It was not an invitation a man could refuse without refusing something larger than supper, and they both understood it. From inside, her mother's voice came, dry as kindling: "A man at the door on this night is not a question, Kaya. He is an answer the weather sent." Nashona sat by the fire with her mending in her lap and did not so much as look up. "Hang your coat, Levi Hartman. You are dripping on my floor."
He hung his coat. Lucy came out of the back room in her nightdress with her hair down, solemn as a small judge, and informed him that since there was a guest there would have to be the good plates, and that he was to sit in her papa's chair because it was the one that did not wobble. The house smelled of roasting meat and piñon smoke and coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in. Outside, the wind went on trying the latch of the world. Inside, the lamp burned on the windowsill, steady in its glass, where a child had set it for the dead.
Levi washed his hands in the basin by the door like a man come to a table he had not expected to sit at again in this life, and he sat down in the chair where Sam used to sit.
Chapter 7 — At Her Table
The good plates were white with a blue edge, and Lucy set Levi's with the care of a girl laying out something breakable and important. Supper was roast beef from Kaya's own herd, beans with a strip of fat pork in them, biscuits, and a dried-apple pie that Nashona had made that morning because, she said, a pie does not care what the weather intends. Nobody remarked on the storm except once, when a gust shook the whole house on its sills and Lucy looked up from her plate and said, quite calmly, "It is only knocking. It can't come in unless we say."
"Then we won't say," said Nashona, and passed the beans.
After the meat, while Kaya cleared and the coffee came on, the old woman told her winter story. She did not announce it. She began the way weather begins, and the room quieted around her voice. In the first winter of the world, she said, the fire belonged to the sky, and the people below were cold. Grandmother Spider — no. She smiled at her own slip and began again, and Levi understood it was a story told so many times that even its mistakes were beloved. In the first winter, she said, the Sevani grandmothers carried a coal from the last fire of autumn in a gourd of ashes, walking all the longest night through snow to the new camp, taking turns, because a coal carried by one pair of hands goes out. A fire, Nashona said, is not kept by the strong. It is kept by the ones who keep walking. Lucy listened with her chin in her hands and her eyes enormous, and at the end she said, "Like the lantern," and Nashona said, "Something like the lantern, granddaughter."
Then Lucy sang, because Mrs. Park had taught the schoolchildren a carol for the season and a guest was an audience that could not escape. She stood by the fire in her nightdress with her hands folded and sang the one about the silent night, her voice small and true and utterly unafraid, and Levi looked at his hands around his coffee cup and thought of another house and another December, and let the thought pass through him the way weather passes through a fence.
It was Lucy who remembered the horse. She had seen the pine knot in his coat pocket when he hung it up — a child misses nothing that is shaped like a toy — and after her song she came and stood at his elbow with the gravity of a banker. "Has it got a tail yet?"
"Not yet," Levi said, and took the half-carved thing out of his pocket and set it on the table. It was a horse the length of his hand, roughed out of the pine knot, the legs blocked in, the head begun. "A horse gets its tail last. So it doesn't swish away before it's finished."
She considered this with great seriousness and allowed that it was probably right. Kaya, watching from the stove with her arms folded, said nothing at all, but something in her face eased that had not eased since he came in out of the snow.
When Lucy's eyes began to close where she sat, Nashona took her off to bed, and the child went the way she went every night — stopping at the window first to look at her lantern, to be sure the flame stood straight and the glass was clean, before she let her grandmother lead her away. The kitchen settled into the quieter quiet of grown people. Kaya poured the last of the coffee. Then she went to the tin box on the shelf, the one with the seed packets and the spare buttons, and took out a folded paper, creased and re-creased, and laid it on the table between the plates where the pie had been.
"You have seen it on my door," she said. "Read what it says when it is not nailed up in the weather."
He read it while she watched the fire. It was the notice, and under it the copy the sheriff had left with it — the company's paper. An unpaid note, it said, signed by Samuel Little and long past due. And a second claim beneath the first, in the same clerkly hand: that the woman on the homestead was not the lawful wife of the deceased, the marriage being no marriage the law could find, and the land therefore not hers to hold.