Chapter 4
Jasper
My mug is on the porch railing. Clean, full, still steaming.
She didn’t break the rule. She didn’t talk to me before eight.
She was inside my cabin. She knows where my mugs are.
I stare at the coffee. I should leave it. Leaving it would establish the boundary. Leaving it would say: rules are rules, and I am not a man who gets softened by a hot drink after a morning at the woodpile.
I drink it. She uses a French press at her camp stove, which means she packed a French press into the backcountry, which means she’s insane. It’s better than mine.
I am now a man who is parsing his own rules like a contract lawyer on a Tuesday morning because a woman with a camera left coffee on his porch without speaking. This is not what I built this life for.
I go inside. I make biscuits. I make biscuits because I was going to make biscuits anyway, which is true in the sense that I own flour and I own butter and the possibility of biscuits has always existed.
I make eight instead of four. I put four on a plate on the porch railing at 7:58. I go inside and close the door.
At 8:01, I hear her pick up the plate. She doesn’t knock. Doesn’t say thank you. Doesn’t break the rule by two minutes the way I didn’t break it by leaving the plate at 7:58.
We are both insane. I split wood until my shoulders burn.
~~~
Levi’s truck has a rattle in the front suspension that I can hear from a quarter mile out. I’m on the porch at ten when it comes up the access road, which almost never sees traffic because I like it that way.
Marissa is out of the passenger side before the engine stops. She’s carrying a canvas bag and wearing the expression of a woman on a mission she’s pretending is casual. She’s bad at pretending. The bag has groceries. The mission has nothing to do with groceries.
“I brought supplies,” she says. “Fruit, bread, eggs, some toiletries Jenna forgot.”
“She didn’t ask for supplies.”
“She doesn’t ask for anything. That’s the problem.”
Jenna appears from the south trail with her camera around her neck. Marissa hugs her. Inspects the tent. Inspects the camp stove. Looks at the bathroom through the cabin’s back door and nods once, which I suspect is high praise from a woman who reorganized Levi’s entire business in three weeks.
Levi is standing by the truck, taking in the property the way a man who lives on a mountain reads another man’s land. The ridge. The tree line. The workshop. He nods.
“Nice land.”
“Thanks.”
He leans against the truck. I lean against the porch. We’re both comfortable with the silence. This is the whole conversation, and it’s fine, until he looks over at Jenna and Marissa near the tent and then looks back at me with an expression I don’t care for.
“She’s going to stay longer than three days.”
I don’t respond.
“Just so you know.”
“I didn’t ask.”
He almost smiles. I’ve seen him around the valley. At the general store. At the Burning Tree once or twice. He’s solid. Quiet in the way that men who work timber and rivers are quiet and competent. I like him.
On the way back to the truck, Marissa stops at the porch. She looks at me directly, which most people don’t do because my face is not an invitation.
“She’s my best friend,” she says. “She doesn’t ask for help and she won’t tell you when she needs it. So pay attention.”
She says it like it’s practical advice. Like she’s telling me about a gate that sticks. But her eyes say something else, and I hear it.
“I will,” I say. I don’t know why I say it.
I don’t make promises to strangers. But the woman standing in front of me isn’t a stranger.
She’s the reason Jenna has a satellite phone and a check-in schedule and someone who was twelve minutes from calling search and rescue.
She’s the infrastructure that keeps Jenna alive when Jenna forgets to keep herself alive. I can respect infrastructure.
They leave. The truck rattles back down the access road. The property goes quiet.
Jenna watches them go from the edge of the clearing. She’s got her camera but she’s not shooting. She’s just standing there, watching her best friend leave, and for a second she looks like a woman who is very far from home and very aware of it.
Then she lifts the camera and turns back toward the south trail and the look is gone.
The Morgan mare at Clearwater ranch is due for new shoes. I have the appointment today. I have the tools in the barn. I have a truck and an access road and a job that takes me off this property a few times a month and has never once been complicated by the presence of another person.
“I want to come.”
She’s standing at the edge of the clearing with her camera bag over her shoulder. I’m loading the farrier tools into the truck bed.
“No.”
“I’ve never seen a farrier work. It’s visual, it’s physical. Exactly the kind of thing the magazine would want.”
“No.”
She looks at me. The expression of a woman who has heard “no” from me three times and has successfully reversed two out of three.
