But on the evening the well roof was finished, rain threatened from the west, and Tazhi led the horses in and looked up at the loft where Amos's blankets lay.
"You will be damp," the boy said.
"I have been damp before."
"The house has a roof," Goyan said mildly, from below. "It seems a waste of roofs, to sleep under the leaky one."
Amos almost laughed. That night he climbed to the loft as always and lay listening to rain find every weak place in the shingles, dripping into pans he had set out years ago, and understood he was not staying out of grief anymore. He was staying out of habit, and habit was a poorer reason. Ruth would have had sharp words for it. He could nearly hear them.
In the morning he carried his blankets down the ladder for the last time.
He moved slowly, room by room. He made the bed β their bed, then her bed, then no one's β with clean sheets from the cedar chest that smelled faintly of her lavender. He washed three years of dust from the table. He took her shawl from the chair, folded it with hands that shook only a little, and put it in the chest, not away forever, but away from duty; it had stood guard long enough. He built a fire in the stove and the chimney, long cold, drew sweetly, as if it remembered its purpose. He drank his coffee at the table, in the chair facing the window, where he could see the well and its new roof and the road from Fortuna.
The house did not punish him. That was the wonder of it. By afternoon it had begun, very slightly, to smell like a place where someone lived.
At dusk he took his coffee and walked out behind the house to the cottonwood.
The two graves lay in their iron fence, neat as he had always kept them β that, at least, he had never neglected. He had weeded them on his knees every month, even the months he could not enter the house. The cottonwood was leafing out, and the light through it fell in coins on the headboards he had carved himself: RUTH DELANEY β BELOVED. And the smaller one: TOMMY β AGED FOUR YEARS. His boy, who had liked to ride the pump handle and shriek with the squeal of it. Tommy would have approved of the silence at the well now. Or perhaps he would have missed the noise like music.
Amos sat down in the grass with his back against the fence, careful of his shoulder, and did what he had never once done in three years of tending this ground: he talked.
"I have kept strangers," he said. It sounded insufficient, so he began again, and told it properly, the way she would have demanded β in order, without leaving out the parts that shamed him. He told her about the three scouts at dawn and a woven bracelet left in the dust at his feet. He told her about twenty-five women at his gate, and Nascha standing straight as a fence post, asking for water and not begging. He told her about the letter hidden where only a wife would think to hide it and only a husband too stubborn to enter his own house would fail for three years to find. His voice broke there, and he let it, and went on. He told her about the water station she had registered in secret, the relief route, and the petition in her clear handwriting that he had not yet signed. He told her he had been shot keeping a promise she had written down before he ever made it, and that it had not killed him, though for a day or two the question had been open.
"Goyan says I was a fool to step in front," he said. "He is probably right. You would have liked him. You would have liked her, too, Ruth. Nascha. She does not waste words. Neither did you."
He told Tommy about Tazhi and the new roof and the pump that no longer sang. He sat until the stars came out and the coffee was cold, and the grief, when he finally stood, had changed its shape β not smaller, never smaller, but carried differently, the way a healed bone carries weight: with an ache in bad weather, and strength for ordinary days.
"I am sleeping in the house tonight," he told the dark ground. "I thought you should hear it from me."
He walked back through the yard. Lamplight burned in the window he had left unshuttered, and for the first time in three years the house on Dry Creek looked like a home someone was expected back to.
Chapter 28
Departures