"Sela," he said, trying it like a step on new ice. It held. "Elias Crowe. Eli, mostly."
"I know," she said, and almost smiled. "The mare told me. You talk to horses more than you think."
That day she ate supper at the table while he was still in the room, and in the morning, for the first time, the bar was up before the coffee was.
Chapter 5
By the end of the first week she had quietly declared war on six years of one man letting a ranch go shabby around himself.
It began with the saddle, and then the bridle whose cheekpiece she re-soled with leather cut so true he checked it twice for the seam. Then the forge scrap heap β a disgrace he had been meaning to sort for years β appeared one afternoon in ordered rows: bar stock here, shoeing iron there, broken chain links in a bucket, a small pile of brass and copper gleaming separate like coins. She had also greased every hinge on the place, including the corral gate he had been lifting bodily off its sag for two years, which now swung silent and true and made him feel obscurely accused every time he used it.
"You don't have toβ" he began, at the scrap rows.
"I know the words," Sela said. "You said them at the saddle. Say the rest of the sentence this time."
He stood there with his hat in his hand. "The rest of the sentence?"
"Every man I have known finishes it with what I must do instead. My uncle finished it with marry. The soldiers finished it with move. The men at theβ" she stopped, and he did not ask at the what β "finished it with money. You are the first who seems to have no instead. So finish it true, Eli Crowe. I do not have to... what?"
"Anything," he said. "That's the whole sentence. You don't have to anything."
"Then understand me," she said, "because I will also say it once. I am not paying. I am not afraid, today, which is new and I am using it while it lasts. My hands need work the way the mare needs the leg walked. If I sit in your cabin and watch the door, I will go back to that post in my head and stay there. Work is how I come back from it. Do not take my work from me and call it kindness."
It shamed him how much arranging of his own conscience the sentence did. He had been keeping her, he saw, the way a man keeps a bird with a broken wing β tenderly, and in a box, and partly for the sake of the man who gets to be tender. Six years he had organized the world into things that could not ask anything of him, and in one week this woman with ruined wrists had re-sorted his scrap, his gates, and him.
"All right," he said. "Then I'll ask it straight from now on, same as I'd ask any hand. The north corral wants re-hanging before the weather turns. It's two-man work. I'd be obliged."
"It is one-woman and one-man work," she said, and went to fetch the hammer β his spare hammer, with the hickory handle worn to the shape of his grip, which she handled without comment and without asking, as one worker borrows from another.
They re-hung the gate together. She was stronger than her frame advertised and her eye for a level was better than his, and twice she corrected his measurement by a fraction and was twice right, and he found β to his own astonishment, there with the frost in the grass and her breath smoking beside his β that being corrected did not diminish him. It had been so long since another person's competence had been aimed at the same work as his that he had forgotten labor could be a conversation.
"For the mare's leg I want the white root that grows by the creek," she said. "And bark β willow, if your creek has willow. My mother poulticed with willow and clay. Your clay mash is good. Hers was better."
"Your mother's welcome to out-do me," he said. "Creek's got willow down by the gate bend. I'll show you."
"You will not show me," she said, standing, gathering the cups with the ease of a woman in her own kitchen, a thing he felt in his chest like a hand laid flat. "You will come with me, because the bank is iced and your knee is bad in the cold. I have watched you on the steps. Do not argue with a healer about a knee."
His knee was, in fact, bad in the cold, and had been since a winter march in Tennessee, and he had never said so to anyone living.
"A healer," he repeated.
"Today I am a healer," Sela said. "Some days I am only the woman at your table. You will have to learn to tell them apart by the tea."