Chapter 25
She couldn’t do it alone, and there was only one pair of hands left in that house to make it two.
She went back in out of the storm, water sheeting off her, and up the dark stairs to the study where Charlotte Nash sat tied to the heavy chair exactly as she’d left her, the curtain sash at the woman’s wrists and ankles, her head down now, her gray-streaked hair come loose and hanging.
She lifted her head when Marielle came in.
Her eyes went to the rifle, and then to Marielle’s face, reading what was written on it, and she didn’t ask the question. She’d heard the shot. The whole house had heard the shot through the storm, and she had been sitting up here alone in the dark with the knowing of what it was.
“I need your help,” Marielle said. “I can’t get him up out of the ground by myself, and I’ll not leave him in a flooding hole one more night for any reason on this earth.
So you’re going to help me. You loved him, or you say you did, and your husband’s the reason he’s been in that hole two years.
You’re going to help me get him out of it. Then I’ll decide what becomes of you.”
Charlotte Nash looked at her a long moment.
“Untie me,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than Marielle had looked for. “I’ll help you. I’d have helped you two years ago if I’d had the courage to, and I haven’t had a courageous day since. I won’t waste this one arguing. Untie me and give me a shovel.”
Marielle cut the sash and the woman stood, stiff, rubbing her wrists. The two of them went down through the dark house together and out into the storm, and they did the work.
It was hard, wet, ugly work and the rain fought them the whole of it. Charlotte took the shovel her husband had dropped and Marielle found a second in the lean-to, and they widened the flooding hole and bailed it with their hands and a bucket and couldn’t keep ahead of the rain filling it.
In the end they did it the only way it could be done: the two of them down in the muddy water of the grave on their knees, working their hands under the wrapped weight of him, lifting him up out of the rising water between them.
The rain poured down on the three of them, the two living women and the dead man, and they got him up over the lip of it and out onto the streaming ground and the two of them knelt there in the mud beside him a moment, blowing, soaked to the bone, not looking at each other.
Marielle didn’t let herself look long at what they’d lifted.
There would be a time for the looking and this was not it, the same as there’d been no time for the crying in the Hendersons’ kitchen.
She made her hands do the work and kept her eyes on the work her hands were doing.
Whatever two years in the ground had left of her father, it was her father, and it was up out of the dark now, and the rest could wait.
They had no wagon. The Nash carriage was in the burned town’s stable, gone with everything else, but there was a flatbed cart in the barn for hauling feed, and a mule the storm hadn’t run off.
The two women got the mule into the traces by lightning-flash and got him loaded onto the cart, and Charlotte Nash climbed up to drive it because her hands were steadier on a rein than Marielle’s were just then.
Marielle walked alongside with David’s rifle, and they brought Emmett Vaughn back into Colinas Rojas through the storm in the dark hours, the dead man’s daughter walking and the dead man’s lover driving and the mule plodding through the rising mud between them.
The town when they came into it was a thing out of a bad dream, black wet ruins standing under the lightning, the rain putting out the last of what had burned and the steam of it rising off the fallen timbers, and the survivors were at their work in it already.
Huerta and the men and the ones who’d come back with her, moving through the wreck by lantern light, calling into cellars, lifting fallen beams off the ones who could still be helped and laying out under what cover there was the ones who could not.
They had found a wheelwright’s shop near the edge of town that the fire had spared, and they had made it the place where the work got done. Someone had knocked together the first of the rough boxes out of the wheelwright’s lumber, and that was where Marielle and Charlotte Nash brought the cart.
Marielle wouldn’t let another hand touch him.
She and Charlotte lifted him down between them and laid him in the first of the boxes themselves, and then Marielle stood over it a moment in the lantern light with the rain on the roof, and then she turned and went to help the others, because there were other fathers in that town and other husbands and other children, and the work was the same work for all of them and there was a great deal of it left to do before morning.
They worked the rest of that night through.
Marielle worked alongside Charlotte Nash and never spoke of who the woman was or what she’d done or whose wife she’d been, and the others, if they knew her by sight, said nothing of it either, because there was a kind of truce that the night and the work had made among all of them, a thing past the reach of the day’s distinctions.
They pulled two living people out from under the fallen feed store before dawn, a man and his half-grown son, both broken up but breathing.
They laid out a great many who were not breathing, and built the boxes for them as the lumber and the hours allowed, and Huerta, who had buried his whole street in his head a dozen times over, buried it now with his hands and did it right, the way he’d said he would, and Marielle worked beside him and did it right too.
The rain slackened toward first gray light and then quit, the storm having spent itself at last after three days of threatening and one of arriving, and the sun came up on a drowned and ruined and steaming town full of people doing the slow grim work that comes after, and Marielle worked on through the morning into the afternoon until the worst of it was done, until the living were gathered and the dead were boxed, and then she found she had come to the end of what her body would give her.
She went home.
She rode the bay out the familiar road in the late afternoon light, past the Hendersons’ fence line and the old dry well and the wash that had run full in the night and was draining now, and she came to the house under the two oaks, and she was so caked in mud, mud to the elbows and mud to the knees and her father’s grave-dirt dried into the weave of her clothes, that she couldn’t bring herself to go in like that, couldn’t carry that into her mother’s house.
The rain had filled the old washtub in the bathing enclosure her father had built years ago, brimful of clean rainwater, and she stripped off the ruined clothes in the last of the daylight and got down into the cold rainwater in the tub and washed it off her, the mud and the blood and the grave, washed her hair and washed her arms and sat in the cold, clean water as the light failed and let it take the worst of the night off her body, if not off the rest of her.
When she was clean, and dressed in dry clothes, she went inside.
Her mother was in the kitchen. Sober, by the look of her, or near it, the way she’d been sober and clear that one night at the table when something had cut through, and she turned when Marielle came in and looked at her daughter’s face, and whatever she had been about to say she did not say.
Marielle stood in the kitchen doorway a moment.
“I found Dad,” she said.
Her mother looked at her, and did not ask the question, because the answer was in how Marielle had said it, in the past of it, and the two women looked at each other across the kitchen in the lamplight. That was all that needed saying for the moment, and the rest of it would come when it came.