Dan sent her into Cedar Bluff on the Sunday with the mail pouch and a broken rein for the saddler, and Etta was glad of the errand. A week of the valley watching Petra at the trough had put a hum in the air she could feel in her teeth, and town, at least, was a place where watching was done openly.
She left the mare at the saddler's rail with a handful of grain and stood a moment on the boardwalk, letting the town arrange itself around the fact of her. Church was out. Women in their good dresses crossed to the mercantile with baskets; men gathered at the hitch rail and did not quite stare. Across the street, in the white cottage beside the church, an old woman sat on a porch among pots of geraniums, shelling peas into a tin pan, and watched Etta the way a cat watches a door.
"You ride that mare like the valley used to ride," the old woman called, "before it learned to ride careful. Come up here out of the dust, girl. There's tea, and I am tired of my own company pretending to be conversation."
Etta knew her by reputation and by Dan's careful way of saying the name. Mrs. Abigail Fenn, widow of Josiah Fenn, who had been brand inspector for the county when brand inspectors were still feared a little. Sixty-eight, straight as a fence post in a black dress with a cameo at the throat, her white hair drawn back so tight it seemed to hold her face honest.
Inside, the cottage smelled of camphor and dried apples and old paper. A portrait of the inspector hung over the mantel — a long man with a mustache and a book under his arm, painted by someone who had loved the mustache more than the man. Brand irons stood in a crock by the hearth like walking sticks. Tea came in cups thin as eggshell.
"You've the look of your mother," Mrs. Fenn said, without preamble, pouring. "She had that same way of sitting — as if the chair owed her money and she hadn't decided whether to collect."
"You knew her."
"I knew everybody, once. That is the curse of outliving your whole generation — the town gets younger and stranger and you sit on the porch knowing where all the bodies are buried, and some of them are." She set the pot down. "Your mother was handy. Not woman-handy. Handy. She shod her own team, I recall, and she carved. Signs, I think. A spoon or two. Something over a door."
The peas had stopped shelling themselves halfway through a pod, Etta noticed, and understood that the old woman's hands had stopped too.
"She carved the lintel over our front door," Etta said carefully. "The summer I turned twelve."
"Did she." Mrs. Fenn's eyes, pale blue and undimmed, rested on her the way weight rests on a scale. "What did she carve, girl?"
The room went very quiet around the question. Etta knew a test when one was set in front of her with tea. Half the valley could have guessed the Marlowe place had words over the door. Guessing the words was the thing. She could refuse, and lose whatever this was. She could answer, and hand an old woman a loaded fact.
She thought of firelight on a lintel, of her mother's gouge biting cedar, of her father below on a ladder saying a motto ought to put the horses first and her mother saying hands did the loving and the horses knew it.
"HANDS AND HORSES," Etta said. "She cut the H's deeper than the rest because the gouge kept wanting to slide. My father said it proved where her heart was. She said it proved where the grain was."
Mrs. Fenn closed her eyes for a moment, and something in her face — some arrangement held up by effort for a long time — set itself down.
"There it is," she said, almost to herself. "There it is, after eight years of folks being careful around me." She opened her eyes. "My Josiah kept a day book. Did you know that?"
"Inspectors keep records."
"The county keeps records. Josiah kept a day book." She leaned forward. "Every night of his working life, at that table, he wrote what he had actually seen that day. Brands read. Sales witnessed. Counts. Weather. Who was drunk, who was lying, who paid in gold and who paid in promises. The county book was for the county. The day book was for the truth, and he never once in forty years let the two of them say different things on the same page unless he noted the difference right beside it."
Etta's hands had gone cold around the cup. "It still exists."
"It does. In this house." Mrs. Fenn watched her over the rim of her own cup. "I have had men in this valley — polite men, church men — suggest I must have burned it when he died, and I have smiled and said how right they were, fire takes so much. It is not burned."
"May I see it?"
"No." The word was gentle and absolute. "Not today. Today I only needed to know the words over a door, and to tell one living soul that it exists, so that if I die in my sleep tonight the knowledge doesn't go into the ground with me. Come tomorrow, after dark, and tie your mare behind the lilac where the street can't see. And Etta —" the old woman stood, slowly, holding the chair back, "— I have not yet decided whether showing you is a kindness, or one more cruelty this valley owes your family. Come anyway."
Chapter 12 — What the Day Book Holds