The surgeon from the troop β a dry Bostonian named Hale β left Dane with a sling, a bottle of something bitter, and instructions to be ornamental for a month, a prescription Dane obeyed exactly as well as June had expected. She found him on the third day attempting to re-hang the corral gate one-handed. On the fifth, he had dismantled her pump. On the seventh, she caught him on the barn roof that no longer existed, and confiscated his tools by main force and marched him to the porch like a truant.
"You'll sit," she informed him, "and heal, and drink broth, and be a cautionary tale. The valley is watching you for signs of sense, Mr. Mercer, and so far the returns are poor."
So he healed on her porch, through the long bright end of spring, and the valley got used to him there as a fixture of the new arrangement of things.
Miss Halloran took to bringing books down from Sage Crossing in her saddlebag β novels, which the cabin had never contained, Thomas having regarded fiction as a species of lying that charged admission. Dane read them in the afternoons with the air of a man defusing ordnance, and June took a private pleasure in watching a man who had faced down Silas Vane be brought to a standstill by the marriage prospects of an English heroine. "She should simply tell him," Dane said once, in genuine anguish, over the third volume. "One honest sentence on page forty would have saved four hundred pages."
"Welcome," June said, "to literature. My father kept it out of the house for your protection, evidently, not mine."
Marta Lindqvist, who had appointed herself his nurse, conducted daily inspections of the bandage, delivered broth with the ceremony of a state occasion, and informed him that when he was entirely well he would be required to teach her to read sign. Dane received these terms gravely and signed them with his spoon. Neighbors' wives, delivering pies with the solemnity of treaty delegations, began including a second plate. The sergeant, passing through on army business in June, stopped for coffee and was heard to address Dane as the Mister with a straight face.
And they talked. Without secrets between them, for the first time, their talk changed its nature β it stopped being a negotiation and became a country they could both walk in. He told her the twelve years plain: the uncle's trapline on the border, the winters he had ridden down to the far side of the Crown Hills with a glass, watching her smoke rise β the year her roof leaked, the winter the mare foaled and lost it, the day of the burial, which he had watched from the ridge through the glass until the trapper who stood with her rode away, and then two hours more, in case, at the end of it, she needed not to be alone in the yard.
"You should have come down," June said.
"I'd promised."
"You should have come down that day, Dane. A promise can be wrong."
He considered this with the seriousness she had come to know as his truest feature. "Yes," he said at last. "I think that's the thing I'm still learning. He taught me promises were iron. He knew better β he broke every promise he ever made, if keeping it would have cost you. The will, the registry β that was a man breaking his own rule about silence, because the rule mattered less than the girl." He turned the coffee cup in his good hand. "Maybe the last thing he left me wasn't an order. Maybe it was an example I'd been reading upside down."
June looked at this man β Vane's runaway clerk, Thomas's chosen son, the valley's secret sentry of twelve years β sitting broken-shouldered on her porch in the sun, and she felt the last of the anger go out of her, leaving something in its place that was bigger and quieter and entirely unguarded.
"Read me the part you're on," she said
An hour before that, she had sat in the doorway with his shirt across her knees β torn at the shoulder where the surgeon's shears had been at it β putting in stitches small and even as print. He had watched her work without speaking, memorizing the sight the way a man memorizes a road he expects to travel in the dark. "Your coffee," he said at last. "Two spoons of sugar. I knew it before you ever poured me a cup in this house β he wrote it in a letter once, to my uncle. The girl takes her coffee sweet and her news plain. I've been carrying your sugar ration in my head for a decade, June, like a dispensation." She had laughed then, helplessly, into the mending β because what else was there to do with a courtship conducted by a dead surveyor, by post, over twelve years?
"Read me the part you're on," she said, and he did, stumbling a little over the old words, and the river went on below them, and the afternoon lasted exactly as long as it was supposed to.
Chapter 25