Chapter 6
Shelter
Amos stood a long time after Nascha finished speaking, with his hat in his hands and the dust settling around the well. Twenty-five women waited in his yard without pleading and without turning away. Some were old enough that standing itself looked like labor. Some were young enough that they should have had no knowledge of burned homes. A few leaned on one another. One held her side where a rib, or the memory of a blow, still hurt her.
He looked past them to the barn, to the empty corral, to the house sitting shut behind the cottonwood. He had not planned for anything beyond the next chore since the spring Ruth died.
“You’ll stay,” he said at last, roughly. “Seventy-two hours is what the law allows, and I don’t know yet what comes after that. But you’ll not sleep in the open tonight.”
Nascha inclined her head once. She thanked him not as if he had given a gift, but as if he had recognized something already true.
He set to work the way a man does when feeling, if given room, would unmake him. He opened the barn wide. The stalls, kept swept though his few horses needed only two, became beds. He shook loose hay that had waited through winter and laid blankets over it. He showed Haseya where the lanterns hung and Kaya where the buckets were kept.
The yard took the rest. Women who could not climb into the loft settled under the lean-to. He strung rope and canvas for shade, set the big iron pot over the outside fire, and brought out salt pork, beans, flour, and dried apples Ruth had put up in a year that now seemed to belong to another man’s life. He put them down without ceremony, because ceremony would have made it charity, and this was not charity. This was shelter.
By late afternoon the problem he had avoided naming stood plain before him. Desba, oldest of the scouts, had sunk down near the well and could not rise again without two women under her arms. Another elder, her hair entirely white, breathed in short, careful pulls. A younger woman, feverish, shivered even in the warm yard. The barn would kill none of them tonight, perhaps, but it would not help them mend.
Amos looked at the house.
He had slept in the barn for two years, telling himself a man alone had no need of rooms. The truth was harder. Inside that house Ruth had set their table. Inside it Tommy had learned to walk holding the edge of her skirt. Inside it, in the last week, he had listened to her breathing change and known he was listening to less of her remaining.
His key had warmed on his belt through two summers without once turning in that lock.
“I need the house for the old ones and the sick,” he said, not quite to Nascha. “It’s time.”
She said nothing. She only stepped aside from the path, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for him in a long while.
The porch boards complained under his boots. The door stuck, as it always had in dry weather, and he put his shoulder to it, half expecting to hear her call that a strong man need not tear a house down to enter it. Instead there was only wood giving way.
Inside, the air smelled of dust and cedar and the faint ghost of her lavender. Everything was where he had left it the morning after the burying: her chair, his chair, the small boots by the hearth he had never been able to move.
Amos stood in that room and wept without sound, as men of his raising wept when strangers in the yard depended on him to be steady. It lasted perhaps a minute. It emptied something full to bursting for two years.
Then he opened the shutters and worked until dark — carrying water, airing bedding, laying the good mattress where Desba could lie flat. He put the feverish woman in Tommy’s room, because it was coolest, and stood a moment in its doorway with his hand flat against the frame, then went on working, which was its own prayer. He swept the floors and lit the stove. Its first smoke rose uncertain, then true.
When the elders were settled and the house held lamplight again, Amos stepped onto the porch. Below, the yard was quiet with the quiet of people at last allowed to rest. From inside came women tending their own. From the barn came sleepers shifting in clean hay.
Ruth’s house had voices in it again. It did not give her back. But under the cottonwood, where two graves lay in the cooling dark, Amos felt for the first time that keeping a house empty had not been the same thing as keeping faith.