He got out his knife, and sat down by the stove, and began, without deciding to, the way a man begins a thing his hands have already voted on.
He worked until the light failed and then worked by lamplight, the shavings curling into the fire. First the head, because a horse is its head — the ears pricked, because Thunder, fastest horse in the territory, would not have them any other way. He was not a carver. He was a man with a knife and a memory of horses and a long evening in an empty house, and outside the window the snow came down straighter and thicker, erasing the lane, erasing the ford, joining his roof to the valley in one white silence, while under his hands the knot gave up, chip by careful chip, the shape it had been keeping.
Chapter 6 — Christmas Eve
The storm came down out of the north an hour before dark, and it did not knock.
Levi stood in his kitchen doorway with a cup gone cold in his hand and watched the snow turn sideways. All afternoon the wind had worried at the eaves like something trying a latch. Now it had the whole valley. The creek at the foot of his yard, which he could hear plain over the wind, had changed its voice since morning — no longer the thin December trickle over stone, but a deeper running, bank-full and talking to itself in the dark.
Diego had ridden in to San Tomas at noon to keep Christmas with his sister, over Levi's insistence and against his own reluctance, and the house behind Levi was dark except for the lamp he had lit out of habit. It was the third Christmas he had kept this way, since Mary's fever. He did not hang the greens. He did not ride down to the mission for the evening service and be wished well by people who meant it kindly. He worked the day like any other day and let the night come down, and that had been enough, or near enough that he had stopped asking himself about it.
The wind struck the house and the lamp flame leaned in its chimney. Out in the barn Buck shifted in his stall, restless with the weather coming through the boards.
It was the creek that decided him in the end. He set the cup down on the table and took his coat off the peg.
The Little place lay across the water and a quarter mile below, and its ground fell away lower than his. The spring house stood close to the bank, and Kaya's pole corral, where she penned the herd at night, sat in the flat that flooded first in any rise. Sam had known it. Sam had meant to move that pen two summers back, and to shore the spring house wall, and to do a dozen other things that a man means to do in the spring of a year he does not live to see the end of.
By the time Levi had the saddle on Buck the snow was coming in earnest, needling his face through the dusk, and the light had gone the blue-gray color it goes before a hard night. He rode down to the crossing with his collar up and the wind taking the horse's mane sideways. The creek was already over the flat stones, running tea-brown and quick, with strings of foam along its edges. Buck picked his way the way a horse does when he trusts the rider above him more than the water under him, one testing step at a time, and Levi sat loose in the saddle and let him have the choosing of it.
Halfway across, through the blowing snow, he saw the lantern.
It burned in the Little window, small and steady, the way it had burned every night since July. Lucy set it there at dusk, Kaya had told him once, matter-of-fact, the way a person speaks of feeding a cat. So her papa could find the house. Levi kept his eyes on it the rest of the way over, because it gave him a mark to steer by, and he did not examine that too closely either.
Kaya opened the door before he could knock, the lamplight behind her and a shawl drawn over her head against the weather. She looked at him, and at the snow caked white on his shoulders, and said, "You have half drowned a good horse to come and tell me it is snowing, Hartman."
"The creek's up," he said. "It'll be in your low pen by morning, if this keeps."
"It was at the stones an hour ago. The cattle are on the high ground, and the spring house is banked with sacks." She said it without triumph, only reporting, the way she did everything. "I moved them when the wind turned at noon."
He should have known she would. He stood there with the snow melting down the back of his neck and felt the particular foolishness of a man who has ridden through a storm to warn a woman who has never once in her life needed warning, and Kaya looked at him a moment longer — at the horse blowing hard behind him, at his own house somewhere dark across the water behind that — and stepped back out of the doorway.
"The crossing will be gone altogether by full dark," she said. "Put your horse in my barn. You will eat with us."