CHAPTER 6
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The mineral came in eight sacks and Wyatt walked them out to the truck one at a time.
Fifty pounds apiece, wet burlap, the cold of the dock coming through the shoulder of his coat on every trip.
Harlan would have taken the other corner ten years ago.
Two fingers on his right hand had quit closing on anything, so he was home under the heat lamp and Wyatt was walking sacks.
The roll-up door went up its chain and clanked at the top of the pull. Wind out of the northwest came down the alley behind the store and laid wet snow across the burlap, and the snow did not lie. He squared the sacks against the headache rack, four and four, and dragged the tarp over them.
Daisy waited inside by the molasses tub with her hood down and her hands behind her.
“Can I walk to the church hall?” she said. “It’s two blocks and one of them is only the church.”
“When we’re done here.”
“That isn’t no.”
“It isn’t.”
Two blocks, one street to cross, and the front window of the store looked out on the whole distance. He had that counted before she finished asking. The window was flat gray at four o’clock and the light in it made everybody on the sidewalk look like weather.
The store smelled of corn dust and the open molasses tub, sweet and thick under the cold. He set a sack of replacer on the counter and a bottle beside it, the long red kind Daisy called the calf bottle.
“On the account,” he said.
The clerk turned the paper book around on the glass so he could read the figure. His name was printed at the top of it in somebody else’s hand. 2,190.40. He signed under it and turned the book back.
“Wyatt Miller.” Loretta Gable stood at the end of the counter with her reading glasses down on their beaded chain and a county folder open in front of her. “Do you know what the council did Tuesday night? It voted the bridge. Nine people in that hall and every one of them raised a hand.”
“I heard.”
“Then you heard the rest of it. The west approach has to land somewhere, dear. It lands on you.” She turned a page with one finger. “Forty feet, Wyatt. Do you know how far forty feet is? It is that door to your truck.”
The bell over the door went and the cold came in with it. Clara stopped inside the mat with her keys still in her hand, hair up in its knot, a pencil through it, and a smear of dust across the front of her coat.
“No relation, before anybody starts,” Loretta said, without looking up. “Her people spell it with an s and mine never could.”
“Twenty years and she still gets that one in first,” Clara said.
“Because it saves time.” Loretta looked at Daisy over the glasses. “And how are you, young lady?”
Daisy studied the molasses tub. She had gone somewhere behind her own face, the place she went with people she had not decided about, and she stayed there.
“That’s all right,” Loretta said. “I was quiet once. It didn’t take.
” She turned her glasses on Clara. “Are those your mother’s boxes at the curb?
The hall takes nothing after Friday noon.
Do you know why? Because I priced the last load myself at ten at night and I am not doing that again for anybody living. ”
“They’re going in tonight,” Clara said.
“Good. Put the jars at the stage end and stay out of the kitchen. That roof has leaked over the sink since I have been on the council, and the council voted a bridge.” She let that sit exactly as long as she wanted it to. “Which brings me back around.”
“It generally does,” Clara said.
She squared the folder and pushed it two inches toward him. “The county asked you for this the first time when the culvert grant came through. It has asked twice since. Do you know what I hear at the hall? I hear that Wyatt Miller is a busy man in calving.”
“The papers are in a drawer.”
“A drawer is where county business goes to die, dear.”
“I’ve got mineral in the truck.”
“You have. Do you know what that ground grows, Wyatt? Willow. It has grown willow your whole life and it will grow willow after the pavement is on it.” She let her glasses drop to the end of the chain. “I am not asking you for money and I am not asking you for hay.”
He put the replacer under his arm and picked up the bottle. There was an answer somewhere behind his teeth and it stayed there, and the clerk went on writing, and the door chain clanked out back where the wind got under it.
“Tuesday,” Loretta said. “The engineer wants a line on a map and I would like to give him one.” She closed the folder. “I have never once had to ask a Miller three times for anything. Your father signed the snow fence agreement standing up, in the rain.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She went out. The bell went again and then the store was only the fan and the wind.
Clara let a breath out through her nose. “She’ll be at your kitchen table before dark.”
“She won’t.”
“Wyatt.” She got her keys around her finger. “She drove to the feed store to say forty feet to a man who buys his mineral here on a Thursday. That’s not a coincidence, that’s a schedule.”
