CHAPTER 17 #2
“I was going to say we could go up without you. Then I thought about who’d be riding point and I quit.”
“Get your horse loaded,” he said.
“Yes, sir.” She went, and stopped at the fender. “If you go off that trail I have to come get you, and I’m the one who has to tell Clara about it. So that’s the deal you’re making this morning.”
“Noted.”
Harlan came up from the bunkhouse with his thermos lid steaming in his left hand, because the right one had quit closing around anything that small years ago. He looked at the trailer. He looked at Wyatt’s face, and then past it, at the ridge.
“A man can be in two places about a week, son, and then he isn’t in either one.” He drank. “That wind’ll come full northeast off the ridge by four.”
“Then we’ll be off the bench by four,” Wyatt said.
Harlan nodded slowly and did not say the rest of it. He never did say the rest of it. He turned his lid up, finished it, and went to open the yard gate so the truck could come through.
Snow started while they were loading. It came dry and small, ticking on the metal roof of the shed, one grain at a time and then too many to count.
Wyatt went in for his slicker at a quarter to eight.
Clara had the end of Daisy’s braid in one hand and a rubber band in her teeth. Daisy sat on the bench with her boots on already, at the table, with her coat on inside the house, which she was not allowed to do and was doing.
“Firewood before dark,” Wyatt said. “Don’t let it get low and then start hauling.”
“I know.”
“The pump handle is stiff. You have to prime it.”
“You told me at five,” Clara said, “and again at six.”
“I’m telling you at a quarter to eight.”
“Okay.”
She finished the braid and let go of it. Then she crossed the kitchen, opened the drawer by the stove, and put a jar in his hands. Matches in it, dry, and a candle stub, and a fold of wax paper.
“The tin in the pannier has been in that shed since October,” she said. “Everything in it is damp and you know it is.”
He turned the jar over. The lid was on tight and there was a rubber band around the threads.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t say it that way. Take it.”
He took it.
“I could ride Biscuit,” Daisy said.
He got his gloves off the shelf over the coats. “No.”
“I could ride him to the gate and come home with Harlan.”
“Not today.”
“You said the gate was a quarter mile.”
“It is a quarter mile,” Wyatt said. “Today it’s a quarter mile in a storm.”
She did not argue past that. She looked at her boots for a while, and then she said, “Gray jays don’t go anywhere in winter. They stay up there the whole time. They cache food in the bark and they remember where.”
“I know it,” he said.
“You didn’t know it in October.”
“Then I learned it,” he said, and she let that stand.
He got his slicker off the hook. Clara was at the sink with her hands in the water and her shoulders set, and he stood in the doorway with one hand come off the frame and hanging.
“Clara.”
She turned. She had the brush in her wet hand and she was waiting for the rest of it, and there was no rest of it that would come out in the right order at a quarter to eight in the morning with three horses in a trailer.
Her hair had come loose on one side. He did not lift the hand.
He put his hat on instead, and settled it, and the wanting to say it went where the rest of it went, and he was going to count wind speed for seven miles to keep from hearing it again.
“Be careful,” she said.
“It’s only weather.”
Daisy got off the bench. She went to her coat, which was on her, and dug in the pocket, and came out with the spiral notebook and the pencil with the eraser chewed down to the metal.
She held them out at the full stretch of her arm. “You have to hold this. Write down what you see and don’t guess. Gray jays will come to your hand if you sit still.”
Wyatt looked at the notebook. It had a rubber band around it too, the same as the jar, and the cover was soft at the corners from a winter of being carried.
“That’s your list.”
“I know what it is.”
“I’ve got my own book.”
“Not for birds,” Daisy said.
He crouched, which cost him more than he had planned on, and took it out of her hand. He put the notebook in the inside pocket of his coat and the pencil in after it, eraser end down, and buttoned the flap.
She watched his hand go in. She watched the pocket after his hand came out of it.
Clara put her palm on the back of Daisy’s coat and left it there and said nothing at all, and that was the most useful thing anybody did in that kitchen all morning.
Outside, the snow had gotten organized. It came at the yard light sideways and did not fall through the beam so much as cross it.
Along the lane the ditch had come up green in the last two weeks. Sweetgrass and brome, all of it bent one way, going white while he walked past it, and the wet smell came up off it stronger than it ever came up in July.
He looked at the house before he got in the truck. The smoke stood out sideways off the chimney, flat to the southwest, and did not rise at all.
Then the corral rail took weight and rang, and he turned around.
Daisy was up on the second rail with her arms hooked over the top one. No hat. Her braid was already coming apart on the right side, and Clara was a step behind her with a hand fisted in the back of her coat, holding her on the rail and not calling her in.
He walked over. He put his forearms on the top rail so his face came level with hers, and the wood moved under his weight and his left side lit up all the way around to his spine, and he kept his breathing shallow and gave her his face anyway.
Snow was landing in her hair and not melting.
She had her mother’s eyes, and she used them on him the way she used them on a bird she was not sure about yet, holding very still, getting it right before she wrote it down.
He had never lied to her. Not about the water, not about her brother, not about what a bank is for. She knew that about him the same as she knew the porch rail was cold in the morning.
“Are you coming back?”