CHAPTER 24
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The gravel apron above the water was gray when she got there, and the willows down the bank were shapes with no color in them yet.
She sat sideways in the hatchback with the door open and laced her boots over two pairs of socks.
She tied them twice and took her time about it.
Then she walked down the pitch of the road and set her right boot on the first slab.
Water came over the toe of it. The cold went through the leather before she got the other foot down.
Runoff, six inches of it, brown as coffee with milk stirred in, moving hard enough to push at her ankles and keep pushing. She stood in it. Her heels wanted the gravel behind her, and she let them want it, and she did not climb out.
A killdeer worked the bar below her and complained about her the whole time.
The air smelled of cold silt and cut willow.
Behind her the road climbed toward town.
Ahead of her it climbed toward the ranch.
This was the bottom of it, and she had driven around it for two months, and now her socks were going wet at the ankle.
The light came up on the far bank and started for gold at the top of the cottonwood. Her feet quit being cold and went to nothing at all. Then tires on gravel, up the grade.
The white three-quarter-ton came down and stopped short of the apron, and the engine died, and the door shut.
He came down the road without hurrying. He did not stop at the water line.
He walked out onto the slab and set himself on her upstream side, so the current broke on his legs first, and stood there with his hands down.
“You’re early,” she said.
“You were earlier.”
“I’ve been here since dark.”
“I know. I could see your car from the top of the grade.” He turned his head an inch toward the gauge. “Heifer in the second pen took till four. After that I sat in the kitchen with the light off.”
“Did you eat anything?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
The water went over the slab and made the one steady sound there was.
“You could have telephoned,” she said.
“I could have.”
“You didn’t.” The water came around her ankles and pulled at the laces and went on down toward the culvert mouth.
“No.” He set his boot down square on the concrete and left it there against the push. “This isn’t a telephone thing.”
He put his thumb along the brim of his hat and took it off and set it on again, which he did about once a year.
He looked at the cottonwood. “I said, “You should go, Clara. I couldn’t look at you.” I’ve had it since Tuesday. I’ve been saying it in the truck to hear whether it sounded like me.”
“Can’t. You said can’t.”
It came out of her flat and quick, the correction, before she had decided to make it. She had been carrying that sentence in the present tense since the June she left. It had never once let itself be over.
He worked his jaw. “Can’t,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’d know.”
“I would.” Her hands were in her coat pockets and she took them out and let them hang where his were hanging.
“I don’t have it.” He said that to the water. “I’ve got the sound of my own voice in that barn and nothing in it. Harlan had to give me the words.”
She stood in the runoff and did not help him. The willow smell came up off the bank cold enough to taste.
“Then I’m asking for it back. Every word of it, and everything it bought.”
“It isn’t yours to take back.” She said it gently and it was still a no. “I’ve had it four years, Wyatt. I’ve worn the corners off it. It’s mine.”
He took it. He did not argue, and he did not step off the slab, and the water kept coming at his legs and breaking.
“Then tell me what you want done with it.”
“Nothing.” She turned so the current came at her side, and she lifted her chin at the water above the cottonwood, at nothing anybody could see now.
“That’s the smallest thing standing here.
You want the big one, it’s about eleven feet that way.
It hit that tree and swung and stopped. Nose downstream, cab tipped toward the far bank.
I have believed every day since that I chose.
That I stood right there and picked one door out of two and left the rest of your family in that truck. ”
The killdeer came up off the bar and went downstream and took its noise with it.
“That’s why I never said it. Not because of you. Because saying it out loud made it a thing I did.”
He was quiet long enough for the cold to find its way into her feet.
“How high was it on the cab,” he said.
“Wyatt.”
“How high.”
“Over the hood. Up the windshield on the driver’s side.” Her voice went into the report register and she could not get out of it. “The rear corner on the downstream side was above the surface. It was above it because the tree had the truck pinned.”
“How much of it was out.”
“A foot. Less than a foot.”
His hands opened and closed at his sides. His eyes stayed on the water above the cottonwood where she had put them.
“Which door.”
“The rear one. Passenger side.”
