CHAPTER 24
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A little past nine, by my watch. The mountain was cool for the first time in nearly eight weeks.
Seventy-six on the porch thermometer, wind eight out of the west, a trace of overnight rain still darkening the plank under the kettle.
Copper stamped once at the far barn three hundred and forty yards south.
A red-tail turned somewhere on the ridge line and did not call.
Treeline a hundred and forty yards north, unchanged.
Fence corner five hundred yards southwest, unchanged.
Half a mile northwest to where the ridge alarm used to trip and no longer did, because seven days ago the men who had made that alarm necessary had stopped coming.
My thumb rested on the warm oval at my left pinky. Signet flat against bone, settled into the small trench years of wear had made.
Boots on the trail below the porch.
Celia was inside, one drawer up from the coffee tin. Beau was in Bozeman until the following weekend. The short, steady step belonged to someone else, and I placed it before it cleared the last switch.
Marta.
She almost never came up. In four years she had walked the cabin trail three times and each of the three times she had brought a thing that needed hands.
She came around the last pine and stopped at the foot of the porch steps and looked at me the way she looked at a stove that had not been cleaned to her satisfaction.
Her silver braid lay down her back. Gray wool cardigan she'd had as long as the main house had had her.
Rosary bulk in the left apron pocket. Something small in her right hand, closed.
“You are up early,” she said.
“You are up here,” I said. “I did not know that was in the play.”
“It was not,” she said. “I have decided it is.”
I stood. Something in my posture loosened before I understood why. She came up the two steps, stood at porch height with me, and opened her hand.
A ring sat in the flat of her palm.
Silver. Worn thin along the underside the way any ring goes when a man rides fences with it for sixty years. The band a half-size too narrow for me. The faint hammered look of a piece that had been struck by hand a long time ago and by weather every day since.
“This was Warren's father's,” Marta said. “His ranch band. Warren asked me to keep it four years ago until it was needed. This morning I decided it was needed.”
She looked at my left hand, the way she looked at any piece of paperwork on the main-house sideboard: reading it. Courthouse gold on my ring finger since a Wednesday in June. Signet on my pinky since a Christmas when I was seventeen. She looked at both and back to the small silver in her palm.
“That is one ring,” she said. “This is the other one. The old one for the new promise.”
I took it. It weighed as much as any decision I had made with two hands.
Silver-warm. Marta's kitchen still on it.
I turned it in the light and the hammer marks caught the way scale catches on a trout.
The inside was smooth. Whatever engraving had been there had been rubbed away by eighty years of horse-work.
I said the one word I kept for her.
“Se?ora.”
She looked at me with a face that had watched three owners of this land come and go and had decided a fourth was allowed to stay. She put her hand on my cheek for one full second. Her palm was cold from the trail.
“Don't waste the morning,” she said.
She went back down.
I stood on the porch until her step cleared the switchback and turned to a rustle in the pine and then to nothing. The little band sat in my palm the whole time. I did not close my hand on it. I did not want to warm the silver before Celia's finger did.
At ten thirty-two, the utility hall answered with the scrape of hose.
I found her in the utility hall on her knees with a coil of quarter-inch hose and the propane wrench and her hair up on a No. 2 pencil.
She was talking to the fitting under the range.
“You sing on Simmer,” she was saying. “You do not sing on Low. Which means it is not the flow. It is the seat. Which means you are old and you have opinions.”
“The wrench is bigger than you think it is,” I said.
She kept her face forward. “The wrench is exactly the size I think it is. What I do not know is which fitting to threaten with it.”
“Put it down.”
“Why.”
“Come ride with me.”
That got her. She sat back on her heels and looked up.
Left palm turned out on her knee — the pink rosette where the extinguisher pin had come off in her hand seven days ago, no longer bandaged for the last forty-eight hours, not a scar yet but on the way.
Her hair had been up two hours and had already lost a strand.
“Where.”
“Up.”
She waited for a reason. I did not give one. Her thumb went to her opposite palm — the tell she did not know she had — and touched the pink rosette twice, then a third time. Her gaze sharpened on the missing explanation. Then she let it pass.
“Is this a boot-tour or a —” she caught herself, then did not catch herself. “Is this a whatever.”
