Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
The first snow came on a Thursday.
At breakfast the sky was clear enough that Hannah left the washing on the line.
By ten the mountains had disappeared. Not gradually, not the way clouds came in Peoria, one bank at a time, but all at once, as though someone had drawn a curtain across the western sky, and where there had been white peaks an hour earlier there was now only grey.
Thomas stood in the yard looking west. Hannah came onto the porch with a basket against her hip.
“Snow?” she said.
“Yes.”
She followed his gaze. The wind had begun to rise. It caught her skirt and sent one of the sheets snapping hard on the line.
“How soon?”
“Soon enough. Cattle are in the north pasture. We were going to bring them down next week.”
“And now?”
“Now we do it today.”
Hannah watched him tighten the cinch on his horse. Harlan was already saddling at the rail. The two men worked the way they always worked, quickly, without talking, their hands doing things their hands had done a hundred times. Hannah stood on the porch holding her basket.
“Will you be long?” she said.
Thomas glanced toward the sky. “Few hours if they move easy.”
“And if they don’t?”
“We’ll still bring them down.”
That was not an answer. Hannah knew better than to ask for another one.
Thomas put his foot in the stirrup. Then he stopped and looked at her, and something went through his face — not worry, exactly, but the weight of leaving, the knowledge that he was riding into weather and she was staying, and he leaned down and kissed her.
Brief, not careless. When he drew back his eyes stayed on hers.
“Keep Lucy in when she gets home.”
“I will.”
The two men rode north until they disappeared beyond the rise, and stood on the porch after they were gone, and the first cold drop struck her cheek. Rain. For the moment. Hannah went after the washing.
By noon the rain had become sleet.
Lucy came home early. A neighbour had collected her from the schoolhouse with two other children. Hannah brought her inside and hung her wet coat near the stove and said nothing about the weather, because Lucy had grown up on this ranch and knew what sleet meant as well as Hannah did.
“Papa went for the cattle?” Lucy said.
“Yes. North pasture.”
Lucy looked toward the window. “He should’ve gone yesterday. He said it might snow. Harlan said it wouldn’t.”
Hannah put another piece of wood into the stove. “Your father evidently decided today was soon enough.”
Lucy was quiet a moment. Then: “Are you sleeping in Papa’s room now?”
Hannah’s hand stopped on the stove lid. The question sat in the kitchen like a dropped plate. Lucy’s face was pale and set — not the hot anger of the braid morning but something colder, something that had been waiting.
“No,” Hannah said carefully. “I sleep in the front room.”
“Nellie said when people get married they sleep in the same room.”
“People do things in their own time.”
“Mama slept in Papa’s room.”
Hannah set the stove lid down. She turned to Lucy and gave her the truth, because this child deserved truth more than comfort.
“Your father gave me my own room because we had only just met. When things change between us, that will be between your father and me.”
Lucy’s chin trembled. “You’re going to take everything.”
“I’m not taking anything, Lucy.”
“The pantry. The braids. The cupboards. Now the bedroom.” Her voice cracked. “She’s only been dead a year.”
“Fourteen months.”
“It’s not enough.”
Hannah looked at this child — ten years old, grief bigger than her body could hold, watching every piece of her mother’s house get rearranged by a stranger — and she did not reach for her, because reaching would have been wrong.
Lucy needed to stand in her anger. She needed someone to hold still while she threw it.
“No,” Hannah said. “It isn’t.”
Lucy stared at her. She had expected a fight, or comfort, or explanation. She had not expected agreement.
“May I help with supper?” Lucy said after a while, and her voice was smaller.
Hannah considered her.
“Yes. You may cut the beans.”
They worked at the table for the next half hour, Lucy with the beans, Hannah with the bread, and the storm strengthened around them. Hannah heard it in the chimney and in the way the house shifted on its foundation when the gusts came, until Lucy looked at the clock.
“It gets dark earlier when it snows,” Lucy said.
“Yes.”
“Papa will be back before dark.”
It was not a question. Hannah put the lid on the pot.
“I expect so.”
Lucy cut another bean. She was cutting them very carefully, each one the same length, giving the knife more attention than the beans required. “Mama hated when he was late.”
The knife in Hannah’s hand stopped. She set it down.
