Chapter 6: The Long Night
Agnes had wedged the chair under the door handle the way her mother had taught her, in another century, in another house, and she lay on top of the quilts fully dressed, with her boots unlaced beside the bed and Thomas's old hunting knife in the drawer she could reach without sitting up. She had not expected to sleep. What she had not expected was the listening.
The house talked all night, the way it always did in a storm, and she had to learn a new grammar for it. Floorboards. She knew every floorboard in the place and could name them by their complaints β the one by the stove that ticked, the one outside her door that sighed β and now there were feet on them that were not hers, and the boards reported it like news. Men's feet. Heavy ones, careful ones. She heard the stove door open and close, twice, three times. She heard the scrape of the poker, the soft collapse of ash, the thump of a log laid in gently, the way Thomas used to lay it in so as not to wake her when he came in from the lambing shed.
They took turns, she gathered. She could tell by the pauses and the padding of different socks. Once, near two o'clock, a voice no louder than a kettle's whisper said, "Your turn's at four. I'll wake you," and another voice said, "Wake me at the gauge, not the clock. Wind's turning." And then, so quiet she might have dreamed it: "Mind the lady of the house don't wake to a cold stove."
The lady of the house. She lay there in the dark with her heart going like a girl's and tried to be afraid in the way she had planned to be afraid, and found the fear would not hold its shape. It kept slipping. An hour of nothing happening is a poor meal for fear. Two hours is starvation. She thought about Thomas instead, because the dark always brought him anyway: Thomas at fifty with a lamb in each arm, Thomas dead three winters in the ground and the house still set for his habits, the second mug washed and put back every morning out of nothing but momentum.
She thought about the four of them out there by her stove. Marcus, who had looked at her door and understood the chair before she thought of it, and had said, "You lock whatever you need to lock, ma'am," as if it were the most ordinary courtesy in the world. Darnell, whose hands could palm a soup bowl. Tommy, who joked because the quiet scared him worse than the storm. Old Eli, who had crossed himself over the stew when he thought no one was watching.
What sort of men, she wondered, fed a stove in shifts so a stranger would not wake cold?
Once, toward three, she heard a chair ease back and a man's voice, Tommy's, start some story too low to follow, and another man β Darnell, by the gravel of it β hush him with a kindness that surprised her: "Hush now. You'll wake the lady." The fire settled. And Agnes, who had locked her door against these men with her mother's chair, felt the lock go strange and ceremonial in the dark, like a hat she was wearing indoors.
The wind worked at the eaves. The snow came and came. Some time after four she heard the kettle lifted, heard water poured, heard a murmur that might have been grace or might have been a man talking in his sleep sitting up. Her eyelids went heavy as wet wool. She told herself she would rest them for a minute only, that she was too old and too frightened to truly sleep with four strangers in her house, four men whose names she had known for less than a day.
She slept.
It was not the light that woke her, though the light had changed β that thin blue-grey that comes before the sun clears the ridge in a Vermont winter. It was a sound, and for one confused moment, surfacing, she reached for the drawer before she remembered anything at all.
Then she remembered everything, and sat up slowly, and looked at the chair.
It was still there, wedged under the handle exactly as she had left it. Nobody had tested it. Nobody had needed to. She sat on the edge of the bed with her bare feet on the cold boards and listened to her whole house the way you listen after a long illness, to find out what still works.
The sound that had woken her came again, from outside, above β a hammer, unhurried, deliberate, striking in a rhythm like a man who knows the cold will punish hurry.
Agnes got up, took the chair away from the door herself, and went to the window to see what the strangers were doing to her roof.