Chapter 2 Bastien — Day 3
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The kitchen smelled like rosemary and coffee, and for a second Bastien forgot who he was supposed to be.
He'd crossed the dark yard from the bunkhouse and slipped through the back door as quietly as he could. Five forty-five. The house was still blue-black at the windows, and he'd figured on making his own cup and getting to the barn before anyone else was up. He'd been wrong.
A woman stood at the stove with her back to him. She was small and round in a soft way that suggested she'd been small and hard once, and short gray hair curled against the collar of her denim shirt. She didn't turn.
“Mug's on the counter, cari?o. Cream in the fridge if you take it.”
Bastien stopped in the doorway. “Ma'am.”
“Opal.” She flipped something in the pan without looking. “Don't ma'am me before six. It offends the eggs.”
“Opal, then.”
He crossed to the counter. His boots were still stiff. He'd bought them off a rack in Alpine two days ago and they'd punished his heels for it since. The mug was thick white china, the coffee in the pot the color of a creek bed. He poured. His hand was steadier than he'd expected.
“Sit.”
He sat.
She turned then, and he understood in one look that this woman saw him.
Not the plaid shirt, not the calluses he didn't have.
Him. Her eyes were the color of good tobacco and they moved over his face for maybe a full second, and then she blinked and it was gone, and she was Opal the cook again.
She reached into a linen cloth on the counter and cut him a slab of bread the color of pale honey.
“Eat that.” She set it in front of him with a small pot of butter. “Thayer likes the crew fed before he says anything to them. Otherwise he's got nothing to work with.”
The bread was still warm. Steam came off it when he broke it, and something behind his ribs unclenched.
“Did you make this?”
“Who else.”
“It's very good.”
“I know.”
He looked at her over the rim of the mug. She was smiling at the pan, not at him, and he understood he'd been thanked and put in his place at the same time.
“How do you take it?” she said.
“Coffee?”
“The morning, Beau. The morning.”
He thought about it. He hadn't been asked a question like that in a long time. Julien would've laughed at him for taking three seconds to answer it.
“Slowly,” he said.
She nodded once, as if she'd heard the right answer, and pushed a plate of eggs across the counter.
“You've got twelve minutes.”
“Understood.”
“And Beau.”
“Ma'am.”
“Whatever it is you're running from,” she said, still not looking at him, “you run from it out there in the yard, not in my kitchen. In my kitchen you're just a man who needs breakfast. Deal?”
He held very still. Then he nodded.
“Deal.”
“Eat.”
He ate.
He was out the back door at six on the nose, jacket buttoned against a cold that surprised him.
In Montreal he'd have called it mild. In the high desert at five thousand feet in a wind, it went through him.
The sky over the roofline was the color of a bruise turning to a pearl.
Somewhere a horse blew out a long breath.
A man was leaning on the corral fence. Tall and rangy and about forty, drinking coffee out of a battered thermos cap, not looking up as Bastien crossed the yard.
Bastien stopped at a polite distance.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
The man went on watching the corral. There was a bay in there working small circles by himself, no rider, tossing his head at nothing.
“Thayer Knox,” the man said eventually. “Foreman. She told you the layout?”
“Some of it.”
“I'll show you more later.”
“All right.”
Thayer took a sip of coffee. He was still watching the horse. Bastien watched with him. He had no idea what he was supposed to see.
“He limp on you?” Thayer said.
“Sir?”
“The bay. Watch his off hind.”
Bastien watched. After a few passes he caught it — a small drop the horse made on one leg, so slight you had to know to look. He wouldn't have known to look.
“Yeah,” Bastien said. “A little.”
“Mm.”
That was the whole test, apparently, because Thayer capped his thermos and pushed off the fence.
“Rafe's in the hay barn. Go help him throw down for the morning. He'll want to talk. You don't have to.”
“All right.”
Thayer paused. He looked at Bastien for the first time — long, evaluating, unhurried. His eyes were pale gray in a weathered face and gave up nothing.
“You'll work today,” Thayer said. “We'll see how you feel about it tomorrow.”
“Fair.”
Thayer walked off toward the machine shed. Bastien watched him go and understood he'd been handed a small kindness and a warning at the same time, and it'd take a while to figure out which one weighed more.
The hay barn was a green metal roof on tall posts, open on two sides, stacked ten bales high in the dim end. A young man was up on the stack with gloves on and a grin already loaded, and he leaned on a bale as Bastien came in.
“You the new guy.”
“Beau.”
“Rafe Calderon. Come up.”
