Chapter Thirteen #2
“I know.” Ben paused. “He is a patient man. I am telling you because you should know I’m watching it. I am also telling you because I would like you to look over your south fence line this week. Start at the creek bend and go east.”
Wade said nothing for a moment.
“All right,” he murmured eventually.
They reached Morrison’s at the same time Zoe and Sadie came out through the door, Sadie with the drawstring bag clutched in both arms and the expression of a general who has won the field and knows it.
Zoe had a wrapped parcel under one arm and the sampler canvas under the other and was wearing the look of someone who had spent somewhat more than she planned to and had decided this was reasonable.
“Ben,” Zoe said warmly.
“Miss Preston,” Ben replied. “Sadie.” He crouched to Sadie’s level with the easy familiarity of someone who had known her since birth. “What did you get?”
Sadie showed him the drawstring bag with full ceremony.
Ben looked up at Wade over Sadie’s braids, and the look carried something between amusement and approval. It was the most complicated thing Wade had seen on Ben Greene’s face since the man had come to stand in the road outside Helena three years ago with his hat in his hands.
“I’m headed north,” Ben said. “I’ll walk the girls as far as the creek road.”
“Thank you,” Wade said.
Zoe looked at him. Something in how he said it, some extra quiet in it, registered in her face, and she held his eyes for a half-second longer than she otherwise might have.
“We’ll start supper at five,” she said.
“I’ll be back before,” he replied.
She nodded once and went with Ben and Sadie down the boardwalk, and Wade watched them go. Sadie immediately took Ben’s hand and began a detailed account of the thread situation. Ben bent slightly to hear, Zoe on his other side with the parcel and the sampler canvas and the light in her hair.
He turned back toward the hardware.
For I know the plans I have for you.
He walked back to Larkin’s and settled his account for the wire and did not think about the rest of the verse and told himself the fence line could wait until morning.
Wade arrived home at four to find the parlor full of thread.
This was not an exaggeration. Thread had escaped the drawstring bag with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting to happen, and it now occupied the horsehair settee, the rag rug, the low round table, the floor between the table and the window, and approximately three feet up the curtain on the left side of the parlor window, where a skein of gold had anchored itself to a curtain hook and draped with a kind of defeated artistry.
Sadie was in the middle of it, cross-legged on the rug, scissors in hand, the expression on her face the expression of a child who had been engaged in an ambitious creative endeavor and had lost control of it at some recent point.
“Sadie,” Wade said with the dry edge of an uncle counting to ten.
“I know,” Sadie answered, her chin lifting.
“The scissors—”
“I know, Uncle Wade,” Sadie cut in.
“You were told—”
Sadie set the scissors down on the table with great deliberateness. “I know.”
From the kitchen came the sound of a pot being set on the stove and Zoe’s voice, slightly raised to carry. “Sadie, I hear your uncle.”
A brief pause.
“He’s here,” Sadie called back.
“Then I imagine he has seen the parlor.”
“Yes,” Sadie said.
“I believe you know what to do next, sweet girl.”
The pause this time was slightly longer. Wade watched his niece look at the quantity of thread on the floor, the ceiling, and the curtain, calculate, and arrive at a conclusion.
“I will need help with the curtain,” she said.
“I believe your uncle is tall enough,” Zoe called pleasantly.
Sadie looked at Wade with the expression of a child appealing to a somewhat uncertain ally.
He went to the curtain, lifted the gold skein off the hook with two fingers, and handed it down to Sadie.
Then, he picked up the nearest spool from the floor and handed it over as well, without comment.
She accepted it, sorted it into its pile, and they continued in this manner, slowly and without conversation, until the thread was off the floor, the scissors were in their proper case, the drawstring bag was repacked, and Sadie had wiped down the table with the cloth Zoe had wordlessly handed through the parlor door at some point during the process.
The parlor had taken twenty minutes to restore.
When it was done, Sadie stood in the middle of the room with her bag and her scissors case and looked at it.
“Better,” Sadie announced, brushing the loose threads from the front of her pinafore.
“Yes,” Wade agreed, the corner of his mouth pulling once at her work.
“Auntie Zoe will come and look,” Sadie went on, lifting the small embroidery hoop a careful half inch for inspection.
“She will,” Wade answered, his eyes on the hoop.
