Chapter 10
DOYLE
Pug came around the corner of the scale house on a Tuesday in the middle of September and said, "Should we be worried?"
"About what?"
"About you." He had a sandwich in one hand. "Denny says you been doing the tower stairs on your lunch. Says he counted four times up."
"Five."
"Five." He looked at me the way you look at a dog that's acting funny. "Doyle, that's a hundred and some steps."
"Hundred and thirty-two."
"Is this a heart thing? Because if it's a heart thing I'd like to know now, on account of I'd have to learn the moisture tester."
"It's not a heart thing."
"Then what is it?"
"It's a knee thing," I said, "and there's a ridge upstate she's going to want walked before the leaves turn, and I'm not going to be the reason we stop short."
Pug ate his sandwich a second. "Huh," he said, and walked off, which is why I like him.
He came back around four, which is what Pug does — he'll leave a thing alone for six hours and then come at it sideways with something in his hand.
This time it was a plastic sleeve of the compression things runners wear.
"Wife had these. For her calf. They're too small for her."
"Pug."
"They're not new. Don't get sentimental on me." He set them on the desk and left. I wore them for two weeks and they helped, and I never said thank you out loud, and he'd have hated it if I had.
My right knee's been going since I was forty-eight.
It's cartilage, or the lack of it, and a doctor in town told me nine years ago I'd want it done eventually and that in the meantime I ought to keep the leg strong.
I did nothing about that for nine years, and nine years was a number that had started following me around, so I did the stairs.
A hundred and thirty-two of them up the outside of the grain leg, steel, open risers, a half hour of my lunch every day for two weeks, up and down.
First day I did two and had to sit in the truck afterward.
By the second week I could do five and still eat. The knee talked. It wasn't worse.
Wednesday of that first week I got the pack down out of the garage rafters — Nate's old one from his scout years, internal frame, blue, one buckle held together with a hose clamp I put on in 2009 — and loaded it in the driveway with the tailgate down.
Took the sleeping bag straps off first. Somewhere around 2004 the boy ran a shoelace through the sternum buckle and I left that where it was.
Two liters of water, then another liter, because there's no water on a ridge.
First aid kit out of the truck. A rain shell apiece, since October upstate does what it wants, and two of those cheap emergency ponchos anyway.
A wool hat for her, because she runs cold and wouldn't pack one herself on the grounds that it's October.
Sandwiches, apples, the peanut butter crackers she likes. The moleskin.
I stood in the driveway with the moleskin in my hand a while. I bought moleskin nine years ago, or rather she did — bought it and put it in my bag and said, your heels always go on you. I put it in the pack.
Then I put the pack on and walked the section road out to the corner and back, a mile and a half, in my work boots, four in the afternoon with the bean dust hanging in the air.
Thirty-two pounds. I did that three times that week and once with an extra gallon of water in there, because I wanted the real day to feel light.
Iris saw me come up the drive one of those evenings.
She was at the sink and she didn't say anything about it at supper, but she set the aspirin bottle on my side of the counter and put it back in the cabinet in the morning, and did that four nights running.
That Saturday, two weeks out from the fourth, she said, "I want to walk the ridge at the state land."
"Okay."
"It's four miles, and there's a climb at the end, and I want to see how you do."
"Okay."
"I'm not doing this to be nice to you. I'm doing it because if you blow that knee out on the fourth, I'll be the woman standing on a bridge alone while somebody drives you to a hospital, and I've done alone."
"Understood."
"Say it back."
"You set the pace, and I don't help you over anything unless you ask."
"Good."
We went at seven and she set the pace, and in four miles I learned that my wife walks slower than me on the flat and faster than me on a climb.
Short steps up a grade, quick ones, and she doesn't stop at the top to blow — she keeps going and lets her breath catch up on the level.
I did not know that about a woman I've slept next to since Reagan.
I got to thinking about all the times I could have known it, and that got heavy enough that I quit thinking and just walked.
The state land ridge comes out where somebody put in a bench and a rail, looking west over the river bottoms. Nothing famous. It isn't even the good overlook in this county. We got there at nine-twenty, she sat on the rail, and I got the water out.
And then I stood there and did not talk.
Every instinct I have in a place like that is to fill it.
Say what the elevation is. Say how far you can see.
Say something about the fella who built the bench, or ask if she's warm enough, or tell the Denny story again.
In a crew that's how it goes — you get somewhere good, somebody makes a joke, everybody laughs, you look for a minute, you head back.
I've done that at the rim of a canyon. I've done it in the basket of a balloon at sunrise with the burner going.
I have never once in my life stood still in a good place with my mouth shut.
I did it for maybe six minutes, and it was the hardest thing I did that month.
I'm counting the shop floor with a phone on speaker.
There was fog way out in the bottoms, sitting in the low spots.
One combine running down there, too far to hear.
The wind came up the face of the ridge cold with the sun on our backs.
Iris drank her water, and after a while she put her hand down on the rail, palm up, and left it there.
I put mine in it. We stayed like that until the fog started coming apart, and then she said, "All right," and we walked back down.
On the way down she went ahead of me on the steep part, and I watched her pick a line through the rocks without once putting a hand out.
It brought up something I hadn't thought about in thirty years.
When I met this woman she was nineteen and worked weekends at a stable outside of town, and she rode a horse named Sugar that would take a fence with a person on it.
A woman who rode fences at nineteen wrote down to the bottom, where the river is at forty, and a man who'd known her since she was nineteen decided at forty-seven that she was being polite.
By the parking area my shirt had gone cold against my back and the knee had that hot wire in it that means you'll pay for this tomorrow, and tomorrow was fine with me. Tomorrow wasn't the fourth.
"How's the knee," she said in the truck.
"Talking."
"Talking or yelling?"
"Talking."
"Good."
We stopped in town on the way home because she wanted a coffee. There's a place on the square that does coffee and also sells frames and art supplies, the kind of store that gets by on class pictures and school awards. Iris walked to the back with her cup.
"I want that paper in a frame," she said.
"Okay," I said, and then, "Which — " and stopped. I knew which paper. I'd started asking to buy myself a second.
"The list. Ticks and all. It goes in the hall."
"Iris."
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to argue."
"You were going to say something about not wanting to look at it every day." She went along the wall of moldings with one finger out, not touching. "That's the point of it, Doyle. It's a record. A record keeps the whole thing or it isn't one."
I stood there with my coffee.
"This one," she said. Plain oak, half an inch, no bevel, no gold anywhere on it.
"That's the cheapest one on the wall."
"It's the right one."
The girl cut a cream mat for it while we waited and asked what was going in it. Iris said, "A list." The girl said, "Oh, like a bucket list?" and Iris said, "Something like that," in a voice that closed the subject so gently the girl never felt the door. I carried it out to the truck.
Halfway home Iris said, without looking over, "The fourth is two weeks out."
"I know."
"And there's something you're going to tell me before it. I don't know what it is yet. But I'm not walking my mother's ridge next to a man who's still got a piece of it in his pocket."
I drove about a mile. "There's something."
"I know there is."
"I'll tell you."
"I know you will," she said. "That's not what I'm worried about."
I didn't ask what she was worried about. The frame slid around behind the seat on the turns, wrapped in brown paper, and my knee came up talking now that it had cooled off, and I already knew what I was going to have to say to her. I'd known since the third of October, nine years ago.