CHAPTER 25
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Daisy stood on the bottom rail in a dress and her own boots, holding the bird list open with one thumb, counting cars over the new bridge.
“Fourteen,” she said. “Ruthie, that’s fourteen since we came down.”
Ruthie Dawson had her chin hooked over the top rail and one braid already coming apart. “You said eleven.”
“That was before the feed truck.”
“Cars aren’t birds,” Ruthie said.
“I know cars aren’t birds. There’s a page in the back for other things.”
“What other things?”
“Cars,” Daisy said. “And one bat.”
Clara set the last folding chair in the grass and straightened up out of it.
The home meadow ran yellow-green all the way down to the willows, cut Thursday, raked Friday, and the whole bottom of the place smelled like cut hay and warm dust. Somebody had staked the tent poles too far east. Loretta would find that out inside the hour, and somebody would move them.
“Miss Clara.” Ruthie pointed with her whole arm. “Daisy won’t come look at the cake.”
“I’m counting,” Daisy said.
“You’ve been counting since breakfast.”
Daisy turned around on the rail without holding on to anything. “The plate says Mill Creek Bridge, and underneath in the small letters it says both their names, and I’ve read it every day since they put it up.”
Ruthie thought about that. “You told me yesterday.”
“I know. I’m telling you again.”
Clara picked up a chair she had already set down and set it down in the same place. Down the two-track, past the cattle guard, the new deck showed pale between the willows, and the county’s plate on the rail caught the sun the way new metal does.
Boots came up behind her in the stubble. She knew them at eight strides.
“Come here a minute,” Wyatt said.
He had his white shirt on and no jacket yet, and his hair was still wet at the temples. He put out his hand. She took it, and they went down the two-track together with the grasshoppers going up ahead of their feet.
The bridge was thirty feet of new fir deck on steel, with a rail at hand height.
The plate was screwed to the upstream post, bright, with fingerprints all over it already.
Underneath, Mill Creek ran low and clear over the gravel, six inches of it at most, moving the way water moves in September when there is nothing left in the high country to send down.
They walked across. At the far end Wyatt stopped and looked back up the meadow, counting something, cars or fence posts or people, his mouth moving a little. Then they walked back.
“Pairs went through the sort yesterday,” he said. “They ship Monday.”
“You could have moved it.”
“No.”
“I know.” She put her thumb in the middle of his palm, on the pale line where the rope burn had been. “Four o’clock again tomorrow.”
“Four regardless,” he said.
“How many go Monday?”
“Steers and the dry cows.”
“And Sadie’s counting them twice.”
“Because she offered,” he said.
Halfway up the two-track Loretta Gable came at them from the tent with her reading glasses swinging on their chain and her arms already out to head them off.
“No,” Loretta said. “Not today, not that road, not the two of you. Do you know what people will say if they see you strolling down a county road together an hour beforehand? They’ll say it was all settled long ago, that’s what they’ll say, and they’d be right, and I won’t give them the pleasure.
Go put your jacket on. You, dear, go to the kitchen. ”
“Loretta, the tent poles are ten feet too far east.”
“I am aware of the tent poles. I have been aware of the tent poles since eight this morning, and what I have been waiting for is two men with nothing in their hands, and there they are.”
Wyatt let go of Clara’s hand. He did it slowly and he did it all the way, and for the next two hours she had nothing in that hand but the handle of a knife and the ribbon on a jar of flowers, and it was the longest part of the day.
The kitchen was full of Gemma Brooks and heat. Two cakes stood on the long pine table, one white with too many flowers on it and one chocolate with eight candles laid out beside it on a saucer, not yet stuck in.
“I made two cakes, because a birthday cake is not a wedding cake and anybody who says different has never been eight,” Gemma said. “Do you want the good knife or the pretty one?”
“The good one.”
“Correct answer.” Gemma pushed a bowl of frosting to the back of the stove and wiped her forearms on her apron, which put flour on both of them.
“All right. The café roof got done in August and it leaks in a different place now. Your mother’s house closed in July and the people who bought it are from Bozeman and they’ve painted the porch a color I won’t describe at a wedding.
The bus doesn’t go around by the culvert anymore, it comes straight over your bridge, which took eleven minutes off Ruthie Dawson’s morning and her mother has told me about it four separate times.
