Chapter 11 Bastien — Day 28
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The morning had that particular Marfa clarity, all edge and no forgiveness, the kind of light that told you what a shirt really looked like and what a face really did.
Bastien worked the last row on the flatbed with his hip and his gloves, tipping bales down so Rafe could hup them into the stack.
The bales weighed about sixty pounds apiece.
That was less than they'd weighed when he'd started here nearly four weeks ago, or he'd stopped noticing.
“You're getting decent at that,” Rafe said, and slapped a bale flat with a proprietary grin. “For a Canadian.”
“Kind of you.”
“I'm a kind man.”
“So I've heard.”
Rafe laughed. He always laughed at his own line first, and Bastien liked that about him. It saved everybody else the work.
Down at the house the screen door made its familiar complaining crack, and Mara came onto the porch with the phone still in her hand, the way you carried a hot pan you weren't sure where to set.
She stood at the porch rail a second, looking out at nothing, and then came off the steps in that way she had — no wasted motion, no waste of anything.
Her braid was already coming apart at the tail.
She'd been up since four; he'd heard her moving through the kitchen before dawn.
“Mara's on her way over,” Rafe said, without looking, having read the yard by the sound of it.
“I see her.”
“You always see her.”
Bastien didn't answer that. He hooked another bale, tipped it, kept his hands moving.
Mara stopped at the tailgate. She didn't say hi. She never said hi. She said the thing she'd come to say.
“Selene Hart just called.”
“Yeah?” Rafe said.
“Not you.” Mara's eyes went to Bastien. “Sorry, Rafe. Give me a minute with him about the loan.”
“Yes ma'am.” Rafe made himself scarce toward the barn, whistling.
Bastien set the bale hook down slowly on the flatbed rail. Slowly, so his hands couldn't do the thing they wanted to do. He pulled his gloves off and folded them together and put them in his back pocket, one movement at a time.
“What did she say?” he asked.
“She said fifty thousand was credited to the restricted cure escrow on the ranch loan.”
He kept his face where it was. That took a little work.
“From who?”
“That's the thing. She said it came through a law firm's client-trust account with an executed gift letter. The bank verified the source of funds, but the donor requested identity confidentiality.”
“Anonymously.”
“That's what she said.”
She was watching him. She wasn't looking for anything in particular; that wasn't Mara's way.
She was watching, because watching was what she did with everything — a fence line, a horse, a man.
He'd learned in nearly four weeks that being watched by Mara wasn't being suspected. It was being seen. That was worse.
He picked the bale hook back up and turned it in his hand, once, so he'd have somewhere for his hands to be.
“Mara,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“That's good news.”
“I know it's good news.”
“You don't sound like it's good news.”
She let out a breath through her nose. It wasn't quite a laugh. It was the sound a person made when a very heavy thing had been moved a very small distance.
“I don't like money I can't put a face on.”
“No.”
“My dad knew neighbors, horse traders, and men who paid in folded bills.” She scratched the side of her jaw with her thumb. “Fifty thousand from an anonymous stranger is a different weight class.”
“Maybe somebody saw the default filing and decided the ranch was worth preserving.”
He said it quietly, and heard the dishonesty in the careful way he'd removed himself from the sentence.
Mara held his gaze long enough to make the silence uncomfortable, then looked toward the barn.
“Maybe,” she said.
He breathed. He didn't let her see him breathe.
“How much does that put you above the floor?” he asked, because if he stopped asking things he was going to stop being able to talk at all.
“Selene said it doesn't cure the notice. But it gets us out of the immediate hole for the November payment. It buys us to the auction.”
“That's something.”
“That's a lot.”
“Then take it, Mara.”
“I'm going to take it.” She said it flatly, but her jaw had gone a little tight. “I don't have the luxury of pride about it. I just — I want to know who to thank.”
“Sometimes you don't get to.”
“That's not how I like to live.”
“I know it isn't.”
She looked at him another beat. He held the bale hook. He held his face. He held the whole shape of the morning like a plate he was going to have to carry to the kitchen without spilling.
“All right,” she said, finally. “Well. I wanted you to know. You've been carrying it with me.”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks.”
“Mara.”
“Yeah?”
He wanted to tell her. He wanted to say I arranged it.
I did it because the first night I watched you put a foreclosure notice in a coffee tin and stand back up, something in me went over.
