Chapter 6
Grace had the food wrapped and the canteen filled before the sky had any light in it at all, which was becoming something of a habit for the Turner house this spring.
She checked the rifle, the pistol, and the small bundle of jerky and biscuits she'd tied behind the saddle, and was still running through the list in her head when Russ came up the path leading his horse, already dressed for a long day in the saddle instead of a wagon seat.
"Still think we can do it in a day?" Grace asked.
"Can," Russ said. "Didn't say we'd enjoy it."
Forty miles round trip on horseback wasn't a short errand by any measure, and both of them knew it.
They needed to be at Cal's by late morning and back on the road well before dark, which meant there wasn't room in the day for lingering over coffee once they arrived.
Russ had already worked out the timing in his head the night before, the same careful math he applied to everything with hooves attached to it — an hour lost here meant an hour of darkness added to the return, and neither of them wanted to be finding their way home by starlight on a road they didn't know as well as the one to Harlan's.
Luke came out onto the porch while Grace was double-checking the cinch, hair still flattened from sleep, already dressed for the day.
"Keep your brothers close today," Grace told him.
"I know."
"I'm saying it anyway."
Luke understood well enough why she was saying it. David was gone. Karen was gone. Curtis was gone. Now Grace and Russ would be gone too, at least until well after dark, and that left fewer grown hands around the Hollow than they'd had in months.
"What if they don't listen?" Luke asked.
"You're their brother. Figure it out."
She saw something tighten in his shoulders at that and softened it before it settled wrong. "If you need help, Walter's here. Rebecca's here. There are plenty of adults around today. I'm asking you to keep track of your brothers, not raise them."
Luke nodded, and some of the tension went out of him. "Straight there and back?"
"Straight there and back."
Grace swung up, and Russ fell in beside her, and they rode out through the gray light with the Hollow still quiet behind them.
Luke was still standing at the fence turning the morning over in his head when Billy Jean came walking up from the direction of her place, a basket over one arm the way she usually carried something when she had an excuse for being somewhere.
"Dad's not back till dark," she said, before Luke could ask.
"I know."
"So, I figured I'd come help."
"You don't have to help."
"I know that too."
"Then why are you here?"
"Because watching you try this alone sounded entertaining."
Luke told her to go on home, which he already suspected wasn't going to work, and it didn't. Matthew appeared from around the side of the house before Luke had finished the sentence and sided with Billy Jean immediately, the way he sided with anybody who wasn't Luke telling him what to do.
Ben trailed a step behind, squinting against the early light.
"Is Billy Jean staying?" Ben asked.
"Apparently," Billy Jean said.
"Nobody asked you," Luke said.
"That's why I came early."
He didn't have a good answer to that, so he didn't try for one.
What he didn't say — what he had no intention of saying, to her or to anybody — was that some of the knot in his chest had loosened the second he'd seen her coming up the path.
He kept that to himself and went to go find something for his brothers to do before they found something on their own.
The road out to Cal's took Grace through country that started familiar and slowly stopped being so — the Hollow's outer households first, then land she recognized from previous trips, then stretches she still didn't know well.
The road was drying but still soft in the low spots, and Russ kept glancing at the fields they passed the way he couldn't seem to help doing these days, reading soil condition the way some men read a newspaper.
"How long do you figure before planting's urgent everywhere, not just for us?" Grace asked.
"Already is," Russ said.
That was about the whole answer, and it was enough.
They'd talked through the Hollow's shortage more than once since the equipment shed conversation, but riding through it made the shape of the problem clearer than talking about it ever had.
They had animals. They had people willing to work them.
What they didn't have was enough iron in the ground at the same time to make full use of either.
"We've got animals standing while we're waiting on iron," Russ said again, like the line had settled into him as the clearest way to say it.
"Think his plow's ready?" Grace asked.
"Better be. Cal's had since our last trip to sharpen that share, replace the bad wood, and get the cultivator cleaned up. Man struck me as somebody who follows through. We'll find out."
"And the mules?"
