CHAPTER 9 #2
He took her left hand in both of his and turned it over, and his thumb lay across the white crescent on the heel of it while he looked at the tear on the other side. He turned the hand once more toward the light.
“It’s clean. It’ll close by supper.”
He let go, put the pouch of staples into her right hand, and went off through the grass for the stretcher.
Clara shut the hand and opened it. The blood came up along the knuckles in a line and stopped there.
Warmth stayed on her palm where his hands had been, the kind that goes, and she stood in the sage and waited for it to go.
Then she put two staples in her teeth, which meant she could not say a word, and there had been nothing to say for three days now.
Three days of pass the salt. Three days of thank you and after you and how did she sleep.
The H-brace at the second bend had walked out of plumb. Frost had lifted the post a little every night all winter and set it down a little wrong every morning, and by March it leaned downhill with the diagonal gone slack.
They dug it out on the low side. Wyatt got the bar under it and Clara heaved on the top with her shoulder while he levered, and it came up an inch at a time, and they packed rock in and tamped and dug and tamped again.
Her arms were shaking by the finish of it.
He put his hand flat on the post and shoved it hard and it did not move.
“Plumb,” he said.
“Say it like you mean it.”
“Plumb.” He picked up the bar. “Ma’am.”
The third span was fifty yards on and it was the worst of the three.
Two posts had snapped off at the ground line and the wire lay buried under a winter of sod.
They pulled the broken posts, dug holes in ground thawed a foot down and frozen solid under that, set two cedars and tamped them tight.
It took the last hour they had. Clara’s hands had quit being hers by the finish and she went on using them anyway.
“That’s three,” she said.
“That’s three.” Wyatt coiled the last of the wire. “There’ll be four more before the bend.”
They ate at the top of the fence line, sitting on the good brace with their boots in the dead grass.
Bread and cold beef and an apple apiece, and water out of a canteen that tasted of the canteen.
Below them the meadow ran off gray-green and unfinished.
Eleven miles of wire waited somewhere out past the bend.
“There’s a showing Saturday,” Clara said. “I have to put the lights on so it looks like somebody wants it.”
Wyatt turned the apple over in his hand.
“When,” he said.
“Ten in the morning. She wants me out of the house by half past nine, because a woman standing in her own kitchen makes a buyer think about the woman.” Clara pulled the crust off the bread and ate it by itself.
“She drives out from Bozeman with a bag of lemons. You cut them and leave them in a bowl on the counter. You put out the good towels that nobody in that house ever used once. It’s my mother’s kitchen and I am dressing it for a stranger. ”
“And if it sells.”
“Then it sells. Then there is a date on a piece of paper and this whole county can quit wondering about me.”
“Somebody does.”
“Somebody does what?” She put the bread down on her knee.
“Wants it.”
Clara looked at him. He was looking at the fence.
“That is not an answer and you know it isn’t.”
“Ground’s soft along the creek. That’s all this morning was.”
“That’s not it either. All right.”
She let it sit. That was the whole trick she had learned in Denver, letting a thing sit in a room without picking it up, and she had never once managed it in this county. She managed it now. He ate the apple down to the core and threw the core out into the grass for whatever wanted it.
Then she went for the sentence.
She had carried it since February, folded flat and ready to hand.
Eight weeks and then I am gone. She had said it in the green hatchback more times than she would tell anybody, on the county road, in the school line, at the sink.
She reached for it. Her hand came up empty.
She sat on a fence brace in the sun with her mouth a little open and no idea at all when she had set the thing down.
“What,” Wyatt said.
“Nothing.” Clara brushed crumbs off the brace with her good hand.
“You made a face.”
“I make a lot of faces. My mother said it was going to freeze that way.”
A bird came out of nowhere and lit on the corner brace at the second bend, and it was blue right through, the blue of a gas flame, blue in a way nothing in Montana is in the middle of March. It sat. It turned its head. It did not go.
Clara got the notebook out of her coat with the hand that worked and pulled the pencil free with her teeth, and she wrote it down in Daisy’s order, all three parts of it, in the order she had been given. Her handwriting made the second entry on the bird list look like nobody’s but hers.
“Mountain bluebird. Corner brace at the second bend, and it stayed.”
“You’re reading it out loud,” Wyatt said.
“That’s how she does it. She reads it out before she’ll let you shut the book.”
“I know how she does it.” He was smiling at the wire, not at her.
“Then you know why I’m doing it.”
He got up and knocked the grass off his jeans and went for the horses, and Clara buttoned the notebook away where it would ride until a small hand came out for it.
The wind came west at four, near enough, and took the warm off her face inside of a mile.
They rode down along the line they had spliced, and it was the only stretch of that fence that looked like it wanted to hold.
The coil rang behind her cantle at every bank.
Her left hand closed and stayed closed, and she rode the last mile that way and did not do one useful thing with it.
At the bottom gate Wyatt stepped down and swung it and held it on his shoulder while she came through, and put his hand up for Marigold’s rein.
Clara gave him the rein. She kept the hand.
He led the mare two steps and handed the rein up again and made no remark about any of it.
Below them the barn light came on, which meant Harlan had gone out to pens, which meant it was later than she had thought.
Daisy would be at the kitchen window. She would want the book before her coat was off.
Then the yard came up out of the dusk under them, and the county Tahoe was sitting in it with its parking lights burning.