He hung it back on its peg, and he and Nils set to the afternoon's mending: the fence line where the militia's horses had crowded and broken two rails, the gate hinge, the roof edge where the sod had slumped. They worked until the light went, two brothers in the falling snow, mending the year rail by rail, and the farm took the snow on its shoulders and settled, the way a man settles into a chair, for the winter.
Chapter 27 — The Winter
The winter shut down hard in December, the way the old men in town had promised it would, as if the season meant to make up in one month for its late beginning. The creek froze to its bed. The wind came out of the northwest for nine days together and the snow that had fallen soft in November went to iron. Erik wrote it all in the farm journal, in his square Norwegian hand, the entries short because the days were short: Dec. 3 — Wind. Nils to town for salt, back by dark. Dec. 9 — Wolf tracks at the woodpile. Dec. 14 — Letter finished to Mor. Will send with the agency trip.
The letters to Norway had waited two years in the tin box, some of them, begun and abandoned for want of postage money and, if Erik was honest, for want of any easy way to say what his life had become. This winter he finished them. He wrote to his mother in Sogn about the farm, about Nils grown tall, about the well that had not failed in the dry autumn. He wrote about the band and the stolen herd and the parley in his yard, and about a chief's daughter who had come to his trough three days afoot and half dead of thirst, and gone away on her father's horse with her arm in a sling and her head up. He wrote it plainly, the way he would have spoken it across a table, and when he was done he sat a long time with the pen in his hand, wondering what his mother would make of such a country, where a man's farm could be a battlefield at noon and a neighbor's yard by supper.
The agency trip came in the last week of January, in a bright, bitter thaw of sunlight that fooled no one. Hollis had sent word that the agency would buy potatoes, turnips, and salt pork against the band's winter stores, cash money, fair weigh-in. Erik loaded the wagon box with sacks from his root cellar — more than he sold, in the end, for he added two sacks of his own on top of the contract, and a side of bacon, and did not put them on the bill. Nils stayed to keep the farm. The road south was a white plain under a sky like blue glass, and the wagon runners sang all the way.
At the agency he delivered his load at the warehouse, took his pay and his receipt, and was walking back across the yard toward his team when he saw her.
Mila was crossing from the woodpile to the council house with an armload of split pine, her left arm bare of any sling, working as soundly as the women beside her. She saw him in the same moment. She did not drop her wood or make a show. She set it down in order on the pile, wiped her hands on her skirt, and came to meet him in the middle of the yard, where the agency flag snapped over them both.
"You came through the snow," she said.
"The road was good," Erik said. "Hard as a church floor. Your arm —"
"It is an arm again." She turned it once, palm up, palm down, the way a person shows a mended tool. "My father is well. Mato's wife has a son, born in the hard cold. He is loud. That is a good sign, the old women say."
"And the horses?"
"Fat on agency hay and full of complaints." She almost smiled — Mila's smiles were rationed things, and worth more for it. "They miss the coulee grass. Horses are conservatives, Erik Halvorsen. Like farmers."
He laughed, there in the yard, and two agency clerks turned to look. He asked after the winter and she asked after Nils, and after the farm, and whether the well had frozen — it had not, it never had, and she nodded as if that were exactly the news she had ridden over in her mind to hear. It was all said in five minutes, standing up, with the woodpile on one side and the flag on the other and twenty people in earshot, and nothing in it was forced and nothing in it was wasted.
"You are not wearing the vest," she said at last.
"I am saving it," Erik said. "For a day that deserves it."
"See that the moths do not get it first," she said, and picked up her wood again. "Spring is a day too, Erik."
He drove home under a sky going rose and gold, the empty wagon light behind the team, and thought about that all the way — spring is a day too — and did not notice the cold until he was unharnessing in his own yard by lantern light.
Nils had the stove hot and supper on. In February he spread his claim papers on the table — the quarter section north of Erik's, along the creek, filed at the land office in the autumn while the world was busy not shooting at itself. All winter he planned his sod shanty the way other young men plan campaigns: walls here, window south, a stable lean-to by spring. Erik drew the roof pitch for him on the back of a seed catalogue.
"You will be a poor neighbor," Erik told him. "You will borrow everything."
"I will be a rich neighbor," Nils said. "I will own everything you borrow first."