CHAPTER 15 #2
Harlan Cobb took his hat off and held it against his chest. The two fingers that wouldn’t close curled outside the brim.
“Annie Miller couldn’t hold a note and she sang anyhow,” he said. “Wind’ll drop about four.”
Nobody filled in after that. Harlan put his hat on and looked off north and stayed where he was. Clara shifted the child a half inch and no more.
Nora Finch came up on Wyatt’s other side. Thirty-one years in that school, and she had taught him, and she had taught Clara, and she wore the same cardigan she wore in front of a second-grade room.
“She spoke in my room on Tuesday,” Nora said. “Twice, and once without being asked.”
Then she waited. That was all of Nora Finch. She said the hard kind thing and stood there and gave a man time to do whatever he needed with it. Wyatt worked his jaw twice and got out a nod. Nora laid her hand on his sleeve for about a second and took it off again.
Loretta came along the row and stopped at Clara’s elbow with her chin up.
“Is somebody going to spell you with that child?” she said. “Nobody is. Then don’t lock your knees.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Bend them a little. Every hour.” Loretta looked at the child’s face and then away, out at the trucks along the wire. “And get something in you before three. I have watched women go over at this fence and it turns into a whole production.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The sun stood over the rise and there was no shade in that place at all.
Clara set her boots and let Daisy’s weight come down into her right hip an ounce at a time, the way a load settles when nobody moves.
Her forearm went hot, then heavy, then quit reporting.
She let it. Down at the fence somebody opened a tailgate and somebody else told them to leave it. A truck door shut and nothing else did.
Halfway through it Daisy hummed four notes into Clara’s collarbone.
Four notes and no more. It is what a child does when she has run out of things to hold on to and her mouth goes looking on its own. Clara’s hand stopped on the small of the child’s back and then started again.
Nobody else on that hill heard it.
The wind dropped about four, the way Harlan said it would.
People had been eating off tailgates since one, standing in the road in twos and threes with paper plates.
The food had come out of the trucks without anybody organizing it after Gemma got it started.
Clara had not eaten. Daisy had been asleep on her since two, gone heavy the way they go, one hand shut in the collar of Clara’s coat.
Gemma came up the fence with a plate in each hand and no free finger anywhere.
“You haven’t had a thing since dark,” she said.
“I can’t take it. Both arms are spoken for.”
“Then open your mouth and stop arguing with me.”
Clara ate two bites of ham off a fork held by the woman who ran the Blue Spruce Café, on a hill east of town, in front of forty people, and nobody at that fence looked over.
Tate Callahan came along the fence line after that with his hat in his hand and stopped a polite distance off.
“Some of us go down to the crossing after and put the flowers in,” he said. “Nobody has to.”
Clara turned her shoulder so Daisy’s head came out of the light.
“I’ll stay up here with Daisy. She told me she didn’t want to go down there.”
Tate looked at the sleeping child. Then he looked out at the trucks, and then at the ground. He had been a county deputy a long time and he knew how to take an answer.
“That’s fine,” he said. “That’s a good reason. Nobody up here is going to count who went down and who didn’t.”
“Take the bucket off the porch step on your way. The stems are wet yet, and there’s twine on the rail if you need to tie them.”
“I’ll get it.” He put his hat on and squared it. “He won’t come down. He goes as far as the gate every year and turns around.”
“Then go on and don’t wait for him.”
He went off down the line telling people, and the doors started. Loretta got herself into somebody’s passenger seat with a hand on the roof. The trucks began pulling out of the grass one at a time. Nobody asked Clara twice. Nobody asked her at all.
Wyatt came up the inside of the fence and stopped about eight feet short of her.
He had his hat in his hand. His arm came up an inch off his side and went down again. He put his open right palm flat on the rail instead and left it there.
“Clara.”
“I’m here.”
He didn’t have the next one. His mouth opened and worked and shut.
He looked at his daughter’s face against Clara’s throat, and the word he was reaching for stayed wherever it had been for four years.
Eight feet is nothing. Eight feet is two steps.
He spent them on the rail instead, and it cost him everything he had in his face, and Clara held on and let him not pay it.
“You can put her down,” he said.
“I know I can.”
“Your arm’s asleep.”
Clara looked down at the sleeve and the hand at the end of it. “It went to sleep about two hours ago.”
“Clara.”
“I’m not putting her down, Wyatt.” She said it plainly, with nothing sharp in it. “She’ll wake up if I do, and then she’ll have to be here awake. She got herself up this hill without crying. Let her have the ride home.”
He turned that over. Down the hill the trucks strung out along Six Mile with their lights on in the middle of the afternoon.
“Feed’s late,” he said.
“Go feed them.”
“Harlan’s got the springer.”
“Then go help Harlan.” Clara nodded at the gate with her chin, because her hands were not available. “Come get us when you’re done. I’ll have her in the car with the heater running.”
“Eat something first,” Clara said.
“I will.”
“Harlan said that too.”
“Harlan lies about coffee.”
He put his hat on. He got as far as the gate, and stopped, and came three steps back, and stood there with his hand open at his side.
“Thank you,” he said. “For today. For the tape on the plates.”
“You saw that.”
“I see about everything you do.”
Then he went, because two hundred and forty pairs were waiting on a man who had given up a working day in April. The twelfth had been got through.
The trucks went down the hill. The engine sound thinned out and quit at the bottom, and the rise went over to birds and wind in the wire and one child breathing on her collarbone.
Clara stood alone in the top corner with the younger green under her boots and the small stone in front of her.
She had come up this hill in the morning carrying a thing she decided, four years ago, never to say to anybody living.
She had carried it into that house in March.
She had carried it up those stairs into the east room and through every supper at that pine table, and she had meant to carry it out of Montana in a green hatchback with Colorado plates and let it stop being anybody’s business but hers.
That was not going to work now. It had quit working somewhere between the mudroom floor and this gate.
She put both hands on the cold rail of the cemetery fence with the child asleep against her and gave herself a date—the first of May, the day she was supposed to be gone—and he would hear it from her and nobody else.