Chapter 3 #4
They came up off the timber below the rimrock, four of them, then a fifth, going to roost the way ravens do at the end of a day, spiraling once and cutting downhill toward the river bottoms.
Ravens roost where they fed.
Tom sat in the rocks and felt something enormous and cold arrive in his chest and sit down and get comfortable.
He came home at eight and told Kindra with his eyes and she nodded once and went to the stove.
They ate at three in the morning because that was the rule and the rule did not care what had happened.
Elk, wild onion, a handful of the last barley, and the pemmican was not on the table because there was no pemmican anymore anywhere in the world except in a crack in the rimrock that Tom was fairly sure now belonged to somebody else.
Oliver said, "Is Chip dead?"
"I don't know," Tom said.
"You think he's dead."
"I think it's likely. I don't know it."
"That's the same as thinking it."
"No it isn't." Tom put his spoon down. "Knowing is a thing you can act on. Thinking is a thing you carry. Right now I'm carrying it, and tomorrow morning I'm going to go find out which one it is, because I'd rather act."
Sofie was under the table with Shyla, where she had spent most of two days.
"Shyla stood up for a whole minute," she reported.
"That's twice as long as yesterday."
"I know. I counted."
"You're doing the best job of anybody here, bug."
Afterward Kindra banked the stove and Tom checked the door bar and the kids went up, and the cabin went dark and quiet with only the tick of cooling iron.
Tom sat on the edge of the bed with his boots in his hands and did not put them down.
He was thinking about a gap in a hedge.
He was thinking about eleven nights of hauling forty pound packs up frozen rock, four trips a night, and a twelve year old girl carrying beans in the dark and never once complaining, and a six year old walking a route blindfolded and crying the first time and not the second.
All of it in a crack in the rimrock. All of it gone in one morning because he sent a sixty one year old man up there alone to do a job Tom could have done himself in half the time.
"Put the boots down," Kindra said, from the dark.
He put them down.
He got under the blankets and lay there, and his heart was going hard, and his hands would not stop wanting to hold something.
He rolled toward her.
"Hey," he said.
"Tom."
"Come here."
He put his hand on her hip and she did not move.
"Babe," he said. "Let's get it on."
"No."
"Kindra."
"I said no."
"It's been a day," he said, and his voice came out wrong, too fast, too bright. "It's been a hell of a day and I'm sitting here in the dark with my head full of a dead man and I need to not be in my head for eleven minutes, and it worked Saturday, it worked great Saturday, so come here."
She sat up.
Even in the dark he could see the shape of it, the fast hard way she came up, and he knew immediately that he had stepped over something.
"Worked," she said.
"You know what I meant."
"I know exactly what you meant. It worked. Like a stove damper." Her voice was very low, because of the loft, and being low made it worse. "Saturday was Saturday. Saturday you came in that door and looked at me like I was a person."
"I'm looking at you like that right now."
"You are not. You are lying there full of the worst day of your life and reaching for the nearest thing in the bed."
"That is a hell of a way to put it."
"That is an accurate way to put it."
Tom sat up too.
"I have been outside since four in the morning," he said.
"I have hauled rose brush for ten hours and I have got thorns in both hands and I sat in a rockpile tonight and watched ravens come off a place where I think my friend is lying dead, and I came in here and asked my wife to be close to me, and apparently that's a crime."
"It's not a crime. It's a no."
"Come on."
"Tom."
"Come on." He said it louder than he meant to. "Come on!"
His hand came off the blanket and hit the shelf by the bed, and the spoon he had carried in from dinner without noticing went off it, and he caught it and threw it.
It hit the log wall by the door with a flat wooden crack and dropped and rattled on the boards.
The sound went through the whole cabin.
Up in the loft, somebody stopped breathing. He heard it stop.
Tom sat there in the dark with his hand still out.
The stove ticked.
Shyla's tail moved once on the hides, uncertain, the sound of a dog trying to figure out if she was in trouble.
"Well," Kindra said quietly. "There it is."
"Kindra."
"Sofie's awake up there. So's Oliver. Kenz never went to sleep at all." She got out of bed and pulled a blanket around her shoulders. "That's the thing about a cabin, Tom. There's one room."
"I threw a spoon."
"You threw a spoon at a wall eleven feet from where your children sleep, four days after a man came in that yard and put a rag on our dog."
