The invitation came by messenger, and the messenger was Lucy, arriving at the Hartman corral on the Whitakers' borrowed pony at three o'clock on New Year's Eve with her errand memorized and her importance worn openly.
"Mama says supper is at six and you are to come at six, Mr. Levi, not five and not seven. Mama says it is not a storm this time and you are not to bring the axe." She considered. "You may bring the axe if you want the wood cut. But you are invited for the supper. The supper is the reason." Then, as an afterthought of her own: "I set the table already. Your chair is the one that doesn't wobble."
Levi shaved at four, standing at the basin with the lamp lit against the early dark, and put on the good shirt that Mary had made him the year before she died — kept folded in cedar all this time, worn perhaps a dozen times. He looked at himself in the small mirror a long while. Thirty-nine years old, gray coming in at the temples like weather, and dressing for supper across a creek as carefully as a boy. He laughed once, at his own expense, and found it did him good.
Diego, saddling his horse in the yard, took in the shirt, the shaved jaw, the hat brushed clean, and said nothing at all for a full ten seconds, which in Diego was an oration.
"You will say it sometime tonight, jefe, or you will freeze solid in that chair like a man in a tintype." He swung up. "I will be at the Whitakers' if the valley needs either of us. It will not." And he rode off into the dusk whistling, which Levi had not heard him do in eleven years.
Kaya's house was warm and bright and smelled of roast meat and piñon smoke. Lucy had set the table with the deliberation of a quartermaster — his chair, which did not wobble, was on the side nearest the fire, and there was a sprig of juniper laid across his plate by way of decoration, which she removed with ceremony when he sat. Nashona presided from her chair and watched the whole proceeding the way she watched everything: as entertainment provided by the young at no charge.
It was not a grand supper. It was beans and beef and bread still warm, and preserved peaches from a jar Kaya had put up in the summer with Sam teasing her about her seal — she said it in passing, easily, the way a person mentions weather in another season, and Levi saw what that ease had cost and what it was worth, and ate his peaches and said they were the best in the territory, which was not flattery but reportage.
Between the supper and the washing-up, Nashona told a story, because Lucy demanded the one about the widow and the three meals, and because — Levi suspected — the old woman had been saving it. "Among my people," Nashona said, "a man who is fed in a house three times in one winter is no longer a guest in that house. He is a debt the house owes, and a debt he owes the house. It is a serious thing. The grandmothers counted." She let the silence do its work. "You have been fed in this house, Levi Hartman, more times than I have fingers to count with — and I am a woman with all her fingers." Lucy, delighted, began at once to count her own fingers against the tally and got hopelessly lost somewhere past ten, which Nashona appeared to regard as the correct ending to the lesson.
Afterward Lucy was permitted to wind her father's watch once, under supervision, and to hear it tick against her ear before bed. Nashona, rising to take the child in, paused at the door of the back room and delivered herself of the evening's blessing, dry as January grass:
"A man who crosses a creek in the dark for a supper he was invited to on purpose has already said the thing. The rest is grammar." And she shut the door, and left them the kitchen and the fire.
They washed the dishes together, because Kaya would not hear of a guest sitting idle and Levi would not hear of being treated as one, and the work made the talk easier, the way work does. She told him the herd count. He told her the creek ice would bear a horse by Sunday. Outside, the old year was going out under a sky like black glass, star after star, and the house ticked and settled around them, warm at the center.
On the porch, with his hat in his hands and his horse stamping below in the cold, Levi said it at last, plainly, in grammar Nashona would have approved:
"Kaya. In the spring — if it suits you — I would like to call. Properly. Not for storms or courts or fence wire. To sit on this porch and be looked at by your mother and courted at by your daughter, and let the valley say what it will." He turned the hat once in his hands. "I've no practice at asking. I had the one wife God gave me and I buried her, and I thought the account was closed. It appears I was wrong about my own books."
Kaya stood in the doorway's light a moment, her arms folded against the cold, looking at him the way she had looked at a courtroom — taking the true measure.
"You have been calling since July, Levi Hartman," she said. "You just did it with an axe and a wagon and a ranch deed, which fooled exactly nobody but you." A smile reached her, slow and real. "In the spring, then. Come properly. Bring no axe." She stepped back into the warmth of her doorway. "And Levi — Happy New Year."
He rode home under the first stars of 1884 with the creek talking under the ice, and the cold could not touch him at all.