He wanted to say there was no anonymous stranger.
There was only a man too afraid to give help in his own name.
“I hope Selene keeps asking,” he said. “You deserve the truth about where it came from.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I do.”
She turned and went back to the house. She'd left her second cup of coffee on the porch rail; he could see the mug from here. She'd forgotten it. That, more than anything, told him what the call had cost her.
Rafe drifted back, whistling.
“Everything all right, boss lady?” he called.
“Everything's fine, Rafe.”
“Copy that.”
Bastien pulled his gloves back on. He picked up the next bale. His hands, when he lifted it, didn't shake. He was proud of them for it, and he was disgusted at himself for being proud.
He worked through the afternoon on the north pasture fence with Thayer, and neither of them said much, which was the way Thayer preferred it and the way Bastien was grateful for that day. Thayer, at some point, drove a staple in and said, without looking up:
“You had a color on you this morning.”
“Did I?”
“Mm.”
Thayer didn't follow up. Thayer never followed up.
It was another thing Bastien had come to like about him.
But Thayer noticed. That was the other thing.
He'd known from about day eight that Thayer noticed too much, and that Thayer was a man who noticed and didn't tell, and that at some point he and Thayer would have to have a conversation, and that today wasn't the day.
“Long morning,” Bastien said.
“They're all long.”
“Yeah.”
They walked the fence.
By the time they came back in for supper the sky had gone that soft rose-brown Bastien had learned to look for.
The house smelled like rosemary bread and onions and something with lamb in it.
Opal was at the stove with a wooden spoon and the look on her face she got when she'd decided a thing and was waiting for the world to catch up.
“Wash,” she said, without turning around, and Bastien washed at the mudroom sink with the yellow soap and hung the towel back on its peg.
“You need help?” he asked.
“Sit,” Opal said. “Sitting's the help.”
Rafe was already at the table, and Orin was already at the table, and Mara came down the stairs in a clean shirt with her braid redone, and she caught Bastien's eye once and gave him a small nod.
She didn't sit until Opal put a bowl on the table.
Nobody sat until Opal put a bowl on the table.
That was a house rule he'd absorbed without ever being told.
“Bread's coming,” Opal said.
“Thank God,” Rafe said.
“Language.”
“Yes ma'am.”
Opal brought the bread in a cloth-lined basket. She set it in front of Mara, who tore the heel off and passed it to Orin, who said “Thank you, ma'am” and passed the basket to Bastien. Bastien took a piece and set the basket down toward Rafe, and Opal watched him.
She watched him the way she'd watched the stew earlier, when she was deciding whether it needed salt.
Bastien felt it on the side of his neck, that watching. He picked up his spoon.
“How's the north fence?” Mara asked, and Bastien turned to her gratefully.
“Two panels replaced. Third one held. The wire was worse than the posts.”
“Wire's always worse than the posts,” Thayer said.
“You said that this morning,” Bastien said.
“It bears repeating.”
“Deep,” Rafe said.
“Language,” Opal said again, mildly, though Rafe hadn't sworn.
“Yes ma'am.”
Bastien ate. The stew was good. The lamb had been simmering since noon; you could taste the patience in it.
Opal didn't sit down. Opal never sat down until the middle of a meal.
She hovered, moved plates, refilled water, opened the oven door with a mitt she kept on the counter for that purpose.
Bastien watched Mara across the table without watching her.
She was eating slowly. She was somewhere else, most of her — probably in the ranch office in her head, moving fifty thousand dollars from one column to another, the way she moved everything, twice over, in ink.
“You're quiet, Beau,” Opal said.
He looked up.
“Long day.”
“Long morning,” Thayer corrected, quietly, into his stew.
Bastien didn't answer that.
“Some more bread?” Opal said.
“Please.”
She came around the table with the basket. She set it down in front of him. Her hand rested a second on the edge of the basket, and she didn't look at him when she spoke, and it was the smallest thing.
“Some kindnesses are their own trap,” she said.
She said it the way you might say pass the butter.
Bastien felt every hair on his forearms go up.
Opal took the empty water pitcher and went back to the kitchen for a refill. Rafe was mid-sentence about a mare he'd seen down south; nobody at the table had heard Opal but him. Bastien understood, with a clarity he hadn't felt since the morning his brother had died, that Opal Serrano knew.