Chapter 8 Mara — Day 18
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The smoke wakes me before the yelling does.
It's not much — a thin curl in the dark that shouldn't be there, sharp at the back of my throat. My eyes open before my brain catches up. Then I hear Rafe holler my name across the yard and I'm out of bed with my feet on the cold floor.
“Mara!”
“Coming.”
I don't bother with a robe. I grab the wool coat off the hook and pull it over my sleep shirt and shorts. My boots are by the door. Old habit. Even the dog would know where to find them, if I still had a dog.
The porch is a slap of cold air. Presidio County in September at three in the morning is a knife going in gentle, then twisting. I pull the coat tight and step off into the yard.
The bunkhouse is glowing wrong.
There's no flame at the windows, thank God, but there's an orange smear behind the glass in one corner, and smoke is coming out of the vent pipe in a fat, wrong-shaped cloud.
Rafe is standing barefoot in the dirt about ten feet from the door.
He's got Orin by the elbow like he's afraid the kid will bolt back in.
Both of them are in T-shirts and drawstring pants with coats yanked on over the top.
“Everybody out?” I say.
“Everybody out.” Rafe's voice is tight. “Stove. It's the stove. I got the door shut behind us.”
“Anybody burned?”
“No. Orin's fine. I'm fine. Just — my feet are cold.”
“Get them off the dirt.”
He picks his feet up and puts them on top of his boots. Orin does the same. Orin is nineteen and shaking, not from cold.
“Orin. Look at me.”
He looks at me.
“You're alright. You did the right thing. You got out. That's the whole job.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
Behind me, boots in gravel. I don't turn. I know Thayer's stride when I hear it.
“Extinguisher's in the tack room,” I say. “Thayer, would you —”
“Already sent Beau.”
I look. Beau is halfway across the yard toward the barn, moving fast in a way that doesn't read like panic, only like a man who has decided where he's going.
He's got a jacket thrown over a plain gray T-shirt and pajama pants.
His hair is doing whatever hair does at three in the morning.
He doesn't look at me on the way past. He doesn't need to.
Thayer stops beside me. He's in his coat and the jeans he must have never taken off. Thayer sleeps in his jeans. He'd sleep in his boots if Opal would let him.
“Told him where it was,” he says.
“Good.”
“Wall's scorched. Corner by the stovepipe. Flue got blocked and something in the wall caught. Slow. Not fast.”
“How bad?”
“Bad enough it's not sleeping four men tonight.” A pause. “Or the next six.”
“A week.”
“Give it a week to be safe, then we open the wall and see.”
Beau is coming back with the red canister under his arm. I move to open the bunkhouse door for him and he stops me with a hand — not on me, only held up — palm out.
“Let me,” he says.
He doesn't say it like an order. He says it like a man asking permission. I nod.
He pulls his coat up over his mouth and goes in. Thayer follows without being asked. I stand in the yard with Rafe and Orin and count in my head the way my dad taught me — one banker, two banker, three banker — because if I get to sixty banker and there's still no sign of them, I go in too.
I get to thirty-one banker when Thayer comes out.
“Out,” he calls. “Beau's coming.”
Beau follows him, coughing once, waving a hand in front of his face.
He walks a straight line to me and stops close enough that I can smell the smoke on him — clean pine smoke and something sharper, like a rag that shouldn't have caught.
His eyes are watering a little. There's a smear of soot at the hinge of his jaw.
He hasn't noticed. I want to reach up and take it off with my thumb, and I don't, and the wanting sits under my ribs like a coin.
“It's out,” he says. “Wall's ugly. Nothing structural I could see. Stove's cracked.”
“Thank you.”
“You'd have done the same.”
“I'd have done it slower.”
He almost smiles. He almost doesn't. His mouth does the thing where it's about to and then thinks better of it, which is a thing his mouth does a lot.
Opal comes out onto the porch of the main house in a robe the color of dried lavender, and she's carrying, of all things, a kettle. She sets it on the porch rail like she's putting down a rifle.
“Nobody in a coffin, nobody in a hospital?” she calls.
“Nobody,” I call back.
“Then everybody in the kitchen in ten minutes, and mind your boots on my floor.”
That's how you know Opal. The first thing she does after a fire is boil water and threaten the flooring.
I turn to Rafe. “You and Orin grab what you can that isn't smoke-soaked. Two duffels each. Don't dig. If it's not by the door, leave it.”
“Yes, boss.”
“And put your boots on.”
“Yes, boss.”
They shove their feet in and go. Rafe's shoulders come down about half an inch when Orin says something too low for me to catch and laughs at his own joke. Good. That's the second thing after get out — make the kid laugh so he knows the world's still running.
