Chapter 18 Bastien — Day 46
◆
The kitchen smelled like rosemary and butter and the last of the sun.
Bastien came in from the porch with his hair still damp from the wash basin, sleeves rolled to the elbow, the day's work brushed off his jeans. Opal stood at the stove with a wooden spoon in one hand and a dish towel slung over her shoulder. She looked up, took him in, went back to her pot.
“Sit,” she said. “Or set the table. Don't stand there like a fence post.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“And don't yes-ma'am me. Plates are in the cupboard by your elbow.”
He opened the cupboard. Plates, then bowls, then the good glasses — six of them, one with a chip on the rim that stayed in the rotation anyway. He counted heads without meaning to. Mara. Opal. Thayer. Rafe. Orin. Himself. Six.
He carried the plates over.
“Napkins in the drawer,” Opal said, without turning. “Not the paper. The cloth ones.”
“There's a difference?”
She snorted. “Tonight there's a difference.”
He found the drawer. The cloth napkins were folded in a tidy stack, corners a little worn, laundered soft. He laid one at each place and stepped back to look at what he'd done, and for a strange second his chest went tight.
Then Mara came in from the mudroom with a bunch of parsley in her fist and a smudge of dirt on her jaw, and the tightness in his chest went a different way entirely.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
“You washed up already?”
“I did.”
“Show-off.” She dropped the parsley on the cutting board and turned on the tap. She'd rebraided her hair sometime in the last hour, and the ends were still a little wet. “Opal, you need help?”
“No. I need people to sit down.”
“When?”
“When Thayer stops picking at the bread. Thayer. Off.”
Thayer had come up on the far side of the counter without any of them hearing him. He held a heel of the rosemary loaf in one hand and wore a very sheepish look on his weathered face.
“I was inspecting it,” he said.
“Sit down,” Opal said.
“Yes'm.”
Rafe banged in through the porch door with his good hand and his slung arm tucked tight, Orin behind him with the water pitcher held out in front of him like it might explode.
“We got water,” Rafe announced.
“You got water,” Orin said.
“I supervised.”
“You told me to fill it.”
“That's what supervising is.”
“Rafe.”
“Orin.”
“Sit down,” Opal said, “both of you. And Rafe, if you spill on my table you'll wear that sling on your leg.”
“Ma'am, that doesn't even —”
“Sit.”
Rafe sat.
Bastien found his place at the far end of the table, the one nearest the window and farthest from the stove.
Nobody had assigned it to him. He'd sat there the first night on instinct — he liked to see the door, he liked to see the room — and after that it was his chair.
He pulled it out. Sat. Watched them all settle.
Thayer at Opal's right, elbow on the table for one second before she looked at him and he moved it.
Rafe across from Thayer, chattering at Orin about something to do with the west pasture gate.
Orin next to Rafe, half a head shorter and pink around the ears from the tease he hadn't heard the punchline of yet. Opal at the head, ladle in hand.
Mara at the other head.
She looked down the length of the table at him, warmth touching her mouth, and he felt it land somewhere under his sternum.
“Grace,” Opal said.
Everyone put their forks down.
“Bless this food,” Opal said. “Bless the hands that grew it and the hands that cooked it. Bless the people at this table. Amen.”
“Amen,” said Thayer.
“Amen,” said Rafe and Orin at the same time, and Rafe elbowed Orin and Orin muttered ow.
Mara said “amen” and picked up her fork. Opal started ladling stew into bowls. The sound of the ladle against the pot, the clink of bowls being passed, Rafe already talking with his mouth full — all of it settled into Bastien like something warm poured slow.
“Bread,” Opal said. “Beau, pass the bread down.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
The rosemary loaf sat on a wooden board next to him, crust dark and crackled and studded with green. He picked up the board and passed it. Thayer took a piece. Rafe took two, got looked at, put one back. Orin took a piece so small it was more of a suggestion.
“Orin,” Opal said.
“Ma'am?”
“Take real bread.”
“Yes'm.”
He took a bigger piece. Everyone laughed at him a little. He blushed.
“Your dad tell you not to eat at other people's tables?” Rafe said.
“My dad told me a lot of things.”
“Was any of it useful?”
“Some of it.”
“Name one.”
“Don't sit next to Rafe at dinner.”
Thayer laughed so hard he choked on his water. Opal handed him a napkin without looking.
Bastien watched them the way he'd watched them for weeks now — the way a person watches a language he's slowly learning.
The rhythm of them. The way Opal ran the table like it was a small kingdom and nobody thought to argue.
