Chapter 5
Holt
By the fourth morning he still couldn't throw a fork without wearing half of it, and he was still there. I'd figured he'd quit by now.
He came out before light now without being told, in the gloves I'd thrown him gone soft and black with use, and he did the work wrong with his whole heart and got a little less wrong by the day, and every evening he climbed back to the bunkhouse moving like a man twice his age and every dawn he came back down.
I'd hired valley kids who'd been doing this since they could walk and lost them inside a week.
This one had every reason in the world to be on a plane and he kept showing up to muck my stalls instead, and I didn't have a place to file that, so I left it lying out where I'd trip on it.
I told myself it was the money keeping him. He'd paid for the six weeks and a man like that hated to waste what he'd bought. It was a clean enough lie and I wore it most of the day.
He'd learned the gates by now, which sounded like nothing and wasn't. A man who could work a gate without turning the whole pen out behind him had stopped being a danger to himself and started being some actual help, and somewhere around the third day Morgan had crossed that line without noticing he'd done it.
He latched a gate behind a heifer that morning, clean and automatic, already moving on to the next thing, and I watched him not notice, and I had to go find something to do with my hands.
He still asked too many questions. But he'd taken to answering a few of them himself before I could, getting them wrong in instructive ways, and twice now I'd caught myself most of the way to a laugh and turned it into clearing my throat.
It was the most I'd let anybody surprise me in a long while, and I didn't trust it a bit.
Dez rolled in around eight with his forge rig rattling in the back of the truck and his radio too loud and his arm already out the window before he'd stopped, hollering something at Lane that I didn't catch and Lane didn't answer.
Dez could fill a quiet the second it opened.
He set up by the barn and got a fire going in the forge and worked his way through the horses that needed it, and the whole time he talked, to the horse, to me, to Morgan, to the dog, to God, a big easy roll of it that asked nothing back and somehow stitched the morning together while it went.
"So this is the famous one," he said when Morgan came by with a barrow, and stuck out a hand black with soot. "Dez. I do the feet around here. You need anything shod while you're visiting, I'm your man, but I'll warn you my rates went up the second I heard a movie star was paying."
"Morgan." He shook it, filth and all, and I watched his whole face open the way it did every time anybody was decent to him. "What's a movie star rate?"
"For you? Whatever the market'll bear and a signed picture for Ruby's mother. Ninety-one years old and she thinks you're very handsome, and she's legally blind, so consider the source."
Morgan laughed, and it wasn't the one he'd been using all week, and I went back to what I was doing and didn't ask myself why I'd been waiting to hear that he could.
He'd lost the soft look already. Four days had burned it off him and there was color in his face the wind had put there, and his hands had gone from split to scabbed to hard.
I hadn't watched it happen. I just looked at him one morning and it had.
I made myself look at the forge fire instead, and Dez, who never missed anything, caught me doing it and for once in his life said nothing.
Lane was in the round pen with the dun colt, and he hadn't said a word to anybody all morning, which was Lane.
He worked the colt in slow circles, all of it in his hands and his weight and the angle of his shoulders, a long quiet conversation nobody else could hear, and the colt that had come to him a month ago wild-eyed and ruined was tracking him now around the pen like a thing that had decided to live.
Lane fixed what other men broke and he did it without raising his voice or his hand, and he'd come to Gus the same as the rest of us, half wild and not talking, and found out he could talk to horses before he ever managed it with people.
Some of us never did manage the second part.
Lane never got close, and he was the best of us anyway.
I watched Dez watch him. Dez never stopped talking except for the few seconds here and there when Lane did something good with the colt, and then Dez would go quiet mid-sentence and just look across the yard at him, his hammer stalled in the air, his whole loud self gone still and soft and wide open, and then the colt would settle or Lane would straighten up and Dez would catch himself and start it rolling again before anybody noticed.
I noticed. I'd been noticing for two years.
The two of them had been going around and around each other longer than that, Dez loud at Lane and Lane quiet at Dez and neither one able to read what the whole valley could see plain, and I'd long since decided it wasn't mine to say.
A man who couldn't get his own house lit had no business pointing at the dark in somebody else's.
I had three horses to sell and that was the morning's real business and I'd been putting it off since Tuesday.
I found Lane at the rail between rounds and didn't make a thing of it. "The two bays and the sorrel," I said. "Get them in the near pen. I'm taking them down to the sale Saturday."
He looked at me. Lane could put more into a look than most men got into a speech, and this one had a question in it he was too kind to say out loud, because the sorrel was one he'd been bringing along himself since fall, gentling the spook out of him a day at a time, and a horse like that wasn't ready to sell, and we both knew a half-trained horse brought a third of what a finished one did.
Selling him now was selling him at a loss because Saturday was the last sale before the payment and the payment didn't care about the horse's manners.
"Holt," Lane said. Just that.
"I know." I looked at the colt and not at him. "Get them sorted."