Beau hasn't moved.
“You alright?” he says.
“I'm fine.”
“You're in boots with no socks and you're shivering.”
“I'm fine.”
He doesn't push. He looks at me the way he looks at a horse he doesn't want to spook — steady, a beat too long — and then he's the one who breaks it by looking at the bunkhouse.
“Where do you want us?” he says.
That's the question I hadn't wanted to reach yet. I feel my head do the little click it does when a problem shows up whole and I have to solve it out loud so nobody wastes time.
“Alright,” I say. “Rafe and Orin can't sleep in there.
Not tonight, not this week. The main house has two guest rooms. Upstairs is the bigger one — two beds, if we drag the daybed in from the sewing corner, which we will.
Rafe and Orin go up there. Downstairs guest room is smaller, one bed, off the mudroom.
That one's yours. Thayer can take the office cot after he finishes watch.”
I say it too fast to think about it. I say it in the same tone I'd use to say the north pasture floods first in spring.
Beau doesn't answer right away.
Thayer is by the barn door. He heard. He doesn't turn around. He doesn't look at me and he doesn't look at Beau. Thayer says nothing, which is the loudest thing Thayer says.
Opal, on the porch, is holding the kettle in both hands. One of her eyebrows goes up. Just the one. Slow and clean, like she's marking something down on an invisible page. She doesn't say a word either. She looks at me and then she looks at Beau and then she looks back at the kettle.
I feel my face get warm. It's not the fire.
“That works,” Beau says.
“Good.”
“I've got a duffel. That's all.”
“That's all you need.”
“Alright.”
He goes to get it. I stand in the yard for another second with the wool coat pulled tight and my toes going numb, and I don't look at Opal, and Opal doesn't look at me, and neither of us has to.
Inside, the kitchen is warm and smells like the kettle already, though the water isn't even close to boiling.
“Sit,” Opal says to Rafe and Orin when they come in with their duffels. “Both of you. Feet on the mat. I'm not asking.”
They sit. She hands them mugs before the water's even hot, which is on purpose. Something to hold.
“Coffee?” she says to me.
“Please.”
“Beau?”
“Please, ma'am.”
“Don't ma'am me before dawn.”
“Sorry.”
“And it's Opal.”
“Yes, Opal.”
She almost smiles. She almost doesn't, either. It's catching, in this house, that particular way of not-smiling.
Thayer takes his mug at the counter, standing. He drinks it black. He drinks it fast. He says, “I'll walk it again at first light. Make sure nothing's hiding.”
“Thanks, Thayer.”
He nods and goes back out the front door with his coat still on. I hear his truck start a minute later. He'll sleep in it at the end of the drive with the heat on and the radio low, the way he does when he's on watch.
I sit down across from Rafe. He's got both hands around his mug and he's not drinking.
“Talk to me,” I say.
“I checked the stove before we turned in. I did. I checked it. I put the screen up. I —”
“Rafe.”
“— I did everything.”
“Rafe. Look at me.”
He does.
“The flue was blocked. That happens. That's not a checklist item you missed. That's a bird's nest or an old rag or God knows what up in the pipe from before you were born. You got Orin out. You shut the door behind you. You yelled loud enough to wake me from across the yard. You did the whole job.”
“I —”
“You did the whole job.”
He looks at his mug. He nods. Orin, beside him, elbows him. Rafe elbows him back, harder, but a little less like a man ready to cry.
“Alright,” Rafe says.
“Alright,” I say. “Upstairs. Left at the top of the stairs. Guest room, first door. There's a daybed in the corner room we'll drag in for Orin. I'll come help move it.”
“I got it,” Beau says. He's leaning against the frame between the kitchen and the hall with his duffel on his shoulder. “Show me where.”
“Second door on the right, upstairs.”
“On it.”
He goes. I hear the boards under his weight — the loose one on the third stair I keep meaning to fix and never do. It creaks under him the way it creaks under everyone. I notice it under him because some part of me has already begun measuring the house around his weight.
Opal sets a plate of rosemary bread down between us in slices. She always has bread. It's her tell. She bakes when she's worried and she bakes when she's not, so you can't use the bread to read her, only that there's always bread, which is its own kind of steadiness.
“Eat,” she says to Rafe.
“Yes, ma'am.”
She doesn't correct him on the ma'am. She corrects everybody but Rafe. Rafe gets to ma'am her because Rafe lost his mother at fifteen and Opal knows it.
I take a slice. It's warm in the middle and the rosemary is sharp on my tongue. I say so, quietly. Opal grunts, which is her thank-you.