14. Sacha
SACHA
Discipline is only fear wearing a better coat. She reached out in the firelight and took the coat.
We climbed back up to the cabin without a word between us.
The kiss had put everything on the table, and it had put it there in the wrong order, and I made the whole climb without one working sentence in either language.
Her glove was still balled in my fist. She had pushed both of them at me out on the ridge when her hands got too cold to work the camera, and one of them never made it back to her.
Inside, I hung the rifle on its pegs and stood facing the wall a good while longer than the task required.
After that I tied the day off with work, the way you tie off a limb.
The stovepipe came down and got cleaned, and it had not needed cleaning.
I split wood into a rack that would not take it.
I walked the fence line twice, found exactly what I had found the day before, which was nothing, and then stayed out in the glare with the cold tearing at my throat, waiting for something to come out of the trees and hand me a proper job.
The trees sent me nothing. That is the trouble with weather like that. It scrubs the world down to whatever you carried into it.
She gave me the rest of the morning. By the middle of the afternoon her charity had run out.
"That's the third trip you've made to that window," she said.
"It sticks."
"It stuck an hour ago, it stuck at noon, and it will stick tomorrow.
Consistency is the one thing that window has going for it.
" She had the Nikon in pieces on a dishcloth, the lens elements laid out in a row like something waiting to be diagnosed, and her eyes stayed down on them.
"You cleaned a pipe that was clean. You split wood that has nowhere to go.
You've worn a groove in that fence. If you'd like, I'll go break something for you. I hear the fixer's very good."
"The pipe drew badly."
"There was nothing wrong with the pipe and you know it." She breathed on a lens and held it up to the light. "You've been outrunning one woman inside two rooms since breakfast, and it's the least successful operation I've ever watched a professional run."
I put my palm flat to the sash and shoved. The frame went up an inch, the cold came in, and none of it did anybody any good.
"It opens now," I said.
"Opening and fixing are not the same word." She still did not look up. "You could try sitting in a chair. People manage it."
I have sat across a table from men negotiating for their lives and never lost the thread of it. I could not find the end of that conversation with both hands.
She went at the bookshelf before the light failed.
She had been circling that shelf since the afternoon she found it, and she chose that day to take it apart.
Every book I own ended up on the floorboards in stacks whose logic she declined to explain, and she worked her way along the boards with a dishcloth as though the dust had been the point from the beginning.
"This one belongs to the Ashland County Library," she said, tipping the spine at me. "This one is from Montana. You've been stealing books across state lines for years."
"They were discards."
"They were adopted." She squared the stack against her knee. "You hide the poetry behind a wall of dead cowboys, by the way. That's the most Sacha thing in this building, and I'm counting the guns."
Then she reached to the back of the bottom shelf, into the part of the shadow the lamp has never got into, and came up with something that had been lying flat behind all the rest.
It was a hardback. The cloth was green, the jacket had come off it years ago, and a title about grafting and the northern orchard sat stamped across the front in flaking gold.
"It came with the house," I said.
"It has your handwriting in it." She turned it so the margin faced me.
My own pencil crowded the white, and under the writing sat the small ugly diagram I had drawn of the south slope, with the fall line marked and four trees standing on it in a row.
"Page ninety-one says spring, if the ground gives. Whose spring is that?"
"It is a note in a book."
"You dated it."
"A man buys forty acres. He reads about what grows on it."
"A man who is leaving does not read about grafting.
" She flattened the book on her palm and read it out in the voice a nurse keeps for a chart.
"A graft takes four years at the very least before it tells you whether it took.
That's the first paragraph. It's practically the opening line.
" She looked up. "That's not a book about a house.
That's a book about standing on that slope four springs from now. "
The fire shifted and the room went orange and then dull, and I stood there holding an armload of wood for no reason I could have defended.
"Put it back," I said.
"I'd rather not."
"I am asking you."
"You keep waving the passports at me like they're the worst thing in this house.
" She closed the book and kept hold of it.
"They're not. Anybody can buy a name. This is the worst thing in your house.
There are three invented men locked in that room, and there is one real spring in pencil, hidden behind the cowboys. "
I fed the fire, because my hands wanted a job.
Then I cooked, because that is the other trick they perform without consulting me, and because a man at a stove has his back to the room and cannot be looked at directly.
There was a hare I had taken before the storm, half a sack of onions going soft, and the end of the good flour.
It turned out better than it had any right to.
She ate two platefuls and set her fork down.
"So here's my question," she said.
"You have asked eleven of them since noon."
"This is the one the others were rehearsing for." She pushed the plate aside, set her forearms on the table, and looked at me the way she looks into a wound, all the way down to the floor of it. "What do you think happens tonight?"
"I have not decided."
"You've decided four times. I watched every one of them. You settled it at the fence and unsettled it at the woodpile."
"That is not a fair account."
"It's the kind version. I left the window out of it."
Behind me Tank groaned and rolled onto his back with all four legs in the air, an indecent hundred and forty pounds of animal with nothing at stake.