“Did she?”
“She used to walk to the window.”
Hannah looked toward it. She had been doing precisely that for the past hour: going to the window, looking at the yard, seeing nothing but sleet, going back to work.
She had not known she was doing what Sarah used to do.
She had not needed to know, because it was the same whether you knew it or not.
The same gestures, the same window Sarah had looked through, and Hannah stood in front of it now and thought about that.
“I suppose waiting is much the same whoever does it,” she said.
Lucy pushed the cut beans into a bowl. “Mama said ranchers have no sense when cattle are involved.”
Hannah smiled. “Your mother sounds like a sensible woman.”
Lucy smiled too. It was the first time Sarah’s name had entered the room without either of them becoming careful around it, and Hannah was glad, and the gladness and the worry sat side by side in her chest, and she let them both stay.
Something cracked against the side of the house and Lucy jumped. Hannah went to the window, but the sleet had become snow, driving sideways, and the yard was gone and the barn was barely visible.
At five she put supper aside. At half past five Lucy stopped pretending to read. At six Hannah lit another lamp, and the lighting of it felt like an admission: the admission that it was dark and Thomas was not home and the storm was not stopping.
“Maybe they’re in the barn,” Lucy said.
“They would have come in.”
Lucy’s eyes went to the window. Hannah had begun to hate the window: the blankness of it, the snow against the glass, the way it gave her nothing every time she went to it.
She checked the stove. It needed no attention. She checked anyway. Her hands needed something to do or they would shake.
There was nothing useful she could do. That was the difficulty.
If Thomas had been ill she could have nursed him.
If something had broken she could have mended it.
Work, cook, clean — any of that. But she could not stand in a kitchen and make a man come home through a blizzard, and the not-being-able was worse than any work she had ever done.
Lucy had become very quiet. She was sitting at the table with her book closed and her hands in her lap, and she was looking at the window the way Hannah was looking at the window, and Lucy had sat in this kitchen before and waited for someone who did not come home.
Not Thomas, not that time, but the waiting was the same, and the window was the same, and Lucy was remembering.
Hannah sat beside her.
“Your father knows this country,” she said.
Lucy nodded.
“Harlan is with him.”
Another nod.
“They may have had trouble moving the cattle.”
“Yes.”
Hannah was saying these things for both of them. She was saying them the way Mrs. Corliss had said I shall see that you are looked after, because the saying was a thing you could do when there was nothing else to do, and it filled the silence, even if it could not fill the waiting.
Lucy closed her book and leaned against Hannah.
The movement came without warning: Lucy’s shoulder against her arm, Lucy’s weight tipping sideways into her the way a child tips against a wall she trusts to hold.
Hannah held still a moment. Then she put her arm around the girl and held her, and they sat together in the kitchen listening to the storm, and Hannah felt the warmth of Lucy against her side and the cold of the window against her face and the two things at once — the having and the fearing — and she held on to both.
At seven Hannah heard a horse.
She was out of the chair before she knew she had moved. Lucy ran to the window.
“Papa!”
Hannah reached the door. Cold struck her face. A rider came through the snow — one rider, bent against the weather, snow covering his hat and shoulders — and Hannah’s chest seized, because there should be two and there was one, and for three seconds she could not breathe.
Then a second shape came through behind him, and the breathing came back.
Thomas was first. He rode into the yard and swung down, and his hand stayed on the saddle a moment after his feet hit the ground, and Hannah saw the staying, the way his weight leaned into the horse, and she went down the steps into the snow.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.” His voice was rough, used up, scraped out by seven hours of wind and calling.
She reached him. Snow had melted against his face and frozen in the folds of his coat. One sleeve was stiff with ice. She put her hand on his arm and felt the cold through the cloth, deep cold, the kind that goes into the muscle and stays.
“Come inside.”
“I need to see to the horses.”
“Harlan can do it.”
Thomas shook his head, and Hannah caught his arm — caught it hard, harder than she meant to, because she had spent three hours sitting in his kitchen watching his window and holding his daughter and her hands had been steady the whole time and they were not steady now.
“Thomas.”
He looked at her. Whatever he saw in her face stopped the argument. He turned to Harlan. Harlan nodded. “I’ll see to them.”