“I already saddled Judy.”
She set the wrench down on the plank floor between us. Delicately. The way she always set a thing down when it had won the argument on her behalf.
“Give me my boots,” she said. “And two minutes.”
Almost noon. Copper's shoulders rolling under my knees on the second switchback. Judy's hooves behind on the loose grit of the trail, Celia's weight solid and un-panicked in the saddle the way it had not been eight weeks ago. She had learned the country on that horse.
I measured because I could not stop. Three hundred forty from the porch we had left to the north treeline.
Five hundred to the western fence corner.
Half a mile northwest to the ridge. Two miles north-uphill to the fire lookout.
Yardages that had lived in my head since the summer I bought the place and would live there the rest of my life whether the men came again or did not.
The wind out of the west at eight, and cool. August had turned in the night. Cool through the porch screen at four in the morning when I got up to check the lock on the safe I no longer had to check and had checked anyway. Cool on the back of my neck the whole ride up.
And then the taste.
Silver-tin on the tongue. A coin-cold flavor off the aspen stand that ran up the slope above the Ives strip — the small round leaves twisting on their long stems the way aspen twist and no other tree does, the underside going pale in the wind and turning the whole slope into a slow ripple of pewter.
That flavor. That the drought was done and the seasons were still turning and the mountain remembered how to be cool.
I did not name it aloud. Celia named it for me a minute later.
“That smell,” she said behind me on the trail.
“Aspen,” I said.
“It tastes like a nickel.”
“It does.”
“Every August?”
“Every August I have been up here.”
She was quiet for the next fifty yards. Then, at the third switch, she said what she had come up here without knowing she was going to say.
“Your water tank.”
“Our water tank.”
She let that sit for a stride. “Our water tank.”
“I want to route it into the fire-response infrastructure. Bib at the switchback. Standpipe at the main house. Backup line to the barn. Two-inch galvanized. It'll take six months to lay it if I don't rush it and I don't want to rush it.”
“How much.”
“I can afford it.”
“I know.”
“You have a permit route.”
“I have a permit route. I could file it in Hamilton in an afternoon. You would not enjoy the setback conversation with the county engineer, but I have had the setback conversation with the county engineer and I would enjoy having it again.”
I almost laughed.
I did not, yet.
Almost twelve-thirty. Wildflower meadow at the top of the aspen slope, thinned by drought but not empty.
Oxeye daisy in a raggedy scatter. Blue lupine going to seed, the pods rattling like small dry teeth.
Rocky Mountain fescue up to the mid-shin.
The mountain very quiet the way mountains go quiet when nothing is hunting on them.
I hobbled Copper at the edge. I hobbled Judy next to him. Celia stood on the meadow side of the last pine with her hands in the back pockets of her jeans and watched the aspen slope run silver down toward the tank. Her hair was half out of its pencil. She had not asked me why yet.
I did not have a speech prepared.
I had prepared one at the kitchen table the night before and had hated every version.
The versions had all sounded like a term sheet.
I had written whereas twice in the margin without meaning to and had set the pen down and gone to bed.
The sentence I meant lived somewhere below language.
I had walked her up here to put it down anywhere language would take it.
I took her right hand. The un-scarred one.
I kept my feet under me a moment longer.
“Your grandfather's letter said the honest one was worth staying near.”
Celia did not speak.
“I do not know if I am the honest one your grandfather meant. I know I intend to be.”
I turned my father's ring on my pinky once. The habit. The small circle of the engraved L. C. W. that had hidden me for six years and had begun this week to feel like something I could sign my name to.
“I married you for a piece of grass, sweetheart,” I said. “That was the paperwork.”
I said: “This is not the paperwork.”
I knelt.
Right knee first, with the practiced balance of a man who had tied his boots on a slope every morning since he was fifteen. Cold ground came through the denim. Somewhere above the tank, an aspen leaf let go and turned in the air; I kept my eyes on her.
I opened my palm.
The small silver band sat in the center of it. Dull-warm from Marta's kitchen and my four hours of holding it. The hammered marks catching the sun the way water catches on a stone.
“Your grandfather would call this staying near me,” I said. “Will you stay.”
Just past twelve-thirty.