Chapter 6 #2
She kept it plain, the same way she'd kept it plain for Harlan. A woman and her husband had been traveling. A group of armed men, eight or ten of them, had come across them. The husband was dead. The woman had escaped, though not without cost.
"Where?" Cal asked.
Grace gave him a general direction without naming anything close to the Hollow, and without naming Rebecca at all.
"Headed this way?" Cal asked.
"Don't know."
"Following her?"
"No evidence of it. Just a warning, not a promise of trouble."
Martha nodded slowly, and Grace could see her weighing the difference between what Grace was certain of and what she wasn't, the same way Rebecca had once weighed it for her.
"We'll watch closer," Cal said. "Keep the kids in after dark. Check the fence line more than we have been."
"That's about what Harlan did too," Grace said.
Cal's mouth twitched at that. "Never thought I'd hear myself doing the same thing as Wade Harlan."
"Don't let it go to your head," Grace said, and that was that.
Cal took Russ toward the equipment shed not long after, and Grace watched Russ move through it with the ease of somebody checking on work he'd already started rather than seeing any of it for the first time.
He went straight to the walking plow, checked the replaced wood, then turned the sharpened share to catch the light.
"Better," Russ said, half to himself.
"Told you," Cal said.
Russ moved to the cultivator next, working the teeth with his thumb, checking how clean the old iron had come up and whether the joints moved freely under his hand. "This'll do."
Grace hung back near the shed door and let the two of them talk, catching maybe half of what passed between them — words like landside and moldboard that meant nothing to her but clearly meant everything to the pair standing over the old iron.
The seed drill still leaned untouched in the corner where Russ had left it the last time.
"Figured you'd leave that one alone again," Cal said.
"Figured right. That's a job for a slower season than this one."
Russ checked the harness next, then the replaced wood on the cultivator again, running a thumb along the grain. Cal's people had cleaned the old iron and worked oil into everything that needed to move. It was about where Russ had expected it to be when they left the last time.
"You did the work," Russ said. It wasn't quite a compliment, but it was close enough for Russ.
"Told you I would."
"Some men tell you a lot of things."
Cal huffed something like a laugh and didn't argue the point.
"Our north field's about ready," Grace said, once they'd settled near the shed to work out the timing. "Soil's drying faster than I expected."
"Ours is close," Cal said. "Week, maybe less."
This was the conversation they'd left hanging on the last visit — not whether the trade would happen, but who got the mules first, and when. Cal had wanted to know that then too, and Russ had told him the same thing he told him now.
"Can't run the mules dawn to dark on two fields at once," Russ said. "Wears them down faster than either of us wants for what's supposed to be a long season."
"So, who goes first?"
"I'll come back for the plow with the wagon and mules," Russ said. "Turn our ground with it first, then bring the team out here and turn yours. Cultivation's separate — I come back a second time once things are up enough to need it."
Cal considered that. "How long before you're back with the mules?"
"Depends some on weather, but figure a week after we're started. Maybe less."
"And if the weather doesn't cooperate for either of us?"
"Then we're both behind," Russ said, "and neither of us is worse off than we'd have been without the trade."
Cal seemed to like that answer better than a promise would have satisfied him. He glanced at Grace. "You always let him do the talking on the hard parts?"
"He's the one who has to keep the promise," Grace said. "Seemed only fair he set the terms."
Grace could see the shape of the whole arrangement settling into something real, the way it had been settling since their last visit — Russ returning soon with the wagon for the plow, the Hollow's ground turned first, then the mules coming out to turn Cal's, then again later for cultivation, and the implements eventually finding their way back to Cal's barn once both places had gotten what they needed from the year's planting.
Cal put his hand out. Russ looked at Grace first.
"Don't look at me," Grace said. "You're the one who has to walk behind the mules."
Russ shook Cal's hand, and the schedule was set.
While Cal and Russ worked out the finer details, Martha pulled Grace toward the house, where a length of gray wool sat spun into yarn on the small table by the window.
"Tell me what's wrong with it," Martha said, holding it up.
Grace turned it over in her hands, feeling for the unevenness she half expected and mostly couldn't identify.
