CHAPTER 12 #2
“You know it.” Harlan poured the last of the lid out into the straw and screwed it back on the thermos, and he took a good while doing it. “A scared horse don’t run at you, son. That’s all I’ll say.”
“Nothing here is scared.”
“No.” Harlan picked up the bucket. “Nothing is.”
Wyatt came up through the corral gate and latched it and crossed toward the house with the spinner banging his knee.
Her bag was on the porch step. Canvas, the strap doubled over the top the way she carried it, set down square on the boards beside Levi’s jar. The green hatchback had been turned around in the yard to face out.
He stopped short of the steps with the spinner still in his hand.
The screen banged and Clara came out with her coat already on and her keys already up in her fist. She picked the bag up by the strap without breaking stride and went down past him, and she said what she had to say on the way.
“Daisy’s bus is at three-forty. It’s on the pad by the phone, and the pad says which house Ruthie’s mother drives to on Fridays, so if you’re in the barn you can call and she’ll keep Daisy till five.”
“Clara.”
“The east room’s stripped. Sheets are in the machine and they’ll want hanging by four or they’ll sour.” She set the bag on the back seat and shut the door on it, not hard. “The flannel she wore today goes back on the rail, not in the wash. It’s clean.”
“Clara.”
“There’s a casserole in the icebox with the day written on the foil, and there’s another one behind it for Sunday. Mrs. Finch sent a note home about the spelling test. It’s under the sugar tin. Daisy signed her own name on the bottom of it and she wants you to look at where she signed it.”
She had done all of that while he was out at the fence. She had done it in the time it took him to set three posts.
“You didn’t have to do any of it,” he said.
“Doing it takes about as long as saying it.”
“The chalk mark on the rail in three.”
“That’s the heifer. She’s standing wrong on her off hind and she’s been standing wrong since Wednesday.” Clara came around the front of the car. “Somebody should write that down.”
He stood in the gravel with the spinner hanging off his fingers.
“The bank paper,” he said. “You read it.”
“I did,” she said.
“Monday night.”
“Monday night. You were in the barn and I was clearing the table, and it was under Bram’s bill, and I had read the whole of it before I understood what it was.
” She stopped at the driver’s door. “I should have told you that night. I didn’t.
That part is mine and I’m not going to stand here and pretend it isn’t. ”
“That’s not why.”
“No,” Clara said. “I know it isn’t.”
“Where are you going,” he said.
“Larkspur Street. The agent has a walk-through Monday and there are forty boxes in that house with nothing written on any of them.” She had her hand on the door handle and left it there. “It has to happen sometime and it may as well happen on a wet Friday.”
“The house sells and then what.”
“Then a man from Bozeman puts a sign in the yard and I stop driving past it twice a week.” She said it to the windshield.
“You’ve got a telephone at that house.”
“It’s on the pad by the phone with everything else,” she said. “You knew that number when it was on a rotary. Look at the pad anyway.”
Her keys came up out of her jacket pocket with something hooked on them. A chain, thin, worn bright. It swung out once at the end of her hand and turned in the flat gray light and knocked against the door frame, and there was a ring on it, small, plain, the gold gone dull and soft with wear.
He didn’t know what it was. Something of hers. Something that had been in that pocket every day since February and had never once been on her hand.
She caught it out of the air without looking down, closed her fist over it, put it back in the pocket and pushed it to the bottom with two fingers.
“That’s everything,” she said.
The yard was forty feet across.
He counted them, because they were there to be counted, and because the spinner had gotten heavy, and because his fingers would not close on the handle any more. He set it down in the gravel. It tipped over and he did not pick it up.
She had the door open. She had one boot in.
Forty feet. He had crossed it eleven times today with a hundred and forty pounds of grain on his shoulder and had not set the sack down once. He stood where he was.
She had said okay. She had said it in his kitchen with a dish towel in her hand, and then she had folded the towel, and in twenty-seven years there had never been an hour when Clara Gables folded something instead of arguing.
“You’ll want those sheets off the line before dark,” she said. “The wind’s dropping.”
“It’s not dropping.”
“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
She got in. The door shut. Through the glass he watched her put the key in and turn it, and the little engine caught on the second try the way it always did in the cold, and the exhaust came out white and low across the gravel.
The barn light was still burning behind him. Daisy was at a desk in Mrs. Finch’s room with a spelling list in front of her and she did not know one thing about any of this, and at three-forty she would be at the cattle guard looking up the drive to see who was standing at the end of it.
He crossed the yard.
Clara put the window down halfway before he got there. Both hands stayed on the wheel. Her jaw was set for arithmetic she did not want to say out loud.
“Don’t,” she said. “Not in the yard, Wyatt.”
The wrap on his palm was through. There was blood at the heel of his hand and a smear of it along the glass where he set it down.
He had one thing he wanted and one grammar to want it in, and the two of them had never fit together, not at eighteen and not now.
“Turn the engine off, ma’am.”