"I need to say a thing badly," I said. "I have no better way to say it."
"Then say it badly. I've heard your jokes, so my expectations are managed."
So I put the truth on the table in the plainest words I own, and I own very few, and I dressed none of them.
"I have not wanted anything in three years."
"I know."
"You do not. Grief arrives, and then one day it packs its bag and goes.
What I did was not that. I stripped the whole apparatus out of myself the way I strip a weapon, deliberately, in order, and I left the parts where they fell.
A man who wants something can be reached.
Being unreachable was the only work I had left.
" My hands lay flat on the table, steady the way they have stayed steady through a great deal worse than a conversation.
"You put it back together. You did it inside nine days, without asking, while talking almost continuously about a dog. Now I cannot get it apart again."
"Then stop trying to take it apart."
"You are asking me to walk around unarmed.
" The words came out with corners on them.
"I do not know how to do that. I do not know how to sit still and let somebody in.
Nobody taught me, I have not practiced in a long time, and every instinct that has kept me breathing for fifteen years is on its feet telling me that what I am about to do will get us both killed. "
"Is it wrong?"
"It is catastrophic."
"That isn't what I asked."
My own training went on talking the whole while.
It is not a voice. It is closer to a hand laid on the back of my neck, and it wanted what it always wants.
It wanted the angles of the room. It wanted the distance from her chair to the door.
It wanted an accounting of everything a man surrenders on the day he can no longer walk out of a room without looking back.
It laid all of that in front of me in its usual order, patient and correct and entirely certain.
Underneath it, for the first time since a night three years ago I have never described to anybody, something else stood up and said it did not care.
"Can I tell you what I've got?" she said. "I've been sitting on it since the snow."
"I expect you will tell me either way."
"There are two of you in that chair." She held up a finger.
"One of them just told me the truth with his hands flat on a table so I wouldn't see them shake.
" She held up a second. "The other one left days ago.
He's been standing in the corner of this room being unbearably gentle with me from the moment that phone rang, because he decided he was going to lose me before the plows came through, and he's been practicing. "
I gave her no answer. There was none available that was not also a confession.
"I've had the gone one," she said. "Two days of that man is plenty.
He's polite, he holds doors, and I can't stand him.
" She leaned in. "So if the choice is the version of you that's afraid and the version already walking to the car, I'll take afraid.
Every time. Afraid is at least in the room with me. "
"You are asking for the worse man."
"I'm asking for the one who's here."
A long quiet followed, and the fire did all the talking in it. She let it run. She is the only person I have ever met who can leave a silence alone.
"Say it plainly," I said at last. "I want it in words."
"You think I don't know my own mind?"
"I know exactly how sure you are. In two days you will be on a road, and I will not have you telling yourself afterward that anything in this house was taken from you."
She stood up. She took her time about it.
"I want this," she said. "I want it tonight, and tomorrow, and for however many hours the county leaves us after that.
I'm choosing it with my eyes open and both feet on the floor.
I won't thank you for it, I won't apologize for it, and I won't stand in your kitchen in two days pretending it happened to me while I wasn't looking.
" She raised an eyebrow. "Is that plain enough, or would you like it in writing? I know where the cards are."
"You have made yourself understood."
"Now do yours, on the same terms."
"I want you," I said. "I have wanted you since the night you told me some things are worth freezing for, and I have been lying about it since roughly that hour, to you, and with a good deal more effort to myself."
"That," she said, "was not badly done."
"I have had all day to work on it."
Tank got there ahead of us both.
He had spent six years treating that bed as jointly held property and the last nine nights treating it as hers, and he reached it before either of us could, poured himself down the middle, and laid his head on the second pillow with the serenity of an animal nobody has ever asked to leave anywhere.
"You are not sleeping there," I said.
He thumped his tail.
"Get down."
He thumped it twice more, then looked past me altogether, to Lily, for the appeal.
"Don't look at me," she said. "I'm compromised."
I took him by the collar. In six years I had not once put that dog off a bed, a chair, a coat, or a doorway, and he went the way an old soldier goes when he is told the war is over and that he has somehow lost it, in a manner nobody intends to explain.
He lowered himself onto the rug by the stove one end at a time.
Then he pushed a long breath out through his nose, and there is no honest way to describe that sound except as the sigh of a disappointed parent.
"He's going to bring this up later," Lily said.
"He brings everything up later."
Then she put her hand out, palm up, and left it there, offering me no help at all.
I have walked into rooms I did not expect to walk out of.
I went through a stairwell door in Rostov once knowing the count on the far side was three and the count on mine was me.
None of it cost what that hand cost, held out in the middle of my own house with nothing behind it but a woman who would be gone inside two days, who knew it, and who wanted me anyway.
I gave her the glove back first. It seemed important to have my hands empty.
She took my hand and led me eight feet across my own house like the dark in me was nothing she had not seen before. So for the first time in three years, I stopped bracing for the fall, and I followed her into it.