“She has a council meeting.”
“She has a town that knows what you paid for mineral, and she has a column in that book with your name on it.” Clara said it lightly, and then she heard herself and softened the end of it. “Not that anybody thinks a thing about it. Half this town buys on the account.”
“The other half doesn’t buy.”
“She has a Buick and a folder and nothing else on her calendar until Tuesday.” Clara looked at the sidewalk. “I need your tailgate, if you’re done. Mama’s boxes are for the rummage sale and I got two of them in the hatchback and quit.”
The hall behind the church had a side door that stuck, and a hand-lettered card taped inside the glass that said the sale was Saturday. Clara went ahead with a carton of jars against her hip and put her shoulder into the door until it gave.
Wyatt took the heavy ones. A sewing machine head in a wooden case, a box of quilt tops packed down hard, a carton of books that had gotten wet once and dried heavier.
He set them along the front of the stage where she pointed, and Daisy carried the coats, one at a time, which took her four trips and which she did not want help with.
“Five months,” Clara said. She had a jar in each hand and nowhere to set them. “Five months and her house still has more of her in it than I can carry in one trip. There is a drawer in that kitchen that is only lids.”
“Keep the sewing machine.”
“I don’t sew.”
“Neither did she.”
He got a thumb under the case and lifted it onto the stage. “How much is left in the car?”
“Four boxes. Two of them are lamps.”
“Lamps aren’t heavy.”
“These are.” She held the door open with her hip. “She bought them the year she married my father and I think they are made out of a courthouse.”
The walk down was mud to the ankle. He carried the lamps up two at a time and they were every bit as heavy as she said, and he set them where she pointed and did not tell her she was right.
Clara laughed at that, one short one, and set the jars down. “No. She kept it because it was her mother’s and it weighed a hundred pounds and it made the corner of the room look occupied.” She wiped her palms down the front of her jeans. “Anyway. It’s the church’s problem now.”
Daisy came up the aisle between the folding chairs with her hands empty. “There’s a magpie on the fence.”
“Is there,” Wyatt said.
“It’s not a crow. People say crow.” She looked at Clara to see if Clara was going to say crow. “Crows are all black and they’re bigger and they don’t have the white on them.”
“I wasn’t going to say crow,” Clara said.
“I know. I’m telling you so you can say it to somebody else.”
“Who am I saying it to?”
Daisy thought about that with her chin down. “Whoever’s here in the summer.”
Clara picked up a box that did not need picking up. “Then I’ll have it ready,” she said, and carried it to the stage.
They had the flats broken down and stacked by half past four.
Clara had left the hatchback at the church because the hall lot was mud to the axle, and the short way back to it was the footbridge over the creek behind the churchyard, forty steps of plank and pipe rail, and then the gravel apron by the parsonage fence.
Wyatt started for it. The creek was up over the willow roots on both banks, brown and quick, carrying last year’s grass down in ropes. The bridge stood a good two feet clear of it.
Clara stopped at the top of the bank with her keys out.
“I’ll go around,” she said. “These boots cost more than I did.”
“The bridge holds.”
“I believe you.” She was already turning. “I don’t believe the boots.”
She laughed a half-second late at her own line, and it came out with too much air behind it, and she got her hand around the keys hard enough that they printed.
Then she went up the churchyard walk toward the road with Daisy after her, and Wyatt crossed the planks and came out at the parsonage fence ahead of them both, and he was thinking about the road home and what the culvert would be doing by dark.
The hatchback sat nose-out with Colorado plates going green at the corners. Daisy had gotten there first and had the passenger door open and was sitting sideways in the seat with her boots on the sill.
“Is this yours? There’s only one of them.” She held a mitten up between two fingers, small and blue, the wool cuff stretched out of shape. The glovebox hung open and the owner’s manual lay across her knees.
“That’s nothing. Give it here.”
Clara had it out of Daisy’s hand and the manual on top of it and the glovebox shut before Daisy got her boots off the sill.
“Buckle,” Clara said. “Your dad’s going to want to beat the dark.”
Wyatt checked the tarp on the mineral and looked at the sky over the west end of town, which had gone the color of a nickel. Feed at five. Sadie and Caleb at nine. He had the evening laid out in his head like a fence line before he ever got the truck door open.