The way Rafe teased and Orin took it and Thayer let it happen, and Mara — Mara ate her stew with her elbows on either side of her bowl and listened to the room like it was a piece of music.
She caught him watching.
He looked away first. Then he looked back, because it was that kind of night.
“Thayer,” Opal said. “Tell the story.”
“Which story.”
“The one about your daddy and the roan.”
“Aw, Opal.”
“Tell it. Beau hasn't heard it.”
Bastien set his spoon down.
Thayer wiped his mouth. He was a quiet man most of the time, wiry, forty-two but weathered older, hands scarred from a rodeo life he'd walked away from. When he started talking, his voice went slow the way it did when he was choosing his words on purpose.
“My daddy,” Thayer said, “wasn't a big man.
He was maybe five-eight in his boots. He weighed about a hundred and sixty pounds soaking wet.
And when I was ten years old he took me out to a corral in the sandhills and he put me on a two-year-old roan, and he said, son, you don't break a horse. You give a horse the chance to break itself.”
Rafe stopped chewing.
“I said, Daddy, what's that mean,” Thayer went on. “He said, it means you sit quiet, you sit soft, and you don't ask him for anything he can't yet give. He said, a horse is a big animal made of muscle and fear. You don't take the fear out with a rope. You take it out with time.”
Opal had stopped ladling. She had a small smile at the corner of her mouth that Bastien had never seen there before.
“So I sat on that horse,” Thayer said. “And I sat on that horse.
And the horse threw me. Three times, that first day.
Every time I hit the dirt, my daddy said, get up, son.
And I got up. And the fourth time he didn't throw me.
And the fifth time he didn't throw me. And by the end of that week that roan was following me around the paddock like a dog.”
“What was his name,” Orin said.
“The horse?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Cinco. Because he threw me five times before he decided not to.”
Rafe grinned. “That's a good name for a horse.”
“It's a fine name for a horse,” Thayer agreed.
“Is your dad still living, sir?” Orin said.
“No, son. He died when I was twenty.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Thank you.” Thayer looked down at his bread.
He turned the piece over in his fingers, and the crust made a soft sound against his thumb.
“It was a good long time ago now. But I think about him most days I'm on a horse.
I think, would he like the way I'm sitting.
I think, would he like the way I'm asking.
Most days he would. Some days he'd have a note or two.”
“What kind of note,” Rafe said.
“Oh, the usual. Elbow in. Weight back. Quit chattering.” Thayer smiled a slow smile. “He wasn't a soft man. But he was a good one. Those two aren't the same thing, and I didn't learn that till later.”
“That's a whole sermon in a sentence, Knox,” Opal said.
“Well.” Thayer shrugged. “I had a good teacher.”
Nobody said anything for a second. The kitchen ticked with the sound of the stove cooling and a fly against the window screen.
Bastien hadn't, in his life, sat at a table with a man like Thayer telling a story like that.
He'd sat at long tables of dark wood in Montreal, tables laid out with the kind of silver that had a family behind it.
He'd sat at conference tables with people who took notes on tablets and never looked up.
He'd sat at hotel-restaurant tables in cities he could no longer name in order.
He'd been fed by chefs whose names were printed on menus.
He'd been served wine older than the youngest person at this table.
He'd been placed, once, next to a woman who ran a small country, and she'd told him a joke about geese, and he'd forgotten the joke by the time the soup arrived.
He thought it plain, the way a fact sits when a man finally lets himself see it: he had never, in his life, sat at a table like this.
Not one of them here knew what he was worth.
Not one of them here would care. Rafe would still steal a second piece of bread.
Orin would still call him sir. Opal would still tell him to sit or set the table, and mean it, and be right.
Nothing in his balance sheet would move a single fork on this table an inch to the left.
The relief of it was almost physical. It sat behind his sternum where the tightness had sat earlier, the same shape at a different weight.
He looked down the table.
Mara was already looking at him.
She had her chin propped on the heel of her hand and her spoon forgotten in her bowl, and her gray-green eyes were on him steady, and there was something in her face — not soft, exactly.
Mara wasn't soft. Something warm and steady and a little bit surprised by itself, like she'd just noticed a thing she'd known for a while.
He felt it hit low in the chest and stay.
Neither of them looked away.
Rafe was still talking. “Orin. Orin. Orin listen to me. Orin.”
“What.”
“Cassia.”
Orin turned the color of a ripe tomato.
“That's not a sentence, Rafe.”
“I said her name and your whole face did a thing.”
“It did not.”
“Did too.”
“Did not.”
“It's doing it now.”