CHAPTER 22 #2
His hands were still on the fork handle.
He looked down at them and made them let go.
He leaned the fork against the wall. The wall was where it belonged, so that much was done.
Then he stood with nothing in either hand and no place to put them.
The flat scar across the base of his right thumb had gone white.
He set both hands on the top rail instead and let his weight down onto them, and his side took it, and he let it.
He knew that barn in the dark. He knew every board in it and which ones were spruce.
He did not have one second of that day anywhere in him. Not her face, and not the west door, and not walking back out into the yard afterward. Only his own voice, which he had carried around for four years with the words gone off it. A man saying something low and flat in a cold building.
“I was in there ten minutes before you come in,” Harlan said. “Fixing a latigo. I could have stood up and made a noise and you’d both have known. I set still instead. That was mine to do and I done it wrong.”
“It wouldn’t have changed what I said.”
“No. But I heard it and I kept it. That part isn’t the weather’s fault and I’m not going to hang it there.” He turned the thermos over in the crook of his arm. “Three weeks after the funeral. You’d slept about four hours in the whole stretch and you were not in your own head. That don’t unsay it.”
Wyatt put his back against the post and stood there. “No.”
“I want you to take both halves of that,” Harlan said. “A man will pick up the half he’s got a use for and leave the other one laying.”
Wyatt looked at the far pen, half forked, and at the sled with the rope laid over it.
“Four years,” he said. “Why today.”
Harlan took a while with that one.
“A man’s got no business carrying another man’s news. Then it started costing that child, and that makes it mine.” He shifted his boot in the straw. “She braids that girl’s hair. Nobody else in this outfit can do it, me included, and I’ve tried.”
“You’ve tried,” Wyatt said.
“Once. In the kitchen, February, before that woman ever come out here.” Harlan cracked the thermos and poured half a lid and did not drink any of it. “Girl was polite about it, which was worse.”
“It came out sideways this morning.”
“I know. I watched her get on the bus.” He held the lid still. “You could ask me what else I heard in there.”
“Was there more.”
“There was four years of me deciding there wasn’t.” He set the lid down on the shelf beside the heat lamp. “I kept my mouth shut and I was right to. I’m not right anymore. That’s the whole of my arithmetic and there isn’t any more of it.”
Wyatt got the fork and went back at the pen and made four strokes. Then his side stood him straight up and held him there.
By four the wind had swung south and gone soft. Daisy sat on the porch steps with the notebook flat on her knees, working down her column with a pencil she had sharpened herself, badly.
He sat on the step below hers so his head was under her level. Levi’s jar of creek rocks sat at the north end of the rail where it has always sat. Harlan was over by the shop door with a bridle across his knee, close enough to hear, which he had done on purpose.
“Six today,” Daisy said. “The magpie doesn’t count anymore because he lives here.”
“That’s fair,” he said.
“Ruthie counts hers twice. Once at recess and once at her house. It’s the same finch and she knows it.”
“Did you write them down at school or after.”
“After. At school you have to look at the board.” She held the page out sideways so he could see the column, and took it back before he had it read. “Two juncos, a flicker, two bluebirds, and a hawk I couldn’t get.”
“What kind of hawk.”
“I said I couldn’t get it.” She wrote something and crossed it out. “It went behind the shop and it didn’t come back around.”
“Daisy.”
“Mm.”
“When you were little.” He put his forearms on his knees. “Do you remember being cold.”
She did not look up. Her pencil kept going, and she finished the word she was on before she answered.
“I remember being cold and somebody put a coat over me and sang right into my ear so I could hear it over the water.”
Wind moved the grass in the home meadow. The bridle stopped moving over by the shop.
“What did they sing,” he said.
“It goes, down in the meadow where the cold creek runs. That part I’m sure of.” She turned the page over and smoothed it flat with the side of her hand. “There’s more. The more is fuzzy.”
He kept his eyes on the jar of rocks at the north end of the rail. “Was it Mama.”
“Mama couldn’t sing.” She said it plainly, with no weight on it, a fact about a bird. “You told me. You said they put her in the back row at church and she was proud of it.”
“I did tell you that,” he said.
“Nobody taught it to me. It was already in there.” She was back at the column, pencil going. The thing had cost her nothing. “Can I put a nuthatch on if I only heard it.”
“What do you think,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Heard isn’t seen.” She drew a line through something. “I’m going in. My hands are cold and this pencil is terrible.”
The door banged and the house took her in. Through the wall came the sound of her dropping into the chair at the pine table.
The braid had worked most of the way out of itself by then. He had watched it go all afternoon and there was not one thing he could do about it.
He stayed on the step. Four years of a woman standing in his barn in the second-worst hour of his life.
Him telling her to go. Then not remembering that he had, which had let him build the whole thing out of her leaving.
She went to Denver in June. He had written it in under her name and carried it that way and been sore about it, and he had never opened the book to check.
Now the words were out in the world with his own voice on them. The wind was warm. The meadow was green. His daughter was inside the house finding out what her hands could do without anybody.
The bridle started up again over at the shop, and then quit.
He turned his head. Harlan stood in the shop door with the leather over his shoulder and the thermos hanging in his left hand, and he had the look of a man holding one more piece of it who had already decided.
“What did she come up here for, Harlan.”
“She come up here to tell you it was her that got Daisy out of that water, son, and you got your mouth open first.”