Erik stood in his yard in the first snow and watched until the last rider was a dark thread on the white land. Then he went into the sod house, and hung the beaded vest on the peg by the door — Ingrid's peg, empty four winters — where a man puts the thing he will reach for first when he goes out into the weather.
Chapter 26 — First Snow
The snow came in the night, three weeks after the band went south, and it came the way Erik had learned to expect it on the northern prairie — without wind first, without warning, a great soft silence settling over the valley while men slept. He woke before dawn and knew it before he opened his eyes, by the quality of the quiet outside the sod walls and by the windmill standing still. All autumn the wheel had creaked and complained in every shift of air. This morning it said nothing.
He lit the lamp and dressed in the cold room, and Nils was already up, standing at the window in his shirt, looking out at a world made new.
"It kept off a long time," Nils said. "Longer than we had any right to ask."
"Long enough," Erik said. "That is what counts. Long enough for the horses to be under agency shelter, and long enough for us to get the last of the hay in."
He pulled on his boots and went out into it. The snow lay six inches deep and still falling, straight down through the windless air, flake on flake, covering the well yard, the trough, the path to the barn, the whole trampled ground where, not a month before, two armed lines of men had faced each other across his fence and not fired. The parley ground was white and smooth as a page no one had written on. Erik stood a moment in the falling snow with his bucket in his hand, and thought that the land itself seemed relieved to cover that autumn over.
The windmill wheel was rimed white, every spoke furred. He broke the thin ice on the trough with the heel of his hand, drew water, and carried it to the barn, where the two farm horses — the old roan gelding and the young black — stood blowing steam in the dim light and were glad of him. Work went on. Snow or no snow, the work went on: water drawn, stock fed, stalls forked clean, the cow milked, the separator turned. Nils took the axe to the woodpile, and Erik took the black horse's harness down to mend a cracked tug by the stove, awl and waxed thread in hand, and for a while there was no sound in the little house but the needle in leather and snow hissing faintly at the glass.
It was near noon when Pastor Lindberg came up the lane in his cutter, runners squeaking on the new snow. He had mail — the stage had got through before the storm closed the road — and among the letters, sealed with the agency's stamp, was one addressed in a clerk's careful hand to Mr. Erik Halvorsen.
Erik read it standing in the doorway, with the pastor stamping snow off his boots behind him.
The letter was short. Mr. Hollis wrote that the Red Willow band had come into the agency on the ninth, whole — every man, woman, and child accounted for, and the herd with them, pastured now on the agency bottoms with agency hay against the winter. He wrote that Mila's arm mended clean. He wrote that the territorial grand jury had found true bills against Obadiah Flint — rustling by proxy, inciting to riot, fraud in the matter of the townsite — and that Flint and Sikes were held for the spring term of court, Dutch Kramer with them, turned witness for the territory. And at the end, in a different ink, as if he had thought of it after, Hollis had added: Chief Gray Elk asks to be remembered to the man at the well.
Nils read it over his shoulder. "Indicted," he said. "Then it is a real thing. Not just talk at the well."
"It was always a real thing," Erik said. "Now it is a written thing. That is the difference. Paper lasts longer than anger." He folded the letter and put it in the tin box where he kept the deed and the marriage lines Pastor Lindberg had written for Ingrid and him, three winters gone.
The pastor stayed for coffee and for the midday meal, and before he left he stood in the yard looking up at the grave on the hill, where the snow had already smoothed the mound into the general white.
"She would have liked this autumn's ending, Erik," he said quietly. "Ingrid. She had a heart for strays of every kind."
"She would have had Mila at the table the first night," Erik said. "Before the band came. Before I had finished being afraid of the whole business. Ingrid was quicker than me at knowing a person."
"Aye," said Lindberg. "Most wives are quicker than us. It is the order of things." He climbed into his cutter. "Christmas in five weeks, Erik. The church will be warm. I expect to see both Halvorsens in their pew."
"You will," Erik said, and meant it.
When the cutter was gone down the white lane, Erik took the beaded vest from its peg by the door. It had hung there since the farewell — red willow branches worked in beads across the chest, and at the center, one drop of deep blue, the size of a thumbnail, for water. He turned it in his hands by the lamp. In Norway a girl's needlework was a language too; he had seen his mother's hands say things her mouth never would. He did not yet wear the vest. It was not a work garment, nor a Sunday one. It was a thing between — a promise in the making, like the year itself.