“She will say well done,” Sadie added, the chin lifting in the small declared note Sadie carried when she had decided she had earned the well done.
“Yes, she will.”
Sadie nodded, apparently satisfied with this prediction, and carried her things upstairs. Wade straightened the fringe on the rug with the toe of his boot and went to the kitchen.
Zoe was at the stove. She glanced at him over her shoulder.
“Well done,” she said warmly.
“You said that to Sadie.”
“I am saying it to both of you,” she replied, returning to the stove.
He pulled out his chair and sat down.
Outside the kitchen window, the afternoon light came through the cottonwoods in long, thin bars, the gold of the leaves and the gold of the afternoon light together.
Wade sat in his chair and rested his hands on the table.
Supper was warm. George came in from the south pasture with new color in his face and a story about the sorrel mare’s opinion of the creek’s current water level that Sadie found extremely satisfying.
After supper, after the dishes, Zoe took the new sampler canvas and the thread and Sadie’s embroidery hoop upstairs.
Wade heard them, through the ceiling, for an hour: Sadie’s voice, Zoe’s voice, a long negotiation about something, a silence, then Sadie laughing.
He sat in the parlor with his mother’s Bible on the side table and George’s newspaper on his knee and read the same paragraph of the newspaper twice without retaining it.
At eight, Zoe appeared at the parlor door.
“Wade,” she said.
He looked up.
“Sadie would like you to come up for the story.”
He set the newspaper on the table.
Sadie’s room was the small one at the end of the hall, with the south window, the patchwork quilt his mother had made, and the pine dresser with the oval mirror that had been Nora’s before it was Sadie’s.
Sadie was already in the bed with the quilt pulled to her chin.
The sampler canvas was on the night table with the thread wound into its proper sections, and the small, carved wooden cross was in its usual place on the window ledge above the lantern.
Zoe was sitting on the edge of the bed with a book. She moved over when Wade appeared in the doorway. He sat on the other side, and Sadie arranged herself between them with the satisfaction of a child who has gotten exactly what she wanted.
Zoe opened the book.
She read with the same voice she used for everything, warm and even.
Never performing it, just carrying the words across the room to wherever they needed to go.
The story was a simple one, a children’s tale about a lost sheep and the shepherd who counted his flock every evening and walked out into the dark after the one that was missing.
Sadie lasted eight pages before her breathing changed.
Zoe read two more, then closed the book.
They sat for a moment in the lantern light, in the quiet of a child’s room when the child has gone to sleep in it.
The lantern threw a warm circle across the quilt, the dresser, and the cross on the window ledge.
Outside, the night had come completely down.
The stars above the Bridgers were the dense autumn stars, more stars than summer ever managed, as though the cold had pressed them together.
Zoe stood.
Wade stood.
They went into the hall, and Zoe pulled the door half-closed.
“She chose that story herself,” Zoe said, quietly.
“The lost sheep,” Wade said.
“Yes.” Zoe looked at the half-closed door for a moment. “She said she liked it because the shepherd always came back. She said some people always came back and some people couldn’t.” She paused. “She said you always came back.”
Wade held the hallway and the lamplight and the half-closed door.
“Good night, Wade,” Zoe said, her hand resting briefly on the newel post at the foot of the stair.
“Good night, Zoe,” he answered, low, his eyes lifting from the writing table to find her at the foot of the stair.
Zoe went to her room and he went down the stairs.
He put his coat on and went out to check the stock.
The night was very still and very cold, stars everywhere, the cattle in the south pasture moving as dark shapes against darker pasture with their breath rising in pale threads. Job and Patience came to him at the barn door and walked the perimeter as they did every evening.
At the south corner of the yard, where the kitchen garden met the path to the small church, Job stopped.
His hackles rose. Just slightly, and only for a moment. Then he shook himself and moved on.
Wade stood at the corner and looked south. The church sat at the far end of the north pasture, white door closed, dark at its windows. Beyond it, the fence line ran east to the creek bend in the dark, invisible at this distance.
He would walk it in the morning.
On that decision he went inside, latched the back door, and stood in the kitchen warmth of the banked stove, and thought about a shepherd who walked out into the night after the one that was missing.
He stood there a long time.
Then he went to bed. Tomorrow, he thought, the fence.