Sadie married Caleb the first Saturday in July in her aunt’s yard and cried the entire time, and he explained the whole ceremony to her afterward in case she missed any of it.
Mitch Lawson hauled the trestle tables out of the community hall this morning at six and set them up before anybody was awake to see him do it, and when I thanked him he looked at me like I’d handed him a summons.
Do you know what I think about all that? ”
“No,” Clara said.
“Neither do I. Hold this.”
Clara held the plate. “Where are the candles going?”
“On the chocolate one, at seven o’clock, when the light’s low enough to be worth it. She counted them this morning and then moved two of them a quarter inch and would not tell me why. I asked her twice and got a look off her I have seen on her father.”
Clara turned the plate around in her hands. “Gemma.”
“What.”
“Thank you for the second cake.”
“Don’t,” Gemma said, and put the back of her wrist against one eye and went after the frosting bowl.
“I’ll drop something.” Out the window, Sadie Hayes and Caleb O’Neill came up from the corrals with their sleeves buttoned down over sunburn and dust to the knee, and Sadie was saying something over her shoulder to the pairs in the near pasture, apologizing to them, probably.
At four the wind came up the meadow the way it does, off the bench and down, and it laid the grass over and filled the tent canvas and popped it like a sail.
The folding chairs walked half an inch on the ground and stopped.
A hundred people, near enough, sitting in a cut meadow with the sun hot on their shoulders and the light going long and yellow.
Half of them had been at the sort that morning.
Harlan Cobb had a jacket on. It was brown, and it fit him nowhere, and he had been standing in it for twenty minutes with his ruddy neck above the collar like a man being measured for something.
He offered Clara his left arm. He always gave people that side.
“You look ready,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“Nobody is. That’s all right.” They started up the grass, and the pairs in the near pasture set up bawling for their calves, two hundred and forty head of complaint, and Harlan did not raise his voice over it. “Your mother would’ve walked you up this same grass and been unbearable about it.”
Clara kept walking. Her hand tightened on the sleeve of that jacket he hated, and he let it.
“Wind’ll come up around four,” Harlan said. “It always does in this meadow.”
“It already has, Harlan.”
“Then I was right,” Harlan said.
“You’ve had that jacket on since two o’clock.”
“Since one.”
“Take it off after.”
“I intend to burn it,” Harlan said, and patted her hand once with the fingers that still worked.
Wyatt was standing at the top of the grass in the jacket Loretta had made him find, with Daisy beside him and Pilot lying in the shade of the tent pole with his one good ear up.
Daisy had a plain band for her father in her dress pocket and had checked it four times since noon.
Clara knew because Daisy had announced each one.
The pastor came out from town and said the part that made it legal, and it took less time than the sorting had. Then Loretta, who had run every minute of the afternoon since seven in the morning, sat down in the front row and folded her hands and let it go.
Daisy stepped forward one step. “We wrote a thing,” she said, to the whole meadow. “It’s three parts. That was my idea.”
Wyatt turned toward Clara. The wind had his collar up on one side. He did not fix it.
“I’ll tell you the truth even when it’s the worse answer,” he said, “and I’ll be where I say I’ll be.”
Somebody’s chair creaked. Clara had her mother’s ring on her left hand and the crescent scar under it, and she put both where he could see them.
“I’ll say the hard thing out loud the first time,” she said, “and not the fourth year.”
Then Daisy, who had waited through two grown-ups with her chin up and her hands flat on the front of her dress, took a breath the size of the meadow.
“I promise not to run at the water, and to say when my ear hurts, and that all three of us are staying, and that one’s the important one.”
The pairs bawled. The canvas cracked. Nora Finch, three rows back, took her glasses off and did not put them on again.
Wyatt looked at Clara and did not move his feet.
“In front of everybody?” he said.
“In front of everybody.”
His hand came around to the small of her back and stayed there, open, and then she went up on her toes and got both hands on his jaw.
His skin was hot from the sun and rough at the edge of the shave line.
Her mother’s ring caught against the side of his neck and she left it there.
He kissed her the way a man kisses when he has already decided, unhurried, one hand spread flat between her shoulders, the other coming up into her hair at the back with his thumb along her cheekbone, and he did not look to see who was watching. He did not turn his head once.