CHAPTER 16
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Dawn.
Just after five in the morning, by my watch.
The coffee in the mug was too hot to hold and I held it anyway, thumb against the pewter handle, palm flat under the base where the heat bit and stayed.
The porch boards were cold under my socks.
Wind twelve out of the southwest, off the ridge, dry the way a fire wants dry.
Treeline a hundred and forty yards north, unchanged since yesterday. Ridge quiet.
Copper's stall dark in the far barn, three hundred forty yards south, one of the numbers I did not have to calculate anymore because it had lived in my head since the summer I bought the place.
I turned my father's ring on my left pinky.
Once. The engraved oval flat against pinky bone in the small dark trench I had worn for it.
My father wore it on the same pinky. His father before him.
I did not think about that any more than I thought about the fact that the mountain, thirty-two days into the marriage that was a piece of paper, had not delivered one drop of rain.
The sheriff called me son in the barn, I thought. Three nights ago. He said it like a promise. I have not decided what to do with that yet.
Copper stamped once in his stall. The sound carried clean through the long strip of pinegrass between barn and porch.
I waited for her forty minutes by my watch.
Her boots hit the great-room floor at a quarter past seven. Two steps, a pause at the kettle, the soft thunk of a mug on the counter, the porch door on its long hinge.
She came out in the flannel she had not given back since the night the ridge alarm hit at nine at night.
Mine. Gray. The second button gone and never sewn back on.
Her hair was pulled back and up on one side, tucked behind her ear the way she did when she was cataloguing. She held her mug in both hands.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
“Ridge is quiet.”
“Quiet all along the ridge.”
“I keep expecting it not to be.”
“That is the whole idea.”
She sipped. She watched the treeline. The quiet carried a sentence already loaded behind her teeth. I left it alone; filling silences was how you gave people what they had come out for.
“Luke.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn't tell me the sheriff called you son in the barn.”
I kept my eyes forward. That was the discipline.
A small dead weight settled on my sternum.
Paid weight. The kind that stayed. She had assembled that from a glimpse through the kitchen window at the Hollister residence, or off Miriam's intonation in the driveway on the way out, or from an educated guess she was not going to name for me.
I could not tell which. She had never told me she was assembling.
She had made her collection quietly over three days and had come out on the porch this morning and set one item on the table.
“He calls everyone son,” I said. “I've heard him call the mailman son.”
“Mm.”
One syllable. Notation. The urban planner's careful lift of a pencil over a plat. She did not press. Pressing was not what she was doing. She was placing.
She lifted her mug and drank. The wind moved a strand of ash-brown off my ear. I needed a cut. I had needed one for two weeks. Three weeks ago she would have said so. She did not say so this morning.
I watched the line of her jaw. I did not turn my head to do it.
“I'm going to read on the couch for a while,” she said.
“All right.”
She went inside. The screen door caught on the second inch of the frame and thumped shut on the third.
I stood on the porch until the coffee in my hand had gone lukewarm.
Ten thirty. Copper under me on the switchback up the fire-lookout side. The Winchester in the saddle scabbard because I did not go up that ridge without it after the Monday.
Six days back. Three in the morning on the Monday. Two hundred and twenty yards. One round through the sternum of the intruder who came uphill with a suppressed pistol and the wrong idea about that morning's wind.
I did not think about the man. I never had. I had thought about his hands.
His hands had been correct.
I let Copper set his own pace up the second switchback. Dry cheatgrass on both sides. Grasshoppers ticking. A red-tail on the thermal above the aspen. All of it inventory.
Trip-wire I had restrung on the Tuesday: armed.
I sighted it, cleared it, moved on. The trap-line I had reset on the Thursday: armed.
Checked. Cleared. Continued. Nothing on the ground that had not been on the ground yesterday.
No boot print in the dust of the game trail that was not either mine or elk.
At the top of the fire-lookout side I put a hand on Copper's neck and drank from my canteen and did not sit.
