The storm showed itself first in the light, which went strange and yellow in the middle of the afternoon, and then in the birds, which quit the cottonwoods all at once and went low over the creek toward the foothills. Elias straightened from the post he was setting and looked north. A wall of cloud stood over the pines, black as a bruise at its heart and torn white at its edges, and it was not drifting. It was building, piling higher even as he watched, and the air under it had gone still and close and smelling of iron.
Maren came out onto the porch with her hand shading her eyes. She needed no telling. "That will be on us by dark," she said.
"Sooner," Elias said. "And it will not be gentle."
They moved without argument, the three of them, in the practiced haste of people who know what weather can take from the unready. Elias and Willa got the cattle in from the creek pasture, driving them up at a trot while the wind began to find its voice in the pine tops, and shut them into the corral with the mule and Cinder, who was already restless, ears working, skin twitching under Elias's hand. "Easy, old son," Elias told him. "We have seen worse sky than this." Cinder did not look persuaded, and in honesty neither was he.
Maren was everywhere at once. She hauled the last of the split wood under the lean-to and stacked the garden tools in the barn, sent Willa for the lanterns and the oil, and wedged sacks of meal and flour up off the cabin floor onto the table, for hard rain could send water under any door. Elias climbed to the barn loft and dropped down hay enough for two days, forked it into the mangers, and checked the roof planks where a leak had shown in September. The wind was rising now, worrying the loose board on the gable, making the whole barn talk.
Then the lean-to began to go. A gust took it under its loose edge and lifted, and the poles strained and cracked in their lashings. Elias got there as Willa did, both of them throwing their weight on the crosspole while Maren came running with rope. Rain had not started but the air was full of driven dust and pine needles, stinging their faces. "Hold it!" Elias shouted, and Willa held, her boots skidding in the dirt, her hair whipped loose, while he and Maren lashed the pole down fresh, turn over turn, fingers clumsy with urgency. When it held at last they stood breathing hard, looking at one another with the brief, wild grin of people who have won a small battle they might have lost.
They got the stores in as the first rain came, not falling so much as arriving sideways in a gray sheet that erased the fence line and the creek in a breath. Chickens were gathered, complaining, into a crate in the barn. The rose bush by the cabin wall β Sarah Ellery's rose, bare now for autumn β Elias covered with an old grain sack weighted with stones, because Maren, passing with her arms full, had looked at it once and he had understood. Willa rescued laundry from the line, a quilt from the porch rail, and his bedroll, which she carried inside without comment and laid by the hearth. He saw it there when he ducked in, soaked to the shoulders, to report the corral gate chained and the stock standing close and trembling but safe.
Outside, the storm settled in to its real work. Rain hammered the roof. Wind tore at the lean-to they had saved and at every shutter and board of the little cabin, and the pines behind the house bowed and roared like surf. Water was already pooling on the porch boards where his bedroll had lain every night of his stay, and running in a dark sheet off the lean-to's edge. No man could sleep out there tonight. No man could even keep a blanket dry.
Maren stood in the middle of the one room, pushing wet hair back from her face, taking stock β table, hearth, two narrow beds against the walls where the sisters slept, and the floor between. Willa was wringing out her sleeves into a bucket, trying not to look as if she were waiting. Elias stood by the door with his hat in his hands, rain dripping from its brim, and began to say that the barn loft was dry enough and he had slept in worse, when Maren cut across him, calm, final, entirely herself.
"The loft ladder will be a waterfall by now, and the barn roof leaks on the north side, which you know as well as I do," she said. "You will sleep inside tonight, Elias. That is not an invitation to argue about. It is the weather deciding, and even you are not stubborn enough to out-argue weather."
Willa, behind her sister, hid a smile in the towel. Elias looked at the floor, at the hearth, at the pooling dark beyond the door, and put his hat down.
"No, ma'am," he said. "I do not expect I am."
Chapter 9
Three Blankets