"Too thick in places," Martha said, before Grace could guess wrong. "You're still letting your hand tense up when you draft it. Relax your grip or you'll never get it consistent."
"I've missed you too," Grace said.
"No, you haven't."
"Little bit."
Martha almost smiled at that, which for Martha counted as open affection. She set the yarn down and pulled a second piece from a basket near the loom — finer, more even, clearly her own work rather than a student's.
"This is what you're aiming for," Martha said. "Give it another season and you'll get there. Nobody spins well the first winter. I certainly didn't."
"You spin like you've been doing it forty years."
"Closer to fifty, if you count what my mother taught me before I had any interest in learning it." Martha held the wool up to the window light, checking it out of old habit. "Funny what comes back to you when it turns out to matter again."
"Where's your nurse?" Martha asked, not looking up from the yarn. "Haven't seen her come with you the last couple visits."
"Away for a while," Grace said, and left it there.
Martha glanced at her once, clearly noting the lack of anything further, and let it go without pushing a second time. That was one of the things Grace valued about her — Martha knew the difference between a question worth asking twice and one that wasn't hers to press.
"People are wearing through clothes faster now that everybody's working the fields harder," Martha said instead. "I could use more wool sooner than I thought I would."
"Shearing's coming," Grace said. "You'll have more than you can spin."
"That's the idea." Martha wound the yarn back onto its spindle, businesslike again. "You'll want to bring her by sometime, once she's back."
"I'll mention it," Grace said, and let the subject move on from there.
Back at the Hollow, the afternoon finally slowed down enough that Ben and Matthew were occupied with a real job — hauling water for the chickens under Walter's loose supervision — and Luke and Billy Jean found themselves with ten unclaimed minutes for the first time all day.
They sat on the top rail of the near fence, not talking for a while, watching the boys work.
"You worried about your dad?" Billy Jean asked, eventually.
"No."
She looked at him. "That wasn't convincing."
Luke admitted it, after a second. Not because he thought David couldn't handle whatever Charlotte turned out to be. Because David had already crossed half the country once, and Luke understood better than he used to exactly how much could go wrong on a road like that.
"My dad's only twenty miles away today," Billy Jean said, "and I've been listening for horses since noon."
That was smaller, but it was the same feeling, and knowing she carried some version of it too made Luke's own a little easier to sit with.
"Does it get easier?" Luke asked. "Waiting on somebody."
"I don't think so. You just get more used to doing it.
" She picked at a splinter on the fence rail, not looking at him.
"Last winter, every time Dad took the wagon out for supplies, I used to stand at the window until I saw it coming back.
Still do, honestly. Just don't make as big a show of it anymore. "
"That's not nothing."
"No. It's not." She glanced at him sideways. "You do the same thing. I've seen you."
Luke didn't argue that one, because it was true, and there wasn't much point pretending otherwise with somebody who'd apparently been paying enough attention to notice.
"You're different than when I first met you," Billy Jean said.
"Better or worse?"
She considered him longer than the question strictly required. "Haven't decided."
"Helpful."
She almost smiled, and Luke was still working out whether that counted as an answer when Matthew hollered from across the yard that a chicken had gotten loose, and the quiet ten minutes were over as fast as they'd started.
Luke got up. Billy Jean came with him without being asked, and that told him more than anything she'd said.
Grace realized the obvious problem only once the deal was struck and Cal's people had gone back to their own work — they'd ridden here on saddle horses, and no saddle horse was going to carry a walking plow and a cultivator twenty miles home.
"We're not taking any of it today," she said to Russ, half a question.
"Wasn't planning to," Russ said. "I'll bring the wagon and the mules out in a couple of days, load the plow and cultivator, and take them home. Once our ground's turned, I'll bring the team back and start on Cal's."
Cal nodded, unbothered. "It'll be sitting right here waiting."
That was the day's real accomplishment, Grace understood — not equipment in hand, but a schedule solid enough that the equipment would follow on its own, and the next trip already planned before this one was even finished.
They left before the afternoon got too far along, both of them sore enough in the saddle that neither pretended otherwise once they were a mile down the road.
"Still think riding was faster than the wagon would've been?" Russ asked.
"Ask me when I can feel my legs again."
"That's tomorrow."