CHAPTER 10
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Five forty-five was the wind hour in the third week of drought. West-ridge air came gritty and dry, stripping the night from the porch before the coffee was off the propane.
I stood in yesterday's canvas jacket with the Winchester across my ribs and counted what I could own: treeline one hundred forty yards north, alarm line half a mile northwest, fence corner five hundred yards southwest. No signal, no radar, no analyst. Only the perimeter I could see.
The forecast said ninety-one. I did not trust it. Wind west at fifteen; the far pasture had been drier than the county chart all week. Ground like that made its own weather.
Beyond the fence, a brown twist of dust rose six feet, spun against the pale aspen trunks, and collapsed. Only wind. Fire had not come. Yet.
The signet turned under my thumb, silver thin on the underside. My father's settling habit before mine.
Coffee was ready when I went in.
At eight she was at the propane range with a cast-iron skillet and a package of bacon Marta had sent up last week.
I leaned against the jamb with the mug I had poured for her and watched her burn it.
She had set the fat too hot. Then she had turned her head to look at the coffee pot.
Fifteen seconds and the strips had gone from crisp to acrid and the whole kitchen went with them, the propane fridge behind her ticking the way it did in heat.
She scraped the pan into the sink with a spatula and a laugh drier than her face. Laugh she was aiming inward, at herself, that landed anyway.
“I can rezone forty acres of downtown Denver,” she said, “but I cannot fry bacon on a Thursday.”
She had a smudge of black grease at the base of her thumb.
Her hair was in the low twist she wore before it got hot enough to pin up.
Her jeans were cuffed once at the boot and one of the cuffs had come undone and been ignored.
She had been in this cabin fourteen days and I had already stopped noticing the things she did not do the way another woman would have done them. I noticed the things she did.
“I have more bacon,” I said. “The propane's just running hot.”
“That is a generous way to describe operator error.”
“It's how I describe operator error.”
She took the mug I had brought her and drank half of it standing at the sink with the water running over the scorched pan.
She is going to be fine, I thought. She is going to be more than fine.
My thumb rode the flat of the oval and settled. Then I stepped past her and knelt at the propane knob and cut the flame down two notches for her without a word.
At nine thirty she was in the great room with one hand on the spine of the Loeb.
The book had been on that shelf beside the stone fireplace since I brought it up in a box from the main house four years ago and put it there because it had come with me.
It had lived there since. I walked past it several times a day the way a man walks past a photograph on a wall he no longer sees.
She had clocked it three times this week and left it.
I had watched her clock it and had not asked her about it. This morning she pulled it down.
The flinch went through me before I could get in front of it — a half-second, the involuntary set of a man watching a door he has kept closed have its knob turn from the other side.
I crossed the room in three steps. I put my hand under hers, gently, so my palm took the weight of the hardback before her fingers did, and I set the book back on the shelf.
“That one was my father's,” I said. “I don't — read it much.”
The answer was a half-truth.
She let me take it. She did not push. She let her hand come away with mine on top of it for the length of an unhurried breath, then she stepped back one step and put her hands in her back pockets and looked at the woodstove instead of me.
“It's a beautiful edition,” she said.
“It is.”
She did not follow up. She did not look at me for the second I stood there with my palm still warm from the spine of the book.
She saw me flinch, I thought. She said nothing. That woman does not miss.
My pinky pressed once against the silver.
She said, dry, still looking at the woodstove: “We should go down to the house.”
“Marta's expecting us at noon.”
“Then we should walk.”
A quarter past eleven we took the switchback trail south down to the main house. A mile and a half. Twenty minutes at a working pace. I set us to twenty-eight, because I did not want to arrive at Marta's porch out of breath. She would notice, and it would embarrass Celia, and I did not want it.
Copper was in the barn on the ridge side, blowing hay out of his nostrils in the way he did when he was bored and would rather have been out on the trail. I told him no with the flat of my hand at the door and he went back to his hay.
Judy was in the near paddock — twelve hundred pounds of retired barrel racer standing with her rear hoof cocked, nickering at Celia through the wire because Celia had been the one on her back three afternoons out of the last four.
