Chapter 3 Mara — Day 5
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The wind changes before the sky does. I feel it on the back of my neck first, cool and sudden, and I know what's coming.
I've lived here long enough.
I'm at the pump by the barn with a bucket half full.
I set it down and look west. The sky over the Chinati foothills has gone the color of old iron.
A wall of cloud stacks up out there, moving fast, and even from here I can see the seam of dust the wind's kicking off the flats. Storm coming in low and quick and mean.
“Beau,” I call.
He's at the tractor shed, coiling a length of hose. He straightens.
“Yeah?”
I point west. He looks. He doesn't need me to explain.
“How long?” he says.
“Twenty minutes. Maybe less. We've got to close up the barn and get the loose stuff in before it starts moving on its own.”
He nods once and drops the hose across the rail. “Tell me what and where.”
I like that he doesn't ask twice. My father used to say a man who asks a question once is worth ten who ask it four ways to hear themselves.
“Shutters first,” I say. “Both sides. Then the equipment on the south apron — the harrow, the two water tubs, the fencing coils. If it can blow, it blows. Then the stall doors.”
“Horses in?”
“They'll come in on their own when they smell it. Junior's already trotting up.”
He looks toward the pasture. I follow his eyes. Junior, the old sorrel gelding, is loping toward the gate, ears pinned back. Behind him, Dancer and Vespers drift up, uncertain. Roman's still out, but he'll turn.
“I'll get the shutters,” Beau says.
“South side. I've got the north.”
We move.
The wind hits the trees along the drive and they sound like they're being torn.
My braid slaps my back and I tuck it inside the collar of my shirt.
The first shutter on my side is stuck — swollen from last week's damp — and I have to put my shoulder into it.
Wood scrapes against wood. My arms burn under my shirt before I've latched the second one.
I don't remember the shutters being this heavy.
Then I remember I usually only close two, and I close my mouth around a bad word and keep moving.
Around the other side, I can hear Beau. He works quiet. No cursing. No talking. The metallic bang of a latch dropping into place, then the next. He's faster than I am. I hate that a little and I don't hate it at all.
By the time I've done my four, he's done his six. He meets me at the corner of the barn.
“Water tubs?”
“They're heavy,” I warn.
“I know.”
We go. The first tub still has an inch of water in the bottom and it slops out over my boots when we lift. He takes the far handle. I take the near. We shuffle it into the shed and set it down and I straighten and roll my shoulder.
“Second one's dry,” I say.
“Easier.”
He's already moving.
We chain the harrow down under the lean-to.
We drag the roll of fencing behind the tack-room wall where the wind won't take it.
The first fat drops of rain hit while we work — one on my forearm, one on the back of my neck, one on my cheekbone.
Cold. The air smells like wet caliche and creosote and iron.
“That's the front edge,” I say. “Get the doors.”
We split.
I take the pasture side of the barn and swing the wide door in on its runner. The wind's got hold of it now and it fights me. I put my back against it and dig my heels in and push, and it moves grudging. I get the pin dropped, breathing hard, one hand flat on the wall.
The horses are in. Junior and Dancer and Vespers, standing in the aisle with their sides steaming, ears working. Roman comes in last at a canter, all four white socks flashing, and skids to a stop at his stall like a foal. I laugh because I can't help it.
“Get in there,” I tell him.
He goes.
I hear the other door slide, and then Beau at the aisle mouth, hair dark with rain across his forehead, shirt stuck to one shoulder. He pushes the door behind him and the wind cuts off like someone shut a mouth.
Then the sky opens.
I mean opens — a wall of rain drumming the tin roof so loud I can't hear the horses breathing anymore.
Water hits the ground outside so hard it bounces.
Lightning stripes the sky over the pasture we came in from, and I count.
One, two, three. Thunder rolls over three counts, close enough to feel in my teeth.
“That was fast,” Beau says, wiping rain out of his eyes.
“West Texas.”
“Yeah.”
He's smiling, not much, but openly enough that my ribs do a quick, inconvenient thing I don't have time for.
I turn away and walk down the aisle, checking latches on stalls I already know are latched. He walks with me.
“Roman doesn't like the thunder,” I say. “He'll be a nuisance for an hour.”
“Junior?”
“Junior's twenty. Junior doesn't care about anything anymore.”
Beau puts his hand on Junior's neck through the bars. Junior lowers his head into it, eyes half-shut. The horse likes him. Has liked him from the first morning. Animals aren't always right, but they're not usually all the way wrong.
“He's a good old man,” Beau says.
“He was my father's.”