The perimeter I had run for six years had been a perimeter. That was all it had been. A line of yardage, a set of trip-wires, a set of angles from the porch to the treeline. The perimeter had a math.
The perimeter now had a woman inside it who had begun testing the perimeter from the inside, and the math had changed.
I did not know the new math yet. I had watched deal-books in a life I did not think about, projection curves and cash-in-cash-out and an equity waterfall drawn on a whiteboard in a corner office by a man who had also been me, and none of that had prepared me for the geometry of a woman who was collecting items about me while I was watching the perimeter she was walking.
I let the whiteboard thought stand for one second. Then I put it back where it went.
Copper stamped. Wind moved the dry grass at the base of the trip-wire post. The right forearm inside my sleeve pulled once where Karn's knife had opened it, the pink railroad-track scab lifting at the edges now, six days into healing, the itch that meant it was closing.
I turned Copper south. Measuring was what I had instead of praying.
A quarter to two in the afternoon. The porch again. Copper hosed off in the barn, tack put away, the ranch quiet.
The jam jar was on the kitchen counter where Celia had set it three nights ago.
Marta's raspberry, half-full, glass lid, the label peeling at one corner.
Beside it in a pint mason jar was Miriam Hollister's porch-railing rose.
Cream and pink. Sent home with Celia in her lap on the drive out of the Hollister place.
Curled now. Shedding. One petal had already come loose and landed on the pine.
Celia was in the leather chair with her feet tucked under her, Angle of Repose open on her lap, her eyes on the west window and not the page.
I did not go into the great room.
I stood in the kitchen doorway with my hat in my hand.
“You want lunch.”
She did not turn her head. Small quiet. Then: “I ate.”
“When.”
“About one.”
At one I had been forty minutes out on the ridge coming back.
She had made herself a plate and cleared it and washed her fork and put the fork back in the drawer and I had come home to a clean sink.
She had never eaten before me. In five weeks she had never eaten before me.
She would wait in the kitchen and read at the table and pour the coffee and pretend she had been reading long enough not to be hungry.
Today she had eaten at one.
I set my hat on the peg and put a mug of water in front of me at the counter. The water went untouched.
“All right,” I said.
“There's a slice of bread cut for you. And cheese. I got it out.”
“All right.”
She turned a page. The paper made a sound like a small wing.
I stood at the counter and ate the bread and the cheese standing up. She did not look up. She did not not look up. She was doing the thing a person did when they were letting you be in a room with them and were also letting you know they were letting you.
Miriam's rose lost another petal onto the pine while I stood there.
At four, she stopped at the great-room shelf.
The reflection in the window over the sink held her, the shelf behind her and the woodstove behind that, her hand rising, her fingers closing on a spine. I set my coffee down with both hands. The old brace in my shoulders loosened. She would not have known what to name if she had turned.
She pulled the Loeb hardback out of the shelf.
Meditations. Marcus Aurelius. The Greek-facing edition my mother had given me the summer I graduated.
Signature inside the front cover in fountain pen.
Three letters and a Roman numeral, put down by a version of me who did not know he would be dead to himself inside eleven years.
She weighed the book in her palm. She did not open it.
She put it back spine-out, exactly where it had been.
I said it without turning around. “Book's dry, if you were going to try.”
“I was going to try. I decided not to.”
“Good instinct.”
She did not laugh.
She stood at the shelf a second longer than a person stands at a shelf. Then she went back to her chair. The pages of Angle of Repose lifted once in the small draft off the woodstove and settled.
I ran water in the sink and washed the mug I did not need to wash.
The afternoon went the way afternoons go here on days when nothing needs doing.
I mended a length of split-rail down toward the pond and did not need to.
She stayed in the leather chair. Twice I came in through the mudroom and she was in the same posture and the page was the same page.
Once she got up and put the kettle on and made herself tea and did not offer me any.
That was not out of meanness. That was a specific politeness.
The politeness you extend to a house-guest whose category you have not yet decided.
By the time I came in for the day the sun had gone to the west window in gold and out, and the great room was two lamps and a small warmth from the stove.