Epilogue
Holt
The morning met me warm at the door, which still caught me off guard some days.
Summer in the high country went out easy.
I stepped off the porch into the gray before dawn the same as I had every morning of my life.
Overhead the Chapel and the Steeple and the Spire stood black against a sky going pink at the eastern edge.
We'd pushed the pairs up to the high pasture weeks back and the near lots were quiet. There wasn't a heifer two days off her time or a list as long as my arm. I stood in the yard a minute with my coffee and let it be quiet.
Orion was back. He'd spent the spring and the early summer gone off wherever he went, the same as he did every year.
Now he was climbing up low in the east out of the thinning dark, just his shoulders showing yet, the rest of him still down under the edge of the world and coming.
A year ago I'd have counted that a fact about the calendar and nothing more.
There was always too much to do to stand around reading the sky.
A man could freeze to death admiring it.
That was what I used to tell myself, like it was wisdom.
I stood there and admired it. I had the time. That was the main thing that had changed.
The plates had come in June.
They came in a flat envelope from the state with our address on it and a name I'd never seen on a piece of mail in my life. Morgan Sobel. He'd given some woman at a truck lot in Denver this address in April, before he drove up here, before he knew whether I'd so much as open the door to him.
He didn't make a big deal of it when they came. He just took them out to the truck and put them on with a screwdriver off the bench.
"You're up." Morgan came out behind me with his own cup and his hair flat on his head, no camera anywhere on the place to fix it for, and fitted himself against my side.
He looked where I was looking, following my eyes and standing in the quiet with me.
He'd gotten good at the quiet. He still talked more than anyone I knew except Gus.
But he'd learned to just be with me in the quiet sometimes.
"Orion's coming back," I said.
"I see him." He was quiet a second. "You never used to point him out."
"I never used to do a lot of things."
He huffed a laugh into his coffee. We drank and watched the morning wake up the valley.
"You snore," he said, after a while, not looking at me, his eyes trained on the sky.
"I do not."
"You snore like the loader trying to turn over in February. I've started keeping notes. I'm going to put them in my memoirs." He took a sip. "Chapter one. The Rancher Said He Didn't Snore."
"You talk in your sleep," I said. "Whole speeches. Last night you accepted an award."
"I did not."
"You thanked the Academy and somebody named Phil."
He thought about it. "Phil's my lawyer," he admitted, and I felt him laughing against my arm, the warm shake of it.
I thought what I'd been thinking most mornings since April, which was that I'd spent thirty-six years certain that letting somebody all the way in was how a man got himself ruined.
It turned out to be how I started my days with a smile on my face.
We stood there and ribbed each other in the early morning like we'd been doing it forty years and would do it forty more, and neither one of us was pretending any part of it.
The house woke up behind us by degrees. Fuller than it had been in years.
Lane first, always, ghosting out to the horses before anybody else stirred.
Then Dez, banging the screen, hollering about whose turn it was to fix the well pump.
Gus was last and slowest, easing out to the porch chair we left out for him now spring through fall, with a summer in him nobody had been sure he'd get and another one after this looking likelier by the week.
He'd watched me point out the sky to a man. I saw him see it as he settled into his chair with the satisfaction of an old schemer whose long game had come in.
Emma was coming home Friday. Gus had the dates written on the calendar and he'd told me about it four separate times like I might have forgotten.
She still loved those silly movies Morgan used to make. Nobody had warned her yet. I was looking forward to that more than I'd looked forward to anything in a while.
Flynn came up from the lower ditch already mad, which was how I knew it was just a Tuesday and the water was running short again.
"He's pinching the headgate." He came across the yard with the mud of an argument still on his boots. "Kane. I rode the ditch and the level's down a third and there's exactly one outfit upstream of us, Holt, so don't tell me it's the dry."
"Hudson wouldn't pinch the gate."
"Hudson's had that ground the better part of a year and thinks the creek came with the deed.
" Flynn was lit all the way up, the particular fury he saved for exactly one neighbor and no other.
"Decent of him to co-sign your note. I'll give him that and not one drop more.
That water's been split the same hundred years and he doesn't get to come in green and rewrite it because he read a map. "
"Leave it be. I'll ride out with you after dinner and we'll look at the gate together."
"I don't need you holding my hand at a headgate, Holt."
"Didn't say you did."
"You said it some." He was already walking off. "You've gone soft is what it is. Man co-signs your note and all of a sudden he can't do wrong."
"Flynn."
"I'm going to go take it out on the loader," he said, and did.
I kept my face where it belonged until he was around the corner of the barn.
There's no talking to a Dwyer with his blood up, and the part of me that knew the valley knew that wasn't a fight settling. That was one just lighting. Kane was a stubborn man and Flynn was a stubborner one, and the water between them was not going to sort itself out quiet.
But that was a summer's worth of trouble standing up to stretch. It wasn't going to get resolved this morning. The morning's only trouble, if it counted as trouble, was Lane coming back from the barn at the exact moment Dez looked up from the well pump.
They caught on each other and glanced off quick as a struck match. Lane went to studying his boots. Dez went back to the pump with a sudden deep interest it hadn't earned two seconds before.
I watched it happen over the rim of my cup. I watched Dez forget what he'd been hollering about.
I'd been a closed man my whole life and even I could read that one off the back fence.
Not yet, I thought. Give them time. They'll get there or they won't, and a man can't hurry it. So I didn't say a word. I'd been crowded toward a gate myself once and I remembered how it felt.
Morgan had seen it too. He bumped my arm. I caught the grin he was fighting and shook my head. It was a whole conversation we had without a word in it, the kind I never knew two people could have until I had it with him.
Gus called from the porch that the coffee was going to outlive him if somebody didn't bring the pot around. Dez went, happy to have an excuse. Lane went back to the horses with his ears red. Flynn cussed the loader.
Then the sun came up over the shoulder of the Spire and put the gold on everything at once. The barn and the house and the long grass and the three peaks, which stood there before the first of us and would stand there after the last.
I felt the whole place tip over from night into the day's work, the way it had every morning of my life and would every morning left in it. There was work to do. There was always work to do. The ranch didn't care that we'd saved it. It asked again every dawn the same as ever.
But I stood in the yard one more minute and I drank my coffee, looking at the sky as long as I wanted to. Morgan put his hand flat on my back on the way past, the way he did going by me anywhere now, in the kitchen or the barn or the middle of the yard with everybody watching.
I set my cup on the rail and went to start the day, and he came with me.