a woodstove cooling.
And underneath all of it, thirty one people breathing.
He got up and went down the stairs, skipping the fourth step because it still groaned and he had never fixed it and he had come to believe he never would.
Mack lifted his head from the rug by the door.
Five years old now, gray coming in around the muzzle, and still of the firm opinion that Joe Henfry belonged to him personally.
"Stay," Joe said.
Mack stayed. His ears tracked Joe across the room anyway.
Joe filled the kettle from the tap, because the spring line ran year round at three gallons a minute and had never once failed.
He did not turn on a light. There was no light to turn on, and there had not been for a year, and he had stopped noticing sometime around February.
He stood with his hands on the counter and let the kettle warm.
Then he took his coffee out onto the porch in his socks, because the boards were dry, and he stood with his arms crossed and looked at the sky.
There were more stars than a man raised in Los Angeles knew what to do with.
Up north, above the shoulder of the mountain, there was nothing at all.
Just black timber and cold air and the hard white points of a sky that had not tried to kill anybody in three hundred and sixty five days.
Joe stood there a long time.
Behind him, the door opened.
"You're up," Imogen said.
"It's four twelve."
"I know what time it is." She came out with a blanket around her shoulders and stood next to him. "You've been getting up at four twelve for a year."
"It's the well pump."
"There is no well pump, Joe. The pump's been dead since October."
"Then it's the habit of the well pump."
She leaned against him.
They stood on the porch of an ugly, added onto, badly built cabin on a bench in the Wasatch, and watched the east go from black to the first gray above the notch in the ridge.
"Say the speech," Imogen said.
"No."
"Say it."
"You've heard it twelve times."
"Fourteen," said Hazel, from the doorway, in her socks, with her own cup.
"Fourteen," Imogen agreed. "Say it anyway. It's the anniversary."
Joe looked out at the mountain.
"Snowpack," he said. "Elevation. Timber. And a valley full of people who already knew this could happen."
"That's the short version."
"That's the only version anybody needs."
The sun came up over the notch in the ridge at six forty one.
It came up on four hundred acres of stubble down in the bottom where twelve thousand bushels had come off in August.
It came up on a shop at the gravel pit with a line of wagons already forming.
It came up on an elevator with six hundred tons in it and a scale that ran on nothing but gravity and a book that anybody could read.
It came up on the Wasatch, catching the storms, stacking the water, letting it out all summer.
Whether anybody was there to count it or not.