There is a kind of chapter in a life that has no event in it and is nonetheless the load-bearing chapter, and this was that kind. Duchess grew round and slow and imperious, demanding her feed with the punctuality of a duchess indeed, and the foal inside her turned and kicked so visibly that Sela would rest her palm flat on the mare's flank at evening and report its opinions like diplomatic cables. He objects to the cold. He approves of the oats. He is practicing, in there, to be a horse, and finds the space insufficient. Juniper's shoulder healed under Sela's stitches until the scar was a pale seam; old Pruitt grew a coat like a bear and stood in it philosophical; and in the cabin, the bar across the door — which had gone down every night of November like a law of physics — began, sometime in that deep winter, simply to stay in its corner, gathering dust, unneeded: she had not moved it, and he had not mentioned it, and the door was shut against nothing now but weather.
She taught him words, in the evenings, as payment — her word — for the forge lessons, because he had begun teaching her the smith's trade in earnest after she proved she could swing a hammer all afternoon and judge a heat by color better by February than he had in his first year. Níłch'i was wind. Tł'óół was rope, a word they both already knew too many uses of, and they let that one lie quiet between them like a sleeping dog. Béésh was iron, knife, metal generally. Łį́į́' — that one took him a week, the click in it defeating his Virginian tongue until she laughed so hard at his attempts that she had to sit down — was horse. And hoghan was home: not a house, she explained, a home; the place built right, with the door facing the dawn, where the people inside it are in their correct relations to one another and the world.
"My hoghan has one room and a forge," Eli said. "And the door faces south."
"Then it is a house becoming a hoghan," she said, correcting his grip on the tongs with two fingers, professionally. "The door can be forgiven. The relations are coming along."
His shoulder — the old war wound, which ached in cold weather with the reliability of a debt collector — she treated through the deep weeks with a poultice of willow and clay and something bitter-smelling from her stores that she refused to name, on the grounds that a healer's secrets were her dowry and he had not yet earned all of them. The ache diminished to a whisper. He caught himself one day reaching up to the high shelf with that arm, full stretch, a thing he had not done in seven years without thinking first — and stood there with the flour tin in his hand understanding that she had been quietly, systematically, unbuilding his damages the way he had unbuilt hers, except that she was better at it, because she asked for help when she needed it and took it as a craft and not a confession.
"Eli," she said, in that season, apropos of nothing, while they watched the light go on the cliffs, "when I was tied to your post I believed my life had been decided by the worst people in it. It took me until the rain to understand the arithmetic was wrong. The worst people only ever get a vote. They do not get the count." The cliffs went rose, then rust, then ash. "Whatever comes in the spring — Calloway, his guns, his paper — it gets a vote. Not the count. I need you to remember I said it, because you have a habit of standing like a fence post in front of things, and I am telling you in advance that the count is mine."
"I remember everything you say," he said. "It's the forge's fault. Good acoustics."
"It is not the forge," she said, "but I will allow you the lie, because your truths are load-bearing and a man should rest a wall now and then."
Spring came closer. The creek rose and sang under its ice. And on the last night of February, walking back from the stable in the blue dusk, Eli saw — small, far, and unhurried — a single rider cross the north ridge against the sky, pause, and turn away; and the horses in the corral stood all facing north with their ears up, like a congregation that has heard, very faintly, the first note of a hymn it does not like.
Chapter 19
At Three Buttes, Ward Calloway was drinking in the middle of the day, which his household of eleven years' standing recognized the way sailors recognize a barometer's fall.