Celia stopped at the wire and put the flat of her hand on Judy's forelock and worked her fingers through the coarse hair between the mare's ears without breaking her stride.
She had done it in one motion — the way a woman does something she has watched me do once and decided to try. Judy dropped her head into it.
I had not clocked, until that morning, that she had hands. She had always had hands. I had not noticed at first because they were folded around a legal pad the first time I saw them at the fence line, and because in the courthouse they had signed the paper without shaking. I noticed today.
She has hands, I thought. Of course she has hands.
We came down the switchback into the smell of the pines the trail cut through, and the sweetness of the wild rose that grew along the last hundred yards where the trail met the gravel of the main house drive.
She walked the way she talked. Even weight.
No wasted motion. She was in her Denver boots still — she had not yet gone into Sula and bought Justin ropers, and I had not told her she needed to.
At the end of the trail she said, “Your barn is closer to your house than the county setback code would allow.”
“I don't have a setback code.”
“I know. I keep forgetting.”
“Marta will forgive you.”
She laughed, short. It was the first thing I had made her laugh at all week. I did not turn my head to look at her when she did.
Marta had laid the wraparound porch for three.
Cold roast chicken sliced thin, potato salad in the yellow bowl that had been her mother's, iced tea sweating in a pitcher that had been sweating in that pitcher on that porch since I bought the ranch four years ago, sliced apples, whole-grain bread from Wednesday's loaf, the raspberry jam in a small dish with its own spoon, and a new small pot of butter beside it.
She was in the linen apron with the deep pockets, and the rosary lived in the left pocket the way it always lived in the left pocket, wooden beads gone smooth from six decades of thumb-work. Her silver braid was down her back.
She served Celia first. Then me. Then herself. She sat.
“Sit down at your table, Marta,” I said. “You do not serve me at my own table.”
“You are not eating at your table. You are eating at mine today.”
That was the first time she had used the possessive on that porch. I said nothing to it. I ate the chicken.
Celia asked about the main house well. Marta answered — seventy percent, holding, softer than last month, worse than last year, better than the year before the year before.
Marta could talk about a well the way a hydrologist could and she never let me forget she could.
Celia asked her a follow-up about the flow rate off the spring line above the barn.
Marta answered that too — three gallons a minute at first light, two at noon, one and a half at dusk this week, and if it went below one she would say so, and I would then know it.
Celia said, “Good.”
Marta looked at Celia the way a woman with two adult children looks at a stranger who has just started to eat under her roof. Unhurried. Taking her time.
Celia asked her about her sons.
“Diego is well. Rafael is well.” Marta cut her apple into slices with her paring knife and did not look up from the cutting. “Diego's daughter has just turned four. She has her mother's laugh, which is a mercy for the child and an annoyance for Diego, who is a serious boy and always was.”
“How often do you see her.”
“Twice a month. I drive down; I do not let them drive up. My son does not like the switchback.”
“He should learn.”
Marta smiled at her apple. “I have been telling him for thirty-two years.”
I ate and left the conversation to them. This was a woman speaking to a woman about a well and a child; my job at the table was to eat what I was served and be grateful for it, and I did both.
The lull came around one. The wind past the porch railing had gone up another notch and the pitcher of iced tea had a bead of condensation running down its glass. Marta wiped her hands on the linen and set the paring knife down.
She looked at Celia. She waited until Celia looked back. Then, in the tone she used when she was going to say a thing she had already decided she was going to say, she said, “He is a good man.”
She held the pause.
“Come to me if he stops being one, sí?”
Celia's face did not move. She held Marta's eyes.
“I will.”
Marta nodded once. She picked up the paring knife again. She cut another apple.
My eyes remained on the plate. I ate the chicken.
Marta has never said that to a stranger before, I thought. She has known Celia fourteen days. She sees her.
The pitcher sweated another bead. Marta pushed the potato salad closer to Celia's plate.
We walked the switchback back up in the heat of the day. Half past two on the porch. I carried a small tin of oatmeal cookies Marta had pressed into Celia's hand at the door and Celia had passed to me on the trail because the tin had gotten warm in her grip.