CHAPTER 20 #2
Daisy quit singing then, because the kitchen had gone different around her, and she came out from under the table with her hand in Pilot’s collar.
“I remembered the words this time,” she said. “Why is everybody standing up?”
Wyatt was looking at Clara’s back and at her two hands in the dishwater, which had not moved since she stopped.
“That’s a second verse.”
Clara lifted her hands out of the water. She did not reach for the towel and she did not turn around.
“There isn’t one.”
“Wyatt,” she said.
Tate set his cup down on the boards of the table without a sound. He turned two pages in the folder and put his finger under a line, and when he spoke it was in the voice he used for reading things into a record.
“Minor child recovered from vehicle by a passerby prior to arrival. Passerby declined to be named. That’s my handwriting.”
Clara laid the towel over the rail of the stove and left her hand on it.
“I was four minutes behind her. She was already in the gravel with your daughter inside her coat.”
The gravel smell came through the open door. Wyatt put his hand on the back of the chair and took hold of it. He got a quarter of a breath and it stopped where the rib stopped it, in the barn and here and everywhere else since Friday.
“She asked me to keep her name out of it,” Tate said. “That was my call and I’d make it again.”
“How long have you had that folder?”
“Since the nineteenth.”
“Then you’ve read that line before today.”
“Every time I open it,” Tate said. “I keep what I’m given to keep. Your girl just sang in front of me.”
“What’s a passerby?” Daisy asked.
Nobody in the room answered her. She had Pilot’s collar wound up in her fist and she went from her father to Clara and to Tate and got nothing back off any of the three of them.
She had sung. That was the last thing that had happened in here that she understood, and it had been a good thing, and now three grown people had gone quiet at once over the top of her.
“Is it a bird word?” she said.
“No,” Wyatt said.
He turned around and got his voice down flat and level, the same voice he used for asking her to pass the salt.
“Daisy. Take Pilot out on the porch and count the rocks in your brother’s jar.”
She looked at Clara, and then at Tate, and then at her father.
“There’s forty-one,” she said. “I counted them at Christmas.”
“Count them again.”
She took Pilot by the collar and went. The screen door came to on its spring behind her.
She was not scared going out, and that was the piece of this he was going to keep.
Through the window over the sink he could see her get to the north end of the porch rail and put one finger on the lid of the jar first, which she always did before she started.
He came around the end of the pine table. Clara turned from the sink and let him come, and then there was an arm’s length of kitchen between them and nothing in it.
Her right thumb was taped and the tape had gone gray at the corner from dishwater.
Her left hand was on the counter with the white crescent across the heel of it, three inches of it, four years old.
He had eaten breakfast across from that hand since the sixth of March and he had not asked her one thing about it.
“You were there.”
She did not tell him he was wrong. She laid the left hand flat on the counter, palm down, and left it where he could see it, which took more out of her than lying would have.
“You sat in the gravel with my daughter and you sang to her, and then you asked Tate Callahan to keep your name off a county report.”
Clara reached up and took the pencil out of her knot and put it back through in the same place.
Her chin came up while she did it. She was not going anywhere and she was not saying anything, and she was standing there taking it with her hands busy, which was what she did with everything in this house.
He could have put his hand on her arm without moving his feet. That was the whole distance. He kept it at his side, and keeping it there cost him more than the lamp chain had, and there was nowhere else in the kitchen he wanted to be standing and no other place on earth he could stand.
“You’ve been in this house since the sixth of March and you never said one word.”
Both hands came down on the counter then and went quiet.
Her hands had not been quiet since the sixth of March.
They peeled, they wrote in his calving book, they wound a braid, they carried a plate to a child under a table.
Now they lay there and did nothing at all, and that was the answer, and it was the only one she gave him.
From the porch, through the screen, a girl’s voice. “Nine.”
Tate had not moved out of his chair. The file was open in front of him and it could not leave his hands, so he sat with it and looked at the window and gave them the room he could.
Wyatt counted what was left of the afternoon, because it was there to be counted.
Six pairs in the barn. Two heifers close, and one of them was the roan that had put him into the rail, and she would want watching before dark.
Twelve miles of fence coming out from under the runoff.
Forty minutes to Bozeman on the highway.
That was the drive nobody had made with her.
“Ten,” Daisy said outside. “Eleven.”
He had washed dishes beside this woman every night for eight weeks. He had handed her his daughter and gone up the trail and not looked back at the house. She had stood at that sink on Sunday and said she would stay, and she had said it knowing this, and she had let him say yes to her without it.
Clara’s hands did not move off the counter. She was waiting for him to ask the question, and he had two of them in his mouth and could not get either one out past the rib.
“I’m going to go check the heifers.”
“Okay,” she said.
That was all of it. She did not follow him and she did not say his name a second time, and the kettle ticked on the stove where she had set the blue pot down.
He picked his hat up off the table on his way to the door, and the top page came with it, and under the paperclip was a half sheet in Tate Callahan’s square county print: C.G.—left hand, needs stitches, refused transport.