He looked at her and felt something in his throat that he could not say anything around. So he did not try. He just held out his arms and Ione Mulgrew, who had never been afraid of anything, walked into them. She came up to his sternum. Her hat got knocked sideways against his chest.
She made a sound that she would later, if asked, categorically deny having made. You great ox, she said muffled against his coat. You absolute great ox. Thank you, he said, for the shotgun. Somebody had to and the chains that was able.
Don't thank me for that and the cake. The cake nearly killed me. That oven is a menace. He held on for another moment. Then she stepped back and straightened her hat and looked at the crowd with an expression that dared anyone to have noticed anything at all.
Nobody said a word. Anel looked at all of them. All those faces, some with shame on them that had been sitting there since Saturday morning and had not had anywhere to go. Some with the careful relief of people who had done the right thing at the last possible moment and were still deciding whether that counted. Some with just the quiet private feeling that comes when you watch a wrong get writed that you have watched go wrong for a very long time.
He did not have a speech. He had never been good at speeches. He had never been good at the words that were supposed to happen when a big moment arrived. Every time he tried, the words came out wrong or late or not at all. And then the moment passed and there was nothing to do but keep going.
So he looked at Odessa. She was looking back at him. That small private smile she kept for him. The one that lived at the very corner of her mouth where nobody else would see it if they weren't looking for it. He lowered his head.
He was always doing that now. Not stooping. Not making himself smaller. Just bending down so she didn't have to crane up. So they could be level.
So she could look at him straight and he could look back the same way. What do you want to do? He said. She looked at the people behind him. At the mountain rising above the rooftops of Copper Hollow, white still on the high peaks, the lower slopes coming into the first thin green of spring.
At the place where a house had stood and now stood no more. At the place where they were going to have to start again from almost nothing. I want to go home, she said. We don't have a home, he said. We have a chimney.
Then let's go start from there. The house went up in 6 weeks. The whole valley came. Walt Dunore cut timber from his north slope. Good cured pine, nothing green.
Abel Lund handed nails from a bucket with the focused intensity of a boy who has decided that this is the most important thing he will ever do and is going to do it right. Ione Mulgrew supervised, which is to say she stood in the middle of the construction site and told everyone they were doing it wrong and was correct approximately 70% of the time. The new house was bigger than the old one. higher ceilings, wider doors, a second room at the end of the hall with good light, and a door that opened straight onto the porch for the practice, for the patients who would come up the mountain in twos and threes, and then in larger numbers, as the valley finally understood what it had in the woman who lived there, with a brass shingle beside the door that read, "In large, careful block letters that took Anel three evenings and two ruined pieces of brass to get right, O' Branick, physician's assistant. And in their bedroom on the windowsill, where the morning light came first, two things, a little wooden bird, no bigger than a thumb, every feather carved in impossible detail, its beak open like it was about to say something.
And beside it, on the day they moved in, Anel set the tin box clean and dented, the raised letters on the lid readable now in the morning light. He set it there and did not say anything about it. And Odessa did not ask. But that evening after supper, she went and stood at the window for a moment and looked at the two things sitting there together on the sill. And then she turned around and looked at him across the room.
And he looked back, and neither of them said anything at all. Because sometimes the thing that needs to be said has already been said in a very cold winter, one word at a time, beside a fire that has been burning for a long time now and is not going out. They lived on that mountain for 40 years. Odessa practiced medicine. Men who had once refused to be in the same room with her came up the road with their hats in their hands and their children fevers and their wives in labor and their own busted bones.
And she fixed what could be fixed and was honest about what could not and charged what people could pay. And when they could not pay, she took eggs or split wood or nothing at all. She became over those 40 years the thing the valley did not know it was missing until it arrived. The person you went to when the thing was bad enough that it mattered. The steady voice in the room where everything was frightening.
The hands that did not shake. Anel read everything he could find. Slowly, out loud, in his low, rumbling voice, still slightly wrong in ways that no longer embarrassed him. He read to Odessa in the evenings. He read to their children when they came along.