The second post was no better. The third came up in two pieces in his hands. But the fourth post stopped him.
He stood with it in the new light, turning it slowly, and his face, which the sisters had only seen arranged in its traveling quiet, changed. The post had not rotted. Its foot was sound wood, cedar still red and fragrant at the heart. It had been cut β sawn or axed clean through a hand's breadth above the ground line, the cut bright under its weathering, the work of a blade and a man with time to use it. Elias set it down gently, the way a man sets down evidence, and walked the line.
He found two more before the garden fence came in sight. One post cut through and its rails dragged off into the creek brush. Another merely loosened, rocked in its hole until a steer leaning β or a man pushing β would bring it down. The rest was honest decay, time and weather, the ordinary ruin of a place kept by too few hands. But those cut posts sat in the middle of the honest ruin like words in a letter written by a stranger, and Elias understood, with the old chill walking his spine, that the fallen fence was not only neglect. Somebody had helped it fall. Somebody had wanted this pasture open, this ranch undefended, these two women one misfortune closer to giving up and going.
He thought about saying so. He stood in the pasture with the cut post at his feet and rehearsed it β ma'am, this was done on purpose β and weighed what the sentence would cost. Fear, laid on a woman already carrying flour-counting and winter and grief, on the word of a drifter camped one night by her creek. Questions he could not yet answer: who, when, how often, whether they would come back. He stacked the cut posts apart from the rotted ones, where he would know them again, and went back to digging, and said nothing. Yet. It sat in him like a stone in a boot, and his work quickened in a way that had nothing to do with wages.
Willa arrived at noon with coffee in a tin cup, picking her way down the pasture in her brotherless boots β her father's old pair, stuffed at the toes β with the pot wrapped in a cloth against the heat. She set the cup on a sound post as if it were a table, poured with ceremony, and announced that a man digging holes deserved coffee that had not yet learned to be careful. The coffee was strong enough to stand a spoon in and Elias drank it gratefully and told her so, and she beamed as if he had complimented a cathedral.
"You talk less than anybody I ever met," she informed him, settling on the grass with her skirt tucked under her, plainly intending a visitation whether visits were in the terms or not. "Maren says that is a point in your favor. I am not so sure. Where are you from, Mr. Vale? And do not say 'the road.' Maren says the road, too, when people in town ask, and it is not an answer, it is a door shutting."
"Texas, first," he said. "A long while back."
"And people? Everybody has people somewhere, even if they are only the aggravating kind."
He turned the tin cup in his hands and found, to his own surprise, that he did not want to shut the door on this girl, who asked as her mother perhaps had asked, as if people were interesting rather than dangerous. "Had a mother who sang," he said. "That is most of what I keep." Willa nodded, satisfied out of all proportion, and began on the subject of the new calves, and the mare's temper, and the rose bush by the cabin wall that had been her mother's and bloomed out of season if it pleased β and Elias worked and listened, and the afternoon was, for whole minutes together, almost ordinary.
From the porch, too far to hear and near enough to see everything, Maren watched: her sister laughing on the grass, the drifter with his sleeves turned and the tin cup in his hand, the new posts standing one, two, three in a line that had not stood in a year β and the rifle across her knees, and her hand resting near it the whole while, because hope was one thing, and she had not survived this year by confusing it with sense.
Chapter 6
Cut Cedar
He waited until Willa had gone to the garden before he asked Maren to walk the south line with him. She came without a word, her father's rifle in the crook of her arm, her dark hair pinned back against the wind off Cottonwood Creek. Elias led her past the new posts he had set, their cedar still pale where his adze had dressed them, and stopped where the fence lay broken near the ash trees.