Wade was still at the table, turned slightly in his chair, his large hands curled around his coffee mug. He let the pause after Rhett’s story sit for a moment, then looked across the table at me.
“The land to the east,” he said. “Past the scrub line. Is that yours, or does it run to the county line before the next property?”
“Mine,” I said. “Another two hundred acres past the treeline, but it hasn’t been grazed in two seasons. Ground’s waterlogged around the creek bed in the south corner.” I thought about it for a moment. “There’s a section above the creek, on the high ground, that would be worth fencing properly. It’s been on the list.”
“Everything’s on the list,” he said, not unkindly.
“Everything’s on the list,” I agreed.
He looked at me when I said it, and what was in his face was not sympathy, which I would have closed off, but something more like recognition, and I held that look for a second without pulling away from it.
I looked him for a moment. Then I looked back at Rhett, who had moved on to a story about a horse, a fence post, and a quantity of industrial peanut butter that he said he would explain in full if anyone wanted the details, though he maintained the context made it better and insisted on building to it properly.
“Go on then,” I said.
He did.
Chapter Four – Lila
I woke to boots on the porch before the sky had made up its mind about the day. Not Reece’s truck, not the creak of the gate he always forgot to lift before pushing. This was heavier, purposeful, the kind of footfall that moved through a job rather than toward one. I lay still for a moment with my hand flat on my stomach and the dawn light just beginning in the window, listening, and then I heard the tractor shed, the low groan of hinges I had been meaning to oil since October, the clank of something metal being lifted from a hook and carried.
I got up slowly in the particular way mornings required now, sitting first at the edge of the mattress, both feet finding the floor, one hand finding the nightstand. The cold had gotten into the floorboards overnight, and I felt it straight through my wool socks as I moved down the hallway toward the kitchen.
The window above the sink was frosted at the corners, the glass clouded and dim, and I wiped a circle clear with the heel of my hand while the kettle heated. Through the gap I had made, Cole was there. He had a coil of new wire over one shoulder and a post driver in his other hand. He was moving toward the north fence, and when he arrived, I watched him sink the first post with four even strikes. Then he moved to the next and did the same. No wasted motion, nothing showy about it. Just a man and a fence post and frozen ground, and the work getting done.
I stood at the window in my wool socks with my decaf coffee warming both hands and watched him.
Rhett was at the paddock gate. I could see the pale shape of him crouched at the lowest rail, one boot up on the wire, and across the yard the gray mare was standing with her neck out and her ears flattened. He did not push her. He knelt there with his palm outstretched and waited, and the mare took onestep and stopped, and he waited some more, and eventually she moved her nose toward his hand in the slow, reluctant way of an animal testing whether the offer was genuine. He did not move his hand. He said something to her too low to carry through the glass, and she stood there with her nose in his palm and the flat ears softened by some increment.
I drank my coffee and thought about nothing in particular.
By the time I pulled on Ethan’s canvas coat and went outside, the morning had lightened into something that was almost day. The cold caught me across the face the moment the back door swung open, a mean, flat cold that found the gap at my collar and the tops of my cheeks and offered no opinion on either. The yard smelled of frost and mud and the faint sweet smell of hay that always drifted from the barn in the early morning.
Reece’s truck came down the track, the engine turning over unevenly the way it always did in the cold, and he was out of the cab before it had fully stopped, pulling on his canvas jacket, moving toward the barn. He nodded to Wade, who was already at the feed trough with the calves, and Wade raised a hand without looking up. Reece took the feed bags without being asked. I was glad for it and said nothing.
I followed the line of the morning’s work the way you follow a fence line, moving from one point to the next, not directing, just tracking. Cole at the north fence, stapling wire into new posts with a fence staple hammer. He did not say anything when I came near, just looked up once to register my presence and then back to the wire.
Rhett had moved the gray mare into the smaller paddock by midmorning. I watched him stroke her nose with the flat of his hand, the mare’s head dropped and her eyes half-closed. Thenhe turned and picked up the post driver from where Cole had set it down, and he carried it back to the shed without being asked.
I walked over to check the water trough, and its surface had gone opaque overnight. Not a skim of ice but a proper freeze, thick enough that the surface had gone matte and pale and showed the slight flex-marks from yesterday afternoon’s contraction as the temperature dropped. I had broken it twice this week already, and each time it had been a little harder than the last. I found the mallet on the hook by the stall door where I always kept it, a wooden-handled thing with a rubber head that was beginning to split at the seam, and I brought it back to the trough.
The first blow landed at the center of the freeze and sent a crack out to the edges, hairline and fast, and I struck it again at the crack line and a section broke free. The vibration traveled back up the handle and into my fingers, which were numb enough at the tips that I felt it more as pressure than as feeling, a distant reverberation in my palms. My breath clouded above the trough. I struck again, harder, working at the broken section, and the ice gave in pieces and sank.
It was the fourth blow that did it. Not a mis-strike, not a slip. The blow landed where I intended it and the ice broke cleanly, but the force of it went through my wrists and up my arms and found the place at the base of my spine that had been waiting for exactly this kind of opportunity. The pain arrived sharp and specific, a line of it radiating up the right side of my back, and I felt my fingers loosen on the handle before I had decided to loosen them, the mallet dipping toward the trough edge. I caught it. My hand went white around the rubber grip. My teeth pressed together, and I breathed through my nose and did not make a sound.
I stood still for a moment with the mallet held in both hands over the half-broken ice and the pain doing what it did, pulsing once and then settling into the more familiar dull insistence. The barn was cold against my face. I could hear the horses, and Cole behind hammering fence posts, and the drill going quiet as Wade paused in his work.
Wade’s hand came under my elbow.
He did not announce it, did not ask. He was simply there, his hand cupped under the joint of my arm, a steady and even pressure that was not gripping and was not hovering but was simply present, an offered point of balance. His palm was warm through the canvas of my coat. The scent of him was low and close in the cold air, gunpowder under everything, the deep register of it that I had learned to expect before I had intended to learn it.
I did not pull away. Not immediately. My body made the calculation that his hand had made, which was that pulling away sharply would require a movement my back was not currently prepared to execute gracefully, and so I stood there for a moment with his hand under my elbow and the mallet still in both of mine and the ice broken and floating in the dark water of the trough.
“I’m alright,” I said. My voice came out flat and even, which was the voice I used when something was not quite right, and I had decided not to let that be anyone else’s business.
He did not argue with me, and he did not let go immediately either. He let his hand drop, and stepped back half a pace.
Rhett was beside the trough. I had not registered him moving, but he was there, and his hand was at the mallet handle before I had thought about whether to give it to him, his fingersclosing around the grip just below mine. He raised his eyebrows once, a small question, and I let go.
