She walked out toward the creek with the basket on her arm, wrapped wrists and all, upright as a fence post in her ragged calico, and Eli Crowe β who had refused the help of neighbors, of the territory, of God on certain documented occasions β pulled his coat on and followed her down to the willows to be instructed about bark.
Chapter 6
On the ninth morning the mare walked the length of the stall and back without favoring the leg, and Sela, who had been watching from the door with her whole body the way a person watches weather come over a ridge, let out a breath she had apparently been holding for nine days.
"She will run again," she said.
"She'll run again," Eli agreed. "Not soon. But the leg's hers now, not the rope's."
"Duchess," Sela said. He looked at her. "Her name. You have been calling her 'the mare' and 'girl' for nine days, and she answers to girl, but her name is Duchess. My father named her for the way she holds her head when she is insulted."
"She was insulted plenty," he said. "She held it fine."
"She is vain and she is brave," Sela said, with enormous seriousness, stroking the chestnut's neck while the mare leaned her great head, gently and entirely without dignity, into her shoulder. "Like all the best of us."
It startled a laugh out of him β the first one, he realized, that the hollow had heard from him in longer than he could count, and Sela looked at him sideways with a satisfaction she did not bother to hide, like a woman who has won a small private wager with herself.
Her wrists had scabbed over clean. She no longer wrapped them in the daytime, and the marks were going from wounds to scars, which is a change like a season turning: the same country, differently endured. She worked bare-wristed now, and if the sight of the ridged pink lines troubled her she gave no sign; she had begun instead to wear her sleeves pushed up like a blacksmith's apprentice, which she effectively was β she could dress a hoof rasp cleaner than he could by the end of the second week, and her hammer arm, once it trusted itself again, was tireless.
Talk came back to the ranch the way birds come back to a creek in a thaw β a few at first, testing. She asked about the forge work and he explained it; he asked about the plants she gathered and she explained that too, and neither explanation was short, because it turned out that both of them, starved of listeners for years, had whole stored-up lectures in them like grain in a bin.
"The white root is for swelling," she said, sorting her basket at the table while the lamp burned between them. "The bark is for fever. This oneβ" she held up a gray-green leaf "βis for a wound that wants to close dirty. My mother said a wound that closes dirty is a liar. It smiles on top and rots underneath."
"Your mother sounds like a quartermaster I had," Eli said. "Man believed the same about paperwork."
"And the stars," she said, later, when they stood a moment in the yard with the dishes done, in the cold so clear the sky seemed to ring. "Your people name them for animals and hunters. Mine name them for the ones who went ahead on the trail. So that when we look up we are not looking at lights. We are looking at company."
He thought about the six years of nights he had looked up from that yard and seen only lights.
"What's that one called," he asked, "the bright one, low in the west?"
"My grandmother's name," she said. "Tse'lina. She was not a large woman but she was very bright and impossible to ignore, and she is low in the west because the west is where she always said the best grazing was, and she would not be kept from it even by dying."
He laughed again. Twice in one day. The sound felt unpracticed and good, like a gate newly greased.
"Eli," she said, when the cold drove them in, and stopped, and he waited, because he had learned her sentences sometimes needed to build their own road. "The mare has a name and I have a name and the star has a name. This place β the cliffs, the hollow. Does it have a name, or do you keep it the way you kept me, politely, at the length of 'girl'?"
"Red Hollow," he said. "For the stone. It was named before me, by whoever ran cattle here in the Spanish time. I just live in it."
"You live in it the way the mare lived in her stall the first night," Sela said. "Resting. Not home." She banked the stove for the night with the ease, now, of long habit. "Good night, Eli."
"Good night, Sela."