And they sat on either side of the fire and drank it in the gray pre-dawn. And she looked at his face in the firelight and thought about the thing Tommy had said months ago. He doesn't usually do that. Go himself. And about the way he had held young Henry and the look in his face that he had not entirely controlled.
You lost your wife, she said. Not a question. He looked at the fire. Seven years ago, he said, Beth. He turned his cup in his hands.
And a daughter, Margaret, same winter, fever. I'm sorry, she said, which was inadequate. But she had learned that the inadequate thing said plainly was more honest than the adequate thing dressed up. It's why I went further into the mountains after, he said, bought more land, ran more cattle, hired more men. I thought if I made enough noise, I wouldn't have to hear the quiet.
He looked at the fire. It doesn't work. The quiet waits. The cabin, she said quietly. He looked at her.
That's what it was for me, she said. I needed to make enough noise to get through the first part. She held her coffee with both hands. Henry believed in that land completely. And when he died, it was the only thing of his that was still asking something of me.
Everything else just needed to be grieved. But the land needed someone to do something. It needed me to do something. She paused. So I did.
He held her eyes for a moment and then looked back at the fire, and the understanding between them was so plain and so complete that it did not need language, which was fortunate because she was not sure either of them had the right words for it. Some things are understood in the doing, not the saying. We should sleep, she said. Yeah, he said. The commissioner's office in Durango was on the second floor of a stone building on Main Street that smelled of paper and coal smoke and the accumulated weight of official decisions.