"That's the part we never settled." Russ kept his eyes on the road, working through it the way he worked through most things — out loud, once he'd already turned it over privately first. "Cal wanted to know who got them first, last time we talked it through.
I told him they can't run dawn to dark on two fields at once, not without wearing down faster than either of us wants.
We left it open till we knew whose ground would dry first."
"And now we know."
"Now we know," Russ agreed. "That's the whole reason for today. Not to find out what he's got. To decide who gets it, and when."
That was why she'd brought him instead of going alone. Grace could talk to Cal and Martha about almost anything under the sun. The schedule, the acreage, the fine mechanics of what a mule team could safely manage in a season — that conversation needed Russ doing the talking, not her.
Back at the Hollow, Luke's plan to get something useful done lasted about as long as it took Ben to announce he was hungry, Matthew to wander off behind the barn chasing something only he could see, and both of them together to decide the creek needed checking for no reason either could explain.
Ben was the practical one, mostly — he'd ask for what he wanted plainly and take no for an answer eventually, once he'd argued it enough to feel like he'd tried.
Matthew wandered. He always had, since he was small enough to need watching every second, drifting off after whatever caught his attention without much thought for where anybody else expected him to be.
Luke chased down the immediate problems one at a time and understood, somewhere in the middle of it, exactly why his mother had given him the instruction she had rather than a longer one.
Billy Jean found the whole thing funnier than Luke did.
"You're doing great," she said.
"I'm thinking about tying them together."
"Your mother probably has rope."
Matthew, overhearing from a few feet away, went wide-eyed. "I'm telling Mom."
"You're the one I'm tying first," Luke said, and Matthew laughed instead of running off to tattle, which told Luke he hadn't meant it as a threat worth reporting.
It was Billy Jean who finally solved the real problem, and she solved it in about ten seconds after watching Luke fail at it for twenty minutes.
"Give them jobs," she said. "Don't try to keep them still. That never works on boys that age."
She sent Matthew to carry seed potatoes to the fence line where Grace had left them sorted, and told Ben to see if he could beat his brother finishing his row.
"Bet Ben can't finish before you," she told Matthew, loud enough for Ben to hear.
Ben took off toward the potatoes at something close to a run, and Matthew scrambled after him, the argument settled before either of them had time to think twice about it.
"That's cheating," Luke said.
"That's management," Billy Jean said, and went to go make sure neither of them dumped the whole basket in their hurry to win.
Grace and Russ reached Cal and Martha's place a little before noon, both of them stiff enough getting down from the saddle that neither bothered pretending otherwise.
The farm looked busier than Grace remembered from their last visit — two of Cal's people working a garden bed near the house, a third splitting kindling by the barn, smoke rising steady from the chimney.
Fourteen people made for a fuller yard than the Hollow's scattered households ever managed, everything packed closer together the way an old farmstead naturally gathered life around it.
Cal saw them coming from a distance and was already crossing the yard by the time they'd tied off, and Martha appeared from the direction of the house not long after, wiping her hands on her apron.
"They finally let you travel without him?" Martha said, looking at Grace with the satisfaction of somebody who'd been waiting to ask that question.
"I escaped," Grace said.
"About time." Martha glanced at Russ and gave him a nod, the easy kind reserved for somebody already familiar rather than a stranger needing sizing up. "Back again."
"Figured your plow missed me," Russ said.
"It's held up fine without you."
Russ's eyes had already drifted past both women toward the barn and the equipment he'd spent the better part of an afternoon crouched over on their last visit, and Martha caught the direction of his attention easily enough.
"He's not here to see me, is he," she said.
"I am," Grace said.
"Better answer."
Cal shook Russ's hand with the easy familiarity of two men who'd already spent real time working side by side.
"Wood's replaced," Cal said. "Share's sharpened too."
"I'll be the judge of that," Russ said, though there wasn't much heat behind it.
Cal laughed at that, short and genuine, and Grace could tell already that this part of the day, at least, was going to go easily.
Before anything else, Grace asked Cal and Martha to step off where the conversation wouldn't carry to the children playing near the porch.