“And the front.”
“Under.” The word came out of her small. “The whole front of it. It was under before I got off the bank.”
“Under,” he said.
“I got the handle up on the second try. The window frame took my hand open. I had her out and up the bank, and when I turned around the cab was gone under, all of it, and the willows were full of—” She stopped.
She put her left hand flat against her own coat and left it there, over the white crescent, and the pressure of it was the only thing holding her jaw shut.
He did not touch her. His right hand came up and stopped short of her sleeve and hung there in the cold air between them, and it stayed hung there, because the arithmetic he was doing said that if he put a hand on her now she would stop talking.
That not-touching cost him, and she watched it cost him, and she had nothing to spend on helping.
He turned and looked at her for the first time since the gauge.
“One door was above the water. One wasn’t. That’s not choosing, Clara. That’s the door there was.”
“You weren’t here.”
“No. And I’ve run it every night for four years.
” He pressed the flat of his palm up under his ribs on the left side and took a short breath and quit on it.
“How long the shop is from this crossing. What a cab holds for air with the windows up. Tate got here four minutes after you were in the water, and I have taken those four minutes apart every way a man can take four minutes apart, and there is nothing inside them for anybody.”
“Wyatt.”
“Nobody chose.” His voice came apart on the second word and he let it and kept going, which was the hardest thing she had ever watched him do with his mouth. “Not you, and not me, and not her either.”
The water went by. He took his hat off again and turned it in his hands, and the brim shook, and he set it on his head crooked.
“Tell me that again,” she said.
“Nobody chose.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
She put her hand out and it landed on his forearm, wet wool over a wet arm, and she left it there, and that was all of it.
The gold came down the cottonwood while they stood there. It got into the top branches and then the trunk and then the water below the slab, and the brown of it turned the color of a penny.
“Those boots are done for,” she said.
“They were done in March.”
“Mine were nice.” She lifted one foot out of the current and put it down again in the same place.
“They were not.” He turned toward her, and he was close, and the current pushed her half a step so that she had to set her feet again. “Clara.”
“Yes.”
He said her name a second time and did nothing with it. The water broke on his shins and went on.
“Tell me to stop and I’ll stop right here.”
“Don’t.”
He kissed her in six inches of runoff on the first slab of the low-water crossing, one hand coming up warm at the small of her back and the other bracing her arm against the push of the water, and the cold went out of her from the shoulders down.
She got her hands into his hair. His hat went off the back of his head and hit the water flat and started downstream, and he did not go after it, and neither of them looked.
He kissed her the way a man does who has already decided what it costs and has the money in his hand.
Then he put his forehead down against hers, and stopped, and did not get a full breath, and tried again and did not get one.
“That’s the rib,” he said.
“I know which one it is. I taped it.”
He laughed, and the laugh caught and turned into a cough, and he swore about it with his forehead still against hers. She held on to his collar. The water kept coming at them both and it was only water. It went around her boots and on down the culvert and did not want one thing from her.
“We should get off this slab,” he said.
“In a minute.”
They did not get off it for longer than a minute. His hat had caught in the willows downstream, brim down, filling. She waded in to her shins and worked it free, and it poured out of the crown the whole way up.
“You’ll want to block that,” she said.
“It’s been wet before.” He turned it over and water ran out of the sweatband.
“There was a fish in it.”
“There was not.”
“There was a fish in it,” she said, “and it got out at the bar.”
He shook the crown out and put the hat on wet. “Then it’s had a fish in it.”
By two o’clock the sun had made a soup of the ground inside the bum-calf pen, and the calf they had grafted on Wednesday was standing in it up to his hocks, which was how a good calf went bad.
“Dry ground’s twenty steps that way,” Clara said.
“I know where it is.”
“Then let’s move the pen and not the calf.” She was already at the first panel with her gloves on. “He’ll be foot-rotted by Sunday standing in that.”
“Panels are heavy.”
“They were heavy in March too.”
“In March I could carry one,” he said.
“You can count them.” She got her hands under the top bar and lifted and the mud gave it up with a noise. “Somebody has to.”