It was heavier work than either of them had budgeted for. Six years of frost heave and settling gravel had married the cedar to the earth, and posts, Eli reflected, digging, do not know they are finished being posts. They hold on with the whole of their buried length. He dug the hole out wide; Sela rocked the post in widening arcs, her whole weight in it, saying nothing; and at the end it came up the way a tooth comes β suddenly, with a sucking sound from the wet earth, four feet of buried cedar dark as walnut, and the two of them stood looking down at the hole like mourners at a very small, very complicated funeral.
"No wire," Sela said. "No staples left in him. Look."
The post lay on the grass between them, scarred by six winters, by the nicks of a hundred tightenings, by β on its north face, at the height of a woman's shoulders β a pale, worn band where rawhide had once eaten the weathered surface bright.
"Firewood's the obvious answer," Eli said. "It's what a post would expect."
"It is not firewood," Sela said. "Firewood is how you make a thing stop existing. I have had enough of men making things stop existing to settle them. We are going to make it into something that keeps things." She ran her thumb over the pale band. "You have the hands for it. I have seen your hinges. A box, Eli. Long, for keeping β papers, letters, whatever a life collects that it does not want to lose. And on the lidβ" she stopped, which for her was an event β "on the lid, you will carve what you think it should say. I will not tell you. A gift that has been dictated is a bill."
He worked on it in the evenings for three weeks, at the bench by the forge, with the post first sawn and planed into boards that smelled of cedar and old weather. The pale rawhide band, by the geometry of saws, ended up in the board that became the lid, running across it like a light-colored river across a dark field; he considered planing it away and then, understanding himself, left it exactly where it was. Some of it is the lid now, he thought. That's right. That's honest joinery.
For the carving he chose β after a false start with a star, discarded, and a creek, discarded β the thing the hollow itself kept suggesting at every hour: a horse, running. Not standing, not rearing for a circus or a brand: running at the full stretch, mane and tail streaming, over a line of open ground; and above it, where a lesser carving would put a sun, he carved nothing at all β just the cedar left smooth and bare, a whole polished sky of nothing, which somehow said sky better than any sun could. Under the running horse, in his careful blacksmith's lettering, he cut three small words, and then sat looking at them a long while before he decided they were true enough to keep: No one tied.
He gave it to her after supper, without ceremony, which was his ceremony: set it on the table between the plates while she was reaching for the coffee, as a man might set down a loaf.
Sela looked at it for a long moment. She lifted the lid on its wooden hinge-pins. She ran her fingers over the running horse, over the bare sky, over the pale band crossing the lid like a scar the wood had decided to keep, and over the three words. Her face did the thing it had done in the rain.
"You left the mark on it," she said.
"I left the truth on it. The mark's part of the truth. The horse is the bigger part."
"It is the same horse," she said quietly. "That is what you have carved, Eli, whether you know it or not. The mark is on the lid but the horse is running over the top of it, and the sky is open. The mark is not the lid. The horse is the lid." She closed it, gently, and put both her hands flat on it, the way she had once put her hand flat on the post itself, in the dark, in January. "It will hold my mother's band when I am old. And the dismissal paper, in the dark, in good company. And whatever else this life collects." She looked up. "You have made a box out of the worst thing, and it is the finest thing in this house. Do you understand what you did?"
"I made a box," Eli said.
"You made a box," Sela agreed, and smiled the smile that had ended his wandering without his permission months before he'd admitted it. "It is your way. Your sentences are also like this. Short, and they hold everything."
Chapter 28
The foal came in the night, as first foals do, at the hour when all the watches are thinnest β and it was Sela, sleeping in the stable on the blanket roll she had refused to surrender, who was there for the beginning of it, and Eli, arriving at a run with the lantern in answer to a call that had not needed to be loud, who was there for the rest.