He looks at me then. Just a look. Doesn't ask. Doesn't push. Files it, I think. Moves on. I appreciate that more than I want to.
“I'll get towels,” I say. “You're soaked.”
“So are you.”
“I'll get two.”
I go into the tack room. It smells like leather and neatsfoot oil and the faint animal warmth of blankets stored too long.
I grab two of the old brown towels off the hook and toss one at him when I come back out.
He catches it one-handed and rubs it over his hair and his neck.
The hair comes up all the wrong ways and stays there.
I dry my own face. I don't watch him. I'm actively not watching him.
“There's coffee in there,” I say, nodding at the tack room. “In the pot. From this morning, but it's hot.”
“I'll take it.”
We stand in there with tin cups and the storm hammering the roof and the horses shifting behind us.
My arms are still burning. I flex the fingers of my left hand and feel the scar in my palm pull the way it always does when I've been gripping too hard.
Barbed wire, age eleven. My father said it was my fault for reaching where I could see and not where I could touch, and then he took me into town for a Coke.
I turn the buckle of it on my wrist without looking down.
Beau leans against the wall of the tack room with his cup between both hands.
“Where'd you learn?” I ask him.
“Learn what?”
“To work like that. To not ask twice.”
He thinks. He doesn't answer right away, and it's the not-answering-right-away I mark. Most people fill silence with words. He treats a question like something he needs to hold for a minute.
“I worked outside a lot,” he says. “Growing up.”
“Where?”
“Up north.”
Two words. Not a lie. Not the truth either. His voice does something small on the words, like he's setting them down carefully so they won't ring.
I let it go. I'm not his mother.
“That works,” I say.
“Does it?”
“For now.”
He watches me over the rim, amusement gathering where his reserve usually sits.
The rain slows into a hard steady rhythm.
Not passing. Sitting on us. I do the math on how long it'll take to fill the low wash behind the west pasture and decide it's not enough to worry about yet.
The bank of thunder has moved off east. Roman has stopped stamping.
Vespers is eating hay like nothing happened, which is Vespers all over.
The barn door on the pasture side rattles.
“Rafe,” I say, before it opens, because it can only be Rafe.
It's Rafe.
He comes in through the smaller person-door with his hat pushed back and his shirt stuck to him and a saddle over one shoulder.
His old saddle — the brown one with the tooling worn smooth on the cantle.
He's got it up on his shoulder wrong, the horn digging into his collarbone, and he's using his free hand to swipe water off his face.
“Y'all closed up already?” he says.
“We did.”
“Good. That came on ugly.”
“Where were you?”
“Bunkhouse. Orin's asleep — could've been eaten by coyotes and he wouldn't have heard. I brought this in from the fence line before it got wet. Figured I'd rub it down while we're stuck.”
He walks past us into the tack room. I hear him say something to himself about the girth. Then I hear the saddle hit the floor.
It's not a soft hit. It's a wooden crack.
“Aw, hell,” Rafe says. Loud. “Aw, no. No, no.”
I'm through the door in three steps.
He's crouched over the saddle. The cantle — the back arch, the one already split, the one I told him to bring to me a month ago and he didn't because Rafe is Rafe — split further.
Not the hairline anymore. A real crack, running an inch and a half through the wood under the leather.
You can see the pale unfinished edge where the finish snapped.
“Rafe.”
“I know. I know.”
“How'd you drop it?”
“Shoulder slipped. Wet. I — Mara, I know.”
“Sit down and breathe.”
He doesn't sit. He crouches with his hand on the split like he can hold it back together.
His face has gone a color I don't like. Rafe's twenty-six and cocky and mouthy, and he's about to cry over a saddle, which tells me it's not really about the saddle.
It's about the fact that it was his uncle's, and his uncle taught him to ride, and everybody on the place knows it.
“It's wood and leather,” I say. “Wood and leather can be fixed.”
“That cantle's ruined.”
“That cantle's cracked. Not ruined.”
“Mara —”
“Rafe. Look at me. Hey. Look at me.”
He looks up. His eyes are wet but he's holding it. He's a good kid.
“I'll ask Beau to look at it,” I say.
Behind me, I can feel Beau in the doorway of the tack room. Not moving. Not talking. There in the way he knows how to be.
“Beau?” Rafe says.
“Beau.”
“Why Beau?”
“Because he's got good hands, and he doesn't talk when he's working, and if anybody in this yard can look at a split cantle and tell whether it can be saved without pretending he knows more than he does, it's him. Yes?”
I turn my head. Beau's looking at the saddle, not at me.