After that morning the work found its rhythm, and the days began to fit together the way well-cut rails fit their posts, each one plain and necessary. Elias rose before first light from his bedroll on the porch, rolled it tight, and set his Colt where it always was, within reach, while he washed in cold creek water and drank the coffee Willa left warming on the hearth edge. By the time the sun cleared the pines he was on the south line with adze and maul, his dun gelding Cinder dozing in the corral shade.
Maren worked as hard as any hand he had ever known. She ran the house and the garden and the stock without complaint, mended harness with neat, angry stitches, and kept her father's rifle oiled and ready by the door. She did not hover over his work. Twice a day she walked the line he had finished, sighted along it with a squint, tested a post with her boot, and if it satisfied her she gave the smallest nod and went on. From Maren Ellery, Elias learned, a nod like that was wages better than coin.
Willa was the weather of the place, changeable and bright. She brought his noon meal down to the fence on a tin plate β beans, salt pork, cornbread still warm from the pan β and stayed to talk while he ate sitting on a stump. She asked him about San Tomas, about the Canadian River, about whether Cinder had ever thrown him, about towns where the buildings were made of brick. He answered in his spare way, and found, to his surprise, that her questions did not tire him. Sometimes she brought the tin coffee cup twice, forgetting she had already come, because she liked an excuse to leave the weeding.
Small kindnesses accumulated the way small savings do, unnoticed until they amounted to something. Willa darned his spare shirt where a nail had torn it, without asking, and left it folded on his bedroll. Maren, who had at first set his plate at the far end of the porch as if marking a border, began setting it nearer the door, where the lamplight fell. Elias split a week's firewood without being asked and stacked it tight under the lean-to. He reshod their mule, patched the corral gate so it swung true on its hinges, and showed Willa how to grease the pump handle so it no longer screamed.
The garden gave up the last of its beans and squash. Together, in the unspoken division that had grown up between them, they lifted the potatoes and stored them in the root hollow under the cabin, and Maren pickled what could be pickled against the winter. Elias dug out the choked place in the creek run so the cattle could drink without miring. In the barn he found Thomas Ellery's tools kept clean and hung in order, and he used them carefully and put each one back in its place, and Maren, seeing it, said nothing, which he understood was a kind of thanks.
He ate at the porch edge still, by the terms they had made. In the evenings he sat with his back against the porch post and his coffee going cold, and the sisters sat sometimes on the steps above him, shelling peas or mending, and talked about ordinary things β a neighbor's new well, the price of flour, whether the Apache band in the foothills would come down to trade before the cold. Smoke rose thin into the blue dusk. It was as near to domestic peace as Elias had come in ten years, and he did not trust it, and he cherished it, both at once.
His sleep did not mend with the fence. That part stayed broken. He slept as he had slept on a hundred porch floors and creek banks, in snatches, surfacing at every small sound β an owl, a coyote worrying far off, a board settling, Cinder stamping in the corral. Each time he came awake his hand was already moving toward his gun before his mind caught up, and each time he lay listening to the dark runnel of Cottonwood Creek and measured out the hours until work would make the day bearable. Sometimes he rose in the black middle of the night and walked the fence line he had built, testing posts in the dark like a man counting beads, until weariness took him back to his blankets for another shallow hour.
Willa noticed, because Willa noticed everything. "You do not sleep," she said one morning, not accusing, just stating it as she would state rain.
"I sleep enough," he said.
"You sleep like a dog by a door," she said. "One ear up." She handed him his coffee and went off to the garden, leaving him to consider that a girl of seventeen had summed up ten years of his life in a sentence, and that she had not been unkind in the saying. Maren, passing with an armful of kindling, heard and said nothing at all, but that evening his plate appeared with an extra piece of cornbread on it, still warm, and no word attached.
Chapter 8
Storm Coming