He woke to gray light and quiet, and for a moment he did not know where he was, nor what the quiet meant. The storm had blown itself out in the night. Water dripped steadily from the eaves, a hen was making thoughtful noises somewhere, and through the cabin's one window came the pale, washed light of a morning after rain. Elias lay still on the middle blanket with the whole of it coming back to him, piece by piece, and underneath the remembering, like a hand turned palm up, disbelief.
He had slept the whole night through.
He knew it the way a man knows a healed bone by its ache being gone. There had been no surfacing at midnight, no start at the latch, no walk in the dark. The evening had gone down into sleep and the morning had come up out of it, unbroken, the way other men's nights were made. Ten years β ten years of creek banks and porch floors and camp blankets, of sleeping like a dog by a door β had ended, for one night at least, on a swept floor in a cabin on Cottonwood Creek, and he had not even felt it happen.
His Colt lay on the floorboards at his right hand, exactly where he had set it, untouched. The cylinder was cold. Dust and a faint pattern of his own placing told him what his body already knew: he had not reached for it once. He looked at it a long time. The gun had been the truest companion of his wandering, nearer than any friend, and last night, for the first time, he had not needed it. He did not pick it up in a hurry. He let it lie while he dressed his thoughts around the fact, and when he did take it up at last it was slowly, and he set it on the table while he rolled his blanket, like a tool and not a lifeline.
The other blankets were empty. Willa's lay rumpled by the wall, Maren's folded with her usual exactness. From outside came the sounds of the morning being put right: Willa's voice talking to the hens, a gate chain clinking, Maren at the woodpile, by the ring of the axe. The ordinary world had gone on and got up without him, and nobody had thought the worse of him for lying abed in the middle of the floor. The thought sat strangely in his chest, warm and uncomfortable both, like a coal carried too close.
He had died, in a way, in the spring of 1874, at a camp on the Canadian River, though his body had gone on walking around for ten years doing a passable imitation of a man. He had believed the price of Abram and Micah Hennessey and Ollie Ferris was that he would never rest again, and he had paid it nightly, faithfully, as if his wakefulness were a debt-collecting that did the dead some good. Lying there in the gray light, with his gun cold and the coffee smell beginning to come from the hearth, it came to him β not as forgiveness, which was not his to grant himself, but as a plain accounting β that the dead had never collected a minute of it. Willa had said something near it days before, without knowing: his wandering was a bill he had been paying to an empty house.
Maren came in with an armful of kindling and stopped, just briefly, when she saw him awake. She took in the rolled blanket, the gun on the table, his face, in one level glance. She had noticed, he understood. Perhaps she had lain awake herself a while in the night, listening to a stranger sleep the deep sleep of the unguarded ten feet from her door, and drawn her own conclusions. She said none of it. Maren Ellery was not a woman to make a man's private reckoning into table talk.
She set down the kindling, took the coffee pot from the hearth, and did a thing she had never done in all his weeks on the place. She did not set his tin cup on the porch rail. She did not hand it to Willa to carry out to the step. She set a place at the table inside β the real table, with a chair drawn up β poured his coffee there, black and steaming, and set the pot back down with a small, definite sound.
"Storm took two rails off the north end of the corral," she said. "And there is a tree down across the creek path. When you have had your coffee, we will look at it." She sat down across from him with her own cup, as if they had breakfasted so a hundred times.
Elias wrapped his hands around the cup and felt its heat come into his fingers. "Thank you," he said, and knew the words were too small and that she knew it too, and that it did not matter.
"You are welcome," Maren said, and drank her coffee, and outside the sun began to come through the wet pines.
Chapter 11
Tracks at the Creek
He found them where the creek bent below the pasture, in the soft ground the storm had left behind.