She was not shouting. She had never once shouted in eleven years and she was not going to start now, and that was worse than shouting.
"You want to know what they heard? They didn't hear a spoon. They heard Dad."
Tom put his face in his hands.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"I know you are."
"I'm not okay."
"I know that too." Kindra sat down on the chair by the cold end of the stove, facing him.
"Nobody in this house is okay. I have been carrying Sofie's dog and Sofie's questions and Oliver's face for three days, and I have been cooking at three in the morning and hanging laundry in a shed and cutting the fur off a screaming animal on the table where we eat."
"I know."
"Do you? Because at four o'clock today I was standing in the woodshed and I could not remember the last time you asked me anything that wasn't a job."
Her voice did not change pitch. "You asked me about the cellar and the salt and the hides and the wood and the water. Six days. Six days of jobs, and then at midnight you want the other thing, and you want it right now, and when I say no you throw something."
"That's not fair."
"Which part."
Tom opened his mouth and closed it.
"None of it," he said. "None of it's not fair. That's the problem."
He sat there a long time.
"I don't know how to want you and also be terrified," he said finally.
"That's the honest thing. It's all coming out of the same place in me. I look at you and I feel lucky and then I feel the size of what I could lose and then my chest goes tight and I want to hold onto something, and you're the thing. You've been the thing since I was thirty one."
"I'm not a thing."
"That's what Charter said. In the yard. First day."
Kindra was quiet.
"He was a foul old man about it," she said. "But he wasn't wrong about that part."
"No."
"Tom, in eleven years I have never once minded you wanting me. That's not what this is."
She pulled the blanket tighter. "It's that tonight you weren't reaching for me. You were reaching for a place to put it down. And I am the only surface in this house, and I have been the only surface all week, and there is nothing left on me to set anything on."
Tom looked at the shape of her in the dark.
"Then tell me what you need," he said. "Not what the house needs. You."
She was silent so long he thought she wasn't going to answer.
"I need you to say Chip's name out loud," she said. "You haven't said it once since five o'clock. You said he and him and the gulch. You have not said Chip."
"Kindra."
"Say it."
"I can't."
"Then that's where it is." She stood up. "That's the whole thing, right there. It's not in the bed. It's in that."
Tom sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees for a long minute.
Then he said, "Chip Charter is dead."
His voice cracked in the middle of it, clean through, like a board.
"I sent him up there," he said. "He wanted to go and I let him talk me out of it, and I let him because I wanted him out of my hair on the hedge line, and that is the truth of it. I was annoyed.
I was annoyed with an old man for talking too much and I let him carry sixty pounds up a gulch by himself so I could work in quiet."
"Tom."
"Eleven days I knew him. Eleven days, and he taught me more than eleven years of books, and I never said thank you one time. Not one." He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "I said don't talk to my children. That's a thing I said to him. Out loud."
Kindra came and sat down beside him.
She did not touch him for a moment. Then she put one hand flat between his shoulder blades.
"He knew," she said.
"He didn't."
"He did. That last night at the table he watched you explain that rifle to the kids and he said well, hell, and I saw his face and you didn't, because you were looking at Kenz."
Her hand moved once. "That was a man who knew he'd found the right house. He told me so, Monday morning, while you were arguing about the .44."
"He said what?"
"He said, ma'am, if it goes bad for me up there, I want you to know I picked this. He said it like he was returning a tool." Kindra's voice finally went, a little. "And I said don't be dramatic, Mister Charter. And he laughed and said that's the first time anybody's accused me of that."
Tom made a sound.
She pulled his head down onto her shoulder and he let her, and for a while there was nothing in the cabin but the stove ticking and a man in his forties coming apart very quietly so his children would not hear.
Up in the loft, three people lay in the dark and listened, and none of them ever said a word about it to anybody, then or later.
At five in the morning Tom was up and dressed and had the fire in the stove and the water on.
McKenzie came down the ladder already dressed.
"I'm coming," she said.
"Yes," Tom said.
She had clearly prepared an argument and had to throw it away, and she stood there blinking.
"Yes?"
"Yes. You were right last night and I was being a coward about it, and a coward in a different direction than usual."
Tom handed her a cup. "Two sets of eyes. You walk where I walk, you stop when I stop, and if I say go, you go and you do not look back to see what I'm doing. That's the deal or you stay."
"That's the deal."