Chapter 11 #2
Lucy came running from the porch. “Papa!” She hit him hard enough to rock him back a step, and Thomas caught her with one arm and held her against his coat, and his hand was shaking. Hannah could see it, the tremor in his fingers as he held the back of Lucy’s head. His hand was shaking.
“Inside,” Hannah said. “Both of you.”
Thomas obeyed. Hannah got his coat off in the kitchen.
The shirt beneath was wet through. She hung the coat near the stove and put a cup of coffee into his hands and watched him drink it.
Her own hands were shaking now — finally, after all the hours of steadiness, now that there was no reason for them to shake, they shook — and she turned away and gripped the edge of the stove until they stopped.
Thomas was home. Harlan was seeing to the horses. The cattle were down. There was nothing to be afraid of. She unclenched her hands and went to heat the supper.
Harlan stayed to eat. He told them what had happened without making much of it.
The cattle had scattered when the sleet began.
One group broke toward higher ground instead of following the herd.
By the time Thomas and Harlan turned them, the rain had become snow.
“Couldn’t see twenty yards by then,” Harlan said, and went on eating, and Thomas went on eating, and the two men sat at the table putting food into themselves with the steady efficiency of men who had been cold a long time and were warm now and intended to fill every part of the warmth before they thought about anything else.
Hannah turned to Thomas. “How many head?”
He told her. It was more than she had imagined.
“You went out in that storm for all of them.”
“Couldn’t leave them.”
Thomas’s brows rose. “That’s our winter income.”
The word hit — our — and Hannah heard it land. The cattle were how he fed his family, and his family now included her.
She looked at her plate and ate, and did not say anything else about it.
Lucy fell asleep at the table with her head on her arms. Thomas carried her upstairs the way he had carried her away from her mother’s bedside, carefully, without waking her, and came back down.
Harlan had gone back to his cabin. The kitchen was quiet except for the wind, and Hannah stood at the sink with a dish in her hands and the wash water cooling.
Thomas came up behind her. She could feel him there, the heat of him, his presence in the room, and she stood at the sink and looked at the dish in her hands and kept her back to him.
“You frightened me,” she said.
Thomas was quiet.
“There was no sense in it. I knew you had Harlan. I knew you knew the country. But when it grew dark and you were not home —”
She stopped. She put the dish down. She turned around.
Thomas was close. He was watching her face the way he watched her face when she said something he needed to hear more than once, carefully, all the way through, not interrupting.
“I minded,” she said. “Very much.”
Thomas looked at her, and the kitchen was quiet, and Hannah could feel the hours of waiting still in her body.
The window, the clock, the one rider coming through the snow before the second appeared.
She could feel the relief, which was larger than the waiting and had nowhere to go, and she could feel Thomas standing in front of her with his hair still damp from the snow, alive, warm, home.
He took her face between his hands and kissed her.
There was nothing careful about it. Nothing measured.
Nothing held back. Hannah caught the front of his shirt and held on, and Thomas drew her against him, and his mouth was warm and his hands were in her hair, and a pin struck the floor, and neither of them stopped.
Hannah’s back met the edge of the table and Thomas’s arm went around her waist and she could feel his heart through his shirt, and hers through her dress, and for a long time there was nothing in the kitchen but the two of them and the storm outside and the warmth between them.
When Thomas broke the kiss his forehead came to rest against hers. His breathing was rough. So was hers. His hands were still in her hair, one at the back of her head, one at her neck, and Hannah’s fists were still in his shirt, and neither of them let go.
“Hannah,” he said.
She kept her eyes closed. If she opened them she would have to think about what came next, and thinking was the last thing she wanted. She wanted to stand in this kitchen with her hands in his shirt and his breath on her face and not think about anything.
Thomas’s thumb moved against her neck. “Stay with me tonight.”
Hannah opened her eyes.
He was looking at her, somewhere between asking and telling, the place where a man puts a thing down and waits to see if the other person will pick it up.
“Yes,” she said.
Thomas kissed her again — slower, his hand at her waist, the urgency still in it but steadied now, held — and then he drew back and took her hand.
Upstairs. The storm still going, Lucy asleep behind her door.
Hannah walked up the stairs with her hair half down and the taste of him on her mouth.
Thomas opened his door instead of hers. She went through it.
Hannah stood in his room in the dark. She could hear the wind and the snow against the glass and Thomas breathing beside her, and everything was strange: the new room, the different bed, the man she had married standing close enough to touch and waiting for her to tell him it was still all right.
She reached for him in the dark and found his hand, and held it.
Thomas’s other hand came to her face, gently, his thumb along her cheekbone the way it had moved along it in the kitchen, and he kissed her once more, carefully, as though he were learning the shape of something he intended to keep.
Then the careful part was over.