He gave his name as Elias Vale and asked if he had camped on their land without leave, because if he had, he would move on at once and trouble them no further. He said it plainly, standing below the pasture slope with his hat in his hands, and Maren, who had prepared herself for bluster or wheedling, found plainness harder to answer than either. She told him the creek bottom was Ellery land to the far bank, but that water was water, and no one named Ellery had ever grudged a traveler a drink or a night's grass for his horse. It was as close to welcome as she had come in a year, and Willa, beside her, ruined the dignity of it by smiling at the stranger outright.
"You passed last evening," Maren said. "You saw the place."
"I did, ma'am."
"Then you have seen the fence." She had not meant to say it. The words came out of the tired, tallying part of her that woke at three in the morning to count flour and firewood. She nodded toward the south line, where the cedar rails lay in the grass like the bones of something that had given up. "Half the creek pasture stands open. We lose the calves to the creek bottom and worse will find its way in by winter."
Elias looked where she pointed, and was quiet a moment in a way that was not hesitation but consideration, a man measuring a job with his eyes β posts, rails, distance, the lie of the ground β before he spoke. "That fence wants resetting more than mending," he said at last. "New posts where the old are rotted. Rails rehung. A week's work, maybe ten days, done right."
"Done right," Maren repeated. "And you know this because β "
"Because it is the work I have done, ma'am, one place and another, most of my life." He glanced at the barn, the corral, the woodpile, and she felt the whole ranch being read like a page and had to fight the urge to snatch it shut. "I am passing south. I have no outfit waiting, no wages owed me. I would mend your fence β the south line whole β for no pay. Meals only. What you eat, I will eat, and no more asked."
No pay. Maren had grown up in a country where men did not offer labor for nothing, and the year since her father's death had sharpened every lesson the country taught. A man who wants no wages wants something else, and she could enumerate the something elses in the dark. Her hand rested near the rifle she had set butt-down against her leg, and she did not pretend otherwise, and he did not pretend not to notice.
"Why," she said.
He considered that too, honestly, she thought, for the answer when it came had no polish on it. "Because the work is there and my hands are idle. Because your fence is down and winter is not far. And because a man who takes a wage owes an accounting of where he goes after, and I would rather owe nobody that." He turned the hat in his hands once. "If it does not suit, say so, and I will saddle up. No offense taken, and none meant."
Willa said, "Maren," in the soft voice she used for cornered animals and her sister alike, and Maren closed her eyes for one breath. She thought of the flour sack and the calves in the creek bottom and the wind that would come down that open pasture in January like a river of ice. She thought of her father's hand gripping hers. Keep it. A fence down was a place not kept, whatever her pride preferred.
"Terms, then," she said, and made her voice businesslike, because business was a fence of its own kind. "You work the south fence and such repairs as we agree on. You take your meals on the porch. You sleep on the porch, under the lean-to, with your bedroll β not in the barn, not in this house. You keep your distance from this cabin after dark and from my sister at all times. You do not ride our stock, you do not go through our papers or our stores, and when the fence stands, you go. If any of that chafes you, go now."
"It does not chafe, ma'am," Elias said, and put his hat back on, and she understood that the terms had suited him precisely because they were plain. "I will bring my gear up."
Willa watched him walk down to the cottonwood for his bedroll, her face alight with the simple pleasure of a problem halved, and Maren watched her sister watching him, and added one more term silently, to herself, where terms she was unsure of lived: that she would keep the rifle oiled, and her eyes open, and her hope β that small, dangerous stirring β on the shortest leash she owned.
Chapter 5
First Posts
Elias began at the creek end of the south fence at first light. He worked the way he did everything, without display and without pause: jacket off, sleeves turned, post-hole digger biting into the damp earth by the water, stones pried out with the bar and set aside in a row. By midmorning he had the first rotted post out of the ground and laid aside, its buried end soft as punk, black with the rot of years standing in wet soil.