"Yes," Levi said. "It would."
He watched the buggy down the lane and across the ford, the bays stepping dainty through the skin of ice. Diego came and stood beside him with a harness strap over his shoulder.
"That one," Diego said, "would sell the snow back to the mountain, with a contract."
"He'd try," Levi said.
He went in and washed the cups and set Draper's on the shelf upside down, not wanting, he realized, ever to drink from it again. Then he stood at his own window a long while, looking at the smoke rising straight and steady across the creek, and thinking about a July afternoon and a grave dug in ringing-hard ground, and about what a man owed, and to whom.
Chapter 5 — Firewood
The barometer in Levi's knee had been predicting weather since a bull stepped on it in '79, and on the morning of the twenty-third it woke him before the alarm of his own habits did, aching in the particular way that meant snow coming in quantity. He stood at the window with his coffee and studied the sky — a flat, loaded gray, the peaks already gone behind it — and the woodpile in the Little yard across the creek, which he could see plainly from his rise, and which had been getting lower in his mind's eye for a week.
A man could mind his own business. He had been advised to, recently, by a man in a good coat. A man could also note that a widow with a seven-year-old and a mother past sixty was burning cedar scraps and fence rails against the coldest week of the year, on a place where the company's paper said she would not be living come the twenty-seventh, and a man could decide that business could go hang.
He loaded the wagon heavy — oak for the long burn, pine for the quick — and hitched the team, and drove down to the ford with the wagon complaining at every frozen rut.
Lucy heard him first. She came around the corner of the barn at the gallop, riding a stick with a cornhusk mane and a piece of twine for a bridle, making the sound with her mouth that children make and horses would be proud to cause. She pulled up in front of the team with a horseman's flourish and regarded Levi with the solemnity of a customs officer.
"That's a lot of wood," she said.
"It is," Levi said.
"We didn't order any wood, Mr. Hartman."
"No," he said. "Your fence ordered it. I cut it too long for my stove and I'm tired of looking at it."
This explanation satisfied nobody, including Levi, but Lucy considered it and nodded gravely, because children understand that grown people have their courtesies and must be allowed them. "I'll show you where Mama stacks it," she said, and galloped ahead of the wagon on the stick horse, whose name, she informed him on the way, was Thunder, and who was faster than any horse in the territory, and who did not eat, which was his best quality.
Kaya came out of the barn with a fork in her hand and took in the wagon, the load, and the man in one look that missed nothing and commented on less. "Levi Hartman," she said. "That oak came off your own lot."
"It did."
"You'll enter it in your book against us." It was not a request, and it was not gratitude either — it was a boundary being kept in good repair. "At the fair price. I'll pay it off the spring calves, or in beef, but it goes in the book."
"It'll go in the book," Levi said, and it would not, and they both knew it would not, and the fiction stood between them like a well-built fence with a gate in it. "Where do you want it?"
They stacked it together under the eave on the north side, Lucy ferrying sticks at a gallop and Nashona supervising from the porch in a blanket, saying nothing, missing less. The work went the way work goes between people who know how: without talk wasted. Once Kaya's hand and Levi's reached for the same log, and both withdrew with a courtesy so exact it was nearly funny, and Lucy, watching, laughed out loud at the grown people being strange, and Nashona smiled the smile of a woman filing something away.
Afterward there was coffee on the porch, because there was always coffee on that porch, it being one of the laws of the place Sam had built. They talked about the weather coming, and the pageant at the school — Lucy was to sing, a fact she delivered with the air of a general announcing a campaign — and about the herd, and the pony's loose shoe. The paper on the door was not mentioned. It stood between them anyway, the way the creek stood between the two houses, a thing named by its absence from every sentence, until Kaya, looking out at the gray sky flattening down, said only: "You saw it, I suppose. The whole road saw it."
"I saw the sheriff ride back," Levi said. "That's all I saw."
"That is all anyone saw, then," Kaya said, and let it rest, and he understood that she had told him exactly as much as her pride allotted for that day, and that a man who pushed for more would be paying for wood with the wrong currency.
Going home in the early dusk, with the first fine snow beginning to sift down through the still air, Levi found his eyes on the woodbox by his own stove. Among the kindling sat a pine knot the size of his two fists, dense as iron, that he had been saving a year for a purpose he had never named. He picked it up. Turned it. In the grain of it, the way the wood had grown around an old wound in the tree, there was — if a man squinted the way children look at clouds — the long curve of a neck, the suggestion of a head held high.