She sat down on the porch step and laughed and covered her mouth with one hand and laughed some more. He looked at her from the mud. You could help, he said. I could, she agreed. In a moment, I'm in the mud.
I can see that. It's cold. I imagine it is. Odessa, you've been getting down in the mud on my account for 40 years, she said. You can wait one minute.
He thought about that. Fair, he said. She climbed down off the step. 69 years old. Silver hair.
All of it now, braided and pinned the way it had always been. steady hands, fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the kind that come from a life that has been asked a great deal, and answered well. She came and knelt down in the mud beside him. Not to help him up, just to be level with him, they knelt there together in the spring mud on the mountain, with the valley spread below them, and the sky enormous above, and everything they had built over 40 years around them, visible and solid in the morning light. He looked at her, "Still the best day," he said.
She reached up, laid her hand against his jaw, the way she had first done it a very long time ago in front of a fire in a house that did not exist anymore. When she had said in 41 years, "You are the first man who ever made himself smaller so I could feel bigger." Her thumb moved along his cheek. "Which one?" she said. "All of them," he said. "Every single one." She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his cheek.
soft, warm, unhurried, the same way she had kissed him the first time in the fire light when the whole world had gone quiet around them and stayed that way. Then she sat back on her heels and looked at him in the mud and started laughing again. "Your trousers," she said. "I know they're ruined. I know you do this every year.
Every year they survive," he said. "I'm an optimist," she helped him up. both her small hands and all her strength and his own considerable effort and a great deal of undignified maneuvering that neither of them would describe in detail later when their grandchildren asked how they spent the morning. And they stood there together in the spring light on the mountain that had once been the loneliest place in Montana territory and was not anymore. Not for a very long time.
He put his arm around her. She put her head against his chest, where his heart beat slow and steady as it had always beaten, the same rhythm she had fallen asleep to on a blizzard night a long time ago when she was still afraid of sleeping. And he had sat completely still for 6 hours so as not to wake her. Below them the valley was coming into spring, the creek running fast with melt, the lower pastures going green. Somewhere down there, Abel Lund, who was 41 now and had a ranch of his own and walked without the crutch and came up the mountain every fall to help bring in the cattle, was probably doing something productive.
Somewhere down there, Walt and Clara Dunore were probably doing the same. Ruth Dunore, 28 years old now and recently married to a young man from the Henderson place, who had the good sense to be terrified of Walt and the better sense to be kind to Clara. Somewhere down there a town was going about its morning. A town that had once called the man on this mountain a devil. And now when people talked about the Branick place went quiet in the way you go quiet about something you consider worth protecting.
Because some places are sacred. Not because of what was built there. Because of what happened there. Because of what was made there out of wreckage and ash and a tin box and a letter written in the dark and a wooden bird with a silent W. He looked down at the top of her head.
We should go in, he said. Your coffee is getting cold. It's always cold before I get to it. Because you forget it when you're reading because you talk while I'm trying to read. I'm reading, too.
You read out loud so you can hear it. I have my own book. You have the same book I have. We're reading the same book. She lifted her head and looked up at him with the expression she had been giving him for 40 years, which was the expression of a woman who is deeply exasperated and deeply happy simultaneously and has made her peace with the fact that these two things are not mutually exclusive.
Go make the coffee, she said. It's your turn. It is never my turn. It was your turn on Tuesday. I made it on Monday.
You were asleep. I was not asleep. I was resting my eyes. You snoring. I do not snore.
He opened his mouth. She pointed at him. Do not, she said. He closed his mouth and smiled and she smiled back and reached up one more time to touch his face briefly. The way you touch something you want to make sure is still there, still real, still exactly what it has always been.
Then she turned and walked toward the house. He watched her go. the way he had watched her a thousand times in 40 years, moving through the spaces they had built together, sure-footed and unhurried, as though she had always been here, as though the mountain had been waiting for her, and she had simply taken her time arriving. On the window sill inside, where the morning light came first, a small wooden bird sat beside a dented tin box. Both of them the same as they had always been, both of them exactly where they belonged.
He followed her inside. The door closed behind him, and the mountain held still, and the valley was quiet. And somewhere in the pine trees above the pasture, out of sight but close enough to hear, a ren was singing.