Bastien climbed. The ladder was two-by-fours nailed to a post, worn smooth where a thousand hands had grabbed it. Rafe was maybe twenty-six and already sun-burnished across the nose, with a cocky mouth and eyes that missed nothing. He handed Bastien a pair of leather gloves.
“You'll want those. Fresh hands, first day, no gloves — Opal'll have to soak your palms in vinegar tonight and you'll cry. Not judging. Just informing.”
“Thank you.”
“Where you from, Beau?”
“North.”
“Big north or little north?”
“Big.”
“Canada north?”
“That kind.”
Rafe grinned wider. “You're gonna be no fun. I can already tell. Where in Canada?”
“East.”
“Real specific.”
“I try.”
Rafe laughed — a good laugh, not mean. He tossed a bale down through the open side with an easy grunt. It landed with a thud and a puff of chaff.
“All right, Beau from Big North. You throw bales like this. Grab the twines — both, don't get cute — knees not your back, swing it, let it go before your shoulders take it. If you don't let go, it takes your shoulder. Ask my cousin. She only has the one now.”
“Understood.”
“Also, boss don't like us up here past seven. Mucking's on the sheet. Roman, Vespers, Dancer, Junior. Junior kicks. Save Junior for last so you're not spooked out for the others.”
Bastien nodded. He grabbed the twines on the next bale, bent his knees, swung. It went over the edge and hit the ground with a thump that felt satisfying in a way he had no words for.
“There we go,” Rafe said. “You lift like you know how. Gym boy?”
“Some.”
“Which gym.”
“Just a gym.”
“You from money, Beau?”
Bastien straightened. Rafe had asked it the way a man asks about the weather, half-teasing, half-testing, watching sideways as he pulled another bale into position. It wasn't a stupid question. His hands had been noticed. His teeth. The way he'd said very good about the bread instead of just good.
He thought about it.
“I've had money,” he said. “I'm not carrying any right now.”
Rafe considered that. Then he shrugged, satisfied.
“Well,” he said, “that's most of us.”
He didn't push again. Bastien felt the small relief of not being pushed as clearly as he'd felt the warmth of the bread, and he filed it away next to it.
They threw bales for forty minutes. His shoulders started to burn by the third row.
His palms would've been raw without the gloves.
There was a taste in the back of his mouth — dust and something sweet, cut grass if cut grass carried childhood in it.
He liked it. It was ridiculous. He liked it very much.
A kid appeared at ground level with a wheelbarrow. Maybe nineteen, thin, ears pink from the cold. He tipped his hat up.
“Rafe. Ma'am — sorry, sir. Mister Beau. Miss Vale said to tell you she needs the tractor moved by nine.”
Bastien laughed before he could stop himself. It came out of him easy, and it startled him almost as much as it startled the kid.
“Sorry,” Bastien said. “It's — it's just Beau. And it's fine.”
The kid ducked his head. “Yes sir.”
“Beau.”
“Yes sir.”
Rafe cackled from up on the stack. “That's Orin. Raised by a very polite grandmother. You will never get him to stop. It's a documented failure.”
“Rafe,” Orin said, offended in a way that told Bastien this had all been said before, at length.
“Orin, meet Beau. Beau, meet Orin. Orin, tell Thayer we'll have the loft cleared by seven. Beau's got a good back on him.”
“Yes sir.”
Orin trundled off with the wheelbarrow. Bastien watched him go. He'd been called sir by paid staff his entire adult life, and it never once made him laugh.
Junior did kick. Bastien saved him for last, and Junior kicked anyway, a lazy back leg that missed Bastien's thigh by an inch because Rafe had told him where to stand.
Bastien said something in French under his breath about Junior's mother, and Junior swished his tail and looked pleased, and Bastien laughed again, quieter this time, and shoveled.
The stalls smelled like ammonia and clean straw.
He'd never smelled either — not quite true, he'd smelled ammonia at the polo grounds outside Buenos Aires when he was twenty-two and Julien had made him go, but not this way, not with his own sweat mixed in.
He filled the wheelbarrow, rolled it out, dumped it on the pile, came back.
Filled it again. His palms buzzed inside the gloves.
His shoulders hurt with a specific, honest ache that felt like it belonged to him.
Nobody spoke to him. Rafe had gone to check a fence, Orin was on the tractor, Thayer was somewhere else.
The sun climbed. It was the strangest thing he'd felt in maybe fifteen years — no one waiting on a decision from him.
No one about to slide a portfolio in front of him.
No phone in his pocket, no email, no meeting at nine, no meeting at ten.
Just Vespers watching him from over the stall door with mild interest, and the scrape of the shovel, and his own breath.
He was nobody. And he liked it. He liked it so much it worried him.