Her track record is strong. She knows it.
I know it. The fact that I’m already calculating how to say no a third time and mean it tells me everything I need to know about the next thirty seconds.
“Puh-lease?”
“Fine.”
“I’ll stay out of the way.”
“You’ll stay out of the way.”
She stays out of the way. In the truck, her camera bag is on her lap. I keep both hands on the wheel and drive.
The Clearwater ranch is twelve miles down the valley. Carol Deakins meets us at the barn. She’s been ranching this land for thirty years and there is nothing in this valley she hasn’t seen or formed an opinion about.
“Jasper.” She looks at Jenna. Looks at me. Looks at Jenna again. Smirks. The smirk of a woman who has lived in a small valley long enough to read a situation in four seconds. “Who’s this?”
“Photographer. She’s shooting for a magazine.”
“Mm-hmm.”
That “mm-hmm” contains entire paragraphs. I ignore all of them.
The Morgan mare is in the cross ties. Good horse.
Calm temperament. I’ve been shoeing her for three years and she knows me by sound.
I run my hand along her shoulder and she drops her head.
This is the part of my work I’d never trade.
A horse that trusts you is telling you something with its whole body, and all you have to do is listen.
I pick up the first hoof. Start working. The rasp, the nippers, the fit of the shoe against the hoof wall. My hands know this. Thirteen years of doing it and the motions are automatic. The mare stands quiet. The barn is warm and smells like hay and leather and horse.
Jenna is shooting. I can hear the shutter.
She’s crouched low, moving between angles, and she’s good at this.
She reads the space the way she reads a landscape: anticipating, adjusting, never where she’d be a problem.
I forget she’s there for minutes at a time, which is the best compliment I can give a person in my workspace.
Then the mare shifts.
Not a spook. Just a step. A weight adjustment. But Jenna is crouched low behind the horse and she overcorrects backward. Her boot catches the edge of a water bucket. Her other foot slides in the stall bedding and she goes down hard, knees and elbows, in the muck of a working horse stall.
Mud. Manure. Wet straw. Everything you don’t want to be kneeling in.
Her camera is above her head. Both hands. Held high like she’s saving it from a flood. Her arms are shaking with the effort and her knees are buried and her face has the expression of a woman who has made a split-second calculation about what matters and the calculation did not include her dignity.
I’m beside her. I didn’t decide to move.
I’m just there. My hands find her waist and I pull her up and she’s slippery, the muck making my grip slide, and I hold tighter.
My fingers press into the curve above her hips and she comes up against my chest, camera still raised, muck smeared across her shins and forearms and the front of her shirt.
She’s laughing.
Covered in horse stall muck, camera above her head, my hands gripping her waist, and she’s laughing. Loud and full and shaking through her whole body and I can feel it against my chest where she’s pressed against me.
“The camera’s fine,” she says. Still laughing. Still in my hands.
“You’re covered in horse shit.”
“The camera’s fine.”
Her face is tipped up toward mine. Mud on her chin. Her mouth is wide and open with the laugh and her eyes are bright and she’s inches away. My hands are on her body. This is the closest I’ve been to another person in longer than I want to calculate.
I let go. Step back. My palms are tingling the way they tingle after I’ve been gripping the axe for too long. Different reason.
Carol is in the barn doorway. The smirk has upgraded to something beyond a smirk. She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t need to.
Jenna hoses off outside the barn. Her legs, her arms, her boots. The water plasters her clothes to her body. Her shirt is clinging to her chest and her shorts are stuck to her thighs and the water is running down her calves and I am trying and failing to look at anything else.
The drive back is quiet. She’s damp and grinning in the passenger seat. The cab smells like horse barn. She’s scrolling through the photos on her camera screen. Tilting it toward me. “Look at this one. Your hands on the hoof. The light in the barn was perfect.”
I glance at the screen. My hands, the rasp, the mare’s hoof. It’s a good photo. She’s made my work look like something worth seeing, which is what she does, apparently. Sees things and makes them worth seeing.
“You’re good at that,” I say.
“At what?”
“Making things look the way they actually are.”
She’s quiet for a second. When I glance over, she’s looking at me instead of the camera. Her mouth does something I can’t read. “That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
“Too late.”
I keep both hands on the wheel. I think about the fence post on the east line. The fence post has never been less interesting.
~~~