"Let me see it. " She let him. He held her hand in both of his, which were finally warming up, and he looked at the burn and found the lard and the cloth, and he wrapped her hand the way she'd wrapped his burned fingers 3 weeks ago, and she sat still and let him, and neither of them said anything while he worked. When he finished, he held her hand a moment longer than the task required. He wasn't entirely conscious of doing it until he realized he was doing it. He let go.
He leaned back. The fire had gotten the kitchen warm now, and the storm outside was enormous and complete, and neither of them was going to try to say anything adequate about what had just happened, and that was all right. Some things didn't need to be said immediately to be true. Viven looked at the fire. Gideon looked at the fire.
Outside, the blizzard held the whole world in its hands and did whatever it wanted with it. And inside the house on the Ashccraftoft ranch, two people sat in the warmth they'd made and were, for the first time, without any remaining reservation, glad the other one was there. The storm took two days to finish with them. For those two days, the world outside the house reduced itself to a white nothing, and the ranch became its own small universe. The kitchen, the main room, the barn twice a day when Gideon made the trip on the rope, with Viven insisting on coming the second morning, and him not arguing because he'd used up his argument credit on the night of the blizzard, and they both knew it.
They moved through the confined space of the house, and managed not to be in each other's way, which was its own kind of skill, and Elsie provided enough noise and motion and questions about the structural integrity of snow drifts to fill whatever silence might have grown awkward. The shoulder was bad for the first day. A deep bruise and something strained along the top of it that made certain movements sharp enough to stop his breath. He didn't say so. Vivien noticed anyway because she noticed things and she found a way to be in the kitchen when he came back from the barn so that she could take whatever he was carrying without making a scene about it.
And he accepted this because it was practical and because he was tired and because the alternative was pretending the shoulder wasn't there, which was less practical than accepting her help. His whole adult life, the alternative to asking for help had been not needing it. He was finding that this approach had a flaw in it that he hadn't examined closely before. On the second evening, when the wind had dropped to something survivable, and the snow had thinned from white out to merely heavy, he found the bull. It had gotten itself into the corner of the north field where the fence met the rise, which was the most sheltered spot in that pasture, and it was cold and unhappy, but it was alive.
He got it to the barn by brute stubbornness and a rope, and did not feel triumphant about it, because the animal made the whole experience as unpleasant as possible, but the outcome was the outcome. He came back inside and stamped the snow off his boots at the door, and Vivien said without looking up from the stove, "The bull barn. Good. That was all. He hung up his coat and she handed him coffee and that was all.
And that was somehow exactly enough. The morning the storm finally cleared, Harlo Creek looked like a town that had survived something and wasn't sure yet how to talk about it. The main street had drifts against the storefronts that came to window level, and the few people moving through it were doing so with the particular purposefulness of folks who had a list of things that needed doing and no patience for detours. Gideon came into town alone, which Vivien didn't argue about. She understood why until they knew where Croft was and what he was doing.