Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Attic of the Collins’
“There is a great deal of your father up here, Wade.”
Zoe said it down the attic stairs into the warmth of the kitchen below, her sleeves pushed to the elbow and a grey cobweb caught in her hair.
The night had passed without a second shot or a third, the one flat report through the snow had been George’s, fired at a shape that turned out to be a yearling heifer broke loose, and the three men had come home to the bottom of the stairs at two with nothing to show for the cold.
The morning had gone to the ordinary work of a household.
Sadie had gone down for her nap at one with Henrietta, and the house had gone quiet, and Zoe had taken a lamp and a rag and the notion of the attic up the narrow stairs to keep her own hands busy.
She had found the box at the back, under the eave, behind the broken spinning wheel and the crate of Mary’s preserving jars.
Wade’s boots came up the attic stairs a count later.
His head and shoulders came up through the opening in the floor, and he stood with his arms folded at the top of the stairs and looked at the open box and the woman kneeling at it in the dust-gold light of the one small gable window, and something in the line of his shoulders eased.
“I haven’t been up here since we buried him,” he said.
“Then come and be up here now.” Zoe sat back on her heels at the box and lifted a heap of grey wool out of it.
“There is a coat. And a razor strop. And a pipe with the stem gone, and a tin of buttons, and a Bible with a great deal of underlining at the Psalms, and a thing I have no notion of the use of, that looks like a tool a blacksmith would own and a farmer would not.”
Wade crossed the boards and lowered himself to his heels at the box across from her.
He took the thing out of her hand. The light caught the worn steel of it.
“A hoof knife.” The corner of his mouth pulled, slow.
“He shod his own horses the whole of his life. He had little trust in any smith inside forty miles. He said letting another man set iron to your own horse’s foot was the first cousin of letting another man court your wife.
” He turned the knife once at his hand. “He said a great many things. I had little patience at them at the time. I have come, these past years, to miss the lot of them.”
Zoe held still at the box and let the quiet sit.
She had learned that the quiet was the thing that brought Wade forward, and that questions were the things that sent him back.
He set the hoof knife down at the floorboard.
He lifted the grey wool coat off her knee and held it up. The shape of his father was in it still; the breadth of the shoulder, the wear at the right elbow where a man leans at a fence, the patient mending at the cuff in a thread that had been Mary’s.
“He wore this the day he bought the Dawson quarter,” Wade said, low.
“I was twelve. He took me into Bozeman on the wagon and we signed the papers at the Gallatin office and he wore this coat. Old Caleb shook his hand at the office step, and the two of them were near to friends that morning. Whatever old Caleb decided about it after. I rode home on the bench beside him in the cold with the new deed in his breast pocket. He told me the whole of the ride home that the land wasn’t the point.
The water was the point. The dry-wash crossing was the point.
A man buys grass, he said, but a man keeps water, on account of grass coming back every spring and water being the thing the Lord set down once and not again. ”
“He sounds a man worth the missing, Wade.”
“He was a hard man, worth the missing. The two go together more than the easy sort will tell you.” Wade folded the coat over his arm with a care he had little shown any object in the five weeks Zoe had watched his hands.
“I had years of being too angry at the manner of his going to do any of this missing properly. I am finding I can do it now, up here, with you. I have little idea why that is. I have little wish to look at it too close, in case the looking sends it off.”
The dust turned gold in the gable light between them.
Below, through the floorboards, came the small turning sound of Sadie shifting in her nap and the cluck of the hen resettling on the sill.
Zoe lifted the last thing out of the box.
It was a book; small, dark, cloth-bound, the spine gone soft with handling and the gilt worn off the title at the front.
She turned it at her hands in the gable light.
A Pilgrim’s Account of the Holy Land, with Maps and Observations.
The pages had been read near to falling, and a great many of them had been turned down at the corner.
The cloth at the back board had a stiffness to it she took for damp at first, and second for a thing to look at later.
“May I borrow this one, Wade?” She held the book up at him. “I should like a thing with maps at it for the long evenings coming.”
“Borrow the lot of it.” The corner of his mouth pulled at her.
“My father read that book to pieces. He had no money to travel and a great deal of wish to, and he did the whole of his traveling at that book by the lamp. Take it. He wouldn’t mind.
He would mind a great deal more the dust you have in your hair. ”
Zoe put her free hand up at the cobweb at her dark hair and found it.
Wade reached across the box before she had it loose.
He took the grey strand of web off her hair, careful and unpracticed, the back of his fingers brushing once at the warmth of her cheek.
He held the web a count at his fingers, looking at her across his father’s open box.
The quiet between them had little to do with the cobweb and a great deal to do with the five weeks behind it.
A board creaked below.
Sadie’s small voice came up the attic stairs, thick with sleep. “Auntie Zoe? Uncle Wade? Where has the whole of the house gone?”
Wade got to his feet at the box, the grey coat over one arm and the corner of his mouth pulling.
“We are in the attic, sweet girl,” he called down. “Come up the stairs careful. There is a great deal of your great-grandfather up here, and a book your Auntie Zoe has decided to steal.”
***
Wade and George were at the south pasture mending the cut wire at the fourth post when a strange horse came down off the Dawson line.
It came at a slow wander out of the cottonwoods at the boundary, a tall narrow bay with the saddle empty and the reins broken at the bit and a wildness in the eye that spoke of a hard run.
George dropped the wire stretcher at the post and went for the bay’s at a slow walk with his hand out and his voice low.
He had the broke rein in his fist within a minute.
“Wade.” George ran his free hand down the lathered neck and came up frowning. “This is no stray. This horse has been ridden hard and fallen off.” He turned the bay a quarter by the rein. “And look here. At the cantle.”
A piece of dark cloth had caught and torn at the buckle of the cantle strap, a small ragged corner of it, the wool gone stiff with the cold. Wade worked it loose off the buckle and held it up in the low afternoon sun.
The thread at the torn edge was the thread he had marked at the elbow of a coat at Larkin’s, the better part of a fortnight back.
“It’s the same wool.”
“And this is one of his horses. A man’s horse breaks loose off a hard run and fetches up at your south line trailing the same wool that was cut at your creek bank. That is not a coincidence.”
Wade folded the scrap of cloth into his coat alongside the first.
“I’ll take it to Ben later,” he said, low.
“We will see whether three pieces of the same wool make a thing a judge at Helena will hear. Hold the horse, George. We’ll walk it back to the Dawson line by the road and hand it across at the gate, civil and slow, and we will look hard at the whole of his yard while we are doing the handing. ”
George held the horse.
Wade stood at the south line with the cold sun going down red over the Bridgers, the strange horse blowing white in the frost, and the third piece of dark wool stiff against his chest.