"One question more, Mr. Stanton," she said at the rim. "You've been plain with me, so be plain now. You knew his name before you ever saw my fence. Beckett says you've carried him twenty years. When this is done — if it's ever done — will there be anything left of you that isn't about Garrett Sloan?"
He looked at her a long moment, honestly, the way a man looks at a flooded crossing he's deciding whether to attempt. "I don't rightly know," he said. "You're the first person to ask."
Chapter 9
Fire in the West Barn
The arsonist came three nights later, in the black hour before the moon, and he came for the west hay barn — the old barn, the one full of last year's hay and the two brood mares and their spring foals, and Preacher's successor, a steady gray, and the ranch's winter feed all stacked in one tinder-dry wooden lung.
Tomás smelled it first — kerosene where kerosene had no business being, carried on the night air — and his shout woke the house. Maren came out in her nightdress with her boots in her hand and saw the whole west wall already blooming orange, the fire running up the dry boards faster than a man could run beside it, and she understood in one glance that this was not meant to frighten her. Horses screaming inside a burning barn are not a message. They are a murder of everything a ranch is.
Stanton was already there, out of the dark from his camp by the corral, with his shirt half on and no hat, and he went straight at the big door and got the bar up while the heat shoved at him like a hand, and the horses came out through the smoke in a thunder — all but one, a mare gone mad in her stall, slamming herself against the walls of the world. Maren heard Stanton curse, once, with feeling, and go in after her.
"Micah!" She had not called him by his name before that night. It came out of her like the shout that woke her. "Micah Stanton, you come out of there!"
He came out leading the mare by a halter he had made of his own belt, with his left side blackened and his shirtsleeve burning, and Tomás beat the fire off him with a grain sack while the mare reared and screamed and then, all at once, stood trembling and alive in the yard. The beam over the door came down in a fountain of sparks ten seconds later. Maren did the arithmetic of those ten seconds later, in the quiet, and had to sit down.
They saved the horses and lost the barn and the winter's hay — lost it entirely, a tower of flame visible, Tomás said afterward, from the Dry Fork road, so that by dawn half the town had ridden out to stare and Sheriff Shaw came with them, with his hat in his hands, saying accident, surely, a lantern, until he saw Stanton's face and stopped saying it.
Stanton's left side was burned from shoulder to hip, not deep everywhere but deep enough in country where deep meant dying of it, and there was a cut along his ribs from a stall latch that laid the flesh open like a page. Maren cut the shirt off him in her kitchen with her sewing scissors and cleaned the burns with boiled water and clean linen the way her mother had taught her, and he bore it the way men of his generation bore things, by going somewhere else behind his eyes, until she touched the worst of it and he came back with a hiss.
"Hold still," she said. "You hold still worse than the mare did."
"The mare," he said through his teeth, "had better sense. She screamed and got it over with."
"Then scream, Mr. Stanton. It's a big kitchen. Nobody here will think the less of you, and I've already seen you be brave past all reason tonight, so you've nothing left to prove in this room."
He looked at her then, really looked, with the pain plain in his face, and she saw what the effort of twenty years had cost him in a way she had not from any story. He did not scream. But his right hand found the edge of the table and held on, and she worked faster, and neither of them pretended not to notice that she had called him Micah, or that he had answered to it like a man answering to a name in his own house.
Outside the window the sky went the color of ash and then of morning. The west barn stood steaming in black ribs against it, and the horses stood in the corral with their heads down, singed and alive, and Maren, binding up the last of the linen with hands that finally shook a little now the work was done, said: "They've moved from my fence to my barn, Mr. Stanton. In Mr. Sloan's two months, that is considerable impatience."