He held it a second longer, then he nodded, because Lane always knew when a thing wasn't up for arguing, and he went to do it, and I stood there a minute with the cost of it sitting on my chest and let it sit because there wasn't anywhere to put it down.
I'd bred the sorrel myself, off a mare Gus gave me the year I turned twenty, and I'd watched Lane bring the colt up out of his own fear all winter, patient as snowmelt, and come Saturday I'd stand at a rail in Brush and watch a stranger buy him cheap and load him on a trailer bound somewhere I'd never hear about again.
I'd keep my face still while it happened.
That part I was good at. I'd had the practice.
Morgan came up with the barrow while I was still standing there.
"Those three going somewhere?"
"Sale Saturday."
He looked at the pen a while. Four days on the place and he had no business telling one horse from another. "The red one's the one Lane has out every morning."
"Sorrel."
"Sorrel," he said back, getting it right the second time.
Then he waited. He didn't ask the next thing and he didn't fill the quiet, he just stood there with his hands on the barrow and left the space open, and I felt every word I wasn't saying pile up in it.
"Get that barrow emptied," I said.
"Yes sir." There was no edge on it. He went.
He never asked me about it again. Not that day, not the next. And that was worse, because it meant he'd worked out that I couldn't answer and had decided to let me not, and I'd have given a good deal to know where a man like him had learned to do that.
Flynn came up the drive too fast, which was how Flynn came everywhere, and got out of his truck already halfway through the conversation.
"You see what he's doing over there," he said, not a hello in him. "Kane. You see what he put in across the headgate."
"Morning to you too."
"He cemented it, Holt. The diversion box.
Poured a footing like he's building a bank vault and pinched my share down to a trickle while he was at it, and when I went over there to talk about it he stood there in a coat that cost more than my truck payment and told me he'd had somebody look at the historical allocations.
" Flynn said allocations the way some men said a slur.
"Historical allocations. On Vesper Creek.
He's owned that ground since October and he's quoting me paper like his people dug the ditch. "
"He's got senior rights on that ditch and you know it. His water comes first," I said, because somebody had to, and Flynn rounded on me like I'd taken Kane's side, which with Flynn was the same as breathing.
"He's got a checkbook and a lawyer and not one day of dirt under his nails, and you know what happens to a place like mine in a dry year when the man upstream decides the paper matters more than the neighbor.
" His jaw was working. Flynn had built his outfit out of nothing and spite and he'd defend it down to the last fence staple, and the worst of it was he wasn't wrong, only loud, and loud never won an argument about water in this valley.
Kane had bought the old Mercer place in the fall, paid cash, and set about fixing everything that had been comfortably broken for forty years, which was its own kind of insult in a valley where nobody fixed a thing until it quit.
Nobody knew him. He kept to himself, ran his fences straight, bought good stock, and did, as far as anybody could prove, not one thing actually wrong, which somehow ran Flynn hotter than a thief would have.
I could have understood a thief. A competent stranger with senior water and no need of anybody at all was a harder thing to hate, and a worse thing to live downstream of.
"Forget it. You're no help." Flynn was already looking past me. "Where's the movie star, I want to look at him."
"Working. Leave him be."
But Morgan had already drifted over, drawn to the noise the same as he was drawn to all of it, and Flynn looked him up and down and some of the fight went out of him and turned into the other thing Flynn did, which was pick.
"You're shorter than you look on a bus," Flynn told him.
"I get that a lot," Morgan said, easy, and Flynn almost smiled, and I felt the morning tilt back toward level the way it did when the boys were all on the place at once, and for a second I forgot the sale and the headgate and the number and just stood in my own yard full of the people the place had collected, and let it be enough.
Morgan stayed out in it the rest of the afternoon, and the strange thing, the thing I kept not looking at straight, was how the place took him in.
Dez had him working the bellows by noon.
Flynn forgot to be furious long enough to show him how to read a horse's foot.
Even Lane walked the dun colt past him close enough that Morgan could lay a hand on its neck, which from Lane was a speech.
By three o'clock a man who'd flown in on a private terminal was standing in my yard black to the elbow, laughing at something Dez said, and he fit.
That was the part I kept away from. He fit like the place had been cut for him years back and nobody had thought to tell me, and I hated how little I hated it.
Six weeks, I reminded myself. Six weeks and a trailer and a check, and then the yard would go back to being only ours, and I would not so much as remember which of his laughs had been the true one.
Then I caught myself watching him again.
Morgan. He'd crouched down to look at the forge fire while Dez explained something about heat color, and the firelight was on his face and he'd forgotten to wear the smile because nobody had asked him to, and he looked young and tired and entirely real, and I was looking at him the exact way Dez looked at Lane, stalled in the middle of my own life with my hands gone idle, and I knew it the second I felt it.
I turned and went to help Lane sort the horses I couldn't afford to keep. It was the only cure I had for any of it, and it had never once failed to be enough work to bury a thing in, and I told myself that too, and went and buried it.